Turn to Hebrews 13 and we're
going to look at verse 5 again. Now, I have just enough knowledge
of grammar and Greek and English and slang and hillbilly and everything
else to be dangerously ignorant and wrong. So, that is one thing
that I don't spend a lot of time on, teaching Greek as it relates
to the text because I can work it out and the English is sufficient.
We can just say what it means and it means what it says, etc.
But tonight in verse 5 of Hebrews 13, we're going to review this
and revisit this because There is some stuff here in the original
language that just cannot be communicated as emphatically
as the Greek language has done it. So let's look at Hebrews
13 verse 5. Paul says, keep your life free
from the love of money and be content with what you have for
he has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. So we can
confidently say, the Lord is my helper. I will not fear. What
can man do to me? All right. Now, some people might
say, okay, this particular approach that you're taking tonight, James,
is a little aggravating for me. So if it's something you could
care less about, great, but if not, maybe it will tickle your
ears a little bit in a good way to interest you. in some sense. But most of all,
I want to expressly exposit the weight of this verse five. When it says, be content with
what you have, for he said, and here's the quote, I will never
leave you nor forsake you. Now we've approached it. We've
approached the idea of the sufficiency and the power of God, etc. dealt
with the reality that we can trust in the finished work of
Jesus Christ. But in the text of scripture there are 94 times
where this particular grammatical construction is and this is one
of them. And so tonight I really want
to express this in a way that can help us see the weight of
it. If you go down to verse 8, we see this. Jesus Christ is
the same yesterday, today, and forever. And so as we pick up
from this next week, we will jump right into that verse, verse
8, and move forward. Now the promise that we have
here is that the Lord will never leave us. The Lord will never
forsake us. Thus we can have confidence.
We can have confidence in our work as human beings, life, relationships,
hardships, good times, bad times, happy times, sad times. We can
have confidence to know that the immovable God, Jesus Christ
our Lord, who does not change and is the same forever, yesterday,
today, and forever. is the one who has promised he
will never leave us nor forsake us." Now this is a quote as you
see there and there are several quotes, there are several places
in scripture we see the psalmist writing those same words, we
see the prophet Isaiah, we see it written in Deuteronomy and
in Genesis, we see it written in the book of Joshua. But in
Isaiah 41 it talks about this and in verse 16 it says, You
shall winnow them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the
tempest shall scatter them. And you shall rejoice in the
Lord, and the Holy One of Israel you shall glory. Verse 17, When
the poor and needy seek water, there is none, and the tongue
is parched with thirst. I, the Lord, will answer them.
I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them. We see it written
in Joshua. No man shall be able to stand
before you, in Joshua 1, 5, all the days of your life, just as
I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you
or forsake you. At the second reading of the
law, chapter 31, verse 6, it says, Be strong and courageous.
Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your
God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake
you. Behold, Genesis 28 verse 15,
I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring
you back to this land for I will not leave you until I have done
what I have promised you. So this is nothing new even though
it's the New Testament. Paul is alluding to the reality
that God has promised to finish his work and to stand fast on
his promises that he is immutable and unchangeable. I know that
seems redundant but it just emphatically expresses the point of immutability,
unchangeability. and that God has promised not
to forsake his people. However, in life, it's very easy
to feel forsaken. It's very easy to be in a place
where we go, I know that God has promised not to leave me
hanging in the salvific sense. I know that I'm going to have
eternal life, but right now, I just sort of feel left. You ever felt that way? You ever
been in a place where you just don't feel or sense that the
Lord is with you? Yet, where do we go? We've already
learned that. We've learned that we go to the promises of God
for the power of God unto salvation through Jesus Christ for the
people of God and that in these promises, in the power of Christ,
we find our hope. We've learned that saving faith
is literally like being put to death. Like our bodies and our
minds and everything that we do to work and our energy and
our motion, it arrests immediately and we drop dead in our flesh
and we rest in the sufficiency of Christ. Because have we not
been crucified with Christ? Is Christ not our life? Did Paul
not say it is not I who live but Christ who lives within me? I think sometimes when we see
verses like verse five out of Hebrews 13, we just go, yeah,
good, God will never leave me, I can trust in him. Moving right
along, he's my helper, I don't have to fear. Moving right along,
Jesus never changes. Let me remember those who teach
me these things. But we don't come to a place where we can
rest. And beloved, let me share this. I've shared it before,
but let me say it again for the sake of reminder. We cannot cause
ourself to rest. We cannot work unto rest. It's like bathing for a bath. It's like being born to be born. It doesn't work like that. We
cannot prepare ourselves for rest. Rest is granted by God. Rest is found in Christ. He is our Sabbath. Now, some
of us might think, well, I don't really care about a lot of these
things because I just wanna see something to do. I wanna find
the way of putting my finger on a specific teaching in scripture
that'll help me do something that'll cause me to rest, and
that's the whole problem, beloved. There's nothing for us to do
that causes us to rest. Of course, there's the disciplines
of the faith. There's the intimacy of the body and all these things,
hearing the word and studying. There are some disciplines that
can help us but ultimately saving faith, faith in the finished
work of Jesus, understanding the promises of God is a supernatural
work of divine origin, God himself causing us to rest, and it is
our flesh that fights against it. And our flesh fights against
it not in that we don't believe it or that we might doubt it,
though that might be the case every now and then in our hearts
and minds, but moreover, we fight against it in that we continue
to try to do something to effectuate it. We continue to try to do
something that will cause us to understand it a little bit
more rather than just sitting still and quitting and resting. And so I want to share some things
about this language tonight that can maybe supernaturally and
divinely and also grammatically help us see a couple of things.
And you might say, well what good is a Bible if it doesn't
teach us this stuff? Well, this is the difficulty
of translation. Beloved, Bible translating is
extremely difficult. Translating from one language
to another in any literature is hard. For those of us who
have some bilingual abilities, it is difficult to express idioms
and figures of speech and slang. For example, in the South, when
someone is visiting and they go, man, I'm finna scoot. What
do they mean? They're about to leave. They're
about to leave. Now, if I've heard that once,
I've heard it 50 million times. Man, I'm finna scoot. And that's
just a hillbilly way of saying, I'm about to scoot off or on
my scooter leave the premises. I'm finna scoot. I'm about to
bus out of here. That could mean I'm about to
leave, but it could also have the connotation that I need to
get out here pretty quickly. Maybe your stomach hurts, maybe
somebody showed up you didn't really want to see, or maybe
there's something else going on in a negative sense. Sometimes
when you see some people cook a meal, I've heard some of my
cousins and my friends and my neighbors say, man, let me get
them groceries. Can I get them groceries? And
you think, what is he asking for? That shopping bag full of
grocery items that I purchased earlier? No, he's like, can I
have some of that food? Can I have some of that food? As a matter
of fact, I mean, as a teenager, we called everything edible grits.
I'm gonna get some grits. What does that mean? I'm gonna
go eat. You know, just little figures of speech. These are
little things. Now, one that always drove our educators and
our parents and our grandparents crazy is to have the double negative,
I ain't got no. So if I say I ain't got no shoes,
that means I have shoes. In English grammar, the double
negative creates the positive. I ain't, I do not have no shoes,
and that means that I do have shoes. Because if I have no shoes,
that means I have no shoes. If I do not have no shoes, that
means I have some shoes. You see? There's also a little
phrase that we like to use in the South called, I'm finna.
I'm fixin'. I'm finna go. I'm fixin'. Fixin'
could be repairing something broken, or I am preparing to
do something else. I'm fixin' to go to bed. I'm
finna go to bed. We say it real quick like that.
Or I'mma head out. Now, where is the verb in that?
I don't know, but I'm a head out. That seems like somebody
saying they're a head, but the head is out. What is this? I'm
a head out. That's another way of saying
silly things. Now, imagine if I told you in
high French to translate these things. Tell this person who
speaks French, I'm a head out. What would you say? Well, I could
translate that directly, Some of us could translate it directly
into Spanish word for word and it would make no sense whatsoever.
