Milk Drinkers vs. Meat Eaters

There's a metric I used for years without ever questioning it. I'd meet a guy, find out he'd been a Christian for twenty years, and my brain would quietly file him under "mature." Meet someone two years in, file them under "still growing." I never said this out loud. I didn't have to. It was just the math running in the background.

I don't think that math is biblical anymore.

"I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?" (1 Cor 3:2-3)

Read that context closely. Paul isn't writing to brand new converts. The Corinthian church had been established for years by the time he wrote this. These were people who had heard real teaching, who had access to Apollos and Peter and Paul himself. And Paul still calls them infants. Not because of their tenure. Because of their jealousy and strife.

Time in the faith was never the metric. Paul just proved that with one sentence.

What "training" actually means

Hebrews gives us the other half of this.

"Solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil." (Heb 5:14)

The word there is aisthētērion, trained by constant practice. That's not a devotional word. That's an athlete's word, a craftsman's word. The Greek behind "trained" is the same family as gymnazo, the root we get "gymnasium" from. It means repeated exercise until a skill becomes reflex.

Here's what that rules out immediately. Maturity isn't what you've read. It isn't what you can quote. It isn't the number of podcasts you've listened to or the theology you can defend in an argument. Information was never the training Hebrews is describing. A guy can have the entire Bible memorized and still be an infant in the actual test Hebrews sets up, which is discernment trained by practice, not knowledge stored by exposure.

I've sat across from men who could out-argue me on doctrine and still couldn't forgive their dad. Knowledge and maturity aren't even in the same category. One is stored. The other is trained.

What a milk believer looks like

A milk believer isn't a new believer. That's the mistake I made for years. A milk believer is someone still needing to be fed, still reactive, still governed by whatever's easiest, whatever protects comfort, whatever avoids the harder road of actual love.

Paul's diagnostic for the Corinthians wasn't "how long have you been saved." It was jealousy and strife. In other words, can you be around someone getting more attention than you without your insides twisting. Can you disagree with someone without turning it into war. That's the milk test, and titles don't exempt you from it.

Plenty of men in church leadership are still on milk. A position doesn't graduate you. I've watched guys run entire ministries while still handling conflict like a nineteen year old, still needing to win every room, still unable to receive correction without getting defensive. The stage doesn't test maturity. Real relationship does.

What a meat eater looks like

If milk is reactive, meat is trained. A meat eater has been through enough reps, under enough pressure, that discernment has become reflex instead of a struggle.

But here's the piece I think we skip past too fast. Meat isn't about being right more often. It's about loving better. Paul's whole argument connects maturity to love, not to correctness. "If I have all knowledge... but do not have love, I am nothing" (1 Cor 13:2). You can be theologically airtight and still be milk, if love hasn't caught up to your information.

So here's the actual definition I'm working with now. Spiritual maturity is maturity in love, found in our union with Christ. How we love God. How we love ourselves when we fail. How we love the people right in front of us, especially the ones who don't reflect us back.

The community God actually used on me

When I first started walking with other men, God put me in a group that didn't look anything like me. Different personalities, different hobbies, different ways of processing a room. I remember wondering more than once if I was even in the right place. It would've been so much easier to find guys just like me and call that discipleship.

But that wasn't an accident. I think now it was the actual curriculum.

Whenever I got rattled by someone different than me, irritated by how they communicated, impatient with how they saw things, that irritation wasn't information about them. It was information about me. It was showing me exactly where my love was still shaky, still conditional, still only working on people who made it easy.

Thomas Merton wrote something that's been sitting with me since I found it: "Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character." If that's true, then every relationship that doesn't come naturally to me is just an invitation to find out how much of that true self has actually taken root, versus how much is still theory.

Six questions instead of one bad metric

If tenure isn't the test, here's what I'm actually asking myself now.

How quickly can I forgive? Not eventually. Quickly. Speed reveals whether love or resentment has the faster reflex.

Can I serve people who offer nothing back? Not clients. Not people who'll return the favor. People with nothing to give me.

How do I treat myself when I fail? This one exposed me the most. I used to think self-contempt was humility. It's not. It's just ego wearing a different costume, still obsessed with performance, just performing shame instead of success.

How's my worship in hard seasons? Not when things are working. When they're not.

Can I celebrate someone else's win while I'm stuck? This might be the sharpest test of all. Envy dressed as encouragement is easy to fake for about ten seconds.

How's my language about those who have hurt me? Do I pray and bless, or do I gossip and tear down? This one is quiet and it's brutal. It's easy to sound spiritual in a room and then poison the same person in private five minutes later. What comes out of my mouth when their name comes up is a more honest measure of my maturity than almost anything else on this list.

None of these show up on a resume. None of them care how long you've been a believer or what you can quote from memory. They only care about one thing, whether love has actually been trained into reflex, or whether it's still something you're managing from the outside.

I don't think I'm past milk yet. I think I'm somewhere in the middle of the gym, mid-rep, still building the muscle. But at least now I know what I'm actually training for.

Chris DeLeenheer writes The Mystical Entrepreneur, a newsletter on faith, business, and the interior life. Subscribe at 85leadership.com.