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Notes
Transcript
Some years ago, Guideposts magazine published a story about a young hospital corpsman during the invasion of Guam in WWII.
The corpsman was aboard a boat that came to a grinding halt on a coral reef, “and the commanding officer ordered everyone off the ship.
"[The corpsman] jumped into the ocean and sank like a rock, his carbine rifle, medical pack, canteen, and boots dragging him down.
“He forced himself to the surface, gasping for air, only to sink again. He tried to pull off his boots, but the effort exhausted him, and he suddenly realized he wasn’t going to make it.
“Just then he saw a man thrashing in the water next to him, and in desperation he clutched onto him. That proved enough to hold him up and get him to the reef where he was picked up by a rescue boat.
“But [the corpsman] felt so guilty about grabbing the drowning man to save himself that he never told anyone what had happened.
“About six months later, on shore leave in San Francisco, he stopped in a restaurant. A sailor in uniform waved [the corpsman] over to sit with him, and as he did so he announced to his friends, ‘This is my buddy. He saved my life.’
“‘What are you talking about?’ asked [the corpsman].
“‘Don’t you remember,’ said the man. ‘We were in the water together at Guam. You grabbed on to me. I was going down, and you held me up.’” [Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 261–262.]
Today, we were going to be starting a series about Jonah, another man who was cast into the sea and sank down and was saved, though in Jonah’s case it was by a huge fish sent by God.
But plans change, and then there’s a weather forecast that suggests dangerous driving conditions about the time that we all would have been heading to the church building, and then even my backup plan was changed.
And so, today we’re going to talk for a bit about a problem we all have, about the danger of letting that problem go unchecked and about how important it is for us to have someone else in the water with us to grab us and to hold us up.
Turn with me, please, to Hebrews, chapter 3. We’re going to look at just two verses from this letter today, and I hope that by the time we are finished, we will all have a new appreciation for those who swim alongside us as we struggle through the dark waters of this sin-cursed world.
We’re going to look at verses 12 and 13 of this third chapter of Hebrews.
Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Now this brief passage is a warning against allowing our hearts to be hardened against God and against the conviction of His Holy Spirit.
But what you need to understand right off the top is that this letter was written to believers, to Jewish converts to Christianity, probably, though we’re not certain, located in Jerusalem.
The writer — and we do not know for sure who that was — calls them brethren here in verse 12, and he calls them “holy brethren” and “partakers of a heavenly calling” in verse 1 of this chapter.
These are not people who had hardened their hearts against the gospel message, as so many in Jerusalem had done.
These were people who had responded in faith to the gospel message — the message that Jesus Christ, the unique and eternal Son of God, had come to earth and lived a sinless life as a man, that He had given Himself as a sacrifice to save mankind from its sins, that He had been raised from the dead, and that He now sits at the right hand of the Father in Heaven, waiting until the day when He will return and take with Him all who have turned to Him in faith that He alone can bring reconciliation between God and man.
So, what’s all this about unbelieving hearts and falling away from God and being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin?
What I want to propose to you today is that what we see here in these two verses is a progression — or, better, a regression — that endangers Christians who ignore conviction by the Holy Spirit.
This is a warning about how sin, when it is left unchecked in the life of a Christian, draws him ever further down the path of destruction, until one day that Christian has hardened his heart against the Holy Spirit and, therefore, against God.
And it all starts with the deceitfulness of sin.
Remember that sin isn’t just a problem for unbelievers. Sin continues to be a problem for believers, because even though we who have followed Jesus Christ in faith have been made new creatures in Christ, we still have within us the awful pull of depravity.
We still are drawn to selfish desires. We still tend to want to satisfy our own fleshly nature, even if it hurts others and even when we know it goes against God’s plan for our sanctification.
Even as believers, we still wrestle with sin, though all too often we simply throw the match altogether.
And here’s the thing about sin: We often are very good at seeing the sin in others, but we are usually pretty terrible about seeing it in ourselves.
We make excuses for our sinful attitudes and our sinful actions. We try to convince ourselves that what God says is wrong isn’t really wrong.
Sin deceives us, and sin allows us to deceive ourselves.
We begin to believe things about ourselves that are not true, and we begin NOT to believe things about God that ARE true.
We begin to believe that whatever sinful attitude we want to justify within ourselves isn’t really a big deal to God.
And so, we move smoothly from sin to unbelief.
Now, I’m not saying here that a selfish heart or a spirit of disunity or any other sin that a true believer might commit is evidence that she is unsaved or that it will cause a believer to lose his faith.
What I’m saying is that sinful attitudes and sinful actions, when left unchecked, are evidence of that believer having a wrong attitude about God and a wrong view of how much He hates sin of any kind and in any person, saved or not.
And when we persist in such wrong beliefs — when we persist in such UNbelief, then we take another step down that terrible path the writer of Hebrews warns us about here. We begin to fall away from God.
This isn’t a falling away from true, saving faith. That’s not possible.
Jesus said:
“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.
So, even this falling away that we see in today’s passage does not speak of losing your salvation. This falling away from the living God is a loss of fellowship with Him who created us in Christ for fellowship with Him.