It doesn't make sense. Translating the ancient languages,
even though there is a massive continual contemporary usage
of Greek, the grammar of ancient Greek is a little different and
especially the fact that some of the apostles like John could
not write well whatsoever. So let me teach us just a few
things about the Greek language, biblical Greek. that you may
not know, so that I can prepare us to see the emphasis of this
five negative never, never, never, never, never in verse five of
Hebrews 13. Believe it or not, there are
five negatives in that verse. But first, we need to understand
what a mood is and what a participle is. Now, I don't wanna get into
this a lot. I wanna spend like two minutes.
A mood is not how you're feeling right now or how somebody's treating
you. A mood is a verb form that expresses how the speaker intends
to present or reveal an action. So it's supposed to show you
what the speaker means in the context of a particular action
or event. And there are three basic moods
in, I almost said French, but there are three basic moods in
Greek, but there are really four. And they are the indicative,
the subjunctive, the optative, the imperative. So in order,
in that order, we have the imperative mood and this is basically saying
this is happening now, or this really happened, or this is going
to happen. It's an emphatic, this is going
to happen, this did happen, or this will happen. It's an imperative,
you see what I mean? So someone's talking about an
action, and it's in the imperative mood, it did, it's a guarantee,
sort of. So when you think about the grammar
of the Bible and things are in the indicative mood, you think,
man, that's a certainty, which it would be, but now we're going
to learn about a couple of other moods that actually emphasize
a certainty that's greater than the imperative. Let me just give
you the other three very quickly. The second one is the subjunctive
mood. The subjunctive mood. And this is the probable mood. So this event is potentially,
with great high probability, it's gonna take place. It's not
absolutely certain, and it's a little bit conditional on some
other things, but it's almost done. The optative mood. This is a possibility that something's
going to happen. This says, we're not really sure,
It may happen, but it may not. Who knows? Because there are
many other things that must take place for this to happen. In
other words, there's some other conditions that must take place.
There's other things that, you know, in order for this to take
place, these things must be present, or these things must also occur.
And the fourth mood is the imperative mood. And the imperative mood
is easily understood by a command. Do this, then this will take
place. Okay, so we've got the indicative
mood, absolutely happened, it did happen, it will happen. The
subjunctive mood has high probability with some condition. The optative
mood, possibly but very unlikely with
these conditions. And the imperative mood which
says probably not going to happen because it depends on what? Somebody
else obeying the instructions. So when we see these four moods,
we're gonna talk tonight, or what the Bible has written here
in verse five of Hebrews 13, is the subjunctive mood. High
potential, high probability that something will take place, somewhat
conditional. But now we get to this little
thing called participles. And we're only gonna talk about
two participles, the participle u and the participle me. They
both mean no or not. It's a negative. Ou is the basic
Greek participle that represents some form of no or not. And me
is the other Greek representation of that no or not. And it has
a variety of forms, but there's a difference in how we use them.
There's a difference in how they are. When we look at ooh, ooh
denies a certain thing in the negative. It denies the thing
itself objectively. Second may denies something subjectively. Basically, it denies the very
idea of something. Together, separately, they just
not. This will not. I will not go
to the store. I will not entertain that idea. But together they form something
called an absolute impossibility. And we call that the subjunctive
emphatic negation in Greek grammar. That's all the time you ever
need to hear that word. You don't even need to understand it. But
you need to understand what it does. What it does. That there is an irrefutable,
an absolute denial of any probability of whatever event that it's appointing
to ever occurring at any time, in any time or moment, without
question, ever. See, that's a lot of redundancy,
right? So for God to say, I will never forsake you, and I will
never leave you, yeah, but what about, what about, what about? Isn't there always a what about?
