Current Blog Series : Biblical Vision Explanation
There
is no such thing as Super-Christians, only obedient or disobedient Christians!
The
calling of all elders is to “equip the people for ministry until ALL are mature.” I truly wish that Paul didn’t say “ALL” rather some. But the
problem with this passage has puzzled me for the entire day. How can we as
elders “measure” the maturity of our believers? In Ephesians 4 Paul gives us a
puzzle to answer this question. “Mature manhood, the
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13) The answer
to the looming question is maturity equals full Christ likeness, which is lived out in a desire to minister one to another.
I’ve
sat in numerous congregations and wonder who was a mature Christian and who was
not. I have quickly begun to realize the people I considered to be mature do
not have a grasp of the Gospel in their lives. Without a doubt
the biggest problem that we have in the churches today is a lack of spiritual
depth. Due to this Spiritual lack we get ourselves into all kinds of problems
by saying immature things, by making immature decisions, by acting in immature
ways. So how do we as preachers combat this spiritual immaturity? We preach the
whole council of God, thus combating the holes in our parishioner’s Biblical
and spiritual lives.
Through
preaching the entirety of the Word we will cover every life topic. In Romans 12
we learn the aspects that describe both the Christ and a mature believer. Spiritual
maturity does take time, and proper understanding of the Word. It takes energy
and it takes effort on behalf of both the believer and the discipler. In the end a spiritually mature congregation liberates the elders to "devote their focus to teaching," because all are to minister one to another.
We will discuss
in later posts each aspect of a mature christian listed in Romans 12.
