The Journey of Christian Maturity

Philippians 3:7-16

St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
Juvenal Cervantes, Pastor
September 18, 2022

Good morning, people of God. The Lord is with you. I heard about a pastor that was used to greeting the congregation that way and one morning he got up and planned to speak that and the microphone wasn’t working and he said, “There is something wrong this microphone” and the congregation replied, “And also with you.”

We say “The Lord is with you” as a recognition that God is with us and that He is with us throughout our lives.

A few years ago there was a fad on Facebook, if you are a Facebook participant. It was called Faceapp and it was a thing that you could put this on artificial intelligence on this so that you can look and see what you would look like in twenty or thirty years. I never participate in that; I really didn’t have the stomach for that. But it is an interesting thing to think about, as we age, as we mature, how do we appear differently to the world? I wonder what it would be like to know what kind of person we’re going to be in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. How would we mature as a person and in our character?

A helpful promise that we can make at St. John’s UCC is a promise to grow spiritually. That’s easy language to throw around, spiritual growth, spiritual formation, but what in the world does that look like, concretely? What if you could see your life in the future to see what kind of persons you and I would become?

How does spiritual maturity even look like? Well, there are probably a number of scriptures in the bible that can describe this. But as we make our way through Philippians, it turns out that Paul addresses that question in Philippians, chapter three to some degree.

Paul is talking about his own life, how he met Christ on the Damascus Road, how his life would turn around from that experience. He lost many things that he had placed a lot of stock in and decided that those kind of things that were on his resume were just rubbish now and he gave himself to following after Christ and he says this:

7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him,

not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ,[a] the righteousness from God based on faith.

I want to know Christ[b] and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal;[c] but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

Beloved,[d] I do not consider that I have made it my own;[e] but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,

I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly[f] call of God in Christ Jesus.

Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. 16 Only let us hold fast to what we have attained.

Look at verse 15 again, having found his own orientation in Christian living.

Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind

“Think like this,” he says, “and if you think differently about any of this, God will reveal to you. Only hold fast to what God has said.” Paul in no way insists that our experience should be just like his, but he does work in us individually, but he does insist that in following after Christ we can share characteristics that are part of his life, some things in common with him. In particular, he is describing the way that Christ has formed him and shaped him, matured him over the years as he has obeyed the vision from heaven that he received when Christ called him to follow after him.

In the same way our lives as we said “yes” to Christ, we begin to follow him in discipleship, in ministry, in service, walk with him in life. That same decision that we made shapes our lives as well. And the goal of that is what his calls maturity.

That those of us who are mature should think this way. Sometimes I think that it’s terribly unfortunate that when we become Christian we don’t have instant spiritual maturity. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? What a church we would have! We would all be mature, we would all be Christlike. But you know, we’re born into this world and we come equipped for the all growth that is in front of us, we mature physically, emotionally, spiritually, as we grow and experience life and we’re shaped by that in so many ways.

Even Jesus, Luke says, when he was 12 years old and had this encounter with the religious leaders, he went back home to Nazareth and subjected himself to his parents, to his home life, and it says that “Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature (physically) and in favor with God (spiritually) and in favor with people (socially) and he grew. The only way to grow is to start less and get more and that’s what he did. Even Jesus experienced this maturing process, even spiritually maturing, coming to understand and know his Father’s will and give his life to that. And that’s what we’re called to, this process. I wish it was instantaneous, but it is not, “It is a long obedience in the same direction,” to quote Eugene Peterson.

So, it would have if we had an idea what the goal was. What is spiritual maturity look like? How do we orient our lives, think like Paul says that we might become more and more mature. Paul says that when we have a perspective of life and discipleship, like the one he describes here in Philippians 3:7 and following, that is what’s formed him over the years and it’s the kind of think that can form us. Many of you as you mature should think that way and as you do God will show it to you, he says.

This is the calling that we have. We can cooperate more fully in the process as we learn to think in this ways. So let’s look at some of things that he says.

