Full text of Zac Poonen’s teaching on ‘Hebrews’ (Part 3) which is part of the popular series called Through The Bible.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Zac Poonen – Bible Teacher
Hebrews, chapter 6. And we saw here that the burden of the writer of this letter is to lead Christians beyond the milk level to solid food level, beyond foundation to superstructure, beyond the nursery class to higher education. In our earthly life, none of us want to be babies, none of us want to stop our education with the nursery class, and none of us will want to have a building with only the foundation.
Why is it then that in the Christian life so many believers seem to be satisfied with just drinking milk, laying a foundation, and living in the nursery class all their life? And we saw in our last study what the nursery class is: Repentance, faith, water baptism, baptism in the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts and healing, the hope of the future of resurrection, and eternal judgment in heaven or hell.
Don’t you realize that most believers are occupied with only these things? And if you have these things and you go to some place and you preach the gospel, the gospel you preach will only be these things, how you can lay a foundation. And you bring people to birth, that means you’re bringing them to being born again, and then never let them grow. They are babies forever and ever and ever, and you have a church full of babies, whether they are fifty years old or two years old.
Retarded children: this is the problem with multitudes in Christendom today. Maybe one pastor who is mature, sometimes he’s also a baby. And this is not the Christianity in the New Testament. Let us press on to perfection. And if you yourself have never gone beyond the nursery class, how can you lead other people beyond the nursery class? If you’re still drinking milk, how can you lead other people to drink more than milk?
So this is the challenge that comes to us. There is a doctrine that determines how we lay a foundation, and there’s a doctrine that leads to perfection. And if we are only gripped with one, and we think that is everything, we will go everywhere producing babies. And we may think, well, the important thing is just to get them out of hell and take them to heaven. If that was the only important thing, there would never be an exhortation in the Bible like we read in Hebrews 6:1, saying, let us press on to perfection. It would have said, let us go and produce more babies.
No. It says you should be mature. Every believer should grow to maturity. Not just bring more and more people to the level of babyhood. And it’s because so many believers are babies that so many churches are full of quarrels and court cases and fightings and leaders fighting with each other, and the leaders fall into adultery and running after money, and so many things like this because they’re all babies. The leaders are babies. Babies will always fight.
When we grow up to maturity, we don’t fight. That’s one proof that we have grown up to maturity. We don’t covet positions of honor in the church. If you covet positions of honor in the church, you’re a baby. And you see the amount of babyhood there is among leadership in Christendom today, seeking empty honor from each other for silly little things. And we see the state of Christendom. It’s a pathetic testimony to the world.
And if you’re concerned about that, you will seek to press on to maturity yourself and seek to lead every convert to maturity. You’ll never be satisfied with laying a foundation. You’ll want to complete the structure. Some of you, if you go somewhere and you preach the gospel and a few people are gathered together and you want to build a meeting hall, how many of you will be happy with just laying the foundation of the meeting hall and say, okay, we’ve got a place to meet here. We bought a plot of land. We’ve laid a foundation. And there’s a floor here. It doesn’t matter if there’s no roof, no wall. We get wet in the rain and we sit in the sun, but we’ve got a floor. I’ve never seen anybody happy with that. Anywhere, anywhere.
But you know, many times I think of people who have only laid a foundation and then they teach a lot of things in those meetings. It’s like a man who hasn’t built a house. He’s only laid a foundation and he decides to move in. He brought his furniture and his beds and his sofas and dining table and kitchen equipment and everything. And he set it up in this house where there are no walls, no roof, nothing. It’s just foundation. This is the condition of a lot of churches.
There’s a lot of teaching and knowledge and this, that and the other, but all the knowledge is like the furniture in a house, which has only got a foundation. And there are a lot of problems. Of course, there’ll be a lot of problems. If you want to solve those problems, teach people. First of all, press on to perfection yourself and lead others to perfection, my brothers and sisters. That is the answer.
And that was the burden of the man who wrote this letter. Let us press on to perfection. And he goes on to speak about the danger of not pressing on to perfection.
See, if you lay this foundation like that for a long time, spiritually anyway, the foundation itself will be destroyed after a while. That’s the great danger. Now, earthly solid foundations, you may say they last for a long time, but spiritual foundations, if you don’t build a superstructure on it, if you don’t press on to perfection, even the foundation will be eroded. And after sometime they would have lost their salvation. They’d have lost their baptism in the Holy Spirit. They’d have lost their faith. They’d have lost their repentance. They’d have lost everything. There’s nothing left. That’s the danger.
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