Hebrews
Lesson 51 April 27, 2006
NKJ Isaiah 41:10 Fear not, for I am with you;
Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I
will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous
right hand.'
We will start off with a letter. This is one of those
nights where I have a lot of different things to do. Who knows how unified
anything will be.
This is from Jim Myers. Actually it is two letters
because Jim has a short letter and with it there is a lengthier letter from one
of the African people that he worked with. He just returned to Kiev from
Africa.
Dear
Friends,
I am
back in the Ukraine after nearly three weeks in Africa. This was the most
productive trip yet as far as opportunity to teach and response to the Word. After
teaching some 60 hours in two weeks I am just a wee bit tired but not
exhausted. It takes almost 36 hours to Kiev to Lusaka, Zambia. The fact that it
is in the same time zone means that there isn’t the jet lag to deal with. I was
a week in the big city and a week in the bush. The settings were quite
different but the objective was the same - to provide sound teaching to pastors
and other leaders. I thank all of you who have prayed for me and supported the
ministry so that I can take the Word of God to so many places. I received the
following letter which I thought you might enjoy reading. The letter is from
Jack C. Nikandu who is the Central African Education Coordinator Church of God
World Missions.
Dear Brother James
Choice Christian greetings!
I am
thankful to God for the Jim Myers Ministries and the most needed and vital role
you are playing in preparing and equipping church leaders for effective
ministry and leadership. The just ended leaders’ seminar in Lusaka, Zambia that
brought together 24 churches and ministries and had an attendance of more that
300 people was a blessing. The seminar addressed the great need of many church
leaders in Africa – the need for sound biblical teaching. There is a
great need for leadership training and development in Africa. Many seminars
have emphasized quantity and not quality. We thank God for your emphasis on
godly quality leadership - a must for African churches and ministries. Many
church leaders have not been exposed to sound biblical teaching at seminars
they have attended. The just ended seminar was with a difference. Leaders have
been challenged to be men and women of the Word - men and women growing deeper
in the Word. The seminar received a tremendous response. The people were open
and receptive to the Word. I am assured that the next time another Jim Myers
seminar is held in Zambia there will be many more people attending because of
the testimony of those who attended. Church leaders cannot remain the same after
such biblical teachings. My prayer is that not only in Zambia but other leaders
in countries surrounding Zambia will also benefit from the Lord’s blessing from
the sound, timely, and biblical teaching of Jim Myers. Finally let me thank
those who have stood together with Jim Myers ministries and who have provided and
continue to provide financial support. The seminars are costly but their
support is an investment in the business of God. I would love to meet and thank
them in person for their love and goodness to God’s work in Africa and other
parts of the world. Those who support your ministry are playing a great part in
transforming church leadership in Africa.
Sometimes people say, “Well, Jim is supposed to be a
missionary in the Ukraine. What is he doing in Africa? What’s he doing in
Brazil?”
The thing is Paul was supposed to be a missionary to
the Gentiles, but he went Greece and Turkey and Rome. He went everywhere. It is
wherever the Lord opens doors and gives you an opportunity to go and teach the
Word.
Last time we are started looking at the doctrine of
the leading of the Spirit. We are going to put a pause on that and go back to
what we were talking about before we got into talking about the leading of the
Spirit that comes out of Hebrews 5.
Turn in your Bibles to Hebrews 5. I want to set things
up again and then I want to give us a framework for discernment which is what
grows out of this passage. Then we are going to look at some application. What
we have been doing the last few weeks as a matter of fact is actually looking
at application of the text. Unfortunately we live in a world where application
is often reduced to being able to give 3 or 4 points on how to love your
children or how to love your spouse or how to be more effective at work or how
to live on the basis of your own potential and be encouraged and strengthened
and have happiness and health and wealth and all of those other things. Real
application of the Word starts with what goes on in your head and your
thinking. That is the toughest stuff to teach and to grasp. Some of this
material that I am teaching and that you have heard me teach in other series
before this and go over again and again related to thought and thinking is so
foundational. Every time I go though this it is like peeling an onion and I go
a little deeper into the subject. It makes a little more sense to me and I hope
it makes a little more sense to you. Thought is foundational. I remember years
ago, the first time I really started digging into the whole subject of
spiritual warfare realizing that spiritual warfare isn’t this charismatic thing
that you are going out and doing battle with the demons. Spiritual warfare has
to do with what is going on in your head.
