The Importance of Spiritual Maturity

Go ahead and find Mark 9. We will be in verses 38-41 today. The title of the sermon is The Importance of Spiritual Maturity.

Mark 9:38–41 ESV

38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39 But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40 For the one who is not against us is for us. 41 For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.

Prayer

The Great Awakening was a string of revivals that happened between the 1720’s and 1740’s. It happened across America and England. There were 2 key figures in the movement, George Whitfield and John Wesley. Throughout the movement though, there was this divide that began to happen with people about who they were to follow. See, Whitfield and Wesley did not see eye to eye on every little thing.

George Whitfield showed great maturity with the situation. He decide to hand the reigns over completely to Wesley. I would argue that this is not something we see enough of in our day today.

Over time though, the landscape of American religiosity has shifted and has become even more divided than ever. The differences between Whitfield and Wesley were way down the line of basic beliefs. They agreed on the major doctrines. Today, there is a much greater divide because of the failure to affirm the major doctrines.

You may think, what does this have to do with the passage for today? In our passage, we have John that is trying to discredit people who are ministering in the name of Jesus just because they were not part of his group. So within our passage and this sermon today, we are going to reconcile what John does and what Jesus teaches with how we are to operate today.

And to do this, we must look at our spiritual maturity. It takes maturity to be able to look at someone that we don’t agree with on every little thing, like Whitfield and Wesley, and say that we love them and we will work with them. At the same time, it also takes spiritual maturity to look at someone who does not even affirm the essential beliefs of Christianity and say that we will not work with them.

Main Idea - Spiritual Growth is Vital to the Mission of the Church

The mission of every Christian church is to make disciples. Matthew 28:19-20

Matthew 28:19–20 ESV

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

We want to make mature disciples. We teach them ALL that Jesus has commanded. To truly fulfill this mission that Jesus has given us, we want to develop mature disciples, not shallow disciples. So that brings up a question that we all must ask ourselves.

Probing Question - Are you more mature today than you were when Christ saved you?

I don’t want anyone to think that there is a way to be perfect as a Christian, because this is not true at all. We will all sin. But, we believe in the perseverance of the saints. That means that all true believers will continually be striving to be more like Christ. So don’t think of it as some sort of “practice makes perfect”, but more of a progression. And what are we progressing to? We are progressing to be more and more mature so that we can be more and more like Christ.

As we look at our text today, there are a few things that stand out of what we can take from it.

We Need Discipleship

The men that have been walking with Jesus had been getting the best discipleship that you could imagine. Yet, they just did not quite understand at times. Let this encourage you. Maybe you have that person that you have been trying to disciple or the person that you have been just trying to encourage with God’s word, and you feel like you are wasting words sometimes because they keep doing the same things.

Well, these disciples were getting it straight from the source and were still not getting it. So, don’t think that you are going to disciple better than Jesus did.

Mark 9:38 ESV

38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

It is best if we put this into the greater context of what is going on. Starting off in chapter 9, we see Peter and James and John go up the mountain and witness the transfiguration of Jesus. They come back down and things have just went haywire. A man brought his demon possessed son for Jesus to help. Well, Jesus wasn’t there so the remaining disciples thought that they could step in and take care of it, but they weren’t able to. After this, they were walking down the road and were arguing about who is the greatest one among them.

Now we see John tell Jesus that they saw someone casting out demons in the name of Jesus and stopped him. I want us to get really deep here. I hope you are ready. This man was having a successful ministry of casting out demons, and the disciples of Jesus stopped him. It was not magic or sorcery. They even said that he was doing this in the name of Jesus.

I could name a laundry list of things that is going on here like pride, envy, and jealousy. But it goes deeper than this. These men need a complete overhaul of the heart. They are ignoring the teaching of Jesus. As we have been going through the book of Mark, we have seen some progression. But in these middle chapters, it is almost as if they are deaf to what Jesus is teaching. Let’s go back a couple of verses here. Jesus just got done teaching them about receiving people in his name. And now, they are stopping people who are using his name. Look at verse 37. Whoever receives one such child in my name. Verse 38 has this man who is using the name of Jesus to cast out demons, and they stop him. Were they not even listening to Jesus?

