The Challenge of Growing Up as a Grown-Up - The Wake-Up Call

Summary5 min read

The Wake-Up Call with Seedbed
Episode: The Challenge of Growing Up as a Grown-Up
Date: April 29, 2026
Host: John David Walt

Episode Overview

This episode centers on the theme of spiritual maturity, specifically “the challenge of growing up as a grown-up.” Drawing from Ephesians 4:14-16, host John David Walt invites listeners to reflect on what it means to move beyond spiritual adolescence and embrace the communal journey of growth in Christ. Walt discusses the importance of truth spoken in love, the power of vulnerability in Christian community, and practical steps for deepening spiritual relationships.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Time, Awareness, and Waking Up

Reflecting on Time: Walt playfully acknowledges the passing of time (“second quarter of the first century”—[00:06]) and nudges the audience to consider how they’re living intentionally.
Spiritual Wakefulness: Repeats the core mantra: “Wake up, sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.” Sets a tone for spiritual alertness and guidance.

2. Scripture Focus: Ephesians 4:14-16

The Dual Imperatives:
- “We must no longer be children.”
- “We must grow up.”
- Walt stresses the seriousness and transformative power of these statements ([03:22]).
Scriptural Call to Maturity:
- Avoiding spiritual immaturity (“tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine…”).
- Growing into Christ—the true head—through communal growth and building up in love.

3. Speaking the Truth in Love: A Personal Story

Vivid Illustration: Walt recounts a formative encounter with Michael Larby, a friend from Ghana who lovingly confronted him ([04:40]). Michael’s approach epitomizes “speaking the truth in love.”
Key Takeaway:
- “When we speak the truth in love, we can say hard things in softening ways.” ([06:43])
- Walt contrasts this with speaking the truth out of anger or anxiety, noting, “The truth hurts… Want to know the real truth about the truth? We need a new saying. How about, the truth heals?” ([07:17])

4. Truth, Love, and Relationship

The Interconnectedness:
- Maturity requires more than head-knowledge; it’s rooted in relationships built on trust and love.
- Notable theological reflection: “What if truth actually can’t be known apart from love? … What if, in fact, love is the truth? After all, didn’t Jesus say, ‘I am the truth’?” ([08:09])
Relational Deficiency:
- Lack of deep relationships stunts spiritual growth: “We lack the kinds of relational contexts and capacities required for speaking the truth in love. As a consequence, we remain arrested in a kind of adolescent stage of spiritual maturity.” ([09:42])

5. The Power of ‘Banded Discipleship’

A Call for Community:
- Advocates for banded discipleship—small, committed groups focused on authenticity and mutual growth.
- Quote from collaborator Mark Benjamin: “Bands lead us to show up, be real and lean in.” ([11:23])
- Emphasizes, “If we’re going to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, we must learn to find one another at a much deeper level of our humanity.” ([10:51])

6. Moving into Practice: Self-Reflection & Vulnerability

Journal Prompts:
- How do you see and understand the relationship between love and truth?
- When was the last time someone spoke the truth in love to you?
- Are you living in relationships where this readily happens?
- What keeps you from speaking or receiving the truth in love? ([13:38])
Barriers Identified:
- Fear of rejection, fear of making someone angry, and self-protective instincts.
- “Oftentimes we just kind of can have the unseen Heisman gesture up, holding people at bay. It's something in us, some self-protective device, some defensive mechanism. Jesus can break through that.” ([14:20])

7. What Happens in Band Meetings?

Not About Confrontation:
- “A band is not a confrontational group... it creates space to speak the truth about ourselves to each other.”
Transformative Questions:
1. What am I struggling with in my life?
2. Where am I succeeding?
3. Where is God? What is God saying? ([15:08])
Over time, this practice “heals the broken places” and leads to spiritual growth.

8. Invitation & Prayer

Encouragement to Join a Band:
- Walt invites listeners to explore training and to participate in these communities, calling it a “game changer.”
Prayer:
- “Abba Father… we thank you for your son Jesus, who holds us together and grows us up into the people we always dreamed we could be. Jesus, lead us deeper into real friendships where we can get to the real stuff of life. A lot depends on this. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.” ([12:43])

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“We must no longer be children and we must grow up.” — John David Walt ([03:22])
“When we speak the truth in love, we can say hard things in softening ways.” — John David Walt ([06:43])
“The truth hurts… Want to know the real truth about the truth? We need a new saying. How about, the truth heals?” — John David Walt ([07:17])
“What if truth actually can’t be known apart from love?... What if, in fact, love is the truth?” — John David Walt ([08:09])
“Bands lead us to show up, be real and lean in.” — Mark Benjamin, quoted by Walt ([11:23])

