It might. All right, let's turn
to Hebrews chapter 6. Hebrews chapter 6. And let's start there. We talked
about this a little bit last week when we discussed what Paul was trying
to communicate here. And as you know, he's not changed
themes, he's not changed his focus, he's not teaching something
different. This letter is not a series of
different doctrinal things, it's about one thing and one thing
specifically. And that is, as a polemic against
Judaism, showing that the shadows of religion, the shadows of all
of Judaism, the patriarchs and everything included therein,
all point to and are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. So that you
have the culmination of the letter when we get to the end. You will
see in chapter 12 that there is a kingdom that is Christ that's
in contrast to the kingdom or the mountain that was Sinai and
the law and Moses and Abraham and everything that they are.
Last week we looked in chapter 6 and 5 together and let us begin
reading in verse 1 of chapter 6. It says, Therefore, let us
leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity,
not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works
and of faith toward God and of instruction about washings, the
laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.
And this we will do if God permits. For it is impossible in the case
of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly
gift, and shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness
of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then
have fallen away to restore them again to repentance, since they
are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm
and holding Him up to contempt. For land that is drunk the rain
that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose
sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing. And but if it bears
a blessing from God, but if it bears thorns and thistles, it
is worthless and near to being cursed. And in its end, it is
to be burned. Though we speak of this way,
beloved, yet in your case, we feel sure of better things, things
that belong to salvation. For God is not unjust who has
overlooked your work and the love that you've shown for His
name in serving the saints as you still do. And we desire each
one of you to show the same earnestness, to have the full assurance of
hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish. but imitators
of those through whom faith and patience inherit the promises."
And then he talks about Abraham and the promise that he was given
by the Lord. So let's just chat about this
for a minute. Let's think about, in the context
of this writing, revisiting what it means to understand the elementary
doctrines of Christ. So put yourself in first century
Judaism, put yourself as a Hebrew person who has come to the knowledge
of truth, and by the grace of God you have believed on Jesus
Christ. Then, as you are growing in the
faith, you're not growing in your knowledge of the gospel,
but you are growing in the depths of that knowledge. You don't
learn the gospel, as I've had this conversation today with
a couple of people, you don't learn the gospel after you're
saved. It is knowing and hearing the gospel that is the occasion
of your salvation. That's the occasion of what faith.
Faith must be in an object that is sufficient for salvation.
And that object, of course, is Jesus Christ, the person of Christ,
and His finished work, so that the words and the message of
the cross of Christ and all that it accomplished is the gospel
message. If you've not heard that, and
you've not believed in the explicit message of the cross, then you
haven't been born of God. That's the point. You can't just
be born of God with no knowledge of the cross work of Christ.
Because that is the occasion or through, as we could say,
it's the means through which God purposes to bring life. To bring salvation and the knowledge
of salvation rather. Sometimes these words can be
confusing because we use them in different contexts. So they
can have different meanings depending on who's speaking of them. who's
speaking them. And so when we think about saving
faith, we've already learned in this letter that saving faith
is to believe in the sufficient and finished work of Jesus Christ
alone. So that we're not looking to
anything but Him. We're not looking to find any
other way to have assurance for eternity. We are sufficiently
satisfied and we hope completely that Jesus Christ has purchased
us with His blood and that all the shadows of the promises of
God and Judaism have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. But now we're
back to our little project. If we are to put ourselves in
their shoes for just a moment, imagine how difficult it is this
present day to be in the gospel, to be found in Christ with the
purity of the gospel of free and sovereign grace. That in
the culture that we live in, the religious, spiritually focused,
or whatever term you want to say, how they despise the root
of grace alone. They despise it in such a way
that they come against you, sometimes subtly, well, I just don't believe
that that matters, they'd say. Oh, I just don't believe that
maybe, you know, these are theological things that aren't necessary
to debate. Oh, these are for pastors and
theologians and professors and seminarians and all that kind
of stuff. Well, maybe I've been saved for a hundred years, but,
you know, now I learn the truths of these things and it's okay.
