He was chapter number five is where we're gonna be this morning.
As we have already read, you all know, if you don't know me well,
then you can learn that I have three kids and I love being a dad almost all the time.
No, I love being a dad.
It's awesome.
And one of the rules that I tell my kids, they have one rule.
I said, kids, you got one rule.
Audrey, Zeke, Milana, one rule.
And the rule is this, no more growing up.
Stop.
And I say that because how many of you guys have felt this before with your kids or grandkids?
Man, they're growing up so fast.
And you're like, it's just going too fast because you love them so much and you want to soak in every moment you have with them.
Some moments you want to fly by.
But some moments you want to soak up and that's a big thing.
And when I was young, time seemed to crawl.
But as we go on, time seems to go faster and faster.
And so you want to capture it and enjoy it and it's a lot of fun.
You ever feel that way?
Of course, though, it's a horrible rule, no more growing up.
Because the other part of me is get out of my house.
Right?
It's time to grow up.
I want my kids to grow up.
You want your kids to grow up?
I want them.
I know you don't necessarily, but in the one sense, but in another sense, you don't want them to not grow physically.
You don't want them to not grow.
You want them to grow physically and relationally and spiritually and financially.
Stunning growth is not an admirable thing.
Nobody's like, hey, let's stop growing.
If you take any time to think about it, and a lot of times the alternative is not growing, is dying.
You know, and we don't want that.
There's a criticism that some make about Christianity.
In fact, I heard Orthodox Jew and political commentator Ben Shapiro say this recently.
He said that in comparing Judaism to Christianity, he made the claim that Christianity is just about faith and belief.
It's just that God's just concerned about what you believe.
He said that in Judaism, we care about what you do, but not so much what goes on in your head and your heart.
And I want you to know something very clearly today, and I like a lot of what he has to say.
Our Jewish brothers and sisters, you know, they're not our brothers and sisters in Christ, but I'm like Paul.
I don't know that I could say this.
This is a big statement by Paul.
I would be a curse if it were for my kinsredeemer in the flesh, right?
Like he's saying, I want Jewish people to be saved.
That's what Paul's heart was.
That's my heart, too.
That's true.
But I want you to know something very clearly today.
That is not an accurate portrayal of Christianity because God cares about what we do.
God cares about what we do.
God cares about your behavior.
He cares about your growth.
What shall we say then?
Should we continue and send that grace may abound?
God forbid.
May it never be.
That's not what God wants at all.
God is concerned with our growth.
Like a father who cares for their kid, God wants us to grow up.
He really does.
I want you to know that very clearly today.
Of course, it matters what we believe.
Salvation does come by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
And if you're here today and you never put your faith and trust in Christ, it matters
what you believe.
The issue isn't that God doesn't care about your behavior.
He just knows that your behavior can't make you right with God.
You're already wrong with God.
Jesus came and kept a law you could not keep and died to death that you and I deserve to
die so that we could have His righteousness put to our account.
God put our sin to His account and now we get to live as people who, believing, have
life in His name.
That's what He wants for us.
But that doesn't mean that we get saved and then that's it.
God wants us to grow.
And in growing, He wants our behavior to be changed.
God wants you to be spiritually mature.
That's His desire for every person who comes to faith in Christ.
So I want you to grow up.
God wants you to grow up.
In today's text, you're going to find that it's God's will that we grow into spiritual
maturity.
This is the third of three warning, actually multiple warning passages in the book of Hebrews.
We're on the third one that we've been to in the book so far.
We're walking, if you're here with us the first time.
It is my pattern, not all the time, but most of the time to go verse by verse through the
Bible.
That's what we're doing.
So we've just gotten ourselves to Hebrews chapter five, verse number 11.
And there's been three warning passages in Hebrews, three times that the author says,
hey, now pause, let me give you a warning.
There's danger here.
Pay attention.
The first one was back in chapter two and he said, he warned us about drifting.
Hey, it's important that you don't drift because the salvation that you received is so great
a salvation.
You don't want to drift from that.
The second warning back in chapter three was the danger of unbelief.
He says, hey, there was these people that could have gone into the promised land and
they didn't believe God.
