I just took my 10 day old daughter out of my office so I could get some work completed.  She is absolutely beautiful and when I look at her I see God's incredible handy work.  My wife is acting as her "resturant" right now, so I don't get to do a lot of the feeding stuff.  It is amazing how this little baby causes my wife's body to respond in just the right way to produce just the right amount of food for our little girl.

 

You know though as she grows she will need food beyond what my wife can provide.  She will move beyond liquids to semi-liquids to semi- solids to solids.  Being a pastor this got me thinking about spiritual matters.  How often do we believers end up falling in love with the milk and don't really want to go on to solids?  I think too many times it is simply easier to consume the milk placed in our mouths and not do the work that spiritually solid food requires.  Guess what though we are just following the example of our spiritual ancestors. 

 

In 1 Corinthians 3, the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians that he gave them milk when they first came to believe in Christ and they are still sucking down the milk, even though they should have been eating solid spiritual food by that time. He is most likely writing this letter to them a few years after they first came to know Christ and yet they are trapped in their comfortableness of drinking milk.  The weak spiritual lives they had must have had a lot to do still drinking only milk. 

 

[Just an aside that came to mind ---- Never thought about it before but maybe the whole tongues issue - insisting that everyone who was really a Christian would be speaking in tongues - arose out of looking for and trying to find some pyhsical expression of their faith because they didn't have the depth of faith that simple flows out into our everyday activities and life. If they could just have some tangible experience to point to they didn't need to worry about going deeper and maturing in Christ.  Just a thought - maybe worth thinking about for a while.]

 

(Now back to the topic at hand)  If there is some relation between being satisfied with  spiritual milk and growing, which Paul certainly believes there is - then what happens in the church today when we become satisfied with the status quo and only want milk?  What happens when we believers become consumers who constantly come in searching to be fed, but never go and feed, never go and make disciples?  What happens when we simply soak in all the stuff they makes us feel better, but never even consider that some of the challenges that are presented, may actually be for us?  What happens when we just come when the teaching/music/preaching appeals to us and meets what we want, and we leave to go else where "when my needs aren't being meet"?

 

Our bodies mature - though in a limited way - because we get chronologically older, but we fail to truly mature in a life sustaining manner.  If we ever settle for / demand only / require only what we want, then we will one day wake up and find that we are spiritually dead.  You see just as we as parents want to see our babies grow, become strong healthy kids then teens and eventually adults who reproduce, our Heavenly Father longs for us to mature and grow to be strong healthy spiritual kids then teens and eventually adults who are reproducing. 

 

Well, those are a few of my thoughts today.