Putting Away Childish Things

1 Corinthians 13:11-12

11. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

The Lord has been teaching me how to understand my gifts and also how to love better.

As I read verse 11 I think about how I really was a child in my abilities to minister, serve, give, and love.

Then Christ saved me, and He showed me that it was His understanding that was complete, not mine.

Only He was the perfect consumation of love, and I needed to strive to be more like Him every day.

I backslid, and decided to not pay attention to the standards God has set for us. It was the greatest mistake of my life.

But God’s love really does surpass all, and I mean ALL. His grace is sufficient for me, for us. But His love is always there because He is always there.

There is no end to God’s love.

When I was a child I spoke as a child. I could hardly express myself, my feelings, my love, my hurts and my desires. I was immature, and I was blinded in thinking that I was better than I was.

I was the man that as James wrote, looked in the mirror and then forgot who I was when I walked away. Now its not like I didn’t want to be a better Christian, and better husband and father, but I didn’t know how.

I didn’t know how because I had never learned. I had also been surpressing many of my feelings and covering them with my own pride. And in that I was a sinful man. I was a child, doing childish things.

I understood as a child. I understood that I could lie, and try to cover up things in my life that God knew were not righteous. But God. But God demonstrated His love toward me in that while I was still a sinner, Christ died for me.

My sin was exposed, my childlike behavior was revealed, and my life was never the same again. It will never be the same again because my pride was destroyed and I was made sick by it, literally and physically sick.

But God’s love still is working in me, because His love never ends. My pride can’t stand against His love for me. Yes, my pride tries to keep rising back up to the prominence it was at before, but thank God that my life circumstances are different now, because that pride of life is so aparent now to others that it cannot rise and be above as it once was.

God is making me, shaping me, into the man He desired me to be. He never wanted me to sin, and He knew that He would have to squelch my pride.

But God is also very patient with us, and He certainly was with me.

God spoke to me very specifically recently when He said that the reason He didn’t allow Enoch to be born was because I would not have been the father I needed to be for my son. I was not repentant at that time, and God knew that in order to lead another human being into the place that God wanted him to go I would need to be a different person, I would need to be a man, not a child.

That saddens me sometimes when I think about that, because I think of all the things that “could have been”. But I can’t dwell on that, it just isn’t healthy.

Enoch would have been an amazing man of God, He had the potential to be a prophet, teacher, evangelist, missionary, amazing father, grandfather, husband, and leader.

But my sin and thus my parenting were standing in the way, and God knew that. So He was gracious.

Job speaks about the death of an unborn child being better than that the child grow up and die because of all the hurt and pain they have to live through in this life.

That is so true of all of us, we have to live through so much bad stuff because of sin.

But God is still greater, and He has so much grace. Things could have been so much worse for me and my son and my wife had God not done what He did.

For 9 years I didn’t know why God did what He did by causing a perfect unborn baby to die in the womb and be miscarried by Liz. It was a very sad time, and yet looking at that I can still see how I was such a child!

I was doing so many childish things at that time, even on that day when we went to the hospital I was doing childish things! I was not a man, I was saved, but I was not a man.

In fact, I was involved with a ministry that was filled with children. Not the infant babes in which we can all interpret these verses and think about how it is better to love as a child loves, just as Jesus often spoke.

But there were children in that ministry that I was ministering to and trying to grow up into mature men and women. But I just couldn’t do it. And so, God’s grace trumped my pride once again.

We left that ministry that day, and our involvement in that ministry quickly fizzled out. We couldn’t do it anymore.

God was still teaching me to be a man for the next 9 years. But I went through lots of things that I didn’t apply what God was trying to teach me.

Why didn’t I learn? Because of my pride. Had I repented of my sin and had my pride squelched at that time my life would have looked much different.

But God always has a better plan. Am I am man yet? That’s a hard question to answer, but what I can confidently say is that I am no longer a child.

Children don’t go through the things we go through as adults, and my life experience is that of a person much older than a child.

The better question to ask would be am I living with childlike faith, and as the man and woman that Christ desires me to be?

Christ sees us as so much more than we actually know and can see. Isn’t that so true? How often do we doubt ourselves or our abilities? ALL THE TIME!

Thus verse 12, now we see in a mirror dimly. This is how we often see ourselves, dimly.

My daughter has a mirror in her room that is an old antique mirror. It came from my grandmother. Its relatively small so you wouldn’t expect it to be so heavy, but when you pick it up, you can tell it is old.

When I clean that thing, it looks great. It’s old and has some flaws in the glass and those can certainly be noticed. But that is what makes that mirror unique. There are no other mirrors like that in the world.

Perhaps there are mirrors like that that are around but this one has a little chip in the frame. We have painted over it now, but it is still visible when you are focused on it.

And when that mirror just sits in a room day after day it tends to get dusty. It amazes me how much dust sticks to mirror, something so smooth and sleek.

Yet, day after day it collects dust and the mirror gets more and more dim. My reflection becomes more and more distorted.

Now I am sure there will come a day when my daughter looks into the mirror and says that she looks terrible. Hopefully on that day I can tell her to just clean the dust off the mirror so that she can see clearly the same girl I see, and the same girl God see’s, a perfectly beautifully child of God made in His image.

Because when that mirror is cleaned, we can really see ourselves face to face can’t we. We may not like ourselves, and we may see things that no one else can see. But God sees, and He knows who we are.

When I first got saved God showed me who I was. I knew that I was a child of God and that the Lord had great plans for my life. I tried to follow those plans as best I could.

But over time, the dust settled, and my mirror became dimmer and dimmer, dustier and dustier. In a sense, I tended to start to forget who I was.

I tell you friends, that leads to backsliding. And that is exactly where it led me.

We all have different hang ups in life and if we are not careful we can fall back into those hangups just like we all have done.

God saved me from those sins. And desires to save us from all those sins. If we can just look back into that mirror, clean off all the dust first, and see our clear reflection I believe God will show us who we are.

He will show us how He sees us.

Do you see the differences in the tenses in verses 11 and 12?

11 is basically past tense.

But what is verse 12, is it future tense?

Verse 12 is not just trying to teach us about who we will be as children of God. It is present tense as well, did you catch that?

“Now I know in part”. We know (today) that we were all these things in the past (we were children, speaking and doing as children do).

But now we know that we are children of God and that He has amazing plans for our life. We no longer have to be like children, immature and being swept around by the waves of life, up and down in and out of sin.

See that last part of the verse in 12? “Just as I also am known”.

Really quickly look back at verse 10 “when that which is perfect has come”

What is perfect? The Word of God.

When did it come? After Christ died. During the cannon of the scriptures which we now hold in our hands.

Pick up a bible, hold it right now.

That is perfect. It holds all the truth you will ever need here on earth, and it is perfectly written for each of us.

Today, we have the perfect Word of God in our hands. We are known by the Father of lights. We are a gift of God.

We may not feel like we are a gift but we are, and if we still aren’t convinced we are a gift then we need to exercise our gifts that the Lord has given us and share our life with someone else.

It may not be preaching to a crowd, it may not be even in a small group. It might just be one person to one person, loving them, pouring the Word of God into them. Filling them up with encouragement just as Christ has done for you.

What has God called you to do today?

Now today, when we go out into the world where God has placed us, do these three things:

Have faith, be hopeful, and love. But remember that the greatest of these three things that you can ever do is to love.

Love, just like Christ loved you and died for you.

Love, love like a child, but act like the man or woman God has called you to be.

Amen.