Pursue God
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Good Morning and welcome!
It is good to see all of you again.
Last week we covered a lot of ground in chapter twelve.
Today we are going to cover a few more verses that close up this section in Hebrews.
Last week we talked about the loving discipline of God.
I started us out with to cautionary statements regarding this topic that can be challenging.
Not every negative thing that we experience is God disciplining us.
Not all of us have had healthy relationships with our parents and that can distort our view of God and what it means for us to be disciplined by Him.
The goal of our study is to better understand who God is so that we can share that with others.
Life can be difficult at times and when they also have a complicated family history, it is so easy to misunderstand what God is trying to do.
What a joy it is to get to see God’s work in our lives from the proper perspective.
What a blessing to get to share that perspective with someone that is struggling with life!
Even though life is tough sometimes, we are going to be okay.
It is easy to give in when times get hard, but with God’s help, there is nothing we can’t endure.
We are going to see that idea continued today.
Throughout our lives, God purposely allows us to be stretched beyond what we would normally tolerate so that we can learn to lean on Him.
In leaning on God when are struggling, we get a front-row seat at what can happen when we let God have control.
God’s goal is to lovingly train us in right character.
He is working to make us more like himself.
He loves you like a parent loves a child and he is working through your circumstances to teach you how great that love is.
We need to realize that our struggles are not the result of God’s inattention.
The enemy tries to convince us that God has forgotten about us and that is why we are struggling.
However, the truth is that when we are struggling, God is there and is working on our behalf.
He works on your behalf because He loves you!
God’s work in our lives allows us to share in His Holiness.
When we respond, allowing God to work, he purifies our hearts.
Although your life may not look or feel the way you want it to, God is working on your behalf.
The God of Love is actively pursuing you, whether you are on the mountaintop or sinking in the ocean, God is right there, working.
As we continue on in chapter twelve we are going to see that the author continues to speak to our responses to our life circumstances.
Look at verses 14-17 in Hebrews 12 with me.
14 Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness—without it no one will see the Lord.
15 Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many.
16 And make sure that there isn’t any immoral or irreverent person like Esau, who sold his birthright in exchange for a single meal.
17 For you know that later, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, even though he sought it with tears, because he didn’t find any opportunity for repentance.
Last week we focused on our own lives and how we deal with struggles, but today the author turns the focus towards the body of Christ.
There is a very particular issue that the author is addressing in this section.
As we have talked about extensively, there was a great temptation for the church to abandon its belief in Jesus.
In fact, this was the very thing that their Jewish family members were trying to convince them to do.
They wanted them to renounce Jesus and return to their Jewish religion.
This week I listened to several episodes of a great Podcast by Matt Whitman called the Ten Minute Bible Hour. In episode 553 he is teaching about Matthew 23:37-38
37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!
38 See, your house is left to you desolate.
When Jesus uses the word desolate, he is purposefully invoking a very specific idea.
In the previous part of Matthew 23 is the “woe” section where Jesus is calling out the religious leaders.
Jesus is quoting Ps 118:8-9
8 It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in humanity.
9 It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in nobles.
Matt makes a statement, I believe it was in the podcast right before this one, about how the religious leaders, generation after generation, are building up a kingdom for themselves, while calling it God’s kingdom.
This is why they were so threatened by Jesus and in Matt 23:38 when He uses the word desolation it immediately brings everyone’s mind to Daniel 9:27 where Daniel is prophesying about the desolation of the temple because it has been defiled.
Jesus is telling the religious leaders that their religious activity is defiling the temple. They made their activity and their identity their god.
Now fast forward that idea and apply it to what we know about these churches in Rome.
Those that were stuck in a religion that not only denied that Jesus was the promised Messiah but also killed him, were beckoning these Christ-followers to come back to their dead religion.
This attempt at derailing the faith of the churches in Rome is exactly what the author of Hebrews is addressing.
The same sin pattern that Jesus was addressing with the religious leaders was still present all these years later.
The religious leaders were still trying to overthrow Jesus’ authority.
To combat this temptation, the author of Hebrews is calling on the church to do a very specific thing.
Make a decided effort to pursue peace and holiness.
Make a decided effort to pursue peace and holiness.
Look at those first two verses with me again.
14 Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness—without it no one will see the Lord.
15 Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many.
I want to qualify what I mean by making a decided effort.
It would be all too easy to see this in a works-based mentality, but that is not what the author is trying to say.
He is calling on the church to stand by its commitment to Christ by pursuing God.
It isn’t that we must do something to please God, it is a call to follow through with our commitment when we “gave” our lives to Jesus.
You entered a relationship with a living God with the expressed purpose of being brought back into His kingdom.
You saw the results of disobedience in the world and choose that a life with Jesus was better than an eternity without Him.
Making a “decided effort” means that every day, you remind yourself that your life is not your own.
You choose to trust Jesus with your life.
