This transcript was generated by whisper.ai. This is day five together of our Look Through Hebrews chapter five. We're going to focus on verses 13 and 14 today, especially the last phrase in verse 14. This is what those verses say, "Anyone who lives on milk, still being an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. " We're going to focus today on what it means to distinguish good from evil. As we talk about that, we're talking about true morality. We're talking about knowing right from wrong. You look at the Bible and it has this awesome story to tell us about morality, this awesome story to tell us about right from wrong. I want to take a moment, ending with Hebrews, just to take a quick walk through the Bible in terms of good from evil, right from wrong. When we talk about right and wrong or good from evil, Genesis tells us why we know right and wrong. Proverbs tells us the value of knowing right from wrong. Romans tells us our responsibility to know right from wrong. And Hebrews tells us how we know right from wrong. Genesis tells us why we know right from wrong. Genesis 2, 16 and 17, "The Lord commanded the man here to eat from any tree of the garden. But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when you eat of it, you will surely die. " We all know the end of that story. They ate of it. And exactly what God said, what happened, did happen. It's the knowledge of good and evil. They ate of that tree. So what did they have? They had the knowledge of good and evil. Before they ate of that tree, all they knew was good. All they knew was God. We weren't meant to know evil. We weren't meant to know evil. The problem is, as human beings, if we know it, left to ourselves, we inevitably do it. Apart from what only Jesus can do, making us a new creation, we inevitably do it. We can't handle this knowledge. It's like letting a five-year-old get behind the wheel of a car. A disaster, a wreck is inevitable. We are not big enough. We will inevitably crash. And we have crashed again and again and again and again. The reason there is evil in this world is because we know evil, and so we do evil. So Genesis tells us where it started. But that is not the value we see throughout the Bible. Well, it's just the way we are. We'll just have to put up with ourselves. Beginning even in the Old Testament, we're told that God has made us to be different. Proverbs tells us the value of knowing right from wrong, both on the positive side and on the negative side. Proverbs 3. 13 to 14 says, "The man who knows right from wrong and has good judgment and common sense is happier than the man who is immensely rich. " Now, just off the top of your head, what do you think would bring more joy? Making good moral choices or winning $40 million in the lottery? Well, maybe you're tempted towards the $40 million answer. I think we all are. But you don't have to think long to realize there's lots of people who won a lot of money who are still very miserable because of the evil that's in their lives. There is joy in doing the right thing. This idea that the world has out there, being promoted by Satan, that goodness makes you boring, makes you stiff, makes you tiresome, nothing is further from the truth. This verse reminds us that goodness is the greatest source of joy in our lives, being who God made us to be. That's the positive side. Proverbs also talks about the other side. Proverbs 11. 11 says, "The good influence of godly citizens causes a city to prosper, but the moral decay of the wicked drives it downhill. " Or Proverbs 28. 2, when there's moral rot within a nation, its government topples easily, but with honest, sensible leaders, there is stability. This reminds us, these verses remind us, the value of knowing right from wrong isn't just for me, but for everyone around me. It affects a whole city. It affects a whole nation. I know it's really easy to say, and everybody says it today, my immorality, my personal immorality, it affects only me. So what right do you have to say anything about it? Well the truth of the matter is, the Bible says it affects everyone around us. Now I can't impose my morality on anybody else, but I can be concerned for everyone's morality, not only for them and how it's going to hurt them, but also for all of us and how it hurts all of us. This phrase, "Who do you think you are to judge me? " It ignores the fact that everything I do affects everyone around me. And it's silly, it's just silly not to think that, not to know that. You can see a million examples of that in our world. All of our actions affect all of us. Now sometimes I'd like to ignore that in my own life. I want to pretend that the things I do that seem to be in secret, the thoughts of hate or the thoughts of bitterness that I have in my heart that maybe nobody knows about, that's not going to affect my family. Well of course it does. It affects the way I talk to them that day, it affects the way that I act around them, my willingness to serve them. The evil that's in my heart affects all the people around me. We all have the freedom to choose, but in one sense there's no such thing as a free choice. Every choice that I make to do evil costs me and costs the people around me. Romans tells us the value of knowing right from wrong. Romans tells us our responsibility for knowing right from wrong. It's a book that's all about responsibility, beginning in chapter 1, 120 says, "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. " We're all responsible before God, this verse says. And Romans makes the argument again and again and again. It doesn't matter whether you're Jew or Gentile, where you come from, Romans says, we're all responsible. Whether you have the law or don't have the law, we're all responsible. We all know from the nature that we see around us, and we all know from the conscience that we have within us, that something's wrong when I do something wrong. Even if you've never seen a Bible or heard about