Quote from Forum Archives on February 3, 2009, 11:36 am

Posted by: bhfbc <bhfbc@...>

 

MATURITY #1/7

 

 

MILK OR MEAT

February 1, 2009

 

 

TEXT:  Hebrews 5:11-6:3

 

I have noticed that whenever I stand before the congregation or a small group and announce that I have a confession to make; people sit up and take notice.  So I begin today by telling you that I have a confession to make.  Even though I know that Christians are instructed to grow and to become mature, as is indicated in this selection of Scripture from Hebrews, I have not always been certain what that means.  What is meant by maturity here?  What is the solid food – the meat – that the author is writing to his recipients about?  How do we identify Christian maturity, and how do we attain it? Is it even a goal that is attainable?  So that is my confession: I have not always paid attention to what the Bible means when Christians are instructed to become mature believers.

 

In order to correct that and better understand the meanings and applications of Christian maturity, I set out to study more about it.  Thanks especially to some Bible study notes I have from one of Lois’s former pastors, and the pastor who led our wedding ceremony, Buddy Schofield, I have been directed to some verses that help me understand more completely what it means to mature in the Christian faith.  There are guidelines and signs that help us on our pilgrim’s path as growing Christians.  Now, I cannot stand here and tell you that I have all knowledge and have been made perfect in all of this.  We know that is not true.  I make the same claim as the Apostle Paul in Philippians 3:12, “Not that I have already attained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”  “Pressing on” is one of those guideposts to maturity, by the way.  As a result of my studies on this important topic, I am developing a sermon series on maturity that I will be sharing over the next few Sundays.

 

I begin the series with this concern that the Hebrews author expressed to his readers: those who should have been on “solid food,” or “meat” as other versions translate, are still on milk.  In other words, the Christian audience to whom the letter was written was not at the level of maturity that they should have been.  Again, though, what are we Christians today to make of this?  What is the “teaching about righteousness” to which he refers?  What is the milk, and what is the meat?  That is what we are going to investigate over the next few Sundays.

 

I have read this portion of Hebrews from the New International Version, but I also found a provocative and an enlightening version from The Message, a version of the Bible in contemporary language.  “I have a lot more to say about this, but it is hard to get it across to you since you’ve picked up this bad habit of not listening.  By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics on God again, starting from square one—baby’s milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago!  Milk is for beginners, inexperienced in God’s ways; solid food is for the mature, who have some practice in telling right from wrong.  So come on, let’s leave the preschool fingerpainting exercises on Christ and get on with the grand work of art.  Grow up in Christ.  The basic foundational truths are in place: turning your back on “salvation by self-help” and turning in trust toward God; baptismal instructions; laying on of hands; resurrection of the dead; eternal judgment.  God helping us, we’ll stay true to all that.  But there’s so much more.  Let’s get on with it!” (Hebrews 5:11-6:3)

 

One element of Christian maturity is that we do not have to keep laying the same foundation over and over again.  Now the church to which Hebrews was written was probably similar to churches today in that it was made up of believers at different stages of maturity.  In fact, there were probably people attending who were not yet believers.  So the topics on this short list in 6:1-2 did need to be taught over and over.  And they still do.  What concerns the author, though, is that there should have been mature Christians in the church who could do the teaching.  Instead, they still needed someone to “teach… the elementary truths of God’s word all over again.”

 

The elementary truths that were included in the letter are just that: elementary truths.  “Repentance of acts that lead to death, and of faith in God” is the basic element of salvation.  Admit that I am a sinner, believe that Jesus Christ paid the penalty for my sins, and confess that Jesus is my Savior and my Lord.  The ABCs of salvation, remember?  “Instruction about baptisms…”  We are baptized as our act of obedience to God and as part of our public witness that we have accepted Jesus as Savior.  “The laying on of hands…” is an act of accepting a believer into the fellowship of brothers and sisters in Christ.  We frequently make reference to the right hand of fellowship today.  “The resurrection of the dead…” was a basic part of Christian teaching because many philosophies and even some Jewish theologies rejected the doctrine of bodily resurrection.  The resurrection of the dead is a promise from Jesus, so it is rightly an orthodox teaching of the Christian Church.  “Eternal judgment” is another doctrine that clashed with some of the popular philosophies of their day.  Every person either lives eternally with God, or they don’t.  Our condition after death is everlasting and unchanging.  These are teachings that make up the milk to which the Hebrews writer referred.  These are the elementary, but foundational, teachings that are to be mastered as believers grow spiritually.  Once they are mastered, though, believers are to move on to the meat – the solid food.  That is what Christian maturity means.

 

Consider the woman who has her precious baby with her and cuddles him and keeps him safe and comfortable.  When the baby begins to cry from hunger, she takes out the bottle and prepares the formula and gives the baby milk.  Anyone witnessing that thinks nothing of it.  It is normal.  Now, however, it is her husband who she cuddles and keeps safe and comfortable.  And when he begins to make that pitiful crying from hunger pains, she takes out the bottle and gives him milk.  Now all the wives here this morning will probably say that’s what we do!  Well, maybe not literally, but I know what you mean.  Nevertheless, if the husband took a literal baby bottle of milk, people would stare with wide-eyed amazement.  “What’s the matter with him?  What’s the matter with her?”  It’s not normal.  Everyone knows that the grown man – and the grown woman, as far as that goes – is supposed to be on solid food.  That’s the image that the author is using here.  Christian maturity means that we are growing spiritually, cognitively, and emotionally.  I will be covering these more specifically in the coming weeks, but let us look at the one area of Christian maturity that is mentioned in these verses.  “But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”  As Eugene Peterson put it in The Message, “Milk is for beginners, inexperienced in God’s ways; solid food is for the mature, who have some practice in telling right from wrong.”  Distinguishing good from evil, or telling right from wrong, is a mark of Christian maturity.

