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The danger of drifting.
January 14, 07 TEMC.
Intro: Last Sunday we began a series of messages in the book of Hebrews.
Hebrews is a book in the bible that points out to us that Jesus is better than the law.
Jesus is better than the traditional systems.
Hebrews points out that Jesus was God’s message to us.
The Christians in the early church knew this, but they needed to be reminded.
Reminders are good for us.
That is partly why we are going through the book of Hebrews.
This morning, we will remind ourselves that we need to pay attention to the message of salvation that God has given us.
It is easy to drift away from it and get caught up in all kinds of other things.
Someone may ask: What is drifting?
In our day we have many areas of life where things are changing very fast.
We live in a day and age when things are changing so fast that most of us can’t keep up anymore.
But change is not bad because it is change.
Everything around us is changing, always has been.
People are always changing.
Little people grow big.
We begin jobs.
And the jobs change too.
We keep on changing.
People grow old.
The seasons change.
Everything is in a constant state of change.
That is not drift.
Change is not drift just because it is change.
Drift, as the bible uses it is when the decisions we make are not made on the same foundation anymore.
Drift in the spiritual sense is when the foundation of God’s word doesn’t have the final say anymore.
Drift, the way it is used in scripture is when the focus has shifted and now we are finding ways to get along peaceably together with the enemies of the cross.
Some people who once preached the cross no longer do.
The goals have now changed.
Instead of preaching a message of repentance, many are now preaching a message of peace where there is no peace.
Instead of preaching a message of love, some preach a message of works of the flesh.
When we look around, it is clear to see that what we once believed about right and wrong, what we as a people believed about good and bad, that has changed.
We have drifted far.
We are a nation that is drifting.
In time to come we will not just drift.
We will go over the edge like a water falls and crash on the rocks below.
It will not be because God can’t help us.
It will be because we refused to obey God’s commandments.
Some people call change: “ progress.”
A lot of the change we see is nothing more than giving in to sinful desires.
The temptations are there to follow the lusts of the flesh and we just give in more and more as time goes on.
In time this leads to more and more separation from God.
*Truth: Spiritual drift leads to separation from God.*
God is not playing games.
When he dealt with the people in the O.T. he was serious about his words through the prophets and angels.
In Hebrews 1 we learned last Sunday that God has spoken in times past through his angels and prophets, but in these last times he has spoken to us through Jesus Christ.
And we learned that there is no one higher than Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the final message of God to us.
He is not just a messenger.
He is the message.
We know from the records what happened to all of those people in those days.
They were destroyed for their sins.
Falling away from God doesn’t happen in one day suddenly.
It happens over time.
We compromise our moral values one by one and little by little.
Things like lying, stealing, pride, anger, greed, - things that we used to have convictions about don’t matter anymore.
Not only do these things not matter, we become proud of them.
In the end we find ourselves in a situation where we can’t help ourselves anymore.
For us to remain close to God, we cannot afford drift.
Drift will lead us into sin and sin is and will be punished.
Hebrews 2:1-4 gives us clear instructions what God expects of us.
How do we avoid drifting?
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*Pay attention.*
*/Hebrews 2:1-4 (NIV) 1/**/We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away/*.
*How is our attention span*?
How are our attention spans?
Are they staying as they are, are they getting longer, or shorter?
Our attention spans are getting shorter.
What does ‘pay attention’ mean?
Does it mean simply knowing what was said?
If a mother tells her child to pay attention and listen to her, and she tells the child to clean up the room, the child heard what the mother said.
But if the child doesn’t do what the mother said, the child has not paid attention, even though the child knew exactly what the mother said.
Paying attention is a real problem in our society.
It is not that we are not paying attention.
The qestion is: “What are we paying attention to?”
Are we paying more attention to the message from God than to the things of this world?
In the book “ Heavenly man” the writer mentions this: Our preachers normally preach for about 2 hours.
Our western brothers can only speak for a half an hour and then they run out of things to say.
He is right.
We don’t have much to say, and our listners don’t have much to listen to.
– except of course, when we are watching a movie – then we can watch for two hours and we don’t fall asleep.
Isn’t it amazing how our attention spans work?
Why is it that in church, we find it hard to stay awake sometimes?
I have struggled with sleeping in church too.
This is not a new thing.
Acts 20:7-12 we have a story of how one man fell asleep when Paul was preaching.
He fell three stories down and was thought to be dead.
Paul took him up and the man was alive.
They brought him back upstairs and Paul continued his sermon.
I am not saying that falling asleep in itself is a sin.
If sin is involved, the sin itself probably happened some time earlier already.
There are people who study attention spans.
They study how long a child can pay attention before the child will just tune out.
They study how long adults pay attention.
I remember when I first learned the importance of long attention spans – which we have for the most part lost.
I remember in 1987 when my wife and I were newly married, we had just moved to Canada and were were part of a church.
This church wanted us to help with the youth.
And so we did for a while.
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