Hebrews 5:11-14 - Jesus Is A Five Course Meal

Welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. We've got a great portion of scripture today, and a really, well, I'll put it this way.

Today, we're gonna be going over the fact that we, in our Christian walk in life, are to be consistently growing in our knowledge of Jesus and of God's Word in a way that we understand more and deeper and more fully, consistently, than we had learned

before. If we only understand now what we understood about the Christian life a year ago, or ten years ago, or forty years ago, we are not following God's will for our life. We are to be consistently learning.

Part of that certainly happens through lived experience, that we understand Jesus experientially, or we understand God's ways experientially more over time. But it is certainly also true that we need to be learning more and more.

Sometimes people can have a mindset that says, okay, well, if I'm not a pastor, or if I'm not maybe like a teacher of some class, then someone else can learn more about God, or someone else can learn more about theology or doctrine.

I just need to know a few basic things, and I'm good. That is not the way that God talks about our walk with Him. And you can read 1 Peter 2 and 2 Peter chapter 1, and several other places as well.

And this passage that we're going to be in today with the end of Hebrews chapter 5 verses 11 through 14. I've entitled this particular Tabernacle Talk episode, Jesus is a five-course meal.

And the reason that I've done that is because of how the author here, I forget if I mistakenly said Paul at some point, the author here is telling these believers, you guys have not been growing in your faith and in your knowledge of who Jesus is and

of God's plan of redemption, all of that. You guys are ignorant when it comes to your spiritual knowledge. And that's gotta change.

So let's read through these verses, and then we'll dive a little more into the topics, and we'll see like, hey, why, you know, Bryon, Pastor, why are you saying this? Why can't you just let me not know some things?

It's because God wants you to know some things today. Let's read verse 11 in Hebrews chapter 5. We have a great deal to say about this, and it's difficult to explain since you have become too lazy to understand.

OK, what's the this that is difficult to explain?

He's talking about Jesus as our great high priest, the one that intercedes for us, the one who presented his perfect sacrifice of himself and his own life and his blood in the heavenly places, that is, in the heavenly temple or tabernacle, if you

will. And so the author is saying, well, I would love to tell you guys like more about this and explain more of like the mystery of what God has done and accomplished in our salvation. He says, but you have become too lazy to understand.

He does not say you lack the mental acuity to understand what's going on. He doesn't say you're too stupid to understand. He says you are too lazy to understand.

And man, we live in a very gifted time in world history where literacy is incredibly high. Many people can read and write. They can pull up a calculator.

You know, if you're listening or watching, if you're listening to this or watching this right now, you have some way of knowing how to work a cell phone or a computer or a tablet.

So God has given you some amazing gifts that he hasn't necessarily given to every single person throughout world history. And I think we are, we are very often guilty of being too lazy to understand the things of God.

We know a ton about maybe our favorite sports team. We know a ton about our favorite politician or our least favorite politician. We know a ton about maybe like fishing or boating or crabs, or we have a favorite author and we love their books.

And we could tell you all about them. We know about, you know, our favorite television show, or we know about all about our favorite musician. But we often, when it comes to the things of God, we become stupid.

We know just the bare minimum. And we think, OK, that's all I need to know. You know, I know enough to get into heaven.

And so that's enough of that. I can leave all the rest to the theologians and to the pastors. There's one great quote that I think was by the pastor of Storyline Church in Arvada, Colorado.

I think he wrote a book on this topic with possibly Jen Wilkin, who's a prolific author and writes some really great material. The book title is every, it's like every person a theologian or every Christian a theologian.

And the truth is you don't get the, so let me define the term real quick. Theology is what we think about God. It is the study of God.

What we know, loggos, what words we know or what descriptions that we put to theos or God.

And in small thought, like in its most direct thing, theology is the study of God himself, but it also is kind of shorthand for everything that has to do with like the Christian faith.

So even if it's sin or if it's the angels or if it's the end times, all of that gets put under the banner of theology. So every person thinks some thoughts when it comes to God, and those thoughts are either accurate or inaccurate.

Or technically, there's also a third category of some things that we don't know because God hasn't made it clear to us.

So technically, accurate, inaccurate, and might be accurate, might be inaccurate, but we have no way of knowing that this side of heaven.

Our goal as Christians is to continually refine through the Word of God and through the help and influence of other believers, both nowadays and throughout the past 2,000 years, being able to determine, okay, what thoughts am I thinking about God?

Or what thoughts am I thinking about my life or the Bible or other people? That are untrue, what, if you will, what lies am I allowing myself to think about these various areas of life, especially as it relates to the spiritual.

So every person thinks thoughts about God, but only those that actually want to think right about God, about salvation, about other sin, heaven, hell, all of it, only those people that care and refine their thinking through going to that word of God

that we learned about in the last episode or two episodes ago. It is only as we look to God's word that we become a better theologian. As I've said before, it's not that you're, you may or may not be an ambassador. Every believer is an ambassador.

The question is, are you a good ambassador or a bad ambassador? Every person is a theologian. Every person has doctrine that they believe.

