Going On To Maturity | Hebrews
Hebrews Part 4
Pastor Charles Price
Hebrews 5:11-6:11
Well, welcome on this autumnal day. It feels like we skipped summer already and back into the fall, but it’s going to get better. I’m told next weekend is going to be beautiful.
If you have got your Bible I am going to read to you this morning from Hebrews Chapter 5 and Hebrews Chapter 6.
If you have a Bible with you that’s great; if you don’t and you can reach one of the Bibles that are in the seats that will be good as well because you really need to follow what I am going to say from the text here to get the full benefit.
And Paul is going to – not Paul – the writer to the Hebrews (whoever that was) is going to talk about a very, very important issue, but his development of thought needs a little bit of tight following. But it is enriching to us.
And I want to read from Hebrews 5:11. We are going to go into Chapter 6 as well.
And he begins by saying,
“We have much to say about this…”
The “this” is the preceding verses where he talks about how Christ became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
“We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn.
“In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone else to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!
“Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.
“But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
“Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life [judgement].
“And God permitting, we will do so.
“It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age,
“if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
Down in Hebrews 5:9:
“Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case – things that accompany salvation.
“God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.
“We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.
“We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.”
We are going to look at all those verses pretty well in a few minutes, but the theme to this whole section is in Hebrews 6:1 where he says,
“Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity.”
This whole section is about the need to go on to maturity, to spiritual maturity.
And spiritual maturity is not related to the years, how many years you have been a Christian. You can in fact have been a Christian 20, 30, 40 years and be spiritually immature.
Spiritual maturity is about our intimacy with God. It’s about the quality of life and the fruitfulness that flows from that where the presence of God in our own hearts and lives is the source of that.
Now this theme starts back where we began reading in Hebrews 5:11. And if you are a mother, you will easily recognize the metaphors that he uses here where he says you need milk, because of your immaturity, and not solid food, which is what you ought to be on.
“Anyone who lives,” he says in Hebrews 5:13, “on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.
“But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”
Milk is very good for babies. Their digestive capability, their nutritional needs are met with milk.
But in the course of time, they move on to solids and they move on meat and potatoes. And yet, Paul says, there are some of you who are Christians who should be on the meat and potatoes but you are still drinking the milk. Your nutritional needs seem met by that; your appetite is for nothing more than that. And if you have anything more than that, it is just liquidized vegetables and carrot juice, but that’s about your capacity.
This is a sad story really, a sad picture of Christians who do not grow up.
Therefore, the theme that we will talk about that he addresses here is what it means to grow up. “Let us go on to maturity.” You are not a victim of your infancy. We can choose and determine that we are going to grow.
Now this raises three questions that are answered in these verses about spiritual growth and about maturity.
First of all, what is spiritual growth? We will answer that question.
Secondly, why is spiritual growth necessary?
Thirdly, how is spiritual growth accomplished and nurtured?
First of all then, what is spiritual growth?
Well, there are three statements that I want to look at in the verses in Hebrews 5:11, down to the end there, that each of them I could spend a whole session talking about them because they have depth to them and riches to them we haven’t time to look at.
But I am going to just draw them to your attention and then later you will see, as we pull these all together, why these are important and why it would be valuable to go back and look more deeply at these issues.
The first issue is in Hebrews 5:13 where he says,
“Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.”
In other words, if you are a Christian and you are living on milk and you have never gone very deep, you are not really acquainted with the teaching about righteousness, is what he says.
This is not the righteousness of having your sins forgiven where we are declared forgiven and declared righteous by the cross of Christ, because this is the elementary, baby language of the Christian faith.
And if you are a Christian at all, you already know that. In fact, in Hebrews 6:1 he says to them that you have experienced the foundation of repentance that leads from death to life.
You know because it is the baby language about being forgiven. You know of it being made right with God, you know about being clothed in the righteousness of God.
And every believer is familiar with that. In fact it is often our guilt which brought us to Christ in the first place.
But there is more to the teaching about righteousness than simply the cross as the place to be forgiven because to be absolutely frank with you, if I can speak like this, there are Christian folks who have relegated their understanding of the cross to little more than a doormat on which to wipe their dirty feet in order to get into heaven. And often that is how we see the cross. And we see that as our righteousness.
But there is so much more than that. The teaching about righteousness that they failed to grasp is where you have died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
That is a much richer, fuller understanding of what it means to be righteous, where Christ Himself is our righteousness, where we are living in union with Him; we are abiding in Him and He is abiding in us. And our life is hidden with Christ in God and His Spirit is residing within us and producing His fruit, fruit that will spill out into our homes, it will spill out into our workplaces, it will spill out into all our relationships.
But perpetual spiritual babies living on the bottle don’t know that, they don’t seek that, they don’t live according to that. They are very glad they are going to heaven when they die. In the meantime, they will do their best to live a good life.
But they know nothing of what he calls there the truth about righteousness where we live in fellowship with God, intimacy with God, in union with God. And Christ is not up there somewhere or out there somewhere; He is in me and He is our life and He is our righteousness and He is our source of wisdom and we live in dependence and in communion with Him.
If we don’t know that, we can only live our Christian lives by human tactics, live it by the flesh (a word used in the Scripture) and you will be, as I have said from this platform many times, frustrated and defeated. And what you affirm on Sundays when you affirm the things you want to be true, you will not live in the good of on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
So that is the first area of being a baby Christian, living on milk instead of on meat and solid food. As I said, we could say much more about those areas.
The second area is in Hebrews 5:14 where he says,
“Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”
Spiritual immaturity does not have that ability with the same clarity to distinguish good from evil. It is the result of the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves.
This is a particular challenge for all of us today because we live in a society that has dismantled its moral infrastructure, the ligaments, the moral ligaments that hold a society together.
In the west our understanding of morality, of what is good and what is bad, is derived by and large from the Christian culture, which was the backbone of society and of progression for many centuries.
Now I know there are many of us here in this building who do not have a western background and you will know immediately the difference. But the European founded nations, I think we could call them (which includes Canada), had as their basis a Christian culture or sub-culture that has been imbedded since the 5th Century with varying levels of intensity.
In that culture the moral plumb line is the character of God. God is love, God is kind, God is faithful, God is just, God is life-affirming. And these attributes that are true of God become to us the attributes of ethics and morality.
But the climate is now ruled by secularism where the criterion for right and wrong is general consensus. There is no external criterion. It is simply what we collectively agree is good and what we collectively agree is bad.
