GROWING UP SPIRITUALLY

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

Hebrews 5:11-14

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Go back to when you were born and think about your developmental progression. When you do, you will see that there were stages you went through in a lot of areas.

In regard to mobility, you had none of your own initially. You relied on someone to carry you from place to place. But then you learned how to roll over and then crawl and then take your first steps and before you knew it, you were off to the races and your parents had to be in constant pursuit to save you from yourself.

You also didn’t emerge from the womb, speaking words that could communicate what you needed or how you felt. You used non-verbals for quite a while, crying when you needed attended to and smiling when you were happy, but then you said your first word one day, usually “DaDa” or “MaMa”. And slowly but surely after that, you learned other words, one by one, before being able to group those words into a sentence as you sought to talk about what you were experiencing in the world around you.

Finally, when it came to being fed and nourished, you started with just milk because your body wasn’t developed enough to handle solid foods. After being on milk for a short time, you were able to eat baby food, food that was essentially mushed up into a paste because you had not developed teeth able to effectively chew food yet. There were a lot of varieties of baby food in jars and your parents would experiment with different types to see what you did and didn’t like. You see, you were also beginning to develop a sense of taste and being discriminate in what you did and didn’t like to eat. Once you gained your first teeth, your parents were able to feed you regular food that was carefully cut up into small bites and soon you were on your way to eating like anyone else.

Mobility. Speaking. Eating.

All had their own associated stages of development after you were born.

Why go into all this?

Because it applies to the spiritual life of someone when they become a Christian and are “born again” as Jesus mentions to Nicodemus in the third chapter of John’s Gospel and Paul later discusses in his second letter to the Corinthian church when he calls anyone in Christ a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:!7).

When a person willingly chooses to place their belief in Jesus as Savior, a new life begins which requires a changing of the way things used to be. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews put it this way in our scripture passage for today:

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:11-14

Here we find the letter’s author losing no time telling the Jewish Christians about the state of their Christian spiritual maturity. In essence, he is telling them that they need to grow up and mature in their walk with Jesus, getting to the place where they could handle “solid food” which would train them “to distinguish good from evil”. As it was, they needed baby milk because, like an infant, they were “not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness”. Before they could advance to solids, they first had to drink the milk of “the elementary truths of God’s word”. In mathematics, addition and subtraction need learning before a person can multiply or divide. One comes before the other. So too is the pathway to growing up spiritually in life. We first need to learn the basics well to form a firm foundation to build upon.

I know I can relate to this and maybe you can too.

When I met my wife, “Amazing” Grace, back in 1992, she told me that if we were going to get married, we had to first put the Lord first in our relationship. It had been years since I had been in church regularly and I have to admit I was a little anxious at first because I was convicted in knowing I hadn’t exactly lived the life I should have lived before I met Grace and I wondered to myself often how the Lord felt about that.

And so I began to attend church with Grace every Sunday, nowhere near the spiritual maturity I have today as I write this to you. I started to drink the baby milk found in the elementary truths of the scriptures and when I had those basics down, the Lord started feeding me solids but only what I could handle as I grew spiritually in Him.

It’s amazing how far He has brought me over more than thirty years but I never lose sight of where I used to be because so many people I minister to are where I was once. They don’t need judgment or lofty theological thoughts and doctrinal statements about the Christian faith. No, they need the fundamentals first, the baby milk that starts spiritual growth and maturity.

Thankfully, the word of God is the only textbook needed as we learn through our Christian lives. It contains the easy, medium, and hard texts to feed a believer wherever they may be in their faith journey. It’s up to us to put it to use and study from it, trusting the Lord to deliver the proper level of understanding as it applies to where we are in our spiritual maturity.

For when we place our trust in Him, He will always bring us the right words at the right time to instruct us the right way. Thanks be to God for the gift of His word.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.