I've grown into the knowledge of the gospel. No, that's not
what Paul teaches. That's not what the scripture
teaches. But imagine learning everything concerning the shadow
of Christ for your entire life, then by the Spirit of God to
be shown that all these shadows are Jesus, and then to believe
by the Spirit, to be born again and to see and have full satisfaction,
hope in the finished work of Christ. What happens? All of
a sudden, all of your buddies, they're beginning to say, why
aren't you coming to synagogue anymore? Why aren't you coming
to temple anymore? Why aren't you coming to the... Why aren't you coming to that?
Why aren't you coming to prayer? Why aren't you coming to this feast? Why aren't
you doing the prayers? Why aren't you wearing the garments?
Why aren't you speaking the lingo? What's going on? We know Jesus.
Okay, let's just concede He is Messiah, but these things are
important too. How do you know that you're really in the faith
if you're going to forsake the very things that God commands?
You know God's commanded it. I don't think He changes His
mind. And you've been there. But now think of it from a cultural
point of view. So as we who believe the gospel are persecuted in
subtle ways and sometimes in direct ways and sometimes in
very aggressive ways, how much more so was the first century
Jew who put away Judaism? Because they understood where
it was and what it was for. To have been given the knowledge
of the truth and then realize that what was coming after them
was their very household, their parents. their siblings, their
friends, their brothers, their sisters, and I know I'm being
repetitive there, and everybody in the community. And not only
that, but when you were in the marketplace, when you were doing
your business, when you were teaching your children, when
you were enjoying whatever recreation that you had, there was always
this undertone of discouragement. Because as you lived as a Jew,
in the precepts of Judaism, you had an affinity there. You had
the same bumper stickers. You had the same t-shirts. You
had the same prayer books. You had the same pastors that
you enjoyed. You had the same teachings. You
had the same prayers. Whatever sporting event you went
to, you did the same spiritual thing. You had your moments of
silence. And then all of a sudden, these things are no longer relevant
to you because the truth is in your heart. And as a Jew, it
became very, very tempting. To stick a toehold back into
Moses. To put a handrail back on Abraham. To find the Holy
of Holies, just a little bit appealing. If nothing else, except
to just give your heart and mind a break. Get away from the constant,
what you would call nagging and frustration and persecution of
those who no longer saw you as an authentic Jew. Or you've forsaken
our culture. Someone said to me Saturday that
culture is the highest priority of a true human being. I don't
understand that whatsoever. And in the context there, they
were talking about their heritage as a Southern person and all
the historical roots of Southern living, specifically before the war, to which I dumbfoundedly
looked like a deer in a headlight that had been struck by the car
and did not know what to say without really being rude to
him." Culture. But it is a powerful influence.
It is a powerful influence. It is not comfortable to be the
odd guy. It is not comfortable to be the
third wheel. It is not comfortable to be the
person that everybody wonders why they're here. It is not comfortable
being invited to speak at a community event and then everybody wonders,
oh my goodness, what is about to come out of his mouth? We're
scared. It is not comfortable being invited to a particular
spiritual event only to be guarded by the sound man Just there with
a mute button up, wondering if you're going to be shut off.
It is not comfortable. It is not comfortable to be a
Jew who has been found in Christ. And the temptation there then
was to try to find a way to appease these people. It's much different
than where we are today. Though I would suggest in one
of the books that I have started writing is the rot of Southern
Christianity. And I can Southern evangelicalism
a lot like first century Judaism, a lot like Roman Catholicism
of the days of the Reformation. that if you are not of the cultural
system of theology or the cultural system of spirituality, then
you are the oddball. And being the oddball, if you
have no voice, you're just a nobody. If you have a voice in the community,
you are hated. Paul is saying to these Jews,
that they need to grow up. They need to grow up, they need
to learn, they need to teach, and he needs to help prepare
them in the way of discernment to be discriminating. Do you
understand that that's what the word means? The word discern
means to discriminate. If I were to pick up a piece
of bread and make a sandwich out of it and take a tomato and
put it on that sandwich and take some turkey or chicken breast
or whatever and put it on that sandwich and I would take it
and put it to my mouth and bite into it and I taste or smell
something rancid that's out of place. We would immediately do
what? We would make a face, we would
take the sandwich away, we would spit out what was in our mouths
because we have tuned or matured our ability to discriminate against
food that is rotted and food that is not. The same thing should be true
in the context of doctrine. The same thing should be true
in the context of the gospel. We should be able to take the
gospel into our ears, see what people are saying concerning
the gospel, and when we start to take a bite of what they're
offering, when something rancid or out of place is in there,
we should discriminate against that and go, no, no, no, no,
no, I will not partake of that. And as we saw last week, Paul's
saying we're going to leave this elementary doctrine. I'm not
going through it again. I told you last week I would
go through this one more time. I'm not going to go again through
explaining the shadow as it relates to the truth. We've been there.