 

Think about children and adults once again.  Children do not know the difference between right and wrong.  They must be told.  They must be taught.  Most of the time, they are taught that there are consequences for wrong behavior, and caring parents try to teach those consequences to their children in a way that gets the lesson across but leaves the child undamaged.  We tell our children to stay out of the street because they could be hit by a car.  We don’t throw them in front of a car so that they experience that, but we might give them a time out or - dare I say it? – a swat on the rear if they run out into the street.  We want them to get the lesson without damage.  We want them to mature as they learn these lessons.

 

Children must be taught these lessons over and over as they grow.  Finally, a conscience awakens in them.  They develop an awareness about things that are right and things that are wrong.  This awareness is sharpened by practice and continued education and, sometimes, by a little luck.  How many of us look back to our childhood and recall some event where we wonder how we survived!  I remember one of the guys in one of my divisions on the submarine who, as a child, was enthralled with Superman.  These were in the George Reeves black-and-white television Superman episodes.  Superman could fly, and he was convinced that he could fly like Superman, too.  So one day, with a sheet cape tied around his neck, he actually climbed the windmill on the farm and leaped off.  Well, he flew – straight down.  Landed on the pump house or whatever building was next to the windmill and somehow walked away unscathed.  But he matured.  He was not quite as enthralled with Superman as he was before.  Yep, sometimes we wonder how we survived childhood.

 

A sad truth is that some folks act like they don’t want to survive adulthood.  As the child grows, maturity is displayed as the young man or woman reject on their own some suggested evil.  That is an outward sign of their inward maturity.  This is normal, and any society has a right to expect it.  When grown people must be told by authority what is right and what is wrong, something is lacking in their development.  They are not mature.  They are still on milk instead of meat.  Even Jesus asked some around him, “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57)  Christian maturity is not blind obedience to some charismatic human authority figure; that is how cults develop.  It is, instead, the growth of men and women from Christian infancy into a basic obedience “who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”

 

Our society has been growing into immaturity instead of maturity these days.  Immorality is celebrated while morality is treated as an enemy to human growth and fulfillment.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Outright evil is being legalized and institutionalized into our culture.  In fact, the very day I was preparing this message, I received an article by Brent Bozell.  He writes, “McKay Hatch is a 15-year-old boy from South Pasadena, Calif., who people clearly hate.  He's received over 60,000 negative e-mails, most of them vicious, some including death threats that have spawned police and FBI investigations.  What has this boy done that's caused such anger?  Was he caught dealing drugs?  Did he rage?  Did he kill?  No.  He started a No Cussing Club.  And for that he is vilified.  Hatch says some people are going out of their way to curse him at school, on the Internet and on the phone.  They send him pornographic magazine subscriptions.”  And so the article goes.  Mr. Bozell relates to readers that as young Hatch is vilified, Britney Spears is idolized.  As she remakes her career, Spears’ latest album is filled with pornographic lyrics and imagery.  Immorality is celebrated; morality is reviled.  Mr. Bozell goes on to write, “If the purveyors of profanity think that cussing is so harmless, why are some of them so unbelievably hostile to anyone suggesting a voluntary ban on the bleeps?” (Brent Bozell III, “Why Do We Love Profanity?”

http://www.gopusa.com:80/commentary/bbozell/2009/bb_01301.shtml)  By the way, the parents of McKay Hatch are the authors of Raising a G-Rated Family in an X-Rated World.

 

Now Hebrews was written to Christians and not everyone out there who is assaulting McKay Hatch or idolizing Britney Spears is a Christian, so, obviously, they are not going to know anything about Christian maturity.  Here is the sad truth, though.  Just as in the day that this letter was written, there are folks who claim Christianity as their faith but fail to distinguish between good and evil.  We have pastors and laity in churches, some of them even Baptist, who support abortion and infanticide; who support unmarried partners living together; who support homosexual unions and marriages; who support public profanity; who buy the latest Britney Spears music and videos – or whoever happens to be the current pop queen or king; who treat non-Christian religions as valid for salvation; who believe, teach, and preach that there is no hell and no punishment in death.  Who deny the deity, death, and resurrection of Christ.  There are even some who believe that Jesus never lived but that the men who made up the stories about him created a good religion to follow.  If those who claim the name of Christ are too immature to distinguish good from evil, what chance does a secular world have?

 

So let’s bring the Bible lesson back to where it belongs, which is inside the walls of our own church.  Where are we on the path of maturity?  Is this letter to the Hebrews being written to us?  Are we drinking milk or eating meat?  Most of our answers are individual.  And, as we all know, none of us are going to attain complete maturity in our lifetime.  Nevertheless, we should be maturing as Christian individuals, and we should be a maturing as a Christian fellowship.  The two go unavoidably hand in hand.  God’s world certainly deserves more than it is getting from secular culture, and it deserves more than it is getting from some church cultures.  Have we attained the maturity to teach the elementary truths about Christ, or do we still need to be taught?  Milk or meat?  “Let’s get on with it!”

 

 

 

Rev. Charles A. Layne

First Baptist Church

PO Box 515

179 W. Broadway

Bunker Hill, IN 46914

765-689-7987

bhfbc@bhfirstbaptist.com

www.bhfirstbaptist.com

 

 

 

 

 

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