Maturing Is Growing Into What Is Already True

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Maturing Is Growing Into What Is Already True"

Living Influence with Bill Thrall and Scott Boyd
Date: January 1, 2026

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Main Theme and Purpose

In this episode, Bill Thrall and Scott Boyd delve into the meaning and process of "maturing" as a follower of Christ. They distinguish between sanctification and maturing, emphasizing that maturing isn’t about striving for a new identity, but about growing into the truth of who God already says we are. The conversation centers on the foundational need for believers to know they are loved, safe, and free from performance-based spirituality, offering a powerful reframe for spiritual growth and influence.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining Maturing vs. Sanctification

• Sanctification happens at the moment of faith, when a person receives a new life in Christ (01:31–04:30).
  • “When Jesus died for me, he gave me a new life... I am now sanctified.” – Bill (01:39)
• Maturing is not about 'earning' spiritual life, but growing into what is already true.
  • Like babies, new believers are alive but need to grow up; their life is never in question (03:23–04:05).
  • The confusion arises when churches present maturity as a new set of rules, rather than a lived reality (04:21–05:06).

2. Faith vs. Performance

• True maturing happens through faith—not by effort or religious performance.
  • “God's sanctification, his work in my heart, was accessed through faith, not effort...” – Scott (00:28)
• Danger of "performance theology" and focusing on doing to earn God’s favor (06:03–06:28).
  • “We’ll get trapped into a performance theology that'll make my godliness depend on how hard I perform. And that is not sanctification.” – Bill (06:03–06:28)
• The Armor of God is put on through belief, not works (05:31–05:49).

3. The Journey of a New Believer

• New believers arrive with self-centeredness and profound needs for love and healing (06:33–07:26).
  • “Every new believer does…needs to be loved, desperately needs to be loved.” – Bill (08:06, 08:41)
• The indicator of maturing: When a believer’s focus starts to shift from themselves to others (07:26–08:41).

4. The Need for Safe, Loving Environments

• Growth requires a space to be known and loved without fear of judgment or need to hide (09:30–10:33).
  • Personal story: Scott found deep friendship and love in a weekly coffee meeting that helped him grasp grace (08:41–09:26).
  • “Find a safe place where nothing about you needs to be hidden.” – Bill (10:27)
• Tragically, many churches emphasize behavior rather than personhood, leading to harm (10:40–11:28).
  • “They discover that none of that is what this church is about. It’s about behavior. It’s about sinning less.” – Bill (10:40)

5. Breaking the Cycle of Performance and Striving

• Many Christians arrive pre-wired to please through effort, burdened by performance-driven backgrounds (12:09–12:41).
  • “Their whole life has been about performance...” – Bill (12:09)
• Story of a young man striving to "think of Jesus first" and feeling inadequate (12:41–13:46).
  • Scott tries to reorient him: “Maybe you already are pleasing to God.” (13:08)

6. The Profound Simplicity of Trust and Acceptance

• Simple acts of obedience, like helping clear chairs, can be powerful expressions of new life for a maturing believer (15:11–16:55).
  • Bill recalls: “He said, ‘That’s the first time in my life as an adult I ever did what I was told.’” (16:27)
• Maturing isn’t complicated; it’s about daily life and ordinary faith lived out in acceptance (16:57–17:07).

7. The Cost of Hiding vs. the Freedom of Transparency

• Faculty and church leaders should foster environments where nothing needs to be hidden (17:49–18:29).
  • “The greatest gift you can give them while they're with you is to teach them to hide nothing...Whatever they're hiding will one day define them.” – Bill (17:49–18:09)
• Future episodes will build on the importance of creating these environments.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On maturing and life in Christ:
  • “We are not in the process of maturing ever talking about whether we have life or not. We are sanctified...it’s called growing up.” – Bill (04:30–05:06)
• On the simplicity and safety needed for growth:
  • “Find a safe place where nothing about you needs to be hidden.” – Bill (10:27)
• On the harm organizations can do:
  • “My first answer was, great harm...Everybody in the room had experienced harm from a church.” – Scott (11:10–11:34)
• On the essential realization for believers:
  • “Could you just pause for a minute in the middle of all your mess and believe for one moment that your God is already pleased with you?” – Bill (13:48–14:49)
• On hiding:
  • “Create a safe place where they don’t have to hide anything. Because whatever they’re hiding will one day define them.” – Bill (18:25–18:34)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Defining Maturity and Sanctification: 01:31–04:30
• Faith vs. Effort (Performance Theology): 05:31–06:28
• The Needs of New Believers: 06:33–08:41
• Importance of Safe, Loving Community: 09:30–10:33
• Performance, Striving, and Acceptance: 12:09–14:49
• Transparency and Hiding: 17:49–18:34

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Tone and Style

The episode is conversational, empathetic, and candid, with both Scott and Bill openly sharing personal anecdotes and hard-won wisdom. There’s a persistent undercurrent of gentleness, honesty, and hope, urging listeners to root their spiritual journey in the acceptance and love that’s already theirs, and to foster environments where truth—not performance—fuels growth.

