A baby elephant is born with a trunk it doesn’t yet know how to use. For months, it nurses directly while that trunk hangs almost uselessly, sometimes even getting stepped on as it wobbles along behind its mother. Slowly, under her patient watch, it learns to coil that trunk around grass, to draw water toward its own mouth, to strip bark from a branch.
If a calf never made that transition, it would starve the moment its mother was no longer there to feed it directly. The trunk was always its own. Learning to use it was the whole point of growing up.
A great many believers never quite make that same transition with their own faith.
Fed Well, But Never Weaned
The writer of Hebrews confronts a congregation with exactly this diagnosis, and it isn’t gentle:
“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” — Hebrews 5:12-14, NKJV
By this time you ought to be teachers. The problem wasn’t a shortage of good preaching reaching them. It was that years of good preaching had produced people still unable to feed themselves — still unpracticed at discerning good from evil on their own.
The Bereans Who Checked Their Own Preacher’s Work
Paul himself — an apostle, with about as much spiritual authority as anyone in the early church — arrives in Berea, and Luke records the congregation’s response with clear approval:
“These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” — Acts 17:11, NKJV
Even Paul’s teaching was checked against Scripture by ordinary believers doing their own reading, rather than received on his authority alone. Luke calls this more fair-minded, not disrespectful. A congregation that never checks anything for itself has skipped a step the Bereans were commended for taking.
When “My Pastor Says” Replaces “The Bible Says”
Ask a good number of believers what they believe about suffering, prosperity, or marriage, and what comes back isn’t a verse — it’s a catchphrase. “No sweet without sweat.” “It’s your season.” Neat and quotable, and just as often unaccompanied by a single reference to where Scripture actually says any of it. Ask why they believe what they believe about a hard situation, and the honest answer is often “my pastor says” — a borrowed conclusion resting on someone else’s authority, rather than the Word that authority was meant to be pointing them toward.
This matters because while salvation is entirely a matter of grace, received not earned (Ephesians 2:8-9), the shape of daily life is governed by something else: how well a believer understands God’s Word for themselves. Grace saves you. Understanding teaches you how to then live. Peter’s final instruction to the church wasn’t “trust your leaders more.” It was this:
“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever. Amen.” — 2 Peter 3:18, NKJV
A command given to every believer personally — not a job description handed exclusively to pulpits.
The Real Danger Underneath All of This
A believer who never learns to divide the word for themselves isn’t just missing out on maturity — they’re left genuinely exposed. Paul names the danger directly:
“That we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.” — Ephesians 4:14, NKJV
Tossed to and fro. Carried about. Not someone standing firm and getting things slightly wrong — someone with no anchor at all, blown wherever the next confident voice pushes them. And that “deceitful plotting” is rarely random. It’s often fueled by ordinary human ambition, vengefulness, envy, and jealousy dressed up as spiritual concern — a determined effort to damage reputation, real intent to scatter what looked united, sowing seeds of distrust and division under cover of righteousness or doctrine. Many a congregation, strong on the surface, has been quietly fragmented this way, precisely because too many of its members were spiritually immature enough to miss what Scripture actually warns us to watch for in each other. Discernment isn’t a luxury for the unusually scholarly. It’s what stands between a believer and being carried off by whichever voice, however cunning its motive, sounds most convincing next.
What This Isn’t Saying
This isn’t an argument against pastors or the real, God-ordained gift of those who equip the saints:
“And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” — Ephesians 4:11-12, NKJV
The danger isn’t having a pastor who feeds you well. It’s never learning to feed yourself because someone else’s clever sentence always arrives before your own study does. A congregation is meant to be equipped by its teachers, not permanently dependent on them.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I know a man who attended the same church faithfully for over fifteen years, always taking careful notes, genuinely growing under a gifted pastor. When that pastor retired and the church went through a weaker season of teaching, this man was startled to discover how little he actually knew how to do with Scripture on his own — he’d absorbed a great deal secondhand, but had rarely wrestled with a difficult passage without someone else’s conclusions already provided. It took a humbling season before he began the slow work of studying Scripture for himself — work he later admitted he should have started in his first year as a believer, not his sixteenth.
There’s a proverb worth carrying into this: the hunter who only eats what others kill will starve the day he hunts alone.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
- If my pastor moved away tomorrow, could I still study Scripture confidently on my own?
- Do I check what I’m taught against Scripture myself, the way the Bereans checked even Paul?
- If asked why I believe what I believe about a hard situation, would my answer be a verse, or a borrowed catchphrase?
- Have I ever mistaken someone’s confident, divisive words for spiritual insight, without testing the motive behind them?
- What’s one passage I could study for myself this week, without waiting for someone else to explain it first?
Final Word
The mother elephant’s patience with her calf was never meant to last forever, and her love for it was never measured by how long she kept feeding it directly. It was measured by whether the calf learned to use the trunk that had been its own the whole time.
A faithful pastor wants exactly the same outcome for you — not a congregation forever dependent on his voice, but believers who grow, as Peter instructed, in the grace and knowledge of Christ for themselves, able to stand in the Kingdom of God on their own two feet, having learned to feed themselves, and to recognise a wind of doctrine when it blows, long before the season comes when no one else is there to do either for them.
