Reflections on Spiritual Maturity

Analysts and church growth experts say the North American church is in decline and “in a state of lethargy.” The signs are everywhere: a steady decline in church membership, especially among mainline denominations, a striking increase in the percentage of Americans who do not attend church, and a decrease in the numbers of young adults preparing for ministry. And the data is there to back this up. According to the Pew Forum, for instance, from 2007-2014, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated — describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” — jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%. And the share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths has also grown. All indications are that the trend has only intensified since 2014.

Things look no better in Churches of Christ, the denomination with which I am most familiar. Since 2000, roughly 1,200 Churches of Christ in the United States have closed their doors forever, and the number of men, women, and children in the pews nationally has shrunk by 200,000.

On top of this we see the loss of moral authority and credibility among ministers and churches due to widespread sex scandals and financial misconduct.

Many Christians view the decline of Western Christendom with alarm, as if God has fallen from heaven. Enormous effort and expense has been marshaled to launch church growth programs and shore up membership, increase giving, and keep religious ships afloat, with very little to show for it.

Naturally, I have some thoughts about all this. I would argue that the failings of the American church can be traced directly to a lack of direct engagement with God on the part of many who profess his name, or what the Bible calls discipleship.

Jesus commanded us to do one thing above all others. After his resurrection, as he prepared to ascend to his Father in heaven, Jesus gave us these words, which we call the Great Commission:

“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20)

Note carefully the order of things in those words. First, Jesus instructs us to make disciples. Help people become followers of Jesus. Then, and only then, do we initiate those people whose hearts are already surrendered to God into the faith through baptism.

For many of our churches, we’ve been going about it backwards for decades: rushing people to the water (because baptisms are clearly defined events we can celebrate and count), and then afterward struggling mightily to get those people (who now believe they’ve received everything God has to offer) to surrender their lives to him.

So my contention is that the North American church has been living in the middle of a discipleship crisis. While Jesus’ call to “follow me” has always been clear, the North American church today has lost sight of the goal. The minister at one of the healthiest churches I know says that we’re pretty good at making church members, but pretty poor at making disciples.

Many of us long for change, but we also feel stuck? Where did we get off track? And how can we find our way back to God’s heart for discipleship?

To begin to turn the tide, we must first address our understanding of what makes a mature disciple of Christ. Many people think you’re mature in Christ if you know the Bible and follow its rules, or if you’re really gifted in preaching, teaching or leading worship. But Jesus seems to point to something else. Jesus says the whole of the law and prophets (in other words, all of the Old Testament) can be summed up in two commandments: to love God and to love your neighbor (Matt. 22:36-40).

For Jesus, everything he wants to do in the world is rooted in and grows out of love. He says, “If you love me, you will keep my commands” (John 14:15). And a few verses later, he tells his disciples, “This is my command: Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).

The apostle Paul seems to echo this same idea. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says we can know all mysteries and speak with the tongues of angels, but if we don’t love, we are resounding gongs and clanging cymbals, and our actions are worth nothing (1 Cor. 13:1-3).

Furthermore, in his encouragement to the Ephesians, Paul establishes an undeniable link between a full experience of God’s love and spiritual fulness (spiritual maturity):

“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:17-19)

Salvation is an invitation to a relationship of love — with God and with others. Too often, though, we’ve viewed salvation merely as an educational exercise, where information is transferred, but people often never learn to follow the God who loves them intensely. The goal of discipleship cannot be merely educational or transactional. It must be transformational. So for me, the goal of discipleship is spiritual maturity defined as helping people love God and love others; in other words, to love Jesus and to love like Jesus.

Some might prefer to define spiritual maturity more in terms of bearing the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23). Certainly that’s a credible line of thought. However, in reviewing the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control), every one of those is an outgrowth of love.

The bottom line is that if we don’t love well, we’re not reflecting the one we follow. And if we don’t reflect the one we follow, we’re not mature, and we’ve missed the whole point of discipleship.

So in working with people, with spiritual maturity (defined as loving God and loving neighbor) as the goal, how do we foster that? How do we help people move down the road toward deeper engagement with God and greater spiritual maturity?

The method by which we do that is relational disciple-making. Jesus made it clear that our ability to love well and to cultivate authentic relationships with others is what identifies us as his disciples (John 13:35). Yet in my experience in churches in various parts of the United States, I’ve found that very few Christians have real and authentic relationships to support and encourage their spiritual growth within the church.

