Potty Training

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. Hebrews 5:12-13

When our kids were infants, it was normal for them to wear diapers, but as toddlers, they had to go through potty training. I don’t know about your kids, but my kids resisted this transition at first. They preferred life the way it was and had no interest in learning something new. What if we’d have allowed them to have their way, not making them learn and grow? It was my kid’s nature to resist progress but getting their way wouldn’t have been healthy or normal. They were toddlers. They weren’t responsible enough to be in charge.

We’ve all gone through this. As children, we all needed someone else to protect us from ourselves, making healthy decisions for us. At some point though, we grew and became responsible for our own decision making. Without someone else looking after us, making good decisions for us, many of us simply followed our own nature, arresting our growth and development.

This is what happens in drug use. When a teen begins using drugs before his brain is fully developed, he impairs the maturing process. So, I meet a lot of 35-year-olds who act like they’re still teenagers, which isn’t cute anymore. To never grow up is abnormal, grotesque, and self-destructive. A 14-year-old simply doesn’t have the skills to navigate life well.

The author of Hebrews chastised his audience with this same metaphor in today’s passage. In it, he said that at this point in their spiritual lives, they ought to be grown up, teaching others the gospel. Instead, they remained infants, living on milk, not solid food. In essence, they were still wearing diapers. What happened? Why didn’t they grow? Maybe some of them were alcoholics, but the passage isn’t specifically about addiction. Rather, their flaw was that they simply continued to pursue their way instead of God’s way. Like the toddler who just doesn’t want to be potty trained, they followed their own nature, instead of living for Christ.

A lot of us find ourselves here. Yes, we’ve believed in God, yet we follow ourselves. In doing so, we remain infants, never growing into who we’re made to be. If we desire to mature, living the life for which we’re created , we must daily abandon our nature and our old ways to follow God. We must grow up because adults in diapers simply aren’t cute anymore.