WHEN you travel to a country where you don’t speak the language, you shouldn’t be surprised when you don’t understand what is being said. More than likely, you will need an interpreter so that you can communicate. There is nothing wrong with you if you don’t understand. It’s simply that you are new to a very different environment.
This is how things seem for an infant Christian. They are new to the Christian environment, and they may not know how to “walk the walk” and “talk the talk.” They are babies born into a whole new world.908
[Christian Living, Spiritual Growth; New Life in Christ]
1 Cor. 3:2–3; 1 Peter 2:2
IF YOU see a baby playing in the dirt, the baby may be dirty but you pretty much don’t make a big deal about it because it’s understood that babies play in dirt. Babies try to eat dirt. Babies scrub themselves in dirt. Dirt is a toy to a baby. But if you see a twenty-one-year-old man playing in the dirt, rubbing himself with the dirt, or trying to eat the dirt, you know you’ve got a crazy person on your hands! The only difference between the two is time. By twenty-one, that man ought to know that dirt is not a toy.
We have too many Christians who have been saved too long that are still playing in the dirt. They play in the dirt and they have fun in the dirt. You can’t come and listen to the Word of God every week and not realize that the dirt is not where you are supposed to be.909
[Spiritual Maturity, Lack of]
1 Cor. 3:3; 13:11
I REMEMBER a time growing up when I was sixteen and I wanted my father to let me start doing stuff. My big phrase would always be, “Well, Dad, you know I’m almost a man,” or sometimes I’d say, “In two more years, Dad, I’m going to be a man and so you might as well let me start practicing some of this stuff now.” My dad would always tell me, “When you start acting like a man, then you can do some of this stuff.”
He basically made it his business to inform me that, although I wanted to have the responsibilities of adulthood, I was still acting like a kid. He wanted me to know that I was still riding the fence between two worlds and that I had to get straight which side of the fence I wanted to stay on.
In the same way, there are many Christians today who are not maturing. They are not producing fruit that is developing and ripening in accordance with the level of maturity they should have for the number of years they have been saved.910
[Christian Living, Spiritual Growth; Spiritual Maturity, Lack of]
Heb. 5:12
RATE multiplied by time equals distance. If I walk from our church in the southwest of Dallas to downtown Dallas, which is about eleven miles, and I start off at 11:00 in the morning, it’s going to take me a long time to get there—probably about four hours or so. If, at 11:45, you decide that you want to go downtown but you want to drive, you will get there a lot faster. Even though I started out earlier than you, you are going to get there before me because you are moving at a faster rate of speed than I am. You’ll be covering more territory in a shorter amount of time than I. You’ll be there and have had lunch before I even get to the Trinity River that precedes downtown. The rate of your speed will allow you to cover more distance than the slow rate that I will be traveling.
What is the relevance of that to your spiritual growth? Some folks have been coming to church for years. Some folk were almost born in church, raised in church, and they still aren’t downtown yet because they are moving along at a crawl. Then there are those people who’ve only been saved five years, but who have reached a steady level of spiritual stability because they moved at a faster rate.
God has guaranteed maturity to every believer as a real option, but it is what each believer does with their time that will determine the rate of their speed and time to arrival at the destination of maturity.911
[Christian Living, Spiritual Growth; Spiritual Maturity, Growth]
Heb. 5:12; 1 Peter 2:2