into you the testimony of God
with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing
among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was
with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. And my speech
and my message were not implausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration
of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest
in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Yet among the
mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age
or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed
before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age
understood this, for if they had, they would have not crucified
the Lord of glory. But as it is written, what no
eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love Him. these things God
has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches
everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's
thought except the spirit of that person which is in him?
So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit
of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the
things freely given to us by God. And we impart this in words
not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting
spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person
does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are
foolish to him, and he is not able to understand them because
they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all
things, but is himself to be judged by no one, for who has
understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? but we
have the mind of Christ. Hebrews chapter 5 verse 11. About this we have much to say,
and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone
to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of
God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives
on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is
a child. But solid food is for the mature,
for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant
practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore, let us
leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity,
not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works
and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings,
the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.
And this we will do if God permits. Well, good morning, church. As Brother James said, my voice
is a little limited today. Cut the grass yesterday, which
is new for me. We have moved into a house with
a yard since I was up here last. There's a certain type of evangelical
Protestant who would say that I don't have enough faith. If
I had enough faith that God would preserve my voice for the preaching. It's funny, you ever see a faith
healer that wore glasses? Think about it. We're going to be in first Corinthians
2 and Hebrews 5 and 6 today. Thanks again James you finished
the first page of my outline for me. First thing I want us to recognize
is that our gospel is simple right. Paul there in Hebrews 5 and 6
talks about milk versus solid food, and we're going to get
into that, but we need to establish first that this gospel that we
profess is simple, it is pure, it is sufficient. Scripture has
given us everything we need to understand it. It doesn't take
profound intellect to tease it out of the Word. takes just the mind of a child.
In Romans 1, Paul declares that the gospel is the power of God
for salvation. We boldly profess that salvation
is of the Lord, it is in his hands, and it rests solely upon
his mercy and his grace. Salvation through this gospel
doesn't depend on any of our works, anything that God has
foreseen in us. God didn't look into the future
to see how you would respond. We also know that this salvation
is not a deep mystery. All right, salvation was a mystery
too. the people of Israel, wasn't
it? Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, they looked upon Christ through
shadows. They saw the works of the temple, and through that, in faith, they
looked upon Christ. They were still saved on account
of the righteous and infallible promises fulfilled by the righteous
and infallible Christ. So Christ is no mystery to us. He's fully revealed to us in
the testimony of the apostles, in the writings of Paul. Here in verse 2 of 1 Corinthians,
I turned to Ephesians out of habit. I decided to know nothing among
you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. That's it, that's
the power of God for salvation. That's the good news. Jesus Christ,
his person, his work, his obedience, his death, his resurrection,
the power of God for salvation. It's not a mystery to us. And so Paul approaches the Corinthians
without any lofty speech and wisdom. I can't tell you what that meant
for Paul. If he was speaking to Corinth,
lofty speech and wisdom probably would have involved the profound
teachings of the philosophers. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates. For us, it means that I don't
have to come to you with profound knowledge of historical theology. My evangelism need not call upon
Calvin Bavinck, or Burkoff, or any of these other people
who have written about Christ. I don't have to explain to you
the significant distinctions between God's attributes, the
ones that are communicable and the ones that are incommunicable,
right? These are lofty speech. Doesn't
mean they're bad, doesn't mean they're wrong, doesn't mean they
don't have their place. It means that when we talk about
encouraging the brothers with the simple gospel, it means that
we don't need them. We have seen this in our own
assembly before, where persons have demanded certain language, certain
vocabulary. This is a lofty speech. Well-meaning people demand certain
working theological vocabulary before they will affirm your
