From Seeker-Friendly to Solid Food

You Are Not Alone

Many sincere Christians have spent years in churches where the sermons were encouraging, the music was engaging, and the atmosphere was warm — but where something always felt thin. Where the questions you brought to the text were never quite answered. Where the sermon ended before it got to the hard part.

If you have felt this way, you are not wrong to feel it. The writer of Hebrews felt it too. His readers had been Christians long enough to be teaching others, but they were still on milk. He was not content to let them stay there, and he loved them too much to pretend the condition was normal.

What “Solid Food” Is Not

Solid food is not harshness. It is not an absence of warmth or a disdain for those who are young in the faith. The Reformed tradition — Calvin, Rutherford, the Scottish divines — is one of the most tender and pastoral bodies of literature in the history of the church. Rutherford’s Letters weep with compassion for the weak.

Solid food is not joylessness. The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” The mature Christian is not the dour one but the one who has learned to enjoy God most fully — because he knows God most truly.

Solid food is not complexity for its own sake. The deep things of God are deep because they are rich, not because they are abstruse. A well-preached sermon on the righteousness of Christ feeds both the scholar and the child, but it does not pretend that the righteousness of Christ is simple.

What to Expect

If you walk through the door of a faithful Reformed Presbyterian congregation for the first time, you may find that it is different from what you have known. The worship will be ordered, not spontaneous. The singing may be from the Psalms alone. There will be no screens, no bands, no performances. There will be a sermon that takes the text seriously and expects you to take it seriously too.

You will also find people who have thought carefully about why they worship as they do, who are glad to talk about it, and who will welcome you with Rutherford-like tenderness. The session of elders exists not to keep you out but to watch over your soul and nourish it.

Give it time. Let your senses be exercised. You may find that what seemed thin was your palate, not the food.