NKJ 2 Corinthians 10:5 casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against
the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of
Christ,
It is a battle. The warfare takes place related to
taking every thought captive for Christ. Not just some thoughts, not just those
sinful thoughts; but every thought. We have to learn to think and structure our
thoughts biblically. That is a difficult thing for most people to deal with. It
is a lot easier to stay at home and watch whatever that show is where everybody
gets on and sings or something like that and have a little entertainment than
to come to Bible class and have your brain cells fried for an hour. If I could
I would fry them for 3 hours tonight.
All of this ties together because I was talking about
apologetics. I did a little bit at the beginning of the last lesson. I was just
tying some lose ends together. Before that we talked about mysticism. We talked
about rationalism. We talked about how everybody comes out of this cesspool of
worldly culture. We all bring this baggage with us that somehow has been
dressed up and perfumed to look like it is acceptable to God and it is really
good morality and all of this other stuff. Of course we know that Isaiah says …
NKJ Isaiah 64:6 But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities,
like the wind, Have taken us away.
That’s a very mild euphemism for the way the Hebrew
expresses it. The best we do is garbage in God’s eyes. We need to have a
complete overhaul of our whole thought process. What happens is we all come out
the cesspool with all of this intellectual baggage as well and moral baggage
and behavioral baggage and all of this other stuff. We have to learn to get rid
of this. The only thing that cleanses it and gets it out of the way is studying
the Word, slogging our way through some of this difficult stuff over and over
again. One day the light comes on. On nights like this it isn’t food for
babies. It is tough stuff.
Those of you who have a tough time with this, you have
to realize just as you do when you are eating a meal and you get a tough piece
of meat and your teeth are bothering you or whatever you need to say, “I am not
going to eat that. I am just going to eat the mashed potatoes.”
The more you hear it the more you will get some sense
out of it, the more it will mean something to you. It is not easy. It’s not easy for anyone to think about
thinking.
So let’s go back and remind you of a couple of things.
First of all in Hebrews 5 we are dealing with the fact
that these believers have become backslidden. They had reached a point where
they had advanced to spiritual maturity. Then due to sin, due to regression,
due to a number of factors they had regressed. So they have deteriorated into
what the writer of Hebrews calls dull of hearing. Actually they have become
intellectually lazy. They have become complacent. They have become sluggards in
the battle. We are all in the spiritual battle. We are all in this warfare. Ultimately
it is warfare of thought, thought, thought. We live in a culture today where
part of the baggage that we bring with us out of the cultural cesspool is
“Don’t think, just feel. It is all about how good you feel. It is all about the
sense, the appearance of things. It’s not about substance at all.”
So we looked at the fact that what puts pressure on us
is the sin nature. The sin nature not only pressures us in terms of overt sins,
mental attitude sins, the kinds of sins that we normally think about, but the
structure of our thinking. So I talked about that.
We have the trends in our sin nature towards either
immoral degeneracy or moral degeneracy. It not only affects sin, it also
affects how you think. So in terms of immoral degeneracy because it is anti-authoritarianism,
it leads to mysticism. There is no external authority that is going to dictate
everything to me. There is no external authority like the Word of God. It is
all about how I feel. In its worst forms, it is raw subjectivism. People do
whatever they want to do on the spur of the moment. They may plan to do X, Y, or Z. Then
when the moment comes they do A, B, or C. It’s nothing more than a failure to be disciplined
in your thought life.
But then on the other extreme when you go to moral
degeneracy you always have these rigid artificial standards that are imposed
either morally or even intellectually. The way that this usually manifests
itself usually in the realm of thought is some kind of external system of
reason or logic. We have a great example of this.