Isn't there always a yeah but in everything that we hear? Even
sometimes in the promises of God in our minds, I think it's
Wallace that said these words. He says, in discussing the ou-me
combination, he says this, one might think that the negative
with the subjunctive could not be as strong as the negative
with the indicative. Remember the indicative, it's
certain it'll happen, the subjunctive, most likely high potentiality.
But with the ou, the indicative denies a certainty. With the
ou-me, the subjunctive denies a potentiality. The negative
then is not weaker, he says, rather the affirmation that is
being negatived is less firm with the subjunctive, so who
may, listen to this, rules out even the idea of a possibility.
And this was something that was very well used in the language,
both verbally and written in ancient times. So now let's get
to some examples. Let's don't worry about it. So
what does it say then? Well, let's look at this text.
It says here, be content with what you have. For he has said,
I will never leave you and I will never forsake you. I will never,
never, never, never, never leave you or forsake you. I will never. So when we think about it in
the Greek, we've got the double negatives and the double negatives
and then another negative, five negatives, that give us the emphasis
in this particular way it's written, that there is absolutely no possibility
whatsoever in the entirety of all possibilities that this could
take place. And you want to think about that
in a different view. It can even get stronger. It
doesn't get stronger here, but it can even get stronger. For
example, in John's Gospel, I'll go through some of those. In
John 4, verse 14, Christ says, go there with me. Let's go to
the Gospel of John and we'll look at some of these. And you
might want to mark these in your Bible. Because they're good, encouraging
tools for us when we're talking with other people. In verse 13
of John 4, he says, Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of
this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water
that I will give him will never, ever, never, never, never, never,
never, never, never, never, never be thirsty again. You see the
point? This is how silly it would sound
if we really emphasized it in translation. We would have to
say, never, never, with any possibility whatsoever, that you would ever
thirst again. And here's something really cool
about John 4.14, 8.51, 10.28, and a few other places in the
scripture, there's another little Greek phrase that says, until
the very end of all time, eternally, eternally. So in this negative,
when Jesus says in John 4, 14, whoever drinks of him will never
thirst again, when he said that, when that was written down by
John in this way, and when people read that, they thought to themselves,
that's why the woman at the well said, what kind of magic water
is this man talking about that I would never, ever, ever, not
even a possibility, ever be thirsty again? for the rest of the world
and eternity beyond. Well, isn't that something? How
about chapter six, verse 35? Go over there. Jesus said to them, I am the
bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall never, never hunger.
And whoever believes in me shall never, never thirst to the end
of age, to the end of time. This is this negative, this emphatic
negation. And verse 37, the same thing.
All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever
comes to me, I will never, never, with any possibility, till the
end of the age, ever cast away. I will never, ever do it. It is impossible to thirst when
Christ has saved us. It is impossible to starve when
we eat of the bread of life. It is impossible It is impossible
to be cast away when Christ has purchased us with His blood. Chapter 8. Matter of fact, that
verse 6-37 there does not have that to the end of age in the
original language. But chapter 8, verse 51. Yet, oh goodness, where are we?
Truly, truly, verse 51, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word,
he will never, never to the end of age see death. Not even a
possibility. Absolutely impossible to see
death to the end of age. Chapter 10, verse 28. I give them eternal life, and
they will never, never, not even a possibility, to the end of
the age, perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand."
Think about that assurance there. God will never, never, Hebrews
8, Hebrews 8, 12, never, never, not even a possibility, remember
the sins of His people. Why don't you think about that
for a second? God will never, never, never,
Never, never desert his people, Hebrews 13, five. It's not possible. So if that's the case, what difference
does it make? Does it make any difference now
being that there's not a way to really translate that without
writing out some extra nevers? I'm gonna say historically, I
think even some historical pastors have even entitled their teaching
on this particular text. Never, never, never, never, never.
