Three basic characteristics of a mature Christian are love, joy, and peace. All of these grow with our faith in God, and the pursuit to be like Him. These are also three of the most “divinely powerful weapons” we have been given.
The Lord helps us mature by allowing people and conditions in our life that require us to grow in these. For love, He will send those to us who are not very lovable. Trials and difficulties will test our joy and peace to help us grow in these because the true peace and joy of The Lord are not based on conditions but on Him.
All that we become in Christ is the result of His grace. We are His workmanship, He is The Potter who is working with us, the clay. We have many instructions on how to best work with Him in this, but since it is all based on His grace, we are given good instructions of how to abide in His grace in I Peter 5:5-7:
God is opposed to the proud, but gives His grace to the humble. Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.”
It would be better to have all of the demons opposing us rather than have God oppose us. For this reason, we should fear becoming proud more than we fear any demon. What treasure on earth could be more valuable than the grace of God?
Obviously, we should be in pursuit of the humility that He gives His grace to more than any other treasure. In this text, Peter tells us to do this by casting our anxiety on Him! Why? Because anxiety is pride! It is the most terrible pride of thinking that a problem is too big for God, so we have to carry the weight of it with our worry.
To worry or be anxious is the opposite of faith. In Romans 14:23 we are told that “whatever is not from faith is sin.” Since anxiety is obviously a sin of unbelief, it is something that we must repent of. If we are growing in anxiety over anything, then we are too focused on it, and we must repent and turn our attention back to our God and how big He is.
As the conditions in the world become more unstable, anxiety is growing dramatically with almost everyone. The Lord even warned that times were coming when men’s hearts would fail just because of the fear. As His priests and messengers during this time we must be growing in the opposite spirit—the peace, joy, and love that He says His disciples will be known by.
A basic characteristic by which we can recognize mature Christians is that they are God-focused instead of self-focused, or world-focused. When troubles come their first reaction is not to think of themselves, but how The Lord wants to use them in this situation. Perhaps the ultimate mature Christian life is defined by Galatians 2:20: “it is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.”
Ultimate maturity in Christ is a life that is dead to our own desires and wants and focused entirely on what The Lord wants to do in us and through us. Jesus told us how to get to this place when He said, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).
We may think that when we cease to focus on ourselves, our needs and our wants, that we are losing our lives, and that is true. However, it is the way to gain the greatest and most fulfilling life we could ever have. The Lord promised that if we would seek His kingdom first He would take care of everything that we need (see Matthew 6:33). God can provide for us far better than we can provide for ourselves, so this is the best trade we could ever make.
The first result of the fall was that Adam and Eve looked at themselves. They were so focused on God and what He had provided for them up to that point that they did not even realize they were naked. To be delivered from the consequences of the fall we must mature to a place where we are again so God-focused, and so thankful for what He has provided for us in our life, that we are fully tuned to Him and how He would use us.
The world is in increasing need of such Christians at this time. Anything that we might lose by following Him is only temporary, a mere vapor, but what we gain in place of what we may have lost will last forever.
