bit more to go, another week
or two, and then we'll get into chapter 11. There is a great deal of conversation
to be had, or that has been had and is still going on, concerning
the assurance of salvation, the assurance of salvation. When
we think of confidence and when we think of assurance, it's natural
for us, as we've learned thus far over these last 22 sermons,
it is easy for our humanity to fall into the trap of thinking
that we must do something or that we must be something in
order to establish some type of image or look so that there
is hope with what we see and what we've become. Paul's letter
here is actually dealing with the exact opposite. As a matter
of fact, it is the constant focus on the flesh, the constant focus
on performance, the constant focus on transformation that
Paul is speaking against. He's told these Christians These
saints, thus far, many times over, that they have their confidence
before God in His righteousness because of the finished work
of Jesus Christ, who is the eternal and only true high priest, who
is greater than Moses, who is greater than the law, who is
greater than creation, who is greater than the shadow of the
worshiper and everything that they've been taught throughout
their entire lifetime, throughout the history of Israel. As Paul
begins his continued explanation in chapter 10, you see, for since
the law has but a shadow of good things to come instead of the
true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices
that are continually offered every year, make perfect those
who draw near. And so, beloved, the reason that
he writes this letter is to comfort and to encourage and to strengthen
the saint. Now imagine if I sent you a postcard,
and on that postcard I said I heard that you had been feeling poorly,
and I wanted to write and cheer you up, and I gave you a few
jokes, and I gave you a few stories, and told you a few things, and
it's a big postcard. And then at the end of it, I
hope you don't die, you're probably going to. Would that be an encouragement
at all? No, it would be a horrible example
of care. It would be terrible. Even people
would not do that for their enemies, much less somebody they cared
about. Yet, that's how many people read the scripture. Paul has
written this letter to encourage, to solidify, to teach, and to
make basically to concrete the hope of the believer in the finished
work of Christ. So if we see something that is
seemingly contradictory to that, we know we're interpreting it
incorrectly. Here's where we are this morning,
or this afternoon. In verse 11, He starts to talk about how Christ's
high priestly role is not something that's continually done because
he finished his work. He has no more sacrifice to give
concerning sin. There's nothing else for Jesus
to do to redeem His people. There's nothing else required
for salvation. Now I have beat this particular
focus over the last few weeks very clearly. So this is review
just to keep us in the mindset of why we're here and what Paul
is trying to teach us. And so we know that Christ finished
the work of redemption. We know that, as it says in verse
14, by a single offering Himself, Infected for all time those who
are being set apart and the Holy Spirit bears witness Quoting
Jeremiah quoting the Lord God out of Jeremiah 31 where he says
my promise and contract to you is that I will forgive their
sins and then there will be no more guilt and Then there is
no more offering for sin Verse 19 let's read together
all the way through verse 31. I Therefore, brothers, since
we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus,
and this is where we were last week, by the new and living way
that he opened for us through the curtain that is through his
flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God,
let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith,
with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our
bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession
of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir
one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet
together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another,
and all the more as you see the day drawing near. For if we go
on sinning deliberately, after receiving the knowledge of the
truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful
expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume
the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the
law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or more
witnesses. How much worse punishment Do
you think we'll be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot
the Son of God, who has profaned the blood of the covenant by
which he has set us apart, by which he was set apart and has
outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, vengeance
is mine, I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge
his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the
living God. Now I want you to think about that for a second.
Paul has written all of this in one thought. He doesn't give a contrast until
verse 32. He goes, but recall. So he's written this letter up
to this point to give confident assurance, strength, and encouragement,
hope, peace, rest, and the finished work of Jesus Christ. Why, pray
tell, would he then begin to say, well, you're probably going
to die. Get well soon. I'll preach your
funeral. You're going to live, but you're
probably dead. I mean, it's not just a contradiction. It's not just oxymoronic, it's
moronic. But we read it that way because
we've been taught to read it that way. We've been taught to
take small little things, and I've heard pastors teach sermons
out of chapter 10 verse 26 that tell the congregation, if you
deliberately sin too much, you're going to die on your sins. Is Paul changing his focus? Is Paul now not going to encourage
the very one? The very ones that he's been
encouraging because he's just fed up. He's written 10 chapters
and he's just tired of talking. Now he wants to scare them. No,
because in chapter 11 he's talking about faith. He's talking about
how all of these depraved individuals, these people who did not live
according to the standard by which God had commanded them.