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Conclusion

This episode lays a thoughtful foundation for understanding spiritual maturity as a process of leaning further into the reality of God’s love and our new identity, not earning it through religious effort. Bill and Scott challenge listeners to seek spaces and relationships marked by genuine acceptance and freedom from hiding, setting the stage for deeper discussions on authentic personal and community influence in future episodes.

Transcript

[Scott Boyd]

Foreign. If you like our content, we have an exclusive seminar for business leaders, March 11th to the 13th. Check it out on livinginfluenceleadership.com welcome to Living Influence. Glad to have you back. Today, Bill and I are going to be talking about the process of maturing. This is really an interesting topic because whenever you hear the word mature. Early in my journey of discovering grace, what happened for me was learning that God's sanctification, his work in my heart, was accessed through faith, not effort, not performance was a huge thing. It gave me this place to stand. It began to be a place where I was able to live into freedom, where I was able to tell the truth to other people about what was going on in my life. And so when that first started happening, anytime it seemed like the old system was going to be brought back into play, I would have this fear of like, oh, my gosh, they're going to sneak in the back door. And now here the law is going to apply again, and I'm going to be proven to be not enough. Yeah. And so when I first heard this word maturing, it's like, well, how's maturing just not a different word for sanctification? And so I just thought that'd be a good place to start as we're talking about it, because as I've learned, it's completely different.

[Bill]

Yes, it is. Oh, thank you, Scott. That's actually a great beginning. I think what happens is sometimes theological words have so been misrepresented or misapplied. This is a reality. When Jesus died for me, he gave me a new life. Let's just agree on that. He gave me a new life. Now that reality is that I am now sanctified. I've been given a new life. I'm sanctified. I am set apart by God, holy. We know that, we believe that, we teach that. But what happens is that gets confused with this truth. I am born with a new life as a baby. As a baby.

[Scott Boyd]

Right.

[Bill]

And I'm discovering with a lot of people that there is a process that lets that baby grow up. And that process is Paul. Paul talks about this in First Corinthians, chapters two and three. He talks about this reality. We are spiritual, but some of us are babies. And we can't eat solid food. He says we can only have milk, so that he's making a comparison to a natural growth of a child. This past weekend, we were with our daughter Wendy's family, and there's two new babies. One's two months old the other six months old, they're precious, precious little things. But we know something about those babies. They're going to mature.

[Scott Boyd]

Right?

[Bill]

They're going to grow up. Now, what's never at question, do those babies have life? That's never a question.

[Scott Boyd]

No, we know they're living.

[Bill]

They're living and they're going to grow. And now yesterday we were just with them, but yesterday the six month old for the first time laughed out loud at her brother. She's growing up now. The reason I'm stressing that so much God is because in the church, unfortunately, in a variety of ways, Christians are still struggling with the foundation of whether they really have life or not.

[Scott Boyd]

Right.

[Bill]

And it's to believe it and to believe it and they're struggling with it. So that they're being taught, unfortunately, that what you have to do is you have to do certain things to get the life you already have.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. And here's five things, here's five to.

[Bill]

Do these, these six things are these. And they sound spiritual and they sound wonderful.

[Scott Boyd]

They'll cause me to come alive and.

[Bill]

They'Ll cause you to come alive. So, so let's lay as we talk about this process of maturing, let's repeat it, let's say it deeply, solidly. We are not in the process of maturing ever talking about whether we have life or not. We are sanctified. Is there a process of sanctification? Yes, it's called growing up. But it's never a process where I am changing who I used to be into who I ought to be.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

It's always a process that has a new beginning.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. For me, it almost seems like it's a process of I hit a bump in the road and then I go a little bit further and I make a wrong turn and I need to remember who God says I am. And so it's always a process of faith.

[Bill]

Absolutely.

