Marks of Maturity (Hebrews 5:13-14)

Kootenai Church

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Hebrews chapter five, we're gonna read together verse 11 through the end of the chapter, verse 14.

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Hebrews five, beginning of verse 11. Concerning him we have much to say and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing.

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For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God and have come to need milk and not solid food.

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For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.

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Let's pray together. Father, it is our desire and our prayer that we may hear you and the words of our

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God in the pages of scripture. It is in your word that you speak to us. You have spoken to your people through the written word and we do not listen for your voice outside of scripture and apart from the revelation that is before us.

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And so we long to hear you speak to us today through these words. Help us to understand this text and we pray that you would give to us illumination.

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May your Holy Spirit be our teacher and your word our guide this morning as your glory is our everlasting concern.

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We ask this in the name of Christ and for his sake. Amen. Well, in the last couple of weeks, we've been examining this issue of Christian maturity and progressing in our faith and we have gone through the end of verse 12 in chapter five where we saw the author's concern was for those who had become lazy in their listening and had need again to be taught all over again the elementary basic introductory principles of the gospel, those things which had pertaining to their salvation and the spiritual state of these believers concerned him in verses 11 and 12, because they had become slothful and sluggish in their response to the truth.

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Having heard the truth, they remained unmoved by it and that state of spiritual apathy was as dangerous to them as any type of spiritual apostasy could be.

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That state of spiritual apathy was as dangerous as any magnanimous or fantastic sin that they could have fallen into.

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And one of the things we need to be aware of as Christians is that we stay away from that spiritual apathy and recognize it when it creeps into our lives that we don't wanna become slow and slack in our listening and in our hearing because Satan does not have to get us to commit some huge sin in order to take us out of the game.

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Doesn't have to do that. But he is content if he could just make us spiritually apathetic. Satan does not have to get you to fall into a massive black hole, sinkhole of sin, and then write your name in big letters across the sky to the everlasting shame of you and your family and your church and your ministry and everything else you have ever done and ruin your reputation for the rest of your life.

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He doesn't need to do that to nullify your effectiveness in the kingdom of God. He can accomplish the same thing if he can just make you a lazy listener.

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If he can just get us to the point where we are apathetic about the truth, where our hearts are not inflamed with affection for Christ, when we are not concerned about our spiritual state, if he can get us to that point, he can accomplish that end, he can work with that.

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It's a good start for him. He can accomplish that end as easily that way as to get you to commit some massive sin.

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And so this laziness, this sluggishness on behalf of the listeners of Hebrews, the author is concerned about that because he knows that it was a harbinger of horrible spiritual danger.

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Now we're looking at what are the marks of maturity in verses 13 and 14. So we might say we understand what it is to be slothful or slow of listening and hearing where the truth makes no effect on us.

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And he wants us, the author does, to move into spiritual maturity, Christian maturity. But what does that look like?

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What does scripture say that a spiritually mature believer is? And what are the characteristics or the marks of maturity?

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It would be nice for us, I think, in one way, if we had some sort of a chart, wouldn't it? A guide, like maybe a

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J -curve sort of a graph or like a stock market type of a graph. We have ups and downs and peaks and valleys.

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And if we had something against which we could measure ourselves, some objective standard, we could say, well,

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I measure up or I don't measure up or I'm here in my progress and I should be here. I'm ahead of the curve or I'm behind the curve.

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That would kind of be nice, wouldn't it? It'd be nice if we had some online tool where we could just go through a series of dropdown menus.

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How long have you been a believer? Zero to three years, three to six years, six to 10 years, et cetera.

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Which church do you attend? Do you like expository preaching? How many kids do you have? What's your wife like?

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Answer all those questions, be able to sort of find out where you're at. How many times a day do you read your Bible?

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How much do you pray? And you go through all the answers, just a few basic questions, and then you hit see results. And then you pay the little fee or whatever it is that they want you to watch the advertisement and then your results come up and you could print it up.

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Here's my score, my spiritual score out of 100 is this. And here I am, I'm in this percentile. Other people who have been a believer as long as I have are in that same ballpark and kind of go to the same church

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I did. Here's where we're all at on the J curve. I'm ahead of the curve or I'm behind the curve. If we had some objective measure, that would be good.

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And then we could have a list where after you hit print up results, it would tell you, by this stage of your

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Christian life, you should no longer struggle with this sin, this sin, or this sin. And at this point in your

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Christian life, after being a Christian for so many years, these things will no longer be a temptation for you.

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These weaknesses that you once had, you'll no longer struggle with those. You used to bark at your wife so many times a week, by now it's down to this many times a week.

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And if you can hit all of these benchmarks of maturity and you're using your spiritual gift and people say these things about you, then you're within the certain percentile of your spiritual maturity, that'd be great, wouldn't it?

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Now in some sense, there's part of me that would like something like that because I like lists and I like standards and I like checklists and I have lists for my lists and I like to -do lists and I like task lists and I like scheduled lists, as long as they're written by me.

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So I'm not a big fan of to -do lists and task lists that are written by anybody else, even if she shares my bed and my last name.

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As long as they're written by me, I like to have something, some sort of a benchmark that I can compare myself against and see how

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I'm doing and how I am progressing. But you can probably see very quickly how difficult that would be, a system like that.

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Because the fact is that not all of us are saved out of the same environments. There are too many factors that come into this, too many variables, we're not all saved out of the same environment.

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Some people are saved out of a cult and they've been in a cult for generations and their parents were in that cult and they were in that cult and they spent 40 years in that cult and they have adopted a certain way of thinking and certain doctrines and practices and ways of viewing the world.

