Last, but certainly not least, is love, unconditional love. To genuinely love God, others and myself is the highest and noblest fruit of maturity, and as long as I have a need for growing in love, I have a need for growing in maturity.

To love unconditionally doesn’t mean that we necessarily like others or what they do. It means that we accept them as fellow strugglers and fellow sinners because, in God’s sight, we have all sinned and fallen far short of his standard of holiness.⁵ It also means that we don’t try to fix people or give them unsolicited or unwanted advice. It means that we are there for them should they need us; to listen to them; and to accept them for who they are even while we may disagree with their manner of life.

In one of my live-in week retreats some time ago there was a lady whom I will call Josephine who was furious at me because I had called homosexuality sin and an abomination in the eyes of God. She angrily blurted out to me in front of the entire group, “You are nothing but a pharisaical religious _ _ _ _ _ _ _!” I admit that I was somewhat taken aback but answered calmly, “Yes, sometimes I am.” This of course defused the situation.

Josephine was gay. Privately I assured her that while I disagreed with her lifestyle, I did love and accept her. At the end of the week, having lived in with a group of Christians—none of whom judged or rejected her—Josephine came to me and said, “Maybe you are right after all,” and then she hugged me warmly. Amazing. This may have been the first time in Josephine’s life that Christians hadn’t judged, criticized, or rejected her.

If fellow sinners are going to come to Jesus, while we disagree with their actions and behavior, we need to show them unconditional love and acceptance. A tough call to be sure, but unconditional love is the highest fruit of Christian maturity. “Tell me whom you love,” Houssaye asked, “and I will tell you who you are.”

Let us remember, too, that growing in maturity is God’s will for all of us. As the Apostle Paul wrote, “Him [Jesus] we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”⁶

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, thank you that your goal for me is that I grow in maturity in every area of life, so that I will learn how to genuinely love you, and love and accept myself and others in healthy and productive ways. So help me God. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’ name, amen.”

5. See Romans 3:23.

6. Colossians 1:28-29 (ESV).

Note: This series has been adapted from “Characteristics of Maturity” online at: Characteristics of Maturity: http://tinyurl.com/characteristics-maturity

For further help read, “Dare to be Honest” at: http://tinyurl.com/dare-to-be-honest

Personal honesty. Another major characteristic of maturity that is vital for healthy relationships and meaningful living is personal honesty both with others and with one’s self. Without personal honesty I don’t believe that intellectual honesty is possible. To the degree that I am dishonest and out of touch with my own reality, the more I will distort all other factors and truths to make them match my distorted perception of reality. On the other hand, the more honest I am, the clearer I will see all other truth, including God’s truth.

Personal honesty includes being in touch with and honest about our true feelings/emotions (many of which have been long since buried and denied). It also means being honest about our motives. This may be the most challenging area of personal honesty because most of us have hidden agendas, be they conscious or subconscious. Unfortunately, hidden agendas cause people to become disgustingly manipulative.

Being honest is being real, transparent, and authentic. It’s a tough call but the only healthy and mature way to live. It means being known for who we truly are (warts and all) by at least one or two trusted friends. It allows us to see both our strengths and weaknesses that, in turn, will help us to develop and use our strengths creatively and work on overcoming our weaknesses.

Being honest is also God’s plan for each one of us. His Word says: “We will lovingly follow the truth at all times—speaking truly, dealing truly, living truly—and so become more in every way like Christ who is the Head of his body, the church.”² And again, “Surely you [God] desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.”³

Spiritual maturity. This will be seen, not in how well we know our Bible, how many church services we attend, or how many religious activities we are involved in (all of which are important when done from pure motives), but in having a healthy relationship with God. In fact, over-busyness in religious activities may be a cover-up of areas of immaturity.

Think of Mary and Martha, friends of Jesus, for example. When Jesus came to visit in their home, one can imagine how excited Martha must have been as she busily labored in the kitchen over a hot oven to prepare a special meal for their special guest. However, she complained to Jesus about Mary who wasn’t helping with the preparations, but just sitting and visiting with Jesus. This sounds like a reasonable complaint to me. I probably would have been ticked off with Mary too. However, Jesus saw it differently.

