Maturing In Christ

Hebrews 5:11-14

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.[i]

If we want a God at all, we want a God we can control. A God who knows exactly how much of our lives he can have access to. A God who stays in his lane. I don’t want a God who wants to transform the way I think, the way I live, the way I view the world and the people in it. I’m happy being a “church goer.” I’m even willing to call myself Christian. But a disciple? A follower of Jesus? Do I really need to go THAT far?

Here’s the thing – A God who stays in his lane, who blesses me but doesn’t challenge or transform me – isn’t God at all. He’s just a comfortable, imagined, small “g” god I’ve made up; a celestial version of a childhood imaginary friend. If that’s the kind of “god” God is, we need to close this church down and all go home, because we’re wasting our time.

But that isn’t the kind of god God is. The creator God of the universe sits on thrones, not in closets. The essence of sin is me insisting on sitting on the throne of my life. The door to forgiveness and salvation lies in me getting of the throne of my life, for that belongs to God, and God alone. And it is in Christ – God incarnate – God with skin on, that God takes the throne of my life.

Today, as we continue our journey through the New Testament book of Hebrews, which is really a sermon in written form, our pastor gets a lovingly confrontational. You see, he wants to take this small, persecuted band of Christ followers deeper in the faith. He is preparing to talk about Jesus being our great high priest whose ministry surpassed and fulfilled the ministry of the Jewish high priests from the time of Aaron, older brother of Moses, to now. Their work was just a shadow, a precursor to the work of Christ on the cross, where he become both our high priest and the offered sacrifice. He wants to talk about deeper theology with them, so he wants them paying close attention, ready to deal with some heavy stuff.

And so he insults them. Seems like a weird thing to do, but he’s a brilliant orator. He accuses them of being immature in their faith, unwilling to grow to maturity in Christ, SO THAT they’ll say, “Hey, that isn’t me. I’m ready to grow.” He’s motivating them to pay attention. AND confronting them at the same time. Because he IS concerned about the temptation they are facing to not appear to be quite so “Christian,” so “Christ-followerey,” to the watching world. Turn with me to Hebrews 5:11-14.

Have you ever talked to someone who is hard of hearing? Sometimes messages have to be simplified. Not because they aren’t smart. They are! But their ears can’t pick up all of the sounds anymore, and so they can sometimes miss the subtleties of long, complex sentences. So you tend to speak a little louder, look right at them so they can read your lips, and keep the sentences shorter.

My grandpa, who died this year back in late February at the age of 95, had gotten really hard of hearing over the past ten years or so. Skin cancer on one of his ears led to the removal of most of the exterior part of one of his ears. Those are the parts that capture and funnel sound waves into the inner parts of the ear, where hearing happens. And a lifetime of listening to loud music and working on engines, paired with 90 plus years of just hearing stuff, had worn out the inner parts too.

We always stayed with grandpa in his big, beautiful home when we were down there. And even from the lower level of the house, you could hear the TV come on at 4 am when he got up. He always had his TV turned up so loud so that he could hear it. And when we told him what we were doing that day, we had to make a concerted effort to make sure that he was looking at us and we kept the messages short and sweet, because he’d miss most of it anyway. His mind was as sharp as a tack. But he couldn’t really hear much anymore, and so he missed a lot.

But there’s a difference between being hard of hearing, and not paying attention. I saw a comic the other day of a man having his hearing checked. And the audiologist said, “Very good. Now we’re going to play the same sounds, this time using your wife’s voice. Tell us what you can hear now.” There’s a difference between can’t hear and won’t hear.

And our pastor is talking about a “won’t hear” condition. The word translated as “dull” here, “dull of hearing,” means sluggish, dull, dimwit, negligent, or lazy. He isn’t talking about people who can’t hear. He’s talking about people who won’t hear. Won’t hear what? The Word of God. He’s talking about people who zone out when it’s taught, or who let it go in one ear and out the other.

There are two kinds of hearers we see this trait in these days. The first is the distracted hearer. We are bombarded with messages from every corner. Research tells us that the average person encounters between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements per day. On television, the radio, on social media, and pretty much everywhere we look, we see something trying to get our attention. Buy this. Sell that. Eat here. Play here. Give us your attention, your time, your money. And all of that visual and auditory information bombards the information processing centers of the brain, and by the end of the day, most of us can’t stand any more messages.

Add to that our inner anxieties and fears – the messages bombarding us from inside our own heads, and it gets truly overwhelming. Some of us have learned how to filter out a lot of that bombardment and be fully where we are, paying attention to what we need to be paying attention to, but that is a learned skill and it isn’t easy. We live in a distracting world, and our world feeds off of our being distracted. It plays to it. And so it causes it. Our attention spans are shortening.

But there’s another kind of dull hearing that is more sinister. It’s the dull hearing that comes from a consumer mindset in the church. The mindset that says, “I’ll go to the places that say what I want to hear, that are entertaining, that make me feel good.”

It’s a mindset that makes God just another product to be consumed, another drug to make me feel good – and so church, if I go at all, becomes a place where I just want them to play good music and make me feel good. I’ve actually had people say to me, “Okay, give me your sales pitch. Sell me on Christ Church.” If that’s the attitude. You probably aren’t going to be happy here, or anywhere else, for very long. Because as soon as the “product” isn’t to your liking, you’ll move on.

Did you know Americans are worse at playing The Price Is Right than they used to be. Research actually shows this. You know the game show, which has been running since 1972, four contestants are asked to guess the price of consumer products, like washing machines, microwaves, or jumbo packs of paper towels. The person who gets closest to the actual price, without going over, gets to keep playing and the chance to win prizes like a new car. In the 1970s, the typical guess was about 8% below the actual price. These days, people underestimate the price by more than 20%.