And so, we are seeing winds blowing around in our culture today and in our society today that leave some of us very confused, but it is totally predictable because the criteria by which those good, bad, right, wrong issues are determined are purely subjective human consensus. And those who shout the loudest usually stir things most.
Now the Christian who is immature, who is living in this world where human consensus is the driving force, yet he is a Christian related to Jesus Christ, who is Himself the truth, and from Him derives the truth about what is right and what is wrong, but because we are only living on milk and we are not nurturing ourselves with the truth of the Word of God, we become, he says, unable to distinguish between good and evil.
And so we, swallowing all the influences that come to us – and we are very easily influenced, all of us, very easily influenced – we start to say, “I think this makes more sense than that,” referring to that which is revealed to us by God.
And that’s why he says in Verse 14 that solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
Constant use of what?
Well, it is constant use of the Word of God because that is the only reliable expression of the mind of God and the heart of God.
And he says by constant use they are able to stand in a totally broken society and know what is true.
Why?
Because of the constant use of the Word of God. Not the spasmodic Sunday morning use of the Word of God, and that is my input for the week – that will leave you floundering completely - or occasional reading of the Bible when I get a few minutes or I get into the mood. But by constant use they have trained themselves and trained their minds to distinguish between good and evil, he says.
And there is no shortcut to this constant use. People try all kinds of tricks. Someone told me a couple weeks ago that they go to sleep every night listening to one of my sermons. Well, you will appreciate that that would send them to sleep, but a fat lot of good that will do them.
I said, “Why in the world do that?”
“Well, it helps me sleep.”
But also they said, “I am hoping that subliminally, what you keep saying when I am sleeping is going to get…”
Nonsense! That’s a fat lot of good that will do them.
You cannot become equipped by osmosis, hanging around Christians, hanging around the church, without this disciplined constant use. And we are going to see in a moment Paul gets more and more about this, about the human element of discipline if we are going to grow and stay in this fresh living communion with God.
And if we depart from the Word of God, allowing it to permeate our minds and our hearts, then every other influence around us will captivate our minds and captivate our hearts. And we will become totally confused because I am a Christian but I am confused about this, because our minds will be moulded by the moods and values of our culture, be moulded by the explicit and the subliminal messages of the media to which we are exposed.
We will be influenced by the trends of our generation of which we are a part. We will be moulded by the music that we listen to and the movies that we watch. And if we are not grounded in truth by constant use of the Word of God, these forces will pull us away and we remain baby Christians on the bottle. That’s the picture he uses.
There is no fast track to this. We have to put in the work. He talks about constant use. He talks about training in order to grow.
That’s why many people who once knew God walk no more with Him because their minds and their hearts have become overwhelmed by other sources of information and ideas that come so strongly to them that they have been seduced without the resistant capability of the Word of God being in their hearts. And so they continue to live on the bottle.
Third thing he refers to here is in Hebrews 5:12. He says,
“Though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again.”
Now he says you are on the bottle so you need being taught all the time, but actually you ought to, if you are maturing, you would be teachers.
Now I suggest there are two reasons why he speaks about this and why seeing ourselves as teachers of others is so vitally important.
The first is that a vibrant relationship with Jesus Christ will overflow and you will have something to say.
Jesus said in John 7:37,
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.
“Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”
If you are thirsty, don’t stay thirsty; come and drink. What happens? “If you come and drink – that is by believing in Me, there will be streams of living water from within you now which will flow out.” The water you are thirsty for becomes a stream that flows out of you in blessing to others.
You see we can only give what we have. And what we do have, we are to give. So inevitably spiritual maturity means that what is going on in my life will overflow to others.
This doesn’t mean formally standing up and teaching, but in our interactions with people, in our conversation with people, that there is a – they are left with something that has taught them about Christ, about God, about deepening their relationship with Him.
And if we have nothing to say to anybody, it is probably because we have nothing to say. And sometimes we have something to say but we think we don’t or we are fearful of it.
Henri Nouwen has written this:
“Often we think that we do not know enough to be able to teach others. We might even become hesitant to tell others what we do know out of fear that we won’t have anything left to say when they ask for more. This mindset makes us anxious, secretive, possessive and self-conscious. But when we have the courage to share generously with others all that we know whenever they ask for it, we soon discover that we know an awful lot more than we thought. It is only by giving generously from the well of our knowledge that we discover how deep that well is.”
That means there’s lots of us here this morning that have an awful lot more to say than you realize, but out of fear, nervousness. But if you are growing in Christ and if you are amongst what he categorizes as the mature, you will teach others. It will be a natural consequence.
The second aspect though is this: that a vibrant relationship with Christ will be stimulated by service. Those who grow give out and those who are giving out grow even more.
A couple of years ago the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada produced a research paper called “Hemorrhaging Faith.” It was a nationwide survey over a period of time as to why young people leave the church (as many young people do).
And they created four categories of people who they called as the “engagers” – they were fully involved, the “fence sitters”, you know who could go either way eventually, the “wanderers” who were in and out, and the rejecters who were out. This was the four categories that they put people into.
Of those who were growing and maturing and had a deep relationship with Christ, there were primarily two common factors that they shared. 70% of that group said, “My faith came alive on a mission trip.” So, they had been on a mission trip, as we have a trip up in a reserve here now presently right at this moment. They went on a trip and in giving their faith came alive. They discovered what they had to give.
And nearly 60% of that same group were involved in summer camps. So 70% had been on a missions trip and this had brought it all alive, and 60% had been in summer camp and that had brought their Christian life alive because they got involved in serving, they got involved in giving, they got involved in teaching.
There is no greater stimulus to growth than seeking to minister to other people.
This was my experience when I was a young Christian and I had been a Christian for four years at that stage and you know my Christian life was simply receiving and go and listen to sermons and I would read my Bible to receive, pray a little bit – that was all about my own interest, my own agendas.
Then I got with a group of young Christians who went onto the streets to share the Gospel with folks, going to coffee bars as it was back in those days in the 60’s, stop people on the street. If we had questionnaires we would ask them, you know, what is your main ambition in life? How do you hope to reach that ambition? Who do you think Jesus Christ is? Why do you think He died?
And we would have these conversations that started neutral and then suddenly we were talking about Christ.
And a number of things happened.
