Think About It, Part 4

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ.

You should be at a maturing level as a teacher where you can bring the Word of God to bear on people's lives. You've got a neighbor or someone at work and they're really struggling with something. You can add a perspective to it. I can't tell you how many times over the years what I end up hearing is, and it's not even a big issue, but whether they'll say, hey, I've got a friend who has this kind of problem. And I said, OK. And I said, what did you say to him?

Well, I didn't say anything, but I told him to make an appointment with you. You see, that's not the way it should work. You should be able to bring it to bear.

That's what you should be able to do. All of us should be able to do something like that. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana.

Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's word meets our world. One of the most beautiful pictures of nature is a baby's desire for milk. And here he's not talking about bottled milk. He's talking about breast milk. It's a beautiful picture.

A mother feeding a baby. I mean, you can't look at it and think, oh, look at that. This little guy.

That's amazing. They start out that way. We just start out with milk. These people have been Christians for 20 some years. And he said, you know what?

You need milk. Someone was teasing me after the first service and said, hey, because he heard the whole sermon. He said, are those empty bottles out here for some of the people in the church?

And I said, yes, they are. And what we're going to do is we're actually going to have those people come up when I give them the bottles. But just imagine if you saw an adult come into any setting like this. And instead of having his mocha coffee or whatever, he's that he has a baby bottle with a nipple in it with milk.

And he just sits there and drinks it. What would you think? Really? Something wrong here, right? I mean, there's something wrong.

What is it? He's a full adult. Why is he drinking milk? Because he's a baby Christian. He never grew. You see, that's what Paul, I mean, the writer of Hebrews is saying here. He says you wouldn't have need of it. He says then in verse 13, he goes on and he says, for everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant.

Here's what he said about him. We had a great English word for it. We have it right here in the church. Toddler rooms right back there.

That's what the word means. He's a toddler. He's talking about people that have said they've been Christian for 20 some years and they're toddlers. Now, what do you know about toddlers?

By the way, if you want to know, they always love volunteers. Volunteer, go back and spend a Sunday with the toddlers. Just get a good feel for what toddlers are like.

They're interesting. First of all, toddlers have the attention span of a gnat. That's who they are. They're just toddlers. They have a very limited vocabulary. But their favorite word of toddlers, mine.

Just go back and watch. What's mine is mine. What yours is mine.

Mine. That's toddlers. Notice, they're completely self-perspective.

Everything is about them. And it's cute when you're three years old. When you're 33 years old, it's not so cute. He said you act just like babies do, like toddlers do. That's the way you act. In our country, probably over the last 100 years, there have probably been thousands of churches that have split.

And almost always, I can tell you why. They're filled with toddlers. They're filled with Peter Pan Christians. They're saying, this is mine. I see it this way.

I know them will split and start too. They're just children. It can happen almost to any one of us. Because the point of a Peter Pan Christian is, they choose to be that way. They're happy to be that way. You see, you might be sitting here now and thinking, I don't want to hear any more of this stuff. You see, I'm very content to the way I am. But you shouldn't be.

You and I were saved to be conformed to the image of Jesus. We're to mature. We're to steadily mature. That's what we're to do. We should never be content.

And you know who gets hurt the most? If you stay a Peter Pan Christian, you do. I'm telling you, never are going to experience, ever, the peace and joy and hope every day of your life. You're never going to get there. Because you just don't think that way.

You're going to be what I'd call a circumstantial Peter Pan Christian. If you take any teenager, when are teenagers really happy? When everything they want to have happen, happens, right? And if it doesn't, they're miserable. You see, they're completely, completely controlled by the circumstances of their life. Well, you and I both know it.

Jesus said it. In this world, you're going to have tribulation. You're going to have a lot of terrible days. It's just going to happen. Are you going to be mature enough to handle them or not? For a lot of us, it's not.