[Scott Boyd]

It's like when I, when I've read shortly after I started discovering this grace message, I read the Armor of God in Ephesians and each one of those are articles that you wear, of clothing are from faith.

[Bill]

Absolutely.

[Scott Boyd]

Of belief.

[Bill]

Absolutely.

[Scott Boyd]

And so this process of maturing is a process of you're going to hit this bump and here we're going to remind you Amen. What's true. Amen. This reality.

[Bill]

Excellent.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

I scream Amen at you because here's the key. It's going to be a key throughout everything we're going to share over these next several weeks. Let's get the foundation straight let's get it straight or we'll get trapped into a performance theology that'll make my godliness depend on how hard I perform.

[Scott Boyd]

Right.

[Bill]

And that is not sanctification.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

And so we have to say that, we have to say that clearly as many times as we need to. When I think of this process of maturing, I think these are reality statements. I think a person comes to Christ and they're brand new, spiritually brand new, but they come to Christ very me centered because of all that they've experienced so far in life. And they come into Christ a very needy person. They need to experience profound healing. That's who they are. That's the condition of their person when they come to Jesus.

[Scott Boyd]

So a new believer comes to Jesus with great needs. With great. Yeah. Very self centered and need for healing.

[Bill]

And a need for healing. Yeah, great. Every, every new believer does something happens when that person. And we're going to go through this list, so to speak, but when that person begins to experience maturing, something changes. In fact, I say to a lot of audiences, the greatest single evidence that you as a Christian are maturing is when the focus of your life turns from you to someone else. That may be the greatest change and the evidence of change in your life. So back to this person who comes into Christ trusting Jesus as their Savior. What do they need? What do they really need? I wonder if we wouldn't be fair to say that person probably I don't even know how to prioritize them. I just have a list. But included in that list I know this. That person desperately needs to be loved. Desperately needs to be loved.

[Scott Boyd]

When I first started to discover grace, my wife was still very much entrenched in her legalistic ways. Yes. Let me just say that. And so I don't think either one of us knew really how to love each other. Well. And she wasn't the first person I went to to find that. Actually I went to a friend and I was like, could we, could we make our friendship more intentional? And we started meeting for coffee on Friday mornings and. But I had to find. And I found love there.

[Bill]

Absolutely. Well said.

[Scott Boyd]

Just an interesting dynamic.

[Bill]

And you met more than one Friday.

[Scott Boyd]

Morning and we met more than we met hundreds of Friday mornings.

[Bill]

Exactly.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

That's the key.

[Scott Boyd]

And it took time.

[Bill]

It took time, a lot of time. But, but you, you are modeling for us the issue. Young believers desperately need a safe place where they can be loved. There's this truism in scripture. We love because we are loved. So Scott Boyd Came to an awareness of grace, began to experience love in a friendship that eventually found its way into your marriage, eventually found its way into your relationship with your wife. And beyond that to me and a whole lot of other people. But that's the process. That's the thing. We want to make sure that anyone who's listening to us say, well, gee, I really want to grow as a Christian. Good. Find someone to love you. I really want to grow as a Christian. Great. Find a safe place where nothing about you needs to be hidden.

[Scott Boyd]

Which is really hard for a lot of people.

[Bill]

Oh, it's so hard.

[Scott Boyd]

It's like unfathomable to, like, how could I ever find a safe place?

[Bill]

Not only that, it's a tragic. This is a tragic reality. They go to a church assuming that it will be a safe place and assuming it's a place where they will be loved, and it's assuming it'll be a place where they can be honest about who they are. And tragically, they discover that none of that is what this church is about. It's about behavior. It's about sinning less. It's about discovering a way to godliness.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. I was in a group, we were talking about this new church that's starting and answering the question, what could be possible? What are the things that could be possible that this church could do? And my first answer was, great harm.

[Bill]

Good for you. Because it's true, isn't it? It is so true.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. And actually everybody in the room had experienced harm from a church.

[Bill]

This person who is new in Christ desperately needs a safe place to be loved. As we said in one of our prior podcasts, this is the wisdom of Jesus. He says this the witness to the world that you are mine is the love you have for one another. I just jumped ahead, but I did it to make a point. So much of what happens to new believers is they get into an environment where the issue becomes their behavior, not their person.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

And the minute that issue becomes their behavior, not their person, that person stops growing, that person stops maturing. We know something about them when they're new in Christ. Their whole life has been about performance, Scott.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. And so they're going to come pre wired to try to please.

