Maturity

Maturity can be defined as "the state or quality of being fully grown or developed." I have a passion for people who call themselves "Christ followers" to become spiritually mature individuals. Since I am fully grown and developed as an adult, I can feed myself, dress myself, and make decisions for myself. I hope they are good ones. However, I find that many people have not reached a level of maturity in their lives, especially their spiritual lives. I want to be clear that this is not a judgement, we are all reaching out for our potential, this is a passion I have to help people come to a level of joy and peace in their lives that can only be reach by spiritual maturity happening. This means that our "idealized self" - the way that we think we look to the world - must come more and more into alignment with our "realized self" - the way that we really look to people. This encompasses the whole person beginning from the inside and working out to behaviors.

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Romans 12:1-2

Spiritually mature people are becoming more and more like God, like Christ, everyday. Spiritual maturity, psychological maturity, comes from practices that we implement everyday that help us to recognize our thoughts and beliefs that lead to the actions that we take. We spend time everyday connecting to God, allowing the spirit to correct us, mold us, change us from the inside so that the outside matches. How we think we look to people is actually how we look to people. Immaturity comes from not taking this time to challenge ourselves, not taking correction - discipleship - from someone to make sure the inside matches the outside - that the real self is getting closer to matching the ideal self.

I encourage you today to begin to think how you could take this journey. What spiritual practices will you begin to do to start the journey of pulling the ideal and the real closer together? What books will you read? Will you take the time to be quiet in your spirit and listen? Will you partner with someone to let them correct and challenge you? Will you see your everyday life - your working, eating, sleeping, walking around - as something that God is at work in all the time and live present in those moments and be awake? Work on your maturity so that God can bring out the best in you.

Namaste'