Got Milk? - Part A

I recall our Lord Jesus Christ saying, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

They will be filled. He said nothing about casually snacking after righteousness. There's some people that can go a week or two weeks without even cracking this book. They feel good about it.

It's no big deal to them. Just pull out the Sunday mask and go for it. What is your craving like? God's Word keeps us strong and helps us stay faithful to Him.

Do you crave it more than everything else? Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip helps you train your appetite for the Bible. Now we want to tell you about a resource that will help you break free from anxiety and experience the peace Jesus offers.

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800-922-1888 or give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer. Okay, we're in 1 Peter chapter two as Skip Heitzig starts today's study. Peter would say, here's some things that come to the table that are so bad for your spiritual appetite that he says you need to lay them aside. You need to say no to these things. These are horizontal sins that will take away your appetite for vertical truth.

And you and I, we must go vertical. These will choke out nourishment. I read an article this week on a heart friendly website that said, food needs to give you the nutrients that you need in order to grow, to repair damages, to prevent disease. Anything that you put in your mouth, except for water, needs to provide nutrition. It should not take away nutrition. If it does, it's a poison. It kills slowly, but it kills.

I don't know where Cherry Cobbler fits into that article, but let's look at these five junk foods. First of all, on the list, verse one, malice. Laying aside all malice, it's a general word for ill will. It's an attitude that eventuates into words that are said and deeds that are done. It begins inside, but eventually you speak it out. Malice, ill will.

It could even be looked at as a complaining, grouchy, grumpy person. I heard about a husband who sat down at breakfast and his wife cooked him like she did every day. He had two eggs, one fried, one scrambled. And he sat down, looked at the eggs and went, I knew it, you did it again, you fried the wrong egg. I think she might have married the wrong egg.

Shouldn't have said anything, just shut up, enjoy the egg, dude. But Jesus said, from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And malice among Christians will quickly cause you to lose your appetite.

So put that aside, that's junk food. Second on the list, deceit, deceit. Now Peter was a fisherman and he understood this word. The word literally means to bait a hook. That's deceit, to bait a hook. Now if you are a fisherman, my dad was a big fisherman, essentially that's what you're doing when you go fishing.

You know that, right? You're deceiving fish. It's all about the lie. You are lying to those little fish.

I have no problem with that. What you do is you take the hook and you cover it up with something that to the fish looks like a meal. You're baiting a hook. It's deceit, that's where the word comes from.

Peter understood this. Deceit among people is when you play a trick in order to get your way. You're manipulating them, you're dishonest with them. Whether it's an overt lie or you are cleverly hiding an aspect of the truth to gain personal advantage. That's deceit. Now notice both of these are on the horizontal level in relationships. Malice, deceit.

I'll give it to you this way. When you eat deceit, you're in no mood to eat real food. It's a growth stopper, it's an appetite quencher.

It will take away your appetite for the good stuff. Third on the list is hypocrisy. Everybody knows what a hypocrite is. The word comes to us from the Greek plays. The Greeks would wear masks, often with a smile or a frown and they would play a part. They would wear a mask in order to play a part and the word given was hypocrite, a stage actor.

It has become a prominent word even in the English language. So a hypocrite is somebody who pretends to be something he or she is not. So if somebody pretends to be smarter than they are or cooler and hipper than they really are or more spiritual than they are, that person is a hypocrite. I read an article about a man who was arrested for impersonating a physician. He wasn't a doctor but he knew lots of medical terms, he knew human anatomy, he knew just enough to be dangerous. They caught him because he wrote prescriptions that were the wrong prescriptions several times in a row and somebody thought in the pharmacy something's up with this guy. Come to find out he was a medical student and he was almost a doctor but he didn't graduate. He was a hypocrite.

He played the part of something that he was not. And so too a person can wear a mask on Sunday and as soon as churches overtake the mask off, go back to real life and then bring the mask out next Sunday and stick it on and live their life that way. And listen, nothing will take away people's appetite for God quicker than hypocrisy.

Junk food, get rid of it, throw it away. Next on the list, notice envy. Envy is a slippery term. It's what one writer said is the last sin Christians will confess because it's so ugly. Envy is what goes on in your heart when somebody is blessed around you and you're mad because they got some fortunate thing that happened to them. Or when you're joyful that some misfortune happened to another person. It's the attitude that says, I should have what they have and I don't. And that breeds an attitude deep within. That's envy. That's junk food. It will quench your appetite.

Get rid of it. Next on the list is evil speaking or a better term slander as some translations say. Literally the Greek word means to speak down. Talk down on someone. Gossip, a cheap shot in a conversation. It could be a raised eyebrow.

It could be a sentence that you leave unfinished. You start saying, never mind, I don't want to say anything bad. You just did.

You're talking down that person's reputation, backbiting, rumor. Here's what I want you to see in all these things. When you forget the appetizer, when you forget how gracious God has been to you, you become eventually somebody who eats this stuff. This is what you feed on. And the reason a person is cantankerous and complaining and down on other people a lot, if they're a Christian and you wonder, how can that be? Being around that person is like witnessing an autopsy.