They didn't listen to God.
They didn't believe God.
And so they did not enter his rest.
And so he says, you need to be diligent to enter into his rest.
And that's kind of a very similar thing to what we're going to talk about today.
Grow.
Get into God's rest.
Now, in this third warning in today's text, we're going to see the warning about the danger
of spiritual immaturity, the danger of spiritual immaturity.
Today we're going to see that God wants us to grow and to mature.
If we do not grow up into all he wants us to be, that's very dangerous for us and it's
dangerous for others.
And we're going to talk about that.
So to pursue spiritual maturity passionately and effectively, we must take these four steps
that we're going to see in the text.
Now, everything I'm going to say, he's talking here to believers, to people who know Christ
as their savior.
And the reason why I say that is because my steps that I'm going to talk about today
are assuming that you've already, you already know Christ as your savior.
If you don't know Christ as your savior, you can't grow because the Bible says that
you're not spiritually necessarily, that it's not, the issue is that you're spiritually
dead.
Ephesians 2 1 says, and you have to be quickened who are dead and trespasses and sins.
Now that doesn't mean you can't make any decisions.
It doesn't mean as some of our Calvinist friends say that you're totally unable of doing anything
good.
You are still responsible to respond to Christ's call.
That's part of it.
You believe that?
You still have the responsibility to choose.
But once you get saved, once you know Christ as your savior, once he comes in and lives
inside of you then, these are steps that you need to understand and take so that you can
grow spiritually.
It's not enough just to be born again.
Once you're born, you need to grow.
So what are these four steps?
Step number one, we must know our unattained goal.
Know our unattained goal.
Verse 11, of whom we have many things to say and hard to be uttered, seeing that ye are
dull of hearing.
Let's pause there.
The scripture continues here in verse 11, and if it's your first time here today, you
need to know that we've talked about every verse up until this point.
So when we get to verse number 11, he's talked to us about what's going on.
And one of the things he said, and this is the theme of the book, and I don't know, Steve,
if you can go back to this, I'm kind of throwing you for a loop, go back to our title slide
if you don't mind.
The title slide, here's the title of this long series that I'm doing.
The title of the series is Jesus is Greater.
Jesus is Greater.
You could sum up the book of Hebrews into this one word, better.
Better.
He's greater than Moses.
He's greater than the angels.
We have a better sacrifice.
And then what he's been talking about in the verses 1 through 10 is we have a better priesthood.
We have a better priest.
There's those Old Testament priests that are from the Aaronic line.
He talks about that.
Here, Christ's priesthood has been compared to the Old Testament priesthood in the previous
verses.
The end of that explanation is that we have a high priest that's not a priest after the
order of Aaron, but a priest that's after the order of a guy named Melchizedek.
And so Moses, who led God's people out of Egypt, had a brother.
God called his brother to be a priest.
And that priest would do things like, he basically, the priesthood, they would represent God.
They would represent the people to God.
They did that through sacrifices, through ceremonies.
That's what they did.
They went up to God on the people's behalf.
And a main part of how they represented people to God was through the sacrificial system.
They would sacrifice, a blood sacrifice, the sacrifice usually of a lamb.
And that pointed to the Lamb of God, Jesus, who would take away the Son of the world.
We'll talk much more about that.
But there was an Aaronic priesthood.
It came down from Aaron, him and his sons, and his sons after him.
They were the people who were the priests in Israel.
But in the last 10 verses, he brought up a different order of priests, a priest after
the order of Melchizedek.
Melchizedek was a figure referred to very few times in the Old Testament.
But in his first description, he's seen, and this was the key, and we're going to talk
more about it here in a couple of weeks, he is seen as both priest and king.
Most of the priests weren't royal.
They were just priests.
In fact, God wanted that to be divided, separation of church and state.
That's what he wanted.
But you had this one who's Melchizedek, and he was called the priest, the king of Salem,
the priest of the Most High God.
He was a royal priest.
And Christ said, in fact, look at your Bibles.
Let's get them open.
Mine's upside down.
Shouldn't be.
Hebrews 5.
Look at verse number six, and he says also in another place, thou art a priest.
How long?
Forever.
