It's good to go back from time to time and review what it is we are trying to accomplish in whatever we do, and that goes for us as a church. We can lose sight of our goal, we humans can, in any of our enterprises, prompting someone to define a zealot as someone who redoubles his efforts after losing sight of his goal. I think it's fair to say that the primary objective of the local church meeting is to edify Christians in their faith, to educate them in the revelation God has communicated to man in the Bible in general and through Christ in particular. This is done not just through teaching and preaching, but also through the singing, praying and sacraments of baptism and communion. The Bible uses the imagery of human birth and growth in this regard. We are born again through faith in the initial message of Christ, and having been brought into the family of God we must grow again, grow up to the full stature of maturity in Christ (Eph. 4:13). This is not to say that evangelism shouldn't or doesn't take place even in the church meetings, for it clearly has throughout the church's history. But the primary goal of our regular meetings is growth and maturity in our faith.

One passage which stresses this clearly is Hebrews 5:12-14. The writer first says, "For though by this time you ought to be teachers...." With the passage of time in our faith, we should be growing in our understanding of our faith, expanding it to the point where somewhere along the line we can begin to become advocates of it ourselves. We should participate in our weekly meetings with a view of mastering our faith so that we can become teachers of it ourselves. That's why I urge you regularly to bring your Bibles, mark them up and take notes. Too often Sunday morning is merely a ritual meeting for American Christians, a rote activity which doesn't advance them at all in their faith. But instead of advancing on into maturity, these readers were stuck in adolescence, no, make that infancy. For he says to them, "You have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is a babe." They should have been meat-eating teachers, but instead were yet bottle fed babies in need of basic, spiritual pablum. Their growth was stunted. The writer was frustrated with their continuing infancy, for he had said in v. 11 that he wanted to say more about Christ, but they couldn't handle it. It would have been like giving a T-bone to a toothless tot.

The goal is stated in v. 14. "But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil." Learning, practicing, training and growing in truth over time in the faith leads to maturity. It leads to discernment in good and evil (God made a whole tree to furnish that in the Garden!), the hallmark of mature Christians. But, like a student who sleeps through class and doesn't master his material, many Christians are merely marking time, which is to say, wasting time they should be using to grow into knowledgeable teachers and mature believers. You can't get much into Shakespeare until you've mastered your ABC's. Christianity is a mountain of marvelous truths, which become accessible at different levels of growth and maturity, which is true in most human disciplines, actually. That's why the author of Hebrews has to say in 6:1, "let us press on to maturity." That's a good word for us too. That's our goal, to grow up spiritually like we do physically. Infants are great, and infancy is a marvelous time of life, but we can't and don't stay there physically (who would change our diapers at 50!!??). We've got to become self-sustaining adults somewhere along the line, and the same is true of your growth in faith and mine. Where are we now on the growth charts? And, more importantly, where should we be? Let's press on. --Tim