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Those things don't let go easily and other people are not saved out of a cult, they're saved out of a Christian home in a good solid church.

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Some people are saved out of horribly depraved and deprived backgrounds where they have been in bondage to a certain sin for decades of their life and they're redeemed out of say homosexuality or drug abuse or prostitution or some sort of an environment or a background where they've been enslaved to something and then somebody else gets saved and they grew up in a

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Christian home and from the earliest of years, their parents have been sharing the gospel with them from as early as they can remember and grown up and nurtured them in a

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Christian environment, take them to church in Awana and Sunday school. The trajectory of those two types of people is gonna be radically different.

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Can you recognize that? What their spiritual progress is going to look like, the speed at which they're sanctified and grow in their holiness, as well as the route that the

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Holy Spirit might take those individuals through and not only we saved out of different environments, all of us are saved into a different environment.

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Some of us are saved and the first day we darken the door of a church, it's in a solid church with good leadership and good preaching and sound doctrine and people come alongside us and nurture us and care for us and teach us and shepherd us and we grow like weeds in an environment like that.

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Others of us are saved and the first time we darken a door at a church, it's in a church with bad doctrine and shallow teaching and shallow preaching and you don't learn anything and you remain a spiritual babe for decades of your life and years later you leave and you wonder, what was

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I doing in that environment? Why in the world would I stay there for so long? We're all saved into different environments. Some of us are saved into a hostile environment.

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Some of us are saved into a Christian environment. This is very supportive. Some of us are saved into a family that has other believers in it.

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Some of us are saved and we go back to a family and we're like brands plucked from the fire, as it were. We have nobody in our environment who's a

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Christian, nobody who can sympathize with us, nobody who knows what the struggles are that we're going through and all of us are saved at different times in our life.

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The spiritual trajectory of somebody who's saved when they're 16 with all of their trials and struggles and tribulations and temptations is gonna be different than somebody whom the

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Lord redeems when they're 60 years old and the trajectory of those two people is going to be different over the course of their lives and then how do you measure what the work that the spirit of God himself does?

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That's another variable. The Holy Spirit doesn't use an algorithm or a chart or a path, right?

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He doesn't use dropdown menus to figure out where we're at. He, by his sovereignty and his providence sanctifies all of his people at different rates and in different places and in different ways.

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He knows what sins need to be addressed and it's different for each of us. Some of you, when you got saved, the very first thing the

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Lord did was take away one sin that you struggled with your whole life and the minute you got redeemed, all of a sudden a sin wasn't even there anymore.

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In other words, you can identify a sin that is still in your life, a temptation that you still have, something you still wage war against and put to death every day of your life that was there before you got saved and you will wage war against that sin for the rest of your life until the

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Lord takes you home to glory. So the Holy Spirit doesn't follow an algorithm or a pattern or some sort of a formula that we can look at.

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It's not the same with everybody and his sovereignty and his providence, all of that is different. And listen, since you can't predict that and you can't pattern it, there's no way you could measure it.

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And even if there were a pattern, a chart, a gray J curve or a stock market type of a graph that you could set yourself up against and measure where you're at in a certain percentile, do you really think that you would have the ability to objectively assess the state of your own heart to compare yourself against a graph?

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We're so radically different, aren't we? And yet there is one thing that regardless of when you were saved, how you were saved, what you were saved out of, what you were saved into, where you have been in your life, what sins you struggle with, whether you were saved 2000 years ago, some of you look like that's when you got saved, others of you were saved more recently, right?

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No matter what time in the period of church history you got saved into or out of, there is something that is the same for all of us, regardless of our culture, our background, our family situation, there's something that all of us share in common and it is this, the goal, the objective.

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There is a goal that we all share and it is Christlikeness. Because God has predestined us to be conformed to the image of Christ and that benchmark does not change and it is not altered by culture, it is not changed by our circumstances, there is an objective, a goal, a standard that is not amorphous, it's not mysterious, it does not change and it is right there in front of all of us.

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All of us have different paths to that goal but all of us are heading to that goal and the closer we get to that goal, the more our sanctification looks alike.

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And you never reach that goal of perfect Christlikeness until the Lord takes you home to glory but that is what he is moving us toward.

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And so now we ask, what then does that Christlikeness look like, at least in terms of the Hebrews and what the author of Hebrews wanted for those believers and then what would that look like for us?

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And so we're picking it up in verse 13, let's read verses 13 and 14 together again. In verses 11 and 12, remember the author expresses his concern with their immaturity.

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Now in verses 13 and 14, he is going to contrast the immaturity with the mature and he is going to do this in four ways which

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I'm gonna give you here in just a second. And in verses 13 and 14, he is giving us some marks of maturity that we can glean from this passage.

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Beginning in verse 13, for everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness for he is an infant.

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But solid food is for the mature who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.

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Now there are in those two verses four things that are contrasts and I'm gonna show them to you in the passage. We're not going to address them in the order in which they appear in our

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English translation, but I just want you to see in verse 13, he is describing the infant. In verse 14, he is describing the one who is mature.

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So that's the first contrast, the contrast between the infant and the mature. Second, there is a contrast between the milk and the solid food.

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The infant in verse 13 partakes only of milk. The mature believer partakes of solid food, verse 14.

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Then there is the contrast between those who are accustomed in verse 13, or better said, those who are not accustomed and the idea of practicing, having your senses trained to discern good and evil because of practice.

