Got Milk? Part 2
Posted: April 4, 2009 by stevie
Now that we’ve gone through the verses that describes the joy of Peter, the frustration of the author of Hebrews and the outburst of Paul, each using the Milk Metaphor; we’ll look into what this ‘milk’ and ’solid food’ mean to us.
Milk
Milk can be described in a few ways.
One, milk is a very basic, easy to stomach liquid that requires almost no effort on the drinker’s part to take in to them. All they have to do is swallow the milk. The diet of an infant consists mostly of milk, because an infant can’t handle anything more complicated. Spiritual milk for the Christian is the basic teachings of our faith, the fundamentals, and every baby needs the basic essentials after all.
Two, an infant requires someone to feed the milk to them in some fashion; this lessens the load on the infant even more, making it easier for the milk to get in them.
Three, milk is the springboard in to higher levels of food, without it, the infant never matures to the point of learning how to eat solid food. I want to look at a few verses here in the New Testament that deal with spiritual ‘milk’ for the Christian.
Solid Food
One, solid food is complex, deep, and requires a more mature and ready ‘stomach’ to handle. It is the deeper teachings of the Christian faith; the things that help us grow up even more in to our salvation and bring us from infancy to maturity. They are the things that hopefully will transform us in to being more and more like Jesus, and more effective for Him in this world we live in. Without solid food this transformation cannot happen.
Two, as a child grows they begin not only to have these more complicated foods, but they begin to learn to feed themselves as well. Anyone will tell you that this step is a normal and necessary step in the development of a child, so why not Christians? This is the other aspect of what it means to have solid food: self feeding. When you grow up in to an adult most of your food primarily comes from you ‘hunting’ down the food, cooking it, feeding it to yourself, chewing on it, digesting it, and then getting it back out of you (do the rough metaphor yourself lol). Christians need to do this very thing. We need to seek out the solid food of the Word, get it in to our spiritual mouths, and chew on it.
This means we must think long and hard on it, meditate on it day and night (Josh 1:8), and hide it in our hearts (Ps. 119:11). We must let it become part of us as we ‘digest it’ in to ourselves, letting God’s Truth permeate us and become part of our very being, putting it in to practice, putting it in to “constant use”. This is the step we need to make, from milk to solid food, from babe to adult. If we just let someone else always teach us, then even if it is ‘solid food’ in the ‘deeper spiritual truths’ sense of the phrase, it’s still basically milk, i.e. spoon feeding. What happens when we learn to feed ourselves and mature in to adult Christians? I think these verses speak greatly to this question:
Three, I want to note that even adults still drink in the milk sometimes. The fundamental truths of Christianity are great to always be learning about and remembering. It should also be said that having someone give you a glass of milk is never a bad thing (like a sermon on Sunday!), it’s just that you cannot survive on that alone. A pastor who is teaching and spoon feeding you the ‘simple milk’ all the time will never be enough fuel for you to continue to mature in Christ.
Solid food is primarily a self-feeding endeavor because like it says in Hebrews 5:14, it is by constant (personal) ‘use’ of solid food that a mature Christian is able to distinguish good from evil. So now when a child becomes an adult, what do the adults do? They feed the children their milk so that they can move on to solid food, and guess what? They teach them how to get that solid food for themselves while they’re at it! It’s the adult’s job to teach the children how to feed themselves, so that they can grow and help mature others. In other words, you need solid food and not milk in order to grow in Christ to the point of becoming everything God desires for you to be in Him.
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