Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You Growing Up? | Historical Books | Joshua 5:10-15

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Are you growing up in your faith? What happens after the spiritual highs? Are you able to trust God in the ordinary? In today's episode, Patrick shares how Joshua 5:10-15 encourages us to keep moving on towards solid food. Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Joshua 5:10-15

Welcome to 10 minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. For whatever reason, we always found transitioning our kids to solid food a bit challenging, especially our first. Calling my daughter a picky eater is honestly a bit generous. For a while, her diet consisted almost entirely of yogurt and peanut butter sandwiches, because that's all she would eat. So going from a liquid diet to solid food, well, That took us some time because she didn't like much of anything. It turns out getting off of milk and getting on to solid food is a pretty hard challenge for a little kid, especially a picky one.

And all this makes me think of one of the most bizarre trends I've ever heard of. Apparently, there's a black market on Craigslist or websites like that of women who are selling their milk to bodybuilders. Apparently, there's a lot of bodybuilders that believe that the proteins and nutrition found in breast milk, improves their performance. Now, when I heard that this was happening, I had two reactions. First, I was honestly kind of grossed out. But second, because I'm weird, I thought about Hebrews 512, and then I laughed. This is Hebrews 512, written to early Christians in the early church. By this time, you ought to be teachers, but you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food. Anyone who lives on milk, being,

still an infant is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. As it turns out, we all develop spiritually through stages of maturity, just like normal babies becoming adults. And as the author of Hebrews points out, we're all a little bit like my daughter. We find the transition to solid food kind of hard. We're kind of like those bodybuilders. We're grown adults sipping on spiritual milk. What about you? Are you still stuck on the elementary truths? of the faith? Is God's word as unknown to you today as it was a year ago? The truth is that as I look over the last five years, especially the years spent during COVID, I know a lot of Christians are struggling. And when I say a lot, I really mean myself. The changes that the pandemic brought in

our lives, changes in child care and lifestyle, work, and everything else, well, it broke a lot of our best habits and a lot of people haven't recovered from that. For myself, I found Bible reading and prayer harder to do than they were before the pandemic. And so all of a sudden, I find myself asking, am I going back to a liquid diet? I don't want to. You don't want to, but have we continued to develop our taste? Not just move forward through the middle school truths of God, but get to the high school truths of God, to the college truths and beyond. How do we go even from eating solid food like a kindergartner, you know, chicken nuggets and mac and cheese to eating like an adult who considers nutrition, fat, and all those things,

and can appreciate a fine kianti. Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, who before his death was the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, he described Israel's journey through the wilderness as a period of spiritual infancy. This is most symbolized by their miraculous diet. Instead of having to be responsible for finding, killing, or growing their own food, for 40 years, they simply walked outside and collected the manna that God left them every morning. We aren't sure what manna was, but it seemed to have been some sort of seed-like or grainy substance that the Israelites ate. Most importantly, though, it was a daily gift of God, like a mother feeding her baby on demand. And this began right after the first Passover when the Israelites escaped from Egypt. But in Joshua 5, there is a new generation

of Israelites, and they're entering into the promised land. And in this chapter, they're celebrate their first Passover. And we read, that is the point when the manna stopped, when Israel grew up. Let's read. On the evening of the 14th day of the month, while camped in Gilgall on the plains of Jericho, the Israelites celebrated the Passover. The day after the Passover, that very day, they ate some of the produce of the land, unleavened bread and roasted grain. The manna stopped the day after they ate this food from the land. There was no longer a few. any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate the produce of Canaan. The point was not that Israel no longer needed God, or that God now had nothing to do with their food. He still controls the

ecosystem after all. But it does seem apparent that God wants his people not to rely merely on his miracles, but on the ordinary mechanisms of creation. It makes me think of cheat codes on video games. You know, when I was a kid, I had this thing called a Game Shark that let me cheat on video games, And it would give you things like unlimited life, unlimited money, whatever you wanted. But I always knew that as long as I was cheating, I wasn't really playing the game. In the same way, God made this world the right way. He wants us to play within the bounds of the world that he's given us. And he's willing to help us through in a special way.

And while he's willing to help us through in a special way for a time, give us the cheat codes, if you will, well, that time doesn't last forever. I think about the spiritual high that new followers of Jesus experience. It might last six months or maybe even a year, but then life goes back to normal. And they realized they were kind of living on cheek coats during that time. They begin to ask questions like, where's the mountaintop experience? Why don't I feel the same euphoria? And when I'm talking to people in this situation, I always say to them, that was God's way of helping you as an infant.

But he wants you to live in ordinary life. with ordinary highs and ordinary lows, learning to trust him, not just on the mountain tops, but also in the valleys. The way God did this with Israel was by taking them through literal mountains and valleys while feeding them on manor. They turned to idols and they rebelled against God. They even asked Moses to take them back to Egypt because they didn't want to go to the promised land.

You see, as spiritual infants, it was ugly. They were like a baby screaming. for no apparent reason or a toddler hitting a sibling because they just like seeing the hurt reaction to the person that they hit. God disciplined them. God fed them. God carried them. Like a good parent, he trained his child for solid food, for real life. And finally, the day for real life came. That's my prayer for you today. That this podcast wouldn't be your only avenue for growth. that you'd eventually as a result of listening to this or being in church that you'd start spending more time in God's word on your own, that you'd read good books that challenge you to think deeply, that you'd allow Jesus to deconstruct every identity you cling to, except for your identity in him, that we'd all say, Jesus, take me off the liquid diet, I want to go beyond the elementary truths of God.

And as it turns out, life's a lot better. When you learn to enjoy a good state, steak and a nice glass of wine, not just milk. Walking with Jesus in the ordinary really is the most extraordinary way to live.