The reason I want to go back and talk about this again
is because many of you were here on Saturday night for family night and watched
the “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe”. Those of you who weren’t, you have
an assignment. That assignment is that you need to rent the DVD and
watch it. It works at a lot of different levels. I have never been a CS Lewis
junkie. There are a lot of folks who are. I know a lot of guys at seminary that
read everything. He has some good things to say. He is a great illustration of
things that I have been talking about for the last month. There are many things
in the “Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” that relate to what I have been
saying and are very positive illustrations. But it also comes with a certain
amount of negative baggage that I also want to talk about.
Why do I want to do this? Let’s go back and think very
briefly about what I set up for an apologetics thing. In terms of apologetics,
apologetics is basically the defense of Christianity. It comes from the Greek
word apologia.
NKJ 1 Peter 3:15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that
is in you, with meekness and fear;
Apologetics goes with witnessing. I remember one time
sitting at a table with several people. I think Charlie Clough was the one who
got some people’s ire up a little bit. He was talking about how important it
was to understand how to think like a pagan so that when you are presenting the
gospel to them you do not get sucked into their logic traps, their way of
thinking in order to try to win them over in the process of giving them the
gospel.
There was one person there who made the comment, “You
don’t need all that. You don’t need to know anything like that. All you need is
to know the gospel and just hit them with the gospel.”
That was a simplistic way of expressing it. Sometimes
that is all you can do. But if you have a relationship with somebody and they
are in the process of being witnessed to by you and they have legitimate
questions then you have to be engaged in a dialogue with them. That means you
have to answer questions. You have to think about the questions that they ask.
You are engaged in a dialogue. Sometimes it can almost be like a debate. In the
good sense of that dialogue they’re really wrestling with objections that
either bother them or they’ve heard bothered other people. So they want honest
answers because they don’t want to slip their brain into neutral and buy
Christianity because it made you feel warm and good and happy and successful,
but that there is a solid rational basis for believing in Christianity or
something of that nature.
So when we talk to an unbeliever we are concerned
about the whole question of common ground. What is the common ground that we
share with the unbeliever? Ultimately the question that we are asking is (if
you are making a truth claim and that is what you are doing) when you tell someone that Jesus Christ
died on the cross for their sins
and that Jesus said, “I am the Way the Truth and the Life, no ones comes
to the Father but by Me. Jesus claims to be the source of everything and the
source of truth. Then you are making a truth claim.
This person is sitting there saying, “Okay, the Hindus
make their truth claim. The Buddhists make their truth claim. The Moslems make
their truth claim. There are all of these other philosophies out there. I can
be Hegelian, existential, Platonic, Aristotelian. Why should I believe you? What
is your basis for truth? How do I validate this? How do I verify it? What are
my ultimate criteria for determining what truth is?”
Over the process of time people have come up with some
different answers. As I pointed out last time, the first appeal that the
unbeliever makes is to autonomous rationalism and logic. Then the believer gets
sucked into that. How the unbeliever views logic is not how the believer is
going to view logic. I am going to give you some illustrations of this a little
later on. Also the unbeliever may appeal to historical evidence where
historical evidence becomes the ultimate determiner or criterion for what is
true. There are apologetic strategies that appeal to empiricism. Then you have
a third category that relates to mysticism. That is fideism. That is the idea
that there is no way to validate a religious claim. You have this existential
leap of faith. You just believe it because that’s what gives meaning, and
purpose and validation in your life. That is called fideism from the Latin word
faith. What we would say is no the ultimate court of appeal is revelation. We
will talk about this a lot more. This
comes out of Romans 1:19. I did this to remind you, get this back in your head.
We will come back to it in a minute.
