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If you like our content, we have an exclusive seminar for business leaders, March 11th to the 13th.

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Check it out on livinginfluenceleadership.com. Welcome to Living Influence. Glad to have you back. Today, Bill and I are going to be talking about the process of maturing. This is really an interesting topic because whenever you hear the word mature, early in my journey of discovering grace, what happened for me was learning that God's sanctification, his work in my heart was accessed through faith, not effort.

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not performance, was a huge thing. It gave me this place to stand. It began to be a place where I was able to live into freedom, where I was able to tell the truth to other people about what was going on in my life. And so when that first started happening,

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Anytime it seemed like the old system was going to be brought back into play, I would have this fear of like, oh, my gosh, they're going to sneak in the back door. And now here the law is going to apply again. And I'm going to be proven to be not enough. Yeah. And so when I first heard this word maturing, it's like, well, how's maturing just not a different word for sanctification? Yeah.

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And so I just thought that'd be a good place to start as we're talking about it, because as I've learned, it's completely different. Yes, it is. Oh, thank you, Scott. That's actually a great beginning. I think what happens is sometimes theological words have so been misrepresented or misapplied. This is a reality, right?

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When Jesus died for me, he gave me a new life. Let's just agree on that. He gave me a new life. Now, that reality is that I am now sanctified.

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I've been given a new life. Yeah. I'm sanctified. I am set apart by God wholly. We know that. We believe that. We teach that. But what happens is that gets confused with this truth. I am born with a new life as a baby.

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as a baby. Right. And I'm discovering with a lot of people that there is a process that lets that baby grow up. And that process is... Paul talks about this in 1 Corinthians chapters 2 and 3. He talks about this reality. We are spiritual, but some of us are babies, and we can't eat solid food, he says.

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We can only have milk. So that he's making a comparison to a natural growth of a child. This past weekend, we were with our daughter Wendy's family, and there's two new babies. One's two months old, the other's six months old. They're precious, precious little things. But we know something about those babies. They're going to mature. Right. They're going to grow up. Now. Now.

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What's never a question, do those babies have life? That's never a question. No, we know they're living. They're living. Right. And they're going to grow. And now yesterday, we were just with them, but yesterday, the six-month-old for the first time laughed that loud at her brother.

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She's growing up. Now, the reason I'm stressing that so much, Scott, is because in the church, unfortunately, in a variety of ways, Christians are still struggling with the foundation of whether they really have life or not. Right. And it's to believe it. And to believe it. And they're struggling with it so that they're being taught, unfortunately—

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that what you have to do is you have to do certain things to get the life you already have.

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Yeah, and here's five things you need to do. These six things, and they sound spiritual and they sound wonderful. They'll cause me to come alive. And they'll cause you to come alive. So let's lay, as we talk about this process of maturing, let me repeat it. Let's lay it deeply solidly. We are not in the process of maturing ever talking about whether we have life or not.

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We are sanctified. Is there a process of sanctification? Yes. It's called growing up. But it's never a process where I am changing who I used to be into who I ought to be. It's always a process that has a new beginning.

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Yeah, for me, it almost seems like it's a process of I hit a bump in the road, and then I go a little bit further and I make a wrong turn. And I need to remember who God says I am. Amen. And so it's always a process of faith. Absolutely. It's like when I've read...

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Shortly after I started discovering this grace message, I read the armor of God in Ephesians. And each one of those articles that you wear of clothing are from faith, of belief. And so this process of maturing is a process of

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You're going to hit this bump, and here we're going to remind you. Amen. What's true. Amen. Of this reality. Excellent. Yeah. I scream amen at you because here's the key. It's going to be a key throughout everything we're going to share over these next several weeks. Let's get the foundation straight. Let's get it straight. Or we'll get trapped into a performance theology that,

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that'll make my godliness depend on how hard I perform. Right. And that is not sanctification. Yeah. And so we have to say that. We have to say that clearly as many times as we need to. When I think of this process of maturing, I think these are reality statements. I think a person comes to Christ...

