Calling Us To Maturity

Please note: This transcript is provided as close to verbatim record of the sermon.

Press On to Maturity Because Jesus Is Better

Hebrews 5:11–6:12

Thank you for praying for me this morning. I value your prayers for me, as well as for my dear wife and family.

Let us consider this topic taken from Hebrews 5:11 to 6:12: pressing on to maturity because Jesus is better. Let us begin by reading the passage.

Scripture Reading: Hebrews 5:11–6:12

“Concerning him, we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. Although 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. 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.

Therefore, leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith towards God, of instructions about washings and laying on of hands, and the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits.

For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame. For ground that drinks the rain which often falls on it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is also tilled receives a blessing from God. But if it yields thorns and thistles, it is worthless and close to being cursed, and it ends up being burned.

But, beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you, and things that accompany salvation, though we are speaking in this way. For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown towards His name, in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints. And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you will not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

Let us come to the Lord in prayer.

Prayer

Our heavenly Father, our gracious God, we thank Thee indeed for another day of Your grace and Your mercies. Thank You, Lord, for leading and guiding us into worship this morning, for You are a God who is merciful, who always gives and gives.

And Lord, even now, as You impart Your word to us, may Your Holy Spirit minister Your word into our hearts, so that we may receive it. Lord, may it take root and also bear fruit in our lives, so that all we do may be pleasing to Thee and bring Thee glory.

We ask this in the Lord Jesus’ name. Amen.

Big Idea

The big idea of this passage, if I may summarize it, is this: because spiritual sluggishness is dangerous, believers must press on by God’s grace from spiritual infancy to maturity, and remain steadfast to the end.

The author of the book of Hebrews has been preaching, and our brothers have been sharing this over the pulpit over the past weeks, to a Jewish audience: Jesus is better.

He spoke about Jesus being superior over the angels, superior over Moses, and then superior over the Aaronic priesthood. Then he also spoke about how Jesus, in the days of His flesh, offered up both prayers and supplications, with loud crying and even tears, to the One able to save Him from death. And He was heard because of His reverence, or His piety.

The author has much to say to his Jewish audience gathered before him. But then he stops and says, “Concerning Him we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.”

Dull of hearing.

I was just wondering whether, as he was talking to this Jewish group or congregation, they looked like this: very absent, perhaps the kind of reaction you would not expect after you share about the superiority of Jesus.

But then I wondered, respectfully and lovingly, whether this is just an issue confined to the Hebrew Christians of that time. Could this be happening to us also today, in this hall, in our families, in our personal walk with God?

And then I extrapolated: is this us also, the same look? But as I cast my gaze around the hall, you are very chirpy this morning. So good. Good.

A Question for Us Today

Earlier this year, we did a survey across the CP groups. 182 of you responded across 13 groups. I think Benjamin may share more with the CP leaders and all that, but I just want to highlight one thing that stood out, and that is this finding regarding consistency in personal Bible reading and prayer.

Assembly-wide, the average was 3.64 out of 5. The breakdown was: young adults, 3.31; midlife, 3.7; seniors, 3.8.

Now, I know surveys are not totally accurate. So we cannot read 100% into it and say, “Ah, why are you like that?” I think maybe some of you were also a bit modest and humble in your response.

But we ask ourselves: the word is being taught faithfully from the pulpit week after week. We engage in Bible study week after week. But does that translate into a personal walk every day after Sunday? Or is it like we are charged on Sunday and then the battery drains through the week?

It would be sad if the word is not consistently carried into the week. It would be sad if the Bible is not opened consistently every day of the week after Sunday.

So then we ask ourselves: maybe this message this morning has something to do with us also. It is not just regarding that Hebrew audience then.

Today I want to approach the passage around three questions. They address the cause, the consequences, and the cure for spiritual dullness.

1. The Cause: How Does Dullness Happen?

The writer says, “We have much to say, but we cannot say it. It is hard to explain because you have become dull of hearing.” So I want to talk about spiritual dullness.

How does dullness happen?

If you look at the verse, it says, “You have become dull of hearing.” As you can see, spiritual dullness is not something that one is born with. It is something that results over time.

And what was this process that resulted over time in spiritual dullness?

Actually, the author of Hebrews has already been sounding warnings in the early chapters, and our brothers have also touched on this.

A. First Comes Drifting

Hebrews 2:1 says, “We must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.”

I think you can recall this. I borrowed from Brother Iumi the slide that he showed about somebody relaxing in the sea. I do not know whether those are his legs, but I think the point, if you can remember, is that if you are relaxing in the sea, you will be carried on by the current.

