Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Grow Up - Hebrews 5:11-14

Bad biblical teaching – it’s a scary thing. God, Jesus – the Word made flesh, and the Spirit are all one and they are all absolutely true. Each one plays a part in helping us know and understand truth.

I’ve had a couple encounters with non-biblical teaching lately. I tell you, it’s a humbling and fearful place to be. It knocked me to my knees as I prayed desperately for God to help me discern and understand the fullness of His message without adding any of my own messed up opinions to the pot.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw our current section of Hebrews will help us recognize false and poor biblical teaching. Like I said, it keeps popping up in my life lately. I encourage you to start by reading the Scripture for this section, Hebrews 5:11-14.


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B88Ivx7ssx4Ad2hhNGJPZ2wyWlk/view?usp=sharing
Click picture for a printable handout for this section.


Grow Up

Encouragement, gentleness, and compassion are all important qualities in the life of believer. I’ve learned that over the years. But we don’t see much of them in this section. In fact, this passage of Scripture is rather blunt. It’s straight to the point – and the point isn’t a commendation for good behavior. The author of Hebrews has three hard-hitting criticisms for his readers. Originally, the readers were first-century Jews. Right now, it’s us as well. Ouch. Fortunately, he ends his critique with some advice for how we can move past these criticisms.

You’re Lazy
“We have a great deal to say about this, and it’s difficult to explain, since you have become too lazy to understand” (Hebrews 5:11).

The author of Hebrews has been talking about some pretty complex stuff – Jesus is our high priest, not only a priest like Aaron but even a priest like Melchizedek. That’s not children’s Sunday school level lessons. That’s some stuff you have to study, cross examine, pray about, meditate on, and really wrestle with to gain full understanding. The author even admits it’s some hard stuff. He wants to explain it to us to help us get it – to bring us to a new level of understanding in God’s great plan of redemption through Jesus the Messiah.

Here’s the problem though – we’re lazy. We’re “slow to learn” (NIV) and “dull of hearing” (NASB). We’re slow… sluggish… heavy. An opportunity presents itself to learn about our Savior – to grow in our relationship with Him – and we easily dismiss it. It requires the exertion of too much effort. Blah. We just don’t care.

You’re Immature
“Although by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the basic principles of God’s revelation again” (Hebrews 5:12).

We’ve been in this relationship awhile. We should be teaching others about it – passing along the awesomeness of His grace, the importance of faith, the kind of actions that matter, and even the glory of our future hope. Not only do we need to be taught, but we need to be taught again! This even has a bad ripple effect. If we aren’t teaching even though we should be, then others aren’t learning because we’re not teaching them.

The author of Hebrews wants us to be ready for some of the hardest aspects of a relationship with Jesus. Instead, we’re still at the “basic principles.” The phrase used here has the idea of learning the very basic elements that are the building blocks of a greater system. It’s kind of like learning the letter sounds that make up the alphabet as we do in our first year of life. We’re learning the sounds the letters make; A sounds like aagh, B sounds like buh, C sounds like kuh. Eventually, we need to move on to combining the letter sounds into words. Then we put words together into sentences. We combine sentences to make paragraphs. Paragraphs come together into a story – a message to communicate with the world! But we’re still the little baby whose message is only the simple sounds, “bababababa.”

You’re a Baby
“You need milk, not solid food. Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness, because he is an infant” (Hebrews 5:12-13).

We’re content with the basic principles. We’re content with babbling when we could be sharing the greatest story ever told. We’re content with milk when we could be feasting on the meat of God’s eternal truth. We’re so content with being a baby that we haven’t even tried to grow up.

The other night I had the privilege of holding my baby nephew. He’s only one month old. This particular evening, he had a tummy ache. He’d wrinkle up his face, pout his lower lip, and cry every time the tummy pains got the better of him. Even in his crying, he was absolutely adorable. Even with spit-up all down his chin, he was stinking cute. Even when various noises required a diaper check, he was so precious.

When he turns 5 or 10 years old, those behaviors won’t be cute and adorable, though. Something is wrong if we have to change the diaper on a ten year old or calm the uncontrollable crying of a twenty year old. Unfortunately, that’s the message the author of Hebrews is communicating.

We aren’t the adorable little infant that hasn’t yet learned to eat, use a restroom, or control his emotions. We’re the 10 or 20 year old who still hasn’t learned. We’ve become a baby.

BUT, we can grow up
“But solid food is for the mature – for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14).

There’s hope. We don’t have to stay lazy, immature babies. (That was kind, wasn’t it?) We can grow up.

In about twenty years, a human body will grow from infancy to adulthood. However, a person may look like a full grown man or woman on the outside but they haven’t learned all they need to know to function as a responsible adult in society. It’s quite possible to grow up physically without growing up mentally.

The same thing goes for our Christian growth. Ten or twenty years may have passed since we entered a relationship with Jesus. The passage of time doesn’t guarantee our spiritual maturity, however.

In the last verse we read that the infant “is inexperienced with the message about righteousness.” We aren’t growing up until we’re attempting to understand what it means when God says things like,
  • The righteous will live by faith (Romans 1:17).
  • There is no one righteous, not even one (Romans 3:10).
  • But now, apart from God’s Law, God’s righteousness has been revealed (Romans 3:21).
  • Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness (Romans 4:3).
  • Since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1).
  • Those who receive the overflow of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ (Romans 5:17).
  • For Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:4).
And that’s just a small sample of some very hard things God has to say about righteousness. Whether the audience is us or a first-century Jew, these are some hard things to comprehend! However, in order to grow up, we have to try to wrap our minds around them.

An infant learning the sounds of the letters doesn’t write a New York Times bestselling novel. A baby drinking milk doesn’t savor a gourmet meal. A little one taking hesitant first steps doesn’t run a marathon. The novel, the gourmet meal, the marathon – they all have something in common. They all require training and preparation. We commit and invest time to make each of those things happen.

Growing up in our faith is the same way. We won’t all of a sudden understand the workings of God’s kingdom; we have to commit and invest time in growing, studying, and learning before our mind starts to understand the realities of a relationship with Him. It is for “those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). We have to train for it. The Greek word used here is gymnazo. It means “to exercise vigorously, in any way, either the body or the mind.”

Can you guess what English word comes from this Greek word? It’s gymnasium! We won’t all of a sudden be able to discern good teaching from false teaching. That ability only comes when we exercise in the spiritual gym – learning to build our muscles of spiritual discernment. We exercise when we study God’s Word, pray through the hard stuff, and discuss it with fellow believers. Only then can we truly be trained to distinguish between the good and evil messages this world will present in our lives.

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