GROWING SPIRITUALLY PART 2

Chapter 2                                        BABYHOOD

"As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby:"

-I Peter 2:2

Here in Peter the Bible speaks about Christians being "newborn babes." No one is born a full grown human naturally and physically. They are born babies, and then they grow up. Similarly no one is born a full grown Christian. You are born a spiritual babe, and then you grow up. There's a whole sermon in just that fact. We are going to be held accountable for the spiritual babies born into the family of God around our altars and in our churches.

I pastored nearly twelve years and really you don't expect too much out of babies because they can't do too much for themselves. Someone else though can do something for them.

Too many times someone is saved on Sunday night and if they make a mistake before Wednes­day night everyone in the church knows it, and is already fussing about it. They expect him to be living, by Wednesday night or the next Sunday, just as good a Christian life as they do when it took them years to get where they are.

A number of years ago I held a two-week meet­ing for a particular minister. We were scheduled to go longer but I cut it off.

Crowds were coming. The auditorium would seat 800 and it was comfortably full every night. People were responding. We weren't really having evangelistic services — I was doing a lot of teach­ing and praying for the sick — yet on Saturday night when I gave the invitation first for people to be saved, thirty-three adults came for salvation.

They stood across the front as I prayed with them and led them in a prayer. Then I sent them back to the prayer room where others would pray with them while I went on ministering to the sick.

The thing that so impressed me about this ser­vice was that of the thirty-three who came for salvation so many were young married couples who looked to be between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-two. I learned later not one of the group had ever been a Christian; not one was a member of any church. I asked the pastor after the service about these young people.

He said, "None of the thirty-three were back­sliders. They were all sinners who came to be saved."

That was unusual. I asked him if he knew any of them.

He said, "I don't know a one of them. They've never been to my church before."

I asked him, "Did you get their names and ad­dresses ?"

He said, "Oh brother, I just figure if they got anything they'll be back. You don't have to worry about them."

I said, "I'm closing the meeting tomorrow night."

People are born babies. They need to be seen about. They had never been to that church before. They had never heard any Full Gospel preaching before. They needed to be followed up and prayed with, talked to, and dealt with. They were newborn babies.

After a leading healing evangelist held a meet­ing in a certain city a pastor who had cooperated with it said to me, "I'm never going to cooperate with another one of those city-wide meetings. Never another one."

"Why?" I asked.

"I didn't get a person out of it," he said. "Not a one. Not a member. It didn't do me a bit of good in the world."

"It didn't?"

"No."

I asked him, "Did you get cards on any of the folks who came to the altar?"

"Oh yes," he said, "they gave me some cards. But none of them ever showed up."

I was talking to another pastor in the same town about the same meeting and he said, "We got twenty-nine new members out of that meeting. I wish he would come back."

"How did you get them?" I asked. "How did they happen to come to your church?"

He said, "Oh they didn't know anything about our church. I got the cards on some of them and visited them. I didn't just encourage them to come to our church, but I insisted they get in some good Full Gospel church and go on with God. And some of them came to ours."

We are responsible for babies. Babies don't know. Babies can't do for themselves. A newborn baby in the natural can't do much. He doesn't walk yet. He doesn't dress himself. In fact, he doesn't do anything for himself. About all he does is eat. And about all he eats is milk. Spiritually there are newborn babes. And if they get the sin­cere milk of the Word, they will grow thereby.

Innocence

The first thing that attracts you to a baby is its innocence. People say, "You sweet little innocent thing." No one thinks of a baby as having a past. It doesn't have one.

Do you know something? If you are a newborn babe in Christ, you don't have any past. You may have been as mean as the devil. You may have been the worst wretch that evet walked. But no matter how you may have lived, when you were born-again you became a new man in Christ Jesus and you don't have any past. God looks at you as an innocent babe.

II CORINTHIANS 5:17 17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature (creation): old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

Even though innocence belongs to the baby­hood stage of Christianity, it is one characteristic we should never outgrow. We should maintain this state of innocence for the simple reason that if we don't, we will fall under the condemnation of the devil and be defeated in spiritual life.

A new convert is simple, full of faith, ready and willing to learn. We should always maintain that teachable spirit. Yet sometimes when we grow older we sort of come to the place where we have a "know-it-all" attitude; a "You-can't-tell-me-anything" attitude. Those people no one can help, including God Himself.