The question is, are we a good theologian or a bad theologian? Do we believe things that are true about God and about the way that he's put the world together? Or do we believe wrongly?

So that's verse number, that's verse number 11. He says, I want to explain these amazing things about salvation to you, but you've become too lazy to understand. That is, you aren't wanting to put the work in to understand more about Jesus.

Now, you are listening, you know, you're like eight, nine minutes into this episode. You have a desire to know about Jesus and about doctrine. And so I want to encourage you in that.

That's a good thing.

Sometimes people have been like, okay, well, I just want to like go to church and get like a self-help thing, like give me, you know, some phrase, some, well, you know, some magic word that I can repeat during my week so that that way my family, they

all behave or that people in my job get off my case or that, you know, I can overcome all of my difficulties. And I don't really need to know like doctrine.

I don't need to know about like how Jesus and, you know, the spiritual realm and sin and all of that. Like I don't really need to know about all that. Like just give me something real practical.

But the truth is this, what we believe directly influences how we behave. And if we believe wrong things about God, it's going to come out in our behavior.

There are plenty of Christians or as we look at the Book of Hebrews, there are plenty of people who gather with churches. That they can behave in certain ways only because they don't understand God's ways.

They don't understand what God's call is on their life. They don't know who he is. They don't know who Jesus is.

They don't know about like how God put marriage together. And so how they interact in their relationships, so they're in their marriage relationship or they're dating relationships or things like that.

They don't behave in the way that God has set out for us. They don't walk after God because they are believing wrongly about those things. So our beliefs determine our behavior.

So it is vitally important to get the right beliefs, because if we have the right beliefs about God, then our behavior is downwind of that.

If we truly believe on the inside, not just like a summary knowledge of, oh yeah, Christians believe this, but no, no, I wholeheartedly believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, well, then I'm going to preach the gospel.

Then I'm going to believe in Christ alone. If I believe, you know, just kind of whatever. As long as Jesus is like somewhere in the mix, a person can be saved.

Okay, well, then you're never going to share the gospel with people that might know about Jesus, might have Jesus as part of their, if you will, pantheon of gods, where it's like, hey, here's some good works. Here's some, you know, prophets.

Here's some saints. Here's some, you know, of my own works or baptisms or thoughts. And, you know, here's this other figure and, you know, kind of this whole mess together.

But Jesus is in there. You'll never share the gospel with those that need it because you will think, you will believe, Jesus plus whatever equals salvation, as opposed to the Bible way.

Neither is there salvation found in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.

If we think wrongly about trials, if we think wrongly about difficult times in our life, then as we encounter those, then we're going to behave in specific ways.

We're going to say, well, God didn't really take care of me, so I don't have to follow him. I'm not going to gather with his people, because if he was really good, then this wouldn't have happened.

And ignoring like, hey, Jesus went through suffering. All of God's people throughout all of history have undergone suffering.

But God's plan in suffering is that we would turn to him, that we would become complete and mature in our walks with the Lord.

And that we would find our reliance on him based in suffering, so that belief then influences our behavior, that how do we respond in trials. I think of my friend Fountain Sr.

from my pastor's dad from back in Washington, that he had cancer for about 10 years, four different types of cancer, beat all four different types of cancers, and then passed away from some strokes after he had defeated those cancers.

And the whole way through over those 10 years, he could have just went like, hey, woe is me. You know, after the second or the third cancer, many people would have been like, hey, God hates me. He's against me.

I'm not following him. But that wasn't Fountain Sr.'s mindset. He said some people, you know, might ask like, hey, why me?

He said, but my question is, why not me? Like, God, what do you have for me to do?

And so he was able to witness to people over that decade that maybe he would not have had any chance to interact with or to share the gospel with other than if he had had that cancer.

And he saw it was somewhere between like 11 and 17 different people accept the Lord as a result of his evangelism and his witness during his battles with cancer. So our beliefs determine what our behavior is. Okay, that's all from verse 11.

I promise I'm going to go quicker through verses 12 through 14. Doctrine is important. What we believe is important.

Verse 12. Although by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the basic principles of God's revelation again. You need milk, not solid food.

He says you guys have been saved. You guys have known Jesus for an amount of time that's long enough that you ought to be teachers. Now, James chapter 3 and verse 1.

My brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers knowing that we will receive a stricter judgment in the Old King James, a greater condemnation. Not every person should be a teacher, like, within a church setting.

But all of us are called to grow up, to mature from being babies that need that initial milk of the basic elements of the Gospel, to know that Jesus came, lived a perfect sinless life, He died in our place, taking the punishment for our sins, and He

was buried, and He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and one day He will return again. That's the milk. That's the basics.

That's Christianity 101. That's a walk with Jesus one-on-one, and that we ought to repent of our sin and believe in Jesus.

But then we ought to grow in our faith that all of those truths get fleshed out, that we would understand them deeper and more fully, so that we understand the scriptures, and that then we can disciple others.

That as others have poured into us, here's the truths from God's Word, then we pass that on to other people, individually, and some people corporately through the public teaching of God's Word. And he says, you ought to be teachers by this time.