profession. This type of attitude is wickedness,
and it goes against the proclamation of Scripture. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians
2 a divinely appointed sufficiency of preaching Christ and Christ
crucified. We need only affirm that Jesus
Christ, God the Son, took on human flesh, perfectly obeyed
his Father's law, and then suffered the wrath of his Father for the
sins of his people. By the power of the Spirit of
God, he was raised from the dead. In glory, he ascended to the
heavens, where he now awaits the day when at his father's
command, he will return to judge the nations. If that's not good enough for
you, then Christ is not good enough for you. Paul approaches the Corinthians
with fear and trembling. humility, and simplicity. His speech and his message are
not articulate or enticing. He did not appeal to the intellects
of the philosophers. The ESV says plausible. I did not approach you with plausible
words. And in some sense, that's an
OK translation, right? the gospel is presented to us
in plain English and we can understand it, but still there's some sense
in which it doesn't make sense, right? The gospel of Christ doesn't
appeal to our sense of justice, right? At least if we understand
that We are sinners in that we bring nothing to the table. We
understand that we deserve God's justice, that there's no reason
for God to have loved us except that he chose to. Instead, Paul characterizes his
teaching saying, in the demonstration of the spirit and of power so
that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in
the power of God. Christ and Christ crucified,
the power of God for salvation. He declares the simple gospel
to the people of Corinth. And when it comes to evangelism,
this is all we really need, right? We don't bring anything to the
table except for the words of God. When we bring in our own schemes,
our own ideas, we can perpetrate a false gospel. There was one apologist he was
talking in the context of. churches that are very attractive
in terms of what they have to offer as far as extracurriculars. And the saying that he likes
to use is, what you win them with is what you win them to. It's this idea that whatever
thing it is that attracts people to your church, will be their expectation. And
if that goes away, so will that. It's my hope that each of you
has been attracted to this assembly because of this simple gospel. And if this simple gospel ever
leaves this pulpit, I hope that you would leave too. About this we have much to say.
It's hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing.
We're in Hebrews 5 now. By this time you ought to be
teachers. You need someone to teach you again the basic principles
of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food.
For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness
since he is a child. Solid food is for the mature.
for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant
practice to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 6, 1. Therefore, let us leave the elementary
doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again
a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward
God and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands,
the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. And this
we will do if God permits. Now, I don't want to rebuke you. I'm using these passages together
to expose the reality of what happens when we neglect the study
of the word and the assembly of the saints, whatever that
looks like. For some, it looks like sleeping
in on Sunday mornings. For some, it looks like thinking,
I'm gonna read the word today, and then you just never get around
to it. For some, it looks like reading so much theology and
believing that that is the same thing. That's where I've been before. Hebrews 5.11 says about this,
and so whenever you see something like that, this ambiguous, you
know, we're talking about this. You need to read up a little
bit to see where we've been. Verse seven is the this. Paul writes, in the days of his
flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries
and tears to him who was able to save him from death. And he
was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned
obedience through what he suffered, and being made perfect, he became
the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him. Being designated
by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. About this,
Paul is writing about Christ and Christ crucified. So we need to recognize the warning
that Paul gives here in Hebrews. Yes, Scripture has warnings to
us. Even in the New Testament, we
are given warnings about certain behaviors, and wisdom will obey
them. It is hard to explain, since
you have become dull of hearing. Obviously the problem is not
the gospel, right? The problem with dull ears is
not the gospel, right? And the problem is not that the
gospel is hard to understand, hard to grasp, right? When we find ourselves disconnected
from Christ, disconnected from the word, disconnected from the
assembly, it's because we have become dull of hearing. We do not receive the teaching
of scripture because our ears have become dull to the words
of Christ. And this can happen to anyone.
It happens to me with alarming regularity. It happens to James. It happens
to each one of you. No one here is special or no
one here is spiritually elite and we're not immune to this. Our ears become dull and I would
point to two reasons. One is pride. When we become
proud of where we've been, proud of our knowledge, how much we
know, our ears become dull. I think most of you are parents. Have you ever told your child
something and they say, I know. And they didn't do what you told
them to do because they weren't listening because they knew.
It's the same thing. I preach Christ and Christ crucified.
