What Are You Eating Today?

As I often do on Monday mornings, I've been reflecting back on the truths I heard yesterday at church.  Our pastor was away, leading a group on a "Journeys of Paul" tour, and we were privileged to hear Seth Buckley, our minister to students, speak to us.  The title of his message was "Changing Your Spiritual Meal Plan", and the text was from the book of Hebrews, beginning at Hebrews 5:11 and going through Hebrews 6:12.

The first point was that the fundamentals of the faith are foundational, but you can't stop there. 

"About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.  For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God.  You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.  But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil."  (Hebrews 5:12-14 ESV, emphasis mine)

In other words, you can't live only on milk forever, even though that is a very basic ("foundational") food. Babies start out their lives on milk.  Then they move on to foods like cereal and applesauce. But they don't stop there!  A diet of milk and cereal and applesauce is not a healthy, well-rounded diet for anyone who is no longer a baby.

That's the message from the writer of Hebrews.  You can't go through life on nothing but milk.  A healthy spiritual diet consists of more than milk.  There needs to be some solid food.  Some meat!

Seth shared these verses with the analogy of changing your spiritual meal plan.  Moving on to solid food.

At this season of my life I am no longer quite so excited about some of the foods I loved as a child.  Perhaps you could say the same.  And that's the message from this passage.  We don't live all our lives eating the same foods we ate as infants; we shouldn't do that spiritually either.

As I've been pondering this passage this morning, I think the message from the writer may be even more direct than that.  It seems to me the message the writer is trying to convey is very simple:  Grow up!

And that brings us back to the title of this post.  What are you "eating", in a spiritual sense, today?

"I have not departed from the command of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food."  (Job 23:12 NASB)