This finding comes from research released in 2019 by Jonathan Hartley, at Harvard University. He’s been a longtime fan of the show, and he wanted to do this research after reading a paper that revealed that contestants don’t use optimal bidding strategies. He wondered what else the data might show. He found that the accuracy of people’s guesses sharply decreased from the 1970s to the 2000s, and then stabilized in the 2010s.

So, what accounts for guesses getting so much worse? Hartley thinks there are three economic factors that are the most likely culprits:

First, inflation in the US was much higher in the 1970s and 80s. When inflation is high and variable, people become more attentive to prices, noticing they are paying more for goods than before.

Second, the rise of e-commerce may have made people less sensitive to price. As a result, people may feel less of a need to do price comparisons.

Third, there are more products than ever. There are 50 times as many products at a grocery store than 80 years ago. This also might make it harder for The Price Is Right contestants, along with the rest of us, to know how much stuff costs.

Are Christ followers getting worse at recognizing sound doctrine and genuine Bible teachers and churches? Maybe its because we are paying less attention to the study of biblical doctrine, are less aware of doctrinal issues, and are confused by the hundreds of varieties of churches, denominations, and even cults. We’re continuing to consume baby food, when we should be eating meat.[ii]

When we are overly distracted, or are looking to be sold a good product instead of developing a relationship with God, our growth in Christ becomes stunted. We become some weird kind of permanent spiritual toddler. Look at Vv. 12-13.

It is the nature of living things to grow and mature. And it is the nature of a living faith to grow and mature. When that doesn’t happen, we know that something is wrong. When grandpa died, Becky and I grabbed every photo we could find from his house, whether it was in a frame on the wall or in an album or just tossed in a box under the bed. We aren’t going to keep them all. But before we turn them over to my brother, Becky is scanning them all into a digital photo album shared with all the members of the family.

We were the first on either side of our family to have kids, and a lot of the pictures she’s working on right now are of our kids. So it’s been a nice trip back through memory lane. We’re seeing lots of pictures of little Aubrey reading books or playing with her dolls, and little Sterling hamming it up or riding his bike, and little Eli getting into something he shouldn’t be getting into. The kids in diapers, drinking from baby bottles, asleep on someone’s lap.

But if 25 year old Aubrey was still wearing diapers and didn’t know how to use the toilet … if 22 year old Sterling was still drinking his meals from a baby bottle … if 17 year old Eli was still climbing up on my lap for me to rock him to sleep for a nap, you all would think something was wrong, wouldn’t you? Either there’s a significant organic developmental delay or disability, or Jeff and Becky are perhaps the worst parents of all time. When adults are still doing kid things, we know that something is wrong.

The same thing is true in our relationship with God. Many of us have been at this long enough that we should be able to handle meaty, mature food that needs to be chewed, but we still want to be spoon-fed pureed spiritual baby food. But he’s talking about people who are spiritually lazy or sluggish, not people who are unable to grow. He’s talking about people who are able to grow but won’t.

Some of us should be able to lead a Bible study, or teach a class, but we can’t, because we’re spiritually sluggish. We continue to need to be taught “the basic principles of the oracles of God.” That’s a smooth translation. The literal translation is choppier but more powerful. “You need to be taught the basic principles of the beginning of the words of God.” The basics of the basics.

Remember being in first grade reading books like “See Spot Run”? If that’s the basics of reading, the basics of the basics are what? Learning the alphabet in kindergarten, right. If 3+8=11 is basic math, the basics of the basics are learning the numbers themselves. The basics of the basics are your “ABCs and 123s.” He’s saying, “You should be able to read novels by now, or at least some decent young adult literature, and you’re still working on your ABCs. You may not need to be able to do calculus, but you should be able to handle algebra, but you’re still working on your 123s.”

Now, look at V. 14. One of the measures of maturity in faith is being able to distinguish right from wrong. Not so that we can yell at people about it or rant about it on social media, but so that we can recognize it in ourselves first, and with the help of the Holy Spirit weed it out of our own lives, and then gently and lovingly help those around us too. Not in a judgmental way. But as a part of a loving community.

Are we living in a state of stunted spiritual development? When people tell me, “I’m not being fed at my church anymore,” I always respond with, “Maybe its time to start feeding yourself. Go to your pastor and offer to lead a small group or Bible study. You’ll find that in feeding others, you’re being fed. That’s the next step in your maturity.”

In C. S. Lewis’s children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia, young heroine Lucy meets a majestic lion named Aslan in the enchanted land of Narnia. Making a return visit a year later, the children discover that everything has changed radically, and they quickly become lost. But after a series of dreadful events, Lucy finally spots Aslan in a forest clearing, rushes to him, throws her arms around his neck, and buries her face in his mane. Lewis writes …

“The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all around her. She gazed up into the large wise face.

“Welcome child,” he said.

“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”

“That’s because you’re older, little one,” answered he.

“Not because you are?”

“I’m not. But each year you grow, you’ll find me bigger.”[iii]

No matter how much we grow, how much we mature, we’ll never outgrow Christ. As we grow, he grows. Not in fact, but in our experience, because as we grow, we experience more of him. Let’s pray.

[i] Wilbur Rees, Leadership, Vol. 4, no. 1.

[ii] Dan Kopf, “Why are people getting worse at ‘The Price Is Right’?” Quartz (11/10/19)

[iii] R. C. Sproul, “On Narnia Time,” Men of Integrity (1-30-04)