First of all, my interest in the Bible changed. I used to read the Bible because I was supposed to read the Bible. I understood you are a Christian; that’s what you do. You are supposed to read the Bible.
But I would sometimes read the bit I was supposed to read, close my Bible, go off into the day and I would forget an hour later anything I had read.
But now when I sat down with people and we were talking about the Gospel, they were asking me questions I hadn’t a clue what the answers were. “What does the Bible say?”
I hadn’t a clue what the Bible said about such and such, so I had to go back and start to read my Bible to answer the questions of people who I had talked to a few days ago and sometimes who I was going to meet again the next weekend. So I had to work out some answers by then.
Also, my praying before that had just been very predictable dull praying. “Thank You for keeping me alive today. Please give me a good sleep tonight. Please bless my family and all my friends and please bless all the missionaries and save everybody else on the planet. Amen.”
That was basically what it was – vague, general.
Now I was having to pray – “I want to pray for Jack; I am going to meet him on Friday night. We talked last Friday. We are going to meet in the same coffee bar next Friday.” And began to pray God would do something in his life.
And all of this was part of what created then a deepening appetite and a hunger and a longing. That’s why encourage your kids to get involved in service. It doesn’t matter what it is – just the principle that I am here to bless you, I am here to do things for you; I am here to help you. And it will develop and it will grow.
And if we teach because our heart is full, our heart becomes fuller because we teach.
You know in this church we have something like 1600 active volunteers in ministry currently. They were counted just two or three months ago. And that was the phenomenal figure – I thought it was a phenomenal figure – who are actively involved in a whole multiplicity of ministries in serving other people.
I will tell you this about those 1600 people – they are the ones who will grow. The rest of us; I hope we are growing too. But they are the ones who are going to grow.
You get the odd one of course who falls away, but by and large as they minister to others, they find that their resources to flow out have to be deepened and the flowing out deepens their resources and they grow.
But he says you ought to be teaching, you ought to be serving, but you are not. Why? Because you are just on the bottle, you are just living “my own nutritional needs spiritually” and nothing more than that.
You can begin small. Do you know that at 7:30 every Sunday morning there is a prayer walk that goes from this church around to this area? And over the couple years that it has been taking place the number of relationships that have been built in our community have been like they have never been in the history of this church.
Some of you could join them one Sunday morning. Join them once and just see. No strings and no obligations – just go, see what it’s like, 7:30. Especially now it’s getting to summer; it’s much more fun than in the winter.
Some of you maybe should be teaching in Sunday school, some of you involved in the youth ministry, some of you on the ushering team. Many of you need to go through the “Rooted” course.
Did you know that in our baptism service two weeks ago that the biggest single contributor were those who had been in “Rooted” courses because suddenly something had come alive for them.
And from that into life groups, which is the heart of the spiritual life and fellowship within a church this size.
But serve in some capacity, not only because you have a desire to, but because in doing so, your output will create a greater need for input and you will start to grow.
But like I said, there is no fast track. If we are ever going to grow spiritually, we have got to bring our lives into conformity with those things which enable us to grow. Or like these folks in Hebrews, we are just on the bottle.
Now if the first question is what is spiritual growth, my second question is why is spiritual growth necessary?
And the answer is, and then I will show you this, the answer is because we must go forward because we cannot go backward, and therefore we just become static and mouldy.
Let me read again Hebrews 6:1:
“Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity.”
(Remember that’s the theme of this section.)
“…not laying again the foundation of…”
And then he gives a list of six things which he says are the foundation, are the elementary teachings of the Christian gospel and they are these: he says,
“laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death,”
(That’s simply a change of mind about myself, about sin, about God.)
Then he says,
“…and of faith in God…”
So we turn from myself to God and put my trust in Him.
Hebrews 6:2:
“…the instruction about baptisms”
(That is a public declaration of our faith in Christ)
“…the laying on of hands…”
(That was associated with the receiving of the Holy Spirit in Scripture)
“…the resurrection of the dead”
(That’s a confidence in the future – death has lost its sting)
“…and eternal judgement (which makes us valuable because it makes us accountable).
Now these things, he says, are the foundation of the elementary teachings about Christ that you have received – repentance, faith, baptism, laying on of hands, resurrection, eternal judgement. That’s a comprehensive theology from repentance to the eternal judgement. But this is the Sunday school curriculum of the Christian life. These things are necessary right at the beginning.
Now he says we need to go on to maturity, which is not going from these things to other things because the principle of spiritual growth is not only grow from to another, but we grow in things, we grow more deeply into those same things. That is the essence of spiritual growth. We grow deeper, we grow further, we become richer, we become fuller in some of these things.
But here’s why it is vital that we do go on, because in Hebrews 6:4,
“It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age…”
(That’s a full experience of God he describes there.)
“It’s impossible…if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
Now this verse has to be read very carefully in its context or it may lead to confusion. Some people have concluded it means that if you fall away from God it is impossible to come back to God, it is impossible to repent again, impossible to come back.
It seems to me that it is actually teaching the exact opposite of that, and I will show you why.
If the theme is “let’s go on to maturity”, which it is, the reason is because you have laid the foundation that begins with repentance (that’s the initial foundation); you have laid the foundation (let me do it this way because then that’s more foundation).
You have laid the foundation of repentance. Now I want you to go on to maturity because if you do not, it is impossible for you to go back to where you were before.
In other words, it is impossible for you to become in that position of being unsaved.
Christians repent of course because we are told to in, for instance, the first three chapters of Revelation. Jesus wrote to seven churches and to five of the seven churches he said, “you need to repent, you need to repent, you need to repent, you need to repent (these are Christians), you need to repent.”
So, it doesn’t mean it is impossible to repent, but what it means is in the way the writer has described it, that if the foundation is repentance, you need to go on to maturity because you cannot go back again and start again at the foundation. You cannot go back there because you are now already locked in to Jesus Christ.
If he had said, instead, “not laying again the foundation of the new birth” instead of the foundation of repentance, it would then say in Verse 4, “if they fall away, it would be impossible to be brought back to the new birth.”
And we would say of course that makes sense; we could understand that, because you are already alive. You can’t go back if you are already alive, and start again.
You and I were born physically on a certain date. If you mess up your life you can’t say, “Ah, man, this is such a mess; I am going to go back and start again. I am going to go back to my mother’s womb and start again.” You can’t do that.
You can’t do that spiritually.
