Walk into chapter 6 as we are
able, and we'll see how far we get.
Again, for those of you who don't know, we do a reading of, or
a reading through, and so as we do our midweek, we go a lot
quicker than we would if we were doing exposition on Sunday mornings.
So let's read together, starting in chapter 5, verse 11. About this we have much to say,
and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing,
for though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone
to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of
God. You need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives
on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is
a child, but solid food is for the mature, for those who have
had their powers of discernment trained by constant practice
to distinguish good from evil. 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, and laying on the hands,
and the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment, and so
forth. 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 have fallen away, it is impossible 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 has drunk the rain that often falls on it and produces
a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated receives
a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles,
it is worthless and near to being cursed. and its end is to be
burned, verse 9. Though we speak in this way,
yet in your case beloved, we feel sure of better things, things
that belong to salvation. For God is not unjust as to overlook
your work and the love that you have shown for His name and 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 be imitators
of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. So, let's catch ourselves up.
Here we are, Paul writing to these Christian Hebrew people.
And in the sense that he's writing, he's doing so because they have
had the occasion through pressure, through life, through frustration,
through temptation, to fall away from the gospel and to fall into
works. to fall back into Judaism, to
go into a place where they would say on one side of their mouth,
I believe in the grace of God and the finished work of Jesus
Christ, and on the other side of their mouth, but I'm a little
fearful that I may not be in Christ or that Christ may not
be enough or that there may be something else that I must do.
And so when I was in Judaism, it was a lot more comfortable
for me. This is the circumstances that's happening. So as this
Judaism was appealing to these Christians, Paul wrote this letter
on this occasion so that we might understand and of course they
might understand that this was indeed what? Apostasy. It was sin. It was something
that could not be overcome. If we say that Christ's imputed
righteousness is ours, yet we are going to try to do something
to earn our righteousness or to support our righteousness,
thus support our confidence, we are falling away from Christ. That's the warning passage that
we see in Hebrews 6. And we see them also again in
Hebrews chapter 10 where we begin to see that there is an impossibility
to bring to those repentance, a transformation of disposition
or a change of mind. Repentance evidences itself by
this, saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is simply and
always and only believing in Jesus and what He did and the
accomplishment that He made. In our world today, many people
who would consider themselves spiritual always fall into the
practice of some type of spiritual maturing through the way that
they live or the morality that they hold. And in doing so, they
are in danger of trusting in that work rather than trusting
in the work of Christ. Now that does not say, as we've
read through Romans last year, we know good and well that there
is no such thing as a license for sin. What does a license
do? It gives you permission. A license
gives you the privilege and the ability. If you have a license
to drive, you're able to get into a car without consequence.
If you have a license to marry, you're able to reap the benefits
of the state's requirements for marriage. If you have a license
to kill, I guess you're James Bond. But nowhere can you find
the license to sin. But grace is so amazing. Grace
is so powerful. Grace is so simplistically perfect
that it leaves the creature with nothing to do but believe in
the grace of God. And it is such that we are so
often tempted to think, well, I can just live the way I want
to live and do what I want to do. I could be like the Addams
family, say what I want to say, live how I want to live, play
how I want to play, all this stuff. And that's it. You get
my references. I dated myself then. But that's not what the scripture
teaches. But the scripture does teach that when we find ourselves
living in the flesh, as believers, our confidence is in the finished
work of Christ. So therefore, we are exhorted
and we are admonished to hold fast to our hope that is in Christ.