through which He would judge them, but rather He judged them
through the righteousness of Jesus Christ and the imputation
of sin on Christ in His death. Therefore the imputation of righteousness
upon those for whom He died, God will judge us based on the
righteousness of Christ who finished the work of salvation, who finished
the work of forgiveness, who finished the work of satisfying
the wrath of God. God is propitiated through the
death of Jesus. He is satisfied. And so we're
going to see what faith looks like, and we're going to hear
Paul say that all these people died in faith, not having received
the things promised, but having greeted them from afar. And then he's going to get to
a place where he's going to do a comparison, as he's been doing. He's compared
Christ to everything, and Christ is superior to all things. Christ
is the fulfillment of all things. Christ is all in all. And when he gets over to chapter
12, he's going to compare Sinai with Zion. He's going to compare
the law of God given which always kills a human being, and the
Son of God who was killed in the place of His elect, who always
gives life to His people. And he's going to say, as we'll
see probably in a couple of months, that there is no possible way
someone who is Anzian can ever have a stakehold in Sinai. You can't. You cannot have property
on both mountains. You cannot have a tent in both
places. You cannot worship at the feet
of both of those. You are either in Christ, in
the jubilee, in the festal gathering of the saints, or you are under
the curse of the law and you are condemned and there is no
hope for you. This is the comparison he's giving right now as well. And I'm not so sure that I've
talked about confession of hope, so I'm gonna start in verse 23
and we're gonna just press into this very quickly and get to
verse 26 through 31 and I will teach this again next week as
we move into verses 32 through the end. So he says, let us hold, verse
23, fast the confession of our hope without wavering. For he
who promised is faithful. Now see, this is where we need
to get the idea that our faith is not the operative agent of
our justification. Our faith is the necessary condition
of one who is justified. In other words, it's a statement
of, I don't know the word I'm looking for. It's a statement
of being. If you are alive, you will have air in your lungs.
If you are justified, you will have faith that you are justified.
And what is that faith? The faith is believing the gift
of God to believe the proclamation that Paul has already argued.
It's the gift of God to see and rest in the very thing that Paul
has just taught. And the very thing that we've
been seeing about sin from the very beginning is what? There
were people who heard the promises of God concerning life. They
refused to believe them, so they wanted to go back to Egypt. They
wanted to worship a golden calf. They wanted to complain about
the manna. They wanted to be upset about
the water. They wanted to be frustrated about the wilderness.
And so God what? He killed them all. And He's saying, we've got to
pay closer attention to what we've heard lest we drift away
from it. Don't drift away from the sovereign and free grace
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Don't drift away into thinking
there's anything, anything at all that you must do in order
to secure your confidence before the Lord. Because if you go there,
you are damned. You see? It's the same thing
he teaches in Galatians. If you are working out your salvation
by expressly empowering your flesh, even by the power of God
to put some sense of confidence in your heart, you have not stayed
in Zion. You have run back to Sinai. You
have run back to the law. You have run back to Moses. You
have run back to Melchizedek. You have run back to Abraham.
You have run back to all of Judaism. And you have run to the shadows.
You've cast off the gourmet table with all of the things that God
has prepared for us to eat. And you started digging in the
dirt for grubs again. And that's what he's telling
us. He's saying, don't neglect the
gospel. of grace. Do not neglect the
finished work of Christ. Some of us had some conversations
over the weekend that dealt with this and what happens is it's
natural for our flesh to focus on what? Itself. It's natural. The way I feel, the way I look,
what I'm thinking about, what I desire, what I like, what I
don't like, what makes me happy, what frustrates me, what makes
me angry. Hopes, visions, dreams, daydreams, entertainment, sports,
music, whatever it might be. We're always contemplating what
we are, who we are, and where we are in the sense of every
aspect of life. But when it comes to salvation,
we can't do that. We have to look solely at Christ
and only at Christ. And if we look to ourselves as
if Christ is doing some magic trick upon us or some divine
work within us, and we think that that is our confidence,
then we're mistaken. Now before everybody burns me
at the stake, there are many, many commands of how we are to
walk and live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. And
we are then corrected when we fall into sin. to the point that
if we aren't willing to listen for the sake of our love for
one another, then we are excommunicated from amongst the body until such
time as we're willing to be submissive to the simple commands of Scripture. So no one's saying that there
aren't things that we need to do, but they're not tied to our
confidence. Surely, when we fall into sin,
our confidence wanes, doesn't it? We see that in the discipline
of the Lord. But the Lord disciplines us. He doesn't condemn us. He
corrects us. The root of discipline means to be put straight, to
be put back on the right path, to get back in the right way,
to walk in the right path and the manner and the direction.