So, here’s the consequence of not growing. In Hebrews 6:6:
“So to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
He’s saying you must go on to maturity simply because you cannot go back to the beginning. And therefore if you do not want the maturity, what you do is you subject Jesus Christ to public disgrace.
Your life becomes an insult to the Gospel of Jesus Christ rather than a glorifying of Jesus Christ because the life you live tells the people next door there’s absolutely no value in being a Christian. There are no virtues that are any different or better than the next person, and you subject Christ to disgrace.
Jesus told a story once about a man who laid a foundation – similar metaphor. He doesn’t have the resources to complete the building so he has laid the foundation and stuck in a few half walls and then he has to quit.
And Jesus said about that man if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it everyone who sees it will ridicule him saying, this fellow began to build and was unable to finish.
This is the picture here that if we do not go on, if we do not grow, if we do not come to maturity, you cannot go back and un-Christianize yourself, un-convert yourself. So you remain a Christian but now you are a disgrace to the name of Jesus Christ.
No non-Christians are a disgrace to the name of Jesus Christ because they are not a Christian. But it is the Christian who is, who is not maturing, who is content to live on bottle-fed Christianity, sucks his bottle every Sunday morning and that’s about it, but doesn’t have the meat and the depth and the quality and the righteousness that comes from Christ and the constant use of the Word of God so that he distinguishes between what is right and wrong and good and bad.
You know the first Bible people ever read is usually us. Somebody else has made that statement before. The first Bible I ever read is you, but I had somebody say once as well, there are three testaments in the Bible, three testaments in which God reveals Himself.
There is the Old Testament, there is the New Testament, and there is the You Testament. And Paul wrote about that when he said to the Corinthians, “You yourselves are epistles (that is, letters) known and read by everybody.”
Your life every time you walk down the road is a letter. What does it say about Jesus Christ? Because if we do not go on and we cannot go back, we subject Him to disgrace.
Now notice he says, Hebrews 6:6,
“To their loss, they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
I think that “crucifying the Son of God all over again” simply means you have made His cross redundant. You have not entered into all the benefits of it, which are that you are now united with Christ and that you have in Him your life and your righteousness. But he says, “To their loss.” There are those people who will fall away from following in the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply because they think it will be to their benefit to do so. It is always to their loss, always to their loss.
And so we either go on or we subject Jesus Christ to public disgrace.
And that brings me to the third, very briefly, question, which is how? What is spiritual growth, firstly? Why is spiritual growth necessary, secondly? How is spiritual life nurtured, thirdly?
And in Hebrews 6:9-12 he says,
“Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case – things that accompany salvation.”
In other words, he is saying there, “I am sorry to speak to you like this. I don’t like to tell you that you need to keep moving, but I need to. And I need you to know, says the writer, all the things that accompany salvation.”
If you define salvation as the basics – out of hell into heaven – there are many, many things that accompany salvation. He then says in the next verse, Hebrews 6:10,
“God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.
“We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.
“We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.”
So, he says, “I am confident” that his readers don’t want to be like that.
And equally I am confident you don’t want to be like that. You probably wouldn’t be here on a Sunday morning if you did.
But like them, as many people do, we have participated on a certain superficial level. He says you have been helping the people of God, as many of you do. We are thrilled with the way people participate in our mission funding, our faith promise and the generosity of this congregation.
But he says we are grateful for that but we are confident of better things. And these better things are nurtured in four ways.
Hebrews 6:11: you show diligence to the very end. That is, you stick with it through thick and thin. You are not just drifting and if the wind blows you go with it, if it blows over there, you go with it, but you are diligent in your Christian life and you are diligent in your relationship with God.
The second part of Hebrews 6:11: that you make your hope sure, that you work it through, that you deal with the doubts; you arrive at this place of certainty.
Hebrews 6:12: you don’t become lazy. Spiritual laziness is probably the curse of our busy lives. It leaves us wading around in the shallows because we don’t exercise the diligence and discipline that he talks about here that is necessary to spiritual growth.
And then in Verse 12 he says, through faith and patience we inherit what has been promised.
Notice how faith and patience go together there. Faith, yes, through trust in God, trust in His ability, trust in His sufficiency. “God, I trust You; my faith is in You.”
That is one aspect but with that, patience, because growth is not instant or overnight. And there are many things that come into our lives we don’t understand and we say, “I am trusting You God; why has this happened?”
“Well, be patient, be patient.”
Faith and patience go together.
Eugene Peterson in one of the titles of one of his books calls it “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.” Patience along with faith, because growth is incremental.
And we are the last people to see it anyway. It is other people who see it first. That’s why don’t naval gaze about how you are doing but keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith.
And as we do so, we will be growing, we will be maturing, we will be becoming more fruitful, and we will inherit, as he says here; we will inherit what is promised.
If you are not yet born again here this morning, never come to the cross in confession of your sin to seek Christ as your Saviour, then you can be born again here this morning.
As Peter writes in 1 Peter 2:2,
“Like newborn babes, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”
Come to Christ and crave the milk – that’s your entitlement as a baby Christian – crave the milk, take what you can digest, absorb what is absorbable to you. And as you mature you will leave the milk and go for the meat.
But if you are born again here this morning, then the message of Hebrews 5 and 6 is grow up. Don’t be spiritual babies. Don’t keep sticking a spiritual bottle in front of yourself. Mature. Go to the solid food. Go to the meat and potatoes. Discover what your righteousness is in everyday living, not just your label for when you go to heaven.
Constantly use the Word of God that you are not confused in this confusing generation of which we are a part. And be diligent. Don’t be lazy. And with faith and patience coupled together, go on growing and serve other people.
And other people around you will notice you are growing. You probably won’t, but they will.
Let’s pray together.
Father, we thank You this morning that You invite us into something so much deeper and richer and fuller than we ever imagined when we first came to know You. We were content then just to know that our guilt had been taken away, and what a relief that was to our conscience. We were content then to know that beyond this human life, there is the possibility of eternity with You.
And had that been all there was that would have been enough. But thank You that is not all there was, that’s not all there is. There is the fact that You have come by the Holy Spirit to live within our lives and You are now our righteousness. You are our strength. You are our wisdom. You are our means of serving. And we pray that our lives will be built more deeply into You, in fellowship with You, through the Word of God. We know the mind of God and the heart of God and the person of God.
