Hebrews 5:11-14

Several years ago, a pastor named Mark Dever wrote a book where he began by lamenting the fact that he had visited several churches over the years when traveling and had discovered that it was uncommon to find someone in a church who one would describe as a “growing Christian.” There is an epidemic of spiritual immaturity in our culture which is fueled by a lack of discipleship and proper views of church membership. He made it a key part of his ministry over the years to address this problem. Over the years in my own ministry, I have found this to ring true. In God’s sovereignty and plan, He has actually addressed this problem of immaturity in Scripture.

This morning as we continue to dig into the book of Hebrews where we have been diving deeply into all of the ways that Jesus is superior. Jesus is better. This passage is heavy. I just need you to understand that from the onset. This isn’t light hearted fare. In fact next weeks message is even heavier.

The author of Hebrews, in writing to these Jewish Christians, is trying to keep them from falling into some grave errors as they live out a life of following Christ. He’s trying to explain to them all of the ways that Jesus is better than their old Jewish ways and the old covenant system. As he does that, he confronts them in warning passages along the way. He calls them out where they need it out of love for them. He is not trying to prove his own point or win an argument. He’s trying to help them. He’s equipping them to persevere in the faith and grow more like Christ.

I originally had this with a larger chunk of scripture but then realized it could truly be more than one sermon so in the interest of doing this well and hopefully shortening it up a bit as the Lord allows, we are going to do it in two parts. Today will be the first part chapter. Next week’s passage is one of the toughest, most disturbing, and most argued passages in the Bible.

The writer seems to want to enter into a deeper study of the heavenly priesthood of Christ but he finds himself in a difficulty because his audience has become dull of hearing. They couldn't go deeper and see how the Gospel connected to all of the deep truths of God. He uses the example of milk and solid food. I love babies. Who doesn’t, really? We have little baby girl over there. If little one is up here and she’s got a bottle and she’s laying on the ground rolling around on a blanket or maybe getting a little bit fussy, we think: “that’s cute, that’s normal.” And not one of us in here would think anything of a baby acting like a baby. However, if it’s Bill Kooy up here gooing and rolling around with a bottle, crying on a blanket, that’s not okay. It’s time to call the “special doctors” or the cops, right? If a grown man is acting like a baby, we are not okay with that. That is sort of the picture here. These Christians that the author is addressing should have been mature but they were reallly just like babies. And it was not okay for them to stay that way. Let’s look at Hebrews, chapter 5, verses 11 through 14 and see how the Word of God addresses this.

READ

Hebrews 5:11–14 ESV

11 About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

This is the Word of the Lord. Let’s pray and ask God to help us understand and apply it to our lives.

Today, we are seeing the author of Hebrews paint a picture of the immaturity of the Hebrew Christians. Let’s take a look at that picture.

I. A picture of immaturity

As we look at these few verses, we see the symptoms of this immaturity.

1. Dull to the Word

- As he writes to them, he wants to go deeper on Christ’s priesthood and how superior it is to Aaron’s priesthood but the people had basically become too lazy to understand. Their ears, minds, and hearts are too immature to understand the concept of what he is wanting to get into. The people who are trained in the Word of God and are progressively growing in the faith are quite simply better equipped to understand the deeper things of God. Some people willfully close their ears and hearts to the Word of God. They regress in their faith and they will struggle with understanding and grasping the deeper truths of God. They drift.

Al Mohler says,

Exalting Jesus in Hebrews The Diagnosis: Dull Hearing (Hebrews 5:11)

Believers have a moral responsibility to know and understand Scripture. We often act as if our biblical ignorance is merely a matter of God hiding or withholding knowledge from us. Yet Scripture teaches us that our ignorance of God’s Word is a moral problem, not an intellectual one. When we deliberately ignore God’s Word for whatever reason, we sin against the Lord. In the case of the Hebrews, the congregation became intellectually sluggish by their own negligence. Their spiritual immaturity was their fault. They grew intellectually dull because they became sluggish of heart. Christ’s priesthood became difficult to understand because their hearts became indifferent to Scripture. Thus, the author must stop explaining Christ’s priesthood in order to admonish his people and prod them out of their lethargy.

