In the physical realm impeded growth may be due to some mishap or may be simply one of the results of the curse, having no direct bearing on the behavior of the parents, and certainly not of the child itself. In the spiritual realm this is not so. God has made abundant provision for every child of God to grow to spiritual manhood, and Paul rebukes the Corinthian believers for not having grown.
The trouble with the Corinthians was that they did not have much appetite for the Word; they did not have a passion to know and obey the truth, for the babe in Christ who βdesiresβ the pure milk of the Word will surely βgrow thereby.β This was the trouble with the Hebrew believers too, for when the Apostle would have gone further into the great subject of Christ as βan High Priest forever after the order of Melchisedec,β he was forced to write:
βOf whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull [Gr., nothros, slothful] of hearingβ (Heb. 5:11).
This is precisely the cause of the carnality among believers today. During World War II there were several occasions when parents came to the writer with letters from their sons in the armed forces, explaining that a code had been arranged by which βJohnnyβ could let them know to which theatre of war he had been sent, but that now it was difficult to understand his letter. Together we would sit down and study the letter in detail in an effort to make out exactly what it was that βJohnnyβ was trying to make his parents understand.
Such interest and concern over a letter from βJohnnyβ! And appropriately so, but do the majority of believers show such interest in the Word of God to them? They do not. They are satisfied with βthe simple things,β with knowing only a few passages which βwarm their hearts.β This is the root cause of the spiritual immaturity in the Church today. source
[…] that fills the hearts of loving parents is turned to bitter sorrow and disappointment if their babe fails to grow. The latter condition is as unspeakably sad and embarrassing as the former is joyous. Just so it is […]