Let's turn back to Hebrews chapter five. We're going to be looking this evening at verses 11 through 15, 14. Let's read 14 together. But solid food is for the mature. for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. If I was to give you a choice this evening, on the one hand, here's a Chick-fil-A milkshake And on the other hand, there's a Ruth's Chris Steak. Which one would you choose? Not asking for answers out loud, but we know which one we would choose, don't we? And our choice usually reveals our age. There's a certain age cutoff where you can almost 100% say it's gonna be a Chick-fil-A milkshake. And there's another age cutoff where you can almost say for sure it's going to be a ruscristeak. And that choice is before us spiritually every day. God sets before us a choice between, as we'll see in these verses, milk and meat. and he wants us to move from milk to meat. In other words, he wants us to move from being spiritual children, spiritual babies, to being spiritually mature. How do we do that? How do I progress from milk to meat? This chapter, as you know, has been going into some truths that are difficult to understand, initially at least. And therefore Paul comes to the point in verse 11 and he says, about this we have much to say. Now what is the this he's referring to here? Some people say it's verse 10, this rather mysterious person, Melchizedek, who's been referred to already in this chapter, in verse six, and who'll be mentioned again in chapter seven extensively. And some people say, well, this is who Paul's referring to, that he'd love to go into more detail on this mysterious person of Melchizedek, but you're really not up to it yet. But it's much more likely, because he does go into that later, it's much more likely that he's talking really about the person and work of Christ, which has been his topic throughout this book. And he really wants to dig in deeper with the Hebrew Christians, and yet he says, I've got to pause. As he says here about this, we have much to say and it's hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. Let's see how he encourages them to move from being spiritual babies to spiritual adults, from milk to meat. And as we do so, remember, Paul here is expressing the heart and mind of God himself. Paul's desire to see them move It reflects God's desire to see us move from milk to meat. So how do we do that? Well, first of all, we're told here milk is for babies. Now children, what if you went into your kitchen one day and you saw a high chair and your dad is sitting in it with a milk bottle and he's sucking away on this milk bottle? Well, you would say, that's ridiculous. That's so inappropriate. Dad, what are you doing? This is a place for children and that bottle is for a baby. What are you doing? Well, really that's what the apostle wants us to think about ourselves if we are spiritually immature. He wants us to see how incongruous, how inappropriate it is for us to be like that despite maybe many years in the Christian faith. Let's see how he explains that. He says, first of all, I've got much to say, but it's hard to explain. It's hard for me to get this across to you. It's hard for me to teach it in a way that is understandable. Why? Because you become dull of hearing. He said it's as if you've got wax in your ears. And when I teach you, all you can hear is like mumbles. And it's really not getting through to your mind in a way that you can process and benefit from. You're dull of hearing. Secondly, he says, you need to redo elementary school. For though by this time, verse 12, you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. Hebrew Christians, you know, given the time you've been following Jesus, you should be graduating teaching college. You should be now in a place where you can actually not just learn yourself, but teach others. but instead of graduating, teaching college, you really need to go back to grade one and learn the basics all over again. Because their ears had become dull of hearing, they weren't listening, and maybe as they used to, or believing what they listened as they used to, they've gone backwards. And here they are, it's been such a long time since they've really dug into the Word and pursued God that they have to go back to the beginning again. You know what it's like when you're studying, maybe you've been memorizing vocabulary or formulae for math or whatever it is, and you give it a concentrated period of time, and then you leave it, and then maybe a few weeks later, you go back and you're expecting to go into the next chapter, to learn the next words or the next formula, and you realize, I've forgotten everything already. And you have to go back to the beginning. And this is what Paul is portraying here to the Hebrew Christians. And then he says, you need milk, not solid food. You can only handle milk. Verse 12, you need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. Milk, of course, is baby food. Yeah, sure, adults can drink it too and enjoy it, but it's really been designed by God to be ideal for a baby digestive system. As he says here, everyone who lives on milk