Jesus changed his world by loving and investing in twelve men for three years. Jesus-style disciple-making centers on relationally investing in a few people at a time over time, loving them and sharing life with them. My term for this kind of relational disciple-making is spiritual nurture, and it is not done quickly or en masse.

The conviction I’ve arrived at after years in ministry and study is that discipleship is a day-by-day, life-long process of patient endurance and obedience. While some try to reduce disciple-making to canned one-shot approaches, experience shows that hurried-up evangelism does not produce lasting results. A better approach is focused teaching on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and intentional and relational investment in a few at a time. The aim is to be spiritual fathers and mothers, loving and nurturing people who can then be spiritual fathers and mothers to those around them.

Love changes people in profound ways. But make no mistake, this is difficult work. Mother Teresa said, “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” Loving hurting, broken people into the kind of deeper engagement with Jesus that brings freedom and life is hard, and it’s messy. But it is the most needful thing we can do. And it’s what Jesus did.

God’s Spiritual Roadmap

God has two primary goals for us, and both of them start with the gospel. According to the apostle Paul, the gospel is the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16). In practice, the power of God in the gospel accomplishes two things:

1) The gospel is the message of salvation from sin through Christ’s atoning death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, and his enthronement as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. God wants me to believe in the gospel, to give my life to Jesus, and thus allow him to forgive me and cleanse me from the guilt of sin.

2) The acceptance of the gospel ushers me into an intimate and loving surrendered relationship with the Father through the Son within which he can begin to transform my heart and mind. In this process he cleanses me, heals me, strengthens me, and slowly begins to unravel and redeem the broken and twisted parts of my life, thus freeing me from the power of sin.

In most of modern Christendom, we have tended to focus overwhelmingly on the first, and paid very little attention to the second. It’s true that you cannot really have the second part without the first, but forgiveness, wonderful gift though it is, is far from all God wants for us. He never intended for us to get stuck at the first part. In fact one might even say that forgiveness is but a necessary first step toward what God really wants for us.

For the last five years or so, my ministry has primarily involved helping Christians (and non-Christians) move into this second part of the experience of God. It is a ministry of relational spiritual nurture, and it happens slowly — more like a crockpot and less like a a microwave. It doesn’t happen in a six-week (or even twelve-week) program. It happens best in the context of an ongoing relationship. Remember, Jesus spent three years with his disciples and even then they needed the Holy Spirit to finish them off.

The journey God ultimately wants to lead us all on is to a deeper experience of his love, and consequently, to a greater trust. This is discipleship, or what Jesus calls “abiding in him” (John 15:4-6).

Abiding deeply in Jesus changes us in the following ways:

1) We find an ever-deepening comprehension of God’s love (Eph. 3:16-19), enabling us to rest in that love. Paul calls this “the fulness of God.” Simply, we are learning to live loved. Living loved frees us from fear (1 John 4:18).

2) We develop a richer understanding and appropriation of grace, and the consequent freedom from a desperate need to perform or produce in order to be acceptable to God.

3) We increasingly enjoy a life characterized by a “peace that passes understanding” (Phil. 4:7).

4) We increasingly surrender more of ourselves to God (because we will not obey one whom we do not trust, and we will not trust one whom we do not believe loves us), and thus more often choose obedience.

5) We find growing freedom from the need/desire to manipulate or control circumstances and people to make things turn out a certain way (Matt. 11:28-30).

6) And overall, we experience a growing holiness (sanctification), a greater sense of being led by the Spirit, and the increasing manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23).

Because you cannot give what you do not have, these six ongoing internal changes God makes in us equip us for gospel blessing (what we typically think of as “outreach” or “evangelism”) in the following ways:

1) God develops in us a greater capacity to love others.

2) God develops in us a greater ability to live love without agenda (a greater capacity to nurture others in their own search for God without trying to control them or to trying to produce certain outcomes).

A Christian simply cannot engage in outreach effectively without the transformation that only comes through a discipleship of abiding in Jesus. Said another way, outreach flows naturally and organically from a life of abiding in Jesus. Fully formed disciples truly become leaven in the world around them.