We need to remember the chart. There are human viewpoint
systems of knowledge. How do you ultimately know truth? The top three -
rationalism, empiricism, and mysticism - I always say these are used
independently. By independent I mean it is independent from what the Word of
God says. So the starting point is not in the Bible. You don’t start with God
as the Creator God of the universe holding, maintaining that creator-creature
distinction. You start with something in creation. Right away maybe you are
beginning to see what the issue is. You either start with human reason some
rational principle laws of logic, law of non-contradiction, history or
something like but you are starting with something in creation, not something
in the Creator. At that level you can start having some methodological
problems. So those three systems of knowledge are set over against revelation. How
do we know anything is true? Because God said it. We start with the Scripture. As
a Christian you can’t start anywhere else without compromising the integrity of
your argument or the integrity of your defense.
Now let me give you an illustration for this. Let’s
say that you are a criminal and you have a dream team defense. You’ve got
Johnnie Cochran. You’ve got F. Lee Bailey. You’ve got Percy Forman. This is
your dream team defense. They are all dealing with the same evidence. I used
this illustration three weeks ago. I am trying to pull a lot of different
strands together here. This is your dream team for defense. They don’t agree
with each other. They are all dealing with the same evidence, but they don’t
agree with how it should be presented. If you follow one of them, let’s say
Johnnie Cochrane comes along and he’s our rationalist. He is going to take one
approach. Then you have F. Lee Bailey. He is going to come along and he’s the
empiricist. He is going to take another approach. Remember they are still
dealing with the same data. Then you have the third guy and that’s Percy Foreman.
But he is the fideist. He is going to come from the same data, but he is going to
come from a third strategy. That is what we are dealing with here, strategy as
opposed to content. The content is going to be basically the same for all three
of these. But you see all three of these even if they win in front of the jury
doesn’t mean strategically they didn’t commit some crucial errors in the
process. That’s what I am talking about.
Isn’t this fun?
Everybody is sitting out there saying, “I worked all
day today. I don’t understand
this.”
See it is strategy and tactics. If you put it in a
military context you are using the same weapons. You are using the same tanks
and the same soldiers, but it is how you use them. Remember the principle that
a right thing done in a wrong way is wrong. Even though you may end up giving
information to people and they trust Christ as their savior as a result of it,
it doesn’t mean that it was done the best way - that you didn’t somehow
compromise the integrity of God and the integrity of revelation in the process.
So we are trying to learn a little bit about this whole thing called
apologetics. That is basically what “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe”
was. That was what CS Lewis is generally known for. His books “Mere
Christianity”, “The Problem of Pain”, “Miracles”, and “Screw Tape Letters” are
apologetic. They focus on evidences for the Christian faith. I want to talk
about on those things.
Let’s go back to Hebrews. Everybody heaves a sign of
relief. Somehow we get real comfortable dealing with the text. It is when we
start applying the text to how we think that things get muddy, difficult and hard
to figure out.
NKJ Hebrews 5:11 of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain,
since you have become dull of hearing.
We have been talking about the dynamics of what makes
somebody dull of hearing.
NKJ Hebrews 5:12 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.
Now let’s look at this a little bit. I am not going to
deal with all the exegesis in this passage. There is a lot in that first clause
“by this time you ought to be teachers”. But I want to look at that second
clause “you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles
of God”. That word for first principles is the Greek word stoicheion. - the basic parts, the rudiment, the elements or the
foundational components of something. It’s what we might call the ABC’s of
Christianity, the building blocks, the separate doctrines of Christianity. While
we are looking at this passage, I want you to see where it goes. It goes to
6:1.
NKJ Hebrews 6:1 Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to
perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and
of faith toward God,
Now if you have been with me through this study these
first 5 chapters and we have been looking at this, some of you are going, “This
is elementary?”
Yes, it is!
You see we have so lowered the bar of expectation in terms of what we
can learn from the Bible and what it teaches us about every dimension of life
and thought that all of a sudden when we get to this verse we realize (and
people are generally uncomfortable with this) that they move it aside because
they don’t want to think about it. But the writer of Hebrews is saying is that
there is such a profound level of teaching that goes beyond basic doctrine of
who Jesus is and what Jesus did that we need to pursue that. We need to get out
of first grade material and second grade material. Let’s get to junior high and
high school material. What we are covering some tonight is truly that. It is
the real meat of the word. It isn’t just that milk that most people are used
to. Even a lot of stuff we consider here is considered pretty basic. It is just
that we have got such a culture of biblical illiterates today and thought and
intellectual idiots today that when you start thinking and talking about some
of the deep implications of the Word of God people can’t follow you anymore. It
is tragic because there is some real significant stuff here that the writer of
Hebrews expects us to be able to handle.
In our verse here in Hebrews 5:12 he uses the word stoicheion for the basic parts, the
rudiments, the elements or the components of something. He contrasts this in
the context with the elementary principles of Christ in 6:1.
Hold your place in Hebrews 5 and turn with me back to
Colossians 2. Let’s go to verse 8. This is a warning from the Apostle Paul to
the Colossian believers.
NKJ Colossians 2:8 Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and
empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic
principles of the world, and not according to Christ.
What he says is you have to be careful that you don’t
get deceived through false philosophical systems of thought and get distracted
from what the truth of God’s Word is. That is what I am talking about here. That
is why thought is so important. Ultimately when you get down to it to use the
fancy philosophical term for how do we know what is true and how do we know
what we know; it’s epistemology. I have said this again and again. We live in a
era of period of epistemological crisis. That is why the charismatics are so
popular. They are basing their knowledge of what truth is on their emotion,
some experience that they have with the Holy Spirit and this becomes the
validation for truth. Not what the Word of God says, but what their liver
quiver says. What their inner vibrations say. They wouldn’t know it if you hit
them in the face with it. They have an epistemological problem. Their
epistemological problem is that the foundation for their thought doesn’t come
from the Word of God. It’s coming from mysticism. But they are wrapping it up
and cloaking it in biblical verbiage. This is what deceives so many people and
gets so many Christians off center. You have got all kinds of philosophies. In
the ancient world in Paul’s time you had Aristotelian and Platonism. You also
had the Epicureans and the Stoics. Today we get the Darwinians. We get the
sociologists who tell us that Christianity and all religions are just
sociological phenomenon. Then you get the Freudians and their descendents that
everybody’s problem is psychological. All regeneration is, is some sort of
psychological phenomenon. If you have problems in your life you don’t have to
go to the pastor any more. He may teach you some things about God, but if you
really want to solve the problems of life you have to go to a psychologist. You
have to go to some person who is trained in psychology. So many seminary
students and pastors get distracted by that. They really want to help people
but they don’t believe in the sufficiency of Scripture. Their starting point
epistemologically is never totally the Word of God. They compromise. They have
a foot in both camps. This happens in a lot of different areas.
So you have various human viewpoint systems. That is
what I have talked about. You have human viewpoint systems of rationalism. You
have human viewpoint systems of empiricism. You have human viewpoint systems of
mysticism. These traditions can deceive you.
The Greek word there is kosmos. The basic principles of the world there are the ABC’s of
human viewpoint thinking. Now lest we forget Romans 12:2….
NKJ Romans 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
That means we have to think about our thinking. We
don’t just sit out here and emote and feel good about Jesus and the fact that I
am going to go to heaven. After I am saved there is a battle to be won, and
there is an objective to be accomplished. That is one of the interesting
things.
For those of you who saw “The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe” after Aslan is killed and then he comes back to life, what does he
do? He goes into the battle. Things don’t end in coming to Christ in salvation.
There is a battle. That is why the kids like Peter were given the shield and
the sword. They are given other tools. Those represent the basic spiritual
skills to get by in the battle. So they have to go on. They have to go through
the battle goes on and the battle doesn’t end with the story. The battle goes
on and on and on because there are other monsters and other enemies that need
to be defeated. That is the same thing in the Christian life. It goes on and on
and on. We have these enemies to defeat. The worst ones are the ones that hang
around in our thought from before we were saved.
The word that is used there for basic principles of the
world is this word stoicheion. What
it is talking about is the cosmic system has its own set of ABC’s. Its
set of ABC’s is basic principles for how to live life and how to know things is at
odds with the basic principles of Scripture. So if you think about what
composes basic foundational elements of any culture whether you are talking
about Japanese culture, Chinese culture, Indian culture, Arab culture, European
culture? What are the foundational elements of a culture?
You start with, how does this culture view ultimate
reality? Who are the gods or goddesses? What is the ultimate reality? If you go
back beyond creation or the origin of the earth what created it? How did it
come into existence? What was there before creation? What was there before evolution?
What is eternal? That is your first thing. That is your ultimate reality. Is
ultimate reality eternal matter so that everything that comes is material? Is
there no such thing as immaterial or spirit or spiritual? That’s Darwinism.
That is evolutionism. That is pure materialism. What was there? Were there like
in the old Babylonian creation ethics these gods that existed - they either had
sex or a battle depending on which version you read. They have sex and that
produces the universe or they kill one another and cut up the body parts of one
of the gods or goddesses and that becomes the foundation for reality. But
anyway, you start with what is ultimate reality? Whatever you perceive ultimate reality to be, that then if
you are logically consistent that is going to develop into your view of right
or wrong. If you start with a couple of gods and goddesses and they don’t have
any absolute ethical system and they are always warring or always involved in
various sexual activity with multiple sex partners, what ethic does that lead
to? That is the ethic that produced the fertility cults of the ancient world. It
is the same kind of ethic that produced the health and wealth gospel today
because the prosperity gospel today is just another version of the old fertility
religion. They just kind of cleaned it up a little. You have your ultimate
reality. From that ultimate
reality you derive your value system. Philosophy calls ultimate reality
metaphysics. Your value system is ethics.
You also have to figure out how you know how anything
is true. That is called epistemology. So every system has its ultimate view of
reality, its view of right and wrong. If it’s postmodernism then every culture
has an equally valid value system, and you have a way of knowing that. Then all
of that comes together and produces a cultural view of art, beauty, and music.
That is called aesthetics. Those are basically the four branches of philosophy.
Once you understand those things you can take it and impose it on anything you
read. You read some literature. Let’s say you read Wordsworth.
You ought to say, “What is he saying here?”
Every writer is saying something. He has got a world
view and that world view includes an ultimate view of reality, and an ultimate view
of values right or wrong. It as a view of knowledge and how we know what we know.
It has a view of beauty. You read Ann Rice who writes these fiction books on
vampires. I understand now that she is not going to do that anymore. She got
converted to Roman Catholic view of Christianity. So that has another set of
problems with it. She is not going to write any more of those awful vampire stories.
She has had a change of personal ethics which changes what she is going to
write in her stories. Authors write from within their own frame of reference or
their own worldview.
Now what Paul said back in Colossians 2:8 is don’t be
deceived through philosophy or empty deceit which is according to (kata plus the accusative) the standards
of the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ.
Ah! Here is our juxtaposition. See it is either this
or that. It is either world’s systems or world’s traditions or the world’s
philosophies or it is Christ. There is no in between. There is no such thing as
neutrality. It’s either human viewpoint or its divine viewpoint. Now in human
viewpoint there can be a lot of truth there. It is how truth is structured and how it relates to ultimate
things that is important. You think that when you are talking to an unbeliever
and they have their viewpoints that you can agree on a lot of things. All these
things that you think you agree on, you really don’t. They are looking at them
from the whole grid of their human viewpoint philosophy whether it is Marxism
or Freudianism or Platonism or Hegelianism. Even though they may get certain
things right, there is a lot of stuff that is wrong. And it is not just the
details; it is how the details relate to one another. So that is why I say we
have to think about these things.
Now let’s go back to our text and see what the writer
of Hebrews says.
NKJ Hebrews 5:13 For everyone who partakes only of
milk is unskilled in the word of
righteousness, for he is a babe.
He just got through saying in verse 12, challenging
them saying you have need for somebody to go back and teach the ABC’s of
the oracles of God (that is another synonym for the revelation of God). You
have come to need milk and not solid food.
