Sunday message · Real Mature series
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Message Summary
On Memorial Day weekend, Pastor Phillip Santillan begins Real Mature, a summer series on growing in maturity by increasingly submitting all of life to Jesus Christ as Master and Savior, anchored in Mark 12:28–31. Phil notes that the world Jesus entered was spiritually confused. Nearly everyone had some religion, and religion was confusing people about who God is, so Jesus came in person, taking on flesh and embodying grace and truth so people could see God’s glory.
At the start of the year Phil gave the church the word incarnation. Missional describes what believers do as people sent by God; incarnation describes how: living on mission like Jesus. Quoting Tim Keller, he says being missional means respecting people’s unbeliefs. He recalls a woman from a former church who stopped attending after bringing honest questions to a Bible study and being told to pray more, read more and just believe. At times nothing distorts a person’s view of God like religion. Jesus came not to make converts but to adopt people into a family, praying in John 17 that his followers would be one as he and the Father are one. Phil has never prayed for Clarity to be big, only for God to make it his church.
The series flows from Mark 12, where Jesus names the greatest commandments: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. The church tends to measure maturity mostly by how well we love God with our minds. Real maturity also submits our emotions, passions and perceptions (heart), the actions that flow from them (soul), and every resource, including influence, gifts and abilities (strength). This summer’s focus on loving God with all our heart draws on Pete Scazzero’s book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and the doctoral work of Phil’s mentor, Dr. Russ Berg, who speaks next week. As Phil puts it, there is no such thing as a spiritually mature person who is emotionally immature.
Phil reads Scazzero’s ten symptoms of emotionally unhealthy spirituality, noting first that nothing can make God love us more or less, and that recognizing a symptom is a chance to submit it to God. They are using God to run from God; ignoring anger, sadness and fear; dying to the wrong things, such as healthy desires for friendship, beauty and laughter; denying the past’s impact on the present; dividing life into secular and sacred; doing for God instead of being with God; spiritualizing away conflict; covering over brokenness, though Scripture never hides its heroes’ failures; living without limits, though Jesus did not heal everyone; and judging other people’s spiritual journeys instead of first removing the log from our own eye.
Becoming real mature, Phil says, will take more than loving God with our minds; it takes our heart, soul and strength too. Anyone who felt a twinge during the list can hold on to the truth that God sent Jesus to die even for that thing, and that God wants to make each of us more like his Son.