The Benefits of Spiritual Maturity In Everyday Life

Life throws all sorts of things in a person’s direction. A famous line in a movie states that with life, “you never know what you’re gonna get.” Sometimes what you get are joys, such as good friendships, meaningful work, and a deep sense of well-being. At other times, you may encounter hardship such as loss of work or a loved one, illness, or conflict in relationships. You can’t always tell what you’re going to get from one moment to the next.

Given the unpredictability of life, one way to face this reality is to cultivate emotional and spiritual resilience.

What Spiritual Maturity Looks Like

When life gets difficult, having the tools to deal with it will enable you to flourish despite those circumstances. Being spiritually mature is one way for you to equip yourself to handle life’s difficulties. Spiritual maturity can be described in various ways, but at the heart of it, it’s about being secure in your relationship with the Lord and having the wisdom to use all the resources the Lord has made available for His people on their sojourn.

Being secure in your relationship with the Lord is about knowing who He is and knowing who you are before Him. A spiritually mature person understands the good news of Jesus Christ, and their life flows from that relationship of freely given grace that abounds to sinners like you and me. The good news about Jesus is the center of a spiritually mature person’s life; that is where they get their sense of identity and purpose (Galatians 2:20; 1 Corinthians 5:17).

In addition to understanding who they are before God, the spiritually mature person also has the wisdom to recognize how the world works. That’s what the book of Proverbs is all about, and a wise person recognizes the nature of God’s world and what it means to live a good life in that world skillfully. As Proverbs 1:7 (NIV) says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

What is this “fear of the Lord”? Many mistake it for a servile fear or living in terror of the consequences of God getting angry with you, but that’s not what the Bible means when it uses this phrase. The “fear of the Lord” describes a healthy respect for God’s definition of good and evil, and true wisdom means learning those boundary lines and not crossing them.

It means humbling oneself before God and acknowledging God as God. He is the One to whom we must look to understand the true nature of this world, as well as how best to live in it, so we don’t ruin ourselves or others around us.

Humbling ourselves in this way means following God’s way, even when it is inconvenient to us, or when we see another way that seems wise to us. As Raymond Ortlund Jr. put it, the fear of the Lord is openness to him, eagerness to please him, and humility to be instructed by him.

The fear of the Lord is also a willingness to turn from evil and change our ways. The fear of the Lord is surrendering to His will and realizing that “I am not the measure of all things. I am being measured.”

So spiritual maturity looks like having a secure, gospel-centered relationship with the Lord, being wise, and lastly, recognizing that God is bigger than our circumstances. A child-like faith trusts that God is who He says He is despite what our circumstances may be telling us.

In reading Scripture, we can realize that God is at work in and through all our circumstances (Romans 8:28) and that just because things aren’t shaping up as we expect, that doesn’t mean that God has failed, or that He doesn’t care about us (2 Corinthians 1:3-11).

How Spiritual Maturity Benefits You

Spiritual maturity helps you in more than matters that could be considered strictly ‘religious’ in nature. That’s because God’s wisdom about life covers every area of our lives, and that includes our work, relationships, etc. As such, being a spiritually mature person can yield benefits in these ways:

Helps you to weather storms successfully. If you know that your future is secure in Christ, you can be resilient and deal with hardship here and now (Romans 8:18). This doesn’t mean that you do not grieve; it is right to grieve, as Jesus did when His friend Lazarus died (John 11:35).

It means that even when you grieve, because you understand who God is, your grief is not without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), and God and His people are a source of comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3-11).

It can help you deal with relationships well, without idolizing them. When good things become ultimate things in your life, they become idols. We look to idols to give us happiness, comfort, and peace, but they cannot deliver. Relationships can become distorted if we put inordinate pressure on them, but they can flourish if our sense of meaning and purpose flows from another source and into those relationships.

Provides you with resources for doing relationships well. Being a spiritually mature person means understanding how life works and knowing the resources available to you to do it well. Some of those resources include other believers in Christ, Scripture, prayer, and the help of professional counselors who can offer you guidance with thorny issues.

With the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, you can forgive others when you are wronged, cultivate the humility to accept accountability, seek help when you need it, and nurture patience, empathy, and compassion to not rush to judgment and hear people out. These are skills that are necessary for resolving conflict and ensuring that resentment doesn’t ruin your relationships.

You can work consistently. Being a spiritually mature person means that you also have a deep source of motivation for the things you do in life. This includes your relationships with other people, but it most certainly also includes your daily work life. A deep connection with God helps you understand that your work, even though it may be mundane, has a higher and deeper purpose that it serves in loving the Lord or your neighbor.

A spiritually mature person is energized to work hard even when circumstances aren’t perfect, such as when you have a difficult boss or work under hard conditions. One set of Scriptures urges,

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. – Colossians 3:23-24, NIV

In other words, when you are working, work as unto the Lord, not working only for the here and now or to satisfy your employer who’s looking over your shoulder. This doesn’t mean that your work life will be problem-free, but it means that your mindset toward work will be different from that of a spiritually immature person or the person who doesn’t follow Jesus.

Being a spiritually mature person does not mean that everything in your life goes swimmingly. It can bring hardships all its own (2 Timothy 3:12). However, it means that you have resources you can use to help you navigate life well. Challenges in life will come, but it’s important to have the resources that can help you work through those challenges and emerge on the other side.

Christian Counseling for Spiritual Development

As mentioned earlier, one of the resources that is available is mental health professionals, such as counselors. If you’re struggling to make sense of your spiritual journey, or if your relationship with God needs some repair, then talking to someone like a Christian counselor in California can be a huge help.

They can help you unpack your situation and help you develop a plan to cultivate a spiritual life that meets your needs effectively. Contact us today at California Christian Counseling to learn more.