Spiritual Immaturity

We have a great deal to say about this, and it is difficult to explain, since you have become too lazy to understand. Although by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the basic principles of God’s revelation again. You need milk, not solid food. Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness, because he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature—for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Imagine you walk into a nice restaurant for a lovely dinner with your spouse, and all you see is this:

Everyone in the restaurant is drinking milk from a baby bottle. Its the only thing that the waiters are bringing to the tables. Would you think, “This seems like a great place to eat. We should come here more often!”?

Or would you look around and say, “What is wrong with all of these people? Why aren’t they eating steak, or potatoes, or chicken, or pasta?”

This picture is what I believe represents a lot of churches in America today. It is what the author of Hebrews saw in the Jews that he was writing to. However, when people walk into churches like this, where there is very little, if any, substance to what is being taught and learned, they walk right in and say, “This looks like a great place to be fed!”

But the author of Hebrews is calling us to move past just drinking spiritual milk, and to grow in our understanding and knowledge of God.

This sermon is not the easiest topic to preach on. I told people this last week that this sermon would have some brutal honesty in it. Some of the quotes from pastors and theologians may have you thinking, “Man, Pastor Ryan woke up and chose violence this week in his preaching.”

My goal as your pastor is not to discourage you, but to point you to the truth and encourage you to follow after the Lord with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And so we need to start by asking ourselves a question today…

Ask yourself: Am I being honest with myself concerning my spiritual maturity?

Some of us might be pretty up front with ourselves about where we are in our walk with Christ. However, some of us may be fooling ourselves about our spiritual maturity. I hope that today will give all of us a chance to know where we are at in our journey with the Lord to know that we can never know too much and seek the God too much as walk through this life.

Big Idea: We should be growing in our faith.

Hebrews 5:11

We have a great deal to say about this, and it is difficult to explain, since you have become too lazy to understand.

The author of Hebrews pauses for a moment in his teaching about Christ being our high priest in order to point out a harsh reality in his readers. He states that there is a great deal more for him to explain about the relationship between Christ’s priesthood and Melchizedek. However, he tells his readers that they have become too lazy to understand what this teaching means, making the author’s job of explanation even more difficult.

The writer is not holding back here as he tries to instruct his readers. The phrase that we have in our translation today as, “too lazy to understand,” can be translated a few different ways. Other translations say “dull of hearing,” “sluggish in hearing,” or “ignorant.” None of these other translations really makes it sound any better. He is telling them that they have been lacking effort in their faith.

Our journey with Christ takes effort.

Philippians 2:12

Therefore, my dear friends…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

This does not mean that we have to do all these works to gain our salvation. Instead, Paul is telling his readers that they are to seek the Lord through prayer and reading Scripture, they are to continue to gain knowledge of doctrines, serve others when it is uncomfortable, and be willing to take criticism when standing for the truth.

If we are not continually being shaped by what God’s Word says, we will find ourselves being shaped by the world and its deception.

One of the first symptoms of spiritual regression, or backsliding, is a dullness toward the Bible. Sunday School class is dull, the preaching is dull, anything spiritual is dull. The problem is usually not with the Sunday School teacher or the pastor, but with the believer himself.

Warren Weirsbe

I have found this to be true for myself with many things, especially with working out. When I force myself into the habit of working out regularly, I feel better about myself, I have more energy, and it is a lot easier to get up and work out again the next day. But when I get out of that habit, it gets harder and harder for me to want to get up and work out. My mind starts to think of all the sore muscles that I had to deal with when I was working out regularly. I tell myself that my warm bed will be a better place for me than the cold workout room, lifting freezing, metal dumbbells, and lying on an icy cement floor to do pushups and situps.

But the other thing that I can tell you is that when I stop working out for a while, my strength starts to leave. I have to work myself back up to the weights I could lift when I was working out regularly. Our Christian walk is the same.

If you aren’t moving forward, you’re moving backward.

If we are not regularly reading our Bibles or praying, we are going to feel stagnant in our walk with the Lord.

Paul tells the young pastor Timothy the same thing in his final letter to him, when the apostle implores Timothy to preach the Word at all times, in season and out of season. Paul then tells this young pastor why he must stick to preaching the Word and nothing else.

