Hebrews Lesson 74
NKJ John
This week I have gotten some
interesting questions. One question that
came in through email was somebody said, “It seems like you always cite these
different verses before class. Why do
you do that?”
Some people don’t know the
answer to that. The reason that I do
that is because Bible memory is very important. I know that a lot of you are
very busy and you haven’t quite figured out how to make that a priority in your
life. A lot of people don’t do that. So I
am hoping that by always repeating these sets of verses before class that you
will listen to them. Every now and then
I see people lip sinking along with me while I am saying them which is good
review for you, hoping that through all of the repetition you don’t put your
brain in neutral and say, “Oh well that is what we go through before class.”
I hope that you will think
through those verses. I have chosen them
for a number of reasons and I put them together the way I do for a number of
reasons. Hopefully that will help you
remember them.
I got started doing that a
number of years ago when I was sitting around at lunch up in
I thought, “That is a
fantastic principle.”
Reciting those verses in such
a way like that before every class so that people will learn them and memorize them
and maybe one day you will be in a position and you will hear my voice in your
head. But you will hear the Word of God
and not just teaching. That is very
important. That is one reason I do
that.
The last couple of weeks we
have been in this paragraph in Hebrews 6:9-12 which comes to a positive
encouragement after a section where the writer has blasted these Hebrew
believers for their spiritual lethargy.
They have become lazy spiritually.
They are yielding to the pressures of the moment, the opposition from Jewish
believers, the antagonism from other Jews who are the opposition from the
Jewish hierarchy – from the Pharisees and the Sadducees- antagonism from other Jewish unbelievers
because they have chosen to follow Jesus Christ and to put their trust in Him. As they are going through this now they are
beginning to second guess their decision to trust in Christ and to follow Him. So he has blasted them back in verse 11.
He said, “I have much to say
about Melchizedek and the unique priesthood of the Church Age.” That is the thrust of his argumentation.
NKJ Hebrews
The word dull means lazy or
slovenly. You just don’t care. It has affected your whole spiritual growth.
“By now I ought to be
teaching you as adults; but I have to go back to basic doctrines, basic
principles because you need milk and not solid food.”
Then he warns them about the real
danger that a person can get in through spiritual lethargy of just losing all
forward momentum in the spiritual life and going into a reverse course where
you back up. It can get to a point just
as a practical matter that you just won’t recover. You reach a point-of-no-return,
not an absolute point-of-no-return because he says that all things are possible
with God. We can recover if God
permits. But practically speaking, we
have all seen this happen in people’s lives.
They create this habit pattern and this negative momentum with regard to
spiritual things. As far as things go in
life, there never is real spiritual recovery.
That is what the warning is. Now
he says in contrast...
NKJ Hebrews 6:9 But, beloved, we are confident of
better things concerning you, yes, things that accompany salvation, though we
speak in this manner.
In other words, “I don’t
expect you to stay in this condition. If
you respond to what I am teaching you in this epistle then you’re not going to
stay in this position of the spiritual doldrums where you are stagnant and
there is no growth or even reverse growth where you are backing up completely.”
So what he is confident of is
those things that come with the package that God gives us at salvation that
prepare us for that future salvation. Always
remember that when you run across this noun “salvation” in Hebrews, it is not
talking about justification.
In English and in English
speaking churches and among American evangelicals our patois, our common Koine
verbiage, is that if we want to know if someone is going to heaven, we ask,
“Are you saved?’
We use the word “saved” to be
a blanket synonym for entering into eternal life or being regenerated for being
justified. But the Bible uses the word
in different senses. In many cases this
noun soteria doesn’t focus on the beginning of
the process where we are regenerate, where we are justified, where we are reconciled,
where our redemption is realized; but it focuses on the end product what we
call phase 3 when we are absent from the body and face to face with the Lord
and realize our blessings and rewards given at the Judgment Seat of Christ. And
so what we see in 9-12 is this focus in almost every sentence on something future,
something oriented to that future destiny and inheritance which is where he
ends in verse 12 that we need to imitate those who through faith and patience
inherit the promises.
