Faith That Endures

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0:00We are in a preaching series through the book of Hebrews and we're continuing in that series this morning. And last week, Pastor Joel let us know that we kind of made a shift from chewing on meaty passages and learning deep truths and then shifting in the rest of Hebrews into a bit of application. And so we're still on that this morning. The text is Hebrews 10, verses 26 through 39. It's printed in your bulletin, I believe. It'll be on the screen or you could turn there in your Bible.

0:30You know, if you learn to drive between the 1960s and the late 1990s when I learned to drive, you might have been exposed to titles such as Red Asphalt or Wheels of Tragedy or Mechanized Death. And these sound like horror film titles. And in a way, they kind of were. You wouldn't see these films at a movie theater. You'd see them in driver's ed at school. As you were learning to drive, the best way they thought to equip young drivers was to scare them so bad that they'd maybe drive pretty good.

1:11They wanted to show the serious danger and the lasting consequences of bad driving. And I think maybe they had a similar thought with the live birth videos in health class. School was wild, y'all. I don't know how effective those films were. I'd be interested in the statistics. And if it's any indicator, they stopped showing them. And so maybe fear alone is not a great teacher. But I do think that the idea behind it is good. The idea was serious danger deserves a serious warning.

1:54Serious danger deserves a serious warning. And that's one of the main truths of our passage today. There's two really main truths. Serious danger deserves a serious warning. And so the preacher of Hebrews wants to seriously warn us. He wants to seriously warn Christians about a danger in verses 26 to 31. And also he wants to help us endure in our faith. And so if I had to sum the message of the passage up today, it would be this. People of God, endure in your faith by heeding God's warning and taking God's help.

2:35So let's read the text together. This is the matchless word of God. It is holy. It's without error. It never fails. And God means by the reading and the preaching of it that your faith would be added to and that he would help you endure. So let's come to it seriously as it is serious. This is Hebrews 10 verses 26 through 39. God's word says this. For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.

3:19Anyone who set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse do you think the punishment will be by the one who has trampled underfoot the son of God and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified and has outraged the spirit of grace? For we know him who said, vengeance is mine, I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

3:50But recall the former days when after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.

4:22For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what is promised. For yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay. But my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls. Pray with me. Lord, indeed, your people are those who do not shrink back, but have faith and preserve their souls.

4:57And Lord, you are the one who is helping to preserve us. Father, help us hear your word. Lord, you are sovereign in every way, and so you mean for this word, for this people gathered. And you'll use it for the good of our hearts and for your glory. Lord, please do it. It's in your name we pray, and the church of Christ says, amen, amen. All right, so here's the serious warning. We see it in verses 26 and 27. Here it is plainly. If you go on sinning deliberately, you cannot be saved.

5:28That's the plain reading of the text. Deliberate sinning, it says, makes you an adversary of God who can only expect judgment and fury from a holy God. That's how verses 26 and 27 read. And that's the real warning that the preacher of Hebrews is giving to you and I this morning. We're being warned not to fall away from God due to ongoing deliberate sin. Maybe already I'm making some of you nervous. But what are we talking about here? What is this deliberate sin that the preacher of Hebrews is talking about?

6:07Let me set your mind at ease maybe. We're not talking about the struggle against sin that every believer faces. Listen, God does not have a secret tally that he's keeping. And if you go one sin deliberately over that mark, then Christ is removed from you and you have no hope of salvation. That's not what we're talking about. If that were the case, friends, none of us would have any hope of salvation. Every true Christian struggles with sin. We haven't reached glory yet.

6:40There is coming a glorious day when God's people will no longer sin. We won't even be tempted to sin. But that day is not yet. It's not until Christ comes back and judges the world and his people enter into glory. It will be glorious, but it's not yet. For now, you and I, we all resemble Paul in Romans 7 when he says, The good thing I want to do, I don't do that thing. And the evil thing that I don't want to do, that's the thing I keep doing. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?

