Sermon Tone Analysis

For better or worse it seems to me that all financial transactions these days are only online transactions.

When we access our bank accounts, we just see numbers on a screen, we bank our confidence on what we see on a screen as true reality.

We live each day with great confidence that the financial institutions are telling us the truth.

However, the truth that God tells us in this verse today is far greater and we don’t need to wonder if what we see here is true.

Rather it will impact how we live each day, and we can bank our eternity on it with great confidence.

After the most dramatic warning in this letter, the author of Hebrews now turns to the readers and calls them beloved.

We might stop here for a minute and say, wait a minute why are you calling us beloved after giving us such a rebuke that makes every believer tremble?

One might say that is not loving at all.

However, even though it is hard to listen to passages like the one we studied the last time.

They are the most loving thing God does for us because He loves us and as a Father, He disciplines us and tells us the truth that leads to life.

It would be the most unloving thing for God to not give us warnings and just let us go astray and deceive ourselves and not examine our hearts and our walk.

It is through warnings such as the one that we studied previously that God keeps us in His hands.

Such warnings intend to remind us of the reality of what sin truly is.

Kevin DeYoung says:

“Sin is not simply a sad thing because it can wreck our lives.

It is not just the ruining of shalom.

Sin does more than make God sad that his world is not the way it’s supposed to be.

Sin makes God angry.

It is offensive to God.

His wrath is aroused not simply because we’re missing out on his best, but because we have violated his law, rejected his Lordship, and made ourselves gods in his place.”

“Godly grief recognizes the utter sinfulness of sin and hates it more and more.

Godly grief produces true repentance, which leads to salvation (v.

10).

[When we are at the center our repentance will be] obsessed over regrets and feeling bad due to the opinions of others.

When God is at the center there is godly grief, which mourns for sin, turns from sin, and finds forgiveness for sin in Christ.”

When God corrects and rebukes you what is your attitude?

Are you still at the center and fighting for your own kingdom, obsessed over regrets and feeling bad because of what others might think of you or what you think of yourself, or do you mourn for sin and long to be with the Lord completely separated from sin and resting solely in the forgiveness that Christ provides?

I know it was hard to digest what the previous passage had to teach us.

However, it made me praise God for such passages, not because of the seriousness of the topic but because it causes us to strip away from our hearts any confidence that we might have in ourselves.

At the same time, it reminds us of the only hope, which is Christ in us.

It caused me to be undone, without any confidence in myself, and praise Jesus because “The Lord is the strength of his people”.

The most glorious and amazing thing, worthy of praise in you and me is Jesus.

I hope you were encouraged and came to the same realization of the worth of Christ in you.

Of ourselves we are nothing, but with Christ we have everything.

God says in Zephaniah 3:17 “he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing”

Why will God rejoice over us with gladness and sing because of us?

It is because of Christ in us.

Because Christ is changing us and through the Holy Spirit’s power and strength making us more and more like Christ.

What a glorious and uplifting truth.

That is why the author of Hebrews turns now to his hearers and says beloved.

This is the first and only time this word is used in the letter to the Hebrews.

It reminds us that we are beloved by the Father because He loves us, He disciplines and rebukes us, but never forget He loves us.

No one ever loved us so much, no one else sent His Son to you while we were still sinners.

Rom 5:6-11 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

11 More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

What Paul just told us here in Romans 5 are the things that belong to salvation that the author of Hebrews talks about in v9 “we feel sure of better things- things that belong to salvation.”

The author of Hebrews shows confidence that the case he described in the previous verses doesn’t apply to them.

However, it seems like previously the author of Hebrews had little confidence in the hearers.

At the end of chapter 5, he had just told them: “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”

Then he gives the strongest warning that there is in this letter and followed by v9, where he says “we feel sure of better things”.

We might ask: wait a minute, why is the author of Hebrews confident of better things for his hearers?

He gives us the reason in v10, which says:

In this verse, we also have an insight into the lives of the believers to whom this letter was addressed.

They had worked and shown love for God in serving the saints.

This seems a little vague, it could mean anything.

It seems that the author’s confidence in the salvation of the hearers doesn’t rely on specific external evidence but relies on the condition of their hearts, because they have shown love for God’s name.

What does it mean to love God’s name?

An example that shows the opposite is to look at our world.

How often unbelievers will use God’s name in vain or as a cursing word?

Not only is God’s name profaned, but God’s holiness is profaned almost instinctively by most unbelievers.

Why is God’s name used in such a way?

It is because in their hearts they hate God, so using God’s name for a curse is instinctive, and natural.

If you love God, you will be bothered and offended when someone mistreats God’s name or use it for cursing.

In the same way, you would be offended if someone would mistreat your spouse’s name or your parent's name.

We live in a world where everyone is right upfront to tell how they are offended, I’m not saying that we should have this attitude, at the same time we should be bold and walk away from a movie, or a show that misuses God’s name.

Furthermore, if others around us at work or somewhere else misuse God’s name we should tell them that it offends us because they are mistreating someone we deeply love.

While this is straightforward and somewhat easy to apply.

A more difficult and profound application of loving God’s name is to examine our hearts and see if we are living for God’s kingdom or if we are living for the kingdom of self.

Paul Tripp says the following: “You could read your Bible every day and the entire Bible each year and still live for yourself.

You could be faithful in your attendance at all your church’s scheduled gatherings and still live for your little kingdom.

You could regularly place your hard-earned money in the plate and still not live with God’s kingdom in view.

You could be expert in the theology of the Word of God and still shrink your life down to what you want and what you tell yourself that you need.

You could participate in ministries to the poor and needy and still not live for the big kingdom.

You could do all of these things, and the trajectory of your life could still be more toward the kingdom of self than the kingdom of God.

Remember sin makes it all about ourselves, and we make ourselves gods in his place, we replace His kingdom for our kingdom and we try to make God the servant for our kingdom, instead of us rejoicing in being the servants for His kingdom.

There are acts of righteousness that are not righteous because they don’t come from hearts of worship.

True Christianity is always a matter of the submission of the heart to God, something that only rescuing grace can produce”[1]

Do we love God and His kingdom more than we love ourselves?

This is something that is only discernable between you and God…

It is so easy for us to think that God is serving our plans and our wills.

We might say no we don’t do that, however, when life doesn’t go the way we expected or hoped for, in our hearts we might doubt God’s goodness and His love for us.

Why is that?

It is because of sin.

“Sin causes us to stick ourselves in the center of our world and make life all about us.

It causes us to reduce the field of our daily concerns to the small agenda of our wants, our needs, and our feelings.

Sin causes us to be driven by selfish desires, a spirit of entitlement, and a silent list of demands.

Sin causes us to want our own way, to want sovereignty over things we weren’t designed to control, and to want to coerce others into the service of our agenda”[2]

Loving God’s name is loving Him more than we love ourselves, it is submitting to His will even when it hurts.

It is trusting in what He said and who He is more than what we see around us in this world.

It is crying out to Him saying we don’t understand, but we will trust Him.

It is saying what Job said, “The Lord gave and The Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

(Job 1:21)

If you love God, your life will be centered around God, and everything in your life will be in submission to His lordship.

You will seek to do everything for the glory of God, “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God”.

Furthermore, you will obey God, not only because you love Him, but because you find the greatest joy to please God and enjoy Him forever.

Therefore, if we love God, our lives will be a living testimony of our love and obedience to God.

This is true for the first readers of this letter because we see the evidence of that later in chapter 10 where it says: