Transcript
Will you turn with me again tonight to the Epistle to the Hebrews? And this time to Hebrews chapter 5. Hebrews chapter 5. And we begin reading at verse 12. Hebrews chapter 5 at verse 12.
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God. And you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
Now you come down into chapter 6 and we pick up at verse 4.
For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance, since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God and put Him to an open shame. For the earth which drinks in the rain that often comes upon it and bears herbs useful for those by whom it is cultivated receives blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and briers, it is rejected and near to being cursed, whose end is to be burned.
And now down to verse 11.
And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
It probably will not come as a surprise to most of you but when I was a little boy I sometimes disobeyed my mother. And like most little boys who disobey their mothers I was frequently tanned on the seat of my education. But there was one occasion when I disobeyed my mom when she treated me like an angel in disguise.
We were living at the time in a second-floor apartment in a place that we called Beechwood. I was about three or four years old and my brother David was about one year old and he was still in his crib. And something that I did displeased my mother and she banished me to the living room. And she told me not to go back into the bedroom without permission. Well that was a long time before they invented TV and I got very bored in the living room. So I decided to sneak back into the bedroom without my mother noticing me. But when I got back in I got a shock.
My brother had athletic talents and he was obviously developing them early. His crib was sitting next to some French windows, one section of which were open. And believe it or not my brother David had climbed up out of his crib. He had climbed through the open section of the windows, probably knocking a screen out in the process. And he was standing outside of the windows on the windowsill holding on to the section of the windows that was closed. And there was a sloping roof behind him. And if he had lost his balance he probably would have rolled down the roof and fallen onto the ground.
I don’t remember doing this but my mother assures me that I did. I grabbed his clothes. But I do remember screaming at the top of my lungs for my mother to come here quick. Though when she got there she was horrified. And of course she snatched David back into the room, put him in his crib and closed the French windows. And do you suppose that I got rebuked for going back into the bedroom without permission? No way. No way. With one stroke I had been transformed from a disobedient brat into a family hero. Maybe, just maybe, I saved my brother’s life.
Now no parent in this audience tonight is going to be surprised at all by a story like that. Every parent knows that as soon as a baby gets the power of locomotion they have a strong tendency to crawl or toddle or walk their way wherever their little heart desires. And they can get themselves into the awfullest of predicaments. In fact when you really stop to think about it babyhood, infancy, is just about the most dangerous period of our lives.
And do you realize that it is exactly the same in the Christian life? One of the most dangerous periods in our entire Christian life and experience is the time when we are babies in the family of God, when we are babes in Christ.
Back at Victor Street Bible Chapel where I preached the word on a regular basis we were very fond of the birthday song. And by the way this is my sixth meeting at the Church of the Open Door and the singing is wonderful and the music is beautiful but I haven’t heard the birthday song sung even once. And I got to wondering what is it with Southern California? Don’t you get any older like the rest of us do? There must be somebody in this audience that’s had a birthday this week.
But back at Victor Street we really loved the birthday song. And particularly we liked the second stanza.
“Happy birthday to you. Only one will not do. Born again means salvation. How many have you?”
And if you’re the one being sung to you’re supposed to hold up two fingers to indicate that you have two birthdays. One the birthday on which you were born into this world physically. And second the birthday on which you were born into the family of God by faith in Jesus Christ. The day that you received eternal life through personal faith in our Savior.
And you know for some people the interval between those two birthdays is a long, long time. And no matter what age you are saved at, after you get saved you are a baby in the family of God. And even if a man is sixty or seventy or eighty years old and he looks very experienced and mature from a human point of view, if he’s just gotten saved he’s just a babe in Christ.
And you know that’s perfectly normal. That’s perfectly natural. The problem comes if we remain a baby too long. Too long. And I happen to think that one of the great tragedies in the Christian Church today is that there are so many Christians who have been saved for years and years and they have barely grown at all in the Lord. And they’re still babies.
You know what would be a kind of a funny and sad thing to be able to do in an audience like this tonight? Suppose I had a magic wand that I could wave out over the audience and every Christian would be transformed into the physical size that corresponds to your development in Christ. Boy the way to look around this audience and we’d be laughing our heads off at some people. And some of us might have very red faces.
You know there might be grown-up people who would be reduced to the size of a little babe in diapers. Adults who would shrink to the size of a little six-year-old girl or a one-year-old boy. There might be some of you who would look older than you do physically because you’ve grown and developed so well in Jesus Christ. But when a person remains a baby too long that’s tragic. And it’s more than tragic. It’s dangerous. It is very, very dangerous.
