Are You Still
Drinking Milk?

There is a passage in Hebrews that has challenged me for years.

The writer is not addressing unbelievers. He is speaking to people who know God: people who have been taught, who have had time to grow. By now, he tells them, they should be teaching others.

But they aren’t. They need someone to walk them back through the basics. They still need milk.

For a long time I heard that as a rebuke about knowledge, as if maturity simply meant learning more. More study. More understanding. More spiritual education.

But that is not where the writer goes.

“But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” Hebrews 5:14 NKJV

Those four words have reshaped how I think about growth.

Milk is not the enemy. Every one of us began there, receiving truth from someone else: learning Scripture, learning who God is, learning what Jesus has done. Those foundations will hold us for the rest of our lives.

But a foundation is meant to be built on, not poured again and again.

Sooner or later, the truth I have received has to become the truth I use.

Something Is Always Teaching Us

Whether we notice it or not, we are being formed every day.

We see. We hear. We remember. We feel. And almost instantly, we interpret.

Someone says something, and something shifts inside us. Circumstances change, and before we have had a moment to think, we already feel it: fear, disappointment, anger, insecurity, the reflex to protect ourselves.

We assume we are reacting to what is happening now. Often we are reacting to what our history has taught us to expect.

This is where intuition matters. Our senses carry information from the world around us into the world within us, but we never receive that information neutrally. We assign it meaning. What I believe shapes what I expect, and what I expect quietly shapes how I behave.

Which means my past can become my teacher.

None of this makes emotions the enemy. Jesus wept. The Psalms give voice to grief, anger, fear, loneliness, and disappointment. God is not asking us to stop feeling.

He is asking something deeper.

And more importantly:

When Worry Becomes Meditation

There is a moment in Mark 8 I keep coming back to.

Jesus and His disciples are crossing the lake. Someone realizes they forgot to bring bread. There is only one loaf in the boat, and the disciples begin reasoning among themselves: we have no bread.

It is such an ordinary problem. Not enough food, and a group of people trying to work out what to do about it.

Except for one detail that changes everything.

The same Jesus who, only a short time earlier, had fed four thousand people with seven loaves. The same Jesus who had fed five thousand with five. They had watched Him provide what could not be provided.

They had His provision behind them and His presence beside them. And still, the lack in front of them became the loudest thing in the boat.

And Jesus asked them:

“Why do you reason because you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive nor understand? Is your heart still hardened?” Mark 8:17 NKJV

That question reaches far deeper than bread.

I used to think of a hardened heart as one that deliberately resists God. But Jesus is speaking to His own disciples: men who followed Him, listened to Him, and watched Him perform miracles, and who still could not interpret what was right in front of them.

Their problem was not the missing bread. It was what the missing bread was teaching them to believe.

How often do we do the same?

A problem appears, and everything God has already shown us goes quiet. A diagnosis. A bill we cannot pay. A rejection. A closed door. A promise that has not arrived when we thought it would.

And without noticing, we begin to meditate. Not on Scripture. On the problem.

We turn it over and over. We imagine outcomes and calculate the odds. We rehearse conversations that have not happened yet. We brace ourselves for disappointment.

Being Hard on Yourself Can Harden Your Heart

I believe it often begins with a feeling of being alone. Not physically alone, but alone in a deeper way:

Once I believe that, the pressure starts to build.

At first it looks like responsibility. It can even look like maturity.

But underneath, my life is slowly being organized around self-reliance. And self-reliance is exhausting, because it never gives me permission not to know.

So I become hard on myself. I punish myself for mistakes. I replay what I should have done. Correction feels like proof that I failed. Delay feels like punishment. Regret starts telling me that yesterday has already decided tomorrow.

And quietly, something is happening to my heart.

Grace grows harder to receive when I have trained myself to believe everything depends on my performance. Faith grows harder when I have trained myself to trust only what I can understand. Forgiveness grows harder when pain has trained me to protect myself.

And all the while, Jesus may still be in the boat.

The disciples did not need to get better at providing bread.

The Holy Spirit Is My Teacher

I call this process Re-Formation: allowing the Holy Spirit to re-form what fear, pain, and history have formed in us. It goes far deeper than changing the way we think.