I'm not going to go again talking about repentance from dead works
like everything you ever did as an unbeliever in the name
of righteousness was dead. It was worthless. It did nothing
for you. It cannot do anything for you.
You cannot go to the temple and offer a sacrifice with the purest
of hearts thinking that that will appease God in any manner.
That's a dead work. You have to have your mind changed
about that. We've already talked about those
things. We're not going through them again. Because what's the
opposite of dead works? It's faith in the Lord Jesus
Christ. That's the definition of repentance. We're not going through the instructions
about washing. We're not going to detail out
the baptism of the Hebrews and the Jewish culture and then show
the picture of being baptized into Christ spiritually through
the physical aspects of baptism in the church. We're not going
through these ceremonial instructions anymore. We're not going to do
these things anymore. because you've already been told.
Now, I want to make a point here that I didn't make last Wednesday.
My mind was a little flipped out last week for some reasons,
obvious reasons. We don't have anything in the
Bible that teaches us that there is an argument or evidence in
any type of debate, in any logical system that can cause a man or
woman or a child to be born again. That means that we cannot take
the world religions, learn their precepts, debate those precepts,
counter those precepts with the truth of biblical precepts, and
expect that God would save anybody through that process. It doesn't
happen. A famous evidentialist has recently
died and people tout him as some type of Christian pillar. The
man did not believe the gospel at all. what makes him a pillar of the
Christian faith. He fit the profile of the cultural
spiritual machine. We cannot think, just like Paul
is teaching here, that we can go back through and show all
the negatives of what cultural Christianity looks like and expect
someone to say, you know what, that is all wrong. Here's the
truth. I'll change my mind. Because
we don't need to go back through what people think and believe
in error. We need to assert that which
is true above all things because it is the proclamation of the
truth through which God will save His sheep, His elect. And when we feel the need to
address certain things, we need to go to the text of scripture
as it relates to addressing these things. For example, if we want
to deal with people who add works to the gospel, or if we want
to deal with people who go back to their previous religious experiences,
we can go to Hebrews and we can go to Galatians and we can read
that and teach them there. But more importantly, If we know
the context in which Paul is speaking, the audience to whom
he's speaking, he's speaking to the beloved. So he's not using
either Galatians nor the letter to the Hebrews in any evangelistic
way whatsoever. He is correcting the encroachment
of heresy to the church. Put that a different way. He's
taking believers who know better, who are being confused by these
Judaizers and others, And he's telling them, remember what you
are. You are a child of God. You are
a child of God. Having children. There are many
times in the life of my children where they have not done what
I've asked them to do. As a matter of fact, even last
night, I asked the kids that were at home, what have you accomplished
today? Give me two things that you've
done well. Because I know as a dad, my laundry list at the
end of the day is what they did not get done. It's my human nature. I want to look and show them
how they did not complete everything that they should have completed.