7:15You ever felt that way about your sin? We all do. And that struggle against sin is, church, sometimes it's because of ignorance. We just don't know that we're sinning. Sometimes it's because of temptation and weakness. We're trying hard, but we fail. And sometimes it's even true that Christians sin deliberately on purpose. We know that we're doing wrong, and then we do it anyway. And that's not okay. When we sin, we have to repent. We should never, church, ever have an apathetic disposition toward our sin.

7:52But, child of God, being a sinner will not lose you your salvation. It's why Christ came. Christ's sacrifice for his people pays for all of their sins, and they will be saved. Scripture's very clear on that. Romans 8, 28 through 30, it's sometimes nicknamed the golden chain. It says, those who are predestined will be glorified. Full stop. It will happen. John 6, 39, Jesus says, and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but I will raise him up on the last day.

8:27John 10, 28, Jesus says again, I give them eternal life. He's talking about the church. They will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. When God saves someone, church, he saves them to the uttermost. The work of Christ doesn't make salvation for God's people possible. It accomplishes it.

8:53So what's the warning then? What is the preacher of Hebrews warning you and I against? The warning isn't against any sin done deliberately, but against a certain sin done deliberately and continuously. The context of verse 26 is directly related to verse 25 from last week's passage. Hebrews 10, 25, as Joel was preaching, he preached and he reminded us, he said, don't neglect the meeting together. And that's what verse 26 is referencing, to not neglect the meeting together, as is the habit of some, the preacher says.

9:32And what he's talking about is some of the professing believers in the church that the letter of Hebrews is written to had neglected to meet with the church. And we shouldn't see this church as like spotty church attendance. And it's like sometimes they came and sometimes they didn't, if they had things to do, you know, if there was a really good chariot race, they would go to that instead. That's not what it's talking about. The Greek word translated as neglect is in katalepontes.

10:00And it means this, to abandon, to forsake, to desert. Picture, a word picture would be a mother abandoning their child and never returning. The sin we're being warned against, church, is the sin of apostasy. That's a theological word. Apostasy is a rejection of Christ by those who know that the Bible teaches he's the Savior. It is knowing that Jesus is the Savior and then rejecting him as your Savior until you die. Apostasy, let me say it a different way, apostasy happens when enduring faith in Christ is replaced with enduring rejection of Christ.

10:47The perfect picture of this in the New Testament is Judas Iscariot, who lived in the light of Christ for three years, aligned himself with the Savior. He was warmed by the gospel. He experienced the blessings of the Holy Spirit in the ministry of Jesus and in his own, and then he rejected Jesus as his Savior. Belief in Christ would have made him an apostle, but rejection of Christ until his death made him an apostate. And our text lets us know how serious this sin is and why those who commit it cannot be saved.

11:30Hebrews 28 reminds us that God is serious about the sin of rejecting him. And the Mosaic covenant, turning away from the one true God, carried with it a death sentence. But Christ's covenant is a better covenant than Moses. The law of Moses existed, listen, like the rest of the Old Testament covenants and the rest of the signs that exist in the Old Testament, they exist at the point to the new covenant with Christ as its redeemer. And already in Hebrews, we've heard in chapter 8 that the ministry of Christ and his covenant and its promises, they're more excellent than the old covenants.

12:11They were all covenants of God's grace, but they existed to point to this final new covenant where all the promises of the Bible would be fulfilled. Verse 28 of our text is saying it's worse to reject Jesus than it is to reject the law of Moses. Because last Christmas, Joel gave me a Christmas card that included a Christmas bonus. That was nice. I like that. Thanks, brother. But if the card had simply said, Merry Christmas, Joel, I wouldn't have kept it, just to be honest.

12:46But what made me hold on to it was that Joel took the time to write in there a genuine letter of appreciation for me, encouraging me how God was indeed using me in this body of Christ. And that really meant something to me. I still have that card. It sits on my dresser, and I'm not an especially sappy guy. Now imagine, though, if I had read that card, that heartfelt card, and I had crumpled it up and thrown it away. That'd feel wrong, wouldn't it?

