Maturity: With Dr. Sinclair Ferguson | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Grazie. And I'm here, my guest this week is Dr. Sinclair Ferguson. You'll remember Dr. Ferguson as a contributor to the Media Grazie Bible study, Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty.

He's one of the contributors on the Logic on Fire film from, on Lloyd-Jones from 2015. And he's also in the forthcoming Puritan documentary, All of Life to the Glory of God. So just a regular movie star.

Oh, thank you.

Yes.

Sinclair, thank you for your friendship over the years and thanks for being with us.

Thank you for having me.

Shepherds Conference, John MacArthur, and Sinclair Ferguson's Ministry

Now, we're the guests of Dr. John MacArthur this week here in Sun Valley, California, and this amazing spectacle known as the Shepherds Conference is going on all around us. It's really unlike anything else conference wise.

Such a wonderful experience for so many pastors. And we're celebrating the 50th year of Dr. MacArthur's pastorate, I guess, all year long. How many years out of curiosity have you been coming to the Shepherds Conference?

Actually, I think this is only the second time I've been able to come to it. You know, he's asked me to come to it on various occasions, but I think this is the only time I've been at the conference apart from one a few years ago, although I've been at the church a number of times.

And I've known John MacArthur for 25, 30 years.

Many of our viewers and our listeners are going to be familiar with your pastoral ministry that I believe started back in 1971.

Yes, 1971.

And there was a peat bog involved in that?

Well, the first church I served on my own was on the island of Unst. And in the old days, ministers' salaries came in different shapes and forms. There would usually be a house that you could live in.

There might be some expenses to help you run your life. There would be some kind of salary. And in the case of this particular congregation, there was a peat bog, which was really a piece of boggy land out of which you would dig these chunks of peat, which people used to heat themselves with.

They used it almost like coal in the winter. Actually, I always enjoyed it because of the aroma, not because I had a skill in working my peat bog, as they said.

Well, I'm sure others are familiar with your involvement as a trustee for the Banner of Truth Trust, Chancellor's Professor of Systematic Theology at Reform Theological Seminary, Teaching Fellow for Ligonier Ministries.

They might have encountered one of your messages that you've preached at many conferences down through the decades. But I think most of all, we're going to be familiar with you as an author, and a fairly prolific one at that.

I started to count up the books, and when I got to 30 this morning, I stopped. Do you know how many?

I don't know exactly. They're somewhere over 50 now. It's never mind the quality, feel the width.

Well, the one that I want to ask you about today is the brand new release from the Banner of Truth Trust, which is titled, Maturity, Growing Up and Going On in the Christian Life. Now, I understand that this new book is also not a new book on the subject.

It's actually, as you say in the introduction, it's a renewed and recalibrated book on an old subject. So, tell us what that means.

Yes. Well, actually, the very first book I published was a book called Add to Your Faith, which was published in the UK, and then it was published in the United States under the title of Taking Your Christian Life Seriously, which probably tells you something about the difference between the United States and the United Kingdom.

And it wasn't particularly well written. It was the first book I wrote. It was my entry into publishing. The publisher asked me to write a book and therefore gave me the opportunity, unless I made a complete hash of it, to have something published.

And I'm tremendously grateful for the privilege that that was, that I wasn't writing something and then looking for a publisher, because it kind of started me on really a pattern of life of writing. And the editor of the Banner of Truth, Jonathan Watson, was kind of, he's been on at me for years and years and years just to republish it.

And I kept saying to him, I can't let it go out again the way it was. I need to look at it again. And so, you know, the opportunity arose for me to have time to rework it. And I wouldn't be surprised, I've certainly revised every single paragraph in the book and possibly almost every sentence.

But essentially the message is the same as it was in 1980, I think it may have been when it first came out. And it's really a book about the basics of living the Christian life and growing up as a Christian.

And as we hunted around for a title, we chose the word, the title, Maturity, partly because it's a word you don't actually hear, I don't hear it so often now among Christian people. There are other words I hear, and yet it is a very important biblical word, and it's a very important biblical concept that once we are born again, we are just at the beginning of the Christian life, and we need to grow up and we need to keep going on.