2 Timothy 4:3-4

For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear. They will turn away from hearing the truth and will turn aside to myths.

This is how we get people falling for the deception of the prosperity gospel. It sounds really nice when you hear a message like:

“It is not God’s will for us to suffer.”

“Believers should be the most prosperous, wealthy, and healthy people there are!”

“Wealth is a sign of God’s blessing!” - Bill Gates? Elon Musk?

And yet, in Mark chapter 12, Jesus does not praise all the wealthy people who are putting large amounts of money into the temple treasury. He praises the poor widow who put in two copper coins because that was all she had.

Jesus told his disciples during his last supper with them:

John 16:33

“I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the world.”

Bill Johnson of Bethel Church in Redding, CA has said that, “I refuse to have a theology of suffering…(where) we tolerate sickness because God uses it to build character in us.” (https://healingrooms.info/is-it-always-gods-will-to-heal-someone) The only suffering Bill Johnson’s theology allows for is persecution for our faith. I guess he skipped over the Book of Job.

The desire for itching ears to hear what they want to hear and ignoring the Word of God is also why liberal, progressive ideas have become so popular in the church over the last couple of decades. As our culture becomes more and more progressive, many churches have done the same, integrating worldly ideas like advocating for abortion, advocating for Critical Race Theory, ignoring what the Bible calls sin because “Love is Love”, and encouraging minors to permanently damage their bodies through surgery and hormone therapies because they are confused about their identity, and while all of this is done by claiming to be “fixing” what they think traditional Christian values have corrupted to keep in power, this is really just an attempt to stay relevant to the culture.

Galatians 1:10

For am I now trying to persuade people, or God? Or am I striving to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

Laziness in our walk with Christ, not studying the Scriptures, and being slack in our prayer life will lead us to accepting anything that our itching ears want to hear. We must be diligent to seek God through prayer and the Word.

Hebrews 5:12

Although by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the basic principles of God’s revelation again. You need milk, not solid food.

The author then tells his readers that they should be teaching the things that he is explaining to them by this time, but their laziness in the faith makes them equivalent to babies who cannot yet eat solid foods. Their understanding was like that of an infant who was still only drinking milk.

I, personally, consider this an indictment of the American church as a whole still today. Like the church today, the Hebrews did not understand basic truths of Scripture. They could not handle tougher theological “steak and potatoes”.

The people in the American church as a whole do not read their Bibles. If they did, there would be a lot fewer people following blatant false teachers. Charles Spurgeon once told his own congregation:

"There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers."

Charles Spurgeon

We can actually see just how bad it is for the American church when it comes to orthodox, Christian doctrines of the faith that have been taught since the apostles were writing the New Testament.

I have shared before that Ligonier Ministries, started by RC Sproul, puts out a survey every other year called The State of Theology, where they ask Christian and non-Christian Americans to respond to a series of statements with whether they strongly agree, somewhat agree, are undecided, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the statement. While there are some responses that are somewhat concerning when it comes to what American Christians believe, here are the responses with the largest disparities.

To clarify, I am only sharing the responses of those who claim to attend church services at least once a week and are Evangelical Christians. To fit this category, the participants had to agree with all 4 of these statements:

The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.

It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.

Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.

Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.

Now, let’s look at the concerning responses to some of the statements in the survey.

Statement 3: God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

54% either agreed or were not sure.

12% only somewhat disagreed.

34% strongly disagreed

Jesus says in John 14:6 “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” You worship the true God, through the true person of Jesus Christ, his Son, or you aren’t worshiping the true God.

Statement 7: Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.

29% either agreed or were not sure.

66% strongly disagreed

Almost 3 out of 10 Evangelical Christians who attend church weekly aren’t sure that Jesus was God. John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Statement 9: The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being.

55% either agreed or were not sure.

37% strongly disagreed.

Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit as a “He.” John 15:26 “When the Counselor comes, the one I will send to you from the Father —the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father—he will testify about me.”

Statement 11: The Holy Spirit can tell me to do something which is forbidden in the Bible.

24% either agreed or were not sure.

71% strongly disagreed.