- The spiritually immature don’t have the energy to even do the hard work of investigating and understanding difficult spiritual concepts.

2. They were childish in their understanding.

3. They should have been teachers by now.

- We see that our relationship to the Word of God is connected with our spiritual maturity.

They have forgotten the fundamentals of the faith.

When the author uses the term “teaches” he’s pointing to their responsibility to be discipling other believers. He’s saying, you ought to be making disciples by now and be equipping and training others but you still need baby food. The church is supposed to be made up of disciples who are maturing and training up newer disciples. He is not writing about them being elders or pastors. Not everyone in the church is supposed to be a pastor. But everyone is supposed to be making disciples.

He uses the word, “again.” That is important to our understanding. These people had failed to internalize the basics of the faith and were having to be instructed in it again. They had recieved good teaching and not internalized it. These are things they should know by heart at this point. They don’t need a recap. This isn’t a refresher for them. They need to relearn. We must be careful in our lives to internalize the teaching that we receive and take it to heart so that we get established in the faith and are able to take up our responsibility to teach it to others. In other words, so we can make disciples.

This warning is not only about the intellect of the Christian life. It is about the whole of the Christian’s spiritual life. We need to be learning more and more to take responsibility for our spiritual growth. We need to develop our appetites for the things of God. The more we know should lead to the more we want to learn. The more we learn about the faith should increase our hunger for more learning. And we shouldn’t just be doing that for ourselves also so that we will be able to teach Christians who aren not as spiritually mature. It is in this way that we say your spiritual growth has an inward and an outward dimension to it. It’s not just for our sake but also for the sake of others around us and for those who we don’t know yet but will come into our lives to be discipled.

4. A baby food diet

2 Peter 3:18 ESV

18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

Instead of going forward, they were going backward. Growing in grace involves also growing in knowledge. This was a real problem because there are some fundamental principles and doctrinal foundational elements that are really needed to understand more complex truths of the faith.

The example is like in college. You can’t go straight to German 401. There are classes you have to take to lead up to that so that you will have the basic understandings needed to do the work in the 400 level class. You have to start in the 101 level class and move forward. These required lower level classes are called prerequisites.

These principles act like prerequisites. Next week we will be looking at what those basic principles are because the author lays them out for us in chapter 6. For now, let’s talk about them generally as the basic storyline of scripture.

These Hebrew Christians, who are the original audience had failed to put the revelation of God into practice. They were spiritually lethargic and the result was that they stayed babies in the faith. They couldn’t handle solid food because their spiritual digestive system could not handle it.

The point here is not that milk is bad. Milk is great! It’s key to life. There’s nothing wrong with an infant being given milk. It’s natural for a baby to live on milk. But here’s why this word picture is so powerful. You wouldn’t give a teenager breastmilk. They’re ready for steak. They need solid food for their continued growth. Your internal reaction to that shows why the author used this picture. These Christians should be dining on t-bone but they’re sticking with milk.

A man, after 25 years with one company, was still doing the same old job and drawing the same salary. Finally he went to his boss and told him he felt he had been neglected. “After all,” he said, “I’ve had a quarter of a century of experience.”

“My dear fellow,” sighed the boss, “you haven’t had a quarter of a century of experience, you’ve had one experience for a quarter of a century.”

The more we know about ourselves and Christ, the better we are able to be prepared to move forward spiritually as God permits and leads.

5. Unskilled in the Gospel

The Apostle Paul uses a similar metaphor as the author of Hebrews does in I Corinthians 3:1-2

1 Corinthians 3:1–2 ESV

1 But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. 2 I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready,

When the author uses the phrase, “the word of righteousness” or maybe your translation says the “message about righteousness”, he is essentially, based on the context, talking about gospel. It’s the message that leads to salvation. Christ followers are supposed to not be ignorant about the gospel. We aren’t supposed to be untaught in the Bible. We are supposed to, by the call of God, be skilled in the message about righteousness and to walk in the ways we have been taught.