Never. It sounds like some, you know,
blowhard fundamentalist. Never, never, never, never, never,
Jesus will ever, never, never. And it sounds great and it pumps
us up and it excites us. But does it, can we see it? Can
we see the promise of God in the promises of Scripture? And
you know what's crazy? We don't need that language lesson,
do we? Because we know by faith this
is true, but yet we also understand that in our language the emphasis
is weakened. Doesn't change our faith. But
it just goes to show you that this is how the Lord has communicated
the reality of His promises. He will not forsake us. So therefore
we don't have to fear what man can do to me. Now I've been really
wallowing through this for a minute. seeing what it is that I could
think about and apply it to my own life as a believer, as a
shepherd, as a father, as a husband, as a friend, as a brother, as
a son, as a nephew. What is it that this should do
for us? Well, it should do a lot of things.
Let's just walk through a few right now off the top of our
heads. It should cause us to rest more thankfully in the finished
work of Jesus, more and more. It should cause us to truly be
grateful and have gratitude that what God has done for his people
is so secure that he expresses it with some absurd, in our language,
hyperbole. That's the way we would call
it, wouldn't it? But it's not, it's doctrinally true. It's theologically
true. So we should be grateful. We
should be grateful. And then another thing that we
should do is to see the efficacy, to see the fact that the finished
work of Jesus Christ caused something. So that we should know, listen,
it is a false gospel to consider the fact that the death of Jesus
was an opportunity for salvation. I'm gonna say that again. It
is a false gospel to say that the death of Jesus was an opportunity
for salvation. The death of Jesus was a security
of salvation for the people for whom he died. Yeah, but no. The Spirit of God does not put
yeah, but in our mouths. There is no condition that Christ
did not make. It should also show us, as we've
already learned, the finished work of Christ, to be understood,
to be received, to be apprehended, to be settled by faith, which
is a gift of God, that the work of the flesh is not only useless,
the work of the flesh is condemning. So that when we sit here and
think, now how can I keep myself in the place of righteousness,
we are by statement learning, living, and exercising in a false
gospel narrative. It is not truth to say that humanity,
that the body of Christ has any obligation whatsoever to anything
and any standard of righteousness before God, because if that is
true and we fail to meet it, then God's a liar and Paul has
already written in this letter, there are two great things that
we can stand on, that God is never changing and God cannot
lie. And he's recapitulating that
here. in the close of his letter. Cannot lie. He says it again
in verse 8, Jesus Christ is the same. So that means the death
of Christ, what it did when he said it is finished, is the same
thing that it's doing today. It has finished the work. It
is a done deal. So that we can never, never,
never, with any possibility, be lost. We can never, never,
ever, to the end of the age, be cast away. And people don't like that. Because
until God the Spirit grants faith, the mind will not change to rest
in such a proclamation. The death of Jesus Christ was
effectual. That's the second thing. The third thing I think
that we need to understand about this is that it's going to cause
trial. It's going to cause strife. It's
going to cause frustration. It's going to cause division.
It's going to cause our own minds to be at odds with itself sometimes. We're going to wonder. We're
going to worry. We're going to have this turmoil
and all that comes to pass in the context of the gospel is
the will of God for his people that we may grow to rest in this
precious promise above everything and anything that we could ever
do. Anything. So then what does it
do? It takes away our fear. That's
the fourth thing we need to understand. It takes away our fear. We don't
need to fear what man can do to me. We don't need to fear
what COVID can do to me. Now I'm not saying we should...
I'm not saying jump into a gang war and jump into a sickbed.
This is silly. We don't test the Lord. What
I'm saying is that we don't need to lose sight of the promises
of God in the midst of trial and death. I mean, Paul understood this.
Why? Because God showed him this. Christ taught him this. The Spirit
gave him this peace. And then he gives this peace
to us through the word that the children of God who have been
called by the power of Christ to believe in him can rest and
be reminded of these great truths and promises. We should understand
that our fear is subject to the never, never, never, never promise
of God, to never leave us nor forsake us. What's the worst
thing that can happen to us in life? There's a lot of things I don't
want to experience, a lot of things I don't want to feel,
a lot of things I don't want to think about or have to mitigate.
