The Learning, Learned and Learners

We've all heard preachers talk about the need to reprove false doctrine, and rightly so, for so the Bible teaches. For many this has become a mantra, a cause, a crusade. Yet, there comes a time to move on.  Basic teaching is a needed thing, yet many do not let even the simplest matters sink in and have to be taught over and over again.  Hebrews 5:11-14 speaks to this end - let's consider what it says.

The writer states, "About this we have much to say, and it is  hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food,  for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.  But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil."  

To always have to be taught something over and over again, can be the fault of two things.

1. The Fault of the Hearer - who is not listening or paying attention to what is said and therefore never learns in order to progress.  I have known many like this, both in school and in life. Always distracted or distracting, they never pay attention. In essence, they do not want to learn. Even Jesus encountered people like this, whom He would try to teach and get to grasp basic truth, yet they never "heard" what He was saying.  Another category in this, is one who thinks themselves too learned to be taught. This person cannot be taught because they "already know everything."  In either case, the fault is not the teacher's in this instance. 
2. The Fault of the Teacher - who is either too simple to progress to greater things, or one who is too complicated. I have known both. I have known many teachers through the years who could not teach anything but basic things because that was all that they studied.  Saying the same things, teaching the same things over and over again until like a recording the audience learns nothing. Not because there is no content, but because as the Hebrew writer puts it, there is no "meat" to encourage growth.   At the same time, I have known of and have been myself so complicated in my teaching, that the audience could not grasp what I was saying.  Like a teacher I once had in high school, whom her students labeled the "talking encyclopedia" because she taught so far above their heads that they could not understand what she taught. 

Many do not stop to consider Heb.6:1f that continues the thought of Heb.5.   "Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, instruction about washings,  the laying on of hands,  the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And this we will do  if God permits."  

It takes both in order for progress to occur and begs the following questions.  What kind of listener am I?  Am I so distracted that I cannot hear what is being taught?  Am I so distracting that others cannot learn, or that the teacher cannot teach?  With what intent do you go to be taught - to hear, build up and encourage, or to argue and find fault?  Do you make learning a joy? or do you make it hardship?

Heb.10:24 24  "And  let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works..."

Jim