Hebrews 5:14 ESV

14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Our powers of discernment get trained by practice. For those who are immature and on a milk only diet, they will be unable to properly exercise discernment. They are weak and have not had enough practice at it. Discernment is a must for our lives. We need it. Some of you may wonder what this discernment thing is. Discernment, according to Mohler, is “like a theological gird or a worldview that helps us make instant moral and theological judgements about our circumstances.” Moving on from milk to solid food will increase our ability to practice discernment. Why is it important? Mohler uses this as an illustration:

Exalting Jesus in Hebrews (The Remedy: Discerning Power (Hebrews 5:14))

Imagine a heart surgeon who has to stop and rethink cardiology in the middle of a surgery. Imagine how disastrous it would be if he needed to consult a textbook every time he entered the operating room. No one wants that kind of surgeon. We want surgeons who can use the intuition they have developed over years of dedicated practice. This need for discernment applies not only to surgeons but also to Christians. Discernment is a higher order of thinking and can only be acquired through diligent training and experience. We want surgeons whose powers of discernment have been trained by constant practice.

Those who are mature in Christ must train their discernment powers by constantly practicing them. The failure of these recipients of the letter to the Hebrews is that they had failed to both consider and internalize the fundamentals of the faith. They should have been teaching others by now but they were still just infants. They had every opportunity to hear and internalize good teaching and mature by the power of grace in the gospel and they did not. The could have matured but they did not. They were willfully ignorant of the things of God. And because of it they could not eat the tender, juicy, nourishing steak but had to stay on a bottle feed. IF they had learned discernment then they would have been ready for the solid food of the heavier matters of God’s Word. The same is true of us.

We will never get to a point in our maturity that we don’t need to study the Bible. Even maturing Christians need the Bible. We need to understand the basics and how they open up our understanding to the deeper things. We need to know how to read, study, understand and make reasonable arguments from the Scriptures. I see so many people getting pulled into false teaching and even approval of things that the Bible calls sin because they have quit growing.

When I get close to Winterset, Iowa, I can tell you because it’s familiar territory to me. I know the general lay of the land. If I got lost in the country I could probably find my way back to town. I can discern where I am and where to go because it’s familiar. Discernment just means that when we open the Bible we find ourselves in familiar territory.

It helps us see how one doctrine relates to the next one, and the next one, and so on.

Conclusion: (Musicians come up)

Where are you at on the spectrum?

You are either growing or regressing. This passage is a stark indictment on those Christians who are regressing when in fact they should be growing. We know this. We should all be growing and the reason we don’t much of the time is because we are not internalizing the things of God.

If you are a believer in Jesus Christ: that means you have heard the gospel that Jesus died in your place for sin on the cross, that he rose from the grave, that He is God, and Lord and Savior, have repented of your sin and trusted Him alone for salvation… Then you have the Holy Spirit indwelling you and helping you understand the things of God as you study them. He helps you internalize them. This is a grace given us! This message is not do more, try harder but Jesus has already won the battle. He has already defeated death and the grave and made a way for you to mature. Now you step into as life of obedience to your King and as you do this and study the Word and internalize them, you will grow in maturity. It’s slow. It takes time. But it’s good and right and we NEED it. We have to come to God with a childlike faith but we are not called to be childish in our faith for our whole lives.

So take a long, hard look at your life. Are there areas in your life where you are spiritually immature and still taking on milk? Repent for your laziness and fall on the grace of Jesus. Then, go do the things that help you grow.

It’s time to think differently about your responsibility as a Christ follower. Maybe you are someone of whom it could be said, “you should be teaching others this stuff by now.” Every one of us who follows Christ has a calling to make disciples. It’s not just for the pastor. It’s not just for missionaries. It’s for all followers of Jesus. If you claim Christ then it’s on you to make other Christ followers and teach them the things about following Jesus. You may say, “Pastor, I’m not there yet.” Well, then you need to get there. Come talk to me and let me help you. Or you can always talk to another brother or sister in this room and ask them to help you get there. We have got to start discipling one another and others in this community of Dixon.

Next week we will continue with part two of this message. It’s going to focus on how to grow in maturity and I will be glad to share it with you. But first you need to be willing to put your yes on the table. So will you today tell the Lord, “ I will do what you command. I will do your will. I will obey before I even know what you’re going to say.”