I really can handle them. So, as you go through this whole thing, you come to this idea that he says you're an infant, you want it your own way. And then he goes to the next verse and he says, in verse 14, he said, let me tell you what a mature Christian, a maturing Christian looks like. I want you to see what a maturing Christian looks like. He said, but solid food is for the mature. Four characteristics.

These will be four questions I want you to ask yourself this morning. Am I eating solid food? Do you eat solid food as a Christian?

I don't mean the milk. Now, there's a variety of ways you can eat it. You can have someone teach you solid food.

Hopefully, that happens occasionally from here. We can teach you solid food. But there's so much more out there than that.

In today's world, a Christian who believes I can't get fed what the word of God teaches is just uninformed. Every single teacher in the whole world that I would say I truly respect as great teachers, you can go online and listen to anything they want to teach on in 30 seconds. Thirty seconds.

I can pillow him up. Here's the subject he's going to teach on. It's just amazing. We have access to everybody. Back here, they wouldn't have had that. They have the teacher in front of them and that's it.

But we have access. Do I feed on solid food? But there's more to it than that. Do I learn for myself anything? Am I teaching myself anything?

Ask yourself that. Do you teach yourself anything from the word of God? Honestly, I can tell you what a Peter Pan Christian will do even in a place like this. You'll open your Bible for this 40 minutes and then you'll throw it in the back of the car and pick it up next week. No, that's not enough. You're not going to make it. You see, that's just not enough.

You have to figure out how do I do this on my own? See, we all want to pray to God all the time. Prayer is me speaking to God. The Bible is God speaking to me. I want to have a conversation with God. I want him to speak to me and I want to speak to him. And we have to do that on our own.

Paul wrote to Timothy and said, all scriptures God breathed. All. That's a heck of a word. And he said, and by the way, it's profitable. Who's it profitable to? Me. You. All scripture. Now, is that challenging?

Yes. All of it? I'll give you a homework for this week. In a week, just read the book of Leviticus by yourself.

And then figure out what have I learned in this process. It's a great book in its own right. But some of the Bible is like, whoa, what is going on here?

And all you've got to do, you've done that. How many of you have looked at the Old Testament or even the New and you get the begetting stuff going on? One name I can't pronounce beget, another name I can't pronounce beget, another name I can't pronounce. And yet, if you took the time and you read, by the way, the genealogy of Matthew, it's unbelievably rich.

It's incredibly rich. You see, but we just sort of pretend we know the word, lip something, and then move on to the next word. But he said, it's all profitable for us. So am I eating solid food? Am I progressing as time moves on?

Ask yourself that question. What did you understand about God and what is your assessment of where you were five years ago, 10 years ago? Have you changed?

Are you progressing or are you just about the same level? You see, that's an extremely important thing for each and every one of us. What I find here that's interesting, Peter said this to us. At the end of his second epistle, he said, grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. You and I are to grow. When? Until with the Lord. We're to grow until with the Lord.

You don't peak. You know, it's not like, hey, you know, I went through a membership class once. Wow.

OK, that's fine, that's nothing. To show you where we are as evangelicals in America, I don't know if you'll remember the book. We even passed it out to all of you that wanted it for free. Rick Warren wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life. OK, it took the country by storm. We put stacks of them up here and let you read them.

I believe back in the 80s, it sold 35 million copies. When I read it the first time, here was my thought. That's kindergarten, first grade stuff. That's all that was in there. The most basic tenets of Christianity. And yet it sold 35 million, like we're getting, wow, this is like getting, you know, this is like getting a graduate degree.

I'm going to read this book. But it also told us where we are as Christians. You see, they didn't know hardly anything.

That's actually become part of the problem in the United States. Matt and I were talking a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about a large megachurch, I believe, in North Carolina. And the church is, I think, maybe 15,000 or so. It's a pretty good sized church.

And the pastor, Matt, putting this out to me, the pastor has actually said, if you want to learn doctrine, which is teaching or theology at all, don't come here. We're not going to give you any of that. Now, they have the best music whoever here. And that's all they have.

