Milk and Meat
In 1 Corinthians 3:2 Paul makes a distinction between milk and meat in reference to spiritual growth, saying that milk is the food for early growth, and implying that this should lead to solid food.
If you’ve been in churches for any length of time, you will probably heard teachings, or at least references to this text. I want to take some time to explore a different aspect of this comparison as it relates to the spiritual practices of gratitude and imitation.
Gratitude: The practice of appreciating the actions of others which have impacted us.
Imitation: The practice of becoming like those whom we admire or look up to.
I would like to suggest that gratitude is equivalent to milk and that imitation is equivalent to meat.
In a Spiritual context, we are flooded with encouragement to thank God for salvation, to thank Jesus for dying on the cross, to express our gratitude for having our sins forgiven and so on. Many, if not most of the worship songs focus on gratitude, largely because the church is sin-focused instead of grace-focused, but that is a topic for another day. There is nothing wrong with any of these responses, and I would say that they are absolutely essential if we are to advance in our spiritual growth because it isn’t until we come to understand the magnitude of God’s love and grace towards us that we can truly appreciate how much God is committed to us.
However, I don’t think we are meant to stay at this level because this is spiritual milk. Its focus is on what we have gained from God. Spiritual growth comes when we move from looking at ourselves to looking at others and imitating God.
Imitation has been referred to as the highest form of praise, because it acknowledges that someone else is so worthy of admiration that we want to shape our lives on that person. In this context, imitating God is our spiritual meat. To imitate God is to see the person of Jesus and recognise that his life is our best example of how God wants us to live, then deliberately choosing to live as Jesus lived. Making this choice moves our focus from how we have benefited by Jesus’ death and resurrection to how we can be like him. The first is milk, the second is meat.
Faith should be lived out in practice
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