To Encourage You

Hebrews 5:12-14 “You need milk, not solid food,for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”

It is a wonderful thing to be born of the Spirit. Jesus talked about this in His well-known conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3.  Jesus explained to Nicodemus that in order for a person to have eternal life, they must be born again, i.e., born of the Spirit.  That’s where spiritual life for any person must begin.  Before the Holy Spirit enters a life, a person, though physically alive, is spiritually dead.  They have no discernment regarding spiritual things.  There is no capacity to see, i.e., understand anything spiritual.  Because an unbeliever has no spiritual sense of hearing, they have no interest in listening to the things of the Spirit that are contained in the Word of God. They have no spiritual hunger, so they don’t have any desire to feed on the Bread of Life. And they are lame, spiritually speaking, unable to walk in the Way of Truth.  But when a person becomes a child of God through the new birth, they begin to really live, although they begin that journey as a spiritual baby.  And while it is indeed a wonderful thing to experience this new birth, it is not God’s intention that we remain babies in the faith.  Just as a person in good health will grow physically from infancy through adolescence and on to maturity, so there are analogous stages in spiritual growth.

So, if you are a Christian, where are you on this spectrum? Are you a spiritual baby, a mature adult, or somewhere in between?  How do we know? What is the process and what are the outcomes of spiritual growth? 

Well, one of the things that the verses above tell us is that spiritual growth comes only as we feed on spiritual food.  Throughout the Scriptures we find that the Bible speaks of itself in just this way.  In 1 Peter 2:2 we are encouraged to, “like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation.”  This is talking about a hunger for God’s Word.  That’s one of the things one so often hears about a new Christian. Whereas in their past life they may have had no interest in the Word of God, now they can’t get enough of it.  They are hungry for spiritual things like a newborn baby is hungry for milk.  It’s a consuming passion – almost a one-track mind. 

But the Scriptures also speak of themselves as spiritual “meat.”  Just as babies can’t eat meat because they aren’t physically mature enough to deal with it, it is possible for a Christian to never mature enough to feed on spiritual meat.  That “meat” is the deeper things of God’s Word. It is those things contained in God’s Word that go beyond the surface understanding of things to the more profound truths that fill its pages.  It’s as a person grows spiritually that they grow stronger, spiritually speaking. It’s like an athlete that disciplines his or her body to grow stronger through exercise and a proper diet.  Spiritually speaking, it is with “constant practice” as the verses say above, that spiritual understanding, i.e., spiritual “discernment” grows. 

A little child is gullible. They do things without giving it much thought, which can quickly get them into trouble. If they’re not constantly being watched they will eat things they shouldn’t eat, go places they shouldn’t go, and do things they shouldn’t do. They will be prone to accidents and self-harm due to their lack of discernment. Likewise, with the baby Christian. Though they may be enthusiastic regarding spiritual things, they lack spiritual discernment because they have so much they need to learn.  They must be trained to distinguish good from evil, for so often those distinctions, though critical, can be subtle, for the enemy of our souls is often very subtle in the way he works (Genesis 3:1; Ephesians 6:11). In fact, we are told that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So, it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness” (2 Corinthians 11:14-15).  The process of growth in one’s ability to discern the evil from the good comes as one studies the Word of God and obeys what he or she understands. Often that obedience is learned through trials, for it is often obedience in the face of trials that is necessary for things that are known in the mind to take root deep in the heart.  It is that obedience through trial, elsewhere likened to the “pruning” that is necessary for a grape vine to grow more fruit (John 15), which opens new realms of understanding that expand as one goes deeper and deeper into the Word. 

So, are you feeding on the Word of God? Are you digging deeper and training yourself to become more and more skilled by feeding on the meat rather than just the milk of God’s Word? Or are you stuck in your maturity, still a babe in the things of God?