In verse 10 he gives his
reason, why he is confident they are going to forward.
NKJ Hebrews 6:10 For God is not unjust to
forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His name, in
that you have ministered to the saints, and do minister.
The same thing with us - no
matter what happens in your life, the same principle is true. God is just and God is going to work in your
life and He is not going to forget any forward advance, any spiritual advance,
any divine good that has been produced in your life through the Holy
Spirit. God is going to remember your
work and your labor of love and the fact that you are ministering and have
ministered even though for them they are in spiritual regression. There is still a measure of some spiritual
momentum and interest because he uses a present tense participle. He talks about God remembering their past
work, the labor that came from their love for God. It is the love for God that motivates
us. You have ministered to the saints
(aorist tense) and you do minister (present tense). So there is still practical application in
terms of Christian service. We studied the terminology there that it relates to
the word diokoneo which is the act of
Christian service.
Verses 11 and 12 are where we
are now. We read…
NKJ Hebrews
“We desire” is your main
verb.
So what you have is an
infinitive of purpose in verse 11 that is your intermediate purpose with your
ultimate purpose given in verse 12.
That is until the end of your
life.
NKJ Hebrews
So step one purpose is show
diligence. Be diligent. Put forth effort
in your present spiritual growth. Step
two is to not become sluggish, but to positively imitate those who through
faith and patience inherit the promises.
Now we will look at that and
break it apart this evening. In terms of
summarizing this…
Now that leads us to understanding
the rationale that he is using. It is
the justice of God. We need to do the
same thing when we think about things.
Think about the justice of God or the essence of God. We saw this as we looked at the essence of
God. The focus was on His righteousness
and justice.
Essence of God
Sovereignty Omniscience
Righteousness Omnipotence
Justice 0mnipresence
Love Veracity
Eternal life Immutability
Righteousness is the absolute
standard of His character. Justice is
the application of that. So whatever God
does in His dealing with us, it is always going to be absolutely fair, right
and just because He knows all the data.
He is omniscient. There is no
fact that he is unaware of. He knows all
of your motivations. He knows all of
your failings. He knows all of your
successes. He knows everything. And as Abraham stated back in Genesis…
NKJ Genesis
We can rest and relax that God
is going to do the right thing in His evaluation of us.
So we put together this
little flowchart. We will look at it one
more time to try to get it into our heads.
The word is taught. Under the
filling of the Holy Spirit it comes into the soul as epignosis doctrine. It is not just academic knowledge which is
gnosis. It is useable knowledge. That is epignosis. It is spiritually useable knowledge. But, it is potential. You don’t just
automatically apply it because you are filled with the Spirit. Some people have gotten that idea. It comes from a quasi-mystical view of the
filling of the Holy Spirit – that if I am filled with the Holy Spirit, He
automatically applies it. We all know
that if you try to do that (let go and let God), it is very frustrating because
the Holy Spirit doesn’t override your volition.
That is what is wrong with defining the word filling with the Spirit as
control. Control has the idea that your
volition is controlled by the Spirit. Your
volition is not. Your spiritual growth
is being controlled by the Spirit – not your volition. It is better to understand it as
influence. God the Holy Spirit is
influencing you with the Word of God so that you have that brought to your
attention in your mind to apply. In that
process as you apply the Word, God the Holy Spirit produces growth.
Now as we study the Word we
go through this process of divine viewpoint truth coming into our soul. Divine
viewpoint comes in and human viewpoint kosmic truth gets flushed out -
hopefully. Actually it doesn’t
leave. It is still there so you have
something to live on when you are in carnality.
Sometimes at certain levels of Christian growth you feel like you almost
have multiple personalities. You are in fellowship
walking with the Lord one day, you are one way.
