It’s time you do this on your own

Have you ever met someone who refused to grow up?

I’m not talking about someone who tries to keep a child-like curiosity and wonder about their life.  Instead, I’m asking if you’ve met someone who still thinks and behaves immaturely, whose view of the world is completely self-centered, small, and childish.  Have you met someone like that?  Of course you have.

Even though they are adult-sized, it doesn’t take long for a childish adult to stand out.  You can hear the whine in their voice.  Any topic of discussion is oozing with self-centeredness.  Other people only matter so much as they are beneficial to them in that moment.

Unfortunately, it’s a little harder to spot a childish Christian, but they can’t hide for long either.  When we first believe in Jesus for eternal life, we are born into God’s Family.  This new life can happen at any biological age – childhood, teens, young adult, older adult – and we all start out as spiritual infants.  However, spiritual growth doesn’t happen automatically like physical growth does. 

Spiritual growth comes from learning about God in the Scriptures (both by being taught and by your own study), applying what you have learned in your life, praying with God, and spending time with others who are in God’s Family and further along than you are.

Want to know an easy way to spot an immature Christian?  Listen to what they say.  Unfortunately, buzz words and buzz phrases have made their way into how many Christians speak…and these phrases are often held at the same level of truth as the Scriptures themselves.  How many of these phrases do you recognize?

God helps those who help themselves.
Money is the root of all evil.
God won’t give you any more than you can handle.
When God closes a door, He opens a window.

None of these are in the Bible.  In fact, some of these are exactly opposite of what’s in the Bible.  But they are often spoken as spiritual truths coming directly from Jesus and His disciples.

Unfortunately, Biblical ignorance (which is nothing more than not knowing what God actually says) isn’t just a modern problem.  At one point during his letter, the author of Hebrews had to stop and call out his audience:

Hebrews 5:11-14
We have a great deal to say about this, and it is difficult to explain, since you have become too lazy to understand.  Although by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the basic principles of God’s revelation again.  You need milk, not solid food. 

Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness, because he is an infant.  But solid food is for the mature – for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.

No punches pulled there.

The Greek word translated as lazy – nothros – means sluggish or stupid, dull or stubborn.  And the thing to note is that they didn’t start out with this deficit!  The author says you have become too lazy to understand – their willful choices are holding them back.  They could have chosen to grow in their walk with Jesus, in fact by now they should have been teaching others, but they liked being childish so much that they refused to learn or mature.

They have become a drag to the church and are unable to confront the societal pressures they are currently facing.  Their immaturity is part of the reason why they received this letter.  The author’s hope was to spur them on to put their faith into action, so they wouldn’t regret wasting their lives on things that did not have eternal value.

And what of us?  Will we heed the same warning?

Let’s stop being lazy and distracted.  Instead, let’s get into the Scriptures for ourselves.  Then we can grow and mature into the people God has created us to be.

Keep Pressing,
Ken

I hate the phrase “It’s the journey, not the destination”

Some things sound really nice – until you stop and think about them.

“Listen to your heart” and “You do you” are common mantras of our day…but, they are flawed thinking.  If we’re honest, we can’t fully trust our heart because it has lied to us before, and always selfishly doing what I want leads to a dead end called “loneliness”.  As much as these two phrases cause me to roll my eyes whenever I hear them, there is another one that feels more like a cheese grater underneath my skin:

It’s the journey, not the destination.

It sounds nice, and people who say it mean well.  They want to emphasize the growth and praise the development a person experiences in life, as opposed to looking at all the big things they haven’t accomplished despite their hard work and life lessons learned.  Celebrating smaller steps can often give us the courage to take the next step – and I get that.  However, the real problem is that we’re not dealing with an either/or proposition here.

To minimize, or even ignore, the destination leaves us wandering around in life, bouncing from one feel-good moment to the next.  Left to our own devices, humans will not choose a harder path – unless there is a clear benefit to doing so.  Not only does that benefit become our “destination”, but the destination also guides the path to reach the benefit. 

If you want to go to Maui, Hawaii, there are many paths that can get you there – and each one has its own journey-lessons available – but, there is only one Maui, Hawaii.  Either you get there, or you don’t.  Even if you decide along the way that your “new destination” is Denver, and you apply all your “Maui journey lessons” to your new life in Denver – you’ll never get to enjoy the beauty of Maui and the opportunities that awaited you there.

The same “it’s the journey, not the destination” thinking can muddy up how we live our lives as Christians.  It is too easy, as believers, to think that just because we’ve believed in Jesus for eternal life and He’s promised us that we’re going to heaven…then God’s good with whatever we do, right?  Wrong.

Jesus repeatedly warned His disciples that how they lived their lives would matter in eternity.  He told them to “store up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (Matthew 6:20), which logically means that the “treasures” aren’t heaven, it must be something else.  Something that they earn now and has value for them later in eternity.

Jesus’ longest recorded sermon (aka “The Sermon on the Mount”) focuses entirely on how to live with His Kingdom in mind and how to earn those treasures in heaven.  You can read it in Matthew 5:1 – 7:29.  He ends the sermon with an application challenge – for those who listened to Him to choose: either put His teachings to use and be like a wise man who builds his house upon a rock solid foundation or ignore what He taught and be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.  While this parable has its own fascinating teaching, I want to focus on something He said just before this, which has a similar intention:

Matthew 7:13-14
Enter through the narrow gate.  For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it.  How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.

Many have assumed that the destruction destination represents hell, and that the life destination represents heaven.  They say that “unsaved people” walk the broad road, and “saved people” walk the narrow road.  Reading these verses in isolation, I can see how you could come to these conclusions – however, Jesus did not speak them in isolation.  This mini-parable is part of the same closing statements as the builders parable, which closes out The Sermon on the Mount.

The correct understanding is to recognize (based on the context) that all the travelers in the parable are believers.  The Greek word for destruction is apoleia, which can also be translated as “ruin”, is the destination of those who take the wide, easy road.  Only those who choose the difficult road of being a disciple will find the full quality of life that Jesus desires for us to live. 

We can choose to be a lazy child of God or we can choose to put His Sermon on the Mount teachings into practice.  The easy road will take us to a place of ruin and destruction – a life of wasted opportunity.  The difficult road leads to a full life now, with rewards and opportunities in eternity future.

Each day, we can choose which road to walk.  But be mindful of the destination when making that choice.

Keep Pressing,
Ken