Posts with the tag “maturity”

Sunday we'll watch Paul name the work of a church that looks like Jesus — and it's not what most churches herald loudest. We'll watch him name the aim — and it's not what most of us would write down if we were planning a church. And we'll watch him refuse two equal and opposite lies about the cost — because the labor is real, and the strength is given.   Read More

James 1:2–4 says count it all joy when you fall into various trials, because the testing of your faith is producing endurance — and endurance, allowed to finish its work, leaves you mature and complete, lacking nothing. That's almost offensive at first read. Joy, in the middle of the trial I would never have chosen? Yes. Not because the pain is joyful, but because the project God is working through the pain is.  Read More

This Sunday we'll sit with one of the most quietly shocking paragraphs in the New Testament — Philippians 3:12–15. Paul has just spent ten verses describing what it cost him to follow Christ and what he's still chasing after. And then, in verse 12, he pulls the brake on his own self-assessment: *"Not that I have already reached the goal or am already perfect…"* This is the apostle Paul. Decades into ministry. Writing from a Roman prison cell, in chains for Christ Jesus. And he says, *I'm not there yet.*   Read More

Sunday is the first week of a five-week series called Maturity in the Body. Across May, we'll ask one steady question together: are we growing up the way our Father longs for us to grow up? May 3 is where that question lands hardest. The next four Sundays, we walk the path of how it actually happens — pressing on (Phil. 3), the trials that grow us (James 1), what we have to put down (1 Cor. 13), and the body that displays Jesus (Col. 1).   Read More