So we discipline our children not to punish them and scare
them. We discipline our children to teach them that that behavior
gets a negative consequence. This behavior gets a blessing.
And sometimes the blessing is no pain. Sometimes the blessing is no
fine. Sometimes the blessing is no
sickness. Sometimes the blessing is a sober
mind. Right relationships. And the
list goes on and on. But we don't conflate the reality
of life together, which is a secondary issue, with the gospel. And that's what happens. They
were being tempted, these Christians, these Jewish Christians were
being tempted to go back into the practices of Judaism, just
like the Gentiles of Galatia were being tempted by the Judaizers
to accept circumcision as a mark of confidence, as a mark of piety,
as a mark of something that would establish in them as they lay
down at night. You know what, I'm glad that I did the circumcision
thing. because I'm a little bit more righteous today, I'm walking
with the Lord a little bit, well, I'm not walking, but I'm with
the Lord a little bit more today, and we could just push that pun
more and more, but we get the point. There are many things
in this life that are just the new circumcision, and this idea
of confidence and assurance based on works and transformation and
the transformation of affections is a damnable assurance. Paul
says that these people who fall out of grace and embrace confidence
elsewhere, what they're doing is they're putting themselves
back under the law. And when the law, and our obedience
to the law is our confidence, isn't that stupid? Because does
not the law convict us and make us guilty? It does. The law makes
us guilty. So we hold fast because He is
faithful. I'm not faithful. I'm not faithful
to myself. Are you? I mean, New Year's resolutions
teach us that. We're not faithful to ourselves.
By golly, I'm going to get up early next year. I'm going to
work out next year. I'm going to eat right next year. I'm going
to read some books next year. I'm going to do whatever. I'm
going to take a trip. I'm going to work on this and
work on that. What, February? Eh, I'll start next year. We're
not even faithful to ourselves. Yes, many of us have great discipline
in so many areas, but we fail in so many more areas that if
we were honest, if we're only measured by what we're good at,
okay, we get an A. But because we're so good there,
we get an F over here. And our assurance cannot be self-contained. It cannot be intrinsic. It cannot
be inward-looking. It cannot even be in the uber
spiritual realm of, let me look at what God is doing in me. Because
if you look and see how the Lord is merciful to put away and help
you crucify your flesh in one sense, and I better change the
way I said that, help you put to death the flesh in one sense,
you will just discover by the Spirit of just some other sin
that you have. Being aggravated that the line
is too slow at the coffee window, is enough sin to condemn you
forever. Being frustrated that your hair didn't flow right because
of the temperature is enough sin to be condemned. A two-year-old, a two-month-old,
as they wore over the toy that some other child snatched, they
weren't selfish, why do they scream? Why do they pull hair? Why do they bite? Because they're
sinners. That's what sinners do. We're
guilty. So no matter how well we are
molded, no matter how much we mature, our confidence and our
assurance, while it may be self-inflicted when we do sin that we lose confidence,
we lose confidence in a real way when we look at our lives
thinking that that is our hope. To know that we know that we
know that we have eternal life. It is He who is faithful. And
we do so without wavering. And in verse 24, Paul begins
to give some instruction to the local assembly. He says, and
let us consider. In other words, with our minds,
we should be contemplating how we are to live our life today.