You see apparently that was what was wrong with the Christians to whom the book of Hebrews was written. They had been Christians for a long time and they had scarcely grown at all. And the writer says to them,
“For by this time you ought to be teachers but you have need that someone teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God. And you have come to need milk and not solid food. And everyone who only uses milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness because he is a babe.”
Look here, says the writer of Hebrews, if folks have been Christians long enough they ought to be able to teach someone something about the great truths of the Christian faith. But it looks to me like you need to go back to grade school. Go back to kindergarten. You need somebody to teach you the ABCs of the Christian faith. You can’t take in the solid food, the deep truths of God’s Word. You can only take in the simple things, the basic things, the milk.
And look, says the writer, anybody who just uses milk is just a little baby, unskilled in the word of righteousness. There was a school principal one time who was very disappointed because he didn’t get a promotion that he had set his heart on. And he was complaining to the superintendent of schools about it. And he said to the superintendent, “After all I’ve had twenty-five years experience.” And the superintendent replied, “No, Joe, that’s where you’re mistaken. You’ve had one year’s experience twenty-five times.”
They’ve had one year’s experience twenty-five times. You know there are Christians like that. They’re no further along today than they were at the end of their first year of Christianity. They’ve had one year’s experience five times, ten times, twenty-five times. And it’s dangerous.
And you know why it’s dangerous? Because baby Christians can’t make the kinds of decisions that Christians need to make. They have a hard, hard time telling the difference between the things that are good for them and the things that are bad for them.
Put a little baby out on the carpet of your living room. Let him crawl around a little bit. And then put in front of that little baby a brightly colored marble and a clear, uncut diamond. The marble may be worth five cents. The diamond worth thousands of dollars. And the chances are very good the baby is going to prefer the brightly colored marble. Baby doesn’t know the difference between a marble and a diamond. He has no concept of the comparative value of these two things. And he is likely to choose the thing that appeals to his baby senses.
And that is precisely the danger that baby Christians face. They are unskilled in the word of righteousness. And since, the writer of Hebrews says, solid food belongs to those who are mature, who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil. Mature people know how to make the right choices. They choose the good and they refuse the evil.
Jimmy Breslin is fed up with kids. Not just with other people’s kids. With his own kids most of all. Just in case you don’t remember who Jimmy Breslin is he’s a kind of a celebrity, a playwright, a journalist and novelist. And some time ago he appeared on a talk show with Charlie Rose and they got onto the subject of kids.
Jimmy Breslin was explaining that his wife had passed away about a year before and left him with a family of kids to raise. And he had finally found out what kids were like. And he said to Charlie Rose very bluntly, “There’s no sense even being nice about it. They don’t stand up. They’re selfish.” Charlie Rose thought to himself this guy’s pretty blunt. I appreciate it. He realizes that Breslin is serious. And so he starts to press him for examples of what he was talking about. And Breslin was happy to oblige.
And he said, “All right. One day I was sitting at home working on this important book and I sent my sixteen-year-old daughter to the supermarket. And she comes back with one hundred fifty dollars worth of cake and cookies. And the kids are in the kitchen fighting over what she’s brought back. So I go in and I say to her, ‘Why’d you bring all this stuff back?’ And she says to me, ‘Because that’s all they had on the aisle that I shopped on.’”
So Breslin says she goes to the supermarket. She shops on one aisle. She brings back what they’ve got. And the kids are fighting over it. And I kicked them out of the house. They’re selfish. They haven’t done one kind thing all year. Charlie Rose said nothing. And Breslin said, “No, nothing. I’m not kidding you. You’ll find out they’re lousy.” And Rose says, “Well surely, surely they bring a lot to your life.” Breslin says, “No they don’t bring anything. They bring you one hundred fifty dollars worth of cake when you send them to the supermarket.”
Now when I hear a story like that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. And I don’t know who’s in worse shape, Jimmy Breslin’s kids or Jimmy Breslin himself. But one thing is obvious. That girl doesn’t know how to shop in a supermarket.
And you know that there are lots of Christians who don’t know how to shop in the supermarket of life. You turn them loose in the supermarket of life and they will head straight for the aisle with the sweets on it. What I’m talking about? Big bright cars with big fancy houses, the expensive clothes, the costly vacations, the good things of this life. That’s what they choose. They choose the marbles of life and they turn their back on the diamonds. They don’t know how to tell the difference between good and evil. They choose the things that hurt them and they fail to choose the things that would benefit them and bring glory to the God of heaven.