Important Timestamps

[00:06] – Introduction, context, “Wake up, sleeper.”
[01:07] – Reading of Ephesians 4:14-16
[03:22] – Establishing the two “must” statements: no longer children, but grow up
[04:40] – Story of Michael Larby, confrontation, and speaking the truth in love
[09:42] – Reflection: Why spiritual maturity is so difficult
[10:51] – Call to banded discipleship and becoming real
[13:38] – Journal prompts and reflection questions
[14:20] – Discussion of self-protective barriers to vulnerability
[15:08] – Purpose and structure of Christian band meetings
[12:43] – Prayer

Tone and Language

Walt’s tone is direct, personable, and vulnerable—marked by warmth and occasional humor (“the unseen Heisman gesture,” [14:20]), clear invitation, and a deep desire for authentic Christian community.

Summary

This episode of The Wake-Up Call offers a profound call to mature spiritual adulthood. Walt urges listeners to move beyond spiritual immaturity by embracing honest, loving relationships grounded in Christ. Through personal anecdote, scriptural meditation, and practical prompts, he highlights that true growth happens in community—where truth is spoken in love, masks are dropped, and God’s transformative grace goes to work. The episode closes with an invitation to deeper community and a heartfelt prayer, setting the stage for ongoing growth together.

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Transcript5 lines

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Nation, friends of Jesus, friends of mine. It is Wednesday, April 29th, in the year of our Lord, 2026. I am John David Walt, and this is your wake up call. Guys, we're into the second quarter of the first century, okay? Right. 22,000 to 2025, first quarter. 2026 to 2050, second quarter. How we doing? Are we awake? Have we thought through where we are in time and what we're doing with and in our time? That's why we're trying to wake up every single day here together. So let's begin. Wake up, sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. And we're praying in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, today's entry is entitled the Challenge of Growing up as a Grown Up. Our text is Ephesians 4, verses 14 through 16. Hear now the word of the Lord. We must no longer be children tossed to and frozen and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love. My gosh, the word of the Lord. There is so much that he's saying there. We could spend weeks right here
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we're barely going to scratch the surface. But let's just do our best to scratch the surface. Today Jesus is going to teach us something out of this word. Now consider this. And now we come. As my friend and mentor, Maxie Dunham, is fond of saying, we come to the lick log. That means you're getting right down to the core issue. Two massive must statements in this text Bring it into focus. We must no longer be children and we must grow up. I'm tempted to leave it there for today and call us all to the fifth grade disciplinary practice of writing these words on the board or on paper a few hundred times. As a movement toward asking the Spirit to write them on our hearts, we. I think I'm going to do it right now. We must no longer be. What does it say? Children. We must no longer be children and we must grow up. I want you to do that in. In your journal. If you got one today, just write those two phrases. And if you're, you know, willing to write them multiple times. Golly, it's powerful what happens when words come from our mind. They come through our heart. They come down our arm, through our hand, into our pen, and onto our pa. It's very different than typing on your phone. Okay, I can't help myself, so I will continue. Something happened to me on two separate occasions that warrant sharing as it bears directly on the point of our text. We had a guest in our home. This is back a few years ago. We had a guest in our home for the better part of two months. He's an African from Ghana and was working with Seedbed on a technology project. I'll just call him out here. Michael Larby, one of my heroes. Love this man. Michael Larby. The guy was. He's African, okay? He's from Ghana. He came by way of London, but he also came by way of Seoul, Korea. He speaks Korean and Ghanaian and English and the Queen's English and the whole thing. Brilliant man of God. He's now a priest, so his professional skills impress me. But more than that, way more than that, his profound faith impacted me. At one point, about midway through the Walt family immersion experience, he asked me if he could speak a word of confrontation into my life. I'm like, okay, bring it, Michael. What was I going to say? No? I braced myself for the truth in an act of courageous candor. Let's just say he called me out on some things. And in an unusual kind of way, I felt profoundly loved by this new friend. We're still good friends. It was something not many people will do, that these words from today's text. But speaking the truth in love put language to the experience for me. When we speak the truth in love, we can say hard things in softening ways. In my life's experience, it rarely happens. Too often. I'm guilty of speaking the truth in anger or in anxiety or in fear or fill in the blank, as the old adage goes. The truth hurts. Want to know the real truth about the truth? We need a new saying. How about, the truth heals? And didn't Jesus say the truth would set us free? That's John 8:32. It feels to me like that breakthrough moment in the puzzle when one key piece falling into place suddenly leads to many other pieces finding their places. What if truth actually can't be known apart from love? I think the truth can stay at the level of knowledge A long time. But like I'm talking about the level of knowing. What if in fact love is the truth? After all, didn't Jesus say, I am the truth? That's John 14:6. Sure, propositions and information can be true. But what if it actually takes a person to be the truth? And what of love? For love to be more than an idea, it requires