And they've got 15,000 young people just loving every moment of it. They think that's our faith. You see, that's our faith. That's Christianity. And that's sad when you think about it.

Because once they're not in that building and they're not in that real world, they don't have any resources at all to deal with anything. But they're Peter Pan Christians. And guess what? They really like cool music. And they give them exactly what they like.

But this is intentional. The pastor said, I'm not going to give you anything more here. You're not going to get that here. Now, you have to understand something here. Because you're a believer in Jesus Christ and the Bible says you're to give an account for the hope that's in you, that means that every one of us is a theologian. Every one. One who studies God. Some of us are adequate theologians. Some of us are horrific theologians.

Some of us don't even know what theologian means. You see, we don't even know. But what if someone asked you about it? No, I don't know. I don't know.

You should be at a maturing level as a teacher where you can bring the word of God to bear on people's lives. You've got a neighbor or someone at work and they're really struggling with something, you can add a perspective to it. I can't tell you how many times over the years what I end up hearing is. And it's not even a big issue.

But they'll say, hey, I've got a friend who has this kind of problem. And I said, okay. And I said, what did you say to him?

I didn't say anything, but I told him to make an appointment with you. That's not the way it should work. You see, that's not the way it should work. You should be able to bring it to bear. That's what you should be able to do. All of us should be able to do something like that.

You see, am I progressing as time moves on? Thirdly, do I practice and apply what I've learned from God? This is important in churches like ours. I run into a group of people in churches just like ours that are what I would call Bible study junkies. They love studying the Bible.

They've got every Bible study they can. And they believe it makes them spiritual. And that's, you know what it makes them? Smart sinners. That's what it makes them. You're just a smart sinner. They actually believe that learning the Scripture is so I can argue with other people about it. That is so far from what God intends for you and me. You have to be able to apply what it is you learn. I'm amazed that I know guys who, I know guys, I won't use any names, who have incredible theological depth on big issues. And they treat their wife terrible. Just terrible. And it's like, how can you do this?

You can't even apply the most basic levels. My second year at the seminary, I was in a class called The Christian Home with Dr. Hendricks. And I'll be honest, going to Dallas was kind of, probably in a bad way, made me a little bit proudful.

You know, I'm going to Dallas. I have to cross the country and go to Dallas Seminary. And when I got saved in my early 20s, for the next four or five years in Pennsylvania, I was teaching Bible studies three days a week. I was preaching in churches.

I mean, I never had gone to church as a young person, anything like that. And everyone kept telling me, attaboys, boy, this is great. This is really good. You're really great. This is great. So I started thinking, yeah, they're probably right.

You know, this probably is great. So I go to Dallas Seminary and Dr. Hendricks says, this statement in class, Dr. Hendricks says, the kind of Christian you are in your home is the only kind of Christian you really are. What?

Wait, wait, what? Wait a minute. I'm a Dallas Seminary. I'm learning all the deep things of God. I preach and teach the Word.

No, the kind you are in your home. I find it unbelievably convicting. But he was right. You see, it's so easy to be a hypocrite.

You see, it's so easy. You take something, you utilize it, you get a reputation, and none of it's true. One of the saddest things I've seen in the last five years in America is several mega church pastors have all resigned from ministries. These are churches that they found that with 20,000 people in them. You know why they resigned? They're all hypocrites. They were all hypocrites. They were caught in all kinds of sexual activity. They shouldn't have. They treated people in a terrible way.

It just went on and on, the kinds of things that you find out they did, and they were forced to resign. But everybody would say, they're so great. Look, I've read their books. I've sat in there, and boy, this guy's so gifted. Yeah, he is. But he doesn't apply what he knows to himself. You see, so what's that say about even his audience? In America, Peter Pan Christians love to make celebrities of Christians. Be careful when you talk. Please don't say you're a follower of and then name a man.

That's not the answer. You're a follower of Jesus Christ, and so is he. But I hear it all the time. And by the way, a lot of churches are that way, and I'll have somebody who'll say something to you like in the lobby. Like, well, I've always wanted to come and then give me my name's church. I always wanted to come to that church, my name. Like, it's not my church. Come on.