After the order of Melchizedek.
And then in verse 10, calling of God, a high priest, after the order of Melchizedek.
Talking about Jesus in a prophetic Psalm, hey, you're going to be a priest, but your
priesthood is not going to end.
It's going to be forever, and it's going to be after this order of this guy named Melchizedek.
The king priest.
And Jesus Christ is our royal priest.
He is king, and he's sitting on the right hand of God.
That's pretty cool.
Now, so when he says, of whom I have many things to say, it's kind of like he pauses
and looks at his audience or thinks about his audience as he writes, and says, oh, no.
But this is going to be hard.
In fact, that's what he says, right?
You see it in verse number 11.
Of whom we have many things to say and hard to be uttered, seeing your idol of hearing.
It is clear that the Holy Spirit has much more to say about Jesus Christ in Melchizedek,
and he mentions that speaking such things is hard to be uttered.
Why?
Why is it hard for him to say it?
What's the reason?
Well, from the text we're told to read, we're about to read.
We know that what he's going to say about Melchizedek is more deep and more complex and more impactful.
It's in those couple of verses that he refers to, though here he says about an ought.
Do you see that?
Let's look at verse of whom we have many things to say and hard to be uttered, seeing
your idol of hearing, verse 12, for when the time ye ought to be teachers, do you see that
ought?
You know what ought means?
Ought means like a duty.
This is where I expect you to be.
This is where you should be.
This is where you're supposed to be.
But he says you're not there yet.
There's a status and a ministry that they ought to have been at by this point that they have
not yet attained.
He's expressed two ways in this particular passage.
The first way is in verse 12.
He says for when for the time ye ought to be what?
Teachers.
You ought to be teachers.
What is he saying?
With as much time as they have been believers, he's saying you've been saved for a long time
by this point.
You ought to be teaching this stuff.
That's what he's saying.
This desire for every believer is that they become teachers.
This does not mean every person in the church is gifted to teach in the way that I'm doing
right now.
God does not call every believer to formally teach as a position of authority in the church.
But every believer is expected to teach in some area of life.
Do you get it?
My wife does not like being in public, speaking in public.
She likes speaking at home.
And I've even heard her preach, amen.
I'm not saying she never gave me an outline.
Everybody ought to teach.
Hebrews 10, 10, 25 tells me that as a believer, I'm not to forsake the discipline of assembling
with the assembly, the church.
And it gives me a reason why in verse 24.
It'll be up on the screen.
Check this out.
And let us consider one another to provoke, to love, and to good works, not forsaking
the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another,
encouraging one another.
And so much the more as you see the day, you know, the day of the Lord, as you see with
the day Christ is coming back, you got to do more, not less of that, as you see this
day approaching.
There ought to be a teaching and an encouraging that goes on between the rows in the parking
lot across the lunch and dinner tables after church and during the week, not just from
the pulpit, not just from the lectern in the Sunday school class.
There's a teaching that ought to go.
There's an encouraging.
There's a provoking.
There's a some as my former pastor used to say, thumbs in the back of the shoulder blades
and our brothers and sisters say, hey, go on, move forward.
You can do this.
Hey, stop doing that.
Start doing this.
Hey, didn't you see in the Bible, let me tell you what I learned this week from God's word.
That ought not to be weird in our assembly.
That ought to be what we do all the time.
You know what else we're supposed to teach?
Not just with each other.
We ought to teach in our homes.
Deuteronomy six forces this.
Hero Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.
And thou shalt love the Lord, that God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all
thy might.
And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thy mouth.
Sorry, they should be in that heart.
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.
And thou shalt talk to them as thou sitest in thy house.
And when thy walkest in the way, by the way, and when thou lieest down, and when thou risesst
up, every mundane, every day moment of life is the opportunity that we must seize to teach
our kids and our grandkids who God is and the way they ought to live.
Do you guys believe that?
That's what he's telling us here.
Now there is some controversy in the church, in the so-called church world about whether
or not women ought to teach in the church.
The passage in 1 Timothy, 1 Timothy 2, 11-15 says this, let the women learn in silence
with all subjection, but I suffer not a woman to teach, nor do you re-surp authority over
the man but to be in silence.