And because of his love for us and what he's done for us on
his cross, we then are, I don't know, motivated. We are compelled
to not suffer Him's shame, to not ignore the sacrifice that
He made, but we are motivated to strive to walk in a manner
worthy of this great call. The problem comes is when we
think that the moral side of walking the way we should walk
and living the way we should live is our confidence. This
is the problem. Paul has already shown that the
law in itself has been used for its purpose. Paul says it very
clearly in Romans chapter 3 that the righteousness of God is manifested
apart from the law. But the law, though the law and
the prophets bear witness to the righteousness of God, they
are not the righteousness of God. Nor are they to be understood
that way. So then Moses is dead. Moses
is finished. He's finished the work. He's
sitting at the feet of Christ, resting from his work. What Moses
was to do What's to what? Point to Christ. Well, then the
high priest, this is where we are here in this letter, the
high priest for millennia, over and over and over again, sacrifice
something for their own sins, sacrifice something for the people's
sins, sacrifice something for their own sins, sacrifice something
for the people's sins, their shedding of blood, the remission
of sins. Yet the scripture teaches us very clearly that there is
no shedding of blood. from bulls and goats and birds
that ever did anything to justify any human being, nor did it ever
appease the wrath of God, but it was to point to the one whom
God would give to be the final lamb, Jesus the Christ. And there are believers amongst
this Hebrew people who have now just fallen away. They have put
their foot back on Moses and said, you know, Moses took us
far and Joshua took us the rest of the way. We want to go back
there because there's confidence there. And Paul is saying there's
no confidence there. As a matter of fact, he illustrates
it this way, that in the Exodus, while God in his power removed
his people out from under the slavery of Egypt and gave them
an amazing miracle every moment for 40 years, to sustain them
in the wilderness. It also was a shadow of two things. It was a shadow of God's grace
and provision and redemption that was temporary on this earth
to be seen in Christ Jesus eternally. And it was also a shadow of God's
judgment and wrath against those who would just refuse his promise.
and not believe in the sufficiency of His promise. So that's why
He let the generations die. And then Joshua comes in and
gives them the land that they were even scared to take because
of the giants, because of these great armies. Yet God gave them
and delivered them into the land of promise, and it itself was
a shadow. For if it were the place that
He promised eternally, then God would have not spoken of another
day, of another true rest, who is Jesus Christ. And so what
Paul then is doing is walking through the precepts of Judaism
piece by piece and showing that Christ is the fulfillment of
these things and that if we ever take Christ plus anything, there's
no Christ at all. We saw that high priest, as Jesus
was appointed to be the true and one and only high priest,
all the high priest of men were appointed every year over and
over again until their death and then a new one would be appointed. And we saw the allusion that
we'll see over in chapter seven about Melchizedek, whom Abraham
gave a tithe and honor. But in verse 11, which is where
we are tonight, and I've said this already last week, but I
want to remind us as we move into it about this, we have much
to say about what about the eternal nature of the finished work of
Jesus, about the promise of Christ, about the sufficiency of the
good news of the grace of God, all of these things. We have
much to say. But Paul says it is hard to explain
to some of them because they... Now listen, who's he speaking
to? He's speaking to his beloved.
And so what we need to understand here just by way of just stepping
back for a moment and realizing what's taking place is that there
are believers and then amongst those believers there are some
believers who are considering Judaism as a viable oxman just
in case. Because there are some unbelievers
who are amongst them who are continually trying to get people
to rest in the sufficiency of their flesh instead of the sufficiency
of Christ. So this letter, though it was
written thousands of years ago to a people that no longer even
exist in the world in the way they exist here, it is very relevant
for us. It is very relevant for us. Because
there are a lot of believers and there are a lot of false
believers who have grown dull of hearing. And then he says, for by this
time you ought to be teachers. What does a teacher need? A subject. A teacher needs a
student. A teacher needs the knowledge
of that which he's going to teach. And he needs someone that he
might be able to teach these things. There is no such thing
as a teacher who doesn't know the material or who doesn't have
a student. Yet some of you ought to be teachers,
says Paul. But because they need milk, and
not solid food, they can't be teachers. Now let's talk about
this for a moment. And there are many, as Brother
Nick is saying earlier, there are many different approaches
to milk and meat and milk and meat. There is the negative approach
to milk in the sense that it is something that only infants
have. When you have a brand new baby, or even a young child,
you can't just shove a steak in its mouth. You can't just
put big pieces of bread, like Trey, and put it, you know, and
get choked up in your first Lord's Table presentation. I mean, you
just have to be careful not to shove something too hard into
the mouth of a child because if you do, you could choke it.
It's not ready for that. Yet if you feed it nothing, it
will perish. So you have to feed it something.
So we understand that when it comes to the context of milk,
and the way Paul is dealing with it here, it's not a positive
thing. Yet it is a positive thing for
nourishment. It is a positive thing for infants.
So right now, Paul is basically saying, you guys are babies.
You're babies in the faith, but you think you're something else.