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So those who are not accustomed and those who are practiced at something. That's the third contrast.

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And the fourth contrast is between the word of righteousness and discerning good and evil.

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And if you identify those four contrasts, it helps you when you see the parallelism between verses 13 and 14, it helps you to understand what he means by word of righteousness and discerning good from evil.

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Because we can put them opposite of each other and say, how did these play in with being mature and being immature? So first contrast, the mature and the infant.

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The second contrast, solid food and milk. The third contrast, being accustomed and being practiced, or not accustomed and being practiced.

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And then the word of righteousness and discerning good and evil. And I think this will make sense as we work our way through it. Again, not in the order that our

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English translation has those words necessarily because sentence structure kind of mixes them up, but we'll take it in sort of a logical order.

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So the first contrast is between the infants and the mature. You'll see in verse 13, he speaks of infant at the end of the verse in the

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NASB, for everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness and he is an infant. And that state of spiritual infancy, of babiness, is contrasted to the mature in verse 14, but solid food is for the mature.

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So we have described in verse 13, the infant, which these Hebrew Christians were, they had come to the point where they needed to be taught milk and not solid food.

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And these spiritual infants had come to the point where they needed to be taught again, the elemental and simple principles of the gospel.

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They had regressed to the point of needing again to be taught these basic instructions. So they are spiritual infants in every way.

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They had not grown up spiritually. All of their Christian lives, they had sat in a high chair and being spoon fed, pablum and milk, and that was all that their diet had consistent.

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Only milk. So these are spiritual infants. And the goal for the Christian is always maturity.

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What does maturity looks like? It looks like Jesus Christ. So that's the objective. That's the goal toward which we're moving.

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And there are certain things that mark those who are mature. So the goal to which we're moving is maturity in the faith, which is described in verse 14.

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And we see what some of those marks are here in a moment. But first I want you to recognize the scripture always chastised or chides those who are childish and naive.

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That's something to remember. Scripture never commends childishness. Scripture commends child likeness in terms of our faith.

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Right? Didn't Jesus say, let the little children come unto me and receives them. And everybody who has faith like these little children is in my kingdom.

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Doesn't he say that? He does. But in those instances, he is not commending a certain state of spiritual immaturity, a lack of understanding and discernment and development.

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He is describing there the purity and the simplicity of saving faith. Just like a child looks to their parent and there is a simple trust upon them for all of their needs.

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So we are to come to Christ with that kind of simple, pure, unadulterated, believing faith.

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It is the faith that's being described there, not a level of immaturity. Jesus was not commending immaturity.

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That scripture condemns immaturity and chides those who are immature in their faith. First Corinthians three, verse one, to the church in Corinth, Paul said, and I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of the flesh, as to infants in Christ.

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There's a strong rebuke there. Like the author of Hebrews, I can't address you as those who are mature.

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I got to speak to you like your little children. First Corinthians 14, 20, brethren, do not be children in your thinking.

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Yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature. There is one aspect in which is okay to be immature, an infant.

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In regards to evil, not knowing it well, not being experienced in it, right?

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A simple, be an infant in regards to the things which are evil, don't be experienced, don't be articulate with it.

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Just let those things be to you like they were when you were a child. First Corinthians 16, 13, be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men and be strong.

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See, it is not childishness that is commended in scripture. It's not immaturity and naivete.

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It is a manly approach to the spiritual life, one of maturity. That is what we are to strive for. That's the goal.

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There are dangers to immaturity and God has given pastors and teachers and gifted men and apostles and prophets to the church and he has given scripture so that we might grow up.

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Ephesians 4, verse 13 says, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the son of God, to a mature man.

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Listen to what Paul says we are to aim for. We are to be mature men to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

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Remember, so what does maturity looks like? It looks like Jesus, a spiritual maturity. So here the author, Paul says, we are to mature up and to grow up like spiritual men unto that measure, that stature, which belongs to Christ.

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That's the goal, that's the objective. Verse 14 says, as a result, we're no longer to be children tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming.

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But we are to speak the truth in love. We are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head, even

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Christ. That is a call to press on to maturity. Again, it's not childishness and childlikeness that is commended in scripture, not naivete and immaturity.

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It is maturity and manliness and an ability to handle accurately the word of truth and to be mature in our faith.

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That is what scripture commends. And our culture is the exact opposite. And I hope you recognize this, that our culture promotes a continual adolescence, a continual dependence.

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Don't move out of the house. Don't grow up. Don't be self -sufficient. Don't do your own thing. Don't be mature.

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Don't act mature. Be immature as long as you possibly can. Enjoy your childhood, even if it means you're doing it when you're 35.

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Enjoy your childhood. That's what the world says. And the church accommodates that. Oftentimes by serving up, as we talked about several weeks ago, spiritual pablum and milk and never encouraging people to grow up in their faith.

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That's not commendable at all. It's condemnable. We're to leave behind these things and to seek to be mature and well -handled and well -gifted and well -able in every aspect of our faith.

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Theology, doctrine, philosophy of ministry, our approach to our lives and how we obey the Lord, all of those are to be marked by maturity.

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So that's the first contrast between the infant and the mature. The second contrast is between milk and solid food.

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They had come to need, verse 12 says, they had come to need milk and not solid food. There's a point at which they had progressed to the point where you thought that they were moving on and growing up and starting to take on solid food and eating that in a spiritual sense.

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But now they had regressed to now they needed milk again. They had come to need to be taught the elemental things of the word of God.

