Seeking Jesus First Feb. 25, 2025
Spiritual Maturity - Part Seven
Are you reading your Bible every day? Are you praying in the spirit every day? Are you memorizing Scriptures that touch your heart? Are you confessing God’s word? Are you applying the commands of God to the way you live your life? Are you responding to situations with the fruit of the spirit? Are you loving and serving others? Are you doing all of these things from a place of a loving relationship with God? Are they birthed from relationship and identity in Christ?
As you mentally answer these questions, you might think that I am asking about your duty to do these things. If you are doing these things as a sense of duty, stop long enough to reestablish your personal loving relationship with God through the completed work of Christ Jesus and with the help of The Holy Spirit. Doing those things are important but they do not create or strengthen relationship if they are birthed from a sense of duty.
Your connection with God comes first. Sit at His feet and be loved. Wait on Him. Spend time with Him. Worship Him. Then, “study to show yourself approved, rightly dividing the word of truth.” This means, “study to pass the test.” We study the word to overcome the flesh, not to be accepted by God. Faith in Christ Jesus is all we need to enter into relationship with God. We simply realize that He loves us and we say, “Yes, I believe in You God and in Your love for me. I believe in Your Son whom You sent to restore me to Yourself.”
However, spiritual maturity means overcoming the fleshly nature and receiving the divine nature of God. Once we know that we are loved by God as a Father, we begin to desire to be like our loving Father. In order to take on His nature and overcome our old nature, we reckon ourselves to be dead to the old nature and alive unto God and His nature. We study God and His Word. We imitate Jesus the Christ. We learn to walk in His Spirit. We learn to speak like Him and act like Him. We start seeing ourselves the way He sees us, as valuable and worthy of the sacrifice of His only begotten Son. We take the focus off of ourselves and put it on Him. We start seeing what He sees - people. We start caring like He does.
Spiritual maturity is evident in our lives when we speak and act like our Father in Heaven and His Son, Christ Jesus. Spiritual maturity is evident in the fruit of the spirit which we produce. Spiritual maturity is evident because we begin to father another generation of believers in the loving nature of Christ.