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And they're brand new, spiritually brand new, but they come to Christ very me-centered because of all that they've experienced so far in life.

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Right. And they come into Christ a very needy person. Mm-hmm. They need to experience profound healing. That's who they are. That's the condition of their person when they come to Jesus. So a new believer comes to Jesus. With great needs. With great, yeah. Very self-centered. And need for healing. And a need for healing. Yeah. Great. Every new believer does. Mm-hmm.

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something happens. When that person, and we're going to go through this list, so to speak, but when that person begins to experience maturing, something changes. In fact, I say to a lot of audiences, the greatest single evidence that you as a Christian are maturing is

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is when the focus of your life turns from you to someone else. That may be the greatest change and the evidence of change in your life. So back to this person who comes into Christ, trusting Jesus as their Savior, what do they need? What do they really need?

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I wonder if we wouldn't be fair to say that person probably, I don't even know how to prioritize them. I just have a list. Yeah. But including that list, I know this, that person desperately needs to be loved. Desperately needs to be loved. When I first started to discover grace, my wife was still very much entrenched in her

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legalistic ways. Yes. Let's just say that. And so I don't think either one of us knew really how to love each other well. And she wasn't the first person I went to to find that. Actually, I went to a friend. And I was like, could we make our friendship more intentional? And we started meeting for coffee on Friday mornings. And I...

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But I had to find, and I found, love there. Absolutely. Well said. Just an interesting dynamic. And you met more than one Friday morning. And we met more than, we met hundreds of Friday mornings. Exactly. Yeah. That's the key. And it took time. It took time. A lot of time. But you are modeling for us the issue. Young believers...

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desperately need a safe place where they can be loved. There's this truism in Scripture. We love because we are loved. So Scott Boyd came to an awareness of grace, began to experience love in a friendship that eventually found its way into your marriage, eventually found its way into your relationship with your wife, and beyond that,

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to me and a whole lot of other people. Right. But that's the process. Right. That's the thing we want to make sure that anyone who's listening to us say, well, gee, I really want to grow as a Christian. Good. Find someone to love you. I really want to grow as a Christian. Great. Find a safe place.

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Yeah. Where nothing about you needs to be hidden. Which is really hard for a lot of people. Oh, it's so hard. It's like unfathomable to like, how could I ever find a safe place? Not only that, it's a tragic, this is a tragic reality. They go to a church assuming...

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That it would be a safe place. And assuming it's a place where they will be loved. And it's assuming it'll be a place where they can be honest about who they are. And tragically, they discover that none of that is what this church is about. It's about behavior. It's about sinning less.

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It's about discovering a way to godliness. Yeah. I was in a group. We were talking about this new church that's starting and answering the question, what could be possible? What are the things that could be possible that this church could do? And my first answer was great harm.

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Good for you. Because it's true, isn't it? It is so true. Yeah. And actually, everybody in the room had experienced harm from a church. This person who is new in Christ desperately needs a safe place to be loved. As we said in one of our prior podcasts,

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This is the wisdom of Jesus. He says this, the witness to the world that you are mine is the love you have for one another. I just jumped ahead. But I did it to make a point. So much of what happens to new believers is they get into an environment where the issue becomes their behavior, not their person.

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Yeah. And the minute that issue becomes their behavior, not their person, that person stops growing. Yeah. That person stops maturing. We know something about them when they're new in Christ. Their whole life has been about performance, Scott. Yeah, and so they're going to come pre-wired to try to please. Absolutely. Yeah. And to work at pleasing. Right. And to perform. Yeah. Or having failed that performance. Yeah.

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they'll come without hope. Yeah, I just was having dinner with a couple, and the young man had been a believer for three to four years. And he was talking about when I wake up in the morning and

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And Jesus isn't my first thought. I just think I got to do better. And he's totally in that striving to please. Absolutely. And I was trying to suggest to him that maybe he already was pleasing to God. I'll say that again because that's a key point. I don't want anybody to miss what you just said.