1 Corinthians 14:33 “...God is not a God of disorder but of peace.” 1 in 4 Christians say the HS can tell me to do something sinful. Reason people leave their spouse is because God told me to divorce my wife.

Statement 12: Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.

59% either agreed or were not sure.

25% strongly disagreed.

Romans 3:10-12 “...as it is written:

There is no one righteous, not even one.There is no one who understands;there is no one who seeks God.All have turned away;all alike have become worthless.There is no one who does what is good,not even one.”

Statement 13: Even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation.

47% either disagreed or were not sure.

38% strongly agreed.

The punishment for Adam and Eve in the garden for eating an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was death. According to God, the simple disobedience of a rule is a capital offense.

Statement 31: Religious belief is not about objective truth.

47% either agreed or were not sure.

39% strongly disagree.

Link to all results: (Put in Notes.)

This is what happens when we have churches full of people still trying to dring milk, not willing to eat solid foods that will sustain them for longer periods and help them grow stronger in the faith. This is why I take time to break down books of the Bible, preaching on a few verses at a time, so that we can understand the depth of Scripture, taking in doctrines that can seem dense and difficult to “chew on” in bite-size portions.

Hebrews 5:13

Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness, because he is an infant.

Those who only take in Spiritual milk, or very basic teachings about God, are not used to the rich teaching of righteousness and struggle to understand more in-depth aspects of who God is.

I believe the recommendation for starting to introduce solid foods to an infant is about 6 months. Now, though I say solid foods, those foods are usually still blended into a puree so that they are practically in liquid form for the child to still try and eat, since they likey do not have enough teeth to chew the food. Even those pureed solid foods can still be hard for an infant to swallow or digest because their system is so used to milk.

If your discussions about God are just fluffy, softball questions that your 5-year-old can answer in Sunday school class, and those conversations do not get you to think deeply about who God is, you are still only taking in Spiritual milk.

Milk is sweet and comforting. Whole milk that you buy in the grocery store has the same amount of grams of sugar per serving as it does protein. That’s because God created it for baby cows to help them grow so that they can eventually stop drinking milk and start eating grass.

Modern American culture is obsessed with “sweet.” On Valentine’s Day you buy candy and chocolates for your loved one. On Halloween your kids come home with massive bags of candy that they got from the neighbors. And then as good parents, we teach them about income taxes by taking 25% of their candy for ourselves.

At Thanksgiving, yes there is turkey, but there is also sweet potatoes with either brown sugar or marshmallows on top of it, cranberry sauce that needs a ton of sugar for it to be edible, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pecan pie, and don’t forget the sweetened whipping cream or ice cream to go with the desserts.

And then there is Christmas. Candy canes on the tree. Sugar cookies for decorating with icing. Shortbread cookies that are just flour, butter, and sugar. Gingerbread houses in which you eat half of the candies before you finish decorating. And then one of the greatest inventions by humanity that can be consumed — egg nog. If that stuff were available year-round, I would weigh about 300 lbs. We get addicted to the sweet.

Let’s really depress you now. A single Oreo cookie has about 55 calories. A medium, hard-boiled egg has about 60 calories. How many of us can take down an entire row of Oreos from the package in one sitting? That is about as many calories as a dozen hard-boiled eggs. When was the last time you tried to eat 12 hard-boiled eggs in a week, let alone in one sitting?

After eating all of those Oreos, you will be hungry again about an hour later. The sugars in Oreos, the sugars in milk, they provide a lot of calories, but those calories are empty of any nutritional value. They will not sustain you.

You eat 2-3 hard-boiled eggs, and you won’t be hungry for a couple of hours. Why, because they are dense with protein, fats, Vitamin A, D, E, K, and B vitamins, including B12, B2, B6, B9, and B5. They contain the minerals iron, phosphorus, zinc, calcium, selenium, iodine, potassium, and magnesium.

Reading and sharing the verse of the day from the Bible App can be beneficial to getting conversations started and for general encouragement. I don’t have a problem with people doing that on social media. But do you know why that verse says what it does? Do you know the full context in which that verse is found in Scripture? Or did you only post it because it sounded encouraging?

Here is a verse of the day calendar that I have seen floating around…

That may sound encouraging, but it is actually quoting Satan as he is tempting Jesus!