The laundry, the chores, the school, the attitude adjustments,
the general get up off your butt and find something productive
to accomplish, or whatever. But yet at no time in any of
their lives have any of my children ever failed to be my child. It's
not possible. Even if I get mad at them and
throw them out on the street, they're still my child. If I
disown them, if they emancipate themselves from me at the age
of four, they are still my children. There is nothing physically,
scientifically, genealogically that they can do to not be my
progeny. It is impossible. The same is
true for the elect of God. We cannot be lost just because
some well-meaning heretics come in and twist us up. But that
is why Paul writes letters this way. so that he can get the children
back on track. But never has there ever been
someone who has believed the lie that he wants to correct
and say, oh, you're a Christian, you just don't know the truth
yet. It's not the problem. The problem is, you know the
truth. You've even been shown the foundations
of this shadow to the truth. We're not talking about these
people who don't know the truth. As a matter of fact, when I speak
of them, that's what I say. That's when he starts in verse
3. The people who have never known the truth. And this is
an important distinction because we are not lost when we meddle
in muddy waters. But if we've never known the
gospel, we've never been saved. Does that make sense? It is impossible
where there have been those who have been enlightened, and I
went through this last week, who've tasted the heavenly gift,
shared in the Holy Spirit, tasted the goodness of the Word of God
and the powers of the age to come and then fallen away. It
is impossible for those who have been part of the assembly in
proximity through confession. Yes, we believe in the Lord Jesus
Christ. Yes, we believe in His imputed
righteousness. Yes, we believe in this. Yes,
we believe in that. Yes, we believe in election.
Yes, we believe the gospel of free grace, the gospel of sovereign
grace. Yes, we believe, oh, but you know, I'm going back to Judaism
because I just want to feel secure. What does Paul say? That they don't believe the gospel. Because to go back into Judaism
is to have faith in works. Now what's the application for
us today? What is, how do we, I mean, because none of us are
Jewish, I don't think. Southern evangelicalism. General Baptist. I'll be honest
is. Whatever it might be that you
come from. In those days of believing that
you're the manifestation of your life's work in a spiritual sense
of your religion. Gave confidence to you concerning
the life of Christ and his finished atonement. Paul saying. The people that
go back to those things, to back to that belief, they've never
believed. I can't bring them back to the gospel because they've
been taught the gospel. They said they believed it, but
they ran from it. They fell away from grace. Now
see, when you hear that, how many times have you ever heard
someone say they fall, they've fallen from grace? You know what
they're talking about? People who fall into sin. Well, he fell from grace, murdered
his wife. Is that really falling from grace?
No! You know what is falling from
grace? He fell from grace because he
didn't murder his wife and he feels good about it. That's falling
from grace. Isn't it funny how we impart
the exact opposite of what it means in our culture? Oh, you're
just given a license to sin. I am not shut that thing down. Nobody's given a license to sin.
You murder your wife, you go to prison. You're excommunicated
from the fellowship, and we'll visit you on the weekends if
you repent, if you confess your sin. If he listens. If you've fallen away from the witness of the father
concerning Jesus, the son that says he came to buy his people
through his blood, he went through the heavenlies and finished the
work of redemption. He is the founder of the faith.
He is the sanctifier of the brethren. He is the perfect and only high
priest. And the list goes on. If you
don't believe in him alone in this testimony, in the witness
of scripture, there is nothing for you. And what you've done is you've
gone back to dead works. Because what you're doing is
you're crucifying against the son of God to your own harm and
holding him up to contempt. And then the image that Paul
gives here in verse seven is he says this, and this is sort
of review, but we didn't get here last week. For the land
that has drunk the rain that often falls on it and has produced
a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated receives
a blessing from God. So let's put that in picture.
Here's the land, imagine the church as land, or a group of
people as land, and the rain comes down on the land, and the
land soaks in the water, and the water causes the crops to
grow, and the crops grow, and they produce whatever harvest
is supposed to be done. And we who are the people are actually
benefiting from that harvest. We get it, it's useful, here
we are. That's a picture, it's called
imagery. And the opposite of that is if
it produces a blessing, if it produces a harvest, a crop, it's
useful. But on that same land, what else
can come? Thorns and thistles and weeds
and briars and inedible mushrooms and all sorts of things. That
is not harvested and fed to the family. That is cut down and
burned. So when God saves His people,
amongst the large majority of these people, there is oftentimes... Let me change that. Amongst the
whole of these people, there is oftentimes a majority who
are not His, but they just sort of follow along. They just sort
of walk around, they just sort of go, yeah, this is good. Because
in that moment, when it's fresh and new, it's sort of like when
somebody goes to a new store and they find a new idea of a
clothing or whatnot, and then everybody in town ends up with
the clothing, or the hairpiece, or the pocketbooks, or the shoes,
or the shotguns, or the tires, or the new radio, or the new
CD, or the new album, or the new sunglasses, or the new koozie. or the new cooler, or whatever
it might be, it's real interesting and fun to get into that mode
of fitting in. And so the same thing is true
in a spiritual sense. Everybody's coming to believe
the gospel. Everybody's coming to the quote, reform faith. Everybody's
coming to the evangelicalism. Everybody's becoming Protestant.
