The Bible refers to the word "stature" in many places. For instance, "And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man." (Luke 2:52, NIV)
"Until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." (Ephesians 4:13, NIV)
Besides, we often hear pastors saying in their sermon, "Do not be a baby in Christ, but grow up into the full measure of Christ, so that the will of God may be fulfilled in us." What does the stature or measure of our body mean? How can we grow up instead of being a baby? Concerning it, Pastor Si preached a sermon, the theme of which is the building up of life in Sunday service in Hangzhou Lianxin Fellowship June 11, 2017.
The word "stature" a word about measurements like length or width, can be called vessel. Simply speaking, how much a person can contain in himself can be called his stature. According to Pastor Si, "the bigger one's stature, the more he can embrace; a person's wisdom will grow with his stature; the stature is included in his life and the building of life requires us to grow our life step by step."
How can we grow our stature?
To answer it, Pastor Si quoted the following three verses.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2, NIV)
For everything in the world-the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life-comes not from the Father but from the world. (1 John 2:16, NIV)
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. (1 John 2:15, NIV)
"Our life is like a good land, which needs to care and cultivation so that we can bear thirty times, sixty times, one hundred times of fruit." How to cultivate? We need good models to learn from and a humble attitude to accept feeding. So that a baby can grow up, he needs to drink milk first and then eat the solid food. He should not drink the milk all the time. And the change for the baby from drinking milk to eating solid food is what every Christian needs to experience in his growth. Some people may need a long time to grow up but our ultimate goal is to have inner life in abundance, in which there are humility, love, faith and hope so that our life can become a living stream and wherever we go, we can impact and bless others.
How should life be built?
1, The subjective part: we need to have the desire first. "If I do not have the desire for growth, other's feeding me is in vain." He said, "What do I want to become? A pastor? A missionary or something else? This is about building up our subjective initiative. One needs to have it to go forward; If he needs others to push him all the time, he cannot go forward with strength. We should take the initiative to go forward in our inner growth by ourselves."
2, The objective part: We need to train ourselves again and again. "It is not simple to believe in Jesus. Prayer needs training, singing needs training so we need to train ourselves in doing one thing again and again. If we do one thing more than others, we can develop our skills in doing it."
If we keep reading the Bible, we can see more and more wisdom of the book. Therefore, we need to train ourselves to become people that accept training. Doing one thing once and again means seeking continual improvement. "If we do not go through this kind of training but do things based on our momentary passion, we cannot achieve anything great."
3, We need to strike a good balance between the two parts. The subjective part is I want to have life while the objective part is I need to train myself. We also need to have a balanced life. Sometimes we wonder whether I can only do this or that. On such occasion, we need a good balance based on love. We need to examine whether anything we do is connected to the Bible's values. For instance, "If I teach, I am not a teacher, I do not live to teach but in order to live out life." Pastor Si said.
Life should be practiced in reality.
We need to develop a balanced life in reality including the home, school and society and other environments. Some believers ignore their parents, family and relatives because of their faith. What they do is not a way of life, not to mention a balanced life, but an indication of their radicalness and extremeness. We should not abandon everything because we believe in Jesus. The reason why we believe in Jesus is that we want our family to become more harmonious and our family can be built up. We should become salt and light in our family, practicing our life in family. If we cannot live out the life in our small family, our great slogan will remain empty shouting only.
The subjective part is about our dream, the objective part is a test, and balance is the responsibility. When we are building up our life, we need to pay attention to the balance among these three levels. If we have dreams without responsibility, it will be empty talk; If our dreams do not go through test, our life does not experience difficulties, frustration, we cannot build up abundant life.
For a life to be built up, it must go through the process from immaturity to maturity and from not able to lay down ourselves to be able to do it. Jesus also experienced this process. When a person's life is built up, he will have developed two characteristics. He will love sinners and hate sin. When our life is mature enough, we will love anyone we meet though they may be tax collectors, prostitutes or drug addicts. And a mature life will show righteousness and kindness to people.
How to grow mature into the full measure of Christ?
We must go through the process from wanting God to work for us to wanting God to be in our heart.
Pastor Si mentioned that in the early time of his faith, he wanted God to help him make money and after he grew more mature, God became important to him. He said, "At the beginning of my faith, I did not understand the faith but wanted success through study and following other successful people's footsteps. But why did Jesus say of John the Baptist that he was the greatest prophet though he had not performed even one miracle? He had said, he will increase but I will decrease in John 3:30, which summarized his life. He lived to bring people to Christ and rejoiced over it."
"The first stage of our faith is when we can only ask God to help us register this company successfully; but the next stage of faith should be when we ask the Lord His will for me in the company. God does not want our life to remain on the same level but keeps raising his standard for us so we need to keep building up our life to keep in step with God. We should live for the goal when we can say "Now it is no longer me, but Christ living in me.(Galatians 2:20)
Do not be conformed to the world. Do not feel satisfied with the fact that you are alive; Do not think that it is enough if you can live a long life. If we have this kind of mindset and ideas, we cannot expect God's work on us. We should change our mind and grow up into adults from being infants. When Paul saw his brothers and sisters fail to grow after 5 or 10 years, he said to them, "My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19). Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)
The growth of life is also a feeding process. Pastor Si suggested that spiritually infant Christians do not find many teachers. If they do it, they need to keep changing themselves in order to adapt their new teachers as anyone wants to learn how to play piano from different teachers. They need only two or three teachers in faith.
He also suggested that one should not drink milk all the time but eat solid food often. Eating solid food can make one strong so that he can have the courage to face crisis and difficulties of life. Sold food eaters, filled with grace, have passion in their heart, courage to take burdens and responsibilities for people and matter.
Christians should practice their inner life.
When a Christian grows up with a rich life, he will have joy in need, hope in difficulties, peace in the face of death, faith to rely on God in his weakness. He will set free others, seek the good interest of others at the cost of his own interest, not regard his own precious. However, this "rich life" does not result from being taught in the church. Pastor Si mentioned that some believers are hypocrite wearing a mask. He acts like a Christian on Sunday only and once he leaves the church, he is no different from the people of the world.
Anyone desiring a rich inner life needs to train himself and learn from life, practicing the life in family, society and workplace. He is like a person learning to swim. The person cannot learn how to swim through studying theories at class only; He must jump into the water. Otherwise he will be drowned to death as he jumps into the water.
Finally, Pastor Si mentioned that faith is not one of our options in life. If faith is only one of the choices in our lives, our faith will become a shackle for us, making us more painful. It seems that when we want to do something, the Bible does not permit it. Christians should train their inner life. If they starts to learn the law after they receive the life, they will taste the goodness and freedom in the law; When people have only the law to obey without the inner life, they will feel restrained and painful because of the collision between their life and the law.
Therefore, if one wants to gain victory over various problems in life, he has to eat solid food and learn from the real life and environment in order to grow into the full measure of Christ with the abundant life.
Translated by Alvin Zhou