In this day, we're supposed to be, as we interact in any particular
way possible with the saints, we're supposed to be thinking
how we can stir our brothers and sisters up to love and to
good works. So as we're resting, we're to
encourage each other to rest. And then as we're resting, we
get up and we work for one another. And in doing so, we're actually
working for the Lord Jesus. Remember what he says in Matthew's
gospel? When I was naked, you clothed me. When I was hungry,
you fed me. When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. When I
was sick, you visited me. When I was in prison, you came
and visited or whatever. When do we ever do that? When
you did it to the least of these, my brethren, you did it unto
me. And you, you over here, you didn't do it. When do we ever
have the opportunity? When you didn't do it unto these,
you didn't do it unto me. So we love the Lord by loving
each other. And we're all gifted in different
ways. We all have different opportunities. We all have different abilities.
We all have different approaches to life. But we are all a gift
one to another. No matter what you think about
yourself, if you are in Christ, God has established you to be
a gift to someone else. And so what we're to do as we
rest in the gospel, we are to be busy about encouraging and
thinking how we can stir each other up to love and to good
works. Those are synonymous. It's not two things. It's synonymous.
Love and good works are one and the same. We love as we serve. We love as we do. I don't know
that it was any different than I normally would, but I went
in and scoured our bathrooms Monday. Just, you know how you
get that bug and I'm putting up a shower and redoing one bathroom
because it fell out and fell apart. And I just got in there
and I don't know, I marimated that thing down to a hospital
status. I mean, the brush, brushed the floor, brushed the walls,
wiped it all down, bleached it all clean. And about three hours
later, Robin texts me and she says, thank you so much for cleaning
these bathrooms. I've never seen them this clean
in my life. I mean, I loved her, I wouldn't even do it for her,
wouldn't even think, oh wow, Robin wants these bathrooms,
although she mentioned that they were really gross, and we need
to get on a schedule where we can rotate. And I just went in
there and just cleaned them up real good, and it was a gift
to her, in her mind, it was an encouragement to her. Simple
things like that, that I was not even, I was thinking, okay,
needs to be done, let's do it. It was a responsibility issue
for me, and I am completely obsessed with cleaning, so it works out. It works out. So we stir one
another up. And in doing that, we can't neglect
to meet together, verse 25, as is the habit of some. But we
are to be together and connect as often as we can so that we
are able to encourage one another. And what is the encouragement?
The encouragement is the same thing Paul's been doing through
this letter. He's been encouraging the saints to understand the
solidarity that comes in the finished work of Jesus Christ
and that their only hope and confidence is in sitting still
in the hand of Christ so that they can know they have been
redeemed because He's alive when He finished the work and accomplished
it in His death. So are we encouraging one another.
All the more as the day of the Lord draws near. As long as we
live, we continue to encourage one another in the gospel. That
is the primary purpose of the church, to meet needs as they
have them and encourage each other in the gospel. That is
the point of the preaching ministry of the church, the teaching ministry
of the church. We look at the Bible, we see what it says, we
don't confuse it, we don't twist it, we don't play cunning with
it, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, but we boldly proclaim the
truth and we do it in front of the Lord God and we confidently
attest to the promises of God concerning eternal life for His
elect through the Son Jesus Christ who saved them, who bought them,
who redeemed them, and it is over. It is finished. Period.
Nuff said. So we encourage each other in
that. Yes, we're fearful of the weather. God bless Texas right
now. That's something else. I thought,
yay. Marcos is going away. Laura comes up and says, here
I am. I mean, it's just I'm thinking I'm sick for them right now.
That's scary stuff. Scary stuff. Okay, there's a
storm, let's do what we have to do, but our confidence is
in the Lord. Our hope is in the Gospel. Our
future is in the hands of Christ. Isn't that silly? I mean, if
you went to your bank and you said, hey, I need to take out
a loan to buy a car, and they said, well, what you need is
Jesus, it would aggravate you. But in the sense where you come
back and say, that bank wouldn't give me a loan, I can't get a
car. If somebody can help you, then we can get you a car. And
if somebody can't help you, then by golly, we can at least encourage
you to know that Christ is sufficient. If you need a house, if you need
food, if you need clothes, if you need just encouragement,
we need to make sure that encouragement always centers on the very thing
that the context of this letter is, and that is our assurance
before the Father, our confidence before the Father. And then in
verse 26, has Paul changed his mind? Paul hasn't changed his
mind. He's giving a comparison. You are to encourage one another
in the faith. You are to motivate one another.
