Moving Toward Perfection

Moving Toward Perfection

By Pastor Jim May

Have you developed a good set of spiritual teeth this morning so that you can handle the meat of God’s Word; or are you still trying to live on milk alone?

As I look at the church of today, much of what I see is just milk. It’s as though people are born again, as newborn babies in Christ, and that’s as far as they ever go. Of course newborn babies are exciting to be around. There’s never a dull moment.

We had a new grandson just a few months ago and that little fellow commands a lot of attention from everyone around him. Even when he is sleeping and the people around him can take a breath, you know that something is brewing. He might be quiet for the moment but you know that the quietness is only for a moment.

To me, raising little kids is kind of like being around an active volcano. Even when its quiet around you can still sense the rumbling in the air and when it gets really quiet that’s when you have to get worried. When the kids are around and you don’t hear them, you had better be checking on them. You might find them quietly sprinkling face powder all over the carpet, or drawing a mural on the wall with a permanent marker, or maybe you’ll find them digging in the cabinets, dumping everything on the floor. Maybe you might even discover that they’ve wandered off down the street. There’s nothing more unpredictable than a quiet toddler. You never know what they are going to get into.

Like that volcano, they can be quiet. Long periods of silence, low rumblings and then comes the eruption. Suddenly, without warning, the top blows off and that cute little kid becomes a Tasmanian devil, crying screaming, kicking, throwing things and just being a wild man.

When I think of those things I am not surprised that some animals decide to eat their young! But thank God for parents who take the time to discipline their kids.

Believe it or not, God’s Word hasn’t changed and it still says over in Proverbs 22:6, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." And it also still says in Proverbs 22:15, "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him."

Little children often cannot handle meat and some foods until they have time to grow a little. You have to feed them food that has been ground up and made into a liquid.

Now it doesn’t bother me to watch someone feed a baby out of a jar of baby food, but when I sit down to lunch in a little while, I don’t want to see a jar of Gerber Sweet Peas and a bottle of Isomil or Enfamil sitting there. It better be something that I can sink my teeth into, even if they might be false teeth.

I was checking out the list for our Valentines dinner this week and I was glad to see that meat was on the list. The only problem is that nobody had signed up to bring any yet. But you’d better believe there will be some. I like salads, even though if I eat them too often I begin to feel like a rabbit. I like veggies – after all I didn’t get this wonderful physique by culling too much from my diet. But I really like meat. If it weren’t for chicken, we preachers couldn’t exist for long.

I think that we have a score to settle with chickens anyway. That rooster squealed on Peter and ever since then we preachers have been trying to get even with chickens and many a chicken has sacrificed his life for the gospel.

The fact is that when you mature you get past the place where you need baby food and now you are ready for some real meat, some real veggies and you want to exercise your power to chew and get the most you can from what God provides for you to eat.

If you are old enough to understand what I’m saying then you should be ready for some meat. If you’re a teenager, or even older, and you still like eating out of baby food jars and sucking milk out of a bottle, I would really be worried about you. I’d probably think that your elevator doesn’t go to the top, that you are a few bricks short of a full load, that your Happy Meal is a few French fries short, or just to put it in plain terminology – I’d believe that you were insane.