But in the end of it all, if the worst thing that happens
to me is that I get rid of this flesh and can stand with my Savior,
so be it. You're gonna scare me with eternal
life? Not gonna happen. You're gonna threaten to send
me straight to my maker? Glorious. Yet, I can say it standing here,
not as easy when something's facing you down. It's not as
easy when the culture is hardening against you. It's not easy when
the very ones who you thought were your family would come against
you and turn you over to the authorities. See, those were
the experiences of these young Christians, of this young church,
that they had just slid in just a little bit, just a pinky toe
hole, just a small little thing, just a step a little bit down
there, back into Moses, back into Abraham, just to appease
the masses. Beloved, you might point that
direction for a season, but if you belong to Christ, he will
pull you out of that. He will cause you to go, no,
I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that anymore. We
should see that we have nothing to fear. We should see that God,
our father, is our helper. He is the one. He is the one
who holds it. He is the one who carries us. He is the one who saved us. Salvation
is all of Christ. Where are you getting all this?
I've already read, we've already, this is week 45. We've already
been through this. We've already been through these
other pages. How many pages in my Bible is it? You know, one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. It's
just 10 pages. Almost 11 pages. And then this
letter's over. We've already been there. We
already know that Christ is the Son through whom God speaks. We already know that Christ is
the exact imprint of the nature of God. He is the radiance of
His glory and He upholds the universe by what? By the word
of His power. We already know that the good
news is that Christ has purified His people before the Father. We already know that righteousness
is ours. in Christ. How is a man righteous
before the Father? See, that's the gospel question.
That's the evangelistic question of the day. That's the only question
that's absolutely necessary in the context of seeing if someone
understands the gospel or not. How are you made righteous Because
it is all about righteousness. The righteousness of God is displayed
in His forgiveness of His people because of His promise to never
leave us and forsake us. And that is just and righteous
because He took our sin debt and Christ paid it with His own
blood. So therefore He is, as Paul was
saying in Romans 3, the just and the justifier of all who
rest in Christ. All who have faith in Christ,
the gift of God, that makes us see, that makes us rest, that
makes us believe. See, salvation is not a decision
we make. Salvation is not a choice that
we appropriate to our lives. Salvation is not a path that
we have put our lives on. There's no trajectory of salvation. The trajectory of salvation was
before the foundation of the world The pinnacle was at the
cross, and now we await the glory. And we will never, never, never,
never, never be forsaken. So why do we fear? Therefore, you know why we fear? Because we spend so much time
sometimes in our flesh worrying over our salvation rather than
resting in the promise. And in order to do that, we have
to substitute something for something else, don't we? If we want to
stop a specific habit, we have to do something else, right?
Isn't that sort of how psychology works? If we're always picking
at our ear, we're always chewing our nails, we need to do something
else with our hands, especially the fidgety folks, you know?
So you can play with something, you can dig your nose, I guess,
I don't know, you can pull at your eyes, or whatever, or how
about this? When we're so enamored with the
gospel in a way that we are fearful, when we're so enamored with the
world in a way that we're fearful, how about what God has promised through
this promise and that what God has instructed around this promise
to just be about the business of considering others rather
than ourselves. Do you know what happens when
I'm not worrying about me, but I'm worrying about you or I'm
laboring for you in service? The Father's promises are not
questioned. The worst enemy in our lives
is the mirror of our soul. Because in that, when we look
at ourselves, we cannot see Christ. And we change. But Christ does
not. And I think that is why he tells
us to remember those who taught the Word of God, to remember
what they've said, to remember how they live. Some people would
say, see, that's a life worthy of praise. No, no, no, no, no.
This is not what Paul is talking about here. It's a life worthy
of imitation. And the imitation is their resting
and their trusting in the Lord. All people in the body of Christ
are tempted by things that scare them. Whether it be just, I don't
wanna lose this friend, to I feel like I'm gonna die. We're gonna
be tempted. We're going to be tempted to
give in to the flesh, to give in to those people that pressure
us. But we don't have to do that because God will not let us go. So we imitate the faith of those
who are strong, imitate the faith of those who share the gospel.