It's the Lord's church. There's only one celebrity in the universe. I say this all the time. It's not you, and it's not me.

There's only one celebrity. That's what you buy into when you buy into Christianity. You see, but Peter Pan Christians are followers.

They just say, well, I love this. You see, this is fine. So I have to apply what I've learned.

The last one, he says this. Solid food is for the mature who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. They can discern good and evil. This is sad, but so many Christians can't discern. I've had Christians come and say, I spent so many years at this church. And I'll say, and now you're leaving? Yes.

And they'll give me a reason. I say, but let me go through five or six things that are blatantly clear about that particular group that are all heretical. I never knew that.

I never knew that. Well, we have to be discerning. Every letter Paul wrote in the New Testament, you know what the primary message is? Be discerning. That's what he says over, you need to be discerning. He said lies and false teachers are everywhere. You need to be discerning to know which are which. That's your job.

You have to have some discernment in your life. First letter he wrote was the Galatians. And what's he say to the Galatians? Oh, foolish Galatians, who's bewitched you? He's mad. The whole way through the letter, he's mad.

Why? They should know better, he says. Judaizers, Jewish Christians, followed Paul into Galatia. And when Paul left, they came in and said, look, Paul told you if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you're going to heaven.

That's not necessarily true. You do need to believe in Jesus, but you have to have your males circumcised. It says so in the Bible. Paul called that a different gospel. He said anyone who would say that to another person should be anathema, forever accursed. He said if angels came and told you that, I'd want them forever accursed. You have destroyed the grace of God by adding that one condition, the Galatians, that's why he said, foolish Galatians, who is bewitched you? Why didn't you buy into this? You see, you have to be discerning.

We have to know the difference between good and evil, between truth and lies. That's the way this whole thing works out for us. So, four questions this morning for you. Am I eating solid food? Am I progressing?

Am I progressing as time moves on in my life as a Christian? Do I practice and apply what I have learned? And by the way, if you're not sure, ask your spouse.

They'll usually give you a good idea. And lastly, do I exercise discernment when it comes to good and evil and truth and lies? You see, this is for all of us. The process never stops. We should be constantly moving forward. And the irony is if you're not constantly moving forward, you are moving backwards.

That's what happened to the Hebrew Christians. You may think, no, I'm just treading water. I'm right here. No, because when you stop moving forward, the current of the world, the flesh and the devil begins to take you in another direction.

And so you find yourself not maturing. So the question of the day for you, are you a Peter Pan Christian? Only you and God now. Let's pray. Father, this is difficult for us, because for people who are Peter Pan Christians, they never recognize it for themselves.

They're not even quite discerning enough to understand are they where they should be. But I pray all of us are challenged by these words from the Apostle Paul. I pray, Father, that each and every one of us will understand that we are to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ, as Peter said. I pray, Father, that all of us ask ourselves these four questions.

Because, Father, the only one we do that will we live lives that are not only glorifying you, but they'll be so good for us. We will have a joy that is not dependent on circumstances. We will have a peace when everybody else is in anxiety and fear. And we will have a hope, a surety of our future, because of what the word has taught us. I know it's your will for us, and I pray it's ours as well.

In Jesus' name, amen. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts, or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com, and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

At that website, you'll find a link to our website, oneplace.com, and you'll find a link to our website at oneplace.com. You can listen to Fellowship in the Word online. At that website, you will find not only today's broadcast, but also many of our previous audio programs as well. At Fellowship in the Word, we are thankful for those who financially support our ministry and make this broadcast possible. We ask all of our listeners to prayerfully consider how you might help this radio ministry continue its broadcast on this radio station by supporting us monthly or with just a one-time gift. Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word, 4600 Clearview Parkway, Metairie, Louisiana, 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our website, fbcnola.org.

That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for, or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online, or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt, thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word. We'll be right back.