The next day when you are carnal
and out of sorts - you are angry, you are bitter or you are resentful- you
think, “What happened to me? I am like a
totally different person than I was yesterday.”
We feel like there is this battle. There is a battle going on in the soul. Sometimes you feel like you are two different
people. We all have days like that where
we look in the mirror and wonder what happened.
Who is that? But when we are
growing we take in the Word. Epignosis
doctrine comes from divine viewpoint truth that goes into the soul and we
exchange the human viewpoint garbage that we learned growing up for divine
viewpoint truth.
As we walk by the Spirit, stay
in fellowship, apply doctrine, abide in Christ the Holy Spirit produces
spiritual growth that affects us in two ways.
One way is through spiritual production of character. This is Galatians 5:21-22, the fruit of the
Spirit. But then it also produces
Christian service. That is the positive
side of divine good, human works, Christian service as expressed through our
priesthood which is toward God, serving God. We have a verb that we will see tonight that
is important. The word is liturgos which is where we get our word
liturgy. It is the idea of serving
God. It is related to worship. Our life should be an act of worship toward
God as we obey Him. The second aspect is
ambassadorship which is related to man.
That is representing God, taking the gospel to a lost world. So, Christian service flows out in a couple
of different ways. This is what is
covered in verse 10 in terms of our work, our labor of love, and Christian
service. That is all summarized in verse
10.
Ephesians 4:11-12 says that
the purpose of the pastor-teacher is to equip the saints. That’s you.
I am the pastor. You are the
saints. My job is to equip you to do the
work of service. How do you do that?
NKJ Ephesians
NKJ Ephesians
You do that by teaching the
whole council of God, teaching the Old Testament and teaching the New
Testament, teaching all the doctrines, teaching everything so that you become equipped
mentally with what you need to live your spiritual life and to grow. That will eventuate in service. That is the work of ministry in verse
12. It is the word diokoneo,
the same word we have in verse 10 which is the word for ministry.
So let’s look at these
verses.
NKJ Hebrews
Here the main verb of this
sentence is “we desire.” The word for epithumeo which is a word sometimes translated lust
in a negative sense. It indicates a
strong controlling desire. It emphasizes volition. It is a strong desire to see something
happen. This is the desire of the pastor
for his congregation that they get serious about the Word of God and that they press
on.
I was going to read was a
report I took off the internet last week on the Barna Report which George Barna
is an evangelical sociologist who takes all kinds of surveys and has for about
15-20 years on the state of evangelicalism in
Now I want to come back to this
word in just a minute. This idea – the
same diligence - the same as what? What
is the point of comparison? The same diligence - you really have to go to
the next verse to pick it up. In verse 12
we read…
NKJ Hebrews
Now in the context of Hebrews
he is going to go through this whole list of faith heroes in chapter 11 at the
end of which he is going to say, “This great cloud of witnesses.”
So what he has in his head is
he looking back to the great heroes of the faith from the Old Testament. Because he is focusing on the Old Testament
doesn’t mean that that nobody in the New Testament is, but in terms of
canonicity they aren’t there yet to mention them. So we are talking about Adam
and Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and David and
Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel and all the Old Testament saints. But also we would include the New Testament people
such as Mary and Martha. We would also
talk about Peter and Paul and James and all of the apostles that these are men
and women who pushed it to spiritual maturity and were tremendously dedicated
to serving the Lord. That is the
example. We are to look to them because
they are imitating Christ. It is not
that we are imitating them because we are imitating them. As we will see in a few minutes, look at some
of these passages.
Paul said, “Imitate me
because I am imitating the Lord.”
We don’t imitate him in the
things where he is not imitating the Lord, but imitate him and these heroes of
the faith because of what they had in common which made them tremendous servants
of God and servants of Christ. Our focus
is to look to them as models and examples of how they through faith and
patience inherited the promises. So we
are to have that same kind of diligence.
So he says that...
NKJ Hebrews
Demonstrate it! It is supposed to be evident in your
life. A Greek word that indicates proof
that somebody will look at your life and see this kind of thing.
