Growing into Spiritual Maturity — Chester Weaver — Ep. 192

Why did the early Anabaptists insist on spiritual maturity, and how does that affect our lives and churches today?

Well, Chester, it's good to have you back again for another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. Chester Weaver is a board member of Anabaptist Perspectives and has also been a school teacher for many years. One of the things that you really care about is what is it about the Anabaptist way or the Anabaptist worldview that is special and unique and that has something to offer to us here and now, even though this is a movement that started 500 years ago. And one of the things that you've mentioned before is this idea of how important spiritual maturity is for the believer and how that started in the early Anabaptist movement. I'd like, yeah, could you unpack that for us?

I'd like to begin with a story. A few years ago, my father and my son visited Belgium. The castle at Ghent, Belgium, was the place where more than 110 Anabaptists were martyred. And so at this place, of course, the Anabaptists were originally martyred as a public example of what happens if you become an Anabaptist outside the castle walls.

But the townspeople and others who came to watch this said, "Wow, what glorious dying. I'd like to have what these people have." Well, the authorities soon caught on to this and they decided, "We can't execute these people in public view. We're going to have to execute them behind the walls, the castle walls, so people can't see this." And so the question is, what was it that made dying so glorious? Okay, I'd like to unpack that. So first of all, Paul Turnier says, "And learn to grow old. Man both seeks truth and flees from it.

Though man flees from the truth, he does not stop seeking it as well. He needs truth in order to live. The love of truth is the source of all harmony with oneself." So it has to do with healing the wholeness, the healing dualism into wholeness. Okay, so this growth process, moving into spiritual maturity, is the way that growth happens, the healing happens.

And somehow the Anabaptists would not have put it in these terms, but they got this right. And we have a lot to learn from this. Okay, so humans need help in the process of Christian growth. So if a person is born, we'll start at the very bottom there. We have parents who pull us back, so to speak. We err, parents pull back. We move on, we err the other way. Parents pull us back. Sometimes we err just a little bit. Parents pull us back. Sometimes we err quite a bit. Parents pull us back. But eventually we go beyond parents. There's an overlap up there at the top where once we make a commitment to Christ, it's both parents and Holy Spirit.

But eventually the parents move out of the picture and the Holy Spirit takes over as we learn integrity. And you know he keeps pulling us back. Okay, so through the process of life, it becomes less of a convoluted line. It's more of a less convoluted line. And hopefully a nice pattern of growth, ideally. Yes.

Okay, so there's four stages of growth. Every child of God progresses through four stages of growth in order to arrive at maturity. And every living church includes people in each stage at any given time. Like a snapshot of any church includes all of these if it's a healthy, normal, growing church. So below the feet in this image, we're not talking about at all because that's unregenerate. The feet begin with some kind of choice to serve Christ.

Okay, so we call that stage one or the carnal stage. And Apostle Paul talked about the people in Corinth. He says, "Are you not yet carnal and walk as men whenever into factions?" Hmm. So in the very beginning parts of our Christian life, I still have quite a bit of me in there yet. And sometimes there's a lot of emotions up and down. We feel saved sometimes and sometimes we don't feel very saved. But it's all the carnal stage. But somewhere along the line, sooner or later, the Holy Spirit begins to say to us, "Is this all there is to Christianity? There must be more." And so we move up into the second stage, which is sacral.

And stage two, the sacral stage, is all about getting it right. Got to believe the right thing. Got to practice the right thing. You got to follow the rules. It's all about performance and behavior. It's like that phase when you're learning everything for the first time. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Okay. And there's some truth in that. We got to learn some of this some time.

But eventually the Holy Spirit says the same thing. "Is this all there is to Christianity?" Now you notice over here, number three, stage three, the question stage, there's four numbers in there. The very first number, number one, we ask the first question.

There must be more to it than this. And if we say something to somebody in stage two, they're liable to say, "Oh, just shut up. Don't rock the boat. Don't ask questions. Just do it the way you're supposed to." Well, sometimes people do. They're too scared.