You ought to be thinking about how you can motivate each other
to love. Primarily that you do the love. Somebody's going to
be encouraging you and you're going to be encouraging them.
And sometimes just our existence together and meeting together
can encourage us to love each other. Because it is in those
times where we have more intimacy than not. But then Paul says forth we go
on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the
truth. He's not changing gears. He's not talking about the law
of God in the sense of obeying it. He's talking about the law
of God in the sense of practicing it as confidence. He's talking
about if anybody deliberately, after hearing the gospel, after
what I've written to you, if any of you, but he doesn't say
you, does he? He says we. deliberately push aside the grace
and the mercy of the Lord. If we willfully reject the grace
of God as sufficient alone, if we do anything to put a toehold
or a safety net in any way in the gospel, after we've heard
the gospel over and over again, there no longer remains a sacrifice
for sins. What's that mean? Look at it
this way, very simply. You children in the room could
understand this. In this hand, I have life. In this hand, I
have law. Which one do you want? Life is the blood of the Lamb
of God, shed for you, sacrificed for sin. The law sacrifices over
and over and over and over and over and over and over. But what have we already learned?
It never satisfied sin. The high priest did it over and
over. People brought their gifts over and over. People prayed
and bowed and worshiped and sang over and over. They went to feast
after feast, after festival after festival, temple after temple,
after temple after temple. They did all these things. They
obeyed the Sabbath laws. They understood it all. They
did the best they could, but none of it ever did anything
but point to the very perfection of God's righteousness who is
Jesus Christ in the flesh and that that righteousness is upheld
and God who put him forward to satisfy himself in his justice
is the just and the justifier of everyone who is in Christ.
So deliberately sinning is to reject the sovereign and free
grace of God. I want you to hear that again.
Deliberately sinning in this context is to reject the sovereign
and free grace of God. More specifically is to reject
in the context the encouragement and the confidence that comes
through the finished work of Christ. Freely. Period. So if I want to reject grace,
which means I want to reject the blood of Christ as sufficient
alone, then there is no sacrifice for sins. If I go back to any
part of works for my assurance, there's no sacrifice for sins.
Does it make sense now? It's that simple. But we have
pretexted that into itself as becoming an entire book of the
Bible just in these warning passages. But what is there? A fearful
expectation of judgment. What did they do with the lambs?
What did they do with the meat? They poured the blood out and
they sacrificed and they prayed. They poured the blood and then
they burnt the carcasses. They consumed it all. They ate
it. They burned it, they consumed it all. It was destroyed by fire,
it was eaten, it was poured out, everything was poured out. But none of it sacrificed, none
of it yielded forgiveness, none of it helped anybody stand before
the Father. Jesus Christ went through the
Holy of Holies in the new and living way, that is His flesh,
and He satisfied the wrath of God once and for all, and everyone
for whom He died is going to live forever. Don't neglect such
a great salvation by embracing some type of other thing because
that is deliberately sinning against Christ. And listen to
the language he uses. A fury of fire that will consume
the adversaries. He's saying that the judgment
of God is what we can expect if we refuse the grace of God.
And some people go, well I haven't refused the grace, I believe
it's grace. You refuse the grace of God when you add to it. When you add one thing to it.
What must I do to be saved? You've got to turn from your
sins. You've got to accept Jesus. You've got to be baptized. Like, what is that? Family feud.
Three X's. You're out. Next time, think
about it before you say anything. Jesus alone. Jesus alone. And he gives a comparison. Look
at verse 28. Back in the day of Moses, if anyone set aside,
if anyone forgot, if anyone made a mistake, if anyone sinned,
if anyone did anything to break the Law
of Moses, what happened? They died without mercy. Children who talked back to their
parents were taken outside the camp and stoned to death. That's
a little harsh. They didn't talk back. You steal, you got your hand
cut off, or you went to prison. You cause your man harm, you're
probably gonna die. And this isn't a journey on Hebrew
law and execution, I'm just saying. There was always a death sentence.
