I Put The Ways of Childhood Behind Me

To make sense of this verse, it helps to remember who first received it. Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth, a busy port city in Greece, after he had lived and worked among them himself (you can read the story in Acts 18). By the time he sends this letter, sometime in the 50s AD, the church is fracturing. They are arguing over which leader they belong to, taking each other to court, divided at the Lord’s table, and, most of all, jostling over spiritual gifts: who can speak in tongues, who has the showiest gift, who counts as more advanced. That is the setting of this single sentence. Chapters 12 to 14 are Paul’s long answer to people who prized impressive abilities over ordinary love. So although we tend to hear it at weddings, it was first aimed at a congregation that thought maturity meant gifting and knowledge, and Paul is quietly telling them they have it backwards. Once I remember that, the verse stops feeling sentimental and starts to sting a little, which I suspect is closer to how he meant it.

Look at how Paul builds the sentence and you notice he gives three pictures of childhood, not one: I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Words, emotions, reasoning. He is covering the whole inner life, not just outward behaviour, and all three belong to the same stage and are meant to be outgrown together. There is no scolding in his tone, only the plain sense of something laid down once it has done its work. What is easy to miss is the harder claim sitting right beside it. A few lines earlier he has said that prophecy, tongues and knowledge, the very gifts the Corinthians were so proud of, will one day be done away with. The growing-up picture is not only about me as an individual, then. It hints that this whole present age is a kind of childhood compared with what is still to come.

The verse leans straight into the line that follows it, the one the short reflection already touches, about seeing now in a mirror only dimly. Ancient mirrors were polished metal rather than glass, so even at their best they gave back a softened, uncertain image, and that is the picture Paul reaches for to describe our knowledge of God now. Here is where it joins the wider story of scripture. Moses was told that no one could see God’s face and live (Exodus 33:20), and ever since the garden we have been squinting rather than seeing plainly. Yet the promise running through the Bible is that this will not always be so. John’s first letter holds out the day when we will see Christ as he is and be made like him (1 John 3:2), and Paul elsewhere calls Jesus the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). So the dim mirror is not the end of the matter. It has a face it is waiting for, and the face is his.

I would love to tell you I read this verse as a finished adult looking fondly back. I cannot. I catch the toddler in me most days. It surfaces when I want a thing the moment I want it, when a slight from someone lands and I quietly keep the score, when I would rather sound clever in a conversation than actually love the person sitting in front of me. That last one is exactly what Paul is naming. The Corinthians wanted the impressive gift. I want the impressive sentence. What helps me is that he does not tell me to manufacture maturity by gritting my teeth. He treats growth as something God works in slowly, the way a child grows without ever feeling it happen. So I have learned to ask a smaller, kinder question than am I mature yet. I ask whether, in this one exchange and this one disappointment, I can love a little more patiently than I would have a year ago. That is a question I can actually live with, and it keeps me from both smugness and despair.

At first glance Paul seems to be pulling against his own Lord. Jesus drew children onto his knee, warned off anyone who would push them aside, and said the kingdom belongs to those who receive it the way a little one does (Mark 10, Matthew 18). The tension only exists if you let one word do two jobs. There is a childishness that needs laying down, and a childlikeness worth keeping for ever. The first is self-centred: the world revolving around me, feelings arriving like weather and ruling the room, a quiet ledger kept against anyone who slights me. The second is trust: open hands, a readiness to be carried, no need to pretend I am fine when I am not. Paul is not asking me to grow cynical or self-sufficient. If anything the mature believer leans on the Father more, only in a clear-eyed rather than a clinging way. The aim was never to stop being a child of God. It is to stop being childish about it.

The rest of the New Testament keeps reaching for this same growing-up picture, and every time it ties maturity to love rather than to information. The writer of Hebrews gently chides readers who ought to be teaching by now but still need milk, and says solid food belongs to those who have trained themselves, by long practice, to tell good from evil (Hebrews 5:13 to 14). Maturity there is a trained instinct worn in by use, not a stack of facts you can recite. Paul says something close in Ephesians. He wants us to stop being children tossed about by every clever new wind of teaching, and instead to grow up, speaking the truth in love, into Christ who is the head (Ephesians 4:14 to 15). Both arrows point the same way. Growing up is not arriving at cleverer opinions. It is becoming someone who can be trusted to love well under pressure, the way you eventually trust a grown child to carry something fragile across a crowded room. That is slow work, and mostly hidden, and it is exactly the quiet thing this verse is describing.