This question stage is the most dangerous stage to be in. And when you begin to question, sometimes people throw back answers that don't feel very good. And so you have to live for a while until the Holy Spirit repeats the question. There must be more to it than this. Okay, so that moves us into number two there. We have to get answers to these questions.

And people who are in stage three ought to be encouraged to ask questions, not discouraged from questions. But the real question is where they get their answers. See, the world has answers. The other kingdom has answers too, to these questions. But so does the kingdom of Christ have answers. But if you notice at number two here, the arrow goes out into the world. If people pursue wrong answers, that's where their Christianity eventually ends. So I think maybe an important piece to this then is where are they asking these questions? Right? Like if they're going out into the world or whatever you want to call it, their pre-Christian life and saying, "Well, maybe the answer is there."

Then you start getting into some real problems. Real problems. And the other option would be saying where asking those questions and then going to the scripture and the church and the community of believers. Exactly. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so now we go into number three. And number three, I cannot overemphasize enough. So I'm going to go on and maybe I'll come back to this diagram.

This has to do with learning how to be honest with myself and others and God. Human beings are great. They're born liars. And we have to learn how to tell the truth. And back when we were parents, it's important for parents to catch their children's lies so that they get into a habit of integrity. But that doesn't take all of it. Parents can never completely train lying out of children. The Holy Spirit finishes that job. Okay, so when we come to integrity, telling the truth and no spin.

I had a son who he wanted a four-wheel drive pickup whenever he turned 18 because four-wheel drive pickups can do anything. And so one day he called me. He said, "Father, I think God's trying to teach me some humility." I said, "What happened?" "Well, I rolled my truck."

But he rolled his truck completely back up on its wheels again. "Well, what happened?" "Well, he was coming out this gravel road. At the end of the road, there's a little curve. And as he went around this little curve, he just flipped all the way back up on his wheels." So we fixed the truck. It was amazing. Didn't take that much to fix it. His brother was in and they were both seat-belted, so they weren't hurt at all.

Okay, so we got the truck fixed. One day he was on the church. He's on the way to church. It had just rained. In Texas, the asphalt comes to the surface quite a bit. And so when you put rain on top of that, it kind of gets slippery. He's coming up the road, just a gentle curve. And he said, "As I was going around this curve," he says, "the back end of my pickup just kind of came around slow motion. And when it hit the gravel on the side, it flipped completely upside down into the water in the side of the road." His Bible's floating in the water and his songbook is floating in the water.

I'm supposed to be preaching that morning, so I don't know anything about it. So my wife goes back and she takes care of him. But by this time, the truck is gone. This time, it's not fixable. Okay, so the first time he slid on the gravel. And the second time he hydroplaned.

Well, was that his real problem? Was the problem he's just going too fast? Exactly. Okay, so what young man wants to admit that he's going too fast? Yeah. See, young men and four-wheel drive pickups can do anything, right? Right.

But that's not—this is fascinating. But you don't say things like that if you're a teenager. You have to spin the story and you have to emphasize gravel and hydroplane. Yeah. But the facts are, I was going too fast. That's the basic problem for both of these.

That's integrity versus spin. Of course, single, not double. It's talking out of one side of my mouth to a certain group of people or a certain individual and out of another side of my mouth to a different person telling the same story of two different ways. That's no good. That's not integrity. That's double-tongued.

That's not integrity. Got to learn how to do it. I say the same thing to you as I say to you, to you, to you. It's all the same. Wholeness. Keeping commitments, that's easy to understand. Jesus said, "Whatever you say you're going to do, do it. Let your yay be yay and your nay nay. For whatsoever is more than these is of evil." The next one is not cheating.

