Spiritual Maturity in Hebrews 5 and 6

Question 18.

What does spiritual maturity look like according to Hebrews 5 and 6? I love this passage because the writer to the Hebrews refuses to let spiritual maturity stay vague. He gives us a working definition, a sober warning, and a clear path forward, all in a few verses. If you have ever wondered whether you are actually growing as a Christian, or whether you have quietly stalled, this is the text that holds the mirror up. And the picture it paints is not about how much you know. It is about what you can do with what you know.

The short answer is that spiritual maturity, in Hebrews, is the trained ability to handle the deep things of God and to discern good from evil through constant practice. It is the difference between a baby who can only take milk and an adult who can chew solid food. Let me open the passage up and show you why that picture is so searching.

The rebuke that defines spiritual maturity

The writer is in the middle of teaching about Jesus as our great high priest when he stops short and says something almost frustrated. “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” (Hebrews 5:11-12). Feel the disappointment in that. By this time you ought to be teachers. They had been Christians long enough to be feeding others, and instead they still needed spoon-feeding themselves.

Then comes the definition I keep returning to. “Solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:14). There it is. Spiritual maturity is not measured by years on the church roll, nor by how many verses you can quote. It is measured by trained discernment, the seasoned ability to tell good from evil, truth from error, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to handle the weightier truths of God without choking on them.

I find that wonderfully clarifying and a little uncomfortable. It means a believer of two years can be more mature than one of forty, if the younger has been exercising their discernment while the older has been coasting. Spiritual maturity is about exercise, not age alone. The writer chooses the language of a trained athlete on purpose. Discernment is a muscle, and muscles grow only under load.

Milk and solid food

The contrast between milk and solid food runs right through this section, and it repays a careful look. Milk is for infants. It is the basic principles, the elementary truths, the gospel in its simplest form. There is nothing wrong with milk. We all started there, and the simplest truths of the faith never stop being precious. The problem the writer names is not that the Hebrews were drinking milk. It is that they were stuck on milk years after they should have moved on to solid food.

Picture a grown man who can still only manage a baby’s diet. You would be concerned, not because milk is bad, but because something has gone wrong with his development. That is the writer’s concern for these believers, and it is mine for many in our churches. Spiritual maturity means being able to take in the rich, demanding truths of Scripture, the things that are “hard to explain,” and to be nourished rather than overwhelmed by them. An immature believer flinches at hard doctrine. A mature one feasts on it.

So one honest test of your own spiritual maturity is this. When the preaching gets meaty, when the passage is difficult, when the truth challenges your comfort, do you lean in or do you tune out? The dull of hearing tune out. The maturing lean in, because they have developed an appetite for solid food and they know their growth depends on it.

Pressing on toward maturity

Chapter six opens with the way forward. “Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation” (Hebrews 6:1). Notice the writer does not say the foundation was wrong. He says stop relaying it. Stop pouring the same slab of concrete over and over and never building anything on it. Some Christians attend church for decades and never get past the foundation. Every sermon, for them, has to start from scratch, because they have refused to build upward into spiritual maturity.

What does it mean to go on to maturity in practice? It means moving from being always taught to beginning to teach. It means developing convictions you can defend from Scripture rather than borrowing opinions you cannot. It means facing the storms of life with a faith that has been tested and found solid. The mark of spiritual maturity is not that you have arrived, for none of us has, but that you are still moving, still building, still putting weight on the truths you profess.

I would add that this growth is not a solo project. The same Hebrews that calls us to maturity also warns us not to neglect meeting together. We mature in the company of the saints, under preaching, in service, through the sharpening of other believers. The Christian who tries to grow alone usually does not grow at all. If you want to press on, plant yourself deep in a healthy local church and stay there long enough to be stretched.

The warning passage and how to read it

I cannot walk through Hebrews 6 without touching the famous and frightening verses that follow, about those who “have once been enlightened” and then “fall away” (Hebrews 6:4-6). Anxious believers read these and fear they have lost everything. Let me handle this with care, because it belongs to the question of spiritual maturity more than people realise. The writer’s whole point is that staying on milk, refusing to grow, treating the faith carelessly, is a road that leads somewhere dangerous. The warning is the goad that drives sluggish believers toward maturity.

I do not read this passage as teaching that a truly born-again believer, sealed by the Spirit, can finally perish. The security of the believer rests on God’s faithfulness, not on our grip. But I take the warning with full seriousness as a real means God uses to keep His people pressing on. Notice how the writer himself softens the blow in the very next breath. “Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation” (Hebrews 6:9). The warning is severe precisely so that we will heed it and grow. A mature reader holds both the warning and the assurance without playing one against the other.

So if these verses trouble you, let that very trouble drive you forward rather than backward. The hardened do not fear falling away. Your concern is itself a sign of life, and the right response to it is not panic but pressing on toward spiritual maturity. You can read how I handle the broader question of assurance in my answers on the security of the believer across the site.

Why so few seem to reach it

If spiritual maturity is so plainly set before us, why do so many believers seem to stall? The writer gives the diagnosis in one phrase, “dull of hearing.” It is not that they could not grow. It is that they let their hearing go dull, their appetite go soft, their discernment go untrained. Maturity is lost not usually through a dramatic collapse but through slow neglect, a thousand small choices to coast rather than to climb.