And sometimes, sometimes they choose poison. They choose poison. Have you ever noticed how many manufacturers tell you to keep their products out of the reach of children? And just about all medicine bottles these days have these childproof caps that are hard for children to unscrew. And they’re a pain in the neck because I can’t get the cap off myself sometimes.
But children have a strong tendency to put things in their mouths without discriminating. And they can’t tell the difference between food and poison. And I think that one of the things that really concerns the writer of Hebrews is that he is afraid that his readers may drink poison. He is afraid that these immature Christians who can only drink in the milk of the word may end up drinking in the poison of apostasy. He is afraid that under the pressure of circumstances and trials and testings they’ll be discouraged. They’ll give up. They’ll throw their Christian faith overboard and walk away from it.
Have you ever watched a bunch of kids playing and maybe there’s one kid in the bunch they just can’t do anything right? I mean he can’t win for losing. And pretty soon you’re gonna see him get up and say, “I quit. I won’t play this dumb game anyway. I’m gonna go home.” He picks up his marbles or whatever he was playing with, walks off and quits.
And sometimes when the game of life gets tough, sometimes when it is difficult to persevere in the pathway of obedience to God, a Christian, particularly an immature Christian, may say, “I quit. I don’t need this Christianity bit anyway. I’d be better off like I was before.” And that is exactly why the writer of Hebrews over and over again urges his readers to hold firm to their Christian commitment. “Hold fast the confession of your hope without wavering.”
And it is precisely because he is afraid that some of his readers may waver that in Hebrews chapter 6 verses 4 to 6 he pens words that must certainly go down as among the most solemn words in the Word of God. The writer says,
“For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance, since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God and put Him to an open shame.”
Now I want you to know tonight that these words of solemn warning come very, very close to home for me. You see I have a friend, and more than a friend, a man who labored with me side by side in the ministry of God’s Word in the little group that has become Victor Street Bible Chapel. And this friend has fallen away from the Christian faith.
He comes from overseas. When he got over to this country he married a very fine Christian girl. He graduated from Bob Jones University and from Dallas Theological Seminary. And about the time when he and his wife left Dallas his wife contracted a very serious illness which over the years got progressively worse until she was reduced to being a complete invalid.
And after the death of his wife I visited my friend who now lives in the Midwest and who teaches ancient history at a secular university. And as we sat in the living room together face to face he told me very frankly but graciously that he no longer claimed to be a Christian at all. That he no longer believed the things that he had once preached and taught. And the situation was even worse than he described because I heard through others that in the classroom on the university campus he often mocked and ridiculed the Christian faith.
And as I sat in that living room I was very painfully aware that it was impossible for me to talk that man into changing his mind. It was impossible for me to talk him back to the convictions that he had once held. It was impossible for me to renew him to repentance.
You want to find someone harder to deal with than an unsaved person? Find a person like that. And the writer of Hebrews tells us that it is impossible after a man has been spiritually illuminated, after he has received the priceless heavenly gift, after he’s actually become a partaker of the Holy Spirit and tasted the goodness of the word of God, the power of Christianity which is the power of the age to come, it is impossible to renew such a one to repentance. Because you see what they are doing is just the same as putting Jesus Christ back on the cross. They are rejecting Him as He was rejected so long ago. And they are putting Him to an open shame.
And I’m going to tell you something I don’t like to talk about. My friends, I virtually never talk about it unless it’s in a message like this because I’m ashamed of this. Oh how disgraceful for a man to have known the truth and proclaimed the truth and then to deny the truth. He has put the Son of God to an open shame.
Well you’re saying, “I guess he’s headed for hell, right? I guess he’s headed for eternal damnation. He’s renounced his Christian faith.” Wait a minute. I didn’t say that. And neither does the writer of Hebrews.
Let me remind you that Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. He that cometh to Me shall never hunger and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst.” And He also said, “He that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.” And He also said, “I came down from heaven not to do Mine own will but the will of Him that sent Me. And this is the will of the Father who has sent Me that of all that He has given Me I should lose nothing but should raise it up at the last day.”
And we have Jesus’ word for it that if a man comes to Him for the bread of life he will never need that bread again. That he will never under any circumstances be cast out. Because Jesus is determined to do the will of God. And God’s will is that He lose no one. He has never lost anyone and He never will.
