I was frantic, I was worried that I wasn’t going to get to attend prom or even graduate. Somehow, I managed to still have one course credit left to complete. I’d skipped one of my classes multiple times throughout the semester, and now I needed it to graduate. Finals were coming up and I didn’t know how I was going to pass a class I’d skipped all semester. I was trying to muster up the strength to go before my teacher and plea to take a test I knew I was not prepared for. But I also knew I needed it to graduate. Later on, I thought to myself, “I have a Master’s Degree, so how is it that I’m still in high school?” I was trying to figure out how I got back there. Once I woke up, I realized that I was just dreaming. I wondered, “Lord, what does this signify?” And I heard the Holy Spirit say, “you’re immature.” I assumed, this only spoke to my faith, however, it was me in my entirety. I may know many things, but don’t always execute the things that I know. Highschool is obviously a perquisite to college and you can’t necessarily skip one to get to the next. But, you can coast and never learn something properly and still advance to the next step. But, what happens when you get a job and can’t perform a task that you should have learned and mastered? It was time for me to go back to the basics. I needed the foundation to shape me to properly adhere to the life God wanted for me.
Maturity is, attaining a final or desired state, it is a completion of natural growth and development; it is to ripen. In my dream I had to go back to take a class that wasn’t yet completed. However, how was I able to advance as far as I have without it? My maturity wasn’t measured to the physical completion of the courses, but the desired state God wants me to be in. God knows when a fruit is ripe and ready to be used. He wants to use you and I, but are we mature? Have we grown in all the areas necessary to be advanced to the next step? I knew my maturity in the knowledge of God wasn’t the issue. However, the application of certain concepts, such as patience, diligence, and faith, were areas in which I was still failing. It was the basic foundational principles I needed to go back to. "For knowledge is information, understanding is comprehension, and wisdom is application”. Maturity can be synonymous to wisdom. I wasn’t exercising wisdom and it seem I needed to go back to the basics to understand why.
Sometimes, as humans, we can over-complicate things. It isn’t our fault, because as we get older things around us change, and we expand in knowledge. We can never just take information as is; instead, we question, analyze, debate, cross reference, and study all that we need to believe or take something as true. We don’t like to be to susceptible -in a way, we are skeptics. We do all that we think is best based on the performance of someone else. We listen to reviews; we Google. We are in the most technological generation ever. We think differently and act differently. Because of this the simplest tasks seem too remedial. In turn, we find a way to make things more complicated than we should. We should consider reverting to how we were as children. As children, we didn’t overthink as much as we do as adults. Not doing so actually improved our quality of life, boundaries and obstacles didn’t exist to us. I had to realize I was being immature in my thinking. I was doing the same things that weaken my faith, all the while, hoping for a different outcome. I wasn’t dealing with what was adding a boundary before me and God.
I know my relationship with God is changing, as it should. If your relationship with God is the same as it was when you met Him, there is a lack of growth. I can’t get to the next tier with God because I need to undergo a lesson I have not yet mastered. When we go back to the basics, it’s not a demotion. Think of it as a sabbatical, therapy, or rehabilitation needed before advancing to a new position. We must return to our previous values to concentrate on the simplicity of the idea. It's funny because God wants us to mature in all aspects in our lives with our gifts, talents and our passions, and the example used to understand how we might TRUST God with this is a child which by the standard of society is the most immature being, its counter-cultural. But consider what God said to Samuel, “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)
God wants us to be like children (Matthew 18:3). A child-like spirit is one that is meek, fearless, innocent, trusting, joyous, faithful, and submissive. Children see no mountain before them. They believe without complications. They are determined without hurdles. Children keep things basic and that is something God can work with. Even as I’m writing this, a hundred and one thoughts came to my mind on how this blog can be refuted due to contradictory things that a child does that bring on complications, as well. However, think of this in its simplest form of trusting God. Because if I had faith like a child that wasn’t constantly questioned, tested, and over-analyzed in my mind, I would trust God more. Consider King Saul in 1 Samuel 15, he took basic instructions and over complicated things by assuming what he believed God wanted. This led to God regretting using him and finding a more suitable person for the position to be King.
Let’s go back to the basics to improve our quality of life with Jesus. Jesus’s life message reverted to a basic principle, fulfilling all righteousness and not complicating his life with unnecessary things. God wants us to go back and complete what we started, deal with what hurt us, trust Him more, or in my case revisit an unlearned lesson. This way we can grow and be ripe for the picking.
What do you believe you are complicating, that can be made basic?
What part of your life needs maturing?
If God is not the author of confusion how has it become this way?