For Adam was first formed in Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived
was in the transgression.
Notwithstanding, here's what it says, verse 15, notwithstanding, she shall be saved in
childbearing if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
When it says here that she shall be saved in childbearing, Paul's not talking about
salvation from sin by the gospel.
That's not what he's talking about.
It is saying that mothers have an incredible teaching ministry already to the next generation
by the nature of their God-given role as mothers and aunts and grandmothers.
You see that after you see the most, here's how you see this.
Do moms have an influence?
Huge.
You know how you see it?
Anybody ever watched those gigantic muscle-bound linebackers on the sideline, and they finally
get the camera on them, and they wave, and what do they say?
Hi, mom.
Right?
What's my point?
They have a huge insolence because they have a lot of time there with their kids.
God expects women who are mothers to be their teachers in the homes.
You know who Oscar calls to be teachers?
Mark 16, 15 tells us really clearly.
And he said to them, go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
Who's responsible for teaching?
Everybody.
To know the Lord is to speak about him.
Acts 1-8, but ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you.
Be my witnesses in Judea, in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the uttermost part of the earth.
Matthew 28, 18 through 20.
Jesus came and spoke unto them, saying, all power is given to me in heaven and earth.
Go ye therefore and teach all nations.
Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things.
What's our command of you?
And lo, I'm with you, all way, even unto the end of the world.
Amen.
When we are commissioned to proclaim the gospel, to be God's witnesses, and to make disciples
of all nations by teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded, that includes
all of us.
That's not just what the pastors do, or the deacons, or the trustees, or the Sunday School
teacher.
That's not just what they do.
That's what all of us do.
We're all called to great commission teaching ministry.
We all, as he says here, we all ought to be teachers.
And notice that he frames this ought, this expression.
Go back to the verse.
Are you ready?
Verse 12, for when, for the time, he ought to be teachers, notice that expression.
He frames it for the time.
You can't teach until you've been taught.
Who wants educated teachers?
Rather than educated teachers.
Right.
You can't make somewhere you've never been when it comes to this consistent teaching ministry.
He says here, you can't teach until you've been taught.
You can't take someone where you've never been.
It takes time to learn and to grow.
And this leads to the second phrase that I wanted to point out in this ought.
Look down at verse number 14.
But strong meat belonging to them that are of, what's the next two words?
Full age, full age.
There's an ought in that too.
He's saying that for the amount of time that they have been taught, they should be mature.
They should have grown up.
Immature things have a hard time teaching.
Immature things do not reproduce.
Immature things needs to still develop.
Mature things reproduce.
The Holy Spirit is pointing to the unattain goal that should be the goal of every believer.
What is that goal?
Spiritual maturity in the believer that is marked by spiritual influence and influential
obedience to everybody around us.
That's what God desires.
Do you see it in the text?
Do you see what I'm talking about?
So let me ask you a question.
You ready?
Is spiritual maturity something that you're pressing towards?
Is it a goal that you desire for your own life?
Now be careful how you answer that question.
If I ask you if you're humble and you quickly answer yes, you may reveal something about
yourself.
It's not wrong to see that you're maturing.
It's wrong, it's a wrong attitude to feel as if you've arrived with no need of maturing
to do.
As long as we're breathing, we should be obeying and growing and influencing.
You believe that?
So the first step to growing spiritually is to accept the unattain goal.
So let me ask you, is spiritual growth, spiritual maturity on your radar?
Are you concerned with that as much as you are your career or your investments or your
short game?
Are you as concerned about that as you are as your popularity at school or your status
with your friends?
Where's this unattain goal?
Who has some room to grow?
Anybody?
Okay, I got you that far.
Good.
Here's step number two.
Step number two.
We must assess our own condition.
Where yeah?
It wasn't full age.
We can see that here in the text about these people, right?
He said, you ought to be teachers, you need to be full grown, but you're not there yet.
They weren't teachers even though they ought to be.
He names our condition in verse 13.
Look at it, verse 13.
For everyone that uses milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness for he is a,
what is it?
Babe, hey, you got it.
Who here loves babies?
I love babies.
Most everyone thinks babies are cute.