A group of men gathered in back of the au­ditorium after service one night in one of the churches I pastored. As I walked up to shake hands with them one of the deacons said, "Brother Hagin, what do you think about..." and he men­tioned a certain Bible subject. I found out later he did that purposely to bring me into their discus­sion.

"Well, I don't know just where your discussion is," I said, "and whether I could fit in or not."

The man the deacon really wanted to help spoke up immediately, "Well, I'll tell you. You or anyone else can't tell me a thing in the world about that Bible subject. I know all there is to be known on it. I know all about it."

I said, "If you do, you've got me beat. And if you do, you have every other preacher beat that I've ever seen or known of, or any other person."

He said, "Well, I know all about it. No one can tell me a thing about it."

But to tell the truth, that fellow was the biggest baby in the entire church. He didn't know all about it at all.

Keep an open spirit and a teachable spirit, as well as an innocent spirit, toward God and man.

Our two children are grown now with families of their own. In observing our babies and grand-babies I know this — a baby seems to think every­thing he can get his hands on is intended for his mouth.

A newborn puts his hands in his mouth. As he grows a little older and learns to crawl across the floor if he finds a screw it goes in his mouth, if he finds a spoon it goes in his mouth, if he finds a spider it goes in his mouth.

Babies are ignorant concerning these things. They don't know what should go in their mouths and what shouldn't. And babies have died as a result of not knowing that. They have gotten hold of something poisonous and it killed them.

In one case I know of, a 14 month old baby, crawling across the floor, picked up some spoiled food left there perhaps by an older child. Before they could get the baby to a doctor, it died. An au­topsy revealed the poisonous food. The parents went back home and found some of the food on the floor of a room which was seldom used. That little one didn't know he shouldn't eat it. He was ignorant concerning the effect it would have.

What am I getting to? The same thing is true spiritually speaking. We need to be careful what goes into our spiritual mouths. We need to be as careful about what we read as we are about what we eat physically. Christians many times think nothing at all of gulping down some poisonous doctrine which will poison life spiritually, rob them of their spirituality, and ruin their testimony if they accept it.

A number of years ago a denominational minister was filled with the Holy Spirit and had a marvelous experience with God. I'll guarantee you this much, I know of no greater soul winner in any church than that man. He was outstanding. He would get people saved when no one else could. It seemed to me you could stand up the twelve best preachers in America and let all of them preach and give an altar call — then he could take the same crowd, preach to them, and get more souls saved than any of the others after they'd had first shot at it. That was his ministry; an evangelistic type ministry. But he got to read­ing after some false stuff, finally accepted some false doctrine, and got off on it. If he has won a soul in more than twenty years I don't know it and no one else does either.

I know of some born-again, Spirit-filled people who were soul winners, getting people saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. But they got taken up with certain doctrines. Some of them told me, "God is doing a different thing nowadays." No. God's not doing a different thing nowadays. They're just off their rockers. He's still concerned about saving people. They just left the fundamen­tal truths of the doctrine of the Word of God and went off on something that doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

Some things are actually poisonous in them­selves. And some things it doesn't make a whole lot of difference how you believe on them — they are simply not essential to salvation and it wouldn't make any difference whether you believed it, or you didn't believe it.

But too many times Christian people will feed on everything in the world except the right thing, and will become poisoned. Then they lead disci­ples off after themselves. If the Spirit of God is in it, He is concerned about there being unity. Did you notice Ephesians 4:13 says, "Till we all come in the unity of the faith"? That which will divide Christians is not of the Spirit of God — it's of the devil. The Spirit of Love never divides.

I went into a Christian home once and saw some books I knew to be poisonous lying on a living room table. They were religious books, but they were poisonous. (We need not only be careful about secular books, but we need to be careful about reading religious books.) I purposely worked the conversation around to these books. I picked one up and said something about it.

This  person   was   a  born-again,   Spirit-filled Christian but they said "Oh that is the most mar­velous book."

"Is it?" I said.

"Yes."

In the early days of my Christian experience I had happened to get hold of some of these books and had detected immediately the poison in them. So I just turned to certain pages and began to read certain things aloud.

"Well now, Brother Hagin, they give chapter and verse in there. I looked some of them up and those verses are in the Bible."

I said, "Certainly. If they didn't give some verses — though they may take them out of their setting — and a little Bible, folks wouldn't read it. If you were going to poison a dog he wouldn't eat just the poison. You have to put the poison on a good piece of meat."

