Going on towards maturity...

"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, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore, let us leave the elementary doctrines of Christ and go on to maturity..."

Hebrews 5:12-6:1a

So I was listening to sermons earlier today and yesterday that pertained for the most part to stepping into biblical adulthood or maturity. The most recent sermon basically talked about how adolescence in and of itself is a lie of our culture and a delusion. That in scripture there is nothing to support the idea of an in between stage in our development into adulthood. That adolescence is essentially this stage that our culture has developed within the last 60 years or so that is a stage where children begin to experience the pleasures or benefits of adulthood without the responsibility of it, a sort of "testing the waters" stage. Yet, in the Bible we more see that you are either a child or you are a man, but how does one know when they have reached adulthood and passed from being a "little child" to being a "young man" (1 John 2:12-14)?

Society has altogether done away with any sort of rite of passage into manhood, and so within our society we have, what many have dubbed "an epidemic of extended adolescence" or as Mark Driscoll calls it "boys who can shave". I believe that this aspect of our culture has bled into even our faith, which is something through out the New Testament that Paul often warns churches not to be taken in with "fine-sounding/ plausible arguments" (Colossians 2:4) not, "Let no one delude you with crazy and outlandish arguments" but rather plausible ones, and adolescence seems to be a plausible argument to me.

One of the things that the letter to the Colossians was addressing was syncretism, which is, according to wikipedia, "the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought". It seems to me that this is where we find ourselves as a Church. Much like the Colossians we have allowed unbiblical teaching and schools of thought from our society to influence our religion, but James says that "pure and undefiled religion is one that remains "unstained by the world"...the very thing that we allow to happen in many ways. I believe that we have allowed this idea of adolescence to come into our development into spiritual maturity as well. Really I can only speak for myself and say that I know that I have allowed this to happen in a variety of ways.

There are many things that we accept into our religion that do not hold true to the sound doctrine God has given us or the Gospel that has been entrusted to us, and I wonder how we as a Church have allowed these things to hold us back from moving on from the elementary teachings about Christ towards maturity. What have we allowed us to keep us from growing in godliness, or living our lives according to the word. I'm finding myself to feel much like Francis Chan, seeing what God commands in scripture and seeing my life in the light that His Word provides and finding that my life does not match up and that I don't look as good as I think I do. I have found that I am a lot like the crowd that Jesus was addressing when He said, "Why do say to me 'Lord, Lord' but do not do what I say?" (Luke 6:46), and I don't think that responding with, "Sorry, I was taught a different interpretation of Your word." or "Sorry, what You asked of me was just to much to carry out.", is really going to get very far because ultimately I am the one who is accountable for my view of God and my interpretation and application of scripture. I will not be able to defer the blame to being a victim of society or bad teaching, and so something in me has to change even if what is being asked of me seems like too much to bear. God has given us all that we need for "life and godliness" even if we feel foolish, and desperately wicked, and that we don't have what it takes most of the time.