And parents, again, are responsible, along with teachers, to catch children at their cheating because we're liars. And cheating is not okay in the kingdom of Christ. And if the parents don't get it all out of a child, the Holy Spirit will work on that because that is not the way the kingdom of God works through cheating. Okay, so not shading the truth. I mean, obviously, human beings, when they tell stories, usually tell it from their side. Yeah. But we need to learn to tell stories the way it is, just the way it is.

Bald facts. If we're called to account, just say it the way it is. By the way, that's objective. So what's the difference between objective and subjective in terms of integrity? Well, some of it's point of view and also how you articulate it, how you make yourself look, can have a lot to do with it. It's like, "Here's my subjective opinion on it." Okay. I spin it my direction. Okay. Or the way I like to see it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, it's how I feel about it. Yeah. So is how I feel about it the same as what the actual bald facts are? Right. I mean, you would hope that they are. And we like to tell ourselves that that is the case.

But many times we do things subjectively when we need to just be objective because we're all prejudiced toward ourselves. Okay, so non-prejudiced. I've got to tell you something about this one. This is a common human failure. So in the South, the prejudice for years has been against Black people.

And so, you know, if a white man has a swimming pool and a Black man swims in it, you got to drain all the water out before a white person can swim. Okay? We call that, that's just prejudice.

Okay, so I moved to Indiana and I found out that the prejudice in Indiana, Northern Indiana, is against Amish. And then one time I was having some meetings up in Minnesota and I discovered that the native prejudice in Minnesota is against Native Americans. Why is this?

Why do people everywhere struggle with prejudice? It's a common human problem. Prejudice simply means people prejudged. Subjectivity is how I feel about Blacks, Amish, Native Americans. No factual basis, just how I feel about them. Whereas in addition to that, I'm often willing to make moral judgments with no factual basis.

I say, "All Blacks are blah, blah, blah. All Amish are blah, blah, blah." Stereotype stuff. It's not true. And if somebody starts to talk about some objective facts, it's like, "Don't confuse me with the facts. I've already made up my mind." That's prejudiced. Okay, so the Nazis did a master job at this in Germany in World War II.

They decided that the Jews had defective genes and they need to be eliminated. Now, most Germans didn't think that. Most Europeans didn't think that. But if you tell a lie and you tell it often enough and you put, quote, "political pressure" along with some, quote, "facts," a lot of subjectivity, they got an entire group of people to believe that. And the Holocaust happened.

And we look at that and we just shake our heads and we say, "How could this have ever happened? How could they pull the wool over somebody's eyes that completely?" But this indicates how gullible human beings are to being told things that are not true and to have their integrity bent.

And some people who wouldn't have thought about hurting a neighbor Jew 10 years before were now willing to turn him in for concentration camp. So another one here. You folks, you're not very old yet, so you don't know much about this, but I've been around a little while. Anabaptist people have fads, just like what's out there. Yeah. Yeah, we do. Yeah.

Okay, so I look back at the fads that were cool when I was young among Anabaptist people and I think, "How bizarre." I wonder how these people feel about that today. You know, out in the world, it's like people, young men would wear bell-bottom pants with pant legs that are this wide and their skin tied to the top. It looked really weird. Nobody does that anymore today. Okay, but then since it's out there, then some of our people had begun to have wide, but not as wide, you know, and you go on and on and on. But all those fads are cool. And if you try to explain to some young man what the problem was, bell-bottom pants, he can't see it.

He doesn't want to see it. It's like, "Clock on the wall? What do you mean? I can't see that clock. I'm trying to. Honestly, I'm trying to see that clock on the wall. I can't see it." It's because I don't want to see it. And so you really can't reason with people like that. When it seems like all the stuff you're outlining here has to do with selfishness, but also insecurities maybe of just like, "I am not sure who I am, therefore I'm going to have prejudices against people that aren't like me." So like as long as if someone doesn't look like me or sound like me or whatever, I'll just kind of automatically think there's some kind of threat to my way of doing things.