Do you see what I'm talking about? You have to put the poison on a good piece of meat to get a dog to come. The devil will use some good scrip­ture to get you to eat it, but he'll put a little poison on it. Be careful no matter who you read after. Don't read everything you can get your hands on. Unless you are a fully mature Christian and able to rightly divide it, it would be best not to read such things.

Years ago I held a meeting for a Full Gospel minister, a very well educated man, a doctor of divinity. Up to that time I had never seen a larger personal library than his. There's no telling how many hundreds of volumes lined the walls from ceiling to floor. Being a bookworm myself I was interested in looking it over. I read some of his books while I was there in three weeks of meet­ings.

As we talked one day he said, "Brother Hagin, 1*11 be perfectly honest with you. There are some things I've read that I wish I'd never read. They bother me. They hinder me yet, though I don't read them anymore..." And he mentioned some of these books. They were religious books. But he said, "I just wish I had never read them. It hinders my faith today. It hinders me in believing God today.

It would have been better for him never to have built that into his inner consciousness. But he had.

When I start reading something that takes faith out of me instead of putting faith in me, I have enough sense to lay it down right then. Be careful what you feed upon. There is a saying used in the area of man's natural diet, "You are what you eat." The same thing is true spiritually, "You are what you read."

Irritability

Babies  are   easily  spoiled.   And   when   they become spoiled they become irritable. It's mighty easy to spoil them to a light so that you have to keep a light on. It's mighty easy to spoil them to being handled and held. They are babies.

But the Bible says something about babies growing up. David said, "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child" (Psalm 131:2). The Bible says concerning Isaac, "And the child grew, and was weaned: and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned" (Genesis 21:8).

That ought to be a great day — that day when Christians grow enough to get off the bottle. But you know, it isn't. It ought to be a feast day; in­stead it's a cry day. I know, I pastored nearly twelve years. It's no wonder to me at all that we're not doing more in some of our churches than we are. If we do get a newborn babe in we don't have a bottle for it. Every bottle is in use. And the older babies are not going to give up their bottles. Every bed in the spiritual nursery is taken. And the older babies don't want to get up and give up their beds.

In the last church I pastored there were two ladies who lived next door to each other. Bless their hearts. They had been saved I don't know how long, baptized with the Holy Spirit and speaking with tongues. But that doesn't make you a full grown Christian. They were the biggest babies in the world. You'd have to run after them, and run after them, and run after them. They wanted you to come and pet them. They would miss church Sunday for you to come over on Mon­day and pet them.

So I just quit. When one of the deacons said something to me about it I said, "Brother, if you want to go over and visit them, you go. But I'm never going over there again. The longest day I live, or the longest day I pastor this church, I will never set foot inside their houses again. I'm tired of wasting my time with them. They are babies who want to stay babies. There are other people who can be helped. There are new people to be visited. And others are getting saved who can be taught." You couldn't have taught those old babies any­thing. So I quit visiting them and never set foot inside their houses the eighteen months I con­tinued to pastor that church. But do you know what? When they saw I wasn't coming again I believe they were more faithful to church than they'd ever been. We ought to grow enough spiritually so that in­stead of someone's having to come and visit us, and pump us up, and prop us up, and pray with us, and feed us, we are able to be out helping others ourselves. When weaning time comes we ought to thank God for it. Actually, if a child is weaned properly, when weaning time comes it will turn its face from the bottle. If it isn't, you have a cry on your hands. If

GROWING UP, SPIRITUALLY

you can just keep people on the milk, they will grow. Peter said, "Desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby."

I have actually had pastors say to me, in trying to tell me I was giving their congregation a little too much, "Now Brother Hagin, I know my con­gregation should be better than they are, but you have to be careful. All they can take is a little milk. All I ever feed them is a little milk."

I said, "No, you haven't even given them milk. You've been pastor here thirty years. If they had been getting milk they would have grown. Peter said that we would grow thereby."

They didn't grow; so they weren't even getting milk. They were just getting bluejohn. Bluejohn is milk with all the cream taken out.

Babies are easily frustrated, easily distracted, easily hurt. The Lord wants to bring us to the place where we're not so easily frustrated. He wants to bring us to the place where we're not so easily distracted. He wants to bring us to the place where we're not so easily hurt.