CHURCH:
APATHY; CURRENT CONDITIONS: SHALLOWNESS; SPIRITUAL GROWTH

There are Christians who grow up and have no relish for anything spiritually advanced. They’re preoccupied with their first lessons. The average church is a school with only one grade and that is the first one. These Christians never expect to get beyond that and they don’t want to hear a man very long who wants to take them beyond that. If their pastor insists they do their homework and get ready for the next grade, they begin to pray that the Lord will call “our dear brother” somewhere else. The more they hate him the more they bear down on the words “our dear brother.” All he’s trying to do is prepare them for another grade, but that church is dedicated to the first grade, and the first grade is where it’s going to remain.

Paul said some of them went up into the second grade and gave it up, and said, “It’s too hard here,” and they went back to the first.

“How long have you been in the first grade, Junior?”

“Twelve years.”

Well, how long have you been listening to the same truth and hearing the same doctrine? You must be born again and there’s a judgment and so on. While that is true and we must not leave that, we must use that to advance. But we don’t do it. Whole generations of Christians grow up in the first grade. They learn to read their Bible in the light of this. To them, nothing in the Bible ever means anything beyond this elementary stage. They have Bible conferences dedicated to the first grade in the Christian life, Bible schools dedicated to the continuance of the first grade. For my part, I feel that I want a little ambition, a little spiritual ambition. Paul said, “Forgetting what is behind … I press on toward the goal” (Philippians 3:13b-14a). There was a man not satisfied with the first grade.

Philippians 3:13–14; Hebrews 5:11–12

Success and the Christian, 4, 5.