And that sounds like insecurity. Yeah, is that true? I mean, I think there's got to be something to that. Yeah. Okay, so, okay, but are the facts that I'm telling myself, quote, "Are they true?" Oh, yeah. Well, no, because we can, well, I mean, I don't know every single situation ever, but there's, we can, we are very good at telling ourselves what we want to hear. Got it. And that is, is, well, you're talking about integrity here. That's just dishonesty to yourself. That's right. That's why we got to be learned to be honest with ourselves. See, humans learn to handle the truth by deliberate and guided effort. And whenever your little boy begins to illustrate and demonstrate prejudice, you need to call him up on it and ask him if that's true and guide him through his prejudices.

Many young people have no adults in their lives to guide them through prejudiced thinking. Let's go back to this list here. Okay, so the stuff that I'm talking about, the nitty-gritty of our experience. We like to think that among us, we're not this way. But when we come to wealth, certain families who have money tend to be up here in spite of what the book of James talks about. And the people with certain last names tend to be up here and certain other last names down here along with the people who don't have as much money. Okay, so at the bottom here, it says the tyranny of everybody does it. Really? So everybody does it, makes it right.

Is that true? Is that integrity? Especially young people, they want to be in the system because they're so afraid of being rejected. And so they just go along. They have no backbone, but they are included and they feel good.

But it's an integrity problem. And so we have to learn how to deal with these kinds of things. And that has to do with being honest with God and honest with ourselves. I've said enough now on number three. And so I'm going to do a little bit of review and then I'm going to go to number four, which is the last part of the question stage. So look on the left side there, we have innocence over here. We'll say the innocence of children, but they're bent to evil. And so they get involved with sins of the flesh, such as theft or immorality and the sins of the spirit, such as jealousy, covetousness, and so on.

And then they get converted and they go through stage one and stage two. But you notice that stage two is about justice and morality. Getting it right. Stage three is the question. But up here in stage four, we have the higher ethic, which is about forgiveness and integrity and humility and reconciliation and so on. Here's this stage two coming in at fairness and justice and correctness, preoccupied with rules and standards and rituals and ordinances, observable practices and orthodox theology.

And all this stuff in stage two generates the question, what's wrong with? People want to do something. That's the first thing they say. What's wrong with blah, blah, blah? What's wrong with such and such? Okay, so what they don't realize is that whenever they say that, they're either not regenerated or they're at stage two.

Doesn't matter what they say. It's just the way it is. But stage two, you notice on the right side it says enforceable, short of coercion.

There's some kind of pressure that you can put on so that that happens. We ought to be raising questions about this so we can go on. So I'm going to go right now to you, Reagan. At your church, how many times are your people allowed to practice the golden rule?

Allowed to practice the golden rule? I've never heard a number put on it. Would twice be enough in a day?

That seems a little low. Okay. Okay, so how many times a day would you folks be allowed to practice the Good Samaritan? That's such a good question. I mean, I was about to respond. It's not very often that I find people beat up by the side of the road, so I'm not sure. Okay, let's go closer. How many times are you folks allowed to forgive people at your church in a day's time?

Mm-hmm. That's a really good, that's a really good way of framing this. Okay. I see what you're doing here. That's really good. How much humility are you folks allowed to have? Uh-huh. How much joy can you have over there? Yeah. Okay, so how much overcoming of evil with good are you allowed to have? How much law of God written on the hearts are you folks allowed to have?

And we could go on and on. But you see it, it generates an entirely different kind of question. It's like, what's right with or what can I do? And you're doing it that way to flip us away from this idea instead of always asking, well, what's wrong with this and this and this or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. But you see all those things at the top that are completely unenforceable because they're the spontaneous byproduct of God's love working in us. Yeah. That's a good point. Good luck enforcing the golden rule, for example. That would be really difficult. Yeah. Okay. I see what you're saying. So basically you're saying once we transcend, push through that level, the level three, where you're asking those questions and you're dealing with the integrity and honesty and coming to grips with who am I really?

