Press On to Know Jesus

The following is an edited version of an address Paul Williams gave on a visit to New Zealand some years ago. A meditation on the Letter to the Hebrews that was addressed to a gathering of Venn Fellows and others, Paul sought to challenge and encourage his listeners to press on—to become mature people, having a living and costly faith in Jesus. His talk was framed in response to the significant challenges that faced the Church globally, and locally. Although some years have passed, the challenges Paul named have only become more acute. And so, his words here remain just as relevant, bracing and encouraging as they were in 2019. A long-time friend of Venn’s work, Paul Williams is CEO of the Bible Society in the United Kingdom—Ed.

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so.

Hebrews 5:11-6:3

The reality that this passage forces us to face is the question of whether we are spiritual infants, rather than the mature believers that we probably all want to be or imagine ourselves to be. In verse 11 of Chapter 5 of the book of Hebrews, the writer says, in effect, that these Christians are slow to learn. We might think that this passage doesn’t apply to us. We’re not slow to learn. We’re trying to understand. But it’s important to understand that this is not about being smart, or academic, or having knowledge; the mature are not those who are intelligent or who have studied theology, but rather those who by constant practice train themselves to distinguish good from evil. It’s a characteristic of diligence, of application, of focus, of paying attention so that they can discern God’s voice. The mature can discern God’s voice in the midst of the cacophony of life. They’ve paid attention to God’s ways. They’ve allowed God to train them to put his words into practice in their lives.

For me, I received a lot of input as a student, but it was actually very difficult to maintain good habits once I had a job. Like many people of my generation (I’m a Gen Xer), I was very focused on performance and success, and it was very difficult when God cut across that. I got to the end of my university career: I had various jobs lined up at JP Morgan, at the Boston Consulting Group. I’d studied economics, and it was very marketable. I was calculating in my mind the salaries. Of course, there was a Christian narrative in there as well. Sarah and I were just married. She had a place to do her doctoral work in London, and I had these job offers—it was just one or the other and, particularly, which I salary was I going to pick? I met with the Pastor at our church in Oxford and he had a chat with me as he did sometimes. He basically asked me about these decisions, and challenged me very directly not to take either of them. He said, “You’ll be eaten alive if you go to London now. You’re not ready. You’re too immature.”

I took it really well, of course. I went back home and I said to Sarah, “You wouldn’t believe what he said!” She said, “I think he’s right” (it’s just so annoying, isn’t it, when the Holy Spirit speaks through your spouse? It’s so unfair!). I ended up taking a job locally in a nearby town in what was a perfectly good job. But from my point of view then, it was a kind of career death: it wasn’t one of the big firms; it wasn’t in London; it wasn’t the big salary. I realize now, looking back, that we were very fortunate to have a church that was as focused as they were on discipleship. But you know, I had my Gen X performance mindset. I wanted to get on. I wanted to get promoted. I wanted to prove myself. The culture at the office was very hard working—nobody really took lunch, except at their desks. God began to provoke me through the story of Daniel. And Daniel, of course, prayed three times a day. So, I figured I could do my high productivity time-management thing. I could do my morning reading and prayer, and I could do my evening, but was I going to do in the daytime? That was a bit of a problem. God began to challenge me about my lunch time: I had to go out of the office to read my Bible and pray. That was difficult, because I had to trust God that somehow I wouldn’t fall behind at work (because I was in a competition for the next promotion with the person on the other desk. It’s hard to understand, isn’t it?). I had to trust God about being able to get my work done if I went out and I prayed. What that meant was that I started praying about my work. I started asking God to help me how to figure stuff out and what to do in certain situations. And I began to learn that actually God was quite good at work. He knew stuff about economics! I began to learn how to hear God in the detail of my life. And I was challenged to be diligent, that is, to put stuff into practice: to ask a question, to wrestle with something, and then to do it.

Are we diligent to learn, or are we slow to learn? A spiritual infant that’s slow to learn is like a toddler who keeps trying to run across a road instead of holding on to their parent’s hand, or who won’t learn to share toys, or to wait to eat at meal times. Spiritual infants are those who have not yet learned that God is God and we’re not, that his ways are higher than ours. We need to learn from him. We have to adopt a posture of humility, and not just do whatever seems right in our own eyes. In Hebrews, the first few verses of Chapter 6 tell us what spiritual milk is, what the elementary teachings of God and his ways are. And there’s six things that are mentioned there—they form kind of three pairs of two.

The first pair, the first two are repentance from Acts that lead to death and faith in God. It’s elementary that human beings are fallen. According to this text, we do things that lead to death. We think we know what’s best, but we’re wrong. We would like the gospel to start with acceptance, but actually it starts with repentance. We need to repent from that attitude of trusting ourselves or trusting false gods and instead trust God our Creator, the one who made heaven and earth and created us and knows what’s good for us. This is spiritual milk: God is the Creator; human beings are fallen creatures; we need to repent of our rebellious attitudes toward God and trust him, rely on him, expect good from him. There can be absolutely no spiritual growth if we don’t start here. God is God. We are not, and we need to trust him that he knows better than we do.