You blaspheme, you die. What happened when Moses came
down from the mountain, Mount Sinai? What happened? And Aaron,
the epitome of man's religion, they all went back to their old
ways of Egypt. Going back to the law of Judaism, going back
to the shadow, finding assurance, and I've said this, this is the
first time I've said this, finding assurance in your performance
and your transformation is just like worshiping a golden calf. And I'm gonna tell you something,
beloved, it is the primary gospel of the Reformed tradition in
our day. When you look at a lot of sovereign
grace, and I use that term very broadly, Most of my brothers
are sovereign grace. Sovereign grace is the gospel,
it's sovereign, it is free. But a lot of people have taken
that title, have taken this mindset of sovereignty, grace alone,
the solas. And they've embraced the knowledge
academically of this theological system. But they've not been
taught by God in the context of the scripture alone. Because
they've not been born again. And they know a lot of cool details
about these things. But when the rubber hits the
road, they're looking in the mirror for their hope. And they're
calling that grace. And Paul says it's death. So if anyone breaks the law of
Moses, dies without mercy with two or three witnesses. How much
worse is it going to be? How much worse should it be?
Or is it deserved by the one who has done that to the Lord
Jesus' blood? And listen to this descriptive
language. This is descriptive language. When you add to the gospel, when
you add to grace, when you think something else is necessary for
confidence before the Father, You have they, let's just use
the they, those who do that have trampled underfoot the Son of
God. They have walked over Him. You ever been stepped on in public
by someone not paying attention? I've been stepped on a little
bit before in sporting events that I didn't want to be at to
start with. People are just moving too fast. I ran over the heels
of my grandmother one time when I was in high school pushing
the buggy. It was in a fabric store. She stopped and I ran
over her heels. I ran her over. And I was like,
oh, I'm so sorry. I mean, if I'd just like, grandma,
and just run her on over, and I'd get out of the way, blah,
blah, blah, blah, just keep on stepping all over, I wouldn't do that.
I wouldn't trample over. What do you trample over? Dirt,
garbage, worthless salt, pavement. You don't trample over the Son
of God, but to add to His grace, to reject the sufficiency of
His sacrifice for His people is to step on Him. It's to just
trample on Him, just walk right over Him. It's to also profane
the blood of the promise. It's to blaspheme it. It's to curse it. It's to talk
ill of it. Oh yeah, Jesus died, whatever.
Yeah, I mean, the blood was necessary, but you know, I had to do my
part. I got to do my, I got to be the, I got to be the doer
of the word. We're going to be in James probably
next. Jesus was set apart to finish
the work of salvation, to bring forgiveness by the father through
the blood And in doing that, in reaching out of the reign
of grace, we outrage the spirit of grace. And Paul's question,
there's a question, Paul is asking, what does that person deserve? If we killed them when they disobeyed
Moses, what does the person who spits in the face of grace deserve? And keep in mind, spitting in
the face of grace in the context of the letter of Hebrews is not
refusing grace, but it's adding to grace. It's putting confidence in anything
that's not grace alone. And he reminds us. Over in verse
30, Paul reminds us what the Lord says. Deuteronomy 32, I
think is where this is. Don't know what verse, but it's
somewhere around there. 31, 32. Vengeance is mine. I will repay. The Lord will judge
his people. And then Paul says it is a fearful
thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Keep that image in your head
for a moment. We are resting And I'm going
to paint a picture that I don't think Paul intended to paint,
but I see it here, so I'm going to just share it. We're resting
in the sufficiency of the hand of Jesus Christ in all His work.
We're doing nothing. We're not even breathing, because
He's our breath. He is our legs. He is our eyes.
He is our hands. He is our hope. He is everything concerning salvation
and then more. But here in the context, the
subject is salvation. You have assurance in that resting,
but it's not the resting that you should hope in. It's the
faithful one in whom you rest. And you don't even have to get
up in his hand. You don't have to get up on his shoulders. You don't
have to come up to him and say, would you carry me? You don't have
to ask to be saved. He did it. He saved you. And by the mercy of God, He bought
you. And in God's justice, there is
no condemnation for you. And when you're resting in that
truth, you are resting in Jesus Christ, you are safe. But when
you get up and you try to walk around in the hands of grace,
imagine this for a second. And instead of being in Christ,
and He be your movement, and He be your life, and He is your
mind, and He is your hope, you begin to work in a way where
you're trying to balance yourself, looking at Sinai, looking at
the law, looking at obedience, looking at maturity, looking
at knowledge, looking at certain types of service, you're going
to fall out. And this is a metaphor, this
is an image that I am creating because we know Jesus says no
one can snatch them out of my hand, that's correct. But those
who seemingly are in the hand of Christ and they find themselves
walking, trying to affect confidence in themselves are actually about
to fall into the hands of judgment. And it is a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the living God. For those of you who know anything
about physics, you know that an object at rest stays at rest
unless it's acted upon by an outside force. It's like the old debate on the
West Coast when we were there about the laws of firearm stowage
and usage and carrying and all those things. I mean, you had
to put your bullets in Oregon and your barrels in Nevada and
you could have your buttstocks in California. I mean, you needed
it. You had to take a plane trip to get it all back together. And the joke was always, as they'd
add new laws about this or that and the other, say, well, the
gun, I mean, look at that gun. It's jumping up off the table.
