August 27

Undeveloped or mature—which?

“Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection” (Heb. 6:1).
“For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God” (Heb. 5:12).

There are two classes of babes—they who are just born, and they who have never grown. The former are ever sources of exquisite pleasure; the latter are the cause of much pain. A parent feels that a fountain of purest satisfaction is opened when God in tender love puts a babe into her arms. How fondly she watches that helpless one, and how gratefully she thanks God for that choice gift. But she does not wish that child ever to remain a babe, but to grow in physical stature, and mental culture, and spiritual completeness, and is only satisfied when these results are secured.


We ought to be equally earnest to grow in the divine life. An overgrown babe—that is, one who has the stature of a man, but the spirit and tastes of a babe; one who has the age of a man, but the manners and the weakness of a babe—is, whether found in the Church or out of it, a most uninteresting spectacle. (When the stunting of the child is physical, our feelings are of unmixed sympathy, but the spiritual baby is to be deplored because his lack of development could have been avoided.)
How many Christians there are who have never grown for twenty years. They are no more loving, no more earnest, no more devoted; they have no more control over themselves; they have no more influence over the world, no more power with God than they had twenty years ago. They would take their child from the school in which he never got beyond his alphabet. They would fling upon the rubbish heap the plant that only just kept alive and never grew into symmetry and beauty of form. They would laugh at that society which just started into existence, but never accomplished the work for which it was called into being.
—The King’s Highway.

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