Now some of you are sitting out there saying, “I am as
lost as I can be.”
Well, guess what I was too. I had to go back over and
over it again. That is how you learn something. We have quit drinking the milk
out of the bottle. We have to go to the fact that there are deeper things that
impact our thinking than just things we are familiar with.
See if all you do is take in basic doctrine and things
you are familiar with and not build on that and go to places that you are not
familiar with – ideas and thoughts and frameworks of thinking that you
are not familiar with - you are just a babe unskilled in the Word of
righteousness.
That word translated unskilled is the Greek word apeiros meaning inexperienced,
unskilled, ignorant of true doctrine pertaining to the lack of knowledge or lack
of capacity to do something. Let’s translate it with the phrase unacquainted
with or unaccustomed to.
Literal
translation: So
everyone who partakes only of milk is unaccustomed to the Word of righteousness
for he is a babe.
Now let’s go to verse 14.
NKJ Hebrews 5:14 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.
The Greek word is teleios
meaning mature. Solid food is for the mature.
That’s a bad translation in the New King James. It’s
not who by reason; it’s those who consistently practice something. That’s the
idea there. It is the Greek word hexis
meaning skill or proficiency. It has the idea of a repetitive and successful
practice of the spiritual skills part of which is taking in the Word over and
over and over again even when you don’t understand everything that is there. You
keep coming back hearing it again and again and eventually things start to click,
things start to make sense. That is how you grow. It is the consistent practice
of learning the Word, learning the Word, hearing it taught and by that having
your senses exercised.
That word for exercise is the Greek word gumnazo which is where we get our words
gym, gymnastics, and gymnasium. All of those words come from gumnazo. Its original meaning was to
train naked. That’s how they originally performed in the Olympics. They didn’t
have neat little spandex outfits. They went out there bare-butt naked. In fact
in the early 20th century when they were going to resurrect the
Olympics they were coming out of one of the Ivy League schools. I think it was
Princeton. Their idea was to bring back the old Olympics. So they started a
pre-Olympic competition. They started competing. The first time they competed
they were competing at a girl’s school. All of these athletes were classic
scholars. They were delving into Homer and all the classics. They studied
everything about how the ancient Greeks did it. They came trotting out on the athletic
field bare-butt naked. All of the girls screamed and ran back in. That was the
last time they did it that way.
That is what gumnazo
means. The basic idea is discipline with the removal of all distractions -
anything that hinders you, gets in the way, slows you down, and prevents you
from performing at maximum efficiency. See that is what I am talking about. You
may think I am getting the razor blade out and slicing things pretty thin as we
go through this, but the thing is we have to constantly let the Word of God,
let that sharp sword of the Word of God, pierce into the depths of our thinking
(remember it is sharp enough to separate soul and spirit) and to surgically
remove all the nasty human viewpoint hangovers that we have got from the
culture, from our upbringing, and from our sin nature and everything else. So
it has to do with discipline through the removal of distractions and
hindrances. It is in that process of the removal of those distractions and
hindrances that allows us to discern.
Discernment isn’t some kind of heebie-geebie word of
discernment that the charismatics talk about.
“I have the spiritual gift of discernment and I have
to be in your presence. I know what spiritual gift you have.”
That’s just garbage. That’s not what the Word of God
teaches. The Word of God says that discernment comes from the Word of God. It
talks here about the fact that it is through discipline and the process of
spiritual growth that as you go to maturity you are able to distinguish between
and evaluate things. There is a difference between judging. Jesus talks about
“judge not that you be not judged”.
I hear these idiot Christians who will hear some
pastor and say, “Well I am not going to say anything about what he said because
that would be judging the pastor.”
What about all of these passages in Scriptures that
talk about thought and evaluation and discernment? That is not judging. Judging
is saying that he is going to hell or he is all wrong and judging him
personally. You need to evaluate what comes out of a pulpit. How do you
evaluate it? Because you have built a frame of reference in doctrine. You learn
to think.
