Pressing On To Maturity – Hebrews 6:1-8

It is a necessary duty of the dispensers of the gospel to excite their hearers, by all pressing considerations, to make a progress in the knowledge of the truth . . . Because their hearers do greatly need the exercise of it. They are apt to be slothful and weary; many begin to run well but are quickly ready to faint. There is no reckoning up the occasions hereof, they are so many and various. Weariness of the flesh; self-conceit of having attained what is sufficient, perhaps more than others; curiosity and itching ears, in attending unto novelties; dislike of that holiness and fruitfulness of life which an increase of knowledge openly tends unto; misspending on the one hand, or covetousness of time for the occasions of life on the other; any prevailing corruption of mind or affections; the difficulty that is in coming to the knowledge of the truth in a due manner, making the sluggard cry, “There is a lion in the streets;” with other things innumerable, are ready and able to retard, hinder, and discourage men in their progress. And if there be none to excite, warn, and admonish them; to discover the variety of the pretenses whereby men in this matter deceive themselves; to lay open the snares and dangers which hereby they cast themselves into; to mind them of the excellency of the things of the gospel and the knowledge of them, which are proposed before them; it cannot be but that by these means their spiritual condition will be prejudiced, if not their souls ruined. – John Owen