6.6.41 9.8.2024 Righteous Word of Redeeming Rest Hebrews 4.1-13

Start:

Entice: Each of us has signal phrases that we use in characteristic response to the world around us. I have found a couple that I have decided to stop using because the expected answers to the rhetorical questions asked, seem to have changing answers.

I have long used the phrase:

How hard can could it be?

To describe an elementary concept which people make unnecessarily complicated.

How hard can it be to find a job?

How hard can it be to get out of bed?

How hard can it be to use a turn signal?

The point is It’s not that hard. Or it shouldn’t be that hard.

I am limiting my use of this phrase going forward, because clearly there are some things which have become much harder to understand, accept, or think over the years.

I wonder…

Has God been asking this question?

Engage: Don’t you think God has been asking that redundant question for generations Himself?

How hard can it be to believe, accept, and act on His promises?

Hebrews 4:1–5 ESV

1 Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. 2 For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. 3 For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’ ” although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. 4 For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” 5 And again in this passage he said, “They shall not enter my rest.”

Next question.

How hard can it be to obey?

Hebrews 4:6–10 ESV

6 Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, 7 again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” 8 For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. 9 So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, 10 for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

Expand: How hard can it be? Not as hard as we make it that’s for sure! The difference is our attention to God’s empowering, liberating Word. To help us grasp the power of Scripture the author weaves scripture into his argument. Disobedience, despair, distraction, and destruction all begin with being inattentive to the Word.

If we both wish to please Him, and enter into His rest it begins with not only valuing the Bible as some kind of religious artifact but actually responding to it as the written revelation that it is.

Excite:

A Biblically illiterate church

can be manipulated by the malicious.

A Biblically inattentive people

can be distracted by the detours of the desert.

The Biblically immature

can be bullied by the brash

and misled by the mendacious.

There is little point in talking about the virtues of Scripture unless we give some attention to how we are to respond to it.

Explore:

We should focus on what the Bible is and what it does to us, when we approach it with listening obedience.

Hebrews 4:12–13 ESV

12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Expand: Several aspects of the Bibles authority.

Body of Sermon: First the Bible

1 Pierces our Pretense.

Its virtue eclipses our elusiveness.

Next, the Bible

2 Discerns our Deliberations.

2.1 Our musings

2.2 Our intending.

God’s Word continues to examine our interior life as it

3 Penetrates our Privacy.

Perhaps I should say our presumption of privacy. We may hide from everyone else…but From God…

3.1 We cannot hide.

And

3.2 He sees what we think is unknowable about us.

And, last of all the Bible

4 Exposes our Excuses.

4.1 We are uncovered before Him.

4.2 We are expected to answer Him.

Shut Down

The questions we need to answer:

What does God find when His word examines us?

How do we react?

What do we change when we recognize that we are fully known to God?

In the earlier verses of Hebrew 4 we hear the recounting of loss of focus, loss of faith, and ultimately loss of God’s promised rest. Why? Because the wilderness

generation heard the Word but did not respond in faith.

All the virtues of scripture are wasted on those who refuse to listen, refuse, to learn, refuse to live by faith. You are not hiding anything from God. What are you

hiding from yourself? Perhaps it is time to respond to His righteous Word of Redeeming rest?