And in your pride, you say, I know this stuff. And you stop listening. Again, I'm not rebuking you. I'm observing this pattern in
my own life. I imagine you are as well. We all go through this. In my spiritual infancy, it was
very easy for me to get caught up in the technical, theological,
thought, profoundly intellectual teaching. It's really easy and it's really
fun to get into deep questions like, what if aliens came to
earth? Do they need the gospel? We could
talk for hours about that. We could come up with all the
different ways in which Paul would evangelize the Klingons. But there's a trap there. When
we start talking about conjectural theology, that's what I'm going
to call it, conjectural theology, how would scripture tell us to
behave in situations that are 100% not real, never going to
happen? We start from a place with a
simple and truthful and sufficient gospel, and then we wander into
hypothetical scenarios, deep philosophical questions that
no biblical author ever attempted to address. And because no biblical author
attempted to address these hypotheticals, we have to sort of fill in the
gaps with our best guess of how Paul would have told Captain
Picard to plan his voyage. We fill in these gaps with our
own creativity. We provide our own conjectures
about how the Bible would answer these questions and then this
is where it goes horribly wrong. We take that system of conjectural
theology and we allow it to bleed backwards into our understanding
of scripture. When this happens, it's far more
subtle than waking up one day and realizing, man, my theology
of aliens is really affecting how I relate to my brothers and
sisters in the church. It's far more subtle than that. The other root cause for these
dull ears is forsaking the assembly. We've talked a lot about how
our maturity in Christ is directly correlated with your fellowship
in the assembly of the saints. When we gather together under
the teaching of the word, it forces us to engage with one
another on the platform of the gospel. It forces us to see the simplicity
of the faith that our brothers and sisters have. For though by this time you ought
to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic
principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid
food. For everyone who lives on milk
is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. All right, I still drink milk,
a lot of milk. But I also eat solid food, right? Each of us from time to time
needs to be reminded of the simple and pure gospel, don't we? Just because we are mature and
have gone on to maturity, which we're gonna talk about what that
means, there's still a place for us
to consume the simple and pure gospel, to be reminded of it. But Paul here is specifically
addressing those people who have been in the faith for a long
time and ought to have a reasonably deep understanding of scripture
who still live off of spiritual milk. And I read this passage. Everyone who lives on milk is
unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child, but solid
food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment
trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. I've come to this passage many,
many times in my life, and I've been looking for a justification
for my interest in theology here. I've been looking for being able
to defend a fascination with theological philosophy, and I've
tried so many times to beat it out of this text. But Paul didn't have the works of
John Calvin, right? Paul didn't have Turretin's Elements
of Elenctic Theology. If you don't know who Turretin
is, God bless you. Don't worry about it. Paul didn't
have these things. Paul didn't have theological
meditations on systematic theology from the history of the church. What history? What church? There's no way Paul's talking
about this here. Solid food is for the mature.
Paul can't be talking about this stuff because it didn't exist.