What Biblical Maturity Means

Yeah, absolutely. So this would be a great time to ask, how should we define maturity biblically?

Well, you know, I always say ultimately maturity means that you're becoming more like Christ, so that it's a matter of the way in which God is transforming your life. But He transforms our lives through His Word, by His Spirit, also in the context of the fellowship of the church, what we learn from others, through suffering, through the way we learn to respond to temptations.

And so some of the chapters in this book are about those kinds of themes. First of all, about the way in which the New Testament emphasizes the importance of maturity if I remember rightly, I actually call the letter to the Hebrews the letter about maturity, because it's urging people not to drift away, but to keep on going.

It uses the language of maturity, and there are other sections of the New Testament that really focus on the fact, for example, when Paul speaks in Colossians 1 about the goal of his ministry, he wants to present everyone mature in Christ.

So it's a very important basic concept for the Christian life. And then the rest of the book breaks down aspects and segments of what that means.

Yes, so in the book you mention that the word there in Greek, it means perfect or complete, but then the concept goes on, and I love the way that you put it, that a mature Christian is he or she, he or she is one in whom God's recreating purposes are clearly illustrated.

So would you unpack that statement a little bit?

Yeah, well, you know, when we read, for example, you take what Paul says in Galatians 5 about the fruit of the Spirit. He lists these, and sometimes we could think of them almost as abstract concepts, but in one way or another, they're really descriptions of the transformation that takes place in your character.

We don't have patience as though patience were a commodity. We are patient. Love is not some kind of substance that's given to us. It's the way in which we become more and more loving, and it's these kinds of things that I think God is working in our lives through the impress that Scripture makes on us.

Also, I think there's a chapter in the book on basically how you handle the providence of God, how you discover the guidance of God, and all of that is part and parcel of this notion I think that Paul is speaking about, about presenting people mature in Christ, that when we become believers, we're united to Christ in order that we might become more and more like Him.

There are obstacles in the way we go through periods of suffering, and we naturally retreat from suffering, and especially younger Christians need, I think, often help to see that those are the very realities through which God works and shapes us.

So I hope it'll be a help to any Christian who read it, but maybe particularly help younger disciples on the way to understanding what it really means to be a Christian and to grow up as a Christian.

There's a saying that I've heard older men say often with maybe a wee bit of glee that young men think that old men are fools, but old men know that young men are fools. Now, that may not be a particularly biblical statement, but there is an element of universal.

Truth there.

Growth in the School of Christ Over a Lifetime

How has your own growth and continued learning in the school of Christ, how has that changed the way that you thought and wrote about maturity 40 years ago till today?

Yeah, that's a really, really good question. When I was a wee boy, I mean seven or eight, my mother, one of my mother's many wise sayings to me was, there's no substitute for experience, and it used to really irritate me because when you're seven or eight, you don't have much of it, and it kind of made me feel I was living in a very unfair universe, and that's a really, really good question for this reason that I think basically the teaching that's in this book is probably the same as it was 40 years ago when the book was first published.

But when I read through it and I kind of rewrote it for myself, I think I was very conscious that almost everything I wrote, I had a better sense that this really is true because I'd either seen it in my own life or watched it, you know, over the years of pastoral ministry in other people's lives.

And what I don't think I really expected was to discover at the end that I was really glad that I had been pressed to publish the book again. And as American presidents might say, I really felt good about it, you know, in the sense that I thought, yeah, I have seen, I knew these things when I was 30, but I know the same things now, but I've seen them worked out in so many more lives as well as in my.

Own.

And that's, I mean, it's just a wonderfully encouraging thing to see over the long haul the truths of the gospel working out in people's lives in very different situations, ages, countries, different kinds of churches and situations.

Yeah, amen. I mean, I can see why the truth, the teaching wouldn't change because that wasn't yours to begin with. It was just what the scripture said. But then as an older man to look back and what a wonderful apologetic to see the truth of God's Word demonstrated out in situation after situation.