You are infants in the faith. You've never graduated to understand
the certainty of the grace of God, and you are being misled,
like he said to the Galatians. You are being misled by those
people who will bother you, to which he responded, I wish if
they want to start chopping off body parts, they would just emasculate
themselves. Because if circumcision worked
for you, you have nothing in Christ. You cannot find any profit
in Him. So, what about solid food? Solid food is what we graduate
children to. They grow up, they learn to eat
more. You can't be on a liquid diet for your entire life. When
we're infants, we're on a liquid diet. When we get a little bit
older and we're sick, we sometimes get on a liquid diet. But when
we're healthy, we eat solid food. And that is the comparison there.
Yet there are some times we see milk as a way of looking at the
purity of the gospel. And that's another explanation
that's not much in here. Paul is not really wanting us
to go and dig too much into that, but we need to understand as
well that there is a purity in a mother's milk. We don't have
formula for cows and formula for pigs and formula for puppies.
Well, I guess we could if the vet prescribed it and the mother
wasn't But the animal in itself makes the purest form of nutrition
for those baby animals and it is what is needed for life and
sustenance. So in a positive way, the gospel
in itself is pure as milk is pure. But in this context, it's
not what you want to be on. You want to graduate. Now, I've
said this before and I'll say it again. Let's read it one more
time. For though by this time you ought
to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic
principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk
is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. So you'll
learn that I get ahead of myself when I talk and teach, and then
I prove what I say by going back and reading what I should have
read to start with. So Paul is calling them children, that they
have never matured and learned to eat correctly. They've never
learned to digest the word of God. And this is what he's showing
them. If you had digested the word
of God, you'd be teaching rightly the gospel that I'm defending.
You'd be teaching others to not wander away back into the precepts
of the law and of Moses. Not go back into the context
of what? Of all of these ceremonial things. Not to put trust and confidence
in the flesh. But to see it as it is. But since you are not
skilled In the Word, you are not skilled. In the Word of righteousness,
you remain a child. And you can't handle mature food. You can't eat a steak. You can't
eat bread. We've got to go back and teach
you again. That's what he's saying. Now,
I have had people argue with me through the years that this
particular text teaches that there are some elementary doctrines
that are just infantile. that aren't, once we get them
we just move on and then there's some deeper things that we have
to dig through scripture and find. That's not the case. It's
not the case. We all learn to walk at a certain
age in life. And then we're forever progressing
in that way we walk. Now I know for some of us we
still might walk like we're ten months old. Depends, but no pun
there. But we know, we come to a place
where we're not worried about walking. We're not looking at
our feet, just like driving. Remember when you first started
driving, you were scared to death to die. Some of you, I was, scared to
death to die. I obeyed every yellow sign, red
sign, green sign, sticker, anything on the road. If I saw somebody
put up a sign that says, hey, slow down, I'd slow down. I mean,
it didn't matter. I did not want to die. Now I
don't think about driving. I just go. I don't even look
at the road. I'm looking back here. I'm reading the Bible. I'm not
even building a tablet. I shouldn't have said that. But you know,
it doesn't matter. I'm not worried about it. I've gotten skilled
in not dying. Not necessarily driving. But
I've gotten skilled in not dying while driving. And so I don't
have to go back and learn. They're sort of instinctive.
That's sort of how it is when we grow into a particular subject.
Katie brought up some chemistry last night, and I was writing
down a bunch of formulas that I used to know, and I got it
right. I had to figure, there were three formulas that could
have worked, and there was one of them that I remembered, and
I got it right. She tested me on it this morning. She's got
some physics we're gonna look at tomorrow, and I can't wait for
that, because at least I know the lingo of physics. But when
we first start these things, it's sort of like Greek to us.
When we look at some of this hard material, it often becomes
a little perplexing and we don't understand how to approach it.
But after a while, it just sort of comes second nature. Language. You get the point. What's more
important than the believer knowing the standard and the focused
foundation of the gospel? Nothing. But sometimes we Let's
just put it this way. Culturally speaking, there are
very few people who learn the scripture because there are very
few people who teach the scripture. There are very few people who
would take the book and digest it. And these immature Christians
are easily led. James says they're tossed to
and fro like what? Like a wind on every doctrine.