You ought to be able to pass on these truths to other people, but right now you are needing someone to teach you the basics again. He says, so I'm like telling you, don't go back to Judaism because Jesus is the point. He is God.

He's better than Moses. He's better than the angels. He's our great high priest.

He's our brother. He says, this is the basics. And you guys haven't gotten that down yet, that Jesus is the point of it all.

And he says, you need milk, not solid food.

He says, sure, like milk is good for some people for a time, but if you've got a four year old, well, maybe a four year old that's still drinking its mother's milk, you might be like, well, isn't it about time that they like grow up?

Or if you have a teenager that's still on baby formula, you'd go, something's not right with the development of that kid. Like they need to be able to, by the time they're a teen, need to be able to eat a steak or eat a crab cake or something.

Those of you here at Tabernacle are probably tired of hearing me mention crab cakes. Honestly, I'm just a little hungry right now, so that might be a little bit of why. So he says, you guys need to mature.

You need to grow up. You need to start learning deeper truths, not just having to be reminded of the basics again. I do think there's a thought here that we tend to regress.

We tend to forget the basics. It's kind of that come thou found, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it.

Seal it for thy courts above. Verse number 13, Now, everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness because he is an infant.

Those that are baby Christians, they can't handle like all of the truths of God's Word right away. That's something that you got to grow a little bit. You got to learn how to read the Word.

You got to learn how to pray. You got to learn how to go to church. You got to learn how to evangelize others.

You got to learn how to give financially. You got to learn how to serve and to give with your life to others and to bless and benefit others for the cause of Jesus.

So he says, people that are infants in the faith, brand new believers, inexperienced, they can't take on everything right away. They got to go kind of step by step. It says verse 14, but solid food is for the mature.

For those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.

That is, that through God's word, through that thing that divides soul and spirit and joints and marrow and discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart, if you are mature, then it says your senses have been trained.

That is, your conscience has been formed over time, no longer to just go by maybe what you grew up with or what the culture around you says, but that your conscience has been shaped to tell you, hey, that thing that that person said, that wasn't in

line with God's word. That's not what's true about Jesus. Hey, what this person just like, what they said about their confession of faith in Christ, that's true and that's right and that's godly.

Hey, this person is giving advice to this other person and that doesn't really align with what Proverbs says in this verse.

Or hey, what this brother just encouraged this group of people to do, that lines right up with what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. That is that we form our conscience, we have to train our senses to distinguish between good and evil.

We don't do that by saying what feels right, what feels good. We do that by looking at God's Word, by knowing it. And it is only through knowing the Word of God that we can become spiritually mature.

And that is the goal. A spiritually mature person is an easy person to be around. They're not easily offended, they don't tend to be jerks, they've got the fruit of the Spirit flowing out of them.

They're the ones that you want to go to for good, godly advice. Lord willing, these ought to be the spiritual leaders in a church. Your pastors and your elders and your deacons, those ought to be spiritually godly people.

And I want to encourage you, that's not something that you just offload to someone else. I'm saying like at a bare minimum, if the only people in a church that are godly, it at least ought to be the spiritual leaders, the church leaders.

If you have a church leader that is ungodly, that is a gossip, that is immoral, if you have a church leader that is constantly stirring up disunity and fighting and complaining and grumbling, that is a bad situation to be in.

But for you today, I say that not for people to point out to someone else, hey, you're really messed up in all those ways. If you are a church leader, then certainly check those things in your life. Are you spiritually mature?

Because that's what God calls us to. If you are a church member, God calls you to spiritual maturity. How do you gain that?

You train your senses to distinguish between good and evil based on what God says. Not taking that fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil for yourself and saying, I'm going to define right and wrong.

I know God says this will bring death and God says this is bad, but I think it's good to look at and it'll help make me wise. We're not playing that game, but we're saying, God, what you say is good is good. What you say is bad is bad.

It doesn't it doesn't matter what our church culture says, but that we ought to follow what God says. Much more could be said, but I think we'll end there for today. The goal is let's become mature.

How do we become mature? By reading God's Word. Our way that we got saved, that was milk.

It was pure. It was sincere. It was genuine.

That's what we read about in 1 Peter chapter 2. As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word so that you may grow in it. But we are not to stay at milk.

We are to mature. We are to get the solid food. Jesus isn't just like the cutesy little thing that we get into the Christian faith with.

He is the full scale of everything we are to learn. Everything in the Christian faith points to Jesus. Every iota of doctrine tells us something about Jesus.

It tells us something about the Lord, about His righteousness or His character or His actions or how He made our world or the spiritual realm or mankind or how we wrote the Word of God. All of it points to Jesus and to God.

And so we ought to grow in our knowledge of Him. Tomorrow, we're going to look at one of what is often one of the most misunderstood portions of scripture.

And Lord willing, we'll get some clarity on that and look at how it fits in with everything we've been learning about following Jesus and what it looks like for people to really know and follow Jesus and what it looks like for people to abandon Him

in favor of religion and what scripture tells us about that. Thanks for tuning in and see you tomorrow.