13:20But if I toss a generic card with no personal message, that's not really a big deal. The card with the personal message is of greater value than the generic one. And in the same way, Jesus is far more precious, far more precious than the law of Moses. And these Jewish Christians in this church that the preacher of Hebrews is preaching to, they had treasured the law as the most precious thing they possessed. But the preacher of Hebrews reminds them and us that Jesus is even more precious, and rejecting him is far worse than rejecting what came before him.

13:57These people that he's warning, once they professed Christ, and they've rejected him in the way verse 29 describes their sin, lets you and I know just how serious it really is. God's word says that, number one, willful, deliberate rejection of Christ tramples God the Son under our feet.

14:29I don't like putting my feet on a nice table, even if it's meant for that, right? Much less to trample under our feet the Son of God. It's like if you were walking down the sidewalk and you step over a piece of gum or a dirty penny. It's treating Christ like that, like he's of no value, of no consequence, of nothing to be considered. It says also, secondly, that the willful, deliberate rejection of Christ profanes Jesus' blood. Profanes the blood of the covenant.

15:00It's treating Jesus' blood as if it's unclean. In the Old Testament, blood made you unclean. If you had blood on you from someone who was deceased or from an unclean animal, you had to get put outside the camp. It made you unclean. But the perfect blood of Christ cleanses us from sin. And the one who rejects Christ treats his blood as if it's common and unclean and dirty. And thirdly, our text tells us the willful, deliberate rejection of Christ, rightfully so, is an outrage.

15:38An outrage to the Holy Spirit. The Spirit delights in magnifying Christ. It's no wonder, church, that this section concludes by saying it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Christian, Christian, Christian, hear me. Don't fall into the hands of the living God as one who has rejected Jesus. Let you and I hear this warning. It is actually for us. Let this wake us up. That's what it's meant to do for the people of God. It's meant to wake us up.

16:27Are you drifting away from God in your life somewhere? Is your love of Christ growing cold? You know if it is. Wake up. Heed the warning. That's why it's here. Hear the call of God to endure in your faith. God is warning us so that we'll persevere. Our good Father, church, our good Father wants us to persevere in our faith. And so he warns us. And as our text continues, we see that his work of empowering us to endure in faith extends just beyond the warning.

17:03He doesn't just say, don't let this happen. But we see as we've been singing this morning that God comes alongside his people and he helps us to endure. By the warning, yes. But not just by that. We also see in the rest of our passage that God gives us help for our endurance. When we were in seminary, when Vickery and I and our family were in seminary, I had an overnight job. It was actually, it was pretty perfect. It allowed me to go to school during the day.

17:33I didn't have to work anything around my classes. I could just take the ones I wanted to when they were offered. And I worked Thursday through Saturday from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next day. And the heaviest part of my workload was like two hours at the beginning and one hour at the end. So that gave me like nine hours where I could kind of do whatever I needed to do. And so I would work on seminary assignments and read what I want. And honestly, I watched way too much Netflix as well.

18:01But the hardest thing about this job was that I couldn't do what I really wanted to do at 2 a.m., sleep. They wouldn't let me do that. And it was hard. It was hard not to sleep. We had small kids at home. I had things I still needed to get done during the day. And my wife, my sweet wife, was a champion of letting me sleep during the day and not having the kids wake me up. But eventually, I would get up because I missed my family or I had something to do.

18:27And I could never really get the hang of flipping my nights and days. And so what I needed for my job to stay awake is I needed a path to endurance. Something besides drinking my body weight in Red Bull, okay? Apparently, that's not very healthy. So I went looking online. And what I found is with the right mix of caffeine and exercise breaks and access to a desk that would stand up when I needed to, I could stay awake. No problem through the whole shift.

