To grow jaded, cynical, condescending, and bitter as we age should not be normal for Christians. Instead, as we age, we should grow in Christ. And as we grow in Christ, we ought to grow in humility. And as we grow in humility, we will find that we are aging backward in our own minds, reverting to our infancy, when we knew so little but were so eager to grow and learn, except that as adults, we are more aware of it. We are more aware that, as we age, we are really only children.

Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” – 1 Peter 5:5 (ESV)

I am in my mid-thirties. Despite what some junior and senior high students in my life tell me, I am not an old man. Yet, neither am I a young man. I am not a child. I am older than Jesus was at the time of his crucifixion. For some reason, that has always been a significant marker for me.

I have been asking God to make me wise since I was a teenager. Because of what James 1:5-8 promises, I am confident that I am wiser now than I would have been had I not asked so consistently for God to supply the lack of wisdom.

Growing Smaller

Here is my point: the wiser I become, the more like a child I perceive myself to be. I perceive a greater dependence on God and a stronger sense of the smallness of my understanding, insight, and discernment. As I consider God’s greatness and my smallness compared to him, I do not become any relatively bigger the older and wiser I grow. Instead, the older and (hopefully) wiser I become, the smaller I perceive myself to be compared to God. I perceive myself to be becoming more dependent, more frail, more insufficient, more ignorant, more foolish, and more in need of his transforming grace in my life. In short, the older I get, the more I feel like a child.

Growing in the grace and knowledge of my Lord Jesus Christ feels a bit like what C.S. Lewis did with Aslan in his Chronicles of Narnia. There is a passage in those books in which the narrator describes how the older and bigger the children become, Aslan somehow seems bigger too, more powerful, more dangerous, less tame. One would expect their sense of smallness in proportion to Aslan to diminish as they grow up. But as they mature, Aslan only seems bigger. The children never come to perceive themselves as around the same size as Aslan.

As I reflect on my few years of growth in Christ, Christ only seems to have grown greater in my perspective, more awful (in the sense of inspiring awe), more grand, more weighty. Meanwhile, I sense myself growing smaller in my own perspective as he grows bigger. This makes my pride and selfishness more ridiculous when they appear in my heart and become evident in my interactions.

More than that, I find other people growing smaller too. I have a tendency to be intimidated by those thinkers we call “great.” I respect and wonder at the feats and prowess of people in the world. I sense myself to be small compared to them. And yet, as I grow in Christ, and probably also as I age in years, I find myself less impressed by them. It is almost as though as I come closer to the ages at which people have typically begun to accomplish great things for which we remember them, they have somehow become less impressive. It’s like looking at a pointillist painting; from a distance, the image appears sharp and clear. But up close, it is much blurrier. Even closer, you see that the image is made of little dots and strokes. The closer I inch toward “old,” the less different it seems to be from “young.”

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