I have heard this verse used badly more than once, always by someone kind who meant well. A new believer weeps through a service, or asks a question nobody has a tidy answer to, and afterwards someone leans over and says, gently, that it might be time to put away childish things. That borrows Paul’s authority for a job he never gave it. Tears and awkward questions are nowhere in his picture. They belong to being human and to being cared for, and they are not faults to be quietly trained out of anyone.

The sharper version happens in meetings, and it nearly always travels downward. Someone newer or less senior raises a concern, and an established voice answers not with a reason but with this verse, so the concern itself becomes the evidence of immaturity. Nobody has ever matured under that. If you chair anything, the test is worth keeping in your pocket: am I reaching for verse 11 because it answers the point, or because it saves me from answering it?

What to do instead is slower and less impressive, which is rather the difficulty. Ask the question back. Find out what sits underneath the tears or the objection, and stay in a conversation that the chapter this verse belongs to says love bears with rather than closes down. That will cost you the last ten minutes of your meeting. I have never once regretted spending them.

If you are teaching this passage rather than quoting the line, notice that verse 11 is neither where Paul’s argument starts nor where it lands. It is a supporting picture, and the claim it supports arrives first, in verses 8 to 10. Then two illustrations come back to back: the child who grows up, and the dim mirror of verse 12. Verse 11 is doing a job for a sentence written two verses earlier.

That changes how it preaches. Taken alone it makes a pleasant point about maturity, and it will preach, and nobody will be harmed. Put back in place it is far stronger, because the abilities this church ranked itself by turn out to have an expiry date, and the love they were treating as the ordinary option does not. So if you have twenty minutes, spend the first five in verses 8 to 10 and let verse 11 arrive as the answer rather than as the text. Read verse 12 in the same breath as well. A congregation given only the growing-up half hears self-improvement where Paul was writing hope.

I would reach for this when a church commissions someone into new responsibility: a newly appointed elder, a leader stepping up, a young adult moving out of the youth group into full membership. It says out loud that gifting was never the mark of readiness, and that what the moment asks for is a settled capacity to love rather than an impressive platform. It sits well in a course on spiritual gifts too, precisely because it refuses to let the striking gift outrank the ordinary one.

I would not go near it at a child’s funeral, however tempting the growing-up language sounds. A child’s worth before God is not Paul’s subject here, and borrowing his metaphor over a small coffin risks implying that a short life was an unfinished one. Keep it away from anyone in acute grief or crisis as well, whatever their age. What a person feels in the worst week of their life, however unguarded, is not what Paul has in view, and a verse offered into a raw moment lands as correction when presence is what is being asked for. Save it for the room where it costs the people with power something.

Long before chapter 13, Paul has needled these people for thinking they had made it. In chapter 4 the sarcasm is sharp enough to leave a mark: they are already full, already rich, already reigning, and they have managed it without him (1 Corinthians 4:8). That is not a compliment. It is aimed at a congregation who had decided the whole story of what God is doing was more or less complete in them, already, on an ordinary Tuesday in Corinth.

For years I read chapter 13 as though it floated free of all that, a few lines of wedding poetry that had drifted into an argument about gifts. It does not float. Set it beside chapter 4 and verse 11 stops sounding like gentle wisdom about growing up and starts sounding like a hand laid on the shoulder of people who had skipped the growing and declared themselves finished. You are not the man yet, whatever thrones you think you are sitting on. The ‘then’ of the very next verse, the face to face, has not arrived, whatever your favourite teacher told you on Sunday.

It is one of the few places I think Paul is genuinely irritated rather than merely firm, and knowing that changed the temperature of a sentence I had filed under sentimental. He is not handing the Corinthians a nice thought about maturity. He is telling a room full of self-declared graduates that the course has barely started, and that the thing they are worst at is the only thing on the syllabus.

The word behind ‘man’ in the WEBBE, and in nearly every English Bible, is the ordinary Greek word for an adult male, anēr, a different word from the one for a child and from the general word for a human being. I want to be careful here, because you can build far too much theology on a single word, and I honestly do not know how much weight Paul wanted this one to carry past the plain contrast with ‘child’. Still, it is worth a minute of your time. Becoming that word was not a private feeling you woke up with one morning. It was nearer to a change of standing: things could now be entrusted to you that had never been entrusted to a child, and everybody in the room knew it had happened.