is a child. And here he's saying, why milk and not meat? Well, because the, the infant, the child digestive system just can't handle that. They don't have the teeth, they don't have the tongue, they don't have the swallow, they don't have the digestive system, the bacteria, the blood vessels and so on that are needed to take that food, process it and benefit from it. So they need a really basic kind of food like milk. And he's saying, you Hebrew Christians, and there are many like them, he's saying, you know, you really can only handle the most simple and basic of truths. We're back here in elementary, we're in grade one, and in fact, it would be dangerous for me to feed you more. It's like, you know, would you take your baby and feed them a piece of steak? No, of course not, because the baby could choke. And even if it swallowed it, its digestive system would block up. It would be dangerous. And so it is here, everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. The word of God here is pictured as something that is actually sometimes dangerous for spiritually immature people. They don't know the word enough. They don't know the connections in the word enough. They don't understand the doctrines enough. They're unskilled in the word of righteousness. It's like putting a sword in the hand of a one-year-old. It's like putting a hammer in the hand of a two-year-old boy. They're not skilled. They're not able. They don't have that capacity. They don't have that ability. And so, Spirit babes cannot themselves use the word. It needs to be fed into them by others all the time. They're not self-feeders. So what does this tell us? Well, it tells us, first of all, we all start as spiritual babies. It's not like we come to faith, and if we're old, then suddenly we are in university. No, it doesn't matter whether we come to faith when we're young, middle-aged, or old. We start, all of us, as newborn babes who desire the sincere milk of the word. And it's a beautiful moment. Paul's not looking down on that. He's only saying, that's not where we stay, but it's a wonderful place to begin. So we start as spiritual babies, recognizing that we have a lot to learn. It's not, oh, we've come to Christ, we're saved, don't need to think about the Bible or Christianity anymore, once saved, always saved, it really doesn't matter how I learn or how I live. No, it's saying, oh, I've got a lot to learn. And it's also recognizing that this is a gradual process. You can't just sit there and wait for the Bible to sort of come into your life by a process of osmosis, or in one fell swoop. It's like a baby learning to eat. It's a long, gradual process where we go from the basics to deeper and deeper truths. And what Paul makes clear here is that learning, that growing comes from listening. listening to God in his word, taking the wax out and listening carefully at every opportunity we have to God's word. It also teaches us though that there is an expected pace of learning. Paul here is clearly looking at the pace of the Hebrews, and they're going from spiritual babes to spiritual adults, and he's saying, you're not far enough along. You're way behind where you should be. You're off the pace. Let's pick it up. And if you do, you can graduate from learning to teaching. What a great privilege that is. But sometimes if we go too slow, or if we don't learn at all for a long time, we're not in the Word for a long time, we're not listening to God's Word for a long time, we need to go back to the beginning again. We need to go back to the basics. So, milk is the most basic doctrines. the most basic truths, the most basic applications of God's word, the most basic kinds of Christian experience. And Paul is saying here, you know, Hebrew Christians, I look at you and you're still learning just the letters of the alphabet. You're still on your ABC when you should be writing essays. You should be putting lessons together to teach others. And that's why this is such an appropriate picture for what Paul's portraying here, isn't it? I don't wanna be that guy, do you? And I hope that the teaching of this passage together with that image will really spur you on, really get you to think, well, am I still in the high chair? Am I still just drinking milk from a bottle? Am I dull of hearing? Am I unskilled in the word of righteousness? If so, Lord, give me a new appetite, a new desire, a new hunger, an insatiable hunger that wants to learn, that wants to grow, that wants to make progress, that wants to advance, not for personal pride, and applause of others, but so that I can know God more, worship God better, and be of more service to others as well, so that I can be a teacher, whether it's a mother to children, father to their sons and daughters, whether it's in a Sunday school class, or a catechism class, or a Bible study, or amongst your friends, you would aspire to be not the unskilled spiritual baby, but the meat-eating teacher. And so while he wants to move us away from being spiritual babies, he also wants to move us on to meat. Meat is for the mature. and chose young-looking faces here because I want to emphasize