You know, when you're a young minister, you understand your goal should be Paul's goal. I want to present all these people mature in Christ, but you don't have enough of it yourself to know actually what that means.

But then when you see in the ministry of the Word and the fellowship of God's people, you see it happening before your very eyes. It's not that the truth has changed, but your appreciation of it is so much, I think it really is so much greater.

And the other thing is that you, I think you then, you know, I write about suffering or about guidance and I know these principles are true, but then you see people who have suffered more and more, or you see people struggling with guidance and you see them getting the biblical principles and you see, you see God sanctifying them through the way they respond to suffering.

And it really gives you a, it just gives you a tremendous confirmation about the rich ways in which the Spirit applies Scripture to many different people's lives.

Pressing On to a Glorious Finish

Well, as you mentioned already, it's hard to read the Scriptures, and I'm thinking too, especially the book of Hebrews, and not notice that the Christian life is not so much about a strong start as it is a glorious finish.

And along the way, there's this emphasis on pressing on in maturity. So, and Peter, he urges us to make every effort to add to our faith. All of these wonderful things supplement our faith with virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness.

And if these qualities are ours and increasing, then they'll keep us from being ineffective and unfruitful. An entrance into the internal kingdom of our Lord and Savior is richly provided for us in this way.

It's just, I don't know how you can miss that subject, that growing up and going on in the Christian life is vitally important. But early on in the book, you identify some of the major obstacles and hindrances that we're bound to encounter on our way.

I wonder if you could speak to some of those.

Yeah, well, I probably need to look at the book to see the ones I mentioned, so this would be a good time to... Yeah, tell me.

So there's the contemporary society discouraging spiritual maturity, our personal background hindering it, and then air quotes, Christian influences not encouraging maturity.

Yes. Well, you know, one of the, I think I really have seen this, that one of the factors that militates against new Christians growing to maturity and Christians who should have grown to maturity not growing to maturity is the poverty of the teaching they hear or the expectations that they have in church life.

I think often that can paint a very false picture of what it means to be a Christian. And actually since, I guess since the book was originally written, we're kind of become awash, not only in the Western world, but also in many countries in Africa and elsewhere with the prosperity gospel.

If you're really living by faith, you kind of fly to heaven on a cloud of ease and a good chunk of prosperity behind you. And the teaching really verges, I mean, it's not only unbiblical, but it's so destructive to people.

I mean, I often think, so what would that seem like to those Christians in China today, even as we speak, whose churches are being despoiled, whose Christian libraries taken away, whose lives are being so pressed down that some of them suffering severe persecution.

And yet, you know, when we meet people like that, we are, you know, we Western Christians are in awe of their faith and their faithfulness. And so, I think there are many Christians who are reared in a culture and much of the Christian media, especially the television media, which is so expensive, portrays to people that this is, the Christian life will give you your best life now.

And the Christian life isn't like that, not least because Christ's life was not like that. And we're encouraged in the New Testament to walk in His footsteps. And so we should expect the same pattern in our lives.

And then I think another, you know, another thing that often hinders people in their growth is God takes us as He finds us, but He doesn't mean to leave us the way He found us. You know, I've heard so many people say, God loves me just the way I am.

And I think the truth of the matter is He actually loves you despite the way you are. He does love you, but He means to change you. And for all kinds of reasons, in some people, it seems to me that they are almost constitutionally wired to find it difficult to understand God's ways with them.

You know, I became a Christian in a Presbyterian background of knowing the Westminster Confession of Faith, you know, since I was a teenager. And I realize I have had things I've needed to unlearn, but I've met so many Christians who've… what they've had to unlearn is what they were taught about what it means to be a Christian.

And often that goes down very deep, and often it's surrounded with kind of the prejudices of church life. And I think for some of those younger Christians, it is very, very challenging to begin to grow to maturity, because there are so many weeds that have been planted in their thinking, especially, that need to be uprooted.