And so when a movement happens amongst a mass of people, many
people follow suit. But then when it starts to divide
out and people begin to see exactly the cost that really comes with
being in Christ, those who have not been born of God will no
longer accept the wage of what it requires to stand for Christ. Now this isn't my interpretation
of this. This is what it's teaching. And Jesus actually is teaching
the same thing when he talks about the sower and the soil. What does he say? The hard path
where the birds just pick it up. What did he say that was?
He sends Satan to take the word of God out of their minds. God
does that. He actively reprobates and blinds
people who are not his. And he teaches that in many places.
2 Corinthians 4. He teaches in the parable of
the sower. He teaches in Romans 1. He teaches in Romans 3. He
teaches in Romans 9. In Galatians. I mean, you see it a lot of places.
And then you see there's a crop, rain comes, it's good soil it
seems and things come out and there's excitement and it grows
up and all of a sudden, what happens? The thorns come up and choke
it out. What does Jesus say that is? The problems of the world.
What is it? Persecution. I can't believe
you're going to that cult. I can't believe you moved from Texas.
I can't believe you, you know, I can't believe you do that.
I can't believe you believe this. I can't believe you wouldn't believe
the gospel that your grandma did. I can't believe you're part
of it. You know what? I don't need you
working here anymore. You're going to be part of that
church. You're going to believe that gospel. I tell you what,
I'm going to write a letter about you to every church in town.
There you go. I wrote it so fast I didn't sign my name to it.
True story. And the list goes on and on.
And that person goes, I just can't take this. Okay, I'm not
a Christian anymore. Well, I am, but I don't believe
that. Or if I do, it's okay. I'm with y'all now. That's what
happens. So in this picture, then what
happens? If we use this as a metaphor, then what does it look like?
But in the soil, that is good. How is soil good? Because the
what? The farmer The landowner prepares
the soil to receive the seed. So God prepares the heart of
the elect to receive the seed of the gospel. And when it's
planted, it receives the word and the word stays there. And
when a weed comes up, the farmer plucks it out. I've seen somebody say, well,
you know what that that soil, that product, that fruitfulness,
that's that's obedience and good stuff and good morals and a clean
mouth and a clean mind and a clean hand and praise the Lord. And
I'm not trying to be I'm not trying to be condescending or
mocking in that context, but it's really silly to impose that
type of stuff when that's the very thing that Paul's talking
about here in Hebrews. We don't look at our lives in
this way. So when the Word of God says that the soil that is
prepared by the Lord is able to receive the Word and it produces
a harvest, the harvest in the context of that is faith. Same illustration. If it bears
thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and
it is burned in the end. What's burned in the end? Thorns
and thistles. Unproductive things that come
out of the ground. Where did the rain come from?
The same source. What soil did it grow out of?
The same soil in this picture. And so for all intents and purposes
we see now that there's a group of people who claim to be in
Christ but all of a sudden now the ones who are not producing
faith to believe in the finished work of Christ and remain in
Him are going back to the old dead works of Judaism. They're
going back to the old way of their confidence. They're going
back to the old way of going, you know what, I got up this
morning and I jogged 10 miles, and then I ate a good breakfast,
and I took my multibottoms, and I drank nine glasses of water,
and I did Kung Fu for an hour, and I studied the Bible, and
I learned French, and I did all this kind of stuff, and I read
my children to sleep in three different languages from three
different translations of the Bible, and then we prayed all night
and woke up fresh and started it all new today, hallelujah,
I'm living for Jesus, let's do it again. That's what happens.
