Sermon Tone Analysis

The Problem of Immaturity

Hebrews 5:11-6:12

Introduction:

Several years ago, a pastor named Mark Dever wrote a book where he began by lamenting the fact that he had visited several churches over the years when traveling and had discovered that it was uncommon to find someone in a church who one would describe as a “growing Christian.”

There is an epidemic of spiritual immaturity in our culture which is fueled by a lack of discipleship and proper views of church membership.

He made it a key part of his ministry over the years to address this problem.

Over the years in my own ministry, I have found this to ring true.

In God’s sovereignty and plan, He has actually addressed this problem of immaturity in Scripture.

This morning as we continue to dig into the book of Hebrews where we have been diving deeply into all of the ways that Jesus is superior.

Jesus is better.

This passage is heavy.

I just need you to understand that from the onset.

This isn’t light hearted fare.

In fact next weeks message is even heavier.

The author of Hebrews, in writing to these Jewish Christians, is trying to keep them from falling into some grave errors as they live out a life of following Christ.

He’s trying to explain to them all of the ways that Jesus is better than their old Jewish ways and the old covenant system.

As he does that, he confronts them in warning passages along the way.

He calls them out where they need it out of love for them.

He is not trying to prove his own point or win an argument.

He’s trying to help them.

He’s equipping them to persevere in the faith and grow more like Christ.

I originally had this with a larger chunk of scripture but then realized it could truly be more than one sermon so in the interest of doing this well and hopefully shortening it up a bit as the Lord allows, we are going to do it in two parts.

Today will be the first part chapter.

Next week’s passage is one of the toughest, most disturbing, and most argued passages in the Bible.

The writer seems to want to enter into a deeper study of the heavenly priesthood of Christ but he finds himself in a difficulty because his audience has become dull of hearing.

They couldn't go deeper and see how the Gospel connected to all of the deep truths of God.

He uses the example of milk and solid food.

I love babies.

Who doesn’t, really?

We have little baby girl over there.

If little one is up here and she’s got a bottle and she’s laying on the ground rolling around on a blanket or maybe getting a little bit fussy, we think: “that’s cute, that’s normal.”

And not one of us in here would think anything of a baby acting like a baby.

However, if it’s Bill Kooy up here gooing and rolling around with a bottle, crying on a blanket, that’s not okay.

It’s time to call the “special doctors” or the cops, right?

If a grown man is acting like a baby, we are not okay with that.

That is sort of the picture here.

These Christians that the author is addressing should have been mature but they were reallly just like babies.

And it was not okay for them to stay that way.

Let’s look at Hebrews, chapter 5, verses 11 through 14 and see how the Word of God addresses this.

READ

This is the Word of the Lord.

Let’s pray and ask God to help us understand and apply it to our lives.

Today, we are seeing the author of Hebrews paint a picture of the immaturity of the Hebrew Christians.

Let’s take a look at that picture.

I.

A picture of immaturity

As we look at these few verses, we see the symptoms of this immaturity.

1. Dull to the Word

- As he writes to them, he wants to go deeper on Christ’s priesthood and how superior it is to Aaron’s priesthood but the people had basically become too lazy to understand.

Their ears, minds, and hearts are too immature to understand the concept of what he is wanting to get into.

The people who are trained in the Word of God and are progressively growing in the faith are quite simply better equipped to understand the deeper things of God.

Some people willfully close their ears and hearts to the Word of God.

They regress in their faith and they will struggle with understanding and grasping the deeper truths of God.

They drift.

Al Mohler says,

Believers have a moral responsibility to know and understand Scripture.

We often act as if our biblical ignorance is merely a matter of God hiding or withholding knowledge from us.

Yet Scripture teaches us that our ignorance of God’s Word is a moral problem, not an intellectual one.

When we deliberately ignore God’s Word for whatever reason, we sin against the Lord.

In the case of the Hebrews, the congregation became intellectually sluggish by their own negligence.

Their spiritual immaturity was their fault.

They grew intellectually dull because they became sluggish of heart.

Christ’s priesthood became difficult to understand because their hearts became indifferent to Scripture.

Thus, the author must stop explaining Christ’s priesthood in order to admonish his people and prod them out of their lethargy.

- The spiritually immature don’t have the energy to even do the hard work of investigating and understanding difficult spiritual concepts.

2. They were childish in their understanding.

3.

They should have been teachers by now.

- We see that our relationship to the Word of God is connected with our spiritual maturity.

They have forgotten the fundamentals of the faith.

When the author uses the term “teaches” he’s pointing to their responsibility to be discipling other believers.

He’s saying, you ought to be making disciples by now and be equipping and training others but you still need baby food.

The church is supposed to be made up of disciples who are maturing and training up newer disciples.

He is not writing about them being elders or pastors.

Not everyone in the church is supposed to be a pastor.

But everyone is supposed to be making disciples.

He uses the word, “again.”

That is important to our understanding.

These people had failed to internalize the basics of the faith and were having to be instructed in it again.

They had recieved good teaching and not internalized it.

These are things they should know by heart at this point.

They don’t need a recap.

This isn’t a refresher for them.

They need to relearn.

We must be careful in our lives to internalize the teaching that we receive and take it to heart so that we get established in the faith and are able to take up our responsibility to teach it to others.

In other words, so we can make disciples.

This warning is not only about the intellect of the Christian life.

It is about the whole of the Christian’s spiritual life.

We need to be learning more and more to take responsibility for our spiritual growth.

We need to develop our appetites for the things of God.

The more we know should lead to the more we want to learn.

The more we learn about the faith should increase our hunger for more learning.

And we shouldn’t just be doing that for ourselves also so that we will be able to teach Christians who aren not as spiritually mature.

It is in this way that we say your spiritual growth has an inward and an outward dimension to it.

It’s not just for our sake but also for the sake of others around us and for those who we don’t know yet but will come into our lives to be discipled.

4. A baby food diet

Instead of going forward, they were going backward.

Growing in grace involves also growing in knowledge.

This was a real problem because there are some fundamental principles and doctrinal foundational elements that are really needed to understand more complex truths of the faith.

The example is like in college.

You can’t go straight to German 401.