Solid Food for the Mature | Hebrews 5:11-6:12 | Once for All

Are you surviving on a spiritual diet of "Pop Rocks and Mountain Dew"? In this study of Hebrews 5:11–6:12, we examine why spiritual nourishment is essential for every believer to stand firm in their faith. The author of Hebrews issues a sharp warning to those who have become "dull of hearing," urging them to move past the basics and feast on the solid food of God's Word.

We explore the gravity of sound doctrine, the biblical reality of the perseverance of the saints, and the call to imitate those who inherit the promises through faith and patience. Learn why moving toward maturity isn't just about gaining knowledge—it's about protecting your heart from false teaching and "going on the attack" in your daily pursuit of holiness.

Is it time to audit your spiritual diet? Join us as we learn to feast on the solid food that matures us for the work of the Kingdom.

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You know, I suppose it's possible to survive on some strange combination of food. I think that perhaps you can satisfy your hunger with nothing but Pop Rocks and Mountain Dew. But it wouldn't take too long for you to start to feel the effects, right? Our bodies desperately need nourishment. And without it, we risk serious damage to our health. When we feel hungry, it's not simply about filling our tank so that we don't feel those hunger pangs anymore. Our body is designed to desire nourishment in order to work properly. And while we could get rid of the rumbling in our stomachs on a diet of, say, Hawaiian punch and Pop-Tarts, it wouldn't be too long until we started to feel something else. Our stomachs might stop making those noises at us, but soon our legs may start to wobble, or it may even start to affect our cognitive function. Good nourishment is essential to being strong and healthy. It isn't just about filling our tanks. You can make the dial in your car go from E to F by putting water in your tank, but it isn't going to make your engine run.

And we see here today, the author of Hebrews is very concerned that the people who are reading this book will fall away from the faith. The solution that is offered in what they need is more than just the basics. They need spiritual nourishment. They're living on nothing but milk, but it's time for them to get some spiritual food that's solid and gives them what they need so that they can stand firm in their faith. And so we come to this passage, and we are going to divide up into three main points. To continue with the food metaphor, we're gonna do this so that we can digest it. That's why we divide it up. The goal is not only to understand what this passage is saying, but we want to apply it to our lives.

And so our first point that we're gonna see today is that we need solid spiritual food. As I pointed out, we need proper nourishment for our bodies, and this is the case for our spiritual diet also. If we're going to be safe from false teaching, we need to know what we believe and why we believe it. If our spiritual diet is deficient, it will have serious ramifications for our spiritual lives.

Secondly, we need to see the gravity of false teaching and unbelief. In our passage today, we see that turning away from the faith has serious consequences. To understand what the faith is and to teach contrary to it shows a contempt toward the work of Jesus for us. And this is the last thing that we would want to do, and so it's important that we understand just how important sound doctrine is for us.

And lastly, we see that faith leads to good works, and God sees our diligence in the faith and our good works, and he rewards it. We read in our passage today that God doesn't overlook the work that we do and the love that we show in His name. Therefore, we ought to be diligent to continue to love others and to do the work that God has called us to do.

And so we come to this first section of today's passage as we look at verse 11 of chapter five through the third verse of the sixth chapter. And as we start looking at this, we see a statement that forces us to look backward in the passage just a little bit. It says, about this we have much to say. Well, what is the this? Well, last week our passage was about Jesus being our great high priest, and the author of Hebrews says that they have much to say about that truth. And the idea being expressed is that there's so much that can be said about the work of Jesus for his people. But there's a problem. It's hard to explain it, because the people have become dull of hearing. Now let's be honest, that's pretty savage.

That's pretty harsh. When it says dull here, the idea is spiritual laziness. He's saying, I could teach you so much, but you are so spiritually lazy, I can't even go there right now. The concept isn't itself that they've been lazy, but they have become unable to understand the difficult things of the faith. And maybe it isn't that it is super difficult, it's just that they have become so lax in understanding what they believe. They don't know what they ought to know. It seems as though they should know this stuff, but they haven't put in the effort. And this is making them susceptible to false teaching and falling astray.

And we know this to be true about a lot of different things. Those who have looked into something and understand it and are invested in the idea are the least likely to step away from something, right? I often go back to what I heard theologian Mike Horton express a few years back. There had been a study on young people that were leaving the Christian faith. When someone went and did a survey with these people, and they asked them questions about what they believed and why they were leaving, and these people were in their early 20s and maybe on into their late 20s. And when they were asked what they believed when they were in the church, they couldn't express much about the Christian faith that they said they'd left. And what Dr. Horton said has stuck with me. He said, they didn't even know enough about the Christian faith to properly apostatize. They didn't know what they were leaving. Basically, they left because they just were indifferent to the faith. They had no idea what it talked about, what it truly meant. They walked away without actually rejecting anything. There were no fundamental doctrines they really had a problem with. They had just left.

