A Word in Season: Growing Up (Ephesians 4:14)

As the parents of young children, their ability to be distracted can be sometimes quite a help to us.

If they're troubled by something or upset, then we can just dangle something else that's sparkly or bright in front of their eyes, and pretty soon we've got their attention, they're focused on something new, and on we can go.

But perhaps as those children get a little bit older, that capacity to be distracted and diverted can become more frustrating.

As they mature, we're training them to focus on things, we're teaching them to concentrate, because in the kingdom of the distracted, the focused man is king.

We want them to learn to hold fast to one course, to start and to finish a job, to do it, and to do it well, and to do it to the end.

And so, as our children grow up, we're encouraging them to really grow up in maturity as well, to learn those skills of commitment and definition and holding fast that will serve them well when they're under not just pressures for distraction and diversion, but pressures in the real world for grown -ups of being pushed around by other people, other forces, away from the things that they could or should be doing, and into things that are of no real value, or possibly even waste and danger.

Now, we are always, as Christians, children of God. That's our status.

But when it comes to our spiritual maturity, we are not to remain children.

That's what the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 14.

Paul also is aware that children have that tendency to be diverted, to be distracted, to be drawn away from the things that are of first importance to things that are of little regard.

You know for yourself, if you have any experience with children, that you can put a wonderful plate of nutritious food in front of them, but the moment somebody offers them some brightly coloured junk food, the chances are they'll leave the solid stuff and they'll run after the passing sweetness.

And so it is with our souls. Too often, as Christians, we go on behaving like children when we should be growing up, when we should be feasting on the meat of the

Word of God. We need, then, to remember that as God's children, it is proper that we still grow in maturity, that we still come increasingly to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the

Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

No one is impressed with a grown man or woman who's still acting like a little boy or girl.

And those men and women in outward stature, who are still in inward maturity, behaving in an infantile fashion, tend to accomplish almost nothing of any real lasting value.

But if we are God's children, we need to become fixed, firm, established, courageous.

We need to grow up with discernment and with understanding that works out in our faith and our life.

For we will face many pressures and increasingly fierce forces that would drive us away from the truth as it is in Jesus, and will stop us growing up and serving others as we do so.

We need, then, as part of the Church of Christ and under the ministry of the Word of God, to start growing up.

Let us not keep in perpetual childhood. Let us understand that a spiritual adulthood, in that sense, involves conviction and courage, compassion.

It involves a genuine understanding of the Word of God that is not merely intellectual, but which grips our souls and constrains us to think and feel and act in certain ways.

Let us encourage one another that no one will be left behind, in that sense, in the

Church of Jesus Christ. And let us never resist or resent those exhortations which do speak to us, even as children in status, that we can no longer remain in spiritual infancy, but need to grow up in all things, into Him who is the