The remedy, then, is constant practice. Discernment that distinguishes good from evil is trained, the text says, by use. So use it. Read the hard passages. Sit under solid teaching. Make decisions in line with what you know and watch your spiritual instincts sharpen. I have written more about why believers stall in my answer on why so many Christians remain spiritual infants after years of faith, and on how right belief feeds a changed life in my answer on why right belief leads to right behaviour.

Spiritual maturity is not the same as knowledge

I need to clear away a common confusion, because it traps a lot of sincere people. Many assume that spiritual maturity is the same thing as theological knowledge, that the believer who knows the most is automatically the most mature. The passage in Hebrews will not let us think that way. The mark of maturity it gives us is not the size of your knowledge but the training of your discernment, your tested ability to tell good from evil and to act on it. Knowledge is part of it, but knowledge alone can leave a person clever and immature at the same time.

I have met believers who could win any Bible quiz and yet fell apart at the first real trial, and I have met others with little formal learning whose spiritual maturity humbled me, because their discernment had been forged in years of faithful walking with God. The difference was not information. It was the seasoned wisdom that comes only from using truth in the furnace of real life. Solid food, the writer says, is for those whose powers have been trained by practice. Practice, not just study, is what turns knowledge into spiritual maturity.

This is a great relief to the believer who fears they will never be a scholar. You do not need a seminary degree to reach spiritual maturity. You need to take the truth you have, however simple, and to live by it under pressure, again and again, until your discernment is sharp and your faith is strong. The quiet saint who has trusted God through decades of hardship may possess a maturity that the most decorated theologian lacks. God measures growth by trained obedience, not by accumulated facts.

The signs of spiritual maturity in daily life

So what does spiritual maturity actually look like when you meet it walking around in shoes? It looks like stability, the kind Paul longed for when he prayed that believers would no longer be children tossed about by every wind of doctrine. The mature believer is not blown off course by the latest fashion or the loudest voice. They have weighed things against Scripture so often that they have settled convictions, and those convictions hold when the storms come. That settledness is one of the surest signs that real growth has happened.

It also looks like the ability to feed others. The writer’s complaint was that those who ought to be teachers still needed teaching. Spiritual maturity turns a receiver into a giver. The mature believer can open the Scriptures for a younger Christian, can answer a hard question with patience, can comfort the grieving with truth rather than platitudes. They have moved from always being fed to being able to feed, and that shift is one of the clearest evidences that a person has grown up in the faith.

And it looks like the fruit of the Spirit worked deep into the character. A mature believer is not only informed but transformed, marked by a patience, gentleness, and self-control that were not there at the beginning. Spiritual maturity shows up in how a person handles being wronged, how they speak when they are tired, how they hold their convictions without arrogance. It is the whole life slowly conformed to the likeness of Jesus, which is, after all, the goal of the entire process.

None of this arrives overnight, and that itself is part of the lesson. Spiritual maturity is the harvest of constant practice over time, the slow strengthening of muscles worked under load. If you are not as mature as you wish, the answer is not despair but patient, daily faithfulness. Keep feeding, keep exercising, keep yielding, and growth will come, as surely as a well-tended tree comes to fruit. The God who began the work is committed to finishing it.

Spiritual maturity is for ordinary believers

I do not want anyone to finish reading this and conclude that spiritual maturity belongs only to pastors and scholars. It does not. The writer to the Hebrews was addressing ordinary believers in an ordinary congregation, people with jobs and families and the same distractions you face. The call to grow up was for all of them, and it is for all of us. Maturity is not an elite achievement reserved for the few. It is the normal Christian destination, the place every believer is meant to be heading.

That means the means of growth are gloriously ordinary too. You do not need a mystical experience or a dramatic crisis. You need the Word taken in regularly, the truth obeyed under pressure, the fellowship of the saints, and time. The God who saved you is the God who will mature you, and He uses the plainest tools to do it. Spiritual maturity is built in the unremarkable faithfulness of ordinary days, which is wonderfully encouraging news for those of us who live very ordinary lives.

So measure yourself gently but honestly. None of us has arrived, and the most mature believers I know are the quickest to admit how far they have to go. But movement is everything. A believer who is still feeding, still being stretched, still yielding, is on the road to spiritual maturity even when progress feels slow. The one to worry about is not the slow grower but the settled stay-er, content to remain a child when God is calling them to grow up.

So, now what?

Hold the mirror of Hebrews up to your own life. Are you still on milk, or have you learned to chew? Are your powers of discernment being trained, or have they gone soft from disuse? If you have stalled, the writer’s word to you is not condemnation but invitation. Leave the elementary things behind, not by despising them, but by building on them, and go on to maturity.

So here is the question I would leave with you. If by now you ought to be teaching others, what is the one truth you could begin to dig into this week, deep enough that it costs you something and feeds you for years?

“But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”

Hebrews 5:14 (ESV)

For Further Study

For deeper work on this passage and the theme of growth, the commentaries and theological writings of Charles Ryrie and Millard Erickson give sober treatment of the warning passages and of sanctification. J. Dwight Pentecost wrote at length on Christian growth and the believer’s progress toward maturity, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s treatment of the spiritual life helps distinguish the carnal believer from the maturing one. Read them with Hebrews open, and let the text discipline the system.