And this is the general idea that we see in Hebrews here. People are leaving the faith and they're struggling with elements of it because they've gotten lazy in understanding what it is that they are actually to believe about Christ. According to the author, they ought to be teachers by now, but instead they need someone to teach them the basic principles of the faith. They should be coaching the team, but instead they've gotta be shown how to do a layup. They should be a master chef with a show on the Food Network, but they need somebody to show them how to turn the oven on. Instead of discipling people in the faith, they need to be discipled themselves.

To help us understand this, the author uses the illustration that I started off with today, food. He says they need milk. They should be getting themselves some meat, some potatoes, some vegetables, maybe even a nice dessert at the end. Instead, they're only getting milk. And you know, you know what's being implied here. Infants receive milk. They can't have solid food, and everyone who's spent any time around babies knows how great it is when they start to have some solid food, right? It takes a little longer to digest, and so they sleep better. They're satisfied for a longer period of time. They start to get a fuller range of nutrition, and you can see it in their development. People need solid food. Even in our day, with the ability to supplement a liquid diet with vitamins and minerals, that still isn't the same as eating solid food, right?

And we see this illustration that the author of Hebrews is using continuing. Those Christians who only have milk are unskilled in the word of righteousness. They're like children. And it's important that we don't understand this to mean that being a child is bad. Obviously, scripture says we should have faith like a child. But what the author of Hebrews is driving home to us right now is that we need to mature in all areas of life and especially in spiritual things. Think for a second about how you viewed the world when you were five. You had an understanding of the alphabet. You knew some simple words. You knew basic math and could solve some simple math problems, right? But you couldn't have written about something really important or had discussions about important topics. Not only was your knowledge not there for that, but your vocabulary wasn't there yet. You could have figured out some math problems, but you couldn't have balanced your checkbook. Or you couldn't have figured out how big a loan you needed for your business.

We grow. We learn. We move beyond elementary things for a reason. Imagine trying to navigate life with just what we knew when we were five. The same holds true for spiritual things. Understanding the love of God and the cross is absolutely imperative, and even children can lay hold of the truth of the gospel. But we see here it's important that we move on to solid food, not just for the sake of acquiring knowledge, but for the purpose of protecting us from false teaching and false doctrine. Now there's so many false doctrines out there. I do my best to educate you on those from the pulpit, but there's more than I can possibly tell you about. Just from what it comes up, when something comes up topically in the text, I try to address it. But like I said, there's more than I could ever possibly be able to do that with.

And that's why we want to move on to solid food. Because we want to know the faith clearly. I've used this illustration before. When someone is worrying about counterfeit money, when it's their job to identify counterfeits, they don't go out and collect all the counterfeits and study the counterfeits. Instead, what do they do? They get the real thing, they get that real $100 bill, that real $50 bill, and they study it, and they know it. It becomes a science to them because they want to know the original so they can see what is false. We want to do the same thing with our faith. We want to grow in our faith and in our knowledge of the truth so that we can know what the gospel is, so we can protect our hearts and our minds from those false things that come at us from every direction.

When we have our discernment trained, it says, then we can distinguish from good and evil. And that's pretty straightforward, but I want to remind us what the topic of discussion is here in this passage. It's false teaching. Normally, we think about good and evil being primarily moral categories, and of course, those are the primary categories. But here, what is being said? It's being said that false teaching is evil. It's important here that we see that these categories of good and evil apply to what we teach and what we believe. We think that teaching someone that Christ isn't sufficient, we know what they mean. That's ill-advised, or maybe it's a bad idea. We don't sometimes get too concerned about those things. But what we need to remember, what we're being taught here, is that teaching against sound doctrine is imperative because teaching falsely about Christ is evil. It causes people to turn away from the truth and this brings us to our second point today.

We wanna make sure that we teach sound doctrine because there is a gravity behind this. There's a gravity to holding on to sound doctrine. Because this is so important, we must continue to grow in maturity in Christ as we've seen. We're to establish the foundation of what we believe. We don't rely on dead work, but instead we trust that God has saved us by his grace. And we see a list of things that they're to move on from here. None of these things are distinctly Christian themes. They would have been things that were talked about in Judaism too, but they have to be understood by Christians in a different way. And we can see here, the perfect example for us is washings. In Judaism, there would have been ceremonial cleansing. But for the Christian audience receiving this letter, it would have been referring to baptism, something that would have been done in both traditions, a ceremonial washing, but it had a different significance for the Christian. And we also see the resurrection and eternal judgment listed here. Obviously, those two would have had a different emphasis for Christians. Why? Because the resurrection of Jesus promises a resurrection from the dead for us, and safety from eternal judgment.