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This person was saying, I wake up in the morning and I'm thinking about work and I'm thinking about breakfast and I'm thinking about chores, but I didn't think about God. But God's the most important thing in my life because I gave my life to God and maybe something's wrong that I don't have my priorities right. And I just was trying to nudge them to the place of, well, maybe that's okay that you thought about all those other things and God still is pleased with you and loves you. That's the key word. Yeah.

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What if for every new believer, Scott, we could say to them, could you just pause for a minute in the middle of all your mess and believe for one moment that your God is already pleased with you? What if we could create a safe place where if no other message came through, but that

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We know something about people who come to Christ. Sin has done a job on them. Their own sin and the sin of others. And so they are intentionally trying to please, through effort, to be able to do something that'll somehow reward them. And God says, slow down. You said it so well.

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Slow down. I'm already pleased with you. What if God was delighted that you were such a good employee that you woke up thinking about your work? Right. Or that you're such a human being, you actually thought about breakfast. Yeah. Right. Right. What if normality— What if he enjoyed that? Exactly. Part with you. What if normality were having that attitude? Right.

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Yeah. So as we think about this process of maturing, okay, we've said a couple things. What if we create a place for them to experience love? What if we create a place for them to not have to work hard to be someone who is pleasing, but to believe that our God has already pleased with us?

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One day in our early days of our ministry, we owned an old church building. We cleaned out everything, just an old empty building, except carpet on the floor and concerts at night. And there was a young man standing behind me. And I said, it was Mike. And I said, Mike, grab some guys and get all these chairs out here. The concerts are in an hour. And I went on to do 10 other things. And 20 minutes later, I turn around, and Mike's standing behind me. He's crying.

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Mike's 26. I knew that. He'd been disarmed and discharged from the Navy. He'd just come out of an alcohol and drug rehab center, and he's standing behind me crying. And I said, Mike, what's wrong? I must be a Christian, Bill. I must be a Christian.

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Well, I'm glad. Why must you be a Christian? Listen to his words. Because he said, when you asked me to get some guys to clean out the chairs, he said, you know, that's the first time in my life as an adult I ever did what I was told. I'm telling that story because let's not make this process complicated.

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Just a simple act of trusting and cleaning the chairs out. Exactly. It's profound. Profound for him. It's profound. So how do we create an environment where people experience the profound? Yeah. Where they experience being loved. Yeah. Where they experience that they're enough. Where they experience that they don't have to continually hide. Yeah.

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As you know, Scott, when I go to speak at a seminary or a Christian university, I meet with the faculty. And without exception, when I go and I meet with the faculty, I will make this statement to every faculty. I want to encourage all of you with something. You're going to have these students from one to four, six years. This is my opinion. The greatest gift you can give them while they're with you is to teach them to hide nothing.

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Yeah. That's the greatest gift you can give them. You can teach them all the theology that's ever been taught, but while they're here, create an environment where they don't have to hide anything. Because I know something. Whatever they're hiding will one day define them.

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Yeah. And I know that. So I think we're going to pause here on this hiding. That'll be a great place to take this up on our next podcast. Wouldn't you agree? I think so. I think this...

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Tell me how you said that again. Teach them to never hide. Yeah, teach them, create a safe place where they don't have to hide. Where they don't have to hide anything. Because whatever they're hiding will one day define them. Yeah, so we'll start there next time at Living Influence. We're going to be talking about this process of maturity. I think this is going to connect the dots for a lot of you. So I hope you stay with us in this series. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week.

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Thank you for listening to the podcast. We're really glad that you're here. We'd love to know that you're here. And so if you could leave a comment, we would appreciate that. But more importantly, if you know someone that should listen to this or hear it, we would love for you to share it with them. Thanks again.