that it's not age-related. You can have old people in the high chair, and you can have younger people who are eating big, juicy steaks, and it all depends on their hunger, their appetite, their desire, their listening, their growing. Look at what he says in verse 14, but solid food is for the mature. He's saying amongst you Hebrew Christians, there are mature meat eaters. There are those whose spiritual appetites and digestive systems have developed and matured in such a way that you're able to take much more substantial, solid, food and actually profit from it. And as a result of that solid food, they have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice. The result of mature meat eating, the result of making progress and advancing in our knowledge of God and his word and of salvation is that we move away from being unskilled and even dangerous with the word of God to being able to use the word wisely, carefully, helpfully. You know, it takes a while for babies to develop the tongue strength, the teeth of course, the ability to swallow, and all the other parts they need to go from milk to mashed up rice and then a bit more meat and veg, but all mashed up, to more and more lumpy, substantial, then proper food. That takes a while. It takes practice. You can't just go from milk to meat overnight. And that's what he's talking about here. He's saying constant practice is involved here. It's a process. It's a long process. It's a demanding process. And yet the result of it is so worthwhile because we move from milk to meat. And that constant practice results in this, trained powers of discernment. Trained powers of discernment. And what is discernment? It's a God-given ability that we acquire by faith-filled reading meditating and practicing of God's Word. And it's so needed in our own day. Spiritual meat is the whole Bible. We start, of course, we just want the Gospels, the stories of Jesus. We'll never tire of them. We always want that milk. But there are parts of the Gospels even that are more meaty, especially the Gospel of John, say, much more profound. And then you go to maybe some of the Old Testament stories that start maybe simply, and then you get into all the kings and the kingdoms, and it's more demanding. and easy to get mixed up. You then have the Psalms, which gives us a measure of relief, and we enjoy that, we can run with them. Into the Proverbs, and we're struggling a bit, trying to apply it to our own day. And then we've got books like Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, demanding. We've got the Prophets, which although we might know the odd verse here and there, most of us are, not very well acquainted with either the major or the so-called minor prophets. And then you've got the epistles of Paul and Peter and John, and then you've got Revelation. We're going from paddling pool to immeasurable depths of profound truth that we will never exhaust while we are in this world. And it's not just knowledge, it's maturity is not just knowing the contents, but knowing what these contents mean. And especially what they mean for us today, how to apply them. How to make them live in our lives. How to teach them, how to share them with others. So, we so much need this word if we want spirit of discernment. Spirit of discernment, as it says here, is about distinguishing between good and evil. It says in verse 14, solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. That's what discernment's all about. It's an ability to separate. To look at a bunch of stuff and say that's good and that's evil. That's maturity. To look at claims of truth that come to us from every direction and say nope, That's not true. That's a lie. That prosperity gospel, that false teaching, it doesn't line up with the word of God. A baby might swallow that. The mature don't. And then you've got that ability to discern between what's foolish and what's wise. It's like a smoke detector in our lives. Just something inside us that There might not be any particular verse in the Bible that tells us this is foolish or this is wise, but through reading the words, you develop a sense, you develop an alarm that sounds when you're being pulled along a line that leads to foolishness, and you may be not even able to explain it, to somebody, but that's foolish. We're not going down that line. Discernment helps you discern between good fruit and bad fruit. It's like an inner fruit inspector. Discernment helps you to discern between what's helpful and what's unhelpful. Again, many things that the Bible doesn't specifically in detail address, but Paul says in these cases you ask that question, is it helpful or is it harmful? A spirit of discernment enables you to see that. It's like you read the word and it's like a lens cleaner that just takes away all the smears and all the dirt from your glasses and you're enabled to see clearly the difference between what's helpful or unhelpful. Discernment helps you to tell the difference between God's will and self-will. You know what it's like? You want to do something, and you say, well, I've got to seek God's will. And then you seek God's