All these things being talked about here are important doctrines, and they have specific implications for us as Christians. But the author of Hebrews is encouraging the readers to continue to grow in the faith so that they can stand firm, so they can remain strong. And notice that this involves the help of God here. It says, if God permits. God is the one who helps us to grow. The Spirit is the one who causes growth in us. If God permits, we will grow beyond these things. We're trusting that God is at work in our hearts.

And we see this idea that this is so important. We see that there's an immense gravity to what he's talking about here because of the way this is driven home in the next section of the passage. Now this is a hard section. I've italicized it here on the screen for you. The next few verses have been interpreted in many different ways. And they can be contentious within different parts of Christianity. It's important that we remember, though, as we interpret this, the context of what is being said. The concern here is returning to dead works, returning to rituals. And that's the false teaching that is leading these people to go back to Judaism.

The contention in interpreting these verses here that we're looking at is the idea that people can fall away from the faith. That on one hand you can be saved, and the next minute you can't. Well, the reason this is contentious is because as Reformed Christians, we believe in something called the perseverance of the saints. And this means that we believe that if God saves us, then he saves us to the uttermost. That he will keep his people in the faith because we didn't choose to be saved on our own, so therefore God will keep us in the faith. We believe that God himself is the one who causes us to persevere. And we get this same idea in the book of Hebrews in multiple places. It tells us that Jesus saves us completely and that he makes us perfect forever. And that doesn't sound like we can turn our salvation on and off as by what we do.

And so here we are in this passage here. What's going on? It says that there have, it says with biting words, with harsh language, that those who have fallen away, they can't be restored. So how do we reconcile this idea that God is the one who keeps his people in the faith? How do we walk around as Christians during the week knowing that we have sinned and not worry about getting hit by a truck before we confess that sin? How do we reconcile that? How do we know that God keeps us in the faith? Well, I don't wanna spend too much time dwelling on this part of the passage, but it's important that we look at it. But the way we're gonna understand it is we're gonna go back and see what we have talked about already in the book of Hebrews. We're gonna do what the book of Hebrews does. We're gonna go back to the Old Testament, do what the book of Hebrews does.

We're gonna think about the Exodus. It wasn't that far back in the book of Hebrews where we read about all those who died in the wilderness because of their unbelief. Now it makes sense to think that the author of Hebrews still has that story in mind. They went through the exodus, we read about these people a few chapters back. They were rescued from the plagues. They went through the Red Sea. They ate the manna in the wilderness. They drank water from the rock. But we read here in the book of Hebrews that they died in the wilderness because they didn't have faith. They experienced all that stuff, but when the rubber met the road, did they believe that God could truly bring them into the promised land? No, they didn't. They didn't, they died in the wilderness because they didn't have faith.

So when we think about that, and we bring it to these words that we're looking at today, I think how we need to understand this becomes clear. There were people, there were teachers who had become members of this church, and they liked some of the ideas that the new Christian faith was espousing. They even enjoyed the benefits of the church. But now they've turned away, and the concern is that they never truly understood. It would be like crucifying the Son of God again, we read. And you can understand the issue with that. The sacrifice of Christ is sufficient, it's once and for all, and to say that it isn't is a blasphemous thing. It means that they truly didn't understand what the deliverance was about in the first place. So when it talks about these people who are falling away from the faith here, it's not meaning that they did one or two things that were sinful and well, they're out of luck. It's meaning that they were like the people in the Old Testament who experienced all these things in and with Israel. But when the rubber hit the road, they didn't really believe, they didn't have faith. And so the same thing is here. So we don't need to read this passage and live in fear that we're gonna do something this week and fall away and we'll be beyond repentance. God keeps his people. What we need to be secure about is making sure that we trust in the sufficiency of Jesus Christ.

And we see here why the author of Hebrews is bringing this up, because he uses an illustration again. If the rain falls and the land receives it, a harvest grows, it's good. There was something good that was planted there. We know how that works. You don't plant your garden one year, you don't get more beans. You don't get more tomato plants. You need to plant something in order to have the fruit. If the rain falls and the sun comes out and only weeds grow, that tells you something about what was cultivated in that spot, right? We know that there wasn't something good in that land. And that's what the author of Hebrews is saying here. If this false teaching is springing up, it's because they didn't have the seeds of faith that were necessary there. True faith grows into strong faith, and it receives blessings. Superficial and false faith does not bear fruit. And this is why knowing the faith and standing strong is so important for us. We don't wanna bear thorns. We don't want the fruit of our faith to be thistles. We want to bear real fruit. And so we need to get beyond milk. And we need to be consuming solid food that nourishes us in the faith.