Yes. You know? Yes. Getting rid of the selfishness? Yes. Then you're up into level four. Okay. There's a little bit more to do that. Okay. Think about this. The people who are at stage two are very threatened by people at stage four.

In fact, there are entire churches, I'm embarrassed to say this, even Anabaptist churches, who don't really want their church to move up into question or stage four. They want to stay at stage two. And that's a disaster. I'm embarrassed that it happens, but I have to be honest that too often we're somewhat. This is all about fundamentalism. Stage two is fundamentalism. All about rules, basically. All about rules and doing it right. And you don't get to that at all. People at stage one are intimidated by people in stage three. The two stages above are intimidating to the people's two stages below. That's just a fact. Yeah.

Okay, so look at this one. Now this is, I just marvel at how this works. You know, we have Romans 6 and we have Romans 8. And he says in Romans 6, you know, we're not in the spirit, not in the flesh anymore, we're in the spirit.

Okay, but then there's Romans 7 in there. Why is Romans 7 there? Romans 7 says, the things I don't want to do, I still end up doing. And the things I want to do, I can't do. What is wrong?

Okay, so somehow in our heart of hearts, if we're honest, we say, you know what? I'm going to grit my teeth. Do it. But that's the weakest way of getting it done. The I will. Okay, then we move up here. A group determination, group accountability. We will. I'm going to hold you accountable and you hold me accountable. Another third, fourth person. We're all going to hold each other accountable. And we come together and we confess how how we failed. Okay? So we will doesn't get it done either.

How does it get done? This comes from Frank Reed. This is very helpful. There's actually three diagrams here. This is the worst way to do it. This was my story coming into Christianity where I wanted to avoid hell and so I did this. But it was a time later where I made my total commitment. But this part right here is Romans 7 where we struggle to know how to do it right and we can never get it. And everybody has their own story. But you notice right here, finally we cut to the end of ourselves and we drop off the end of the rope into the gracious arms of Christ where the top one happens.

And I can't explain it. I know my story. I don't know what your story is, but somehow God gets a hold of us and puts something in us where we begin to love the stuff we used to hate and hate the stuff we used to love. It's called empowerment. And when we have that empowerment, that is number four in the question stage that pushes across the line into maturity.

But it seems we have to go through all this stuff to get there. So here are the components of the higher ethic. It's like forgiveness. You know, some people struggle in stage two. They know they have to forgive, but they don't want to. But Christ says you have to. There's this battle going on. But when you come, a person comes to the end of himself, he gives himself to Christ. Forgiveness, you still have to work with the flesh a little, but it's like, why would I not forgive? And glass and height. That's a whole subject in itself. I'm not going there right now. But the golden rule thing, I get a chance to do the golden rule.

I get a chance to do good Samaritan work. I'm not embarrassed by humility. I can be real. I can be selfless. And I can have joy because the work of God does that in me. It produces joy. I can seek first to understand and then to be understood instead of the other way around.

I'm even willing to suffer for doing good. And I realize that I got to pull my planks out of my eyes before I try to deal with you instead of the other way around. And it's always integrity first.

These and more are the spontaneous byproducts of Christ living within. And there is no limit here. When you live at the maturity stage, you get a chance to work in the kingdom of God with unlimited possibilities. Nobody makes you.

I delight to do thy will, O God. So we move on to this golden circle of Christianity. It's like we always start with why, right there in the center. Why all this? We love Jesus and desire to live in infancy and oneness with him.

That's what it's all about. The how we see Christianity is relationship, which means in everything we do, we keep the person of Jesus as our focus. We follow him in all things and draw as close to him as possible.

That's how the why works out. But the what is on the outside there. And it says, we do not lay up earthly treasures. That's a what. We share with the poor. We make peace and forgive. Another what. We don't lie.

