Twenty Years in Church and Still a Baby

Count the services.

Fifty-two Sundays a year. Twenty years. Round it down for the ones you missed and you still sat through more than nine hundred sermons. Add the Christmas Eves, the Good Fridays, the funerals, the weddings. Nine hundred times a man stood up front and told you something about God, and you were there, in the seat, awake.

Now answer one question. Could you open the Bible tonight and teach it to your son?

Not read a verse to him. Teach it. Walk him through what it means and why it is true and what it asks of him. If you flinched at that, keep reading. This one is for you, and it is not written to shame you.

There is a church that will run you through a thousand services and never once try to make you a man who can feed himself. It counts heads. It measures attendance and giving and how the room felt on Sunday. It hands you a bite, cut small, warmed up, and never expects you to hold a fork. Twenty years of that and you are exactly where you started. Older. Tireder. Still eight years old on the inside, and starting to sense it.

The writer of Hebrews met men like this. Listen to how he says it.

"For though by this time you ought to be teachers, 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." Hebrews 5:12.

By this time. Read that again. He is not scolding new believers. New believers are supposed to drink milk. That is health. He is talking to men who have been at it long enough that the clock has run out on the excuse. They have had the years. They logged the time. And they still need the food cut up.

He keeps going. "For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil." Hebrews 5:13 and 14.

Look at that word. Practice. The mature man got that way by reps, not by seat time. Trained senses come from use. You do not become a man who can tell truth from a lie by sitting still for it. You become that man by working the Book with your own two hands until you can smell a counterfeit before it finishes its sentence.

That is the whole design. Paul spells it out in Ephesians. Christ gave the church its shepherds and teachers "for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ." Ephesians 4:12. Equipping. The pastor is not the fork that feeds you forever. He is the man who is supposed to teach you to hold your own. The goal is right there in the next lines. "As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine." Ephesians 4:14.

Children get tossed. That is what children do. A man who cannot feed himself will believe whatever the loudest voice tells him, because he has no trained sense to weigh it against. He is one bad podcast, one smooth talker, one hard season away from being carried off. He has been kept a child, and a kept child is easy to move.

Now the knife turns, and it turns on you first.

It is easy to read all that and picture the shepherds. The low-expectation pastor. The church that trades depth for a full parking lot. Hold on. Before you point at the pulpit, take the log out of your own eye. "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." Matthew 7:5.

Here is the log. Nobody stopped you. For twenty years the Book sat on your nightstand or in your phone, free, complete, the same solid food available to any man who reaches for it. Nobody locked it. You could have opened it Monday through Saturday and did not. You blamed the milk on the church, and the church earned some of that blame. But some of those years the fork was in your hand the whole time and you set it down.

That is the honest part. Say it and stop performing the victim. Yes, you were failed. A shepherd who feeds you baby food for two decades will answer for it, and God is not blind to lazy pulpits. But a grown man who stays a baby on purpose is not only a victim. Both things are true, and only one of them is your move to make.

So make it.

Here is the good news, and it is the only news that finally moves a man. You are not too far gone. Christ did not save you to keep you a baby. He commanded the opposite. "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you." Matthew 28:19 and 20. Teaching them. That command lands on you too. He does not just want you fed. He wants you feeding.

So start in your own house first.

Tonight, open one chapter. Not a plan, not an app, not a devotional someone chewed for you first. One chapter of the Book. Read it slow. Ask three things: what does it say, what does it mean, what does it ask of me. Do that five days this week. When you can, put a Bible in front of your son or your wife or the man across the table and say, here is what I saw, walk it with me. You will be clumsy. Clumsy and yours beats smooth and borrowed. That is practice. That is how the senses get trained.

Then, and only then, look at the man in the seat next to you.

You know him. He has the same nine hundred sermons and the same empty hands. Do not walk over there as his judge. Walk over as the brother who just found the fork last month. "Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted." Galatians 6:1. Gentleness. Say it plain and kind. Say, I sat where you sit for twenty years and thought showing up was the same as growing up. It is not. Read one chapter with me this week. Just one.

That is the whole thing, Brother. Take the fork. Feed your house. Then go hand a fork to the man beside you.