Hebrews 5:11-6:3
We have plenty to say about all this; but it may be hard to make it clear, because your capacity to take things in has become sluggish.
Yes: by now you really should have become teachers, but you need someone to teach you the basic elementary beginnings of God’s oracles. You need milk, not solid food!
Everyone who drinks milk, you see, is unskilled in the word of God’s justice; such people are just babies. Mature people need solid food–and by “mature” I mean people whose faculties have been trained, by practice, to distinguish good from evil.
So let’s leave the basic level of teaching about the Messiah, and go on toward maturity!
Now I agree that we do need to be continually reminded of the basics of what we believe, but something just didn’t sit right whenever we would visit this “Numbing Factory” as it felt to me. Looking around at the catatonic droolers, I was like, “Who is he preaching to?” These are the exact same people that we’ve been seeing here for the last three years, and he’s preaching the exact same sermon! Talk about not getting your money’s worth.
This passage has helped me see what was so unsettling and even quite disturbing about that experience. You build no capacity to serve others, or yourself for that matter, while drinking milk only. We can only help others as far as we’ve journeyed. I’ve been given the vision of a guy feeding adults with a little” ba-ba” of milk. (Flashbacks haunt me from a Jerry Springer episode I saw years ago about a fetish some adults have to be dressed, fed, and changed like a baby.)
Following Christ is well described as “simple, yet challenging.” It’s simple from the standpoint that all we really need to do is love God and others via staying closely connected to Jesus so that the Holy Spirit’s life can flow freely into ours. It’s challenging because everything in the world seems to want to distract us away from this simplicity and beautifity.
But with the simplicity comes inevitable growth. We’re created to be creators and humans of maturing. We need to be challenged, and at least at times become, what a friend coined last week “Uncomfortably Unnumb.”
It’s comfortable to sit around sucking on a bottle, left unchallenged.
But is that really satisfying?
Is that what you really want?
Are you still messing with the basics?
Are you being challenged?
Is it time for you to be teaching/passing on to others?
Eat some solid food for crying out loud!!!
Let’s challenge ourselves and each other to some growth and capacity, baby!
(Funny, I didn’t really mean “baby” like an actual baby there at first, but more as a generic term of endearment, but hey, if the diaper fits!)
In the Name of Jesus,
Soli Deo Gloria
I am writing a book at the moment about growing up and being able to make war on the enemy. This picture of the old man and the baby bottle is great, can I use it or do you know where I can obtain it?
Cheers!
Awesome that you’re writing a book, man! I do not remember where that came from–it’s been a while, sorry.
I completely agree with your post by the way. No guile there!