And I grieved because my friend and brother has lost his faith. But Christ has not lost him. He has lost his faith but Christ has not lost him.
Do you believe in the grace of God? Then hold it. Stop right there. I don’t want anybody in this audience to say to themselves, “Well I guess it really doesn’t matter what we do after we’re saved, huh? Throw your faith away. Maybe you’re still going to heaven. It doesn’t really matter what you do.” Oh yes it does. Oh yes it does.
My friend is safe from the fires of hell but he’s not safe. My friend is safe from the fires of hell but he is not safe from the righteous anger of God. He is not safe from the fire of God’s chastisement and discipline and retribution. And he lives in the shadow of disaster, menace.
Why? In Hebrews 6 verses 7 and 8 the writer speaks words that are both very encouraging and terribly threatening. And the writer says,
“The land which drinks in the rain which comes often upon it and produces herbs that are useful for those for whom it is cultivated receives blessing from God. But if it produces briars and thorns it is rejected. It is near to being cursed, whose end is to be burned.”
Have you ever been out in the country driving through the countryside and you saw a field on fire? You know, in Pennsylvania where I come from I’ve seen it. You may at first think, “Well the fire started accidentally.” But as you get closer to the field you notice that the fire is under supervision. Maybe the field has real tall grass on it and it has lots of weeds. And it becomes evident that the owner of the field has set fire to his own field to burn off the grass and weeds.
And this agricultural practice was known way back in the days of the Bible. And the purpose of burning a field was not to destroy the field but to destroy the rank and unacceptable growth that the field had produced.
And listen. When we become a Christian we are not like a plot of ground that belongs to God. God has poured out upon us the blessings of His grace like rain from heaven. And He has a right to expect that our lives will be fruitful and productive and useful to men. And when they are He blesses that life.
But if after the rain has fallen upon our life, after we have received the blessings of His matchless grace, we produce briars and thorns, the fruits of a sin-cursed world, then God rejects that kind of a life. It falls under His temporal curse. And its destiny is to suffer the fire of His discipline, His chastisement, His retribution.
And I happen to think that the reason why it is impossible for us to talk an apostate Christian back to his former convictions is because God reserves that individual for the fire. And if recovery in this life is ever to happen it will only happen after the individual has passed through the searing reality of God’s righteous retribution.
I know that that is heavy. That the writer of this epistle is heavy. And in chapter 10 where he is talking about the same thing he says, “We know Him who said, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ saith the Lord. And again, ‘The Lord will judge His people.’” Did you hear that? The Lord will judge. Not the unsaved. Not in this context. The Lord will judge His people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. For our God is a consuming fire.
But, says the writer, that’s not the experience I want you folks to have. That’s not what we desire for you. We desire that you should show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end that you may not be sluggish but that you may be growing, growing. And that you may be imitators of those who through faith and endurance inherit the promises.
Hold on, says the writer. Hold on. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering for He is faithful who promised.
My dad has discovered one of the joys of retirement which for him is gardening. And when I was up north in Pennsylvania just a few weeks ago I was given the special tour of his garden this summer. And everything was growing fine.
And you know one of the things that we don’t realize when we’re looking at a garden is the tremendous powerful growth that is there. You know that I have read that turnip seeds, which I understand are very tiny seeds, when they are in their growing season under ideal conditions can increase their weight as much as fifteen times a minute. And under the very best of conditions they can increase their weight fifteen thousand times a day. Turnips!
And there’s nothing more powerful than a growing squash. This boggled my mind but here’s what I have read. An eighteen-day-old squash has been harnessed to a lever and has been able to lift fifty pounds. And if that doesn’t surprise you, nineteen days later the same plant harnessed to the same lever was able to raise five thousand pounds. The miracle of growth that God has imparted. Tiny seeds the capacity to grow like that.
And listen. You may feel like a very tiny and insignificant Christian but I’m going to tell you this. That the Holy Spirit of God lives in your heart. All of the power that God has is resident in every Christian. And the miracle of growth can take place there. There is no reason to remain a baby. There is no reason to fail. There is no reason to give up.
Therefore do not cast away your confidence which has great reward.
Shall we pray? Father teach us the solemn lessons of this portion of Thy Word. May we be men and women who are growing steadily in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and holding firmly to the confession of our hope without wavering. We pray it in Christ’s name. Amen.