18:57It helped me endure this plan. In the same way, to help us endure in our faith, in the rest of our text, God gives us four ways we can keep on trusting Christ in faith and endure in our faith. Number one is this. Number one, we need to remember God's faithfulness to us. Verses 32 and 33 say, But recall the former days when after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to reproach and affliction.

19:29And sometimes you were partners with those who were being treated like that. The preacher calls the believers of this church to remember the days after they came to be saved. And he doesn't say this. He doesn't say, Remember when it was all good and when things were perfect. You just hold on to that feeling. That's not what he says. He says, Remember how good my love was when things were bad. Remember how it caused joy in your heart even though you were being persecuted.

20:01The preacher says you had hard struggles. You were publicly reproached and you were experiencing affliction. And if that wasn't happening to you, it was happening to people that you loved. And you were caring for them. And verse 34 says that you did it with joy. Why? Why? Why did the church do that? Because they were enlightened. They had received the knowledge of the truth. Which is all that they have in Jesus. God saying, All of my promises to you.

20:31You were living in them and you were leaning into them. You trusted me in the midst of hardship. Remember that I am a faithful father to my children. My love, God says, is not fair weather love, church. Friends, when we're feeling like the hardships of following Christ might not be worth it. We would do well to remember former hard times when God got us through. When despite the circumstances, there was joy in our lives. Or when God used us to encourage someone else.

21:06Or when they encouraged us. I recently visited somebody who'd lost their wife. Well, it's no secret in the room. I visited Randy. And brother, I was so encouraged to hear you talk about the goodness of God in the midst of your struggles and Teresa's. The phrase over and over again that was talked about is, God is so good. He's been so kind to us. I needed that. I needed to hear that. That bolstered my own faith and my gratitude to God. It put my own struggles in perspective and it caused me to praise God.

21:47When you're struggling in your faith because of some persecution in work or culture or family or just hard times, church, run to God and remember that he is faithful. Remembering God's faithfulness to us feeds our endurance. Secondly, our text tells us to remember that our future is eternal. Verses 34 and 36 says, You had compassion on those in prison. You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

22:28Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has great reward, for you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you would receive what is promised. What would make Christians being persecuted, being put in prison, having their property stolen, face such things with joyful acceptance? What would make these Christians do? What would make Christians around the world, seeing these things happen to them right now, face it with joyful acceptance?

23:02God's word tells us it's because they had an eternal perspective. Their treasure wasn't on earth. Their treasure was better than what they had lost. And their treasure abides forever, where no thief can take it, and no rust can weaken it, and no moth can destroy it. Friends, hear me. Today, you could have the riches of the world. You could have money and fame and houses. You could get every single toy that you always wanted to buy. You could have the freedom to go anywhere and do anything you want as soon as you want to do it.

23:43But if you don't have Christ, you have nothing. Nothing. All of those things can satisfy our flesh for just a little while, but they cannot feed our souls. And they do not last. You don't ever see a U-Haul behind a hearse. You can't take it with you. Friends, the greatest treasure the people of God has is God himself. God is priceless. All the wealth of the world could not come close to estimating his value, and he owns it all anyway. Oftentimes, I think that Christians think the best gift of salvation is that we escape hell.

24:36Listen, pardon for our sins is a great gift. But God did not save us primarily so that we would be free from the punishment of sin. He saved us so that our record of sin would no longer separate us from him. Being reconciled in relationship to our great God is the greatest treasure of salvation.

25:02Sin separates us from God. Think back to the Garden of Eden. What did Adam and Eve do as soon as they had sinned? They tried to go hide from God. In Christ, friends, the guilt of sin and the record of debt that makes us want to hide from God is paid for. It's done away with. It's forgiven. If you feel like in your life you want to hide from God, come to Jesus. There stands nothing between us and our great God when we come to Jesus. The curtain is torn down.

25:37The way is open. The Father's arms are open wide. And that goes for us today. Listen, if you've never put your faith in Christ as your Savior, hear the goodness that is being offered to you in Jesus. Come today. Be free from the guilt of your sin. Come and know what true and lasting joy is. Come and know what real security in Christ is like. Let me ask you, if you don't know Jesus, aren't you tired of the counterfeit joy that the world is offering you?