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And now they've come to the point where they hungered for the milk and not solid food. And that tells you a tremendous amount about the spiritual status of these

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Hebrew Christians. What you hunger for speaks volumes about your spiritual maturity.

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What you hunger for speaks volumes of your spiritual maturity. They had come to the point where they just, man, just give me milk.

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They just wanted milk. And they couldn't handle solid food. And if somebody came and gave them solid spiritual food that might grow them up and mature them and bring them along and teach them the truth and press them into deeper understandings of truth, they just, they didn't like that.

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And they didn't like the taste of it. They didn't like the sound of it. They had come to need milk. And that's what they hungered for.

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What you hunger for speaks volumes of your spiritual maturity. But doesn't, you might say,

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Peter say that we are to long for the pure milk of the word. Doesn't he commend that? First Peter chapter two verses one through three,

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Peter says, therefore putting aside all malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander like newborn babies long for the pure milk of the word so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation if you have tasted the kindness of the

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Lord. So Peter there tells us that we're to long for the milk. Doesn't he? Is there a difference between what

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Peter's describing and what the author of Hebrews is describing? There is, because Peter is not saying, look, you need to not pursue maturity.

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Just be forever a Christian who just has milk and that's all you get. Just simple superficial stuff.

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Don't long to be deep, don't long to be profound or to understand truth or anything like that. That's not what Peter is commending. In that passage,

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Peter is describing the hunger that we should have for the word of God. If anything, he is describing the status of a mature

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Christian who longs to be taught truth, who hungers after truth and for truth.

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That is what he desires. He doesn't want just milk. He wants solid food so that he may grow and the solid food is the word of God.

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So in that passage, Peter's describing the longing that we are to have, the hunger that we are to have, the passion for scripture, not necessarily the type of food that we are to eat.

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Like babies, we as Christians are to hunger for that milk of the word, that word which nourishes and cherishes, nourishes us and builds us up and makes us mature.

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There's a physical analogy here that the author of Hebrews is playing on and I want you to notice it. It is the physical analogy of what happens when a child grows up and goes through the stages of needing different types of nourishment.

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You're familiar with this because you know that an infant takes milk and that's all they're capable of handling.

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You can't put meat into the mouth of an infant. They can't take that, their digestive system cannot process that, their teeth cannot chew that, they're not able to take that in at all.

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But they will, starting off with just milk, they will reach a point where that milk becomes mush, it's blended up peas and carrots and other things and you kind of spin all that together and give that to them on spoon and that's a little bit better.

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And then there comes a point where that mush turns into meat and they're able to eat meat. So they go from milk to mush to meat.

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But imagine somebody who has gone from meat and now he just wants the Gerber bottle with whipped peas and carrots.

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If you went to a man who is accustomed to solid food, who has grown to the point where they can process that and you offer them a bacon cheeseburger, smoked on a grill, you offer them that, or a can of blended peas and carrots in a

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Gerber bottle, what do you think he's going to choose? He's gonna gag visibly over the idea of eating the blended peas and carrots, he doesn't want that, he wants the meat, why?

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Because he's become accustomed to solid food. And there is a process, and even in our own kids, when they move from milk to mush to meat and then they get to the point where they have, and they also have to have more of these things.

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It starts off with just a little bit of milk is fine and then they want more of that milk and then they're eating constantly and you move them on to solid food and they eat tons of that and they're eating solid food and then they grow up and they want meat and then like a cloud of locusts, they come in and consume all the consumable food in the whole house and eat you out of house and home until they finally move out.

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And then you hope that the Lord, after you take a sigh of relief, that the Lord lets you live long enough to see them have teenagers that eat everything that they earn for them.

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And maybe that's just me, but that's, I think, the process that we all go through, right? So not only do they need different types of food, but they need larger quantities of food.

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And so it is with a Christian who's growing in their maturity and in their walk with the Lord. Start off with milk, that's fine, but eventually you gotta move to the point where you're having mush and then some solid food and then more and more of it.

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So that these disciplines and these character qualities and virtues that scripture describes are evident within us.

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These are the qualities of an infant that they need milk and that they only want milk.

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And if you are only fed milk, you will never mature. You cannot, you cannot be spiritually mature if you sit in an environment where all you were ever fed is simplistic chicken soup for the soul, teaching and sermons.

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That's all you listen to. If you're content to spend your week and the only thing you get is the quality of a devotional that you pick up down at the dollar store and something off of the rack where you read it through and it kind of warms your soul a little bit as you read a

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Bible verse, a little explanation of it and a little poem and it makes you feel good. That's all you get. You will never mature into a godly

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Christian of maturity. You have to take in solid food. And if you don't have that, you can never mature.

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What would you think of a parent who only fed their child no matter how old they were, the same amount of milk and the same quality of milk that they got when they were infants?

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At six weeks old, they had this kind of milk and this quantity of milk. And then when they're six years old, that parent is still giving them the same amount of milk and just milk.

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What would you think of that parent? Even at 16 years old, that kid longs for something and is starving for something.

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And all that parent gives them is just the same amount of milk they had when they were six weeks old and the same quality of milk that they had when they were six weeks old.

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You feel that disgust in the pit of your stomach as such criminal negligence? That's how

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I feel about pastors and churches that do the same thing spiritually speaking to Christians. That kind of criminal negligence is absolutely inexcusable.

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That you would foster an environment like that and just feed people that, thinking that they can grow up and mature and become able

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Christians. It is a malicious dereliction of duty and any parent who did it, we'd put them in prison.

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Pastors that do it, you get radio and television programs. So that's the second contrast that I see.