Here’s the scene: “But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Him [Jesus] and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Therefore tell her to help me.’ And Jesus answered and said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.’”⁴

In our language, Martha may have been a workaholic keeping busy to avoid facing some painful issue/s in her life. On the other hand, relating to Jesus was more important to Mary than busily preparing a meal for him. What Martha and Mary were both doing was important, but what was more important was the motive behind their actions. It’s good to do work for God but more important is our relationship with him, and that we have pure motives. Loving and relating to God is a vital part of spiritual maturity out of which genuine service is to flow. Service used as a way of avoiding any unresolved personal issue is not service, but a way of escape from facing reality.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, please search my heart and face me with the truth of any and all unresolved issues in my life—including any past hurts, any areas of un-forgiveness, and every area of immaturity, and please lead me to the help I need to overcome so that I will become more and more like Jesus Christ—and mature in every area of my life. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’ name, amen.”

2. Ephesians 4:15-16 (TLB) (NLT).

3. Psalm 51:6 (NIV).

4. Luke 10:40-42 (NKJV).

While none of us is perfect or completely mature, if we understand the characteristics of maturity, we can work on these areas to grow in maturity. While there are many characteristics, the following certainly would be among the top five:

Emotional maturity. While spiritual maturity is reflected in the quality of our relationship to God, emotional maturity is reflected in the quality of our relationships with people. They go hand in hand. As God’s Words say, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”¹ Thus, in reality, I’m no closer to God than I am to people.

Without a reasonable level of emotional maturity, it is virtually impossible to have healthy interpersonal relationships. Immaturity is without doubt a major cause of impaired relationships and failed marriages. Emotional maturity means that we will have a healthy self-concept—not thinking too highly or too lowly of ourselves. This will include a healthy sense of self-acceptance and self-worth, which will also determine how well we do in many other areas of life. If I fail to accept myself in a healthy way, it makes it extremely difficult to accept others in a healthy way. This is because the issues I reject in myself, I will automatically reject in others.

Emotional maturity also involves being in touch with all of our God-given emotions and that these are well integrated into every area of life. Unless one is connected to his or her inner-self (his/her emotions and motives), meaningful communications and intimate relationships are impossible. It also requires that, wherever possible, impaired relationships from the past are resolved, that we have forgiven all who have ever hurt us, and that all supercharged, repressed negative emotions from past experiences are resolved.

Personal responsibility. Another vital characteristic of maturity is acting responsibly and appropriately in all situations—neither overreacting nor under-reacting. People overreact when unresolved painful issues from the past are triggered and they react as if they were responding to the original hurt. People under-react when they withdraw from dealing with an issue they need to confront and resolve. Some excuse this behavior as being Christian and not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings. Rather, it is basically being weak, afraid, or insecure—not to mention being dishonest.

As John Powell so eloquently said, “We defend our dishonesty on the grounds that it may hurt another person and then, having rationalized our phoniness into nobility, we settle for superficial relationships.”

True, “I may have been a victim in the past but if I remain a victim, I am now a willing volunteer.” Acting in a mature manner means that I now accept personal responsibility for every area of life. It means that I refuse to play the blame-game. Consistently blaming someone else for the difficulties I have will cause me to B-LAME—emotionally, that is.

When working with divorced people, I have found that so many primarily blame their former partner for the breakdown of their relationship. They fail to see that they, too, contributed to the conflict either by being too weak, too passive, too codependent, too over-dependent, too independent, too needy, too afraid of closeness, or in any of a score of other ways.

On one occasion a friend once said to me, “Are you angry at me because I’ve been divorced three times?” “Angry, no,” I answered, “afraid, yes!” “Well they were all jerks,” she responded. So I asked, “Well, why did you marry them?”

The last I heard is that my friend is now in her fifth marriage.

The reality is unless we act responsibly and admit, confront, and resolve our personal issues, we are destined to repeat past failures. It’s either resolution or repetition.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, thank you that you love and accept me as I am, but love me too much to leave me as I am. Please help me to see every area of immaturity in my life and, with your help, resolve and overcome these issues. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. 1 John 4:20 (NIV).

