Hebrews- Part 5- " Stunted" Series

Hebrews

Encouragement for a life of Faith

Part 5

“stunted”

Today we will continue our study of Hebrews

With sermon number 5

So far we have seen our writer

Proclaim Jesus as the answer

He is the real deal

Then we learned how the writer of this great book warned us about the dangers of drifting away from God’s word and how we can avoid that

The next week I titled the sermon pure hearts

We prayerfully took a hard internal look at our lives and our hearts and began making changes in the needed areas

We followed that sermon last week with

Sharper than a two edged sword

And that sermon is cowboy terms was a real mashing on

The writer showed us how God’s word is true and correct

He showed us there are no gray areas and he showed us how when applied properly to our lives

The written word of God will expose our true selves

Prayerfully as Our writer continues applying pressure

We will continue in our spiritual growth

That is the topic of today’s sermon

Spiritual growth

Personal spiritual growth

I have shared with you as a congregation many times and with some of you individually some of my experiences in Zambia Africa

I can tell you again that

The things we did

The people we were blessed to interact with

Changed my life forever

One of the jobs we went to Zambia to do was to evaluate the health of the people in the area especially the children

I can tell you this was a humbling experience

I love to talk about my time at Chogwe village

And will be glad to give you many more detail to the point of maybe even boring you

Any of you who have talked to me about this time of my life know I get pretty excited about it

But for today

I need to tell you

In my time in Africa I saw amazing thing and disturbing things

And

One of the most disturbing things I saw in that land so far from here was lack of good nutrition

Part of our assessment on the kids was to do height /weight measurements as well as an overall physical assessment

The one common problem that I saw over and over was that the kids were malnourished

I was assessing kids that I thought were 3 or 4 years old that when questioned turned out to be 6 or 7 or even 8

We were in a farming area, so food was available

That made it more surprising that so many of these children were undernourished or even malnourished

That is until I learned more about their diets

A staple in the diet of Zambians is a food called Shema

It is made or ground corn called mealy meal

What it is- is basically boiled corn meal

No salt – no pepper, no seasonings

They boil corn meal in a pot to the consistency of raw bread dough

You pull out a piece from the pot

Roll it into a ball

And then eat it with every meal

Actually forks and spoons are so rare in the area we were in that they kind of soaped their food with Shema eating with their fingers

The fingers part had a lot to do with their health as well

Water was a luxury there and cleanness was never seemed to be a priority

I could go on for days about that

But back to the Shema

Shema is supposed to be an add on to a meal

Like a piece of cornbread with your beans or a biscuit with your gravy

It was never intended to be a staple

The problem was the Kids liked it so much that that is all they wanted to eat

The other problem was that Shema has very little nutritional value

So while having full bellies

The kids were starving to death due to lack of protein and other needed nutrients

This brings us to today’s teaching from Hebrews

Please open your bibles to Hebrews 5

Let me read for you Hebrews 5:12-14

You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word.[a] You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. 13 For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. 14 Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.

6:1-3

So let us stop going over the basic teachings about Christ again and again. Let us go on instead and become mature in our understanding. Surely we don’t need to start again with the fundamental importance of repenting from evil deeds[a] and placing our faith in God. 2 You don’t need further instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3 And so, God willing, we will move forward to further understanding.