Over the last ten years, these truths have become some of my deepest convictions about God’s work in the world. The place to begin all ministry must be helping people come to a deeper experience of God’s love and a growing intimacy with him. In the end, it is only the power of God that can change us. As Jesus reminds us, “apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Shalom

God in Everyday Life

I’ve been thinking more over the last week about the idea that God seeks to transform us within the context of our own lives. I think this is an important point and deserves a bit more discussion.

God speaks to you and seeks to transform you from within your own context; in other words, through the circumstances unique to your own life. He uses the resources available in your own life to shape you and transform you, IF you are willing to respond appropriately (we’ll talk about appropriate response in a minute). The point, though, is that God does not need to use resources outside of your own life to shape you. You already have, in your own life, everything necessary for God to mold you into what he wants you to be. You don’t necessarily need a new job, or a new place to live, or new circumstances, or more formal education to become what God intends for you to become. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “A lot of shaping goes on on our way to something else.”

God uses the circumstances unique to your life – your conversations with others, your experiences, your thoughts, the books you read and the movies you watch – all of it serves as the crucible within which he seeks to forge your soul into what he’d like it to be.

Even Scripture, if disconnected from the context of your own life, becomes weakened in its ability to transform you. Scripture is meant to interact with your life, and only finds its power to transform you when it does.

That’s why learning to pay close attention to what is going on in your life, at a heart level, is so extremely important. It’s where God is most active and visible. God meets us where we are and asks us to follow him, from there, deeper into his life.

It’s also why living in the future is so disastrously unhelpful. Most of us are always reaching into the future and fretting about what might be there when we get there. Don’t get two steps ahead of God. Concentrate on, and try to understand what God is doing in you as you take this step. Only when this step is complete – when your foot is solidly back on the ground again – will you be able to see clearly where God wants you to step next.

So, what’s the correct response to God’s activity in your life? There are three of them, and if you’re familiar with Scripture, they won’t be surprising to you.

1) Deny yourself (in other words, surrender your agenda).
2) Take up your cross daily (in other words, sacrifice. Again, surrender your agenda).
3) Follow God where he leads you (this implies a willingness to be led, see points 1 & 2).

Don’t you find it interesting that Jesus essentially says the same thing in the first two points (Matt. 16:24)? Do you suppose it’s important????

This is so hard for us to learn to do. Almost nothing in the religious heritage most of us have inherited gives us any help here. That’s why spiritual fathers and mothers are so important – people who have learned how to follow God in the here and now. Spiritual fathers and mothers help others learn to discern God’s activity and calling in their own lives. They put others in touch with God’s activity in their own lives so they can cooperate with him. And it’s an intensive process for a while – just like parenting.

Spiritual parenting, at least as I’ve described it here, is something of a lost art, mostly because discerning the activity of God in one’s own life is something of a lost art. This is a developmental model of discipleship, but I believe it’s the only thing that will take us beyond where many of us have stalled.

Remember Jesus’ words: “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me” (John 6:45).

Shalom

Identity and Expectations

When does trying to meet the expectations of others become unhealthy? Most of us have found ourselves on a wicked treadmill of being driven or consumed by the expectations of others.

I’d like to suggest that the only way to not be constantly blown around by the expectations of others (or by the ridiculous expectations we sometimes place on ourselves) is to live in a state of confidence in your own identity. Who you truly are. Who God has made you to be.

Ah, but where do we acquire such confidence? Most people I know have only the vaguest sense of who they really are. If you ask them who they are, they’ll start telling you what they do. Push them a bit farther and they quickly grow quiet. Only God can give you such confidence because only God can give you your identity. Only your Creator can tell you – accurately – who you were created to be.

Furthermore, only knowing who we really are – at a heart level – can direct us toward what we are to do (our calling or vocation), and by extension, away from what we’re not to do.

Sadly, many (most?) people are deaf to God’s “still, small voice.” Many (most?) people cannot hear God speak into their Iives his message of peace, love, healing, and identity. This is so because they have not created any space in their lives in which they could hear God.

Intimacy with God is the cultivated space in which God can do the work of deep healing and identity formation in the heart of the disciple.

We will never move beyond the warped sense of self we all possess until we create the space in our lives in which God can begin to work on our hearts – shredding the false self and all its attachments, props, and masks – breathing life into the shell that remains, and recreating a new person – redeemed and transformed into his image, and thus confident in their identity.

Shalom