You may be thinking that this verse here has nothing to do with discipleship, and if you take it by itself then yes you are right. But I want us to look at this verse in the context of the entire New Testament. In this verse, we have an extremely important detail. It says that John was the one who said this. John was one of the 3 closest to Jesus. He was one of them who went up on the mountain and witnessed the transfiguration. Maybe he was even one of the ones who was arguing about who was the greatest. But here, he stops someone from having effective ministry, and then goes and tells Jesus what he did like he was a dog that found a stick.

How does discipleship come into play? Even after this rebuking that Jesus is about to give him, he continues to follow Jesus. Now, in my experience, and yours too, oftentimes when you are discipling someone and you start pinpointing certain things going on. And then, all of a sudden, poof, they are gone. Maybe they find someone else who tickles their ears or maybe even another church that doesn’t care how they live.

But John didn’t do that. He stuck with Jesus. He saw Jesus go to the cross and be raised from the grave. He witnessed him after the resurrection. He was there when the church grew and the church spread out of Jerusalem. And he went on to write 5 of the books in our New Testament. He went on to be imprisoned on the Isle of Patmos where God gave him the vision to be written down as the book of Revelation.

And this was all because of the discipleship he received. We need discipleship. We need to surround ourselves with men and women who will challenge us and call us out on our junk. And we need to stick with them. Discipleship does not happen in one day or one week but over a lifetime. And as disciples, we should be making other disciples. I have heard it said before that every Paul needs a Barnabus and a Timothy. We need people to be learning from and people that we are teaching. This is discipleship. We need discipleship.

We Need a Kingdom Perspective

I want to have a time of confession here this morning. I have had a problem with coveting. And God has really been dealing with me. He is softening my heart to it and I am confessing and repenting of it. But over the course of the last several months, I have been jealous and envious of other churches. I will leave after service and be driving and see churches with parking lots that have more cars in it than we had people for the day. I will hear pastor friends talking about how their church is growing. And it makes me jealous and makes me feel like I am not good enough. Now I don’t say that because I want any kind of sympathy. I say that because the disciples went through it too. And Christ is working in me daily with this.

Mark 9:39 ESV

39 But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.

I don’t think this was the response that John was expecting. He was proud of what he had done. He wanted to hear Jesus say, “good job”. But he got the opposite. Don’t stop him. See, the reason that John said he stopped him was because this man was not “one of them”. John was being small minded. He did not see the kingdom of God as he would one day soon.

We have this issue today too. I gave you my example. We look at other churches and we think that it is not fair that they are successful and we might not be as successful. But what we must be reminded of and what John needed to learn is that Kingdom success is much more important that individual success. Just because this man was not in John’s group, did not mean that he was not in the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is much bigger than just us. This us and them mentality is what will destroy churches and will harm the reach of the gospel in a community. We have churches that are near us in proximity here. West Albemarle Baptist, Poplin’s Grove Baptist, and Second Street Presbyterian just to name a few. They may do things that we don’t do. They may have outreach events that are successful for them but would fail for us. They may sing different songs than we do or preach from a different version of the bible than we do. But, when they are working in the name of Jesus, that does not matter. We cannot see things as an us and them matter.

But we can take this further too with how we look at people that may not be believers. Each and every one of us are different. We look different, sound different, like different foods, live in houses that cost different amounts of money, and make paychecks that look different. When we look at people like they are better than us or less than us because of things like this, there is an issue.

John here, learned real quick, that just because someone didn’t run in his circle doesn’t mean that they weren’t part of the kingdom of God. Same goes for us. When we are in this world and we are see others work for the kingdom, we need to understand that the kingdom is bigger than just us. We need a kingdom perspective.

I want to put a little asterisk with that though. Because there are some that claim to be in the kingdom of God that would not affirm the same things that we affirm. And that leads to the last thing I want to point out.

We Need Discernment

Discernment is being able to judge well. So we see something going on or we hear something, and we are able to determine whether or not it is true or good. Jesus teaches his disciples about discernment. He just told them that no one who does a mighty work in his name will be able to speak evil of him. He is teaching them that although we may not see eye to eye on every little detail, that we can still work together. That is discernment.

