From Milk to Maturity

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, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.
(Hebrews 5:12-13 – ESV)

Now the problem becomes slippage. We have to go back to basics because people become sluggish. People forget what they know: Use it or lose it. Their spiritual life is slow, even though they may have lots of entertainment and excitement about it. They might have advanced before but they have gone backward. They had become dull of hearing, and they had come back to the place of needing milk, the same word in Greek is used in both verses. Not everyone is called to be a teacher in church, but everyone in church is supposed to be teaching, we ought to help others grow, to explain things to spouses, children, younger people, unbelievers, etc., etc. (cf. Titus 2). After all this time they ought to be able to teach but they have become unteachable.

The truth is that this is why some people need to be at every revival or happening or conference or anything that mentions God and is exciting. It is because their spiritual and you could say scriptural life is actually slow, sluggish, it has no push, no strength, and they have been deceived into thinking activity is spirituality, that excitement is empowerment. They want an experience they don’t want to exercise, and so they need to be re-taught again and again. Their spiritual ears had become dull. Their maturity level had sunk to a milk only diet. The Bible was becoming uninteresting. Things of the world were becoming more exciting and attractive than the Word of God and the greatness of His salvation. They are drifting instead of rowing against the current of sin, and that means drifting backward toward destruction. They weren’t learning, they weren’t discerning, they weren’t skilled, and they were self-willed.

You need to handle the bread and milk before you try and eat the meat, it is for the mature, those that aren’t will mess up with the meat, they will choke, and you don’t feed a one year old a steak. The problem is that they are unskilled, they stay babies, or they reverted back, because they are not exercising with the milk they have. People want to go from toddler to titan without even knowing or living what the Bible teaches. That makes growth based on them not God, they act the part, they get a lot of superficial knowledge and can maybe quote a lot of verses or perhaps they can even teach, but there is something missing, and they will fall when tested. A giant baby is still a baby. It hasn’t cut its teeth, and it needs milk. Milk produces righteousness and then you are ready for meat when you become skilled by practicing and can discern truth.

So the path to becoming more discerning, to becoming mature, to being able to handle the Word of God and sense when something’s a fraud is not to jump from milk to meat, but to learn how to drink the milk. Even then you are still not supposed to be teaching some deep truth yet. You apply yourself, stop being lazy, stop thinking you’ve heard this before, stop thinking you know it all, stop thinking you are ready for meat, stop looking back, start exercising what you know, submit your will, become obedient, practice, become skilled. Learn to eat the food on the table, and stop dropping it off your plate onto the floor and waiting for the goodies. You don’t recognize how good what you have already is, and when you do, then you will grow from that instead of thinking it isn’t enough, and then you will become mature.

“Living For Today With An Eye For Tomorrow”©