Lindsey Blair and Bobby Gilles recap and discuss Pastor Jonah Sage's sermon from Hebrews 6:1-12.
Lindsey Blair and Bobby Gilles recap and discuss Pastor Jonah Sage's sermon from Hebrews 6:1-12.
Lindsey: Welcome to the Midweek Checkup. My name is Lindsey Blair and I’m here with Bobby Gilles. This past Sunday, Pastor Jonah Sage preached from Hebrews five, verses eleven through fourteen in our series, Soul Anchor.
Bobby: Pastor Jonah taught that Christians grow as we move from information about God to intimacy with God. If you missed the sermon or need a quick recap, you’ve come to the right place!
Lindsey: Jonah began by reminding us that the solid food of the gospel is a life of obedience fueled by experiences of God’s presence. Verses one through three describe spiritual milk as the basics of God’s word
Core doctrines. Repenting of evil deeds, faith in God, getting baptized, praying/laying of hands. Resurrection, eternal judgment. That’s spiritual milk. Theology is milk. We always need milk. It does a body good. The Preacher follows this with a curious warning, though, saying, “For it is impossible to bring back to repentance those who were once enlightened.”
Bobby: Have you ever told your kid “if you keep making that face it’ll stay that way?” The preacher is making an invitation by way of warning.
He’s saying, “The solid food is so good that if you gave it up you’d never eat again.” He’s arousing their appetites, getting them ready for solid food. So let’s put some pieces together. Baby Christians think of life as a problem to solve. It’s about their behavior, “What do I do?” Then they have a plan to solve it, which is all about competency. Their posture is willfulness: “I will press through.”
Lindsey: For mature Christians, the problem to solve isn’t what I do but who I am. It’s a relational problem. The plan to solve it is communion with Christ. And this comes from a posture of willingness. At some point, competency, willfulness, and striving doesn’t work. It exhausts, you keep trying, but then you eventually will throw your arms up and say, “What a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?”
Bobby: Spiritual puberty, that transition from infancy to maturity, begins when we realize I’m the problem. The solution is no longer competence, but communion. Not doing stuff for Jesus, but being with Jesus, because it is in his presence we are healed and changed and transformed. Our willful posture softens. We take the hands off the plow, so to speak, and instead embrace a posture of willingness. Help me. Lead me. Teach me. Guide me.
Lindsey: If you’ve been serving, praying, and reading the Bible for a long time and it feels like it’s not working anymore, that is a normal part of growing up. You’re in a transition. And you need to know that the way ahead of you is not like the way behind you. You’ll keep reading the Bible, keep praying, keep serving…but in new ways. It’ll be different.
Bobby: And it won’t be nearly as straightforward as it used to be. Go to the places you’ve sensed God’s nearness before. When was the last time you sensed God was with you? Something happened, something stirred in your heart? You felt peace, felt refreshed, and renewed? Wherever that is, wherever that was, go there more often.
Lindsey: We desire for you to become mature, to feast on solid food, to live lives of obedience fueled by experiences of God’s presence. This coming Sunday, we’ll continue our series called Soul Anchor as we finish Hebrews six. And in Sunday Bible Fellowship, we’ll dive deeper into the world of First Corinthians, a letter to a church that had many of the same struggles we have. Join us and bring a friend.