“Growing-Ups!”

“But for right now, friends, I’m completely frustrated by your unspiritual dealings with each other and with God.  You’re acting like infants in relation to Christ, capable of nothing much more than nursing at the breast.  Well, then, I’ll nurse you since you don’t seem capable of anything more.  As long as you grab for what makes you feel good or makes you look important, are you really much different than a babe at the breast, content only when everything’s going your way?  When one of you says, ‘I’m on Paul’s side,’ and another says, ‘I’m for Apollos,’ aren’t you being totally infantile?”

1 Corinthians 3:1-3 (The Message) 

My two grandsons make me smile.  Recently at the dinner table on a Friday night, they solemnly told me that salt and pepper were for “growing-ups”!  We are all growing up, but do we become ‘grown-up-children’, or mature adults? 

This can be considered in a spiritual sense as well.  1 Peter 2:2 & 3 says, “So clean house!  Make a clean sweep of malice and pretence, envy and hurtful talk.  You’ve had a taste of God.  Now, like infants at the breast, drink deep of God’s pure kindness.  Then you’ll grow up mature and whole in God.”  We read in Hebrews 5:11-14, “I have a lot more to say about this, but it is hard to get it across to you since you’ve picked up this bad habit of not listening.  By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics on God again, starting from square one—baby’s milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago!  Milk is for beginners, inexperienced in God’s ways; solid food is for the mature, who have some practice in telling right from wrong.”   

The basics, such as John 3:16 are the milk which makes us the children of God.  But we do not remain babes or children, we need to ‘grow up’ to be mature in the Lord, as we read in Ephesians 4:13-15 (NLT), “This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.  Then we will no longer be immature like children.  We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching.  We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth.  Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.”  

We need to get stuck into the ‘meat’ of God’s Word so that we can grow in grace and knowledge (2 Peter 3:18) and become God’s true ‘Growing-ups’!  

Prayer

Father in Heaven, help us to drink in and feed from the milk and spiritual strong meat contained in your Word so that we can grow as your children to maturity in the fullness of the stature of Christ.

Amen 

Study by Nancy Silcox