Sermon Tone Analysis

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.

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

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

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.

Look at those first two verses with me again.

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

This is a direct throwback to Deut 29:18

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.

“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.

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.