It'd sort of be like the spiritual conspiracy theorists. that man,
you know what, Jesus might not have really been Jesus. He might
have had a different name. And one thing goes to another
and after a while it's, I believe this, I'm solid on this, I'm
standing on this. Somebody pressures you and you think that sounds
pretty good too. We can't be that way, beloved.
We cannot be that way. You ought to be teachers. You
need someone to teach you, again, the basic principles of the oracles
of God. You need milk, not solid food,
for those who live on milk are children, and they're unskilled
in the word of righteousness. Do you realize that over in chapter
four, we've already seen Paul say that the word of God is living
and breathing, active, sharper than any two-edged sword, that
it cuts bone and marrow and soul and mind and thought, spirit?
And then he uses a personal pronoun, no one can escape him. Jesus
Christ, who is the living word of God. If we are to be skilled
in the word of righteousness, it means we're skilled in the
doctrine of Christ, the teaching of Christ, the person of Christ.
So the foundations of the faith is to understand who Christ is,
what He actually accomplished in its efficacy, and for whom.
Those are the basics. If we read the Gospel of John,
as we've been doing for several years now on Sunday morning,
and as we look and we see in chapter 20, verse 31, where John
writes, I've written these things that you may believe that Jesus
is the Christ and by believing you may have life in His name.
Right? So by believing that He is the
Christ and that He is God, you have life in His name? No. All
that he wrote, the testimony of the Lord Jesus, all the teachings,
all the work, And everything that's detailed in the Gospel
of John is what he says is sufficient for life, to know Christ. I think I said it last week,
knowing is the full battle. And Brother Mike sent me the,
actually, G.I. Joe, wasn't it? Knowing's half the battle. Knowing
is the full battle. It's the full battle. But why
is it that so many people could become dull of hearing? They
know these things, but yet they're dull of hearing. There's an old
adage that says the squeaky wheel gets the oil. And you may not
understand that, but if you've ever ridden a machine that squeaked
or had a door that squeaked, you want to oil it. It's ridiculous. You know, it'll drive you insane
at night. Yeah, y'all got one problem needs
fixing. OK, so we you know, we don't we want to oil that. We
want to fix that noise. It's crazy. But yet there's a
lot of other things that need our attention. But that noise,
that incessant squeaking always gets our attention over everything
else. And beloved, this is how the
world is. When we have weak and immature
people in the body of Christ and they want to assert themselves
in a position of authority to try to tell everybody else what
they need to believe. And they come back to the place
where they're asserting works, they're asserting the law, they're
asserting all of the precepts and the practices of the flesh
to such a degree that it actually clouds out the gospel of grace.
This is where, and this is the occasion, this is the purpose
of Paul's writing in this context. We have to realize that there
are many people who will make much of nothing and make much
of error to a fault. And your eyes and your focus
is are taken away from that. And it's not just the context
of Hebrews either moving into assurance of law or works or
the flesh. But it could be anything could
be any doctrine whatsoever. And I think about this all the
time. We are called to emulate Christ. We are called to teach
as Christ taught, to love as Christ loved, to think as Christ
thought, to speak as Christ spoke. Paul says to follow him and emulate
him as he follows Christ. Yet when I say that stuff from
a pastoral position, a lot of people would say, oh, no, no,
you're going to tell me how to live my life. No, Jesus is telling
you how to live your life. The Word of God is telling you
how to live your life. The difference is, I don't live my life according
to the Word of God because I fear God's judgment. I've been rescued
from that. I love the Lord Jesus because
He's first loved me. So the motivation that I have,
if I love you, and Paul says it here, I'll read it to you.
We're not going to get into it until the week after next. God is not
going to forget and overlook your work and the love that you've
shown for His name in serving the saints as you still do. There's
no other way to serve and love the Lord Jesus except to love
and serve His people. And so if we are able to teach,
then we should be teaching. But when all we're doing is making
assertions that continually point people away from growing in the
knowledge of grace, we are damaging the body of Christ. We are defaming
the name of Christ. We are doing harm to our brothers
and sisters in the church. And think about it. Where in
the narrative of the New Testament, even the commands that you see
from the apostolic authority, Where in the New Testament do
we see all the examples of just raising canes and starting divisions
and doing all the things that is so popular today in our culture
in the name of gospel purity or defending the truth? How did
Paul defend the truth? He rightly divided it. He rightly
divided it so that when he'd make gospel assertions, And he'd
assert and assert and assert. He'd make gospel propositions.
