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Is it your desire to grow spiritually? You need to be intentional about it, otherwise your growth will be hit and miss, on and off, up and down. When you grow spiritually, you inevitably grow emotionally and mentally, too. They go hand in hand.
If that is your desire to grow up in Christ, you need to:
Set realistic goals.
You can’t just wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to grow up today into maturity for Jesus!” It’s not a one-time decision and it’s not one size fits all. What will help is to set realistic goals so that you can achieve them, which will encourage you to keep on keeping on, and set more realistic goals.
For example, if you want to become more patient like Jesus, determine that you will focus on being patient toward one person—maybe the person that most often causes you to be impatient. Focus on showing patience to that person for a week, and then when you’ve done that—with God’s help—you’ll be encouraged to see that you can learn to be patient.
Or maybe you know you need to have a regular time set aside to get into your Bible and pray each day, but you haven’t really been able to get that going with any consistency. So, set a realistic goal to get that going. Maybe you determine to get up 15 minutes earlier each day and set aside that 15 minutes for you and Jesus. Get that going for at least a week. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start, and getting it established regularly will really make a difference. I tell you, if you’ll do that, pretty soon 15 minutes just won’t be enough because you’ll see what a difference that makes in your life and how sweet that time is each day, so before you know it, that time frame grows and you need to increase that goal.
If you try to bite off too much, and you don’t achieve your goal, it just discourages you and causes you to give up. So, don’t do that. Set realistic goals.