In the Book of Hebrews chapter 5:12 to 6:6 we find the Apostle Paul chastising the Israelite Christians because they refused to grow up in the Lord and were therefore dying spiritually. He told them that they should by that time have been teachers of God’s Way. Instead they were in need of someone to teach them the first principles of the oracles (Words) of God–they were in need of milk, not strong meat. Paul is also speaking to the modern church, telling her that anyone who ingests only spiritual milk is a spiritual infant who is unskilled in the Word of righteousness. Strong meat, he goes on to say, belongs to those who are of full spiritual age who can discern good and evil–good being the Word of God and evil being everything else. He calls on the church to leave the elementary (infant level) principles such as repentance from sin, faith, the resurrection from the dead, baptism, etc. and move on to spiritual adulthood where strong meat is the Biblical food served at the Lord’s table. In 6:4-6 Paul warns that to fail to grow up after being taught the “good Word of God and powers of the world to come” is to “fall away” from God. Once this happens, Paul warns, it is impossible to renew them to repentance in that they “crucify unto themselves the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame.” Then in verse 8 he describes the end of such people. They are “rejected” and “burned.” Note that he is writing to the church about the church. When is the last time, or first time that you heard a strong meat sermon? I am guessing never. I spent over 30 years in a mainline Protestant church and never once heard the kind of message I teach almost on a daily basis.

Through Paul, God does not let up in His command for spiritual growth. In Hebrews 10:26-31 He notes that if the church member knowingly sins, the only thing he has to look forward to is “firey indignation” by which the Lord will “devour His enemies” (sinners saved by grace) who “trod under foot the Son of God,” who “count the blood of the covenant as an unholy thing,” who “insult the Spirit of grace.”

In 2 Peter 2:22 the Lord tells us that once church people know the Truth and accept it, if they continue to sin it would have “been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, after having known it, to turn from the holy commandment that had been delivered to them.” He compares such people to “the (healed) dog that returns to its vomit and the sow that has been washed to her wallowing in the mire.” Enough said about repentance. L.J.   My YouTube address is:    proveallthingsofgod