He says that maturing people have a capacity to distinguish from things that are more valuable from things that are less valuable in life. It’s a capacity that comes as we mature, we start to realize that’s important and that’s not so important, this is valuable and that’s not so valuable and it is true spiritually also. It is this sense of giving ourselves to the things that are important, that gives our lives a sense of gravity, that holds us in place. It’s the mark of immaturity and childhood that we can’t distinguish between the instantaneous, the unimportant to the more important, the less valuable from the more valuable.

There is a profound poet named Shel Silverstein who has a poem called “Smart.”

Many parents read this poem to their children and this is it:

My dad gave me one dollar bill
‘Cause I’m his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
‘Cause two is more than one!

And then I took the quarters
And traded them to Lou
For three dimes — I guess he didn’t know
That three is more than two!

Just then, along came old blind Bates
And just ’cause he can’t see
He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,
And four is more than three!

And then I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs
Down at the seed-feed store,
And the fool gave me five pennies for them,
And five is more than four!

And then I went and showed my dad,
And he got red in the cheeks
And closed his eyes and shook his head —
Too proud of me to speak!

It’s the mark of immaturity not to know what’s more valuable and to trade off things for things that are less valuable and it’s true in the life with God as well.

Mature people are those who are able to distinguish the more important to the less important in life and Paul had even prayed that for his friends in Philippi.

Remember that in chapter one:

9 And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight 10 to help you to determine what is best,

so that on the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, 11 having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

A primary mark of maturity is that one does distinguish between the more important from the less important, making judgements on values. For one learning to respond to God call it is so important to understand that the call of God upon our lives is the core, it is the most important thing that we could ever say yes to and it is by orienting our lives to that, that we give ourselves to the most important things.

Verses 12 and 13 here, Paul make a play on words, he does that through the whole passage, but his time is here.

12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal;[a] but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Beloved,[b] I do not consider that I have made it my own;

You see those underlined words, those are the same words in the Greek language, the same verb. It means to take hold of something, to apprehend it, to chase it down and catch it and snag it, to understand it, it’s a big word and he just plays with that through there.

Paul had been apprehended, taken hold of, by Christ, on the road to Damascus, captured. He was on his way to Damascus to apprehend Christians and Christ apprehended him on the Damascus road. And now Paul is convinced that Christ apprehended him for a purpose and so he is determined to apprehend that for which Christ apprehended him.

I’m going to chase Christ’s purpose for my life and I am going to get ahold of it, I am going to obtain it, it’s going to be mine because Christ apprehended me. He describes that purpose in terms of “pressing on towards the goal to win the prize to which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus, in verses 14.

So that, for him, is the answer to the question, “What’s the most important thing in life?” The most important thing in life is to lay hold of God’s purpose for our life, to say yes and to know God’s purpose for our life, it doesn’t matter whether we are apostles or students or engineers or farmers or whoever we are in the world. A maturing person know that the most important thing in my life is following Jesus and to lay hold of that for which Christ lay hold of me, to be able to pursue God’s purposes.

Spiritual maturity grasps the truth that God is involved in our world, accomplishing his redemptive purposes and that when he lay hold of me, he invited me into that process as well, to be part of his church, to pursue his redemptive purposes in this world, to lay hold of that which Christ lay hold of us. What could be more important in our lives?

Maturing people make distinction between the most important and the least important thing in life and the most important thing is finding and laying hold of the purpose for which Christ Jesus lay hold of us.

A rabbi’s followers, known as his talmidim in Hebrew, went everywhere with him, not just to hang on his every word and learn theology from him. They followed him everywhere so that they could mimic what he did. They didn’t just want to know what he knew; they wanted to do what he did, live as he lived. Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg note:

To follow a rabbi…involved a literal kind of following, in which disciples often traveled with, lived with and imitated their rabbis, learning not only from what they said but from what they did—from their reactions to everyday life as well as from the manner in which they lived…. This approach to teaching is much more like a traditional apprenticeship than a modern classroom.

Jesus still says to us today, “Follow me.” He never told us to gain a lot of knowledge about him, but rather, to be with him, to remain in him (see John 15), and then, to live as he would in our place—to do what he did.