This is birthday season in our family.
It happens twice a year.
There's three of us out of the five in our family.
Three of us have birthdays within a couple of weeks of February and March.
Then my wife and daughter have, I know when it is, birthdays in July, right?
So we celebrate births.
Almost every time this time of year, Facebook memories come up or different things.
We start reminiscing and we look at all.
Remember when she used to pronounce her aas like this and all that stuff, right?
You remember that?
We go back and reminisce about when kids were babies.
They were so cute and fun.
Most of the time they were fun.
Babies being babies can be really cute.
If you're nursing or bottle feeding at six months, it's cute.
If you're still bottle feeding at 16, it's a tragedy.
And you laugh, but let me say it again.
If you're bottle feeding at 16, it's a tragedy.
Do you get the metaphor?
The issue with these Christians that he was writing to was that they were still at a place
where for the time they were still babies.
The Holy Spirit is referring not here to, not to physical development, but to spiritual
development.
They were immature spiritually.
That's the metaphor.
What was making, teaching them difficult?
What was creating their current condition?
Okay.
You guys get the big picture, right?
You've got, you've got babies.
Let's think this all the way through.
You've got babies, then you have toddlers, then you have kids, then you have adolescents,
and then you have teenagers.
And then you get them out of the house.
You have young adults, and then you have adults, and then you have, you guys notice this pattern,
right?
He's saying you should be over here, but you're still over here.
You're still over here.
What was creating them being here and not over there?
What does it say?
Verse 11 tells us, you see it?
I want to tell you some things that are going to get you to grow, but the problem is ye
are dull of hearing.
The word for dull is the word nothrose.
It means sluggish, lazy, or even stupid, slothful.
The issue wasn't that they had no capacity to learn.
The problem was one of character.
They were slow to hear and not very receptive.
They were not taking the teaching very seriously.
What was it that they were slow to hear?
Verse 13, for everyone that uses milk is skillful in the word of, what is it?
The word of righteousness.
According to the Holy Ghost and the writing of Hebrews, there's a connection between spiritual
maturity and the reception and the receiving and the obedience to the word of God.
Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
So don't let this miss you.
You're like, Ben, I already knew this.
I don't care if you know it.
What are you doing with it?
There's a connection between milk and meat.
It's talking about the word of God.
According to the Holy Ghost, what was causing their stunted growth?
What was creating their arrested development?
It was how much that they were taking in the word of God and receiving it.
It wasn't that they didn't know it.
It's that they weren't receiving it.
They weren't hearing.
There is not like they didn't have any capacity necessarily.
Everything was, they weren't doing anything with it.
They were slow to hear and apply God's word to their lives.
So if the second step is to assess your current condition and what's causing you or stunning
your spiritual growth is your capacity to hear and obey the word of God, where are you?
Not you.
You and you and you.
You get it?
Miles, where are you?
Miles.
You gotta deal with him.
No, I'm joking.
You ever feel like the preacher's preaching right to you?
Where are you?
I'm not talking to you.
I'm talking to you.
Do you get it?
If you're new into the Christian faith and you're growing, there's no shame in being a
baby.
There's no shame in that.
So he goes, well, we don't want babies.
We want babies.
We want a bunch of people who don't know Christ coming to know Christ and starting out their
relationship with God.
Let this be a spiritual nursery.
But we just don't want to have babies and not help them grow.
We don't want to have babies and leave them on the doorstep.
Bring them inside and help them grow.
You get it?
And four or five years from now, I just don't want them to be babies anymore.
You get it?
It doesn't necessarily mean that you're a baby in life.
Don't take this.
Don't be offended.
There are some very sophisticated, responsible people that don't even know Christ as a Savior.
We're committed at our church to making sure that if someone gets saved, we have a pathway
for them to grow.
We don't want to have spiritual babies through evangelism and then leave them at the hospital
to fend for themselves.
We want to help them grow.
If you've been in church for years and you know a lot, but you're not growing in the
responsiveness to God's word or an obedience to God's word, what you just learned is that
time doesn't equal spiritual maturity.
Let me say that again because it's really confused in a lot of churches, sometimes even
our church.