Jesus, because God has made us, because God has made everything around us, God's put this moral compass inside each of us, in a sense, He's built in this warning light on all of our dashboards. And that warning light, when it goes off, tells me something's wrong with what I'm doing. In order to do evil, I have to in some way ignore that warning light. I read a while back about a lady whose airbag in her car just burst open in the driveway. She was just sitting in the driveway, the car wasn't even started, broke her nose. Somebody had disabled the warning light on the dashboard that would have told her that there was something wrong with that airbag, and we do that. We don't necessarily disable the warning light. What we do is we put black tape over it. We just don't want to see it. We put our hand over it. Let me just sort of ignore it. We look the other way. We've all done this. We've all done this, and we're all responsible before God for that. We're all responsible for the good and evil that's in our lives. We're all responsible, and we all struggle with that responsibility. Listen to what Paul said in Romans 7, 21. It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do right, I inevitably do what is wrong. Paul struggled with this responsibility of good and evil, and we struggle with right from wrong. Knowing right from wrong makes us responsible, but it's not enough. It's not enough to enable us to do right instead of wrong. Just knowing that it's the wrong thing to do doesn't keep me from doing it. In fact, Paul says it actually draws me into doing it. There's a magnetic power to the wrong thing. Paul knew right from wrong better than any of us ever will. He knew the law. They memorized the law, but Paul says knowing right from wrong sometimes makes him knowing what's wrong, makes him want to do what's wrong. So how do we escape this? Well, we come back to Hebrews now after this journey through the Bible. Hebrews tells us how. Hebrews and James are the two main books in the New Testament that have verses about this. We're going to focus on Hebrews here. Hebrews tells us how we learn right from wrong. In the Living Bible, Hebrews 5. 14, you'll never be able to eat solid spiritual food and understand the deeper things of God's Word until you become better Christians and learn right from wrong by practicing doing right. We learn obedience. How do I know right from wrong? By learning obedience, by becoming acquainted with God's principles, God's Word, by practicing it. How do we learn this? How do you learn to throw a football? By throwing it. How do you learn to drive? How do you learn to ski, to surf, to play a saxophone? Practice, practice, practice. How do you learn right from wrong? By reading a book on philosophy? By taking a college course on morality? Of course not. How do you learn right from wrong? By going to a debate on right from wrong? The only way to learn it is to practice it. You don't learn right from wrong by looking at the truth from every angle, making a lifetime study of it. You learn right from wrong by obeying Him, by doing His Word. And what we're talking about here is biblical ethics, right from wrong. And biblical ethics are prescriptive, not just descriptive. It's more than just a doctor saying, "Well, here's what's wrong with you. " It's a prescription written out on a piece of paper, something I can do. Prescribing what we do wrong, or even what we do in life, that's sociology. But prescribing what we can do right, that's morality. And Hebrews 5:14 says you practice it. You train yourself by constant use of solid food. What's solid food? It's God's Word. God's Word. You continually use God's Word, and that lets you know right from wrong. You don't have to get involved in the wrong to know what's right. They don't teach treasure agents how to recognize counterfeits by giving them a lot of counterfeit bills. They just give them real American bills, and they study those bills, and they study them to the extent that when a counterfeit comes along, they know it in a second. You don't have to know every evil in this world. You don't have to experience every evil in this world to understand how right God's righteousness is. You don't have to understand everything about every cult or every New Age religion out there. You just need to know the truth. And then when the falsehood comes along, when the lie comes along, you see there's something wrong there. You may not even be able to put your finger on it right away, but there is something wrong there. I do have to share one verse out of James with you. James 1. 21 says, "Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that's so prevalent, and humbly accept the Word planted into you, which can save you. " There's a word in that verse that really is the challenge point in my life, in your life. I need God's Word in my life to be good, to do good, but the word "humbly," that's the challenge. Isn't that the real issue for you, for me? It takes humility to let His Word become real in our lives. It takes humility to say, "I'm not going to do my idea. I'm going to go your way. I'm not going to follow my emotions. I'm going to look at your truth. " We need that kind of humility. Let's pray for it right now. Jesus, you're humble, and in your humility, you accepted God's Word for your life and followed Him. Give us the strength of your humility to hear your Word and to follow you. Even though it's sometimes three steps forward and two steps back, even though sometimes we struggle, let us keep practicing, keep doing, never give up, and in that, let us keep growing, closer and closer to you, more and more like you the rest of our lives. We've got a long way to grow, but Jesus, you're willing to stick with us through it all. So we trust in you right now. In your name, amen. Next week, Hebrews chapter 6. Hebrews chapter 6 has one of the greatest warnings and one of the greatest assurances in all of the book of Hebrews. See you next week.