Those things that didn't line up with that were automatically
suspect, weren't they? I saw a video this last week
where this little toddler, two years old, the mother acted like
she had feces on her hand. It was chocolate. She wiped it
on the child's arm. And the child starts gagging.
And I'm thinking, just go ahead, throw up. Serves your mama right.
But the child was gagging. No, it's okay. It's just chocolate.
She would not believe it was chocolate. There was no way because
the context was this woman came out of the bathroom with toilet
paper, wiped it on her child's arm because she wants some clicks
on whatever the social media platform she had. She's getting
some clicks, all right. Cruel clicks. But there was nothing
that she could do to cause that child to believe that wasn't
some gross stuff on her arm, to the point when she picked
it up and licked it herself, the child gags more. You see? What's the point? There's a great
illustration. This is how you mature. When you know the truth
of something, and in its context, someone puts out things that
should not be there, you gag. When someone tells you to eat
something and tells you that it's something that it's not, but
you know the context from which it comes is not appropriate to
put in your mouth and digest in your body, you gag. And when
the truth of Christ is asserted, and you are maturing and rightly
dividing the word of righteousness, when you are growing in your
understanding of the gospel, When someone else comes along
with these crazy assertions, these immature accusations, these
frustrating infantile, just like one, two punches, you go, no,
that's not the truth. Yet I could have a class and
charge money for it. I could do a 25-part class on
all the damnable heresies of history. And Trey and I could
probably put that on video and make mega money over it. And
everybody that took it would feel like they're an expert in
the truth, but they're actually an expert in heresy. And so you see that Paul doesn't
spend any time in this letter, none, zero. He spends no time
in this letter dealing with all the errors. He just shows how
the error of thinking that these things mattered is wrong by showing
what they really did. So this positive doctrinal teaching
of the truth of Christ in light of all these things puts to death
all of this other stuff. But he's not finished. I don't know about you, but when
I was called a child, when I wasn't a child, it hurt my feelings.
It actually made me angry. And he continues, verse 14, but
solid food is for the mature. For those who have their powers
of discernment trained, how? How do we train our powers of
discernment? I've already said it. Constant practice to distinguish
good from evil. And in that context there, that
good and evil is to understand what is truth and what is error.
It's not as much about how we live. We all know what's good
and evil. It's about what is true. It's
about what is right concerning the testimony of God. You know,
we make God a liar when we say we refuse to believe that concerning
His Son, when God's Word says that concerning His Son. How
horrifying must it be to call God a liar? Well, that's where
chapter 6 goes. Because they're dull of hearing,
because some of them are so immature, they can't even get off milk. Let us leave the elementary doctrines
of Christ because you're still stuck there. Now, you just heard
me say that the way we mature is to start and understand the
elementary doctrines of Christ. So now Paul's saying to leave
it. Is that literally what he means to just leave it behind?
No, because everything comes from there. In 1 Corinthians
we can see what Paul says concerning how we build upon that which
is already built. If we build upon the material
of the prophets, if we build upon all the things that are
given to us from the Old Testament, if we build upon that, we have
to build upon that with the same material. So in other words,
the language and the story and the teaching of the prophets
from the Old Testament are identically the same thing that God has revealed
in the New Testament. because they reveal Christ. Christ,
rather, reveals what they were speaking of. Jesus says in John
5, when the Pharisees accuse him of being blasphemous and
having dare he as a sinner, someone who eats with sinners and lives
with sinners and had an unwed mother, how dare he tell them
they have sinned? And who do you think you are?
We're the sons of Abraham. We're the sons of Moses. And
what does Jesus say? Moses is who's going to indict
you when you stand before the father, because he wrote of me.
So this elementary doctrine of Christ is what we continue to
go and understand. And it's not a hidden message,
it's a maturing message. Just like we learn to drive a
little bit better, learn to walk a little bit better, learn to
speak a little bit clearer and more grammatically correct. We're
not constantly thinking about those things, they just happen.
With the same building blocks of Christ, we grow and mature
in our knowledge of grace. And it's never going to stop.
But in this sense, Paul does list some, and for those of you
who haven't been with me, yes, I assert that Paul wrote Hebrews
and can argue it very confidently. But he gives us some things.
