Growing up in the spiritual world is similar to growing up in the material world in the sense that you start out young, lacking knowledge and experience, and in need of care and protection. In the Spirit, God is our parent and the members of the Church are our siblings.
God assumes responsibility for our care and education - duties he then delegates to one extent or another, to our brothers and sisters.
We, in return, are to be loyal and diligent, looking to our Lord for direction and to our spiritual family for edification and fellowship.
Similarly, just as the physical child gains wisdom and understanding as he develops intellectual maturity, acquires information and experiences the several common and uncommon life events, so too does the spiritual child grow and develop through study and spiritual interaction.
Recognizing that spiritual growth is a process that takes time and demands dedicated effort with education is vital to the Christian fellowship. We should no more expect that a new believer have the discernment and understanding of an older Christian than we would expect a three-year-old to operate a car like a fifty-year-old adult would.
Spiritual growth is also dependent on the relationship between the individual believer and the Godhead. Data flows and rote memorization are dry and lifeless without the inspiration of the Christian by the Spirit of God.
Because understanding and discernment become more complete and more acute as the believer grows and learns, it is reasonable to expeect that young believers will have simpler, less-developed theologies than older believers. New Christians will not perceive the spiritual natures of people nor the nature of the spirit informing events as readily as a more mature Christian. Thus it is not surprising that as we grow up in the Spirit we will find that people, acts, events, or things once viewed as benign or even acceptable in previous times may one day, perhaps in a sudden flash, be recognized as a temptation or a source of evil.
Spiritual immaturity is blindness.
Those of us who are further along in our spiritual life are as obligated to bringing light to the believers oppressed by the darkness of this material world as we are to shining the light of Christ into the physical world at large.