What is he talking about? New Christians, spiritual infants
need milk, the pure and simple gospel. But solid food is for
the mature. What comes after believing the
gospel? Living with the church in the
assembly. The solid food that is for the
mature. is reflections on the scriptural commands about how
we ought to relate to one another. The solid food that is firm and
the mature is how we ought to love our brothers and sisters
in the assembly. Paul's not talking about systematic
theology, because there's no such thing. Closest thing to
it was Romans. So maybe Paul's talking about,
read Romans, guys. All right, you believe the gospel, now go
understand Romans. And so he explains this in chapter
six. In case you still had hope of
finding systematic theology in 514, therefore let us leave the
elementary doctrine of Christ and go into maturity. not laying again a foundation
of repentance from dead works and a faith toward God and of
instruction about washings, laying out of hands the resurrection
of the dead and eternal judgment. And we will do this if God permits. Right, and there's a place for
these things, right? This is not to say that systematic
theology is bad or wrong or useless. There's a place for it. It has particular application
in certain refutations of certain heresies in their thought structure. But even then, the purpose it
should serve is as an encouragement to the saints, right? I can tell you about all the
different heresies that are sort of variations on a theme of something
called theistic mutualism, that there's some sort of give and
take between us and God. This is the gospel of evangelical
cults, the gospel of Arminianism, that there's this idea that God
is waiting, just waiting for you to make the next move. or this idea that God does not
know everything. There are all variations on this
same theme, that God is not the omnipotent sovereign of all things. And when we examine scripture
and how scripture relates to these false heresies, we come
up with something called divine simplicity, right? Scripture doesn't have those
words. But if we were to systematize all the ways in which scripture
refutes these heresies, slap a label on it, call it divine
simplicity. Cool. We did theology, right? There's a place for the study
of theology. And if you want to talk about what that looks
like, let's talk about it, right? But that conversation that we
have, if we want to talk about how we should study systematic
theology together, the conversation's not going to look like, all right,
which theologian do you think we should read together? Do you
think we should start with Calvin, move on to Burkhoff? No. This conversation is going to
look like, all right, here, let's figure out how we can situate
reading some theology in the context of your reading of Scripture. Let's talk about how well or how poorly so-and-so
reads particular text. There's a place for theology,
and it is as a supplement to, as an exercise in applying what
you have read from the Bible. Back in 1 Corinthians 2, Paul
says, the natural person does not accept the things of the
Spirit of God, for they are folly to him. He's not able to understand them
because they are spiritually discerned. And this gets back
to the heart of the issue with the simplicity in evangelism.
It doesn't matter how convincing you are. That's the big beef
that I have with apologetic evangelism. So many people view apologetics as though they are convincing
the unbeliever to follow Christ. Paul says that you can't do that.
You're not good enough. You're not smart enough. And the gospel isn't convincing
enough because it doesn't make sense. Romans 3, no one does good, no
one understands, no one seeks for God. The natural man cannot understand
spiritual truth and there is only one solution to spiritual
blindness, that he be born again by the power of the Spirit and
have his eyes opened to the truth of God. And there is only one thing which
God has promised as the appointed means of doing that. God has ordained that the faith
of his people be found in the gospel of Christ heard through
the teaching of the word. It's the unique means that God
uses to bring about the regeneration of his people. Nothing else can open your eyes. So in this, we see the futility
of adding our own wisdom to the gospel. If the gospel alone is the only
thing that can open the eyes of the blind, how can we make
that even more effective? What do we have to offer? we offer Christ and Christ crucified. Just how Paul approached the
Corinthians. The natural person does not accept
the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him. This
gospel is foolish. For who has understood the mind
of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of
Christ. So this gospel, this pure, simple,
easy to understand gospel, it's only our starting point. And from here we go on to understand
Paul's instructions about how to love one another, how to live
in the assembly. If that means you want to get
together and talk about theology, we can do that. But theological vocabulary is not
maturity. I have had an enormous working
understanding of systematic theology for a long time, but I've been
somewhat spiritually mature for a much shorter time. And even saying that, we need
to be careful. We need to stand before you and say, I am spiritually
mature, right? I might be right now, and I might
not be tomorrow. There have been plenty of times
this week when I haven't been, right? This maturity of faith is not
a status that we attain and then hang onto as a matter of, you
know, I've got it, now I'm good, right? It ebbs and flows, it
comes and goes. And sometimes we must be reminded.
of this pure and simple gospel that we have been given. Christ and Christ crucified. If anyone tells you that your
evangelism must be anything apart from simply teaching Christ and
Christ crucified in love, don't listen to them. I said something important there,
right? Teaching Christ and Christ crucified in love, right? That's that moving on to maturity
part I was talking about. Because it's entirely possible
to, you know, say things that are biblically accurate, theologically
correct, without love, right? My voice is about spent, so I'm
gonna keep it short today. Maybe we'll do an extra long
Lord's table. We'll go ahead and pray, and
then we'll take the table together. God, we thank you for this simple
gospel, that through your spirit, we
can understand it despite its foolishness. And that, in your time, we will
go on to maturity, to solid food. And that, again, by your spirit,
we will