Milestones

Milestones

We all have milestones in out lives. Today I want to focus on the milestones that we work toward ,primarily education and the expected results.

We all have some common background of being in school and had to work toward a grade. Elementary school leads to middle and High school, then for some collage.

Before that, when we are born we automatically have the ability to learn. We quickly learn how to get things from our parents, by crying. It is not long before we reach point and make faces that show how we feel. We automatically learn, we don’t have to be taught how to adapt.

Now our world has become more complex. Long ago people learned that verbal communication was not enough and writing, then math, Now computers. School has been around a long time to aid children and adults in keeping up with the vast amounts of information and knowledge.

When we started school everything, well most everything, we learned became a building block for the next week, month and year. An example: I still use the same alphabet that kindergarten and first grade teachers taught me. The alphabet is used to day to make 10’s of thousand of new words and absolute truths that we did not realize 30 or 100 years ago.

We are students all our lives, but in formal education for at least a time in our lives. Now for our first piece of scripture.

Hebrews 5: 12-14

12 You have been Christians a long time now, and you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things a beginner must learn about the Scriptures. You are like babies who drink only milk and cannot eat solid food. 13 And a person who is living on milk isn’t very far along in the Christian life and doesn’t know much about doing what is right. 14 Solid food is for those who are mature, who have trained themselves to recognize the difference between right and wrong and then do what is right.

The Bible is the basic building block of our Christianity. It is the starting point of our Christian faith. Your initial faith was probably based on another person’s description of their understanding of a Bible truth. It might have been a parent, a friend, teacher, preacher but someone that had heard the good news shared it with you. Someone explained what it meant to them and invited you to share in the understanding of the Word.

No matter what you age when you heard it you were able to learn from what you heard and saw. You probably did not understand everything that you were exposed to but you found some comfort that you accepted as true.

We really don’t know the author of Hebrews. I personally suspect Paul. Something about the style of writing. How would I make a guess like that?

As a maturing Christian you read and study the Word of God for yourself. You go from having someone just tell you and you accept, to reading and understanding for yourself.

Well there is something else at work, Scripture tells us that the helper entered our lives, the Holy Spirit is involved. It helps us to accept the verbal teachings when we are new and later as we mature we find meaning, we find meat, something that sustains us and improves us..

I only remember tiny faded snapshots of elementary school. I guess I trusted my teachers would tell me the truth and not teach me the wrong alphabet. Now I know, that they were living under rules to teach us certain things, basic truths. They were under an obligation to help us get to the next level.

My school teachers already knew all the things they were teaching because they already had learned it. They already went through all the grades then collage and then additional steps to become teachers.

So at some point in their lives, they went from being a formal student in the class room to being a teacher. They took all the knowledge that accumulated over the years, added the things that life taught them along the way and came back into that 1st grade class to bring another group along.

Give us the building blocks to make us ready to go into the world. The scripture from Hebrews, is a letter to people who were confused about the basic truths. They were unable to advance to having their own understanding. They took whatever snack or meal someone offered and accepted it as truth.

Enough time had passed and the lessons taught that they themselves should have become the teachers to the next generation. And not been totally dependant on someone else. Something happened in their education. Some how they had either not received the gift of the Holy Spirit that would help their understanding of right and wrong, truth and lies or they ignored it’s prompting