And it can be a pretty painful process, and naturally we tend to resist painful processes. So I think those would be two of the ways in which, you know, in some people it's a tremendous challenge even to think about the fact that God is calling me to grow to maturity.

Sanctification Through the Word and the Preaching of Scripture

So what do we do, brother? The absolute necessity.

Of pursuing maturity, of growing up and going on, is undeniable. But this is an area where we might be most tempted to just determine, well, right, I'm going to pull myself up by my bootstraps. I'm going to look within myself and find the strength that I need to do this thing that I need to do where men give me 12 steps, and I'll take those steps.

And we're already off on a path that's destined for failure, and that is dishonoring to the Lord. So how is it that we look to Christ, and we find in Him all the sufficiency that we need?

You know, I think really the key to this is, in His prayer in John 17, Jesus prays that the Father will sanctify His disciples through the truth. And then He adds, your word is truth. And growing to maturity and being sanctified are, in a way, two different ways of looking at the same thing.

And it seems to me that we're in a kind of culture where, as you say, if you'll just tell me what to do, I'll do it. And even a culture in which, many Christians I think are taught this way, if you'll just tell me from the Bible what I've got to do, then I'll try to do that.

And what is missing in their thinking, and sadly I think often missing perhaps in the preaching and teaching they hear, is the notion that God Himself will do it through His Word. And our responsibility, therefore, is simply to expose ourselves to that Word, and especially to expose our lives to a ministry of the Word that does actually accomplish that.

Because otherwise, we've really got a wrong view of what God is about. He's not about throwing us back on our own resources. He has resources that He's given to the church and put in our hands, that by using them He will do the transformation in our lives.

And remember, for example, when Paul speaks in Romans 12, 1 and 2, he speaks about our lives being changed by the renewing of our minds. And I think, to go back to your earlier question actually, I think this is one of the things I knew then and really believed with all my heart, but 40 years later I think I've seen so much more of it, that the Word itself transforms people in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Word begins to change the way we think. The Word begins to change the way in which we respond emotionally and intuitively to life. The Word guides us, so that we're not looking into ourselves for, you know, do I have the resources for this, or to 10 steps or 12 steps if I just do these things and tick these boxes.

But we're constantly, if I could put it this way, we're constantly being molded and shaped by the hands of the potter. And in this instance, the hands of the potter are actually the teaching of Scripture, the exposition of Scripture, our own reading of Scripture.

But especially, and this is a very non-cultural thing, I think, among evangelicals, especially the idea that God means us to be changed by the preaching of the Word, and that that's His characteristic way of transforming people's lives.

And we therefore, we really need to take seriously belonging to a church where the Word is preached, and where it's preached more than it is in most churches. Not just because preachers need something to do, but because if the Word is preached in the power of the Spirit, it does change lives.

And, you know, we enjoy a kind of illustration of that here. You know, folks listening may not know there are 4 ,500 men here. There are a thousand members of this congregation serving them. And everybody I speak to comments on their care, their kindness.

And, you know, that's not because they're in Southern California and the weather is good. It's because so many of them have been under the ministry of the Word that has actually changed their characters and made them mature.

And it's really a beautiful thing to see.

Reading Ephesians as a Whole and the Grammar of the Gospel

Wow, that's undeniable. You wrote a book not long ago, From the Mouth of God, on understanding Scripture. And there's an account in chapter 12 here of maturity where you tell about your friend who is going through the process of journaling Ephesians.

And so that's a very popular thing to do in our day. Not a bad thing to do, but there are dangers in that. And you pick up on that here. So could you tell us about that?

Yeah, well, this was, this happened, I think, I think we were 23 at the time. And I was a very young minister. And this was a fellow who came around our church that I got to know quite well, probably about the same age.

And he is very enthusiastic Christian. He told me he was having wonderful quiet times, which was a British way of talking about his personal Bible reading and prayer. And I had, I think I had begun to notice something in the way people read the Bible.