And we feel pretty confident. And on the way to church, we
stub our toe and we go, fraggernackle. Oops, I messed up, Lord. I might
not be saved. And I'm not mocking people's
conviction when they find evil and sin in their hearts. But
what else do you think you're going to find there if you're left
to your own flesh? Flesh. So Jesus Christ, who is
in us, it is not I, James Tipton, who lives, but it is Christ who
lives within me. So the new man in me is Jesus.
The new mind in me is Christ's. Which is yours in Christ Jesus,
Philippians. So the fruit of all that I am to believe in the
finished work of all that Christ has done is all of God, is all
of grace. It is a gift. And if I one day
stand up here and say, you know what guys, I've been wrong and
I want you to know we're going to start dealing with some church
discipline here a little bit different. And we're going to
stand up here and we're going to get confession of our sins every dag on time.
We get together. We're going to purify this church.
We're going to formalize this stuff. We're putting two center
aisles down here because we're going to do it right now. I'm
tired of it. Y'all better throw me out on my head, my butt, my
legs, my elbows, and my face. And you better do it fast. Don't
give me a week. Don't give me two times in this pulpit. If I bring
this church back to dead works, I am disqualified and I should
not be called a brother until I have repented before you all. And Paul says, if I do that,
it's almost impossible for me to come back to the mindset that
Christ is enough. That's what he means. It's almost
impossible for me to come back to the mindset that Christ is
enough because I am crucifying him for nothing. Because if he died and I've still
got to be a Jew, If he died and I still have to prove something
to him, if he died and I still have to be imparted some type
of some type of righteousness or justification that's working
itself into steps and stages, then I, he's not enough. His work is insufficient. His
work is dependent upon me. Even if it's monergistic, it's
still dependent upon me. If Jesus is trying and I'm not
doing it, then Jesus isn't doing it well enough. And He needs
to talk to Yoda because Yoda's smarter than God. There is no
try. And before we get too bent out
of shape, we need to recognize that in verse 9, what does he
say? We are speaking these things, but not about you. So Paul is
correcting the church. He's correcting the saints, but
he's not condemning the saints. As a matter of fact, he's not
rebuking the saints. He's encouraging the saints to
realize that when I get through with this letter, there's going
to be a lot of you that are gone. Unconverted people that put on
airs can tolerate grace for several years before they just have to
bolt. And they will try their best to convert the church to
an improper image of righteousness. And we've seen it here in our
midst. And by the Lord's mercy, they
have been put out and we have been spared. We're speaking this way, but
we feel sure of better things. Things that belong to salvation.
You are not giving up your hope in Jesus Christ just because
you were tempted to walk into Judaism again. See, they didn't
go back, but they were tempted to. You don't go back to free will
once God saves you. You don't go back to a well-meant
offer once God saves you. You don't go back to dead work.
You weren't saved and ignorant. You were lost in religion. You
were lost in a false Christ, in a false hope, with a false
gospel. But as I said today, which was
told to me in 2003, America has a love affair with salvation
experiences. We want to talk about what we've
experienced, what we've come to know, what we've come to feel,
what we've done, what God has done for us. We want a testimony
that's longstanding. We want to stand before people
and say, I was saved in 1973. And God's shown me a lot. In
1990, he showed me the gospel and I understood that. Now you
were saved then. Otherwise, we continue to give
testimony of dead works. You see what Paul's showing?
We're not going back through and saying, these are dead works.
We're not going back to show you these dead works were dead. You were dead when you were doing
dead works. You were dead when you had a
dead faith and dead works. You were dead when you thought
that your relationship with God and righteousness was your doing. That's why I hate testimonies
that have to do with me, myself, and I. A testimony is about what
God has done and finished through Jesus Christ, and saving faith
is to believe in the revelation of the witness of God the Father
concerning His Son, and that is it. Things that belong to salvation.
And then in verse 10, there's a further explanation here that
goes down through verse 12. For God's not unjust as to overlook
your work and the love that you've shown for His name and serving
the saints as you still do. We'll get there. Chapter 10,
we've already seen that here. Encourage one another. As long
as the day, exhort one another. Don't be deceived and hardened
by sin. If we hold fast to Christ, we've
shared in Christ, so God has not overlooked it. Just because you know that it's
all of grace, just because you were in this place of turmoil,
just because you love these people, don't think that it was a waste.