So, the problem of unchecked sin leads to a heart that is deceived into thinking it doesn’t matter to God, and that leads to falling out of fellowship with Him. And that leads to a heart that is hardened toward God and toward the conviction by the Holy Spirit.
It’s a vicious cycle. The more we allow sin in our lives, the more we ignore the Holy Spirit’s conviction about it, and the more we ignore His conviction, the more we allow sin into our lives.
So, you can see why the writer of Hebrews warned his readers — and us — about this dangerous path.
But he also gave us a solution to the problem. Do you see it in verse 13?
But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Now, we get the word “encourage” from the French, encorage, which means “in courage.” So the sense is that when we encourage someone, we put courage into them.
The Greek word that’s translated as “encourage” here means to call someone to your side.
So, the idea in this verse is that we’re to be calling one another to our sides to give them courage to stand against temptation, courage even to flee temptation, to turn from their sins.
So, what does this tell us about our struggle for sanctification, our daily work to be more like Christ?
Well, it tells us that we cannot do that work alone. We cannot fight this battle by ourselves.
We cannot struggle free of the things that threaten to drag us down into the sea without the help of others who are swimming along around us — others, by the way, who are struggling with their own weights and who desperately need someone to come along and grab them and hold them above the waters.
And that’s one of the roles of the church. That’s one of the purposes of this community of believers.
It is no coincidence that it is also in the Book of Hebrews that we also read:
And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.
You see, the fellowship of believers exists, at least in part, so that we might encourage one another in our walk with Christ, so that we might call fellow believers to our side to give them courage to stand up to temptation.
But it also exists so that each of us might see who we really are.
Let me give you an example.
I like to think that I am the perfect husband. I like to think that Annette hit the lottery when she found me.
But the truth is that I’m blind to a lot of my faults. We all are. As long as we have sin within us, there will be pockets of spiritual blindness, things about ourselves that we just cannot see. And what’s more, we can’t see that we can’t see them.
And so, I am blessed — and I mean this quite sincerely — that I have a wife who can see me a lot better than I can see myself. I look in the mirror, and I see hair, but she can see my bald spot. It’s not hidden from her.
She knows my weaknesses, she knows my struggles, and she knows my secrets. And I thank God that we have a relationship now that is strong enough for her to tell me when I’m going off track.
She is an instrument of sight to help me see my blind spots.
And as believers, we need instruments of sight to help identify those areas in which we are spiritually blind to our own sins.
“We need an active network of intentionally intrusive, Christ-centered, grace-driven, redemptive relationships.” [Paul David Tripp, lecture, Dallas Theological Seminary]
We need Christ-centered people who are full of God’s grace to ask probing and personal questions with the goal of allowing Jesus through the Holy Spirit to redeem those areas of our lives that are still under sin’s deceitful spell.
The Christian author, Paul David Tripp, put it this way: For the Christian, “self-examination is a community project.”
This is what true Christian fellowship is all about.
But the sad fact is that most of what passes for fellowship in the church isn’t much different than what I used to get at the Rotary Club — or what a lot of people get at the local bar on a Thursday night.
We talk about the weather, and we talk about politics, and we talk about our families and our health problems.
But we hardly ever see this deeper fellowship that calls for transparency and grace and a genuine love that expresses itself in sacrifice and vulnerability and mercy.
I want to be sure you understand that I’m not standing here in judgment of anyone in this matter. Indeed, often I am the chief of sinners in this regard.
This kind of fellowship frightens me. This kind of fellowship makes me vulnerable. This kind of fellowship is risky. This kind of fellowship lays all the cards on the table and says, “All in.”
This kind of fellowship requires more than an hour a week where you sit and listen to me talk and then we all go home.
This kind of fellowship requires that we build deep and trusting relationships with one another, and that takes time and a lot of effort. And it takes a whole lot of grace.
But the result of this kind of fellowship is something wonderful. The result, as Paul put it in 2 Corinthians, is that:
For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing;
The aroma of true Christian fellowship is that of life itself. It is the aroma of those who have given their very lives to God in Christ, of those who are putting sin to death in their own lives, of those who consider others as more important than themselves.
This fragrance is pleasing to God, and this fragrance is strange and foreign to a world that tries to protect itself by building walls and keeping secrets and engaging in barroom banter.
This kind of fellowship makes us more like Jesus. It enables us to be salt and light to the world, to be a city on a hill whose light cannot be hidden.
This is the kind of fellowship I so earnestly desire to see here at Liberty Spring Christian Church.
This is the kind of fellowship that will help rid you of the sinful attitudes and behaviors that weigh you down and threaten to sink you beneath the waves of this world’s dark waters.
None of us can do this on our own. Each of us needs the power of the Holy Spirit and an active network of intentionally intrusive, Christ-centered, grace-driven, redemptive relationships.
There will be risks. It will be frightening. And it will take time and a lot of hard work.
But the rewards are great, both here and in heaven.
Join me in this quest for true Christian fellowship, won’t you? Let us make this church one that sends the pleasing fragrance of Christ to God by our commitment to true fellowship, to true Christian community.
[Much of this sermon is adapted from a Dallas Theological Seminary chapel message delivered by Paul David Tripp on Sept. 22, 2018, and the author wishes to thank him for his insights.]