DON’T BE A BABY

Heb.6:1,2 – Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of instruction about washings and laying on of hands, and about the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.

The church has always had an abundance of baby Christians in it’s number. It is obviously okay to begin your Christian walk as a baby but it is really embarrassing to be a thirty year old baby. There was a popular cartoon that I watched as a child called ‘Baby Huey’. Huey was an overgrown duck who still wore diapers and ate from a baby chair and acted like an infant. I have seen far too many Christians who resemble Baby Huey. How can we avoid perpetual infancy? We have to eat strong food to grow up. That is what today’s passage is about. It is describing Christians who are stuck on the beginning teachings of our Christian life and never move into fullness. Here is how Andrew Murray describes this dilemma.

“There are Christians who never get beyond the foundation, who never know what the house is for the sake of which alone the foundation is; what it is to be an habitation of God through the Spirit, and to dwell in the love and the power of God. The writer mentions, in three pairs, six points which belong to the foundation truths, in which the young beginner has to be instructed. Repentance from dead works and faith towards God: these are in very deed only the rudiments of the word of Christ. Then follow two points that have reference to the public confession of faith and the connection with the Church: the teaching of baptism and of the laying on of hands. And then two more, that relate to the future life: the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. Without these elementary truths one could hardly be a Christian: but the man who rests content with them, and cares not to know more, cannot be a Christian as God would have him, has reason to doubt whether he be a Christian at all.”

Paul was calling the church in Jerusalem past the surface level of their faith into the deeper waters that we encounter when we begin to consider Jesus. These elementary teachings are an introduction to our faith but will never keep us when the dark days come. I have been talking to various ministers recently as we come out of the Covid pandemic and there was much concern that many Christians have not returned to church. Apparently many had a philosophic belief in the Lord but had never drunk deeply from the powers of the world to come. When difficult times come we must have our eyes on Jesus, Who is seated in heaven and has entered into God’s presence on our behalf. Stop being a baby and press in to the heavenly kingdom.