will and you make God's will your will. Or you make your will God's will. And it's really not God's will at all, it's just self-will. And a mature person's able to tell when they're doing that. And they're able to pull back and say, no, this is all about me. It's not about God. And it's like the old radios, before you just press the button and it automatically tuned, you've got this crackle until you eventually just, you get that sweet spot and it comes across clearly. Discernment enables you to do that, to clear the crackle of self-will away. and just key in on this is what God wants me to do, no matter what I want to do. Discernment helps you to tell the difference between faith and feelings. Again, we have our passions and our desires and our emotions and our feelings and they're often very powerful in our lives. And then there's the facts of God's word. Discernment is the GPS of our life that guides us clearly when we've got lots of backseat drivers telling us our feelings, telling us, we'll go this way, oh no, go that way. I feel like we'll go around this path today. No, I feel like that path. And discernment says be quiet and let me focus on the GPS of God's word. Discernment helps us discern the meaning of providence, events that happen in our lives or in our world, and it perplexes many, but by reading God's word, you have a new way of looking at the world that enables you to see purpose and meaning. Discernment helps you to apply God's work, to put it into practice, the principles, what they look like in practice in our own day. And when somebody's brought up in the church and they come to faith in their teens or their 20s or later in life, they start as spiritual babies but they've got a huge store of food in the kitchen. It's that truth that they've built up over the years that they've really not taken into their lives. They just keep stored up. They know all about it. They know where to get different things, but it's not come into them in a life-changing way. When they are converted, when they're brought to faith, they have a huge advantage. because they've got all these stores of truth that have been stored there over the years and now they have an appetite for it. Now they don't just know it, they want it in their hearts. They want to actually taste it and savor it and grow from it and be changed by it. And so they develop usually a discernment much quicker. than maybe somebody who comes from no background of gospel teaching whatsoever. To me, it's a great vision that God sets before us here. He's presenting it in very few words, but in such a way that it's meant to pull us in. I want that. I really want that. Who wouldn't want to have powers of discernment Yes, there's a battle towards it, there's training, there's discipline, there's study, there's perplexity, sometimes you just don't know. And we need to pray for the Holy Spirit to open up the Scriptures and to open up our hearts so that this spirit of discernment grows in us. But what a useful person you become. Not just someone who knows God, but someone who can teach about God and bring that rare spirit of discernment into everyday life. So, meat is for the mature. How do we progress from milk to meat? Eat more Bible. to exercise more discernment. Eat more Bible. And by that, it involves chewing, digesting, delighting in, and the result is more discernment. And here's the wonderful thing. More discernment gives you more appetite. a more desire for God's word, and it's a beautiful cycle or circle of blessing that we get involved in. Who doesn't want to move from being a baby to being an adult, from milk to maturity? Even though it will take time, it will take effort. It's like the chef in the kitchen. You know, You and I, we go into a kitchen, unless we're in the food industry, we taste something and it tastes good. Taste it the next day, tastes the same. Taste it the next day, tastes the same. But a chef, someone whose taste buds have been trained and exercised by constant use, they can tell, nope, that doesn't meet the standard. That's not good enough. And so we want that chef spirit. cultivated in us in a spiritual sense. So I'll go back to the beginning. Milkshakes or steak? Chick-fil-A or Rooskris? Thankfully, we don't need to pay Rooskris prices, okay? Because God's word is free. But we're invited to dive into this word, to delight in it, to digest it, and to become discerning. And one last word. Remember the apostle Peter in our call to worship said, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. That's where we must begin. Tasting the grace of God. That's the first atom of food that we begin with. We can't go past grace, salvation by grace, salvation by grace without works. That is what springs new taste buds into life. If you have tasted that the Lord is gracious and if you want to move from being a baby to an adult, from milk to meat, this is where we must start. tasting that the Lord is gracious. And the more we taste that, the more appetite we'll have to grow and increase and progress. And that's open to anyone and everyone here. Taste His grace and then grow in grace. Let's pray.