What You Call “Grown” God Calls Fornication

THE DEVOTION

'I'm grown.' It's the phrase that ends the conversation. 'I'm a grown adult, I can do what I want, who are you to judge?' And there's a half-truth in it — you are an adult, and you do have the freedom to make your own choices. But being grown was never the same as being right. Adulthood gives you the ability to choose; it does not give you the authority to redefine what God has already called sin.

Paul is blunt about it: 'this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from porneia.' Porneia — sexual immorality, any sexual intimacy outside the marriage covenant. It's a category God defined, and notice: age is not one of the factors that moves an act out of that category. A twenty-year-old and a forty-year-old doing the same thing are both in porneia. 'Grown' doesn't sanctify it. It just means an older person is choosing it.

Here's what our culture has done — it has taken maturity in years and confused it with maturity in wisdom. Being grown enough to pay your own bills does not make you grown enough to overrule your Creator. In fact, real spiritual maturity moves in the opposite direction: the more grown you actually are in God, the more you submit to His design, not the less. The Sugar-Free Gospel™ says it plainly: 'I'm grown' is not a covering for sin — it's just a grown-up excuse for it.

This isn't about shaming anyone's freedom — it's about redefining what freedom really is. True freedom isn't doing whatever your body wants; it's being free enough from your appetites to obey God even when it's hard. So the next time 'I'm grown' rises up as the final word, ask the deeper question: grown enough to submit? Grown enough to wait? Grown enough to honor God with the body He gave you? That's the maturity that actually counts.