And so I said to him, I said, tell me if, he was reading Ephesians, it was particularly Ephesians. And I said, well, tell me if I had given you a notebook at the beginning of the month when you started reading Ephesians, and you had written down what you were learning.

He was very excited about what he was learning. And I think he may have been journaling. He said, now, if at the end of the month you were willing, if at the end of the month you were willing to let me see that, would I find either A, a very interesting account about your own spiritual experiences?

Or B, would I find at least an outline of what Paul said in Ephesians and how that applied to you? And he said, oh, he said immediately, undoubtedly it would be the first. And I had begun to think that there were actually Christians who had read the Scriptures for years, but if you asked them, could you just tell me what's in Ephesians?

Or what's Romans about? All they would be able to tell you would be a verse that had stuck out to them here and there. They would know that all things work together for good for those who love God. They might remember that they were to put on the whole armor of God.

But what they would not be able to do would be to tell you what Paul actually said to the Ephesians. And so I tried to explain to him that if that was the way he was studying the Bible, actually there was a lot of time he was wasting.

And he wasn't embedding into his life, into his psyche, even into his memory banks, what the message of Scripture actually was, because it doesn't come to us in isolated texts, although individual texts may mean a great deal to us.

But there was a message in Ephesians that it had a structure that shaped the Christian life. And I said, why don't you try that for a month? And so we met again at the end of the next month. He said, this is absolutely revolutionized.

I think he said, this has revolutionized my Christian life, and I was wise enough to know that, you know, that probably had not happened in a month. But it had really revolutionized his appreciation of what the Bible is and how the Bible works, and how to read the Bible in such a way that it's a long-term investment in your life, because you're really building a Bible into your soul in that way, and not just isolated texts.

So, you know, even at that level, learning to read the Bible, this is not a sophisticated thing. In a way, it just takes the flick of a switch to be able to see this. You know, we're not saying here you need to go to seminary in order to be able to learn to read the Bible properly.

We're just saying, first of all, you listen to what it's saying, and then you apply that to your life. You don't look at it in order to begin to reflect on your own life without reference to what the Bible is actually saying.

And that, I've found for some people, that is a real movement forward to a steady growth and maturity.

The Structure of Romans, Ephesians, and the Gospel's Grammar

One of the things that has happened here this week is the Banner of Truth sponsored an event for the Master's Academy, the Master's Seminary, where you gave an overview of the book of Romans in 40 minutes, and gave away some Lloyd-Jones on Romans 13, I believe, to all the students.

So this is something that you've done in your life, I mean, is working through and outlining the Scriptures, making sure that you understand what is the author's point here, and what's the shape of his argument?

Is that something that you would recommend?

Yes, yes. And, you know, sometimes that's very difficult for readers. You know, it just seems, you know, how am I going to find this out? And, you know, there are good study Bibles that actually will give you a start at doing this.

And, you know, if there's a little introductory section, then it really is worth reading. For example, we don't usually write letters to people unless, well, we don't write letters to people period, but I should modernize that.

That would have been all right for this book when it originally came out. But, you know, we don't send emails to people without having a reason for actually writing the email. But we could look at Paul's letters, and it never crossed our mind, he must have had a reason for writing this.

And the reason for writing it will help me to understand it. So a simple question like, why did he write this letter? And sometimes you'll find the answer to that question early on in the letter, but sometimes you'll not find it till later on.

So it's a good thing to kind of skim through to find the answer to those kind of basic questions. And then when you do that to ask yourself, well, what's the structure of this letter? How is he thinking here?

And Ephesians, for example, is a great illustration of the way in which, the way Paul thinks about the gospel is our response to the gospel needs to be rooted in our understanding of the gospel. And the commands that are given to us in Scripture need to be deeply embedded in our appreciation of the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

I usually refer to that as the grammar of the gospel, and if we don't understand that, we'll actually misspeak the gospel. And I believe that happens really sometimes too long in the lives of Christians, partly because they've not yet come to an appreciation of how the Bible itself actually.

