On the Topic of Spiritual Maturity

Some thoughts on Spiritual Maturity:

True spirituality manifests itself in certain dominant desires.

1.    First is the desire to be holy rather than happy.

2.    A man may be considered spiritual when he wants to see the honor of God advanced through his life even if it means that he himself must suffer temporary dishonor or loss.

3.     The spiritual man wants to carry his cross.

4.    Again, a Christian is spiritual when he sees everything from God's viewpoint.

5.    Another desire of the spiritual man is to die right rather than to live wrong.

6.    The desire to see others advance at his expense.

7.    The spiritual man habitually makes eternity-judgments instead of time-judgments.

Tozer 

In my own pastoral and personal Christian experience, I can say that I’ve never known a man or woman who came to spiritual maturity except through discipline. Godliness comes through discipline.

Donald Whitney

We have to know that one of the great marks of spiritual maturity is being able to take admonition and rebuke! This matter of being able to admit faults and seek to correct them is a mark of maturity.

Max A. Forsythe

The Christian life is very much like climbing a hill of ice. You cannot slide up. You have to cut every step with an ice axe. Only with incessant labor in cutting and chipping can you make any progress. If you want to know how to backslide, leave off going forward. Cease going upward and you will go downward of necessity. You can never stand still.

C.H. Spurgeon

You are not mature if you have a high esteem of yourself. He who boasts in himself is but a babe in Christ, if indeed he be in Christ at all. Young Christians may think much of themselves. Growing Christians think themselves nothing. Mature Christians know that they are less than nothing. The more holy we are, the more we mourn our infirmities, and the humbler is our estimate of ourselves. 

C.H. Spurgeon

When God prunes us, the result will be greater growth and sweeter fruit… Pruning usually takes place when God uses situations, people, and circumstances to help mature us in our Christian disposition, attitude, and temperament… The way we respond when we are pruned reveals our true level of spiritual maturity.

P. Bunny Wilson

It is a mistake to assess spirituality simply on the basis of a person's emotional display. What you want to be careful of is looking around at people in the church service and seeing people really into it – on their knees, people singing with glazed-over eyes, people expressing a lot of emotion, people weeping – and drawing the conclusion that because people are responding emotionally that they have a deeper connection with God or a more mature faith than the person who is not reacting emotionally at all. This is a profound error… Emotional response is not in any sense a Scriptural measure of spiritual maturity.

Gregory Koukl

“A mature person is one who is does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably”

Eleanor Roosevelt quotes “Maturity begins to grow when you can sense your concern for others outweighing your concern for yourself.” “Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for long-term values.”