There are many and varied reasons why people feel lonely. We have already discussed some of these. We talked about Sharon who was afraid to love because of her fear of losing love, the roots of which went back to her childhood when her father left home when she was only five years of age.

On the other hand, John came from a happy home but his parents moved every year for business reasons. Every time John made close friends, the family moved and he would lose his friends. As he grew older, he no longer wanted to make close friends because it was too painful to lose them. This left him lonely.

Both Sharon and John were able to overcome their loneliness when they realized its cause—which is the first step in resolving all problems. Once they recognized their fear they were able, little by little, to reach out to others and, in time, overcome their loneliness.

If I’m having trouble with loneliness, I, too, need to ask myself what the real cause is. Is it a communication problem, feelings of inadequacy, fear of being hurt, or another cause? If so, I may need the help of a trained counselor or an understanding pastor or friend to help me work through my struggle.

Service to others is another way to overcome loneliness. I think of my grandmother who lived to age 90. She had been a widow for many years but didn’t suffer from loneliness. She reached out to help others by regularly visiting the sick and the elderly. In helping to meet their needs she met many of her own.

People simply cannot live without human contact. As Dr. Lynch reminds us, “If we fail to form loving human relationships, our mental and physical health is in peril.”² This is why it is vital to be committed to family and friends and to make the effort to strengthen these ties.

Besides one’s family, there is no better place to find love and a sense of belonging than in a church where unconditional love, acceptance, and friendship are expressed in open, positive, and practical ways.

Here, too, one can find God—the only one who can satisfy our innate sense of spiritual loneliness. “To live apart from him,” says Wright “is the most pathetic loneliness of all.”

If you respond to God’s love through his Son, Jesus Christ, he has promised to “never, not ever, not ever leave you or forsake you.”³ No matter how you feel, Christ will always be with you.

Visualize Jesus right there with you now—wherever you are. Respond to his call to follow him. Commit and trust your life to him every day. Ask him to give you the faith to believe in him and the courage to do your part in overcoming your loneliness. As you do your part, God will help you. He has promised he will.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, when I am lonely, help me to find at least one soul brother/sister with whom I can share my total being without any fear of being judged or condemned but feel fully accepted and loved. And help me to be such a friend to another fellow struggler. Above all, help me to know and feel your presence knowing that you are always with me and will never leave me or forsake me. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Genesis 2:18 (NIV).

2. Time, Sept. 5, 1977.

3. See Hebrews 13:5.

Continuing our series on loneliness, psychologist Norman Wright in An Answer to Loneliness quotes one lonely woman who said, “I hurt deep down in the pit of my stomach, my arms and my shoulders ache to be held tight . . . to be told that I am really loved for what I am.”

“Deep within each of us is the hunger for contact, acceptance, belonging, intimate exchange, responsiveness, support, love, and the touch of tenderness,” says Wright. “We experience loneliness because these hungers are not always fed.”

For example, a child feels lonely when his parents are too busy for him. But to whom can he turn? The adolescent feels lonely when he feels misunderstood by his parents. A mother of small children feels lonely when she is too busy to have her own needs for companionship met.

When married couples cannot communicate effectively, especially with their feelings, loneliness can cut deeply.

When one loses a loved one through death or divorce or is isolated through illness, he or she feels incredibly lonely.

The elderly, who are often cut off from their families and whose friends have passed away, know the bitterness of loneliness.

People who feel inadequate are often lonely. Because they don’t like themselves, they think others don’t like them either, so they tend to withdraw, at least emotionally, from other people. Sometimes hidden hostility is a cause for loneliness. The hostile person is angry at people so he prevents them from getting too close through his negative attitude.

Another cause of loneliness is fear—fear of getting hurt, fear of rejection, fear of not measuring up, fear of losing a loved one, fear of failure, and so on. For instance, when Sharon was five her father left home, and she felt rejected by him. Ever since, she has had an unconscious fear that if she ever fully loved another man, he would leave her too. Thus she was afraid to fully love her husband until she realized why she was holding back from him.

To be continued . . .

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, when I am feeling lonely help me to find a loving church/group where I can discover a sense of belonging and feel that I am contributing something worthwhile to others. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Ecclesiastes 4:9-11 (NIV).