And we pray Lord that You will give us deeper appetites for that, to be liberated from the superficial and to find our meat and substance.
Well, welcome on this autumnal day. It feels like we skipped summer already and back into the fall, but it’s going to get better. I’m told next weekend is going to be beautiful.
If you have got your Bible I am going to read to you this morning from Hebrews Chapter 5 and Hebrews Chapter 6.
If you have a Bible with you that’s great; if you don’t and you can reach one of the Bibles that are in the seats that will be good as well because you really need to follow what I am going to say from the text here to get the full benefit.
And Paul is going to – not Paul – the writer to the Hebrews (whoever that was) is going to talk about a very, very important issue, but his development of thought needs a little bit of tight following. But it is enriching to us.
And I want to read from Hebrews 5:11. We are going to go into Chapter 6 as well.
And he begins by saying,
“We have much to say about this…”
The “this” is the preceding verses where he talks about how Christ became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
“We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn.
“In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone else to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!
“Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.
“But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
“Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life [judgement].
“And God permitting, we will do so.
“It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age,
“if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
Down in Hebrews 5:9:
“Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case – things that accompany salvation.
“God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.
“We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.
“We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.”
We are going to look at all those verses pretty well in a few minutes, but the theme to this whole section is in Hebrews 6:1 where he says,
“Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity.”
This whole section is about the need to go on to maturity, to spiritual maturity.
And spiritual maturity is not related to the years, how many years you have been a Christian. You can in fact have been a Christian 20, 30, 40 years and be spiritually immature.
Spiritual maturity is about our intimacy with God. It’s about the quality of life and the fruitfulness that flows from that where the presence of God in our own hearts and lives is the source of that.
Now this theme starts back where we began reading in Hebrews 5:11. And if you are a mother, you will easily recognize the metaphors that he uses here where he says you need milk, because of your immaturity, and not solid food, which is what you ought to be on.
“Anyone who lives,” he says in Hebrews 5:13, “on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.
“But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”
Milk is very good for babies. Their digestive capability, their nutritional needs are met with milk.
But in the course of time, they move on to solids and they move on meat and potatoes. And yet, Paul says, there are some of you who are Christians who should be on the meat and potatoes but you are still drinking the milk. Your nutritional needs seem met by that; your appetite is for nothing more than that. And if you have anything more than that, it is just liquidized vegetables and carrot juice, but that’s about your capacity.
This is a sad story really, a sad picture of Christians who do not grow up.
Therefore, the theme that we will talk about that he addresses here is what it means to grow up. “Let us go on to maturity.” You are not a victim of your infancy. We can choose and determine that we are going to grow.
Now this raises three questions that are answered in these verses about spiritual growth and about maturity.
First of all, what is spiritual growth? We will answer that question.
Secondly, why is spiritual growth necessary?
Thirdly, how is spiritual growth accomplished and nurtured?
First of all then, what is spiritual growth?
Well, there are three statements that I want to look at in the verses in Hebrews 5:11, down to the end there, that each of them I could spend a whole session talking about them because they have depth to them and riches to them we haven’t time to look at.
But I am going to just draw them to your attention and then later you will see, as we pull these all together, why these are important and why it would be valuable to go back and look more deeply at these issues.
The first issue is in Hebrews 5:13 where he says,
“Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.”
In other words, if you are a Christian and you are living on milk and you have never gone very deep, you are not really acquainted with the teaching about righteousness, is what he says.
This is not the righteousness of having your sins forgiven where we are declared forgiven and declared righteous by the cross of Christ, because this is the elementary, baby language of the Christian faith.
And if you are a Christian at all, you already know that. In fact, in Hebrews 6:1 he says to them that you have experienced the foundation of repentance that leads from death to life.
You know because it is the baby language about being forgiven. You know of it being made right with God, you know about being clothed in the righteousness of God.
And every believer is familiar with that. In fact it is often our guilt which brought us to Christ in the first place.
But there is more to the teaching about righteousness than simply the cross as the place to be forgiven because to be absolutely frank with you, if I can speak like this, there are Christian folks who have relegated their understanding of the cross to little more than a doormat on which to wipe their dirty feet in order to get into heaven. And often that is how we see the cross. And we see that as our righteousness.
But there is so much more than that. The teaching about righteousness that they failed to grasp is where you have died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
That is a much richer, fuller understanding of what it means to be righteous, where Christ Himself is our righteousness, where we are living in union with Him; we are abiding in Him and He is abiding in us. And our life is hidden with Christ in God and His Spirit is residing within us and producing His fruit, fruit that will spill out into our homes, it will spill out into our workplaces, it will spill out into all our relationships.
But perpetual spiritual babies living on the bottle don’t know that, they don’t seek that, they don’t live according to that. They are very glad they are going to heaven when they die. In the meantime, they will do their best to live a good life.
But they know nothing of what he calls there the truth about righteousness where we live in fellowship with God, intimacy with God, in union with God. And Christ is not up there somewhere or out there somewhere; He is in me and He is our life and He is our righteousness and He is our source of wisdom and we live in dependence and in communion with Him.
If we don’t know that, we can only live our Christian lives by human tactics, live it by the flesh (a word used in the Scripture) and you will be, as I have said from this platform many times, frustrated and defeated. And what you affirm on Sundays when you affirm the things you want to be true, you will not live in the good of on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
So that is the first area of being a baby Christian, living on milk instead of on meat and solid food. As I said, we could say much more about those areas.
The second area is in Hebrews 5:14 where he says,
“Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”
Spiritual immaturity does not have that ability with the same clarity to distinguish good from evil. It is the result of the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves.
This is a particular challenge for all of us today because we live in a society that has dismantled its moral infrastructure, the ligaments, the moral ligaments that hold a society together.
In the west our understanding of morality, of what is good and what is bad, is derived by and large from the Christian culture, which was the backbone of society and of progression for many centuries.
Now I know there are many of us here in this building who do not have a western background and you will know immediately the difference. But the European founded nations, I think we could call them (which includes Canada), had as their basis a Christian culture or sub-culture that has been imbedded since the 5th Century with varying levels of intensity.
In that culture the moral plumb line is the character of God. God is love, God is kind, God is faithful, God is just, God is life-affirming. And these attributes that are true of God become to us the attributes of ethics and morality.
But the climate is now ruled by secularism where the criterion for right and wrong is general consensus. There is no external criterion. It is simply what we collectively agree is good and what we collectively agree is bad.