26:10Aren't you tired of trying to be good enough to have a relationship with God? Come to Jesus. Because in him joy is unending. His promises are sure. And when you put your faith in him, all of your sin, even those sometimes deliberate sins, are forgiven. Come into the good pleasure of your Father. I hope you will. When we set our minds on eternity, on the true and certain promises of God, church, it feeds our endurance. It helps us to continue on in faith.

26:48Because we believe, despite everything that we're losing here, Christ is a better and abiding possession. Third, this one's shorter, but very important. Hebrews 10.37 teaches us this, that if we're to endure in our faith, we really need to remember that this world is temporary. We need to remember that we have an eternal future and we need to put that in the right perspective and remember this world and its troubles are temporary. Verse 37 says, Listen, time can feel a lot different depending on what's happening, right?

27:3230 seconds of a shoulder rub seems to go by pretty quick. Compared to 30 seconds of burpees, which feels like a literal eternity, okay? 30 seconds of burpees feels like you've already been judged and you're in hell, to me, okay? They're terrible. That's actually my new evangelism strategy. You do 30 seconds of burpees. Did you like that? No? Come to Jesus. He'll never make you do burpees. When we remember that our suffering and our hardships are only temporary, it helps us to endure, church.

28:17This life is just for a little while. And eternity is forever. Though there's sorrow in the evening, the scripture says joy comes in the morning. And it's forever. Finally, as our good God is calling us to endure in our faith and he wants to equip us to endure in our faith, our text tells us to remember that, church, we should live by our faith. Hebrews 10.38 says, But my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.

28:55We're to live by our faith, not shrink away from Jesus. Listen, when you're taking a trip abroad to a place with a much different time zone than yours, you know it's a good idea to kind of match your sleeping schedule to the new place that you're going. Because then, when you get there, you're acclimated to night and day in that country. And our Christian life is like that, too. Faith that endures until the end, friends, is a faith that is practiced to the end.

29:23When Christians live their lives like they don't have faith, it's no wonder that the Christian life seems so difficult. And friends, we all do it. We all do it. We all have areas of our lives that we live in like we don't belong to God, like we aren't his people. We try to live by the wisdom of our flesh and the wisdom of the world, and it makes life hard. Because the Spirit of God in us says, no. No, we're not going to be comfortable with that. No, we're not going to focus on other things.

29:58We're going to focus on this. Thankfully, the Spirit does that. God says the righteous one, the enduring one, lives by faith. What does that mean? I've been studying a lot for these exams I'm taking in the Presbyterian. Question 88 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism says that Christ communicates the benefits of our redemption to us by the ordinary means of grace. Living a life of faith is extraordinarily helped by partaking of the ordinary means of grace that God has given to his people.

30:38Let your life, church, be full of feasting on the reading and the preaching of God's word. Fill your life with prayer, your own prayer and others. I love when we pray as a church. That is a means of grace that God is using to help us endure. Fill your life with meaningful relationships with God's people.

31:05Have relationship with each other. Come to the Lord's table. Listen, not as something that we just do at the end of service, but as what God gave it for, for real grace in your life, real grace that helps you endure in your faith. Friends, don't just make faith a part of your life. Live by your faith. It'll help you endure. Press in and see that God's way for living your life is better. Listen, when we take God's warning not to fall away from faith seriously, the warning helps us endure.

31:43When we remember the faithfulness of God and the goodness of his promises, we endure in our faith. When we dwell on eternity and remember this life is temporary and its hardships are temporary, we endure in our faith. When we live our lives leaning into God and living with our faith at the center, it helps us endure in our faith. God is using all of these things to preserve the faith of his children so that verse 39 is true of them. We are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but we're those who have faith, enduring faith, and it preserves our souls.

32:21We are not those who males. We are not those who 느�ages.