Just because you've been here a long time doesn't mean you're fully mature.
You could sit here every week and not grow.
So what's the solution?
Well, here's the third step.
This is just awesome.
Number three, we must consume the necessary nutrition.
What's the goal?
I've got to grow.
Where am I at?
Am I a baby?
Where am I at?
Well, how do I grow?
Now that I know where I'm at, where do I grow?
Well, you have to consume the necessary nutrition.
This is what he says, verse 12, 13, here we go, for the time you have to be teachers,
you have need that want to teach you again to be the first principles of the oracles
of God and are become such as having need of milk and not of strong meat.
For everyone that uses milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness, for he is a
babe.
So what was the solution?
The solution, if they were babies, was milk.
The solution was to teach you again.
The solution was to go back to the beginning with a right attitude.
The time they needed to be quick, this time though, they needed to be quick to hear.
They needed to be quick to respond.
The solution is the word of God.
That's the solution.
What's the difference between milk and strong meat?
What's the difference?
Well, one difference is the ability of the consumer to assimilate the nutrition.
Okay?
Babies can digest milk.
Have you noticed that?
It's very good for them.
They grow like crazy on milk.
The Bible tells us to even be like babies, to desire the sincere milk of the word that
you may grow there by.
That's what 1 Peter 2 2 says.
Babies know just a couple of things right from the beginning.
They know when they're uncomfortable.
They know when they're tired and they know when they're hungry.
That's what they know.
Babies have an intense desire for milk.
We ought to have a desire like that for the word of God.
We ought to.
Once you get older though, just eating milk isn't enough.
The older you get, the more nourishment you need.
Strong meat isn't absorbed or digested by babies in the same way.
So as you grow in Christ, you move on from the first principles of the oracles of God
to strong meat.
I can tell you that the Bible does not disappoint in this way.
There's plenty to consume.
If you want to eat, there's some food right here.
Are you with me?
And it's good.
It is so good.
Please don't help me bore people with the Bible.
It is not boring.
Another difference is the way that, okay, what's the difference between milk and strong meat?
One is the ability of the person to digest it, right?
Another one is the difference in the way it's consumed.
A baby desires the milk, but think about it, a baby has to be fed.
A baby has to be fed.
He must be fed by their parents.
They're either bottle fed or breast fed.
Either way, it takes a direct connection by someone else to get food to the baby.
People who are eating steak for dinner are usually not being fed by a fork with their
mother.
That is a lot funnier to me, apparently, than it is to you.
Woo-hoo, here comes the...
Kind of weird, right?
Here comes the steak, huh?
Right?
Hopefully, the last time you had a steak, you cut it up yourself and ate it off your
own plate, right?
As a parent, you give milk to the baby, then you give food to the baby and help them learn
how to eat themselves.
Even for a long time, you provide the food.
You're paying for the food.
Anybody paying for the food?
Who's paying more for the food right now?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
As they grow, though, you teach them to prepare their own meals, even though you finance it.
Eventually, they need to be able to finance and consume their own meals.
Get out of my house.
Get off the payroll.
Go out and live your life and just bring back the grand babies, right?
Reproduce and start the process all over again.
You're laughing, but that's basically what he's saying here.
Do you get it?
When it comes to the Word of God, we want people to end up as self-feeders.
A classic line that gets told to pastors all the time is, pastor, we're just not getting
fed.
And I hope that I'm never guilty of not trying to feed you or helping you to learn.
And sometimes I think that that says more about you than it does about me.
Because you can't expect to eat once a week and to be spiritually nourished.
What will help you grow more than anything is being taught how to be in God's Word every
day and not just to hear it, but to consume and consume it, but to learn it and to obey
it and then train somebody else to do the same thing.
You know, there's a kind of learning that you can only get from teaching.
There's a kind of learning sometimes that you can only get when you're responsible now.
Anybody learned something as a parent you didn't learn as a kid?
Yeah.
So God wants us to get the food into us.
So what's your relationship to the Word of God?
Are you only getting it at church?
Are you only getting it in your Sunday school class?
Are you only getting it when someone else has digested it and is feeding it to you?
When you hear it this way, are you responding to it?