And so, we are seeing winds blowing around in our culture today and in our society today that leave some of us very confused, but it is totally predictable because the criteria by which those good, bad, right, wrong issues are determined are purely subjective human consensus. And those who shout the loudest usually stir things most.
Now the Christian who is immature, who is living in this world where human consensus is the driving force, yet he is a Christian related to Jesus Christ, who is Himself the truth, and from Him derives the truth about what is right and what is wrong, but because we are only living on milk and we are not nurturing ourselves with the truth of the Word of God, we become, he says, unable to distinguish between good and evil.
And so we, swallowing all the influences that come to us – and we are very easily influenced, all of us, very easily influenced – we start to say, “I think this makes more sense than that,” referring to that which is revealed to us by God.
And that’s why he says in Verse 14 that solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
Constant use of what?
Well, it is constant use of the Word of God because that is the only reliable expression of the mind of God and the heart of God.
And he says by constant use they are able to stand in a totally broken society and know what is true.
Why?
Because of the constant use of the Word of God. Not the spasmodic Sunday morning use of the Word of God, and that is my input for the week – that will leave you floundering completely - or occasional reading of the Bible when I get a few minutes or I get into the mood. But by constant use they have trained themselves and trained their minds to distinguish between good and evil, he says.
And there is no shortcut to this constant use. People try all kinds of tricks. Someone told me a couple weeks ago that they go to sleep every night listening to one of my sermons. Well, you will appreciate that that would send them to sleep, but a fat lot of good that will do them.
I said, “Why in the world do that?”
“Well, it helps me sleep.”
But also they said, “I am hoping that subliminally, what you keep saying when I am sleeping is going to get…”
Nonsense! That’s a fat lot of good that will do them.
You cannot become equipped by osmosis, hanging around Christians, hanging around the church, without this disciplined constant use. And we are going to see in a moment Paul gets more and more about this, about the human element of discipline if we are going to grow and stay in this fresh living communion with God.
And if we depart from the Word of God, allowing it to permeate our minds and our hearts, then every other influence around us will captivate our minds and captivate our hearts. And we will become totally confused because I am a Christian but I am confused about this, because our minds will be moulded by the moods and values of our culture, be moulded by the explicit and the subliminal messages of the media to which we are exposed.
We will be influenced by the trends of our generation of which we are a part. We will be moulded by the music that we listen to and the movies that we watch. And if we are not grounded in truth by constant use of the Word of God, these forces will pull us away and we remain baby Christians on the bottle. That’s the picture he uses.
There is no fast track to this. We have to put in the work. He talks about constant use. He talks about training in order to grow.
That’s why many people who once knew God walk no more with Him because their minds and their hearts have become overwhelmed by other sources of information and ideas that come so strongly to them that they have been seduced without the resistant capability of the Word of God being in their hearts. And so they continue to live on the bottle.
Third thing he refers to here is in Hebrews 5:12. He says,
“Though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again.”
Now he says you are on the bottle so you need being taught all the time, but actually you ought to, if you are maturing, you would be teachers.
Now I suggest there are two reasons why he speaks about this and why seeing ourselves as teachers of others is so vitally important.
The first is that a vibrant relationship with Jesus Christ will overflow and you will have something to say.
Jesus said in John 7:37,
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.
“Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”
If you are thirsty, don’t stay thirsty; come and drink. What happens? “If you come and drink – that is by believing in Me, there will be streams of living water from within you now which will flow out.” The water you are thirsty for becomes a stream that flows out of you in blessing to others.
You see we can only give what we have. And what we do have, we are to give. So inevitably spiritual maturity means that what is going on in my life will overflow to others.
This doesn’t mean formally standing up and teaching, but in our interactions with people, in our conversation with people, that there is a – they are left with something that has taught them about Christ, about God, about deepening their relationship with Him.
And if we have nothing to say to anybody, it is probably because we have nothing to say. And sometimes we have something to say but we think we don’t or we are fearful of it.
Henri Nouwen has written this:
“Often we think that we do not know enough to be able to teach others. We might even become hesitant to tell others what we do know out of fear that we won’t have anything left to say when they ask for more. This mindset makes us anxious, secretive, possessive and self-conscious. But when we have the courage to share generously with others all that we know whenever they ask for it, we soon discover that we know an awful lot more than we thought. It is only by giving generously from the well of our knowledge that we discover how deep that well is.”
That means there’s lots of us here this morning that have an awful lot more to say than you realize, but out of fear, nervousness. But if you are growing in Christ and if you are amongst what he categorizes as the mature, you will teach others. It will be a natural consequence.
The second aspect though is this: that a vibrant relationship with Christ will be stimulated by service. Those who grow give out and those who are giving out grow even more.
A couple of years ago the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada produced a research paper called “Hemorrhaging Faith.” It was a nationwide survey over a period of time as to why young people leave the church (as many young people do).
And they created four categories of people who they called as the “engagers” – they were fully involved, the “fence sitters”, you know who could go either way eventually, the “wanderers” who were in and out, and the rejecters who were out. This was the four categories that they put people into.
Of those who were growing and maturing and had a deep relationship with Christ, there were primarily two common factors that they shared. 70% of that group said, “My faith came alive on a mission trip.” So, they had been on a mission trip, as we have a trip up in a reserve here now presently right at this moment. They went on a trip and in giving their faith came alive. They discovered what they had to give.
And nearly 60% of that same group were involved in summer camps. So 70% had been on a missions trip and this had brought it all alive, and 60% had been in summer camp and that had brought their Christian life alive because they got involved in serving, they got involved in giving, they got involved in teaching.
There is no greater stimulus to growth than seeking to minister to other people.
This was my experience when I was a young Christian and I had been a Christian for four years at that stage and you know my Christian life was simply receiving and go and listen to sermons and I would read my Bible to receive, pray a little bit – that was all about my own interest, my own agendas.
Then I got with a group of young Christians who went onto the streets to share the Gospel with folks, going to coffee bars as it was back in those days in the 60’s, stop people on the street. If we had questionnaires we would ask them, you know, what is your main ambition in life? How do you hope to reach that ambition? Who do you think Jesus Christ is? Why do you think He died?
And we would have these conversations that started neutral and then suddenly we were talking about Christ.
And a number of things happened.
First of all, my interest in the Bible changed. I used to read the Bible because I was supposed to read the Bible. I understood you are a Christian; that’s what you do. You are supposed to read the Bible.
