Five Steps to Spiritual Maturity

Hebrews 5:11–6:3 (ESV)

11 About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.

12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food,

13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.

14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

1 Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity...

Introduction

The title of my message today is Five Steps to Spiritual Maturity.

We are going to delve into this subject today. It is a question that I think we all need to consider, and I believe it is a subject that is often misunderstood.

Some people assume they have spiritual maturity when they do not have it, and some people may have a greater level of spiritual maturity than they realize.

Here are a few questions I hope to answer today.

1. What is spiritual maturity?

2. Are you spiritually mature?

3. Do you want to be spiritually mature?

4. What are the indicators you’re spiritually mature?

5. What are the indicators that others are spiritually mature?

Today we will attempt to answer these questions by looking at five steps to spiritual maturity.

Step one:

There Must Be a Desire

The first step to spiritual maturity is that you have a desire to be spiritually mature.

Hebrews 5

11 About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.

12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food,

The writer of Hebrews here sounds like he is writing to a group of people who are not really interested in achieving any spiritual maturity. You don’t see the desire coming through, he says they have become dull of hearing, in other words, they are not even paying attention.

Have you ever had this happen to you in school, Sunday School or other school, you’re sitting there thinking about anything other than the subject at hand when the teacher calls your name and asks you a question on the subject under discussion? I used to have that happen to me all the time in school. I was supposed to be in class but my mind would be miles away. That’s the people the passage is talking about here, like me in high school, they are dull of hearing, they are not paying attention.

Now this doesn’t mean that they are not believers, it doesn’t mean that they are not saved. It simply means they have not progressed in their walk with Jesus. Their spiritual senses are dull because they have not spent the time to develop those senses.

They are perfectly happy with their spiritual life right where it is at this moment. This is the case with so many in the church today. They sit in church week after week, year after year, probably on the very same pew, and not only are they in the same place every week physically, they are in the same place spiritually. They are not making any progress. They are not growing in their relationship with the Lord.

Charles Spurgeon said, “Alas! Much has been done of late to promote the production of dwarfish Christians. Poor, sickly believers turn the church into an hospital, rather than an army. Oh, to have a church built up with the deep godliness of people who know the Lord in their very hearts and will seek to follow the Lamb wherever he goes!”

The encouraging thing is it is not too late. If you have the desire, you can still move forward. Which brings us to step two. The next step after desire is:

Desire Must Lead to Knowledge

Once you have the desire, then you start learning, you start gaining knowledge.

13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.

14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Knowledge begins with “spiritual milk,” but it doesn’t end there. Just as a baby begins the development of his body with milk, his natural progression is on to solid food. Food that has mass and weight. Food that will “stick to your ribs” as my grandmother used to say.

The passage says the mature have powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. The King James translates it as “senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” We all have certain senses, we all have certain abilities, but our senses will be little more than just of basic use until we exercise and develop and train them.

You see, you can’t tell good from evil without some training. It’s like a career in the trades. First you go to a trade school where they teach you a skill. You might train to be welder or a carpenter or a mason. Then, after your formal classroom training, you go out and serve an apprenticeship. This is where you practice those skills under the supervision of someone who is more experienced than you. You have the basic skills from training, but you develop those skills in the field with practice, with the practical application of those things you have learned in the classroom and on the job.

1 Timothy 4:7 (ESV)

7 Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness;

Paul says, “train yourself for godliness.” This is where you take that knowledge that you have gained, and you expand upon it.

Hebrews 6

1 Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity,

It is good to gain that foundational knowledge, it is good to know doctrine, it is good to learn the things of faith, but that is not the end goal. A large percentage of believers are stuck here at this point. They have a lot of knowledge; they know a lot of scripture. They have an idea of what is right and what is wrong, but they have never moved on to the next step and they are still baby Christians until they take that next step:

Knowledge Must Lead to Responsibility

In other words, we have to be responsible for what we know.

Responsibility takes place when we come to the realization that God has taught us these things for a reason. Responsibility takes place when we are able to comprehend that our knowledge now requires something more. Responsibility is when we start to “own it.”

Okay, now we know some things, we have some knowledge, we have developed our faith to a degree, we have a basic idea of what is right and what is wrong, now what are we going to do?

How is our knowledge of God and His ways going to make a difference in our lives? If we have the knowledge but nothing in our life changes, have we really acquired that knowledge or not.

After I completed training to get my pilot’s license, I undertook an advanced course toward obtaining an instrument rating. What this means is that with an instrument rating you are qualified to fly an airplane in the clouds where you cannot see the ground any longer. You can’t tell if the airplane is upright, upside down, or turning left or right unless you look at the instruments on the panel that tell you if you are flying straight and level.

If you try to fly an airplane in the clouds without instruments you will quickly lose your bearing and you will probably find yourself descending through the clouds in a spin that you have no idea how to recover from. This is what kills most pilots without an instrument rating that accidently fly into clouds.

If you have that knowledge, but you don’t take the responsibility to use it, if it doesn’t change the way you live your life, what good is it? At worst you crash and burn, at best you don’t do yourself, anyone else, or the kingdom of God any good.

James 2:17 ESV

17 So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

We have the responsibility to act on what we know and once we grasp that responsibility, it will leads us to the next step:

Responsibility Must Lead to Action

What do I mean by action? It means we take what we have learned and start putting it to use. It means to start telling people around us about Jesus. It means letting Christ’s light shine in our lives. It means starting to live in a way that shows people that you are different, that you have something that they don’t have.

It means being obedient to God and acting on what we have learned.

James 1:22–24 (ESV)

22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.

This passage is not talking about forgetting what you look like, it is talking about not taking to heart who you are supposed to be.

Transforming your knowledge into action is a step that a lot of Christians have not taken. You have all this knowledge, you have this deeper faith, but it’s not going anywhere. It is just sitting around. It like spending all your time eating and never getting any exercise. You start to become spiritually obese.

The famous early twentieth century evangelist, Oswald Chambers, said, “Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God. Some people mature into an understanding of God’s will more quickly than others because they obey more readily; they more readily sacrifice the life of nature to the will of God."

When we start to translate our knowledge into action, we get to the last step:

Action Will Lead to Maturity

Hebrews 5:14 (ESV)

14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

After we establish a habit of putting our knowledge into action, we start to develop some spiritual maturity. We start to develop some skills.

You start to recognize situations that you did not recognize before. Not only do we recognize these situations, but we also have the ability to respond to those situations and handle them in a way that honors God. In other words, with spiritual maturity, you will handle difficult situations not in the way the world handles them, but in the way that God would have you handle them.

With maturity you also develop some spiritual equilibrium. Your highs don’t get too high, and your lows don’t get too low.

When we reach that spiritual maturity, we get to the point where we can actually teach others. We become anchors for those who need us to be strong. We can be an anchor in a way that gives others something solid to lean on, and not the anchor that weighs others down as is often the case of the spiritually immature.

Conclusion

Think about these five steps we have talked about.

Desire

Knowledge

Responsibility

Action

Maturity

Which steps have you accomplished? At which level are you on this road to spiritual maturity?

You have a relationship with the Lord, but does your life bring glory to God.

You have a good concept of what is right and what is wrong, but does your life inspire those around you to become more mature in their faith?

Ultimately, if we seek the measure of spiritual maturity as recorded in Scripture, it is not the display of spiritual emotion, or even the display of spiritual gifts, but the manifestation of spiritual fruit as we find in Galatians, chapter 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.