The Journey

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Oxyrhynchus Hymn: Egypt, late 200’s.

This is an ancient hymn sung by early Christians. The recovered text reads:

“Together all the eminent ones of God: Night nor day, let them be silent–Let the luminous stars not shine. Let the rushings of winds, the sources of all surging rivers cease. While we hymn Father and Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers answer, “Amen, amen, Strength, praise, and glory forever to God, the sole giver of all good things. Amen, amen.”

How did Jesus intend for His followers to grow, mature, and ultimately change the world?

“I am writing to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name. I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one (1 John 2:12-13).“

Spiritual Infancy

We delight in the goodness of God

When we are new in the faith, our experience of God and our community of fellow believers is often charged with an excitement, continual discovery and visible representation of God actively at work in our life for our well-being, protection and favor. In this stage, our experience of the Holy Spirit often centers on uplifting times of worship and sensory moments that validate and inspire. The length of this stage varies somewhat, but ultimately many Christians reach the designed terminus of this stage as God begins to invite us beyond pleasure and enthusiasm and into the next stage of our maturity, Spiritual Adolescence.

Spiritual Adolescence

Character formation

This is the stage where our experience of Holy Spirit begins to shift away from inspiration toward conviction. This may be conviction of sin when needed, but it is also sometimes pangs of realization of our character flaws and immature mindsets and behaviors. The Spirit of God is actively at work within us, illuminating the traits that He wants to bring into conformity with the character of Jesus Christ. This stage of maturity is earmarked by struggle–struggle against selfish desires; against temptation; and against oppression.

The fruit of the Spirit

In Spiritual Adolescence the Holy Spirit is at work within us to bear fruit, and as a general rule, it is probably safe to say that the Spirit’s priority is more about creating fruit within us than through us at this point–that will come with growth and maturity.

Learning to Yield

It is also in our Adolescence that the Holy Spirit begins to nudge us and illuminate areas of our life where we are holding on too tightly to anything that is a distraction and entanglement and might keep us from enjoying the abundant life we were promised in Christ Jesus. He first begins with the obvious–sins that we are entangled with–but in this stage we are usually too focused on managing sin that we miss the fact that God is inviting us beyond self-control and into true freedom. Besides sin, the Spirit of God also begins to highlight within our hearts the activities we indulge in that may be too consuming–habits, addictions and various forms of escapism. The Spirit also invites us to yield certain possessions or products that have become far too meaningful in our life and provide us a sense of identity or self-medication.

Learning to recognize the voice of God

One of the most significant discoveries in the Spiritual Adolescent is the Holy Spirit teaching us how to recognize the voice of our Heavenly Father. This can be a difficult milestone to reach in our journey for many reasons: perhaps no one ever modeled how to hear from God; perhaps we have difficulty quieting our hearts and minds to be able to recognize Him speaking; it could be that we have given other voices, messages and lies prominence to speak into our life and it drowns out the voice of God; and maybe we are simply too contented with our own performance of Christian behaviors to recognize His still, small voice within us.

The dark night of the soul

Learning to recognize how God speaks is certainly a profound transition in the life of a Spiritual Adolescent, and it often results in us mustering a new-found resolve to live a more dutiful Christian life.

In reality, hearing God’s voice is not the pinnacle of Christian life. In the Scriptures, people committing sin still heard God’s voice, and even certain people who did not follow God also heard His voice. It isn’t so much about the fact that He does speak–it is more so about what He wants to talk with us about. He wants to experience intimacy with us. More on intimacy here.

But what happens when God seems to stop speaking? What about the Christian who never seems to discover God’s voice in their own heart? The pattern seems to be that a Christ-follower will reach the end of the Adolescent stage and will begin to experience a dryness–a spiritual desert of sorts–with no relief, no end, and no hope. This plateau has been written about for centuries and it is known as the Dark Night of the Soul. It is actually an incredibly purposeful season, and if a Christian can yield in the process, he or she may very well move quickly through it. If not, a person may endure it for years or decades.

What we know as the Dark Night of the Soul is actually the threshold between Spiritual Adolescence and Spiritual Adulthood. God–though seemingly far away–is actually inspiring a great feeling of discontent and unsettledness, because He is inviting us into a whole new chapter with Him, and He knows that we won’t want to leave the predictability of adolescence as long as we are contented with it.

Discontent, however, is a scary thing for most Christians, especially when it has to do with our Christian life, our Church experience, and our connection with God. Unfortunately, countless people hit this milestone, panic, and then feel deep shame. This shame keeps us from talking with other Christians about our struggle and keeps us isolated, when in reality, it is a normal, healthy part of the maturing process.

The misery of the Dark Night of the Soul, according to theologian Dr. John Coe of Talbot Seminary, tends to generate three typical responses in Christians: 1. a resolve to morality, 2. a departure to immorality, or 3. a settling into despair. What God is inviting us into, however, is the path of brokenness, where we embrace our insufficiency and need for healing and come to the end of self: self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, self-promotion, self-control, and self-righteousness. God is calling us to something greater.

Spiritual Adulthood

The Father’s heart

When we give up that last part of ourselves–self–our conversation with our Father takes an interesting turn. He begins to show us more of who He is, and at the same time, He shows us more of who He made us to be. He starts connecting the dots for us between our personality, our strengths, our gifts, our heritage, our passions, and so on, to reveal who you are as His beloved. And when we hear from our Father’s heart who He designed us to be and the purpose He created us for, it changes everything. We want–we crave–to be about our Father’s business because it answers the deepest questions of our soul, “Who am I and what is my purpose?”

The Authority of Jesus Christ

When we are finally aligned and in agreement with our Father’s design for us and Him inviting us into His mission, the Holy Spirit begins to ignite something within us–call it a resolve, a confidence perhaps–it is the authority of Jesus Christ. It is the same authority that Jesus gave 70 of His followers as He sent them out ahead of Him throughout the countryside to prepare the way for His work. He gave them authority to bless and to curse; to bind and to loose; and to heal people and cast out demons (Luke 10). Throughout the gospels Jesus gave his followers authority to act on His behalf as his emissaries and ambassadors, bringing freedom to people enslaved to sin and oppression. And in some of His final words, Jesus instructed those followers to teach the world everything that He had taught them–including how to operate in the authority of Jesus himself.

When we walk in His authority and in obedience to His promptings and directives, we can experience supernatural results. The demonically oppressed are freed, the wounded in spirit are restored to wholeness, the sick are healed, miracles happen, and the name and reputation of God is lifted up in awe by the world.

Passing the torch

You can’t effectively teach what you don’t know-it lacks credibility and is incomplete at best. When a Christian learns to operate as a Spiritual Adult, they naturally cultivate the same maturing process in others. For this reason they are called Fathers and Mothers–they bear fruit and replicate, creating successive generations of Christ-followers who have learned through modeling what it can look like to know God.