Please, hear me! Sharing the verse of the day is not sinful, obviously. But if that is the only way you are interacting with the Word of God, you are only taking in your Spiritual milk and Oreos. You aren’t actually building your faith.

As Jews, the Hebrew readers of this letter had been raised on the OT Scriptures that pointed to Christ as the Messiah. But they were unable to understand or see how Jesus was the fulfillment of everything the OT said. They were still spiritual infants.

We cannot stay as infants and expect to be effective for Christ.

All of us have a spiritual infancy phase. We have to start somewhere. But we cannot be content to stay there if we want to make an impact in this world for the kingdom of God.

Hebrews 5:14

But solid food is for the mature—for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.

Solid food is for those whose systems have been trained in processing and digesting things of greater substance than milk. Training is necessary. More complex doctrines can only be fully understood when our minds and hearts have worked through understanding lesser doctrines first.

When we were introducing our kids to solid foods, we started with mashed-up avocados. We would cook up things like brown rice and blend some of that with carrots or applesauce. We would even mix in a little bit of milk with it to help give it a familiar sweetness. We couldn’t just give them steak and think that their system was going to handle it well.

Let's look at this from another angle. I cannot just walk into the gym after not lifting weights in a long time and think I am going to put up multiple reps of 225 lbs on the bench press like they do at the NFL Combine. I need to train my muscles to handle that amount of weight by starting with lighter weights and building my way up as my muscles get stronger.

We must do the same thing in our walk with Christ. We should not submit our lives to Christ, say “I’m a Christian”, and then do nothing else about it. As we learn more about who God is, we should start to investigate deeper into the doctrines of Scripture.

Romans 12:2

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

This passage infers that the opposite of having your mind renewed is conforming the world around us.

We do not have our minds renewed once, but we are to be continually renewing our minds. When I became a pastor, I did not automatically have a mind so renewed that I completely understood what all of Philippians said so that I could preach through that book. I am still trying to figure out what the book of Hebrews is saying in some of our upcoming passages!

If I am going to teach this congregation the truths of Scripture, I have to keep studying and digging into the Bible, reading scholars and preachers who are better read and studied than I am, especially when the topics are harder to understand.

If this church is going to be full of Bereans who will check the Scriptures to make sure that what I teach and preach from this pulpit is in alignment with the truth of Scripture, you need to be consuming more than just spiritual milk.

Here are some basic topics of Theology, with the easier and more difficult aspects of these topics.

The Nature of God:

Easier aspects: Belief in one eternal, omnipotent, omniscient God who created and sustains the universe.

Harder aspects: Understanding God's transcendence (existing beyond physical realm) and immanence (God’s accessibility) together, His immutability (unchanging nature), and impassibility (not experiencing suffering), which require abstract thinking.

The Deity of Jesus Christ:

Easier aspects: Jesus as the Savior who died and rose again for human salvation.

Harder aspects: The hypostatic union, meaning Jesus is fully God and fully human simultaneously, challenging human logic.

The Trinity (God existing as three persons—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—in one essence):

Easier aspects: The concept that God is revealed in three persons.

Harder aspects: The philosophical and theological challenge of understanding one God in three distinct persons who are each fully God, a concept that even theologians find difficult.

The Doctrine of Salvation:

Easier aspects: Salvation is a gift from God through faith in Jesus Christ.

Harder aspects: The mechanics and extent of atonement, the nature of grace versus human free will, election, and predestination raise complex theological questions.

The Authority of Scripture:

Easier aspects: The Bible is seen as authoritative and foundational for faith.

Harder aspects: Understanding the ontology of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, and how it relates to the church and tradition—can be contentious and complex.

It is possible to learn the depths of these topics without having to wait for me to teach on them in a sermon on Sunday morning. Because I preach expositionally through books of the Bible, it may be a long time before we touch certain points of theology in the text. So what can we all do to further our knowledge of Scripture? We can start by reading our Bibles more.

If you are not sure how to start studying Scripture, I have a PDF that is loaded into the website and sermon notes in the app. It has a step-by-step process for learning how to study Scripture.

Next Step: I will study Scripture more consistently.