We have more or less inverted that. Adulthood is the thing people apologise for now, or postpone, or describe as an administrative burden they got landed with. I have made the joke myself about never wanting to grow up, as though staying small for ever were the option Paul carelessly forgot to mention. I doubt he would have got the joke. I doubt anyone he knew grieved becoming a man. You had waited years for it, and what it meant was that somebody had finally decided you could be trusted with something breakable.

Here is where I would rather be honest than tidy. The verse assumes a direction of travel: child gives way to adult, dim gives way to clear, and the traffic runs one way only. Most of the time that is exactly how it works, and it is a real comfort. But picture a woman in her eighties whose mind is going back by inches to something like a child’s world: the same worry circling, the same small fear arriving at four in the afternoon, names slipping away from her one at a time. I do not believe for a second that this makes her less mature in the way that counts before God, and I want to say so plainly, because it would be a cruelty to read this verse as a scorecard on cognitive decline. Whatever putting away childish things means, it cannot mean capacity. Capacity is not something any of us earn, or keep by being good.

The harder case, for me, is the other one. The believer who is entirely capable and still, thirty years into a pew, catches the identical petty jealousy and the identical need to be right that he brought to his first week as a Christian. Often enough that believer is me. Paul’s picture has a clean before and after in it. My life mostly refuses to supply one. I have no tidy answer for why some people visibly ripen while others of us seem to settle at roughly the emotional age we arrived at, gifts and doctrine and good intentions notwithstanding. The chapter promises a direction. It does not promise me a date, or an explanation for the friend still stuck at the same junction after decades of genuinely trying to pull away from it. That is not a small thing to sit with, and I have not made my peace with it.

It helps me, oddly, to lay this verse next to something Paul says about himself much later, writing from prison rather than to a squabbling church. In Philippians he says flatly that he has not already obtained it and has not already been made perfect, and that he is straining forward like a runner with nothing behind him worth turning round for (Philippians 3:12 to 14). Same man. On the usual reckoning of when these letters were written, and I will not pretend the chronology is settled, the Paul who told Corinth he had put away childish things is the Paul who some years on refuses to claim he has arrived anywhere at all.

I used to worry at that as a contradiction. I do not now. Read together they say something neither of them says alone: growing up is real, and it is not finished this side of the mirror clearing. ‘I have put away childish things’ names a direction he has genuinely travelled, not a certificate he is holding up for inspection. He is not boasting in one letter and being modest in the other. He is telling the truth about the same road at two different mileposts. That is more comforting to me than either verse on its own, because it means the confident-sounding line about becoming a man never claimed the finish. It claimed the walking, and it came from a man who kept walking right to the end of everything we have from him.

Something I missed for years: count the pronouns in this chapter. The opening is not ‘if you speak with the tongues of men and of angels’, or ‘if you have all knowledge’, or ‘if you give away everything you own’. It is I, every time, and it runs all the way down to our verse. When I was a child. Now that I have become a man.

Think about who he is writing to. These are people who have exasperated him for twelve chapters, and he has the standing to say ‘you are the child here’. In chapter 3 he very nearly does, telling them he had to feed them with milk because they were still infants (1 Corinthians 3:1 to 2). Then he reaches the sharpest chapter in the letter, picks up the knife, and turns it on himself. He is the one who might be a clanging noise. He is the one who once spoke and felt and thought like a child. Whatever correction is coming has to pass through Paul before it reaches Corinth.

I find that harder to imitate than anything else in the passage. When I am right about something, and I am occasionally right, the pronoun I reach for is ‘you’. It costs me nothing, and it settles nothing, and I have watched it fail in enough kitchens and enough church halls to know better by now. Paul’s way costs him. He has to be the example, and the example is not flattering. It is also the only version of this verse a human being can actually hear. Say ‘you spoke as a child’ and the room folds its arms. Say ‘I did’ and something quietly opens. I do not think that is a rhetorical trick he picked up somewhere. I think by the time he wrote it, he simply meant it.

• Where do I still expect the world, or the people around me, to revolve around what I want?
• When I picture a ‘mature’ Christian, do I think of knowledge and confidence, or of patient love that does not keep score?
• What is one childish thing God might be gently asking me to set down for good, not by force but as I grow?
• Does the promise of one day seeing him face to face make me more patient with how unfinished I still feel?

If you would like to keep growing in this, you might sit with a few more passages over at our topic pages or read on through 1 Corinthians.