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The third contrast is the contrast of not being accustomed to something and then being well -practiced to something.

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You'll notice in verse 13, that the one who partakes only of milk is not accustomed. And that word describes an inexperienced or somebody being unacquainted with something.

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They're not experienced in it and they're not acquainted with it. They have become unaccustomed to solid food. They've become unaccustomed with the word of righteousness.

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We'll describe what that is here in just a moment, but that is contrasted with the one who is well -practiced, the one who has trained their senses to discern good and evil.

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What does it mean to be, what does the word of righteousness mean there in that text? And this is kind of something that is a little bit of an issue of debate, as many things are in this warning passage.

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The word of righteousness, some take this as a reference to the gospel, which brings us righteousness, that we are justified or made righteous on the basis of faith and faith alone.

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Some people think that the one who has partaken only of meat and is unaccustomed to the word of righteousness, or sorry, only of milk, and is unaccustomed to the word of righteousness, and this describes somebody who has only taken in tepid and pablum -like spiritual food, and so they really don't even understand the gospel yet.

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That word of righteousness being the word that brings righteousness, the gospel, the word that brings us righteousness imputed and makes us righteous in the sight of God.

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And I don't think that that's what the author is describing because the subject or the theme of this passage in this context is not describing justification by faith or necessarily the gospel and the implications of righteousness and being justified by righteousness.

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I don't think that's what he's describing. He is describing here these people's grasp on spiritual truths, their inability to handle these things.

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So he is describing here, I think, that by word of righteousness, the righteous requirements of the word of God, which are to be lived out in a lifestyle of righteousness when we obey the truth.

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And this was the problem with the Hebrew Christians. They had not grown up to the point where they were obeying what it is that they were being taught.

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And so they are unacquainted or unaccustomed to even the righteous demands of scripture that ought to be the marks of a believer once we become mature.

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Once we grow up in our faith to a certain point, we ought to be living lives of righteousness informed by the word of righteousness, which tells us what that righteous living looks like.

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But if we only fed spiritual milk, spiritual pablum, and that's all that they get and you remain a perpetual infant, nobody will ever be able to look at your life and say, now that is a righteous man because of how they live.

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They're not mature enough to demonstrate that righteousness to everybody. But the mature man is acquainted.

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In fact, scripture says he has practiced to do righteousness. Verse 14 says that the mature, because of practice, have their senses trained.

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There are two key words there. The word practice, which refers to something that is a habit, that is something that is done over and over again, like discipline or like a workout or the habitual training of an athlete.

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That was a word that was used to describe that. The type of practice that you do to mature or grow yourself up to the point where you can become an athlete, to the point where you have certain physical capabilities.

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That's the way the word was used. And then the word discipline or trained there is the word gumnadzo, from which we get our word gymnasium, is the idea of somebody who was disciplined and trained.

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You would go to the gym. It should be obvious to you that there's a difference between the muscles of an infant and the muscles of somebody who goes to the gym three times a week.

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Right? You understand what training and effort and discipline does to somebody, that habitual discipline?

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And what is the habitual discipline that he's talking about here? It is the obedience to the word of righteousness. The one who is an infant has and partakes only of milk.

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He is not accustomed and disciplined through obedience and through the training of himself to live righteously and thus to discern good from evil and understand the difference between righteousness and unrighteousness in his day -to -day living.

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The mature believer has that capacity because by his practice of obedience, the mature believer has trained himself to know good from evil and to discern the difference between good and evil.

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So the natural result of the one who is fed spiritual milk constantly is that they are immature.

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They will always be immature because you cannot grow up to maturity on a diet of milk. It can not happen.

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Doesn't matter how long you take in milk. You cannot be mature on that. It is impossible.

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If you grow in maturity in an environment where all you're fed is milk, it is because you are getting solid food from somewhere else because the milk will only produce immaturity.

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Every time and always, it cannot produce anything else, only immaturity. Solid food produces the mature believer.

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Taking in something that is sustenance makes us chew on it and think on it. It takes us deep into scripture and an understanding of truth.

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Those things produce maturity. The immature remain completely unacquainted with the word of God.

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And I wanna combine that observation, that contrast with this final contrast. And that is between the word of righteousness and what it means to discern good and evil.

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So the infant partakes only of milk. He is not trained and disciplined himself in the word of righteousness, which describes righteous conduct, but the mature believer is trained and disciplined.

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And because of his effort and obedience to the Lord in becoming not a lazy listener, but in taking heed to what he is taught in an environment where he is being given solid food and not milk, he is able, because his senses have been trained, he is able to discern good from evil.

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That word discern there is the word that they use to describe somebody or the act of judging, to make a distinction, to make a judgment, to decide or to discriminate.

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It's the word to discriminate. Today, we think in our culture that all discrimination is bad.

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Not all discrimination is bad. There's good discrimination. There's bad discrimination, but there's good discrimination.

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If you have a, you and your wife are gonna go out or you and your spouse are gonna go out for an evening and a date and you wanna leave the kids with somebody and you can choose between the registered sex offender next door or grandma and grandpa, you're gonna make a discriminating judgment.

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And nobody's gonna fault you for that. It might depend on who grandma and grandpa are. I mean, some of our in -laws, right?

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You might wanna interview the guy next door, but most of us would make a discriminating judgment in that situation and nobody would fault us for that because we make discriminations and judgments all the time.

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We're constantly discriminating and discerning between what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is just and what is unjust.

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We make these discriminating judgments based upon standards that we have, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with them or not.