I am not pretending hard things are easy. I am not denying what I feel. I am not trying to manufacture a positive emotion and call it faith.

Jesus gave us something far better than positive thinking.

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” John 14:26 NKJV

I love that. The Holy Spirit is my Teacher.

So when an old emotion rises, I do not have to condemn myself for feeling it. I can get curious about what it has been teaching me, and invite a better Teacher into the moment.

Fear says, Protect yourself. The Holy Spirit can teach me love.

Disappointment says, Don’t expect anything anymore. The Holy Spirit can awaken desire again.

Weakness says, You don’t have what it takes. Grace says, My strength is made perfect in weakness.

My history says, This is how you always respond. The Holy Spirit says, Let Me teach you another way.

That is Re-Formation. And it rarely happens because I heard one powerful message. It happens by reason of use.

The old response shows up, and this time I practice something different. Then I practice again. And again. Until what once took everything I had becomes second nature. Until it becomes discernment.

My senses are being trained.

That is why I no longer have to despise the moment an old reaction appears. That moment may be an invitation to practice.

So instead of asking only, “Why am I feeling this again?” I can ask:

Pursue Love. Desire Spiritual Gifts.

Paul puts it this way:

“Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.” 1 Corinthians 14:1 NKJV

Notice that Paul refuses to make us choose. He does not say pursue love or desire gifts. He says both.

I do not need the gifts of the Holy Spirit to prove that I am spiritual. I need them because the people around me need something I cannot supply on my own.

Someone needs encouragement. Someone needs wisdom. Someone needs comfort, healing, hope. Someone needs to know that God sees them.

When fear has trained me to protect myself, I walk into every room asking, “What could happen to me?”

Love teaches me to walk into the same room with a different question:

That changes everything. I am no longer only receiving from my environment. I am learning to bring something into it.

And that takes practice. I can pray for someone and then listen. I can ask the Holy Spirit whom He wants to encourage. I can pay attention when a Scripture, a thought, a picture, or an impression comes to mind. I can test what I sense against Scripture, then share it humbly, without pressure or dramatic language.

And then I can notice what happened.

Maturity Cannot Be Practiced Only in Your Head

If I had to say it in two sentences:

Knowing that I should love someone is a beginning; practicing love when it costs me something is how that truth becomes part of my life.

Knowing that God provides is information, until lack gives me the chance to trust Him.

Knowing that God speaks is theology, until I start to listen.

Knowing that spiritual gifts exist is doctrine, until I desire them for someone else’s sake.

Knowing that His grace is sufficient is comforting, until weakness gives me the chance to lean on it.

This is why practice matters. Truth becomes something I use. Use trains my senses. Trained senses grow into discernment. Discernment changes how I respond. And changed responses, repeated over time, become maturity.

And maturity eventually produces something that can strengthen someone else.

Suddenly the opening of the passage makes sense:

“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God…” Hebrews 5:12 NKJV

A teacher is not simply someone with a microphone. A teacher is someone who has let truth become so practiced, so tested, and so woven into their life that what God has done in them can now strengthen someone else.

Maturity Changes the Direction of Influence

When I am immature, my surroundings do most of the shaping.

Someone rejects me, and rejection becomes my teacher.

Something frightens me, and fear becomes my teacher.

Something I hoped for doesn’t happen, and disappointment teaches me to expect less next time.

Someone hurts me, and pain decides how close anyone else will ever be allowed to come.

My environment forms me.

But maturity reverses the flow.

I can encounter fear without letting fear become my teacher. I can walk through disappointment without letting it become the prophet of my future. I can acknowledge what I see without letting it grow louder than what I know about Jesus. I can feel weak without believing weakness disqualifies me from being used by God.

So I walk into my environment differently. Instead of asking only what the room is doing to me, I begin asking what the Holy Spirit wants to do through me in that room.

I can bring peace where fear has been doing the talking. Kindness where pain once taught me to withdraw. Encouragement to someone who has run out of hope. Faith into a situation that disappointment has governed for far too long.

Maybe that is why Hebrews says that by now we ought to be teachers. God never intended His work in us to end with us.

What He teaches us, we learn to live. What we live, forms us. And what He forms in us becomes a gift to the world around us.