But that’s not all. The next two elementary teachings are about our ability to live God’s way consistently, rather than simply living a cycle of trying and failing, trying and failing. It’s the history of Israel, isn’t it? A cycle of God blessing, providing leaders, but eventually the people rebelled, fall back into sin and incur judgment, and then we have another cycle. I wonder if you’re in a cycle in your life of trying and failing some way in the spiritual life? During the Babylonian exile, both Jeremiah and Ezekiel talked about the need for a new life, a new heart, a new spirit that God would provide to break the cycle of human failure. God doesn’t want us stuck in a cycle of failing and then having to repent again, and then failing and then having to repent. He wants us to move on. It doesn’t mean we’ll never have to repent again, but God’s heart for us is that we grow. And that’s what baptism and the laying on of hands are about. In baptism, we acknowledge that our old life needs to die. God isn’t just going to improve it a bit (that’s not the gospel, right? “Good news, God’s going to improve you a bit”); no, what we need is a complete new birth. Christ gives us a new life in him: our old life dies, and Christ’s life grows within us instead. We need the ongoing outpouring of God’s Holy Spirit in our lives to empower this new life, to keep it vital, energized. And that’s what the laying on of hands is all about: every one of us is anointed by God to live his way and serve his purposes in the world. This, too, is elementary spiritual milk. An infant that refuses to be dependent on its own mother and receive her nourishment will die. In the same way, a believer that keeps trying to be good in their own strength and isn’t willing to die to the old life and receive the empowering of the Holy Spirit just won’t be able to sustain the Christian life. It will become unbelievably burdensome.

The final pair of these elementary teachings that the writer highlights as part of this spiritual milk that his audience needs to be reminded of again concern the resurrection and eternal judgment. These teachings are about the future. They deal with our hope and reward, and about the judgment and evaluation of our lives. Growth toward maturity is not haphazard—it’s directed. We talk about training a tree (some of you probably good gardeners. You know how to do this); we train a tree to grow in ways that will promote fruitfulness. We train a young child to learn the difference between behaviours that will be life-giving, and those that will cause harm to them and others. And in the same way, spiritual maturity has a direction to it and requires a directedness. That’s what these elementary teachings are about. The promise of the resurrection is the promise that though our bodies decay and eventually die, we will be given new bodies that will not decay. In other words, our future hope is a human hope. It’s not a disembodied existence floating on a cloud somewhere. Human beings are the union of a God-breathed spirit and a God-formed body. Jesus’s resurrection is the foundation of our hope that physical death is not the end will be raised to new life and a new body, and we’ll be able to continually love God and neighbour in the context of a new creation. This is the basis of our hope for the future. It’s a human future.

In the new creation, all believers will stand before the judgment seat of Jesus Christ—there’ll be an evaluation of our lives (see 2 Cor 5:10). For believers, it’s not about sin, because the judgment for our sin has already taken place when Jesus Christ died for our sins on the cross; but we will have to give an account for our actions. I wonder how you feel about that? We often frame the idea of judgment quite negatively, don’t we. But I wonder whether you’ve ever had a bad teacher or a bad employer, and you’re working really hard and they never give you any feedback—you never know if you’re doing a good job. What does that communicate? It says: What you’re doing is not that important; it doesn’t matter. But it really does matter! God does notice. And this teaching is good news, because God is paying attention. He notices our choices about how to respond to his love in our lives. He notices when we give away that love to others around us, however falteringly. He wants us to look forward to hearing the words of Jesus, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” He wants us to hear the words that Jesus himself heard, “You are my beloved child, in you I’m well pleased.”

So spiritual milk involves recognising our need of God, our need to trust Him and repent of our self-centred way of life. It involves dying to that way of life, and receiving the new birth of Christ’s life in us. It teaches us to be filled and empowered with the Holy Spirit. It means looking forward not to escaping the body or the world that God’s created, but to the resurrection and the world’s renewal. And spiritual milk involves a sober evaluation of our actions now, because we know that we’ll have to give an account of our lives before Jesus: actually what we’re doing now matters. That’s spiritual milk.

Let me wrap up with two questions for you to reflect on.

Firstly, are you tempted by a comfortable form of faith? That’s where we kind of started, wasn’t it? If you are, be honest with yourself. If you are so tempted, let me encourage you to press on to know Jesus as fully and unashamedly as you can. There is no life or fulfillment in a half-hearted faith! There may be places in your life where you’re really tempted to accommodate, somehow to compromise. Let me appeal to you: Jesus is amazing. He’s really worth it. He’s worth the sacrifice of whatever it is that you’re thinking you might have to give up. Let me encourage you read the gospels again, maybe in a version that you’re not familiar with, see what an amazing person Jesus is. He commands creation. He tells the wind and the waves to stop. He stoops down and lifts up the woman caught in adultery. And he says to his disciples: I’m not calling you my servants, I’m calling you my friends face to face, because I’m sharing with you, the Father is sharing with you, the very heart of his purposes in the world, and he wants you to be part of it (see John 15:15). He wants to invite you into it. After all, where else will you go? Who else would you want to follow? So ask God to soften your heart and strengthen your faith.

Secondly, do you still need spiritual milk? I’ll be honest: sometimes I need spiritual milk. I need God to remind me some of these things. And sometimes God reminds me whether I think I need to be reminded or not! This is okay. But let’s not be slow to learn. Let’s be diligent. Let’s open our hearts toward God. Let’s train ourselves stay focused so that we can distinguish good from evil. Trust his word—put it into practice. There are clear actions arising from the passage in Hebrews we’ve been considering: we’re told to repent from dead works, from thinking you can get by without God; to trust God— don’t just believe he’s there, but actively rely on him and put faith into practice. Do what you hear God tell you. Just start doing it. And this is easy, I suggest, if we lift our eyes to Jesus, if we see his face and his love and mercy for us.

Let me end with these words from John chapter 6. In John 6 is recorded the occasion when many of Jesus disciples did turn back; they stopped following him. Do you know the scene? They are offended by Jesus’s teaching. And Jesus asks the twelve disciples, are you going to turn back as well? And Simon Peter says: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” Amen.