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We have standards, everybody does an objective standard in their mind and they make discriminations and judgments on it. And so scripture is saying that the mark of a mature believer is discernment, a discriminating judgment.

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It is somebody who can judge the difference between what is good and what is evil. So we're talking about judgment here in its biblical and right sense, not a hypocritical judgment where I'm committing a certain sin and casting aspersions on others who are doing the same thing.

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That's a hypocritical judgment and scripture condemns that. And we're not talking about a self -righteous judgment where we think that the standard is ours and we're using our standard to judge other people as to how they measure up to us.

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That's a self -righteous judgment. And we're not talking about a self -justifying judgment where we look down upon other peoples to make ourselves look good and look righteous.

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Scripture condemns all those kinds of judgments, but scripture does not condemn a righteous and good judgment, a good discernment.

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In fact, that is the mark of spiritual maturity, discernment, the ability to discern and to make judgments.

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An infant cannot do that. An infant cannot do that. You take a toddler and you take them into the store and unless you shackle them into that little thing in the cart where they sit there, unless you built them into that, they're gonna walk around the store picking up anything on the floor and putting it in their mouth.

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That's what they do. You might think that that cart seat is there for your convenience. It's not, it's to keep them from eating everything on the floor because they can walk up and they cannot discern the difference between somebody's bubble gum on the floor and a piece of hot dog on the floor or a

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Lego on the floor. And this is why we childproof our houses because infants do not have the ability to discern between apple juice and Drano.

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This is why we put childproof caps on everything. To them, they have no ability to tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, poison and good food.

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They cannot discern that. They have not learned that yet. And in the same sense, the spiritual believer has the ability, a mature believer has the ability to discern between good and evil.

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Children lack that capacity. One of the marks of an immature believer is one who has not yet learned the difference between good and evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is righteous and what is unrighteous, what is good and what is bad.

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They can't tell the difference between those things. They have no benchmarks, it's all mystery to them. They can't discern that.

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They can't see through it. They can't judge those things. A mature believer is able to judge.

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Our world says you never make any moral judgments about anything or anyone ever. That's the, if our world thinks that anything is a sin, they think that is a sin.

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They think judge not that you be not judged is the only verse in all of scripture. That's their favorite verse.

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It's the only one they can quote from memory. It forms the warp and the woof of everything we do in our culture and in our society.

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That's what they think is the mark of the worst people in our society is that they make judgments.

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And scripture says that is the mark of the mature believer, that they can judge between good and evil.

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Now, what do we mean between good and evil? Before I answer that, let me ask you a question.

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If you had, when you walked in here today, if I had asked you, what do you think the mark of spiritual maturity is?

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Don't answer, but would any of you have said discernment? Probably most of us would not.

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Most of us have asked that question, probably not given a chance to really think about it or read scripture and study it out. Most of us probably would have said, well,

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I think that spiritual maturity is really probably, I don't know, maybe a proficiency in using my spiritual gift. If I can, if I'm a teacher or a preacher or my job is to communicate the truth in some way, if I'm really proficient at that and have a big crowd and a big church and a big

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Bible study and a big group that meets in my home, that's the mark of spiritual maturity. And the smaller it is, the less mature you are, the bigger things are, the more mature it is.

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Some people would think that. Some people might think that the mark of spiritual maturity is the amount of time that you spend reading your

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Bible every day. I used to read only two chapters a day and now I read four chapters a day. I hope that I would reach spiritual maturity sometime when

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I'm reading 12 or 14, 15, maybe even 20, maybe a book a day. That would be real spiritual maturity. The real godly ones are ones that read whole books of the

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Bible in one sitting every morning, right before 4 a .m. Their family gets up and they make breakfast for everybody.

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That's real spiritual maturity. Or maybe spiritual maturity would be marked by the amount of time I spend in prayer or the things I pray for, the number of people

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I pray for, the length of my prayer list. That's real spiritual maturity. We might put into place all of those benchmarks.

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All those things are good, but none of them are the thing that scripture says is the mark of spiritual maturity.

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What does scripture say is the mark of spiritual maturity? Discernment. It's the ability to judge between right and wrong.

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And so important is this, that Paul said this is what he was praying for the Philippians. Listen to Philippians 1, verses nine to 10.

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And this I pray that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment so that you may approve the things that are excellent in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ.

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Do you hear that? I pray that your knowledge and your discernment may abound more and more. Why? So that you may approve the things that are excellent.

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Judge the difference between good and evil. That's the mark of maturity. I want you to grow up to the point where you know the difference between what's good and what's bad.

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That's why Paul said to the Thessalonians, examine everything carefully and hold fast to that which is good. But what is good? What is that standard of goodness?

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What is the author describing when he talks about the knowing the difference between good and evil?

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Is it just things which are morally good and morally evil? I think there's an element to that, but that's certainly not all of it because you could go down to any restaurant after you leave this building and sit next to somebody there and go over to the table next to them and run and encounter a complete pagan.

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Somebody who hasn't darkened the door of a church in 40 years. You can walk up to them and ask them what they think good and evil is. And they would probably give you maybe a list of things that you would for the most part agree with.

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They would say that these things are evil and these things are good. They have some objective standard and there's probably some overlap between what you would say is good and what they would say is good and what you would say is evil and what they would say is evil.

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Any pagan can tell you because the law of God is written on their hearts and their conscience bears witness with them.

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Any pagan could tell you that there are good things and bad things. And a lot of what a pagan would assess as being good and bad would agree with probably most of what most of you would think is good and bad.

