In life we’ve got to keep growing, keep maturing and keep working to become more like Jesus. The Bible says that we need to ‘grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (1 Peter 3:18 NIVUK) and that ‘the wise listen and add to their learning.’ But how do we grow? We grow through changing our attitudes and responses to things. We need to take a look at ourselves and see where we’re stopping ourselves from moving forwards. Maybe it’s a bad habit, repeatedly giving in to temptation, fear of leaving our comfort zone, or not making the time to spend with God. So many things can become barriers to us advancing to spiritual maturity. And that’s something we should be heading towards. Babies have milk before they’re ready to move on to solid foods. And it’s the same for us in a spiritual sense. We need to be fed the basics, but at some point we need to mature enough in our faith to move on to the solid foods. The Bible says: ‘solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil’ (Hebrews 5:14 NIV). But we’re not going to move to spiritual maturity by just wishing we’d reached it. We need to work every day at becoming mature in our faith. We need to be prioritising time with God, reading His Word, working with Him to overcome the things that get in the way and spending time with people who are more mature in their faith than we are. Without effort on our part, we won’t keep growing, so let’s make spiritual growth a priority in our lives.

What Now?
Choose one thing you could start doing to grow your faith, and choose one thing you could stop doing that’s a barrier to becoming more spiritually mature. Make those changes this week and then honestly assess how your faith has changed at the end of the week.