You ever loved a lost person thinking they were a brother
and they stabbed you in the face? You ever encouraged and fed a so-called
sibling in Christ and turn out their apostate, they run, they
just go. And what does it do? It's like,
look at the waste. Paul even uses it, says, I prayed it in
labor and vain. But God doesn't look at that and go, look at
that waste. God's not unjust. Because you've
shown not just the work and love you've had for those people who
you thought were the saints, but also the work and the love
you've had for all the saints. You've served the saints and
you're serving the saints now. Does it sound familiar? Paul's
writing to the Thessalonians. He praised them for that. Beloved,
it's the reason we're here. So we get the gospel right, we
get the gospel pure, and then we come to the place of realizing
that our life in the gospel is to love one another as Christ
has loved, that we might continue to encourage each other to maintain
faith in the gospel. So if we're gonna love each other
in a way of exhorting and admonishing and warning, as we get over to
chapter 10, you'll see there are like four or five warnings
in this text. We've dealt with two of them already. We what? We're to warn more about falling
away from grace than we are to warn about falling into sin.
I'm going to say that again. We are to warn each other about
falling away from grace than we are to warn each other about
falling into sin. And remember what I said when
people said he fell from grace because he murdered his wife.
Falling from grace is when you want to murder your wife. You
know what? I didn't do it. God has made me not a murderer anymore.
That's falling from grace. Because we have a testimony of
our own self-righteousness. There's no grace there. Jesus
hates self-righteous people. He did not die for them. He will
not save them. His words, not mine. God even
said that to the prophet Isaiah. Blind the hearts and the eyes
and the ears so they cannot believe. But then Paul says, we desire
each one of you to show the same earnestness. What earnestness? To have the full assurance of
hope until the end. Hold fast. This is hard, beloved. Remember, Christ was tempted,
but he did not sin. He is your advocate. He is your
power. You can go bold before the throne of grace. We've already
learned that. Go back and listen to it if you don't remember it. bow before
the throne of grace. We can come in our time of need.
Christ will help us in our temptation when we feel like we are alone
and abandoned. We are not alone and abandoned.
Christ prayed this. He promised it to the disciples
in John 14, 15, 16. He would not leave them as orphans. He
has not done that. He has finished the work of redemption.
And I want you, beloved, to have the same earnestness, to have
the same full assurance of hope until the end so that you may
not be sluggish. Because what does it do for us?
We'll talk about this a little bit more next week because it
is the promise of God, verse 13, that gives us the striving. Don't be sluggish. Continue to
work and love. Continue to do that which you've
been called to do. Continue to serve one another
and to hold fast to the gospel of grace till the end. Don't let your flesh cause you to fear. Be imitators of those who through
faith and patience inherit the promises. And we know what chapter
11 looks like, right? I'm like, Paul, why don't you
just put, because he's got to talk about the promises for the
next three chapters. That's why. He's got to look at it. He's
got to show us what this promise is. The promise is Christ. Christ. Christ died. He settled the debt. It is finished. He's not offering it to any.
He's done it for you. That's the gospel message. So hold fast. We look to Christ,
but we also have a long heritage of those who held fast. And when
I get to chapter 11, I want to slow down and I want to talk
maybe in depth week after week after week of those people who
did not receive what they were looking for, except they looked
at it by faith. And I want to show you how their
lives really looked. I want to show you what Abraham's
life was really like. I want to show you Gideon. I want to show you Samson. I
want to show you Samuel. And David. Moses. When you look at these people,
you realize, wow, it is all of grace. It's all of grace. It's about the promise of God
fulfilled in Christ, and it is finished. Don't go back to dead
works. Don't put your assurance in yourself. Don't put your assurance in the
power of God in you. Put your assurance in the promise
of God for you, and that is Jesus. Let's pray. We thank you, Father,
for this great and eternal promise. Hugging it to our hearts and
minds, grow it there, help us to share it, help us to live
it, help us to learn it more and more and to teach it to one
another. And Father, we praise you, we
praise you for all that you are and all that you've done for
us, for your namesake and for your glory as you've revealed
it to us in Jesus Christ. In his name we pray, amen.