Maturity

Maturity is marked by a tension of increasing awareness...

* Of the total extent of our brokenness i.e. our persistent tendency to try and be our own god and make life work without the only true God. 

* That we make a very poor god and cannot make life work, as it should, without Him. 

While at the same time becoming increasingly aware...

* That God's love for us has nothing to do with our brokenness - or our "goodness" - and everything to do with Christ being broken ¹for us and His goodness being fully credited to us, resulting in being perfectly accepted and embraced by God, which moves us to love, trust in and pursue Him more faithfully. 

The more we see what He has done for us, the more we love him for it and the greater our trust grows in His directions (commands) for us. As Christ said, "if you love me you will keep my commandments..." And how do we come to love, trust, and obey Him? When we see that He loved us first before we ever had any love for him.

In fact, we can not admit the full extent of our brokenness until we see the full extent of God's solution - his absolute and perfect forgiveness, acceptance, and love for us in Christ regardless of our obedience. The more we see God's remedy, the more we can "own" - admit - our brokenness without it ²crushing us emotionally. To see the full extent of our brokenness without a firm grasp of God's grace and forgiveness in spite of it, would affect us so deeply we would not be able to function e.g. emotionally and possibly even literally. We would likely want to crawl into a hole and die. 

Our awareness of this gap between our brokenness and God's complete remedy for it - His total acceptance of us in spite of it - increases as we mature. Or to say it another way this increasing awareness is the mark of increasing maturity. 

The greatest indication of maturity is not our perfection but the growing awareness of our imperfection and God's total remedy for it. "Our righteousness" - feigned maturity - isn't our strength, our humble recognition of Christ's righteousness imparted to us and our lack of perfection is. 

For a discussion on whether believers can ever be depressed click here. 

For a discussion on where we derive strength for self-denial click here.

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¹completely removing the legal consequences of it and then fully assigning His perfect and complete goodness to us. It is ours. This is what it means to be "in Christ" i.e. to have his right standing with God fully assigned (credited) to us and the full consequences of our violating His design born by Christ.

²to fully admit our weaknesses we must first feel safe to do so, knowing our admission will not result in God's rejection of us. If we don't feel safe, we won't own up to how broken we are. And if we don't own it, we won't turn away and be freed from it. This is the essence of repentance. 

For more on owning our brokenness click here.

 

For a discussion on repentance, click here.