There is nothing wrong with sitting out there and
thinking, “You know I am having a difficult time with what I heard. Help me
understand this a little better.”
You hear some pastor say something. You screw up your
face and say, “That just doesn’t sound biblical.”
How do you know? You have to go back to the text. There
has to be an ultimate authority. That’s the Scripture. It only comes from
feeding on solid food reaching maturity through the consistent disciplined
practice of taking in the Word and discerning both good and evil. You have to
learn how to do that.
I have given you a couple of examples. When we started
last week with the leading of the Spirit, I took a quote out of Charles Ryrie. I
am trying to teach you a little discernment so that if you read something or
hear something you don’t just say, “That sounds great and nice! He is somebody that
I am supposed to respect. Let’s go along with what he said.”
There is not one pastor-teacher, theologian, or
evangelist who is inerrant or infallible in the Church Age whether they are
filled with the Spirit, whether they are in fellowship. That doesn’t count. It
is not a guarantee of inspiration or infallibility. That’s not what that’s all
about. Yet there are a lot of people who think that.
“Oh, the pastor, he goes and studies and he is in
fellowships and he studies the Word so God is going to teach this to him.”
Wait a minute it sounds mystical to me, doesn’t it? Let’s
clean that up a little bit. Yes, the Holy Spirit is working covertly in the
background. As I have been talking about, I’ve got a program running in the
background of my computer right now. It is a virus protector. You don’t see it,
but it is running back there. That’s how the Holy Spirit works.
The Holy Spirit teaches us in this age, but not all at
one time. As the years go by, it’s a gradual process of teaching. It’s not that
I sit down and read Ephesians 4:7-11 and all of a sudden, “Yeah! The Holy
Spirit taught me and told me what it means.” Next year I may study it in a
little more depth and do more correlation with another passages and say, “Oops!
I didn’t catch that last time.”
Was I out of fellowship? No, I am learning. I am
growing. That happens with every one of us. That is the process. So we have to
learn a few things about exercising discernment and part of this is in reading
and understanding things of an apologetic nature. I am going to go back to that
illustration. We talked about C S Lewis.
Let’s talk a little bit about apologetics and about
thought and about how we can avoid a few things.
I will hit CS Lewis next time.
Let me give you 8 points that we need to think about
in terms of what apologetics is all about. Apologetics is important. The
Scripture talks about it. It’s simply giving an answer for the hope that is in
you so that when somebody asks you why you are a Christian that you can give
them an answer. Some of you remember that this time last year I got a chance to
go down to the hospital and sit next to an old friend of mine that I first
witnessed to 30 years ago.
After about two or three minutes of small talk he
said, “Okay Robby. Why do you believe what you believe?”
I sat there and went through a rational defense of the
gospel and an explanation of the gospel for about 3 hours. That was the first
of several 3-hour sessions. People are not always ready right away to respond
to the gospel for a variety of reasons - good reasons and bad reasons. We have
all talked to people and they throw out all of these questions. What about the
heathen? How can a good God let these things happen? You know all they are
doing is throwing up a smoke screen because they aren’t interested and they
don’t want to talk about it. They are using it as a way to try to push you
away. Then there are other people that we talk to and they ask the same questions,
but they are legitimate. They really want to know. They have heard these
objections. They have raised these objections. They have been concerns for them
and they want to know the answers because they are positive, but they don’t
want to just park their brain in neutral and accept what you have to say.
So when we talk about apologetics which is part of
evangelism we have to think through some foundational principles.
What is apologetics?
Now that is the build up. Now I want to talk about CS Lewis. See,
I told you we were running out of time. We need to look at this in a little
more detail. Those of you who haven’t seen “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”
you can go watch it. What I say next week may make a little more sense. Since a
whole week will go by and this isn’t something that you will think about every
day, I will have t review about 90% of what I covered tonight so it will get us
right back to this point. Then we will get into it but I will do it a lot
faster because it won’t be as new and as fresh.
This is great stuff. I just love it. Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.