It's just always down and negative. The reason a person becomes this way is that person has forgotten what the appetizer was like. They've forgotten how gracious God has been to them. And when you forget how gracious God has been to you, an undeserving sinner, you start getting ungracious toward other people.

That's the idea here. Your bitterness will kill your appetite for His sweetness. Or His sweetness will kill your bitterness and dispel it. You cannot have both. So be mindful of what you taste.

Be careful to avoid junk food. It takes us to the third and final point here. Be faithful to feed on truth, the real stuff. Verse 2, As newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word that you may grow thereby.

The highest rate of growth in human life is the infant stage. They change weekly. Have you noticed? It's amazing. I haven't seen my grandkids all week. They've been at their other grandparents' house.

Especially that little cute girl, Katie. I know she's going to change radically in one week. And the reason they change is they're eating a lot and they're growing rapidly during that phase. Now, when a baby is hungry and a baby doesn't eat, a baby is always faithful to let you and everyone else know exactly what they want. Am I right? So when a baby desires milk, you'll know about it. It's an unmistakable signal. And when a baby cries because the baby is hungry, you go, I can't believe that demanding little baby.

When is she going to learn manners? Not at all, because for a baby, milk is not a fringe benefit. It's absolutely necessary for life. It's a necessity.

You can't live without it. In order to grow, you need milk. Now, when Peter uses this little metaphor, like babies desire milk, he's not writing to his audience saying, you guys are a bunch of babies. Or he's not implying that you have such a low spiritual growth rate.

You're just like spiritual infants. I'm not writing to mature believers. He doesn't mean that at all.

Some of them are very mature. Nor is he meaning that we should avoid deep spiritual meaty truths of the word and just love the milky things, no doctrine, just the milky truths. He's not meaning any of those things at all. Rather, it's very simple. He is saying crave God's truth just like a baby craves milk.

And if you do that, you'll grow because of it. That's the intent of the passage. It all revolves around a single verb, and I want you to see it yourself. It's the word desire as newborn babies desire.

Some translations give you a better word. Crave it. Crave it. It's where you got to have it. You yearn for it. You require it. The Greek word is epipateo. It means a vigorous, passionate, intense desire.

Got to have it. I heard a fun little story about a farmer named Ollie. Ollie was a Lutheran. He lived in a little town back in the Midwest, a farming community. Everyone in his town was Catholic except Ollie. He was a Lutheran. Well, that posed a problem Friday evenings when he would barbecue beef on his backyard porch. And that smell wafted through that Catholic community Friday they eat fish, not meat.

I can attest to that in my upbringing. So the community got together and said, let's talk to Ollie. So they went to Ollie and said, Ollie, listen, you're like the only Lutheran in this Catholic community, and the nearest Lutheran church is like the next town. It's so far away. Why don't you just convert and be a Catholic? Be one of us. Join our church.

Join our community. He thought about it. He said, that's a good idea. Don't do that.

That's a great idea. So the big day came. They arranged it with the priest, and Ollie knelt down on his knees, and the priest stood over him and put his hands on Ollie and said something to the effect, Ollie, you were born a Lutheran, and you were raised a Lutheran, but now, and he sprinkled water and incense on Ollie, but now you're a Catholic.

That was it. Ollie got up, gave the guy a hug, hugged all of his new friends, was a part of this church, and everything went well that week until Friday evening. And once again, all of Ollie's neighbors could smell beef being barbecued over at Ollie's house. So they go, we've got to go talk to Ollie. He's changed now.

He can't do this. So they went over, and just as they were entering his yard, they peered over the fence, and there was Ollie standing over his barbecue talking to his beef, saying, you were born a beef, you were raised a beef, and then sprinkling salt and spices said, but now you're a fish. I got the biggest kick out of that. Ollie was bent and determined to eat beef no matter what. He craved beef.

So he thought if that worked, this will work. He wanted to eat beef. What do you crave? What do you crave? On a scale of one to ten, what is your spiritual appetite like? I want you to think about that.

I'd like you to think about that this week. On a scale of one to ten, evaluate your own spiritual hunger, your spiritual appetite. One being mildly interested, ten being an intense craving.

What's it like? You see, I recall our Lord Jesus Christ saying, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. They will be filled. He said nothing about casually snacking after righteousness. There's some people that can go a week or two weeks without even cracking this book. They feel good about it. It's no big deal to them.

Just pull out the Sunday mask and go for it. What is your craving like? See, that's the real thrust of this passage.

Just like a baby has to have milk and lets everybody know crave spiritual truth. Can you think back and can you remember how you devoured the Word of God when you were first saved? You know what I used to listen to? They had this thing years ago called cassette tapes.

Some of you remember them, others you have to go to a museum to see what they look like. Cassette tape, I could listen to an hour message, Bible message. I'd listen to several cassette tapes during the day to go through the whole Bible. My wife, before we were married, when she was single and a brand new believer, she would go to church every single night of the week that they offered Bible study. She just could not get enough.

Have you lost that newborn passion, that kind of craving? It's not a priority any longer? What makes one student in school better than the average students? What makes one athlete excel more and get the gold more than the rest of the athletes?

