Things Mama Taught Me: "Act Your Age"

On Becoming a Grown-up Christian

I am a middle child, born after two boys had arrived in quick succession and followed by two more brothers and a sister. When my behavior failed to measure up to the expectations of my mother, she would sometimes tell me, “Act your age.”

Acting my age was, I admit, sometimes a confusing point. I was old enough to wash the dishes and help feed the chickens, but too young to go to the grain elevator and watch the trucks dump their loads of wheat. I was too big to cry when my older brothers teased but too little to go along with them when they rode their bikes down the lane to play with the neighbor kids.

A lot of Christians are equally confused by the issue of spiritual maturity. Does it mean one is fully developed as a believer, that there is no more growth to be attained? Does it mean that we have been trained in every essential way and have reached some level of perfection? Does it mean that we have served all that we need to and can now “retire” from Christian duty?

It means none of these.

Maturity, in its finest sense, is acting out of what we know rather than what we feel. James, one of the Church’s early pastors, wrote, ”Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.” (James 1:2-4)

If we have obtained any knowledge at all beyond the recognition that we need Jesus as our Savior, then we are “old enough” to face with success the tests that come to everyone. Holding steady in the face of difficulty is not really about being tough; it is a choice we make, a challenge to act as nearly like our Older Brother as we can. Giving it all up as too hard, or giving in to whining while we endure, is not acting our age.

MaryMartha
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Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 2003 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Email: mrymrtha@gmail.com