[Bill]

Absolutely. And to work at pleasing and to perform or having failed that performance, they'll come without hope.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. I just was having dinner with a couple and the young man had been a believer for three to four years and he was talking about when he I wake up in the morning and Jesus isn't my first thought, I just think I got to do better. And he's totally in that, striving to please.

[Bill]

Absolutely.

[Scott Boyd]

And I was trying to suggest to him that maybe he already was pleasing to God.

[Bill]

I'll say that again because that's a key point. I don't want anybody to miss what you just said.

[Scott Boyd]

This person was saying, I. I wake up in the morning and I, you know, I'm thinking about work, and I'm thinking about breakfast, and I'm thinking about chores, but I didn't think about God. And I. But God's the most important thing in my life because I gave my life to God. And maybe something's wrong that I don't have my priorities right. And. And I just was trying to nudge them to the place of, well, maybe that's okay that you thought about all those other things and God still is pleased with you and loves you.

[Bill]

That's the key words.

[Scott Boyd]

You.

[Bill]

What if for every new believer, Scott, we could say to them, could you just pause for a minute in the middle of all your mess and believe for one moment that your God is already pleased with you? What if we could create a safe place where if no other message came through, but that message came through, because we know something about people who come to Christ. Sin has done a job on them, their own sin and the sin of others. And so they are intentionally trying to please through effort to be able to do something that'll somehow reward them. And God says, slow down. You said it so well. Slow down. I'm already pleased with you.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. What if God was delighted that you were such a good employee that you woke up thinking about your work?

[Bill]

Right. Or that you're such a human being, you actually thought about breakfast?

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. Right.

[Bill]

What if normality. What if he enjoyed that Exactly.

[Scott Boyd]

Part of you.

[Bill]

What if normality were having that attitude?

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

So as we think about this process of maturing, okay, we've said a couple things. What if we created a place for them to experience love? What if we create a place for them to not have to work hard to be someone who is pleasing, but to believe that our God is already pleased with us? One day, in our early days of our ministry, we owned an old church building. We cleaned out every. Just an old empty building, except carpet on the floor and concerts at night. And there was a young man standing behind me, and his name was Mike. And I said, mike, grab some guys and get all these chairs out here. The concert's in an hour. And I went on to do 10 other things and 20 minutes later, I turn around and Mike's standing behind me. He's crying. Mike's 26. I knew that he had been disarmed. He discharged from the Navy. He'd just come out of an alcohol and drug rehab center, and he's standing behind me crying. And I said, mike, what's wrong? I must be a Christian, Bill. I must be a Christian. Well, I'm glad. Why must you be a Christian? Listen to his words. Because he said, when you asked me to get some guys to clean out the chairs, he said, you know, that's the first time in my life as an adult I ever did what I was told. I'm telling that story because let's not make this process complicated.

[Scott Boyd]

Just a simple act of trusting. Clean the chairs out.

[Bill]

Exactly. Is profound.

[Scott Boyd]

Profound.

[Bill]

For him, it's profound. So how do we create an environment where people experience the profound? Where they experience being loved, where they experience that they're enough. Where they experience that they don't have to continually hide? As you know, Scott, when I go to speak at a seminary or a Christian university, I meet with the faculty. And without exception, when I go and I meet with the faculty, I will make this statement to every faculty. I want to encourage all of you with something. You're going to have these students from 1 to 4, 6 years. This is my opinion, the greatest gift you can give them while they're with you is to teach them to hide nothing.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

That's the greatest gift you can give them. You can teach them all the theology that's ever been taught, but while they're here, created an environment where they don't have to hide anything, because I know something. Whatever they're hiding will one day define them.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah.

[Bill]

And I know that.

[Scott Boyd]

So I think we're going to pause here on this. Hiding. That'll be a great place to take this up on our next podcast, wouldn't you agree?

[Bill]

I think so.

[Scott Boyd]

I think this. Tell me how you said that again. Teach them to never hide.

[Bill]

Yeah, teach them. Teach. Create a safe place where they don't have to hide it.

[Scott Boyd]

Where they don't have to hide anything.

[Bill]

Because whatever they're hiding will one day define them.

[Scott Boyd]

Yeah. So we'll start there next time at Living Influence. We're going to be talking about this process of maturity. I think this is going to connect the dots for a lot of you. So I hope you stay with us in this series. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the podcast. We're really glad that you're here, we'd love to know that you're here. And so if you could leave a comment, we would appreciate that. But more importantly, if you know someone that should listen to this or hear it, we would love for you to share it with them. Thanks again.