GodSprings - 21 July, 2016

Spiritual Malnutrition? Drink The Milk

Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk. 1 Peter 2:2 (ESV)

 

What makes people work hard? Is it just for a personal satisfaction of achieving something or is it for something else. Survey reports reveal that people have a desire to work hard to gain three basic necessities in life: Roti, Kapada Aur Makan (Bread, Clothes and House). The passion and the intensity with which an individual works for these is seldom seen in the arena of spirituality.

Peter chooses a simple analogy, a simple analogy of a baby. Peter wants to bring out the passion. It’s about a longing, a driving, compelling craving, something that is strong and intense.

Peter is commanding us to have that consuming kind of craving. It's obvious that we all crave things. We understand passion. We understand longing. We understand what it is to be thirsty. Perhaps we don't understand it as much as those who lived in an agricultural society out in the middle of a field being baked in the middle of the midday sun, but we understand what it is to be thirsty. We understand, perhaps, what it is to be hungry.

Peter says that with all your longings, this is one you need to have - an intense, passionate, overwhelming, and insatiable craving for the word. And he defines it as the pure milk of the word; pure, a word meaning uncontaminated. It's a pure substance in the midst of a world of corruptible, contaminated, polluted things. And he uses the marvelous, beautiful analogy and imagery of a little baby who longs for the uncorrupted, unpolluted, unadulterated milk of its mother's breast. This is the purity of that milk - uncontaminated, untouched by anything, coming straight, as it were, from the mother into the mouth of the child, unpolluted by the world around. And what milk is this that Peter calls us to that is analogous to that, that nourishes that infant? It is the milk of the word. The milk of the word.

One thing is true about a baby. You don't have to work real hard on a baby to get them to feed. That is the longing and the desire and the craving that God has built into them. It's a very natural and a very normal thing. That baby cries out to be fed.

That’s the basic exhortation here - desire the pure milk of the word with the same singularity and the same compulsion that a baby desires milk. God marvelously has built into babies loud, crying mechanisms. They're weak everywhere but in the voice. I think that's a God-given gift. Because in the business of life, a mother could be doing this or that, and her baby left somewhere else might seriously be harmed physically if they were not properly nourished. And so God has a built in mechanism so that the mother can't escape.

Let us ask ourselves a simple question "Do we have that craving? Do we have a real desire for the word?" Has our Bible study, evangelism and mission today become be a duty, a chore or some kind of legalistic thing that we do out of fear or intimidation? Is the need to know the word and do the word really flowing out of this longing or craving in the heart?