And so this brings us to our final point today. God sees our faith and he blesses it. As we come to verse nine, there's almost a tone of being apologetic for speaking so strongly. The author of Hebrews is kind of saying, hey, all of this stuff is true, and I know it's harsh, guys, but we know you folks aren't gonna do this. We expect more from you. The author is sure that they have better things coming their way, specifically salvation. God does not overlook the faith of his people. And if they hold fast in the faith, God will see their work and their service for one another.

And it's important that we see the practical side of this. All of this that we see here is not just intellectual and theoretical. Their faith works out into good works. It manifests itself in service. An understanding of the faith is going to drive us to good works out of gratitude for how God has saved us in Christ. If we believe that God has rescued us by no work of our own, but instead has reached out to us and saved us by his grace, then that will give us a desire to love our neighbor as God has first loved us. And that's the desire shown in this last part of our passage, that they would show earnestness to have full assurance of hope until the end. We didn't do good works to be saved, but our good works show that we have understood the love of God.

And so we're encouraged not to be sluggish. Again, some harsh language there. We're encouraged not to be sluggish, but instead be imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. We should be imitating those that we know have received the promises of God. So what does that mean? When we think back on those who have inherited the promises of God in Scripture, who was it? It was those who persevered. It was those who stayed faithful to God in the face of persecution and in the face of culture. I'm specifically drawn to the stories in the book of Daniel. Daniel faced the lion's den despite what was being told to him that he had to do to renounce God. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walked into fire because they would not bow the knee to ungodliness. What a contrast to those unfaithful in the wilderness that we've seen earlier on in Hebrews. They were afraid of the people that they would have to overcome in the promised land. That's what they were afraid of. They were afraid to try and fight a battle with a large army with God on their side. But what did Daniel and Shadrach and Abednego and Meshach do? They stood for God when they were the only ones. So we're told to be imitators of those types of people. We know who we're to imitate. It couldn't be clearer. Those who stand strong in the faith, that is what we are to emulate. So may we not be sluggish in standing strong in the faith, but instead do what is being challenged to us at the end of this passage this morning. Let us imitate those who inherited the promises of God because that is our call on our lives as Christian.

And so this brings us to our application for this week. Two things stand out for us today. They're very clear in the passage. And Mark, could you advance to these because I'm disconnected up here. The first application for this week is that we are to feast on solid food. This is a clear application from this passage that we just can't miss. If we're to remain in the faith, we need to be nourished with the word of God, and this is challenging, and this means something different for each one of us. Even if you're mature in the faith, there are still new avenues of solid food that you can pursue. And so the challenge for us is to begin something new. Maybe it's picking up your Bible and digging into larger sections of scripture. Maybe it's listening to scripture as you drive or listening to sound teaching on God's word. Perhaps it's finding a passage and committing that passage to memory. We're to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against him, right? But in our day of instant access to information, we don't seem to think that memorization is necessary as it used to be. But that access to instant information shouldn't carry over to how we view scripture. We need to meditate on God's word and let it shape us and form us. And so I challenge you this week, think about your spiritual diet. Is it Mountain Dew and Pop Rocks? Are you getting some nourish that can help you to stand firm in the faith? The world is relentless. You're gonna be challenged. Do you have what it takes to stand firm in the faith? And not just stand firm, but respond with why you're able to stand firm. And to share that good news. These are important questions for us to consider this week.

And secondly, our second point of application is to be earnest in holding strong to the end. What we saw today was the author of Hebrews telling us that those who hold strong have something in common. They're feasting on solid food. But for those who fall away from the faith, those who are subject to false doctrine, they're like those people who perished in the wilderness. We do not want to be those people. That is not how we want to be found by those who come after us. This past week, I heard a story about General George S. Patton. His policy for warfare against the German forces in World War II was that, if at all possible, be on the attack, constantly be on the attack. He asserted that the greatest security you can have in battle is advancing against your enemy. When asked why he always pressed for the attack, he said this, I don't like paying for the same real estate twice. We want to advance in our faith. We want to be earnest in our faith because we want to be sure in our salvation and endure to the end. We don't want to fall back. Who wants to take the same ground twice? And so the challenge for us is to go on the offensive. What would our lives look like if we strived for holiness every day instead of having it be an afterthought? What would look different in our daily lives if that was our focus? How can you and I be imitators of those who through faith and patience inherited the promises of God? Because we are the ones who will inherit the promise of God. Because we are in Christ, we have this promise. And so may we actively pursue it. May we be on the attack and let the solid food of God's word mature us in the faith and take ground for the kingdom of God that all glory, honor, and praise may go to Christ alone for his saving work in our lives. So may we feast on God's solid food this week and strive to chase after, to attack holiness in our lives, taking ground for the kingdom of God. Amen.

View the full series: Hebrews: Once for All

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