Works. One thing that I noticed as reading just in the very beginning of the book, that the idea of maturity is not taken from an isolated text here and there, but as you show really in the introduction, it is woven right through so many of the epistles in the New Testament.

It is a great theme. And so I want to encourage our listeners or people who may be watching this that if this is not something that has stood out to you, then it will. If you just begin to let Sinclair sort of guide you through and show you that this is a theme that it's impossible to ignore once you see it.

And so I wonder if you could speak on that a little.

Yeah, I think I may mention early on in the book the statement Luke makes at the end of Luke 2 about the Lord Jesus when he was 12, that if I ever read those words in a service, I make sure I'm looking very carefully at the congregation.

And I often find when I point it out, I get amazed, Luke's in the congregation, because Luke says that Jesus grew not only in stature, but in wisdom, and not only in favor with man, but in favor with God, which is a stunning statement to say that the Lord Jesus himself grew as a believer.

It's not that he grew from sinfulness to holiness, but he grew from the holiness of a 12-year-old boy to the holiness of a 30-year-old man. So that even within the sinlessness of his life, there was a spiritual growth.

And if that was true of the sinless Savior, and if the sinless Savior is both our Savior and our Lord, our friend and our example, it's kind of written into the nature of the Christian life that from beginning to end there's going to be growth.

And in addition to that, you know, lots of the pictures that are used about how the kingdom of God works in our lives are biological or agricultural or horticultural metaphors, so that once you begin to see that there is this notion that we grow as Christians, it appears in the New Testament in all kinds of ways.

And you see it expressed differently. For example, in 1 Corinthians, Paul's tremendous concern is that they're behaving like infants, like children. I can't speak to you as though you were mature men.

In Galatians, he says, you're almost at the state where I feel I almost need to give birth to you again if Christ is going to be fully formed in you. In Ephesians, he talks about us growing to maturity in Christ.

In Colossians, in Philippians, in Philippians chapter 3, he ends this marvelous passage about his own devotion to Christ by saying, now, all of you who are mature should think this way. Not all of you who are mature should feel this way.

That may or may not be true, but that you should think this way. And then Colossians, it's just all over the place that because we have been born into God's kingdom, we need to grow in God's kingdom to maturity.

I think of Hebrews telling us that Christ matured by his suffering, and a line from Begone Unbelief, why should I complain of want or distress, temptation or pain, he told me no less. That if that's how Christ matured, then we should know that through great tribulation, that's how we will pass.

So, it is such a wonderful encouragement, though, to see that ultimately Christ did walk every moment of his life loving the Lord as God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that perfect righteousness is now counted as ours,.

And we're free to live from that and not to that. I'm not sure that I've said this in this particular book, but I remember being very struck by something John Owen, the 17th century Puritan writer, wrote.

He said, you know, you don't measure somebody's growth spiritually by their height, but by the obstacles they've had to overcome to reach the height at which they have presently arrived. I think that's another thing that the New Testament is really very emphatic about, that we don't measure people's growth by worldly standards, but by an understanding of how much the Lord has accomplished in them and transformed them from what they were to what they now are.

So, the more we talk about it, the more you think there is so much to learn about this, and maturity, although it's called maturity, is really a start in a whole lifetime of growing.

To maturity. So, the book is Maturity, Growing Up and Going On in the Christian Life, available now from the Banner of Truth at banneroftruth .org and everywhere where good Christian books are sold. Thanks again for tuning in to our podcast.

We're back now in Dr. John Snyder's office here at Christ Church New Albany in New Albany, Mississippi, and this is where we usually shoot our podcasts when we're not out on trips and we're not out at conferences and whatnot, and I want to invite you to go to our website mediagrantia .org and browse through our back catalog of podcasts there.

We've done podcasts on book recommendations. We've worked slowly through some letters of men like Newton and Calvin and Rutherford, and we're currently in the middle of a series on careful evangelism, so I think that there will be things there that you might be interested in.

So, take a look at mediagrantia .org or in English themeansofgrace .org.