That is the drift. You look up, and then you see that you are now far from where you were before. And then you cannot explain how you got there.

If we want to apply it to assembly life, perhaps we have missed some meetings because we are tired, or because we are rushing to work or school. We read the Scriptures less and less. Maybe our prayers have reduced to emergency prayers to God because of some issues or concerns.

So that is drifting. Drifting happens when our attention weakens.

B. Then Comes Hardening

Then comes hardening, and the verse was Hebrews 3:7–19: “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”

He was referring to the Israelites in the wilderness. They saw the parting of the Red Sea. They saw how manna fell from heaven, and then water sprang from the rock. And yet, when God asked them to enter into Canaan and take Canaan, they refused to go.

Hardening is when we regularly encounter God’s word, but we refuse to obey it. We refuse to obey it.

Each time we respond this way, we actually become slightly more resistant.

Do you recognize whose hand this is? This was in Joel’s message. In his heartwarming illustration, he showed his mother’s hand. It was calloused through use, which means the skin had grown thicker and less sensitive.

In a similar way, the heart is either softening under God’s word or hardening against it. The heart is either softening under God’s word or hardening against it. And each day of refusal to obey hardens it to unbelief.

C. The Result Is Dullness of Hearing

From drifting, from hardening, and from unbelief comes dullness of hearing.

The word “dullness” is the Greek word nōthros. It means sluggish, inert, without energy.

It is like a hand that has now lost all sensation and no longer responds to stimulus.

So it represents people who hear the word, but it no longer affects them.

We have a famous verse that the word of God is alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. But then the sword no longer penetrates their thoughts or the attitudes of their heart.

The NIV translation is very telling. It says of the same verse that “you no longer try to understand.” Not that it just goes in, but you do not try to understand anymore.

So the habit of hearing God’s word without obeying is repeated over time until there is no connection between hearing and responding.

Unfortunately, we can be in this hall every Sunday. We can open our Bibles. We can sing every hymn and still be dull of hearing, because the hearing has never been connected to obedience, to repentance, and to the genuine application of the word to our lives.

2. The Consequences: What Does Spiritual Dullness Produce?

What are the consequences of dullness? What does spiritual dullness produce?

There are three negative consequences: arrested development, loss of discernment, and vulnerability to apostasy.

Let me go through them one by one.

A. Consequence One: Arrested Development

It says that “by this time you ought to be teachers,” and yet “you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles,” and “you have come to need milk and not solid food.”

These Hebrew believers were not new believers. They had enough time to have grown to a point where they should be able to minister to others from the word of God. Not necessarily as a teacher in a classroom setting, but certainly ministering to others with the word of God to encourage them, to give them comfort and peace.

But instead, they still needed someone to teach them the elementary principles all over again.

In this verse, you notice: “By this time you ought to be…” So spiritual growth is not optional. It is assumed. It is assumed that over time you will grow—not perfectly, but still progressing.

“For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant.” The King James Version uses the word “unskilled”—unskilled in the word of righteousness. The Greek word is apeiros. It means without experience, untested.

So they may know the Scriptures, but they have not applied it. They have not experienced it. They have not tested it.

The believer who feeds only on milk has not yet learned to apply God’s word to the demands of everyday life, real life. They can recite Scriptures, but they do not have the skill to use it wisely.

What can it look like? Here I am just trying to put side by side what he means by milk and solid food.

One commentator says that milk refers to what Christ did on earth: His birth, His teaching, His death, and His resurrection. Solid food refers to what He is now doing in heaven as our living, interceding High Priest.

For example, milk may be that you cannot explain repentance to a child, or you cannot share your faith clearly to a colleague. Solid food is when you are trained to navigate moral complexity with biblical wisdom.

B. Consequence Two: Loss of Discernment

“Solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.”

The mature refers to those who are fully developed, those who have their senses trained to discern good and evil. So the reverse is also true: the immature have untrained senses.

If you pick up the word “senses,” we have senses to see, to smell, and so on. So immature believers have untrained senses.

For example, they cannot smell false teaching. I do not want you to go around sniffing teaching; that is not the point. But what it means is that they can sense when something is wrong, something that sounds right but carries a faint odour of corruption. They can have that sensitivity.

They can taste whether worship is genuine or whether it is just a religious performance. We are extrapolating from physical senses to what it means spiritually.

Basically, they cannot navigate the moral complexities around ambitions, relationships, and compromises with biblical wisdom.

Discernment is not a gift that you receive at conversion. It is a capacity that you develop through training.

