Spiritual Growth Determines Accountability
1 John 2:12-13 “I write to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake. (13) I write to you, fathers, because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you have overcome the wicked one. I write to you, little children, because you have known the Father.”
Spiritual growth is very similar to natural growth. In the natural we are born into the earth as babies and from that point on we develop and grow until we reach full maturity. As we grow in the natural we progress through the various stages of growth, i.e. babies grow to become young children, young children grow to become teenagers, and teenagers grow to become adults. During every stage of our natural growth we are held to an ever-increasing degree of account for our actions and our behaviour. When we are babies we are held accountable for nothing, but as we grow up we are then held more and more accountable for our actions. And so when we finally become adults we are then held accountable for all of our actions, because by that stage it is expected of us to have full knowledge of what acceptable behaviour is. In the spirit it is very much the same. In the passage of scripture quoted above the Holy Spirit places the saints into three main stages of spiritual growth, for He refers to children, young men and fathers. And so when we first come into the kingdom the Lord deals with us as babes in Christ, for that is what we are, and as such there is a lot that we do and say that the Lord does not hold us accountable for because He understands that we don’t yet know what is acceptable to Him. But as time goes by, as any parent would, the Lord expects us to begin to grow up, because of which He then starts to hold us more and more accountable for our actions. And so we find that sin that was previously overlooked because of our ignorance is no longer ignored by heaven.
Hebrews 5:12 “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food.”
Although they are similar, there is a difference between natural and spiritual growth however. The difference is that in the natural, growth takes place automatically, for it is plainly evident in the natural that one who is born as a baby behaves completely differently thirty years later when they become mature adults. Sadly this is not the case in the spirit however, for in the spirit it is entirely possible for a believer to remain a babe in Christ for thirty years, never maturing at all. This is an indictment against that particular believer but nevertheless it does happen. When the Holy Spirit wrote the above quoted passage of scripture to the church at Jerusalem they were the oldest existing church in the earth at the time. And so even though this church had been in existence for over forty years we see in this passage that they could only digest the milk of God’s word because they were still babes in Christ. The question is then asked, does the Lord allow the Christian, who refuses to grow up, to continue in sin and not hold them to account because they are still babes in Christ? Not at all, for the Lord deals with us at the level of maturity that we should be at, not at the level of maturity that we are behaving at due our own refusal to grow in the things of the Lord.
Michael E.B. Maher
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