What makes one worker at a job stand out to the boss more than the others? One word describes it, passion. Passion, craving, desire, yearning, passion. J.C. Penney said, Show me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll show you a man who will make history.

But show me a man without a goal and I'll show you a stock clerk. What's the difference? Passion, passion, desire, crave, yearn. The pure milk of the word.

Now look at it again. It says the pure milk of the word. It means no additives, no contaminants. It comes from the language of the farm 2,000 years ago. It was a word that described pure grain or pure uncontaminated corn, in this case pure milk. Think about it. Does a baby want 2% or skim milk?

Are you kidding? That's adult stuff. They want the full meal deal.

Whole milk, the real stuff. You know why? They're trying to put on weight. They're trying to grow. They're trying to add substance. If you mix it up and contaminate it with other things or water it down, that child will not have a healthy upbringing.

You want to grow? Don't mix God's truth with anything else. The pure truth, the pure word.

Not the Bible plus philosophy, the Bible plus psychology, the Bible plus somebody's theological bent, but the pure milk of the word. And here's why it's important. That you may grow thereby. Here's the truth, baby Ruth.

Here's the bottom line. You cannot grow spiritually without a steady diet of God's word. You just cannot. You can't just read a devotional. You need the word, the pure word. You can't grow without it.

That's why Wednesday nights are my favorite time of the week because we tear through a chunk of scripture, a chapter, two chapters at a time and really go into it and go through all of it that you may grow thereby. Picture in your mind right now an adult wearing diapers with a binky and a rattle. Just put that little image in your mind. Some of you have no imagination.

It'll be hard. But others of you, it comes quite readily to you. Think about that. Look at that. Sad, isn't it?

It's not right, is it? And now ask yourself, am I in the same place spiritually that I was a year ago or five years ago? Have I not grown beyond that?

Is that just sort of where I've stagnated and stayed? Perhaps here is why. Timothy. Here's this from Paul. 2 Timothy chapter 3.

All scripture is inspired by God and useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It straightens us out. It teaches us to do what is right.

It is God's way of preparing us in every way, fully equipped for every good thing God wants us to do. There you have it. It's like the story I love to tell about the factory that had to shut down because its biggest, most intricate piece of equipment failed. And they couldn't fix it. They couldn't repair it. So they brought in the expert who built it. He looked around and he listened and he watched and he took out a little hammer and with one little BING tap, just one tap, the machine started working again. And he sent the company a bill. Ten thousand dollars.

And he itemized it this way. It's one dollar for the tap. It's $9,999 to know precisely where to tap. Have you discovered God's word knows precisely where to tap? You read a passage of scripture and it's like, whoa, that hurts.

Bam, tap. It speaks to you. It challenges you. It confronts you. At other times, it comforts you. It warms you. It encourages you.

It knows exactly where to tap. So there you have it. You're given the appetizer. When you're first saved, he tastes so good.

He is so gracious. But then we can start feeding on junk food that take away our real spiritual appetite. And we need to clear those off our plate and move those off the table and make ready, make room for the real spiritual stuff. Clear the plate of the horizontal junk, relational junk, so that we might go vertical. But we'll never make it vertical as long as we're mired horizontally.

Those two axes are connected and they work together. There's some common philosophies Christians have in regards to church, Christianity. First is the philosophy that says, I'll show up. That's all I got to do. I'll just show up.

Find a seat, occupy the seat. I went to church. So you ask people, do you know Christ? I go to church, not the question.

But that's it to them. I go to church, I show up. I dress up, I show up. Others take it a step beyond that.

I dress up, I show up and I listen up and I'm okay as long as I listen to the sermon. All of those things are good but you need to take another step. Grow up by remembering if indeed you have tasted that He is gracious. Get in touch with that again. Go back to that gracious appetizer.

Clear off the junk food and be craving and desiring the real stuff. Because here's the deal. Your growth, your growth spiritually is directly proportional to your desire. Make sense? You are a spiritual giant this morning or a spiritual midget all because you want to be right where you are.

It's directly proportional to your desire. You and I have access to the same stuff. It's out there. We are where we are in our spiritual growth because of our desire or lack of it. So maybe a more basic question to end with is not got milk but got Jesus, got salvation? Maybe we should start there.

That's Skip Heising with a message from the series Rock Solid. Now, we want to tell you about a unique opportunity to take your knowledge of Scripture to a new level. Calvary College is now open for registration. Calvary College is offering select online classes as an opportunity for individuals to take their life's calling to a whole new level with an educational emphasis in Biblical studies. With our unique partnerships with Veritas International University and Calvary Chapel University, you will have the opportunity to obtain your bachelor's or master's degree with complete online programs. Whether you're looking to obtain an accredited online degree or take individual courses to become better equipped in your knowledge of God's unchangeable truth, Calvary College has you covered with a range of opportunities. For updates on classes and registration information for Calvary College, please visit calvaryabq.college. That's calvaryabq.college.

For Calvary College, calvaryabq.college. Thank you for joining us today. Our goal is to connect listeners like you with God's truth so you can stand on the unshakable foundation of His Word. That's why we've made these teachings available to you.

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