He says we're not gonna lay a foundation again from repentance from dead
works. What is repentance from dead works? All the obedience
to the precepts of the law of Moses, all the things that were
done for thousands of years as Jews did nothing to appease God
or to justify those people. They were to show them God's
promise in the coming Christ. So no matter how hard we obey,
no matter how hard we love, no matter how hard we did good stuff,
no matter how awesome we helped people and did all sorts of things,
these are dead works. And more specifically, dead works
is not believing in the sufficiency of Christ's work. That's the
first and foremost. And then everything else that
we think grants us some type of favor with God is a dead work.
So it's a dead work. We're not going to go back and
start talking about all those things again. Paul's saying,
I'm not going to go back and show you every shadow of everything
that you've ever accomplished as a Jew and show you why it's
not sufficient. I'm not doing that. I'm going
to show you Christ. And the spirit of God is going
to give you faith to believe it or he's not. Faith toward God. That's why
it says repentance of dead works, a change of disposition concerning
dead works. That means someone's righteousness and faith toward
God. That's why I can assert contextually
that repentance and faith are not two separate things, but
just one in the same. The very fact that you believe in the
sufficiency of the finished work of Jesus Christ for your righteousness
is repentance. Your mind has been changed concerning
righteousness. We're not going to talk about
washings. What do the washings mean? What do the baptisms mean?
Jews had three types of baptisms. You know what they were? Dunking,
sprinkling, pouring. Sound familiar? Nothing's changed. The laying on of hands, the scapegoat,
The resurrection of the dead, eternal judgment. We're not going
to go back through and deal with all these things. Stop arguing
about all these things. See, when Paul writes his letter
to the, his pastoral letters, he writes two to a young, to
young Timothy. And he forbids Timothy, he said,
pastors can't get in dealing with all this doctrinal dialogue,
all bogging down and all this kind of stuff. You got a job
to do and you need to do it. You don't need to do anything that will take
you away from that job ever. You're not the yard man. Stop
doing yard work because you love yard work. Stop cleaning out
the gutters when you're supposed to be mopping the floors. You
see what I mean? Do your job. Don't get bogged down in civilian
pursuits. Don't get bogged down in arguments
over words. Don't get bogged down. What does
he tell the others? What does his other letter say?
Stop dividing. When you tell somebody that this
is the truth of the gospel of grace, and they go, yeah, but
no, I don't think so. Well, that's not happening for
me. Just warn them. I'm not having this conversation
with you one more time. And when they say, well, yeah,
you are, you go, no, and you walk away. You don't labor for
days and weeks and months and years arguing these positions
with people. It is unfruitful and it's not
healthy for your soul or for your body or for your relationships. It's like watching soap operas
and they get mad at your spouse because you just project that
stressful relationship onto your own. It shouldn't be like that. We're going to leave these elementary
doctrines. And we're going to do this if God permits. Now,
there's two things at stake here, and I don't have a whole lot
of time, so I'm going to probably get another sentence or two, and then we'll pick up
from there again in verse 11 next week, because there's more
to say. We'll do this if God permits.
We'll do two things, both in the same. We will deal with growing
and maturing in the knowledge of grace. And some of you will grow if
God permits it. So if God permits us to teach
it to you, fine. And if God gives you ears to
hear it, fine. Because what he says next in
verse four is an extremely difficult thing to read for some people.
Because we see it in the world that we live in and we see it
all the time where people will confess to believe the Lord Jesus,
to believe in the testimony concerning grace. And yet, After a season,
you see them walking in a pattern that suggests they're scared
and they are trying to do more to justify themselves before
the Lord. And Paul says that there is a
very big warning here. If God permits, we'll teach all
of you the truth. That's only if God permits it.
See, I need to go to John three there, right? For it is impossible. Now look at those parentheticals,
look at all those commas. It's impossible. Find the end
of it. What? It is impossible to restore them
again to repentance. Who? What does that mean? We
just learned repentance is believing in the Lord Jesus Christ in his
sufficient worth. Believe in the gospel of grace, period.
Not adding works, not adding anything else, but believing
in the gospel. So, for you to have a mind to believe the gospel
when you've been sitting amongst the presence of the assembly
for this long. Look at all these things, and
we'll unpack these week after next as well. It's impossible
in the case of those. You see how he changes his pronouns?