Every day you make a choice to follow through with that commitment or to act in disobedience by living for yourself.
This is the struggle that the church is having!
In verse 15 he says… Hebrews 12:15
15 Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many.
This is a direct throwback to Deut 29:18
18 Be sure there is no man, woman, clan, or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations. Be sure there is no root among you bearing poisonous and bitter fruit.
The author isn’t just talking about general sin.
He is specifically warning the church not to walk away from their faith in Jesus.
I’ve made this same point so many times over the past few years and it is still true today.
Our relationship with Jesus reveals the truth about who Jesus is to others.
I read this Saturday morning during my quiet time.
“The practical preparation for the Lord's coming consists first of fully entering into fellowship with Him in our own spiritual lives *(this is a daily decision), letting Him not only cleanse us, but perfect us in all the finer touches of the Spirit's deeper work. Following that it will mean getting out of ourselves and living for the benefit of others and the preparation of the world for His appearing.” *emphasis mine
If we choose to disobey God, we are not the only ones that are affected by it.
In order to be a “follower of Jesus”, we have to follow him.
If you are going your own way, you are not following.
This would be like going through the effort to map out a route in Waze/Apple Maps/Google Maps, and then ignoring it’s instruction and blindly trying to find your destination.
God desires to be actively involved in your life and lead you.
Listen to this from Tozer’s devotional this morning.
27 Instead, I discipline my body and bring it under strict control, so that after preaching to others, I myself will not be disqualified.
“What must our Lord think of us if His work and His witness depend upon the convenience of His people? The truth is that every advance that we make for God and for His cause must be made at our inconvenience.
If it does not inconvenience us at all, there is no cross in it! If we have been able to reduce spirituality to a smooth pattern and it costs us nothing—no disturbance, no bother and no element of sacrifice in it—we are not getting anywhere with God. We have stopped and pitched our unworthy tent halfway between the swamp and the peak.
We are mediocre Christians!
Was there ever a cross that was convenient? Was there ever a convenient way to die? I have never heard of any, and judgment is not going to be a matter of convenience, either! Yet we look around for convenience, thinking we can reach the mountain peak conveniently and without trouble or danger to ourselves.” - Tozer on Leadership
This is the reality of living in an abiding relationship.
We decide to live an inconvenient life for the sake of knowing Jesus.
The church in Rome was struggling because the hardships they were enduring had caused the focus of their lives to shift from their mission to their comfort.
The author is trying to protect the church by warning them that if they defect from their faith, others will join them.
Look back at the end of verse 14 again.
14 Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness—without it no one will see the Lord.
If we make a decided effort to pursue God and share it, people will see the Lord.
If we don’t make the decided effort, no one will see the Lord.
It is through obedience that the Gospel is shared.
If we allow a culture to develop where it is not only okay but accepted, to disobey God, we become just like those religious leaders that Jesus was talking to in Matthew.
Our house too will become desolate because we will have forsaken the very thing that makes us who we are, Jesus.
If you choose not to follow through with what God has told you to do, you are creating a culture of disobedience and halting the spread of the Gospel.
You may be thinking that there is a big difference between renouncing your faith and just not following through with something God told you to do.
I don’t know..., they kinda sound like the same thing.
Keep in mind that a snack got Adam, Eve, and the whole of humanity into this mess in the first place.
The enemy has been using the same trick of convincing us that there are varying degrees of sin for a long time.
Sin is sin and rebellion is rebellion.
They always separate us from God and the moment that we try to justify why it is okay to ignore God, we are in trouble.
I want to make it crystal clear that as believers in Jesus, we have received his grace and forgiveness for all sin.
This is not a statement on the status of your relationship with God, nor am I insinuating that there is anything that you could do to make God go back on his word.
We see in this passage that, while our sins are forgiven, they still have an impact on our lives and the lives of those around us.
This is what the author is driving home.
If you leave the faith, others will follow.
If you make it acceptable to sin, others will follow.
Sin, if left unchecked, will destroy the church.
Sin, if left unchecked, will destroy the church.
Look with me as he continues this line of thinking.
16 And make sure that there isn’t any immoral or irreverent person like Esau, who sold his birthright in exchange for a single meal.
17 For you know that later, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, even though he sought it with tears, because he didn’t find any opportunity for repentance.
Let’s take a look back at the story of Esau so we can see what the author is pointing to.
29 Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field exhausted.
30 He said to Jacob, “Let me eat some of that red stuff, because I’m exhausted.” That is why he was also named Edom.
31 Jacob replied, “First sell me your birthright.”
32 “Look,” said Esau, “I’m about to die, so what good is a birthright to me?”
33 Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to Jacob and sold his birthright to him.
34 Then Jacob gave bread and lentil stew to Esau; he ate, drank, got up, and went away. So Esau despised his birthright.
Here is Esau, the firstborn son of Isaac, who would inherit twice as much as his brother, Jacob.
Remember who Isaac is, he is the promised son of Abraham, whom God promised offspring as numerous as the stars.
God affirms that promise to Isaac as well.
1 There was another famine in the land in addition to the one that had occurred in Abraham’s time. And Isaac went to Abimelech, king of the Philistines, at Gerar.
2 The Lord appeared to him and said, “Do not go down to Egypt. Live in the land that I tell you about;
3 stay in this land as an alien, and I will be with you and bless you. For I will give all these lands to you and your offspring, and I will confirm the oath that I swore to your father Abraham.
4 I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky, I will give your offspring all these lands, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed by your offspring,
5 because Abraham listened to me and kept my mandate, my commands, my statutes, and my instructions.”
6 So Isaac settled in Gerar.
Esau’s inheritance was no small token.
It was going to be significant!
Esau would have been the named beneficiary in this legacy of God’s work, but instead, he gives it away for something of no value in the scale of things.
Esau comes in from a long day, he’s hungry, and Jacob is cooking some red stuff.
He trades this incredible work of God for a bowl of stew.
It would be easy to cast judgment on Esau, and it is obvious by the mention of this story that Esau was regularly used as an example of what not to do.
The author is drawing a parallel between this well-known story and his word of warning to the church.
Don’t trade the treasure of a relationship with God for something as meager as momentary happiness.
To bring this back into focus, the people that the author is writing to are contemplating walking away from Christ in order to make their lives happier.
This is a temptation that all of us fight on a regular basis.
I mentioned this last week and it needs to be mentioned here as well.
We don’t like hardship and when given the opportunity to move away from anything that is pressuring us up, we will.
The problem that we see in Esau’s life and we experience in our own, is that by the time we have felt the pains of that disobedience, it is too late.
The damage is done and we are stuck with the consequences of our actions.
Again, I’m not saying that God can’t or won’t forgive you, He absolutely will, but the effects of the sin in your life will not magically disappear.
Esau regretted his decision to give up his inheritance, but it was too late.
The deed was done.
17 You know that afterward, when he wanted his father’s blessing, he was rejected. It was too late for repentance, even though he begged with bitter tears.
Church, there is much application for own lives from these few verses.
While you may not be struggling with renouncing your faith, there isn’t a person in this room that doesn’t struggle, daily, with sin.
Over the last few years, God has been slowly moving us into deeper levels of commitment.
We all fully understand the necessity of obedience.
We see over and over again in scripture the results of the choice to obey or disobey.
There is no grey area when it comes to obedience.
You are or you aren’t.
This week all of us need to take an opportunity to sit before the Lord and let Him speak.
All too often we decide to ignore God’s prompting for the sake of ease, convenience, or neglect.
This challenge to the churches in Rome is as necessary for us today as it was for them.
God desires to speak into your life, to guide you, to bring you closer to himself.
He wants us to share in his Holiness and he wants us to share this gospel message with those that don’t know Him.
We have to decide, daily, if we are going to make the effort to pursue God.
If we ignore the areas of our lives where we are not obeying, the consequences of that sin will continue to build and it will affect your life and the life of the church.
This is not a call to simply try harder.
This is a call to repentance.
This is a call to remember that you entrusted your life to Jesus.
Let him guide you to Himself.
Let him use you to bring others along.
It doesn’t matter how big or how little the thing that God has asked you to do is.
If he asked, it matters and it matters to others as well.
God has a call on all of our lives, but we have to make a decision every day to follow Him.
If we don’t, it will have tragic effects on our lives.
It is a great deliverance to lose one's self. There is no heavier millstone than self-consciousness. It is so easy to become introverted and coiled around ourselves in our spiritual consciousness. There is nothing that is so easy to fasten onto as our misery: there is nothing that is more apt to produce self-consciousness than suffering. Then it becomes almost a settled habit to hold onto our burden and pray it unceasingly into the very face of God until even our prayer saturates us with our own misery. Rather, we should ask for power to drop ourselves altogether and leave ourselves in His loving hands and know that we are free. Then we may rise into the blessed liberty of His higher thoughts and will and demonstrate His love and care for others. The very act of letting go of ourselves lifts us into a higher place and relieves us from the thing that is hurting. This habit of prayer for others, and especially for the world, brings its own recompense and leaves upon our hearts a blessing, like the fertility which the Nile deposits upon the soil of Egypt as it flows through to its ultimate goal. -Simpson
There is nothing more vital in our lives than the pursuit of God.
As we close in worship this morning, let this song be your prayer.
That Jesus would be our joy.
Let’s pray.
Father, we come to you this morning laid bare.
We know that there are areas of our lives where we are still in control.
As we worship this morning, work in our hearts.
Reveal and change the parts of us that still rebel against you.
Give us the desire to pursue you daily and speak clearly as we do so.
Give us the strength and courage it will require to do what you are asking.
Jesus, we are completely dependent on you.
Amen