But I would sometimes read the bit I was supposed to read, close my Bible, go off into the day and I would forget an hour later anything I had read.
But now when I sat down with people and we were talking about the Gospel, they were asking me questions I hadn’t a clue what the answers were. “What does the Bible say?”
I hadn’t a clue what the Bible said about such and such, so I had to go back and start to read my Bible to answer the questions of people who I had talked to a few days ago and sometimes who I was going to meet again the next weekend. So I had to work out some answers by then.
Also, my praying before that had just been very predictable dull praying. “Thank You for keeping me alive today. Please give me a good sleep tonight. Please bless my family and all my friends and please bless all the missionaries and save everybody else on the planet. Amen.”
That was basically what it was – vague, general.
Now I was having to pray – “I want to pray for Jack; I am going to meet him on Friday night. We talked last Friday. We are going to meet in the same coffee bar next Friday.” And began to pray God would do something in his life.
And all of this was part of what created then a deepening appetite and a hunger and a longing. That’s why encourage your kids to get involved in service. It doesn’t matter what it is – just the principle that I am here to bless you, I am here to do things for you; I am here to help you. And it will develop and it will grow.
And if we teach because our heart is full, our heart becomes fuller because we teach.
You know in this church we have something like 1600 active volunteers in ministry currently. They were counted just two or three months ago. And that was the phenomenal figure – I thought it was a phenomenal figure – who are actively involved in a whole multiplicity of ministries in serving other people.
I will tell you this about those 1600 people – they are the ones who will grow. The rest of us; I hope we are growing too. But they are the ones who are going to grow.
You get the odd one of course who falls away, but by and large as they minister to others, they find that their resources to flow out have to be deepened and the flowing out deepens their resources and they grow.
But he says you ought to be teaching, you ought to be serving, but you are not. Why? Because you are just on the bottle, you are just living “my own nutritional needs spiritually” and nothing more than that.
You can begin small. Do you know that at 7:30 every Sunday morning there is a prayer walk that goes from this church around to this area? And over the couple years that it has been taking place the number of relationships that have been built in our community have been like they have never been in the history of this church.
Some of you could join them one Sunday morning. Join them once and just see. No strings and no obligations – just go, see what it’s like, 7:30. Especially now it’s getting to summer; it’s much more fun than in the winter.
Some of you maybe should be teaching in Sunday school, some of you involved in the youth ministry, some of you on the ushering team. Many of you need to go through the “Rooted” course.
Did you know that in our baptism service two weeks ago that the biggest single contributor were those who had been in “Rooted” courses because suddenly something had come alive for them.
And from that into life groups, which is the heart of the spiritual life and fellowship within a church this size.
But serve in some capacity, not only because you have a desire to, but because in doing so, your output will create a greater need for input and you will start to grow.
But like I said, there is no fast track. If we are ever going to grow spiritually, we have got to bring our lives into conformity with those things which enable us to grow. Or like these folks in Hebrews, we are just on the bottle.
Now if the first question is what is spiritual growth, my second question is why is spiritual growth necessary?
And the answer is, and then I will show you this, the answer is because we must go forward because we cannot go backward, and therefore we just become static and mouldy.
Let me read again Hebrews 6:1:
“Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity.”
(Remember that’s the theme of this section.)
“…not laying again the foundation of…”
And then he gives a list of six things which he says are the foundation, are the elementary teachings of the Christian gospel and they are these: he says,
“laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death,”
(That’s simply a change of mind about myself, about sin, about God.)
Then he says,
“…and of faith in God…”
So we turn from myself to God and put my trust in Him.
Hebrews 6:2:
“…the instruction about baptisms”
(That is a public declaration of our faith in Christ)
“…the laying on of hands…”
(That was associated with the receiving of the Holy Spirit in Scripture)
“…the resurrection of the dead”
(That’s a confidence in the future – death has lost its sting)
“…and eternal judgement (which makes us valuable because it makes us accountable).
Now these things, he says, are the foundation of the elementary teachings about Christ that you have received – repentance, faith, baptism, laying on of hands, resurrection, eternal judgement. That’s a comprehensive theology from repentance to the eternal judgement. But this is the Sunday school curriculum of the Christian life. These things are necessary right at the beginning.
Now he says we need to go on to maturity, which is not going from these things to other things because the principle of spiritual growth is not only grow from to another, but we grow in things, we grow more deeply into those same things. That is the essence of spiritual growth. We grow deeper, we grow further, we become richer, we become fuller in some of these things.
But here’s why it is vital that we do go on, because in Hebrews 6:4,
“It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age…”
(That’s a full experience of God he describes there.)
“It’s impossible…if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
Now this verse has to be read very carefully in its context or it may lead to confusion. Some people have concluded it means that if you fall away from God it is impossible to come back to God, it is impossible to repent again, impossible to come back.
It seems to me that it is actually teaching the exact opposite of that, and I will show you why.
If the theme is “let’s go on to maturity”, which it is, the reason is because you have laid the foundation that begins with repentance (that’s the initial foundation); you have laid the foundation (let me do it this way because then that’s more foundation).
You have laid the foundation of repentance. Now I want you to go on to maturity because if you do not, it is impossible for you to go back to where you were before.
In other words, it is impossible for you to become in that position of being unsaved.
Christians repent of course because we are told to in, for instance, the first three chapters of Revelation. Jesus wrote to seven churches and to five of the seven churches he said, “you need to repent, you need to repent, you need to repent, you need to repent (these are Christians), you need to repent.”
So, it doesn’t mean it is impossible to repent, but what it means is in the way the writer has described it, that if the foundation is repentance, you need to go on to maturity because you cannot go back again and start again at the foundation. You cannot go back there because you are now already locked in to Jesus Christ.
If he had said, instead, “not laying again the foundation of the new birth” instead of the foundation of repentance, it would then say in Verse 4, “if they fall away, it would be impossible to be brought back to the new birth.”
And we would say of course that makes sense; we could understand that, because you are already alive. You can’t go back if you are already alive, and start again.
You and I were born physically on a certain date. If you mess up your life you can’t say, “Ah, man, this is such a mess; I am going to go back and start again. I am going to go back to my mother’s womb and start again.” You can’t do that.
You can’t do that spiritually.