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So if we're talking about spiritual maturity, it can't just be, well, murder is bad and yeah, we can agree with the whole world on that.

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And then these things are good. Love is good and giving is good and charity is good and these things are good. It has to go deeper than that.

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Because any pagan can discern the difference between good and evil in that sense because they have the law of God written on their hearts.

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But there's a level at which they cannot discern what is good and evil. Do you think your average run -of -the -mill garden variety pagan, having lunch this afternoon in a restaurant next to you, do you think that they would be able to tell you the difference between a good sermon and a bad sermon?

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A sermon that preaches Christ and exalts him and his word, do you think that they would have the ability to discern between solid food and milk?

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Pagans don't have that ability. To them, it's just a sermon. And you give them two of them, a good one and an evil one, and both of them talked about Jesus, that was good.

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Yeah, they both quoted the Bible, that was good. They have no ability to see through it and discern good and evil, even in the midst of that.

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Charles Spurgeon said that discernment is not just the ability to know what is right and what is wrong, but to know the difference between what is right and what is almost right.

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That's discernment. It's not just right and wrong in the clear things that all of us agree on because the law of God's written on our hearts.

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It's the ability to walk into an environment and say this is good and this is evil. Do you think that your average garden variety pagan, eating lunch this afternoon, would be able to tell you the difference between a false teacher and a true teacher?

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Do you think they can discern that? They can't discern that. They can't discern the difference between a good sermon or a bad sermon.

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A good sermon and evil sermon. They can't tell the difference between a good church and an evil church. They can't tell the difference between a good philosophy of ministry and an evil philosophy of ministry.

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A good, accurate biblical presentation of the gospel and one that completely misses and is man -centered and man -exalting and that gets the response to the gospel entirely wrong.

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They can't tell the difference between those two things. Rank pagans have no ability to discern the difference between good and evil in any of those things, and yet that is the very mark of spiritual maturity.

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The ability to walk into an environment and say, I know I heard this, there's something wrong with this and I can tell you what it is.

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This is man -centered or this is God -centered. This is biblical and this is unbiblical. That's maturity.

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Knowing the difference between what is right and what is really close to right. And the more honed you get in your ability to do that, that can only come with maturity.

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And the more honed you get in your ability to do that, the more mature you are. How do you get this discernment?

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Well, I think there's some clues right here in our text. I'll give you three of them. Discernment is created by the right spiritual diet.

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You see this just in the contrast between the spiritual foods, the milk and the solid food. Those who partake only of milk will never be mature.

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Solid food produces solid believers with solid discernment and understanding in spiritual things because the word of God, when given appropriately and preached rightly, has the ability to hone people's senses.

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So then they can come to the point where they say, I know the difference between good and evil. Justin Peters.

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Should I give this illustration? I will. I should have thought this through, but I got a little bit of time. So I'm going to go ahead and dump this on you.

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Justin was doing a devotional out at Coquilla Lake Bible Camp several years ago for a big event where there were a whole bunch of churches, some of them good, some of them bad, had sent all of their teens out here and he was doing this devotional.

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The way he started out, he told me ahead of time, he said, look, when I start this thing, give me five minutes. Don't, don't drag me out of my ear and stone me because of what

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I'm going to say, but I'm going to, I'm going to start off on a really bad foot, really bad track, but just give me time.

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I'll redeem it. And I said, okay. So I let him go. And, and I sat there and watched as he had about a hundred students that were all kind of gathered around there.

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And he started to give this devotional and, and as he did, he was, he was going through this thing and starting on a bad track.

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And I watched what was happening. And, and the whole point of this was to set them up to get these kids to agree to this thing.

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And then he was going to sort of drop the hammer and say, no, that's not it at all. And I don't know if, I don't think the intention was to make them feel stupid.

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I think the intention was to point out the difference between good and evil in this sense. So we started down this path and he got halfway through and, and he says, and he will tell you this, that as he was looking out over the crowd of kids, he said, it was the kids from Kootenai, the ones in our youth group who soon as he started, they just went like that.

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For those of you listening on the recording, I just cocked my head to the side and had sort of a puzzle look on my eyes.

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He said, it was, it was the kids from Kootenai that went, something's not right. And he said, he would tell you, the longer he went on, the more perplexed that were, look, until, until our youth became physically uncomfortable with what they were hearing.

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But he said, in the mass of those people, he said, all the rest of them nodding their heads in agreement, thought this was great.

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Yeah, that's what we heard in our youth group. And he couldn't believe it. I'll tell you what the fruit of that is.

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I'll tell you what creates that. Sunday school, Attawanna, and student ministries and preaching that they get here.

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That creates that. So the minute you begin to feed them lies, their head goes sideways and they think this isn't right.

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Why? Because they have their transit. They have their senses trained to discern good and evil. What creates that is solid food, not milk.

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Milk never creates that. It cannot. It cannot create that. It is incapable of doing it.

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It only creates spiritual infants. Second, it takes practice and training. It doesn't take the right food or the right spiritual diet, but it takes practice and training.

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Notice that the author uses those descriptions. He says that it is practice. It is habitual use of these things. And it is the discipline training that comes with it.

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It is the practicing in righteousness, the word of righteousness and practicing in obedience that creates that spiritual discernment.

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It is repetitive Bible reading and prayer. It is repetitive appropriation of the means of grace, the worship of God and the preaching of his word and the teaching of his word and the reading of his word and listening to his word and studying his word and memorizing his word and disciplining ourselves in obedience and mortifying sin and putting that to death and choosing to obey righteousness and being practiced in that righteousness.