a relationship. Truth in love requires relationship underline that. Could this be our problem? The explanation for our stunted growth? We lack the kinds of relational contexts and capacities required for speaking the truth in love. As a consequence, we remain arrested in a kind of adolescent stage of spiritual maturity. So many of us grown ups still need a lot of growing up. Let's not reach the end of our lives and still be saying this. What were those two phrases? We must no longer be children. We must grow up. You can already hear me saying it, can't you? It's why we must band together. Banded discipleship. Remember? If we're going to grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ, we, we must learn to find one another at a much deeper level of our humanity. We must become far more real with one another about our own frailty and brokenness. We must learn to take off our masks and meet one another in our places of weakness rather than our strength, our projected strength. As my friend and co laborer in this work, Mark Benjamin puts it, bands lead us to show up, be real and lean in. You know, Only a few days later I heard from another friend who brought me the same truth in love. And I shared the whole thing with my band too. I think Jesus is trying to grow me up. Maybe I'm finally ready. It's high time. Let's pray. ABBA Father. Yeah, let's just camp out right there. In those words. ABBA Father, you are our good, good Father. We thank you for your son Jesus, who holds us together and who grows us up into the people we always dreamed we could be. Jesus, lead us deeper into real friendships where we can get to the real stuff of life. A lot depends on this. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Journal prompts Today how do you see and understand the relationship between love and truth? When is the last time someone spoke the truth in love to you? When is the last time you shared love in this way with one another? Are you presently living in these kinds of relationships where this can readily happen? And last question. What is it about you? What is it about me that keeps others from speaking the truth in love to me? That's the Question. We often times we just kind of can have the unseen Heisman gesture up kind of holding people at bay. It's something in us, some self protective device, some defensive mechanism. Jesus can break through that. And then what is it about me? What is it about you that keeps us from doing this with others? You know, really it's fear of being rejected. It's fear of making somebody mad. It's. I don't know. And it's something, you know, in a band. In a band. A band is not a confrontational group. That's not really what, what it's about at all. But a band creates the space for you and me to simply speak the truth about ourselves to each other. And that doesn't mean like this is not like I'm telling you all the bad things about me. No, I'm talking to you about my real life. What's good was hard. Where's God? What's God saying? That's, you know, there's, there's quite three transformational questions. Those are basically it. What am I struggling with in my life? That's just life. Where am I succeeding? Right. Where am I winning? What's going good? What's going hard? Then where's God? What's the Lord? What might the Lord be saying by his word, by his spirit, by counsel of others? What. What is God saying to me right now? Yeah, we just tell people to take those three questions and go a thousand miles with them and come back to us and then we'll tell you the other two questions. It's brilliant model changing people's lives. So basic, but so foreign to us. What happens when you do that? Over time, the, the defense mechanisms, the dysfunctions, the, the kind of broken places just start healing. They just start growing. Because you're getting prayed for too. In a band meeting. I'm working on getting just a training session put together. We could do it online, just kind of help you understand this, know what it is, how to do it, how to get into it. Would you be interested in that? Something tells me a lot of you are. A lot of you already are doing this, but it's a game changer. Okay. You know what I, what I want to do today for our song? I'm going to reach back to our gospel series and call on my friend Chris Tomlin to lead us in one of his great songs. Pat Barrett wrote the song. Chris Tomlin has picked it up and taken it global. Good, good father. Just, I just felt that as we were praying today, you know, we have a good father. And he wants us the very best for us. So we're going to pull that song, and he's going to lead us in it. And we'll see you on the field.
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Oh, I heard sound stories of what they think you're like? And I heard the tender whisper of love in the dead of night and etern that you're pleased and that I never alone. Oh, you're a good, good father. It's who you are. It's who you are. It's who you are. And I'm loved by you. It's who I am. It's who I am. It's who I am. Oh, and I see many searching for answers far and wide? But I know we're all searching for answers only you provide? Cause you know just what do we need before we say a word? You're a good, good father. It's who you are. It's who you are. It's who you are And I'm loved by you. It's who I am. It's who I am. It's who I am. You are perfect in all of your ways. You are perfect in all of your ways. You are perfect in all of your ways to. Yes, you are, lord. You are perfect in all of your ways. Oh. Oh, you're perfect in all of your ways. You are perfect in all of your ways. To us, oh, is love so undeniable? I. I can hardly speak. Peace so unexplainable I. I can hardly think. As you call me deeper still. As you call me deeper still. As you call me deeper still in trouble. Love. Love your good, good father. It's who you are. It's who you are. It's who you are. And I'm loved by you. It's who I am. It's who I am. It's who I am. Father. It's who you are. It's who you are. And I'm loved by you. It's who I am. It's who I am. It's who I am. Love by you. All right.