Hebrews 5:12-14

Hebrews 5:12-14

In fact, 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. 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.

If we live a largely peripheral life when it comes to our relationship with the Lord, then we are like the infants referenced in the text above that still need to be fed milk. If we just go through the motions, punch the ticket each week, and participate in church traditions (or not) because someone tells us that we are “supposed to” and we don’t personally dig into God’s word regularly, then we are going to stay as infants. We are going to be in constant need of reminders of the elementary truths of God’s word. A logical question might then be: “So what? What’s so wrong with that? I still have salvation through Christ.” What’s wrong with that is that life is not easy and life is not predictable. We are going to have challenges and difficulties thrown in our faces daily and we need to respond accordingly. If we don’t truly know God’s word, then we are largely resolved to guessing our way through the difficulty. And when we guess, when our knowledge of God’s word is weak, we lean to what we know from this world…we lean on worldly knowledge, logic, and definition of “right”. And that’s when we undoubtedly mess things up. We can’t be resolved to just taking in what the pastor/priest feeds us each week then “check out” spiritually until the next weekend rolls around. No, our goal each day should be to deepen our relationship with the Lord. Our goal with each new sunrise should be to grow stronger, better equipped, and more disciplined in our calling as servants to the Lord. And we can’t do that unless we choose to personally “own” our relationship with God. And by own, I mean actually invest time and energy into deepening our understanding of God’s word. If we want to grow in our careers, we put in extra time working late hours. If we want to grow in a relationship with a significant other, we put in extra time getting to know that person. If we want our children to excel in some arena, we put in extra hours helping them refine and develop their skills. We give so much extra time to many things in this life…what about extra time for the Lord? What about investing time and energy into the one thing in our existence that has no expiration date…the one thing that is truly eternal while everything else is temporary? May we take time each day to make our relationship with the Lord a true priority. May we take time each day to personally invest in deepening our faith. May we take time each day to grow from our infancy, to deepen our knowledge of God’s word, and to become greater servants to Him. To God alone be the glory!