How Jesus Transforms Adulthood
The Big Idea: Growing up in Christ is the best, truest, most beautiful way to be human.
As Christians, we have even more to offer our youth than maturity and social status. We have an opportunity to invite them to grow up into the fulness of the stature of Christ, who offers us true freedom, true power, full belonging, and inexhaustible joy.
Even the best realization of human adulthood radically pales in comparison to the life that Jesus intends for everyone who follows him. Just as Jesus invites everyone to be born again, Jesus invites us to grow up again into Christian adulthood.
Everyone pursues liberty, authority, identity, and mystery when they claim adulthood, but no human individual or society has ever known how to achieve them perfectly. We don’t know how to completely liberate people. We don’t know how to gain appropriate power justly. We don’t know how to know ourselves accurately or represent ourselves honestly. We don’t know how to perfectly face pain, fear, desire, and confusion. Many people and many societies have pretty good guesses for some of these, but nobody knows how to lead everyone into the perfect fulness of adulthood.
Jesus knows. Jesus transforms adulthood by making a way for anyone to enter into his life. And his adulthood, Christian adulthood, is the best, truest, most beautiful way to be human. It’s ours, if only we’ll stick with him.
Liberty - Jesus Sets Us Free
While individuals and cultures can only make guesses about what true human freedom looks like and how to achieve it, Jesus knows. Left to ourselves, it’s all too common for us to discover that, after working our hardest to free ourselves from one kind of encumbrance, we’ve snared ourselves in something else. But Jesus, who made us, knows the way through every encumbrance. He knows how to set us free, and he does set us free.
Through Jesus’ bodily resurrection and his willingness to share it with us, he frees us from the death and corruption that we all inherited from our first parents. He offers us resurrection bodies too.
Through his bodily ascension to God’s right hand, King Jesus frees us from fallen human culture. He offers us citizenship from heaven.
Through his sinless crucifixion, he frees us from all devils’ power. He makes their power to destroy into weakness by transforming the violence against his body, which was the furthest possible extent of their power, into the instrument of all peace.
Through the outpouring of his Spirit and his intercession to the Father, he frees us from sin, and he frees us for glory. He purifies our hearts as his own holy temple and gently shapes us into the perfect creatures he intends for us to be.
There is no freedom like the freedom Jesus gives. His freedom is absolute, unassailable, and full of a glory that we cannot yet contain.
By receiving our freedom from Jesus, we can enter Christian adulthood.
Authority - Jesus Gives Us Power
Imagine the human who has desired more power than anyone else in history. Imagine the amount of power they craved, in all its awe-inspiring terror. Now, consider that the power they desired is dim and weak in comparison to the authority that Jesus wants to unleash in every individual who follows him.
Jesus wants to give us access to the kind of power that his prayers have with his Father. Jesus wants to give us access to the kind of power that Adam and Eve had before they fell. Jesus wants to set us above angels as their judges, above fig trees and mountains and all the beasts and birds.
Such power is dangerous in the hands of anyone who is imperfect, but Jesus is intent on setting us free from all sin so that we can share his glory. And as he sets us free, as we abide in him and he abides in us, he gives us a greater and greater share of his power, just as it says, “the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.”
Jesus is able to give us the authority, because he, the human who sits at God’s right hand, the God who came down to join us, has all authority in heaven and earth. It is his to give. He came down in order to give it, to reverse our first parents’ fall.
By receiving our authority from Jesus, we can enter Christian adulthood.
Identity - Jesus Adopts Us
Jesus knows each of us perfectly: better than we could possibly know ourselves. Jesus loves each of us perfectly: better than anyone else could possibly love us. Because he knows us and loves us, we can learn who we are from him. And he is so generously ready to teach us who we are. He longs to give us ourselves, until we fully know as we are fully known.
By his incarnation, Jesus became part of our human family. By his resurrection, he founded a new human family. In his mercy, he asks us to become his sisters and brothers. Through his Spirit, he unites us to one another more closely than ancestry ever could. He is our Brother, our Savior, our King, and our Friend. He gives us ourselves, and makes us into a new nation, a royal priesthood, an adopted family, cutting every tie to the world of death and binding us to his own eternal life.
By receiving our identity from Jesus, we can enter Christian adulthood.
Mystery - Jesus Gives Us Eternal Life
Because death can’t contain Jesus, and because he has the power to lead us through death, he gives us access to the biggest and most beautiful mysteries in the cosmos. Because we will live everlastingly through him, we can risk loving imperfect people. We can risk asking questions that have no clear answer. We can endure pain, because death won’t stop us. We can keep loving, keep asking, keep seeking, and we can rise stronger from our difficulties, into everlasting life.
What’s more, Jesus teaches us that every person is worth it; that everlasting souls are everlastingly lovable. He teaches us that seeking is worth it; that if we seek, we will someday find. And he teaches us that God has mansions and glories and joy prepared for us that are beyond our best imaginings.
Mortal adulthood can make mystery seem like it isn’t worth it. Like pain isn’t worth enduring. Like love isn’t worth risking. Like confusion is futile and truth is inaccessible. In Christ, all those lies are abolished and we can live with the joy of the Lord as our strength.
By receiving the cosmos from Jesus, we can enter Christian adulthood.
In every respect, Jesus offers the fullest, best vision of adulthood that anyone could possibly offer. No life is better than growing up in him.
We should minister in light of this reality.
The church could step up and offer youth all three forms of adulthood: maturity, status, and the fullness of the stature of Christ.
Christian adulthood, maturity, and social status are separate but intertwined. They do not form at the same times or in the same ways, but they share strong interconnections that allow them to illuminate and support one another.
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With this fuller understanding of adulthood, free from mere myths and symbols, we could become well equipped to meet youth in the middle of the biggest identity transition of their lives, offering a kind of support that isn’t found anywhere else in our society. We could foster desire and hope for adulthood instead of dread and fear. And we could re-articulate the messages of scripture in a way that directly relates to the central challenges and opportunities that all youth face, helping the Bible come alive in their minds and hearts. Churches could become the places where kids become Christian adults.
