Spiritual Maturity Matters More Than Age
In 1 Corinthians 13:11 Paul declared, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” Notice Paul did not say, “When I became eighteen years old, I put childhood behind me.” He said, “When I became a man,” or another way to say it is, “When I matured, I put away childish things.” It is not age but maturity that reveals our growth. Paul is making the point that his speech, thinking, and rationalization developed over the years to the point where he no longer acted like he did as a child.
Youth Are Developing, Not Deficient
This is also true of teenagers. They are still developing into adulthood, but they have developed from childhood into their season of adolescence. They are no longer babies. They are less dependent than children and can be entrusted with more and can do more than young children. Youth are young, but they are also useful.
Spiritual Gifts Grow Through Love and Character
At first glance, this passage from Paul can seem like a deviation from his discourse on spiritual gifts. Both in the previous chapter and the following chapter, Paul is discussing the issue of spiritual gifts. In chapter twelve the focus on spiritual gifts is about the diversity of gifts that each member of the church has and how they should function in a unified way for the edification of the church as a whole. In chapter fourteen the issue of spiritual gifts are about how they should function in an orderly manner for the development of the church.
Chapter thirteen opens with a focus on the display of love, but it is not a deviation from the spiritual gifts. Rather it if a demonstration on how the gifts should operate through love. The force of this chapter is not only gift development but character development.
Love Is the Measure of Spiritual Growth
Paul opens in verse one by saying, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” In verses four through eight, Paul provides a description of love as a mark of spiritual maturity, stating in verse seven that love “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
Paul begins to transition to the end of this focus by saying, “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears” (1 Corinthians 13:8-10).
Paul seems to be comparing the ceasing of spiritual gifts with the ever existence of love and thus the superiority of developing our love. This is when he makes the statement of verse eleven that “when I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” Like Paul we are all developing. Developing in our thoughts, in our rationale, and developing in our gifts, our love, and our ways. For a parent, their child will always be their child regardless of age, but the parenting methods will have to adjust as the child develops and matures. It is, therefore, helpful to recognize the development of the adolescents we serve and guide them based upon their capacity in that season.
Youth Are Often Undervalued in the Church
No youth are useless, but many youths are undervalued.
When we see the potential of God in every one of our youths regardless of their trials and traumas, their value begins to surge in our eyes, and we can easily commit to investing our lives into theirs. No youth are useless, but many youths are undervalued. The consequence of undervalued or despised youth is they will always be underutilized.
Examples Speak Louder Than Age
Paul charged his young pupil, Timothy, not to allow anyone to despise his youth or undervalue him because he was young. The way for our youth to demand and garner respect according to 1 Timothy 4:12 is by being an example of a believer. This is what youth workers are there to nurture. We have to invest in the spiritual growth of our teenagers until they are living out their faith because when they are living out their faith, they become examples for the believers.
Adapted from Don’t Despise Our Youth by David A. Washington. ©2025 David A. Washington. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
David A. Washington (DMin, North Park) is the founder and senior pastor of Kingdom Covenant Church, an urban inner-city ministry on the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of Kingdom Church and Don’t Despise Our Youth and is a youth ministry and gang intervention specialist with over three decades of experience working with youth, gangs, and prison ministry.