It's killing people. It's running outside and causing
havoc. It's at rest. And until a person
picks it up and operates it, it's not dangerous. Until a child
touches it when he or she shouldn't, it's not dangerous. A knife. I got knives all over
my kitchen. And the only person that's ever
been cut by them is me and Robin. Because they're at rest, and
the children walk into the room, the knives just go, start trying
to slice them. They're at rest, they don't go.
It takes a human being and his will and his motivation and his
effort to grab those tools and try to use them for something,
even good, but carelessly. We're not realizing it's so sharp
and chop the tip of your finger off or not paying attention.
that they become dangerous. Beloved, it's dangerous to be
in the hand of Christ or think you're in the hand of Christ
and find out you're actually trying to affect your own work,
your own salvation. It's the same way. Things that
are at rest, stay at rest. Beloved, stop getting up out
of the grace of God and trying to affect your confidence, your
assurance. Because you didn't do anything
for your salvation, you can't do anything to be hopeful for
it. And I know that psychologically
that's counterintuitive in every aspect. But if you look what he says,
let's read these next few verses so that we can have a close to
this mind, this mindset, this thought. He says, but. He's not
talking about them, he's just making a statement. The deliberate
sin is to reject grace alone. Recall the former days when after
you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings,
sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, sometimes
being partners with those who are treated For you had compassion
on those in prison, sound familiar? And you joyfully accepted the
plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves
had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore, beloved,
do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For
you have need of endurance, so that when you've done the will
of God, you may receive what is promised. For yet a little while, and the
coming one will come and will not delay, but my righteous one
shall live by faith. And if he shrinks back, my soul
shall have no pleasure in him. Verse 39, but we are not of those
who shrink back and are destroyed. But we are of those who have
faith and preserve their souls. Faith in the faithful one who
promised life. That is our hope. That is our
hope. And then the question is, as
we move into next week, what does faith look like? And Paul
answers that. He answers that. Be encouraged
in the truth of this tonight. Let's pray. We thank you, Father,
for the word that you've given us, Lord, for the salvation of
our souls. Lord, help us to really see when
our flesh begins to become self-sufficient. Help us to see when our hearts
and minds turn to the old historical traditions of evangelicalism
and Protestantism or whatever other isms we might come up with
and we sort of feel a little bit better about our hope when
we've been again to practice some of these things. Lord, help
to shake that out of us because it only ends in despair. Father, put it in our minds to
be in your word, to read it, to hear it, to know it, to share
it with others, to focus on that which is eternal and not the
things of this world. Lord, help us to truly begin
to pray that we might be useful to others. If nothing more, but
in our prayers, it is greatly powerful. that we might encourage
each other in the faith, that we might encourage each other
to hold fast. And as we see that we don't suffer
for the same reasons that these Christians suffered when this
letter was written, Father, we know that we are suffering under
the same conditions in many ways across this world. And Lord, there is a loneliness
when it comes to the true gospel because the culture and its false
gospel speaks a lie concerning your son. But this word that
we've heard tonight speaks the truth concerning your son. And
when we rest in you and your truth, the world comes against
us. Our own flesh comes against us. We war and we war. Let us stop warring and help
us to start trusting. Help us to encourage each other
in that journey, knowing that if we would look at the victor,
we would not think we were still, we would see that we are no longer
in the war. And even when it feels like a
battle, we are more than conquerors in Christ Jesus. And it's in
his name we pray, amen.