Mark 9:40–41 ESV

40 For the one who is not against us is for us. 41 For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.

Jesus here puts people into 2 camps. People are either for us or against us. There is no middle ground. There is no lukewarm. No riding the fence. For us, against us. If someone is doing work in the name of Jesus, then they are for us. Everyone else is against us. He is very clear.

Jesus uses verse 41 to describe this man. Whoever(anyone) who gives you are cup of water because you belong to Christ(someone who serves Jesus), will not lose his reward. Just because you don’t know someone or they are not in your group doesn’t mean that they are not on your side.

But how do we know who is on God’s side? We live in a very confused world. And this confusion has made its way inside of many churches. So how do we know who we can align ourselves with?

Has anyone here ever had to go to the emergency room? Most of us have. Well when you go to the emergency room and maybe you are having some sort of flu symptoms (flu is going around). Well you are waiting in the emergency room and it has been a while and you see someone else come in and they are having chest pains. They sit down too and the next thing you know, they get called back first. A logical person would have no issue with this. Why? Because there is a scale of importance.

What we should do is take this concept and apply it to how we view others and their beliefs. Albert Mohler coined this term “Theological Triage”. It is where you map out things that are essential, non-essential, and convictions.

So I want us to take a look at a tool. On this pyramid, we have primary(essential-all believers should agree), secondary (non-essentials, things that individual churches agree on), and tertiary (all the rest, things that we may have convictions on but don’t have to agree on to be in fellowship).

What is primary? Things that are primary are things like the trinity. Believing that God is 3 in one, father and son and Holy Spirit. Believing that Jesus is fully God and fully man. And believing that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. We cannot work our way towards God and earn a place in heaven. But that it is a gift given freely. These things are primary. When it comes to us maybe partnering with a church to do work in our community, this is the standard. If you cannot agree on the primary things, then we should not be working together. But then we take it a step further.

What are things that are secondary? This would be things like views on baptism and the Lord’s supper. There are great, gospel believing churches that do not hold to the same beliefs on baptism that we do. If John Black from Second St. Presby called me tomorrow and wanted to do an outreach event with our church, I would not hesitate. Because we agree on the primary. Just because they hold a different view on baptism than we do does not mean that we cannot work together. They would also hold to a different view of church government. And there are some churches that view the roles of different genders in church differently than we do. But if we can agree on the primary, we can work together.

Now in the local church, these things can be problematic. I would say that these are things that the local congregation must agree on. I would never suggest someone join a church that does not line up with their secondary issues unless there is no other gospel presence around.

But then we get all the way at the bottom of the pyramid. These are the tertiary issues or what you might call personal convictions. This would be things that you could go to a particular church and find that people have differences with and it not cause division in the church. This would be things like which translation of the bible you like reading. Or your personal beliefs of the end times. We could have Premil, postmil, and amil all rolled up into a particular church and we can all get along. If those terms went over your head, that is fine. We will dive into those one day. Maybe there are certain texts in the bible that may be looked at differently. We can still be in fellowship together.

This is the beauty of the local church. We are like a pot of stew. You have your primary(beef). Then you have your secondary ingredients like carrots and celery and potatoes. But then once you put it in the bowl to eat, you have people that think there are things that you should put in there that others think differently. Maybe you have someone that likes to put crackers in their stew. Or someone who likes a nice piece of bread with it. But then you have someone that might put ketchup in it for some reason. Would I do that? Absolutely not. But that is the way that they want to do it and that is fine.

Let us agree on the main things. Keep the main thing the main thing. And that is Jesus.

And that is how we should sum up our text. John tries to make something that isn’t the main thing more important than it really is. The kingdom of God was much bigger than he knew.

So what should we get out of our text today. If you remember one thing, it is that spiritual growth is vital to the church. We see the life of John. How he grew from the person who was stopping people from doing ministry all the way to the Apostle who wrote 5 books in our New Testament. Part of maturity is learning to work together with others for the gospel. But it is more than just that. So be like John.

Keep following Jesus. Find someone to help you out. Fight sin. Dig into God’s word. Spend time in prayer. And keep doing it every single day.

Prayer.