SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS & SPIRITUAL MATURITY--By Maria                 11/86
--Maria No.62

         1. IF YOU CAN'T READ THE LETTERS OR BIBLE OR EVEN THE ANECDOTES & APPLY THE LESSON TO YOURSELF, THEN YOU'RE NOT VERY SPIRITUALLY MATURE. How are you going to grow in the Lord or grow spiritually if you have to take everything at face value & you can't apply the principles to yourself or to your own situation & learn the lessons for yourself? In essence you're always going to be saying, "Well, that lesson isn't for me", since you're not able to apply them to yourself. If your attitude is always, "This is for somebody else" or "This is for the church" or "This was only in the old days, we don't do that now", etc., then where are you going to get your lessons from? Are you expecting your leaders to come around & specifically point out every single individual lesson to you that you're ever going to learn?--Sorry, it just doesn't work that way!
         2. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GROW AT ALL if you can't take your lessons from what you read of other people's experiences, or things that other people learn or tell you or have gone through. If you can't apply the lessons from the Anecdotes or Letters or Bible, what good are they to you? Obviously the Anecdotes don't all portray exact specific situations that we would come up against necessarily, but they're there to teach a basic lesson. I chose them because there's some lesson that we can take for ourself, a broader application.
         3. IT'S A SIGN OF MATURITY IN A CHILD WHEN HE STARTS BEING ABLE TO APPLY THE LESSONS HE'S BEEN LEARNING TO HIMSELF & not just getting his head stuffed full of knowledge & stories & lessons on good manners, etc., but when he starts reflecting, "In my storybook Joey asked politely for the food & wiped his mouth after eating & his parents commended him for it, so I should do the same."
         4. THAT'S WISDOM--THE ABILITY TO APPLY THE KNOWLEDGE & THE FACTS THAT YOU'VE ALREADY LEARNED. Maturity is really equivalent to wisdom, when you can use all of these things that you've learned. As the Bible says, "In all thy getting, get understanding." (Pro.4:7) In other words, the purpose of all these pubs is not just to pump up ourselves with knowledge, but with all our "getting" to also learn how to apply these things in our own lives.--That's real wisdom! You can have a genius who can quote a hundred textbooks by heart & is technologically & scientifically superior to anybody else & can put together all kinds of gadgets & invent all kinds of contraptions, but they're not really wise inventions unless there's a need for them, or a purpose, an application. Likewise the genius isn't really mature in that sense, unless he knows how to apply all that knowledge. If you can't translate them into lessons for your own life, they're no good.
         5. THAT'S HOW THE SELF-RIGHTEOUS PERSON IS TOO. They're always saying that everything is for somebody else but not for themselves. I wouldn't say the self-righteous person is very spiritually mature. He's pretty much of a flatlander, because if he always considers the lesson is for somebody else, he's never going to learn any lessons for himself. He's just learning a lot of facts or knowledge, but is so close-minded that he doesn't apply anything to himself. Until self-righteous people are able to recognise their problem & ask for prayer against it & get rid of that self-righteousness, they're never very deep spiritually, they're usually pretty shallow. They usually think they're pretty spiritual, they may have a lot of head knowledge, know the Letters by heart & always be able to pull out what somebody else needs, but if they haven't learned any of these lessons themselves, they're babes spiritually.
         6. SOMETIMES I WONDER ABOUT PEOPLE WHO CRITICISE SOME OF THESE QUOTES & STORIES IN OUR ANECDOTE BOOK, IF THEY'RE NOT JUST A LITTLE JEALOUS! Here all the time they thought "we are the great one & only", the only ones that ever witnessed in this World & ever got out on the streets & sacrificed & gave our lives to win people to the Lord & there's never been anybody else before us. I wonder if it's sort of breaking their bottles a bit since they were so self-righteous in thinking we were the only true witnesses in the whole World during the last few hundred years, & then we show them all these great Christians & missionaries & Godly people that believed in witnessing & did the same thing, who got out there & really gave their lives. A lot of those people suffered cruelty & torture & all kinds of much greater persecution than we've ever thought of.
         7. SO I WONDER IF THEY CRITICISE THE ANECDOTES FOR LITTLE PICKY THINGS--like saying they were too churchy & traditional--because they don't like to recognise the other great people who went before, who look pretty good compared to us sometimes. If you're jealous of somebody, then you criticise them to try to demean them & minimize the good they've done so they won't seem as good as they are & consequently bring them down in the eyes of others. So in this case, criticism & self-righteousness are manifestations of jealousy.
         8. SELF-RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE CAN SEEM LIKE THEY'RE THE GREATEST SPIRITUAL GIANTS IN THE WORLD. But if they're self-righteous, they think they're so great that they don't need any help from anybody, so they stay in their own rut because they wonder why they should learn any lessons & get any victories. Their attitude is that they think they have all the lessons & they've already learned everything. So the paradox is that they remain babes spiritually, even though they may be able to quote you whole books of the Bible & preach you great, eloquent sermons & teach babes 24 hours a day & get up & lead the most inspiring inspiration you ever heard. It shows how much of a babe they are if they have that self-righteous attitude.
         9. ANOTHER SYMPTOM OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS IS NOT VALUING THINGS--feeling you're too good for them, or they're not good enough for you! For example, if you're not going to try to repair things or "sew up the rip" if your garment gets torn & instead you just throw it out instead of "applying yourself" & fixing it. Well in like manner, spiritually if you don't want to take things or accept them because they're not exactly in line or exactly perfect or exactly right, it's the same basic symptom of self-righteousness. You just want to get rid of it all, which really is a childish way of looking at things.
         10. WE HAVE TO TRY TO TAKE THINGS AS THEY ARE, see them for what they are, & work on them & try to improve them, not just throw everything out & start over from scratch! We'd never get anywhere if we kept doing that. You have to work on it & improve it, take the basics of what you have & build on that & make it into what you need it to be, just like Michelangelo did with that big rock that he found on the scrapheap. Someone else had discarded the rock completely, but when Michelangelo found it, he had vision & faith to put it to use! He didn't just go looking for another one, he tried to make something out of what he already had, & from that rock he sculptured the famous "David" statue. (See FSM 25, Pg.9) So don't just throw everything out, or throw the baby out with the bath water, just because somebody or something has one fault or failing. Instead, try to have the vision for what they really are & their good, & try to repair that one little problem or two, & try to make them useful!

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family