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It is that consistent, repetitive, disciplined training in those things that produces the spiritual maturity that makes one able to discern between good and evil.

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And third, it takes time. That's why the author says by this time, you ought to be teachers. He didn't expect that this would happen to them overnight the next day.

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He didn't expect that the day after they get saved, that they would all of a sudden be able to tell the difference in all of these areas and be fine -tuned and well -honed and well -crafted mature believers able to distinguish and discern in all of these different areas.

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It takes time to develop those disciplines. It doesn't come easy. And so here's the process.

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We hear the truth. We respond to the truth rightly, and we obey the truth and practice it.

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And that through that disciplined, repetitive training in righteousness equips us and matures us so that we are able to discern good and evil.

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That is what creates a mature believer. But what had happened with the Hebrews is they heard it, and they did not act upon it, and then they became lazy listeners.

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And having become lazy listeners and dull of hearing, they became unmoved by the truth. And after becoming unmoved by the truth, then they didn't want to be moved by the truth.

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And then rather than hungering for solid food, they just said, give us more milk. That other stuff, the soft stuff that makes us feel good, that scratches my ear right back here, tells me what

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I want to hear, that's what I need to get. I'd like you to stand up there with a

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Southern accent and a big grin in a basketball stadium and tell me how pleased God is with me.

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That's what I want to be told. Tell me what I want to hear. See, that's the spiritually immature that desire that.

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It is the spiritually mature believer who says, challenge me, crush my heart, crush my mind, crush my will, make me mature, give me something that I can live with, something

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I can live on. So what is spiritual maturity? The mark that the author gives here, the ability to discern, to make right judgments between good and evil, not just those broad moral categories that even pagans agree with us on, but the ability to discern good and evil, even in the things where pagans cannot discern anything.

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That is an ability that only comes to the spiritually mature. Spiritual maturity is not an intellectual ability.

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Get this down. It's not an intellectual ability. And remember this, you don't have to be a John MacArthur, an R .C. Sproul, or Charles Spurgeon to be spiritually mature.

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I'm thankful for that because I'm not John MacArthur, R .C. Sproul, or Charles Spurgeon. And you don't have to be an intellectual giant.

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It's not spiritual discernment. It's not an intellectual ability. Spiritual discernment is not even necessarily a theological depth that you reach.

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If you can't give me the difference between infralapsarianism and superlapsarianism and give to me the order of the decrees of God in eternity past and what all the differences are there, if you can't give me those, it doesn't matter.

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You can still be spiritually mature. You don't have to be able to finely parse the development of Reformation theology over the last 500 years and the development in all of the different canons and synods and all of the different catechisms and everything.

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You don't have to be able to do that to be spiritually mature because it's not an intellectual ability and it's not necessarily tied to theological depth or theological understanding.

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It's not either of those things and it's not spiritual giftedness. You say, I'm not a teacher so I can never be spiritually mature.

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I'll never be up preaching. I can't be spiritually mature. It's not any of that. What is it?

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It is having your senses trained so that you can discern good from evil and you can identify what is healthy and what is unhealthy.

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You can know the difference between spiritual apple juice and spiritual Drano. If you cannot distinguish between those things, you are not spiritually mature.

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It does not matter how old you are in the Lord. There has to come a point in your spiritual life where you look back and you say of yourself 10 years ago,

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I cannot believe I was there at one time. How did I ever think that I was being fed there? How did

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I ever consist on that? How did I ever live on that? I've come to this point now and I've matured to the point where I want this.

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I don't know what I even liked about that back there. There has to come a point where you say that. And if you can look back on that and say, yeah,

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I've, I've moved beyond that. I have grown up past that. Then you are on your way towards spiritual maturity.

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But if you look back at yourself 10 years ago and you say, yeah, I'm the same today as I was 10 years ago, something is tragically wrong with your spiritual growth.

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We are all moving toward one objective and what is it? It is Christ. And these poor

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Hebrews could not even discern the fact that in wanting to turn back to the old Testament covenant with the practices and the things attached to the temple, that that was evil.

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That was evil. And that is what the author is describing here. You think about turning back to that, the spiritually mature would say to turn back is to commit evil, to move forward and to hold fast to Jesus Christ in the midst of persecution.

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That is the good decision. They were on the verge of spiritual apostasy and they could not even see it. They had not reached the point of being able to discern good from evil.

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So what is the mark of maturity discernment? You know the truth. You understand the truth. You apply the truth.

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You obey the truth. You love the truth. You take it in and you can't get enough of the truth. It's the mark of spiritual maturity.

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Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the encouragement that your word gives us in these things.

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And it is our desire that all of us here may move on towards spiritual maturity in every aspect to grow up in all things pertaining to Christ and to your word and your truth.

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We pray that you would grant this, that we may be for you and toward you obedient, loving, affectionate, truth -loving believers in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. May you accomplish your purpose through your word in our hearts today. And as we seek to pursue spiritual maturity, we pray that you would give to us and endow us with every grace necessary to bring about that end, to grow up in Christ and to know the difference between what is right and what is almost right, to discern the difference between good and evil.

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We thank you that your word does give us some benchmarks that we can pursue. And we thank you that you are already and have predestined us to be conformed to the image of Christ.

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By your grace and by your providence, by the working of your spirit through the truth of your word, we know that you will accomplish that great end for all those who belong to you.

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We pray that that grace of sanctification may rest upon all those who are yours, both now and forever, for the glory of Christ our