If you need a Bible, especially a good study bible that has notes and commentary at the bottom of each page to help you understand what a passage is saying, please come and let me know after the service, and I will help you get one.

RC Sproul fear when getting to heaven

If you do not know where to look for resources to help you dig deeper into the Bible or to learn about deeper topics of the Christian faith, I have a few resources to share with you this morning.

If you like a classroom-type setting for learning about different topics, there are many great websites with classes that you can take for FREE to deepen your knowledge of God, His Word, and the doctrines of the faith.

BiblicalTraining.org

I just stumbled upon this website in the last few weeks. This is a free website where you can take online classes to learn more about the faith. You sign up for a free account and then pick the classes you want to take at random or go through one of the 5 pre-made learning tracks (Basics - for new Christians, Foundations - for a better grasp of the faith, Academy - college level classes for those who want to go deeper, Institute - seminary level classes for pastoral training, Leadership - classes for training lay-leaders within the church).

The classes are taught by some of the best and most trusted theologians in the world, whose books I have used for my own study. The man who started the website, Bill Mounce, is on the Biblical language translation team for the NIV. If you take a college course in Biblical Greek, you will probably be using the textbook he wrote.

Ligonier Ministries

This is the teaching ministry started by RC Sproul. I have grown so much, both in my faith and my theological knowledge and understanding, from the resources at Ligonier. They have a podcast that goes through sections of different teaching series available on the website.

There are a bunch of free teaching series on the site that deal with all stages of the Christian walk like “The Holiness of God” which I have referenced many times, “Developing Christian Character” on the struggles of the Christian life and how to live out the fruits of the Spirit, “Essential Truths of the Christian Faith”, and a series on “Knowing God’s Will.” (Disclaimer: Reformed Theology w/ specific views on God’s “elect” people and predestination. If that is not your thing, I would encourage you to learn from Ligonier anyway. The best way to know how to argue against what someone believes is to know what they actually believe.)

Stand to Reason

Stand to Reason is an organization that specializes in Apologetics (which is the science of defending what you believe). They have a website called Stand to Reason University,

where they offer a bunch of free classes on things like engaging in conversations with people from other religions, tactics for talking with others about Christianity, whether science and faith are compatible, and whether the Gospels are reliable history. You just create a free account and then go through whatever courses interest you.

There are many other organizations with free resources for Christians who want to grow in their faith and their knowledge of God. These are just three resources, but they are ones that I trust to provide solid, Biblically accurate instruction that will encourage you in the faith. They all provide resources for those who still need some mashed-up veggies and fruits, spiritually speaking, preparing you for eventually being able to chew on theological steak.

I want a church full of spiritual steak eaters who can also enjoy the simplicity of a glass of milk, and can teach baby Christians how to start processing more solid foods, because as we mature, we will be better at discerning both good and evil according to the wisdom and knowledge we have received through prayer and the study of God’s Word.

“Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong; it's knowing the difference between right and almost right.”

Charles Spurgeon

Knowledge and discernment are what helped us to see that in that “verse a day” calendar, the quote was actually from Satan as he was tempting Jesus, even though it sounded like an encouraging message.

Knowledge and discernment are also what will help us when our friends and family ask us why we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, why Jesus is the only way to heaven, and why there is evil in this world. If you don’t know how to answer those types of questions, or don’t know where to go to find answers to those questions, it is going to be difficult for you to reach your loved ones who want those answers.

It is time to grow up in the faith. It's time to depend less and less on spiritual milk that will leave us hungry and unsatisfied. We need to start learning to process greater knowledge in the Word of God and in Biblical doctrine.

Next Step: I will commit to growing in my faith and knowledge of God.

I hope that today is a day of recommitment to study God’s Word and to work out our salvation with fear and trembling!

You may be here today and be the one who has those types of questions, like how do we know Jesus is God, or why there is evil in the world. That is okay. I am glad you are here with us today. I would love to talk with you about those questions.

Perhaps you have sensed God calling you to follow after Him, to seek him through the Scriptures. Today is the day to call out to him. Repent of your sins, asking God to forgive you for the things you have done in disobedience to him. Then submit your life to him. Follow him. Ask him to lead you in the ways of righteousness.

Next Step: I will repent and submit my life to Christ.

Let us pray.

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