Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

If you’ve ever been on a boat in a lake, you may have witnessed drifting.

I can remember going out on a lake to fish and we stop in a certain place.

I get work on casting and reeling and trying to catch something.

I’m just working on my task and eventually when I look up, things look different.

The shore is closer than it was when we stopped.

We had turned off the motor and were sitting still in the water, we thought, but in reality we had drifted quite a ways from where we started.

As fallen humans, our natural inclination is to drift away from God.

In one of my favorite hymns, Come Thou Fount, there is a line that always gets me.

“Prone to wander, Lord I feel it.

Prone to leave the God I love.

”

There are tons and tons of messages coming at us today.

They come from everywhere.

News stations, internet sites, social media, church, podcasts, and other people.

Sometimes I personally get overwhelmed with the amount of information pouring into my brain during the day.

We have to choose which messages we are going to focus on.

If we are not careful and are passive there is a danger of taking many of these messages and mixing them all together into a sort of worldview soup.

It’s a danger that I see tall the time.

People who claim to follow Christ take an approach whereby they push aside the hard truths of scripture and either replace or supplement them with popular cultural teachings that are easier or make them more acceptable to their peers.

There is real danger here.

And as soon as you think you are not in danger, you are.

The writer of Hebrews steps in here and gives us the first of five warnings in the book of Hebrews.

These passages lay before us the hard truth of apostasy and hold up warning messages for us to heed so that we stay true to the faith.

Please understand that I believe the Bible teaches that those who are truly in Christ can not lose their salvation.

It is also evident that not everyone who professes Christ is truly a believer in Christ.

For an example, look at Judas.

He traveled around with Jesus and knew him personally day to day.

He handled their money.

No one who was with them would have thought he was not a true follower until he betrayed Christ.

A tree is revealed as a good tree by its fruit.

In the same way, true faith is revealed by the fruit of our lives.

This is serious.

FF Bruce writes,

“The truth and teaching of the Gospel must not be held lightly; they are of supreme moment, they are matters of life and death, and must be cherished and obeyed at all costs.

The danger of drifting away from them, and so losing them, cannot be treated too gravely.”

Let’s read Hebrews 2, verses 1 through 9.

Chapter 2 begins with the word, therefore, which should point us back to what came before being the reason to do what the author is about to tell us.

Last week we looked at the author’s argument for Jesus being greater than the angels.

So because that is true, that Jesus is superior to the angels and because of His divine identity, you need to pay attention.

He deserves to be heard.

So listen, pay attention, and don’t drift away.

The Greek word used there for drift away is actually a nautical term that was used to describe a ship at sail that has drifted off its course or for a ship in a harbor that slipped its moorings.

In other uses it can be used to describe when something has slipped from our minds or like a ring that slips from a finger.

When I was a student pastor in Iowa, I would take my students tubing on the river after church a few Sundays during the summer.

It was a great youth event because it was after they had come and worshipped at church and it was free.

One day we were out in the river and my tube hit a faster area where there was a tree in the water and I got a little hung up.

I stood up and looked down and my wedding ring was gone.

I didn’t feel it slip off but it was gone.

So now I’m standing in river looking through the riverbed like Gollum looking for the One Ring.

I didn’t find it.

Eventually I got in my tube and continued down the river.

That mirrors many of our lives.

We feel like we are riding safely down the river in our tubes and don’t even realize that while we are not paying attention, the truly valuable is slipping from our fingers.

This brings me to the first main point this morning:

I. Pay attention (v. 1)

The Greek word translated as “pay attention” is yet another word that has naval implications.

It is used for holding to a course or setting an anchor.

If you don’t want to drift off course, you have to hold the ship’s wheel on course.

If you don’t want the current to take you, then you drop the anchor.

What are we paying closer attention to?

According to verse 1, the author of Hebrews is exhorting us to pay closer attention to the message that we have heard.

Remember, he had just argued at length how Jesus was greater than the angels.

The message they had heard, that they should pay closer attention to was the message that is all about the Son of God, the message about Jesus, THE GOSPEL.

Why should we listen?

Why should we pay attention?

Not to puff ourselves up with theological knowledge for the purpose of winning arguments.

Ultimately we aren’t paying such close attention to the message of the gospel to build our knowledge up.

We pay CLOSER attention because that is how we keep from drifting.

That is how we stay on course in our sanctification.

Pay attention so that you don’t drift but also because paying attention is the antidote to drifting.

II.

God holds people accountable.

(v.

2-4)

The message of God’s law

-that was declared by angels - God’s law at SInai.

Exodus 19-20 does not include angels at the giving of the law but some later biblical texts refer to the presence of angels… Deut 33:2

Psalm 68:17 (ESV)

17 The chariots of God are twice ten thousand, thousands upon thousands; the Lord is among them; Sinai is now in the sanctuary.

This message proved to be reliable and from this reliable message there was no escape for the sins committed.

One of these words in the Greek describes deviation from a boundary and the other a refusal to obey.

I think both commission and omission are covered.

So even under the law, sins that we commit by action and also sins that we commit by not acting were not able to escape from judgement.

Ligon Duncan tells the story of Lance Armstrong:

Lance Armstrong was an American cyclist who won the Tour de France, which is one of the most important bicycle races in the world, he won it seven times.

He appeared in Olympic races; he was the most famous American cyclist maybe ever.

But over the years, he has been dogged by accusations that he was using illegal performance enhancing drugs, that he was doing blood-doping to get his oxygen level up so that he could perform at a higher level than the other cyclists were able to perform and thus he was cheating.

And he has recently been stripped of all of his titles by the cycling federations here in the United States and in the world and has come under intense legal scrutiny.

But all along, he has denied the truth of the allegations.

This week, he went to the high priestess of American culture, Oprah Winfrey, and he made a confession.

And he admitted – and now understand that he has actually sued people, he has litigated against people who have accused him of doing this illegal blood-doping, and he admitted it.

Maybe some of you saw those programs; I wonder what you thought about what you've heard.

But here's the interesting thing.

He wrote an autobiography seven or eight years ago; I think it's called, It's Not About the Bike.

In that autobiography at one point he's musing about God.

He says he's not affiliated with any particular church and he's musing about God.

And he says something like this, “If I am going to be judged someday by some-Body,” and he puts the “B” in a capital, “by some-Body, if there's a judgment for me by some-Body, I hope it won't be on the basis of what church I've joined or whether I've been baptized, but I hope that He will take into account the whole of my life.”

Received a just retribution - God’s law outlines a penalty for the ones who break it.

We are to pay attention to the message of the gospel because God’s law is reliable and just and the death of Jesus the Son on the cross is the only sufficient payment for the consequences of not following the law.

When you stand before God, you don’t want to say something like, “God, I hope you’ll accept me because You’re taking my whole life into account.”

You don’t want what happens to you in judgment to be based on your guilt or innocence.