Are you growing into a self-feeder?
Are you taking in the Word of God so that you can grow in it on a daily basis?
And then are you feeding somebody else?
Are you training them in the Word of Righteousness?
You may be able to see where you are in your spiritual maturity based on your relationship
to the Word of God.
Do you get it?
Do you want to grow?
Do you want to be spiritually mature?
Well, you have to know the unattain goal.
The unattain goal is I want to be a reproducer.
I want to be a trainer.
I want to be a teacher.
Once you get that decided, then you have to assess where you're at.
Am I a baby?
Am I an adolescent?
Am I a young man?
Am I a reproducer?
Am I a grandparent spiritually?
I can't wait.
That's an awesome place to be.
And then number three, once you figure out where you are, then you have to consume the
proper nutrition.
Do you need milk?
Do you need bread?
Do you need meat?
It's all right here.
That leads us to step number four.
Are you ready?
Step number four.
We must exercise the right discernment.
There's a really tough word in there.
Exercise.
Look at verse 14.
But strong meat, strong meat, belongeth to them that are of full age so that they will
eat it and get fat and slow and happy.
Is that what it says?
What's the point of the nutrition?
So even those who by a reason of use have their senses, exercises discern both good
and evil.
So let's take verse 14 phrase by phrase.
You ready?
It's going to go quick.
We've already made a connection between food, nutrition and the word of God.
Okay.
Strong meat belongeth to them that are full age.
Mature people need adult meals.
You need the proper nutrition.
The word of God is the milk, bread and meat that gets us the nutrition we need to grow.
Oh, and by the way, anybody in here a physical adult?
Anybody in here?
Physical adult.
Adults.
Some of you are not adults.
Okay.
Anybody here drink milk this week?
Yeah.
It's not that you reject milk.
You just don't eat.
It's like that's not the only thing you ate last week, right?
You ate some milk and some bread and some meat, a full nutrition.
Okay.
That's a whole other part.
Okay.
Mature people need adult meals.
They need a balanced breakfast.
The word of God is milk, bread and meat that gets us the nutrition we need to grow.
And he says, then he says, even those, these are those mature believers.
Why?
Why do they need strong meat?
Why does it belong to mature believers?
Why?
Because by a reason of use, use of what?
Use of the strong meat, use of the nutrition that they have taken in, have their senses
exercised to discern both good and evil.
The whole point of nutrition is to use the energy that it gives to go out and do something.
To go out and do something.
The word of God gives us the spiritual life and vitality to live for Christ.
Are you struggling with temptation?
Are you struggling at being what God wants you to be?
I'm not saying it's every time, but at least some of the time, it may be because you're
not, you don't have any food.
You're emaciated.
You need the word of God.
The word of God is what gives us spiritual life and vitality to live for Christ.
The word of God then also, it says here, have their senses exercised to discern both good
and evil.
The word of God gives us discernment.
It tells us how to live.
It shows us what to do.
If you take it in and do not do anything with it, you get spiritually fat and lazy.
There's a lot of people in a lot of churches who would kill it on jeopardy if the category
came up and it had anything to do with the Bible, but they're babies.
Do you get it?
What's the point of the nutrition to go live it out, to go do something with it?
I'm not asking you how much you know.
I'm asking you what are you doing?
What would the health of someone be who takes in a lot of calories and never uses those
calories?
They do not get up.
They do not walk.
They don't exercise their senses.
They never reproduce.
That's the problem in so many churches.
It can be a problem in our church, though I don't think that it characterizes everybody
in our church.
For some, the problem is that they never take in God's word.
They don't attend enough to get much from the preacher or the teacher.
They don't have much nutrition in the first place, so they don't grow.
For others, the problem is that you can tell, they can tell you the finer points of theology.
They can tell you every kind of position that you can take on the tribulation.
They can describe you the hypostatic union.
They can tell you the difference between being infrelapsarian and superlapsarian.
They win every sword drill.
They know what a sword drill is, but there is hidden sin in their lives.
They aren't godly in their daily walk.
They're not kind to their wife.
They're not kind to their kids.
They haven't told somebody about Jesus in years.
They don't serve.
They don't give.