You notice that the leaders of the body are all about preparing
to teach the body to do the work of the ministry, as Paul would
say in Ephesians. And as we grow up into Him who is the head,
to full maturity, into manhood, into adulthood, into Him who
is the head, who is Jesus Christ. How do we grow into the head?
How do we grow into the likeness of Christ? It's not by looking
in the mirror. It's not by changing our attitudes
and our actions and our behavior. It's about resting in the sufficiency
of the perfection of Jesus Christ to begin with. It's about knowing
that our righteousness before the Father is not ours but it
has been given to us through the Son and what the Son has
done is done indeed to the uttermost. Because we have come not to Sinai.
We have not come to the law. We have not come to death. We
have not come to the courtroom of justice. We have come to the
mercy seat. We have come to Christ. We have
come to the celebration. I've seen a lot of people on
the streets die. I've seen a lot of people die
standing beside me. I've seen a lot of people die
in hospital beds. I've never seen families blow
little confetti blowers when somebody dies. He died. Yay. I've never seen that at an accident
scene. I've never seen that at a murder scene. No, we don't rejoice in the face
of death, except that we know that we have life. So when we
come to this festal gathering, it is a rejoicing, you see. And
we rejoice Because we know that he will not forsake us. And you
see that in verse five, you know, he says that free from the love
of money and be content with what you have. But I think we
need to be content with the gospel we've been given. I think we
need to be content with the Word of God that we have. I think
we need to be content with the doctrines of the Bible. I think
we need to be content with the trials of the faith. We need
to be content. We need to rest and appreciate
and enjoy and have happiness in that which God has ordained
for us and knowing that all that we need for life and godliness
is found in His divine power. And so that while you may be
struggling, and while you may be rough around the edges, there
will come a day when God will glorify us all, and all of that
chaff will be laid aside. This old, nasty, corrupted, dying,
graying, aching flesh will be left to the dust, and I and you
alike will receive a foundation of newness. Like we've never
understood before, like Christ is presently, we shall be like
Him. And that is our promise. So we
do not need, look at verse nine here, eight and nine, Jesus Christ
is the same yesterday, today and forever. So we do not need
other teachings. We do not need teachings that
can divide us away from our suffering. We don't need teachings that
would separate us in such a way that we might find a more solid
path philosophically or academically or spiritually. The path is set,
the path is closed, the path is narrow, the path is Christ.
There's no other way opening to eternal life except Jesus
Christ and he has already opened himself up and his blood has
been shed and his body has been destroyed and he has saved his
people from their sins and all those for whom he died will be
granted the life and be granted the faith to believe that he
is their eternal life. And so without going into more,
the ultimate end to all this is that we can we can have the
joy of Christ. We can have the peace of Christ,
and we can be equipped in this comforting truth to rest and
then work to serve one another, not to serve our salvation, not
to earn or to prove, but to serve one another. For that gives glory
to God. Let's pray. We thank you, Father,
for just little things that you've shown us. Father, while these
things are not necessary, it is encouraging to us, those who
have been shown the truth, that even grammatically, Lord, in
certain languages, you have expressed yourself in such a great way
that it almost sounds weird. Father, we know And we thank
you that you will never forsake us. We thank you that Christ
is sufficient. So keep us from the idols of
worry, and the idols of fear, and the idols of if things could
just be better. Lord, we do want things to be
better, and Father, we can pray for one another, but Lord, we
do not need to do so at the cost of our hope and joy. Help us
to be content with the station that we are in. Help us to be
content with the health that we've been given. Help us to
be content in the marriage that we have. Help us to be content
with where we are and the unknowability of tomorrow, for Christ is unchanging. And you have promised us this
unchanging favor, this unchanging grace, this unchanging love,
to whom you only give the elect, your people, your sheep, your
children. Let us rest in this. And we pray
these things in Christ. Amen.