Stuck On Milk

Paul writes theses words in 1 Corinthians,

    But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready,
   
(1 Corinthians 3:1-2 ESV)

Christians can be very immature people. We all know this to be true. We've all seen someone who claimed to be in Christ but seemed to be stuck on milk. Likewise we've all seen people who seem to be these spiritual giants. I believe there is a big problem in our churches when it comes to finding the latter. The Christians who really seem to get it aren't as common as we'd like to think.

What jumped out to me in these verses is that it kind of goes against our assumptions. Here's what I mean; we all seem to think that the mark of spiritual maturity is being able to know and understand the Scriptures. We think that spiritually mature people are the ones who know their Bibles backwards and forwards. We think the people who have all the answers must be the ones who are mature. While I think this is part of it, I don't think this is the main thing Paul is getting at.

What does Paul say an infant in Christ is? A new Christian? A person who doesn't know the Bible? Someone who doesn't understand deep theology? No, he says an infant in Christ is a person of the flesh. The mark of a spiritually immature person is that they are living for themselves, or the flesh, instead of living in God through the Spirit.

This is confirmed if we read on: 

    I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?
(1 Corinthians 3:2-4 ESV)

The reason they couldn't handle solid food was because they were still in the flesh. If you are a person who is living for yourself instead of for God, you are a spiritually immature, fleshy, Christian. We need to be people who not only know our Bibles and rejoice in God's Word, but also people who put off the old self and put on the new self. We need to be people who walk according to the Spirit not according to the flesh. We need to be people who grow up and stop living as children.

Let us be a people who no longer lives like the world but lives like Christ! Let us reach, "....mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love."   
(Ephesians 4:13b-16 ESV)