He doesn't say you, beloved, he said those. Those who have
once been enlightened. They've had an aha moment. Oh,
I see it, I believe it. Oh yeah, I gotcha. or have tasted
the heavenly gift, have tasted in some sense the sweetness of
the gospel, have gone to bed one night and go, you know what?
I am forgiven. This is so good. It's all about grace, grace,
God's grace, amazing grace, how sweet the sound and so on and
so forth. And they've tasted it. And they've
tasted the goodness and shared in the power of the Holy Spirit.
They've seen the Lord work. They've seen people come to believe
and they've seen knowledge be granted to people who should
not have it. And they've tasted the goodness
of the Word of God. They've sat under the teaching of the Word.
They've received the benefit of the ministry of the Word with
the saints and the Lord's table and baptism and all these things. They've tasted it all. And then
in the midst of all this, somebody comes along, taps them on the
shoulder and said, hey, look at Sinai. If you don't know that
reference, we'll catch you up. Look at Moses. Look at the temple.
Look at the sacrifices. Look at the high priest. We better
do more because we're not going to make it if we don't do more. Paul says they tasted the power
of the age to come and then they've fallen away by going back into
those things. It is impossible to restore them
again to repentance. Why? And I'll close with this. since they are crucifying once
again the Son of God to their own harm and holding Him up to
contempt. Do you know when you say you
believe in the grace of God as your hope and that your righteousness
does not belong to you but it's Christ's righteousness for you?
And then you come back to a place where you just one day go back
into works and you start working out in some sense, some satisfactory
opportunity that creates some satisfaction in your soul to
give you a better assurance. And you put your toeholds here
and your left foot here and a toehold here and you strap yourself off
to something else. And the next thing you know, you're not even
believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what Paul's saying. He
was killed for nothing. If Christ died to satisfy the
wrath of God for His people, then His people will never face
judgment. And it changes the entire plan,
doesn't it? And if we say that we're no longer
going to hold fully into the sufficient work of Christ, we're
crucifying Christ again. But beloved, we're not in that
number. And we'll skip some stuff, and
we'll pick it back up. We're not in a hurry. Though
we speak in this way, in your case, beloved, we feel sure of
better things. What things? He doesn't say we feel sure of
better things, things that you probably got right, and you got
your doctrinal things all square. It's important, but that's not
what, the point is, we know who you are, And we feel certain
of better things, things that belong to salvation. I'm just
going to stop there. Because if I say anything else,
I'm going to have to deal with the rest of this text and bring these
other verses in. And it's going to be 10 o'clock before we get
through. We got to finish now. Sorry,
guys, I'm joking. You who are in Christ, who believe
in his mercy, you are saved. Christ satisfied God's wrath
for you in place of you. And He was perfect and sinless.
And there is no other way to salvation but being granted the
faith to believe in the finished work of Jesus. And then everything else that
comes out of our lives together, individually, collectively, as
a church, as a church family, in our homes, with our people
that we deal with in life, all of those things are just going
to ebb and flow. We're going to have strong seasons
and weak seasons, good seasons and bad seasons. We're going
to feel like we're on the top of the world sometimes, and we're
walking in the light of the Lord. And then sometimes we're going
to feel like we're stuck in a rut somewhere that we don't know
how we're going to get out of. And Paul had that same experience.
And as the apostle to the apostles, he wrote it so clearly to give
us a clear picture of that it all matters on the one who has
mercy, on whom he desires to have mercy on, rather than us
working and laboring for the rest. If we work, we will receive
our just reward. And what is it? Death. But if
we rest in the reward that has been purchased for us, who is
Jesus Christ, we are free. We're free. Let's pray. We thank
you, Father, for your word, for this amazing letter to these
Hebrew Christians. Father, how often we ourselves
just damage it and destroy it and try to make it what it's
not, saying out of pretext, Lord, protect us from that, protect
us from making much to do about our own wisdom, and help us to
see what you have written through Paul, that Christ is our wisdom. our righteousness and our sanctification.
And that all these other conversations, though they are vital and important,
all these other things that come about in life, we should never
steer from the left to the right or forwards or backwards. We
should stand permanently and firmly in the center of your
mercy, in the seat of mercy where you meet us, who is Jesus Christ,
your son. And it's in His name we pray
these things. Amen. All right.