They don't share.
They don't reproduce.
And the danger in that is they think that because they know a lot that they're spiritually
mature.
And what John the Revelator got from Jesus, they told one of the churches there in Revelation
is you think you're great, but you don't even understand that you're wretched and poor and
blind and naked.
The emperor has no clothes.
Do you get it?
If you're feeling guilty about this, I'm not thinking of one person in here.
I'm not.
I'm not except for me.
But there's a problem when our knowledge far outpaces our obedience.
Do you get it?
Their knowledge outpaces their obedience.
James spoke about this when he said this, be doers of the word and not hearers only.
What is it?
Deceiving your own selves.
For if any man be a hero of the word and not a doer, he's like a man beholding his
natural face in the glass.
For he beholds himself and goeth his way and straightway forgeteth what manner of man he
was.
But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty and continueeth therein, he being
not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.
That's a good verse, isn't it?
Jesus said something about it too.
He told the story of a wise man and a foolish man.
You know the song, some of you.
There's Matthew 7, 24, therefore whosoever heareth he sayings of mine and doeth them.
I will like him into a wise man which builds his house on a rock.
Who's the man with the rock?
He's the one that hears the word of God and does something with it.
And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house
and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock.
And everyone that hears he sayings of mine and doeth them not shall be like him into
a foolish man which built his house upon the sand and the rain descended and the floods
came and the winds blew and beat upon that house and it fell.
This is a very scary phrase.
This is why what Hebrews says is a warning.
Are you ready?
The great was the fall of it.
Did you know the Bible is amazing?
It is amazing at giving us discernment and teaching us how to do every kind of good work.
That's exactly what Paul said to Timothy in this critical passage on the word of God.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God and it's profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, what to know, what to reject, for correction, for instruction and righteousness,
what to do.
That the man of God may be perfect.
Do you know what that word perfect means?
Mature.
That the man of God may be mature, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
If the word of God equips you for every good work, then let's get equipped.
Let's get equipped.
Let's not just put on our pads and our cleats and our shoulder pads and helmets and then
show them off at church, go back home and take them off and live however we want.
Let's put all those things on and let's go out and win the game with the Lord's help.
You're not dismissed, you're set.
How do we grow in spiritual maturity?
How do you do it?
Do you want to grow?
You have to know the unantamed goal.
We rarely end up doing anything that we don't set out to do.
There's got to be a pointed decision.
What's the unantamed goal?
You ought to be teachers.
You ought to be influencers.
You ought to be reproducers.
What's your current condition?
Are you a babe?
Are you a young man?
Are you full age?
Are you a grandparent?
What's your spiritual condition?
What's your, you have to consume the right nutrition, milk, bread, meat.
What's your relationship like with the word of God?
Is it a weekly thing?
Is it a monthly thing?
Or do you say give us this day our daily bread?
And then we gotta, once we actually get it in our heads and in our hearts, is it affecting
your hands and your feet?
Are you exercising the right discernment, able to know what's right and what's wrong?
I want to end today's message with a verse from next week's text in Hebrews 6-1 where
he says, therefore, leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto
perfection.
The word perfection here is a word for maturity.
It's a word for completion.
It's the same phraseology that you'll find in the preamble to constitution when it speaks
about becoming a more perfect union.
The idea is moving on into completeness.
It speaks of progress.
It's saying, here's what Hebrews is saying.
Here's what the Holy Spirit is saying.
Let's grow up.
Don't stay a baby.
Don't stay a teenager.
Don't stay an ineffective, lazy adult.
Let's grow.
Let's move out on into his rest and be on mission for Christ.
So my question to you is, first of all, are you saved?
Have you gone from spiritual death to spiritual life?
Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye must be born again.
If a man is not born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
He that believeth not is condemned already because he is not believed in the name of
the only Son of God.
So if you're not saved, get saved.
If you are saved, time doesn't mean that you're mature.
Are you mature?
Are you maturing?
Are you growing?
Are you teaching?
What's your spiritual condition?
What's your relationship to the Word of God?
And are you living it out?
Let's go on to perfection.
Let's grow up.
Would you bow your heads and close your eyes with me?