The beverage most associated with the devil is that old demon rum, the high powered drink of sinners headed for hellfire with ample fuel to light their eternal doom. However, the devil's most successful drinks are served up in churches at his dairy bar, passed out the door to the rest of society by well-meaning souls who stop by for a snack on Sunday morning.

The first lessons taught to potential converts and baby Christians are sometimes referred to as the milk of the Word. They are simple lessons on the love of God for mankind and His willing sacrifice of His Son's life to pay to redeem lost humans back into His family. They are passed out to give these untutored souls their first sweet taste of the Word in an easy-to-swallow form, giving them spiritual nourishment to build them up to handle the meat of the word, that is, the more complex and difficult lessons about life in God's kingdom. If these lessons result in the salvation of the person in question and his subsequent strengthening in the faith, they have done their job in nourishing him through his spiritual babyhood and preparing him for further growth.

The devil, of course, doesn't want that to happen, and so he devises strategies to thwart such growth by altering the contents of the milk bottles. Perhaps he convinces the older children in the church preparing the lessons to water the milk down a little, to make it a little easier to swallow. When the babies don't thrive as well on such a diet, he suggests that the milk is still too strong and needs a bit more water. Eventually the milk is so thin that the babies are starving with bloated bellies full of unsatisfying teaching.

Perhaps a milkless pacifier of activities to substitute for the milk or sweeten it is the solution to that, then. Pretty soon you have a church full of babies sucking on pacifiers of entertainment programs with a trace of milky water offered occasionally, with the program directors frantically thinking up new ideas while starving people slip out the door to see if the world can offer them better sustenance for their unmet need for God.

Some churches are too stubborn about sticking to sound doctrine to let it be watered down or sweetened up that much. For them, the devil can substitute new doctrines derived from the intellectual if unenlightened studies of older children not quite firmly established in the Word, or worse yet, by a still unsaved person churched long enough to consider themselves well-instructed in the Word. Tweak it with a nice bit of pride about how they are furthering the work of the Church with their contribution to the better understanding of the Word, and you have a fine recipe for adding a little poison to the milk. Sprinkle it on the meat for the older children, and you have the making of a church split into a new denomination over doctrinal disputes, with more unsaved people slipping out both doors for the world.

You can be sure that the devil has his hosts waiting to steer them into more satisfying drinks of power, love of money, lust, pride, and the like that the world so readily offers. These heady brews have damned many a lost soul to hell without a trace of spiritual milk ever passing his lips. However, if the sips of watered down, sweetened up, poisoned spiritual milk coming out of the churches is offered as an alternative to the brew fed to the world, one can readily see how the church's true diet of the Word suffers so badly by comparison.

If the teaching in the Church on the Word is so badly weakened by well-meaning but ill-considered attempts to adapt the Word to modern life that the church members are wrongly taught and even leaving the church because of the famine, how then will people outside the church ever find out what the Word is really like? Worse yet, we are told that we must be tolerant of every wind of new doctrine that blows yet another bit of the solid foundation of the faith out the door. Our churches are becoming like the ruins of the ancient temples of the pagan cultures scattered around the world, slowly ground away by the relentless winds of time and the devil's schemes, their people and their culture dying away and leaving only these slowly vanishing stony ruins behind to mark their existence.

If we are to stop this spiritual erosion and begin freely giving the true spiritual milk to the world again, we must get back to the basics of Christianity still taught in a few solid churches before we lose them as well. The Bible is meant to be read for the enlightenment of the whole world, not studied by a few experts as one of the many religions of the world. We have the only God with solid proof that He not only exists, but that He controls the future as well as the present. Name one other god that came to live with us in the flesh, was willing to die to redeem mankind from the spiritual slavery to the devil through sin and death, rose again to eternal life, and predicted it all in exact detail centuries in advance. Even His enemies couldn't deny or hide that.

There is no need to help the devil run his deceptive dairy bar in the churches or spread these altered teachings to the world, and every need to spread the true milk of the Word as much as possible. We won't win converts by giving them water, sugar, pacifiers, or poison to satisfy their spiritual hunger. People are more likely to come to the Word when they see the example of growing Christians feeding on the milk and meat of the Word and successfully applying it to their lives inside and outside of the church.