We seek to be humble. We actively seek the lost. We do not seek earthly power. We love our enemies. We speak to Jesus often. We overcome temptation and sin. The fiber of who we are is love. We have been born again and baptized. In other words, we radically obey Jesus' commandments with no spin, no complicated interpretation, no excuses. We live out his kingdom vision with passion while dwelling in oneness with the king. That's all what. People aren't motivated by what we do. They might see it and, well, that's interesting.

They're motivated mostly by why we do the what. So we always start with why, which means we start with him. So we don't start with ourselves. This is huge. This is the golden circle of Christianity. And for some, I cannot explain it. Anabaptists would not have said it in these words, but they got that right. It's always about starting with why.

This they did say. Christianity is understood as voluntarism. We want to because we're in stage four, the maturity stage. We're past one, two, and three. You see, down in stage two, it's all about have to. But in stage four, it's all about want to. I get a chance to. Voluntarism. Big word for Anabaptist people. And unfortunately, whenever fundamentalism comes in, it's going down here to the have to. Because then it starts going back into the rules idea instead of saying how much can I do for Jesus today. It's more about how can I make sure I don't break any rules. Exactly. That's a really neat way of framing it. It's like restructuring how we think about these things and saying, let's reexamine this.

It's almost like you said at stage three, you almost have to get to the end of the rope, so to speak. And that's what's required for us to realize. Exactly. Like this is the end of ourselves. That's right. That we can't do it on our own. That's right. That we can't, all the rules and all the, like we are so limited as human beings. And we get to the end of ourselves and remove self from the picture, basically. Yeah. So if you look at this image right here, you notice that Christ is the head. This is his body. This is what happens to everybody who comes and is joined with him. This is his church.

And a church can only reproduce itself as a living church if there are enough people in stage four in every generation. If you only have people in stage two, you reproduce a religious club. You do not reproduce a living church.

And this is why this is so important. And this is what we older people owe younger people. We owe them illustrations and demonstrations of stage four maturity so that we become a model of what to grow into. Unfortunately, there are many churches with zero or very few people in stage four.

And some people aren't even allowed to go into stage three. Christianity is all tied up in stage one and two. And it's so sad. It's not even a part of our vision. But they might be called Anabaptist. I'm so sorry about this. So our Anabaptist forefathers who are heroes of the faith and many who are not even named in our histories have demonstrated stage four. When I was young, I saw people at stage four. And I hear stories and I'm wondering where the other models are. Because I think that's an important element for us to see, for young people to see what that looks like. Yes. And say, oh, okay.

There's more here. There's more than just myself. And keeping the rules and all that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's a real, that's an important element. You know, the examples that we have both from history or people around us, whatever that might be. Okay, but we should not be alarmed at people at stage one if we're in our church. We just encourage them to grow. Same with stage two, stage three. This any living church has people in all these stages at the same time.

We just, people have coming in the bottom and they move out. We want to get, the Holy Spirit wants to get us up to stage four as soon as possible. We're the limiting factor of moving up. But I don't want anybody to ever blame me for hindering their growth.

Yeah. For through my hypocrisy, my dualism or whatever. It's like you said, you know, what's your rule on how many times you can practice the golden rule, you know, each day? That's such a great way of reframing it. It's like, wait a second. That's not what, that's not how this is supposed to work. Right. You know, that's. Instead of focusing on the minimum, it's like there is no maximum even. Yeah. It turns it on its head. Yeah. When it, and it turns the focus away from me. Right. So to speak, like, oh, how can I force myself to perform a certain way? This is good. I'm really glad you have taken the time to piece this together and shared this.

I think you're helping to, hopefully helping to reframe this in people's minds and encourage them to continue to grow and be more like Jesus each day, take those steps and. Well, I want to say to the viewers, I owe this as an older person, I owe this to young people. Many young people don't understand things like this. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, thank you for being willing to share. My pleasure. And yeah, put this out there. I think it's going to make a lot of people think. Thank you for joining us for this episode. And thanks to our donors and partners for making this possible. For more episodes, please subscribe or visit our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. You can also leave a comment or review to help more people find our content.