This training is the steady, disciplined engagement with Scripture over time. You cannot outsource it. You cannot download it. You cannot acquire it merely by attending service. It only grows through your personal practice, your personal training, and your obedient engagement with the word of God.

Discernment is indispensable in everyday life.

In the workplace, the issue is not always outright wrongdoing. Sometimes it is subtle compromise over integrity.

In relationships, the issue is not always whether something is sinful, but whether it is drawing your heart towards or away from Christ.

In media consumption, the issue is not always explicit content, but the cumulative shaping of the believer’s mind to the world’s values. As you scroll and scroll and scroll, it forms your mind.

Without discernment, these decisions appear harmless. A believer may say, “Oh, this is fine,” and continue to move forward without concern, only later to realize, “How did I arrive here?” It is just like drifting.

Many may assume that when such moments arise, they will simply know what to do. But the Scripture has just told us that this is not the case. You will not respond according to what you hope to do in the moment. You will respond according to what you have been trained to see. And you will not be trained if you have grown dull.

This is a warning not only to young believers, but even to those who have attended faithfully for 20 or 30 years, like myself. We could know the Scriptures, but we are not spared.

We can know teaching about forgiveness, but without actually having forgiven somebody who has hurt us deeply. We can know about the doctrine of God’s providence, but then not really trust God in a season of real need.

Knowledge that has never been tested in the furnace of real life is not discernment. It is just information. And information alone will not hold you when the pressure comes.

C. Consequence Three: Vulnerability to Apostasy

The next consequence is a very sobering one.

The author describes people who have once been enlightened, tasted of the heavenly gift, shared in the Holy Spirit, tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then still have fallen away to the point that it is impossible to restore them again to repentance.

Now, who are these people?

Interpreters across the ages—Bible expositors, scholars, and people more intelligent and more learned than me—have debated this over the centuries. But we as an assembly believe in the eternal security of the believer, based on passages like John 10:28–30, Romans 8:38, and Philippians 1:6.

Once saved, always saved. You will not fall away.

With that as a basis, we will try to understand that these are people who came very close to having genuine faith, but never had genuine faith. Very close, but not truly having genuine faith.

In the verses after that, they are like the soil that receives the rain and, instead of producing a useful crop, produces thorns and thistles. They have turned decisively against Christ.

One noted example is Judas. Judas was chosen by the Lord Himself. He participated in the apostolic mission. He preached the kingdom. He healed the sick. He cast out demons. He participated in the gift of the Holy Spirit. He experienced such close proximity to Christ, and yet he was never regenerated, though he was so very close to Jesus.

The sobering thought is this: the ultimate consequence of dullness, the end result of drifting, hardening, unbelief, and dullness, is apostasy.

Now, if you feel that you are one of these people, then I can tell you that the very concern you have is evidence that you are not. But if you are still concerned after that, speak to one of your elders.

Those who are truly apostatized, if there is such a word, feel no sorrow. They feel no sorrow. They have moved beyond sorrow to open contempt, publicly denying and rejecting Christ.

If the Spirit is still pressing you, if the passage is making you uncomfortable and pulling you towards repentance, that is a good sign of grace still working in you. Do not resist it. Respond to it.

But the warning is more for those who are drifting and feel no anxiety about it. The time to respond to the warning is now, while the heart can still be moved.

3. The Cure: What Cures Dullness?

Let us talk about the cure. What cures dullness?

There are three parts to it: press on to maturity, remember that God sees, and be diligent and imitate the faithful.

A. Press On to Maturity

“Let us press on to maturity, not again laying a foundation.”

The Greek phrase here has the sense of “let us be carried forward.” It is passive. So it is a bit ironic. You are supposed to do something, and yet it is passive.

What does it mean? It means that the cure for dullness is not totally an act of willpower. It is not self-improvement. It is not “I want to do, I want to do.” It is yielding to the Holy Spirit.

Here again, I borrow from Joel’s slide about entering God’s rest. We were reminded then that entering God’s rest is active submission. It is obedience. And if I may add, it is letting God complete the good work that He started in us.

So we yield to the Spirit.

We yield to the Spirit’s work by hearing the word with genuine attention, realizing that it is God speaking to us. It is coming to the word with a broken and contrite spirit, wrestling with its implications, and obeying what we understand, even though we do not fully understand why.

It is pressing into the deeper things of Christ. Not avoiding the difficult passages, not staying permanently at milk level, but growing up into the meat of what Christ has done for us.

And then there is this phrase: “let us.” Let us go on to maturity.

Spiritual maturity is never a solo journey, a one-person journey. We meet together in God’s community. It is God’s design for encouragement, for accountability, and for exhortation to keep individual hearts from hardening.