So, here’s the consequence of not growing. In Hebrews 6:6:
“So to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
He’s saying you must go on to maturity simply because you cannot go back to the beginning. And therefore if you do not want the maturity, what you do is you subject Jesus Christ to public disgrace.
Your life becomes an insult to the Gospel of Jesus Christ rather than a glorifying of Jesus Christ because the life you live tells the people next door there’s absolutely no value in being a Christian. There are no virtues that are any different or better than the next person, and you subject Christ to disgrace.
Jesus told a story once about a man who laid a foundation – similar metaphor. He doesn’t have the resources to complete the building so he has laid the foundation and stuck in a few half walls and then he has to quit.
And Jesus said about that man if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it everyone who sees it will ridicule him saying, this fellow began to build and was unable to finish.
This is the picture here that if we do not go on, if we do not grow, if we do not come to maturity, you cannot go back and un-Christianize yourself, un-convert yourself. So you remain a Christian but now you are a disgrace to the name of Jesus Christ.
No non-Christians are a disgrace to the name of Jesus Christ because they are not a Christian. But it is the Christian who is, who is not maturing, who is content to live on bottle-fed Christianity, sucks his bottle every Sunday morning and that’s about it, but doesn’t have the meat and the depth and the quality and the righteousness that comes from Christ and the constant use of the Word of God so that he distinguishes between what is right and wrong and good and bad.
You know the first Bible people ever read is usually us. Somebody else has made that statement before. The first Bible I ever read is you, but I had somebody say once as well, there are three testaments in the Bible, three testaments in which God reveals Himself.
There is the Old Testament, there is the New Testament, and there is the You Testament. And Paul wrote about that when he said to the Corinthians, “You yourselves are epistles (that is, letters) known and read by everybody.”
Your life every time you walk down the road is a letter. What does it say about Jesus Christ? Because if we do not go on and we cannot go back, we subject Him to disgrace.
Now notice he says, Hebrews 6:6,
“To their loss, they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”
I think that “crucifying the Son of God all over again” simply means you have made His cross redundant. You have not entered into all the benefits of it, which are that you are now united with Christ and that you have in Him your life and your righteousness. But he says, “To their loss.” There are those people who will fall away from following in the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply because they think it will be to their benefit to do so. It is always to their loss, always to their loss.
And so we either go on or we subject Jesus Christ to public disgrace.
And that brings me to the third, very briefly, question, which is how? What is spiritual growth, firstly? Why is spiritual growth necessary, secondly? How is spiritual life nurtured, thirdly?
And in Hebrews 6:9-12 he says,
“Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case – things that accompany salvation.”
In other words, he is saying there, “I am sorry to speak to you like this. I don’t like to tell you that you need to keep moving, but I need to. And I need you to know, says the writer, all the things that accompany salvation.”
If you define salvation as the basics – out of hell into heaven – there are many, many things that accompany salvation. He then says in the next verse, Hebrews 6:10,
“God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.
“We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.
“We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.”
So, he says, “I am confident” that his readers don’t want to be like that.
And equally I am confident you don’t want to be like that. You probably wouldn’t be here on a Sunday morning if you did.
But like them, as many people do, we have participated on a certain superficial level. He says you have been helping the people of God, as many of you do. We are thrilled with the way people participate in our mission funding, our faith promise and the generosity of this congregation.
But he says we are grateful for that but we are confident of better things. And these better things are nurtured in four ways.
Hebrews 6:11: you show diligence to the very end. That is, you stick with it through thick and thin. You are not just drifting and if the wind blows you go with it, if it blows over there, you go with it, but you are diligent in your Christian life and you are diligent in your relationship with God.
The second part of Hebrews 6:11: that you make your hope sure, that you work it through, that you deal with the doubts; you arrive at this place of certainty.
Hebrews 6:12: you don’t become lazy. Spiritual laziness is probably the curse of our busy lives. It leaves us wading around in the shallows because we don’t exercise the diligence and discipline that he talks about here that is necessary to spiritual growth.
And then in Verse 12 he says, through faith and patience we inherit what has been promised.
Notice how faith and patience go together there. Faith, yes, through trust in God, trust in His ability, trust in His sufficiency. “God, I trust You; my faith is in You.”
That is one aspect but with that, patience, because growth is not instant or overnight. And there are many things that come into our lives we don’t understand and we say, “I am trusting You God; why has this happened?”
“Well, be patient, be patient.”
Faith and patience go together.
Eugene Peterson in one of the titles of one of his books calls it “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.” Patience along with faith, because growth is incremental.
And we are the last people to see it anyway. It is other people who see it first. That’s why don’t naval gaze about how you are doing but keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith.
And as we do so, we will be growing, we will be maturing, we will be becoming more fruitful, and we will inherit, as he says here; we will inherit what is promised.
If you are not yet born again here this morning, never come to the cross in confession of your sin to seek Christ as your Saviour, then you can be born again here this morning.
As Peter writes in 1 Peter 2:2,
“Like newborn babes, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”
Come to Christ and crave the milk – that’s your entitlement as a baby Christian – crave the milk, take what you can digest, absorb what is absorbable to you. And as you mature you will leave the milk and go for the meat.
But if you are born again here this morning, then the message of Hebrews 5 and 6 is grow up. Don’t be spiritual babies. Don’t keep sticking a spiritual bottle in front of yourself. Mature. Go to the solid food. Go to the meat and potatoes. Discover what your righteousness is in everyday living, not just your label for when you go to heaven.
Constantly use the Word of God that you are not confused in this confusing generation of which we are a part. And be diligent. Don’t be lazy. And with faith and patience coupled together, go on growing and serve other people.
And other people around you will notice you are growing. You probably won’t, but they will.
Let’s pray together.
Father, we thank You this morning that You invite us into something so much deeper and richer and fuller than we ever imagined when we first came to know You. We were content then just to know that our guilt had been taken away, and what a relief that was to our conscience. We were content then to know that beyond this human life, there is the possibility of eternity with You.
And had that been all there was that would have been enough. But thank You that is not all there was, that’s not all there is. There is the fact that You have come by the Holy Spirit to live within our lives and You are now our righteousness. You are our strength. You are our wisdom. You are our means of serving. And we pray that our lives will be built more deeply into You, in fellowship with You, through the Word of God. We know the mind of God and the heart of God and the person of God.
And we pray Lord that You will give us deeper appetites for that, to be liberated from the superficial and to find our meat and substance.