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Hebrews 4:14 - 6:12 Spiritual Maturity

by fol CHURCH on November 20, 2018

About nine months ago, I attended a church service where the sermon was on this topic. The speaker used an amusing YouTube video to illustrate his point. The skit was filmed like an interview with a man, who appeared to be in his forties, attending kindergarten, or pre-school. The guy in the interview was saying that he didn’t see the point in progressing any higher in school: at his kindergarten they played games, the learning was simple to understand, they had naptime and sang fun songs together. He was always the tallest and the cleverest in the class.

It’s a clever analogy for a trap into which so many Christians can fall if we’re not careful. It’s easy to become complacent in what we already know about God; to focus only on the basic truths of our faith, rather than having a desire to delve deeper into the complexity of our God and his love for us. To use the phrasing used by the writer of Hebrews in today’s passage, we can reject solid food as an adult in favour of milk intended for the young. This can result in us congratulating ourselves on how well we understand our faith, even though we only think about a tiny part of it.

From the age of 10 through to about 15, I attended a tiny house church; for much of that time, I was the youngest member by 20 years, and there was no real discipleship. I had only one Christian friend, and as a young teenager, rather than deal with the frankly uncomfortable scenario of discussing my opinions on slightly more in-depth theology, I preferred to stick with what I knew, or worse, not bother at all. I can see in my development through those years that this was not constructive. I became arrogant and judgemental in my belief, but still made some fairly poor choices, until I finally decided to do something about it.

The Father doesn’t condemn us; He guides and corrects. But we can help ourselves too, by taking actions such as taking time to read God’s word, and to meet with other Christians and talk about the Bible’s more difficult issues. We were made to be in community, and to intertwine our relationships with each other with our relationship with God. Let’s not settle for milk today.

 

 

 

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Lord God, we know there are times when we turn our eyes elsewhere and forget you. Help us to turn back to you and constantly want to learn more about you and your love.

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