Hebrews 3:13 says that we are to exhort one another as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

We know this is difficult in an Asian context, because we all manage our public appearances with great care. We are Asians. We like our face.

The idea of being genuinely known by other believers, allowing somebody to ask us the hard questions, to call out the drift that they see in our lives—that sometimes feels very intrusive. And then we get defensive. We get angry.

Yet this is God’s way to keep us from blind spots, from the slow drift into dullness, the hardening that we cannot see in ourselves because it is happening gradually.

We need someone who knows us well enough to say, “Brother, I noticed you have not been coming,” or, “I noticed that you have not been joyful. What is happening?”

And we need to receive this kind of question without feeling defensive or angry.

So press on to maturity.

B. Remember That God Sees

The second cure is to remember that God sees.

This beautiful verse says that “God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown towards His name.”

And it starts with the word “beloved.” This is the only time in Hebrews that it appears. So you can see that the cure for dullness is recovering a true sight of God: a God who is not merely a judge, although He is a judge, but a God who is perfectly just and perfectly attentive. He is a Father who has not missed a single act of love done for His name.

Some of you have been serving quietly for a long time. You have visited the elderly and the sick when no announcement was made. You have taken care of children who have since grown up, and sometimes they may have left. We have done acts of generosity, private prayers in exhaustion, often unseen and unnoticed.

Sometimes you wonder whether it matters, whether it is changing anything.

This verse reminds me of one thing: God is not unjust. He has not missed one act of love offered in His name. He has catalogued them all.

And here is a paradox I want to share with you. In Christ, God forgets our every sin, and yet He remembers every act of love you have ever expressed to Him.

This morning we considered how merciful God is. But more than that, how loving God is. He forgets our sin, and yet He remembers every act of love you have expressed to Him.

What a wonderful God. What a wonderful God we have. Praise the Lord.

C. Be Diligent and Imitate the Faithful

The third cure is to be diligent and imitate the faithful.

Here it says, “We desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you will not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

The word “sluggish” appears here, and it is actually the same Greek word, nōthros, as at the beginning, “dull of hearing.” So you can see how the author bracketed the passage with nōthros at the beginning and nōthros at the end. He is tying the remedy back to the diagnosis.

The antidote here to dullness is diligence.

Spiritual dullness is overcome by diligence. Diligence is a steady, intentional pursuit of spiritual growth and maturity.

It is done through daily devotion. It is done through prayer, Bible study, faithful fellowship, and serving others.

As we do this, our hope becomes steadfast. Our hearts are kept from sluggishness, and our lives begin to imitate the pattern of those who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises.

I just want to add one word: to imitate is not merely to admire. To imitate is to study closely enough in order to reproduce it.

So it is not just hearing about them and knowing them. It is asking the people you imitate life questions. It is hearing how they navigate the season that you are currently in.

That is why a multigenerational community assembly like ours is so good. We have older saints, more mature saints, whom we can imitate.

So start forming these bridges if you have not already done so. Reach out to the older saints. We have many older, faithful saints here. Personally, I am very appreciative and grateful for the pastoral care and the prayers by which they have supported me and my family.

Conclusion

What have we covered?

We have covered that the cause of spiritual dullness does not happen overnight. It begins when we hear God’s word but do not respond.

The consequences are serious. We stop growing. We lose our discernment. And then we place ourselves in real spiritual danger of falling away.

But the passage does not leave us there. It shows us a cure: press on to maturity, remember that God sees, and practice diligence and imitate the faithful.

I want to leave you with one question:

Between last Sunday and today, did the word of God shape any decision you made, any conversation you had, any moment where you could have reacted from the flesh but chose to respond from faith?

Did the word of God shape you through the week?

If the answer is yes, press on.

If the answer is no, then please prayerfully begin today.

I want to end by asking our pianist to lead us in this song, and perhaps Clavin can also lead us. Let us close with this song, “Speak, O Lord”: “as we come to You to receive the food of Your holy word; take Your truth and plant it deep in us; shape and fashion us in Your likeness.”

Let us rise.

Closing Hymn

Let us close with the hymn “Speak, O Lord,” asking the Lord to plant His truth deep in us, shape us in Christ’s likeness, teach us obedience, renew our minds, and fulfil His purposes for His glory.

Closing Prayer

Our heavenly Father, we thank You that we come to You in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, the One who has opened up a new and living way into Your holy presence.

Lord, we thank You for speaking to us this morning. We pray that Your word will indeed bear fruit in our lives, Lord, that we will be good witnesses for You. We ask this, giving thanks and praise in the Lord Jesus’ name. Amen.

Thank you.