The word for diligence is spoude. It is
the noun form of the verb spoudazo. Spoudazo is
the word that is translated in the King James Version, “study to show thyself
approved unto God.” The study is more of an interpretation in
that passage. It is the idea of being
diligent in your responsibilities. Since
Timothy was a pastor, his responsibility was to study and teach. So that is why they translated that “study to
show yourself approved unto God” in the King James. Newer translations usually translate it “be
diligent.” But that is the idea. It involves hard work. It has a sense of
urgency about it. It has a sense of
priority and importance that this is so crucial that you need to be diligent,
you need to put forth effort, and you need to put forth spiritual sweat to
grow. You need to make going to Bible
class a priority, reading your Bible a priority, learning promises a priority,
studying everything you can and putting it into application. As we will see there is a sense of urgency in
the text all through the New Testament because Jesus could actually come back
tomorrow. Are we ready for the Bema
Seat? It can happen tomorrow. It may not happen until the next day. Even if Jesus doesn’t come back tomorrow, you
may be in a head on collision on the way home tonight and you are meeting Jesus
just as sure as if He had come. So are you ready? That is the urgency that he has here. Put forth a diligence, an effort to the full
assurance of hope until the end.
The word for assurance is
conviction. Do you really believe that
Jesus could come tomorrow? Now if you
believe that, how is that affecting how you are living today? If you knew for sure that Jesus Christ was going
to come back next week, how would that change what you are doing between now
and next week? If you knew you were going to be standing
before the Bema Seat of Christ in 10 days, how would that change? If it is going to change anything, then that
is what we need to work on. We need to realize
that this really is going to happen. It
is not just a nice doctrine. It is not
just an interesting curiosity. It is not
just a nice academic fact. Jesus is
coming back. We are going to be taken to
an evaluation before Him. And, are we
living today in the light of that evaluation.
That is the idea here - that we have a true conviction that this is
true. That is part of what faith
is. If you believe that your house had
just caught on fire, what would you do right now? You would be running out the back door. Your actions would be related to what you
truly believe and are convinced is true.
That is the idea here. There is
to be diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end.
That word “hope” is the word
for confident expectation. It is to the
end. That is the destiny. That is the end goal of the Christian life,
not the end of our life; but until the end where we reach that mature
stage. It is the Greek word telos which is related to the verb teleioo which is translated maturity or
completeness. It is the idea of taking
it all the way to the final product of spiritual maturity.
Then we come to verse 12.
NKJ Hebrews
In other words, be
diligent. Don’t be lazy. Don’t become complacent, but set out your
goals spiritually. Make a plan. Change your priorities. Make the Word of God a priority. Listen to tapes. Get in the car and listen to a MP3 player. When you are at home, put it on whatever
recording device that you have. Listen
to DVD’s. If you don’t have time to
listen to a whole lesson at one time, then listen for 15 minutes. Whatever time you have, utilize that
time. If you want to memorize Scripture,
get 3 x 5 cards. Print them out. You can go to any Christian books store and
buy the NavPress pack for the Navigators that they
have for their basic Bible memorization.
They give you a vinyl plastic thing that has a clear side on it. You get your memory verses and you work on
that. I did that for years. You
learn those verses. Whatever works for
you, but just get it done. Memorize
Scripture. Listen to the Bible on tape.
You can go to any kind of website (a used book website) and get Charlton
Heston reading the Bible on tape or on CD or whatever
it is. The point is to maximize the time
that the Word of God is shaping your thinking.
So we are not to become
sluggish. This is the Greek word nothros which is a word meaning lazy or sluggardly
or complacent. So the contrast is not to
become complacent and sluggish in your spiritual growth, but to imitate mature
believers. He has already accused them
of being sluggish. The same word is
used in verse 11 where he says that they have become dull of hearing. So they are already showing signs of slipping
into negative volition.
Then he says to imitate them,
the mature believers. This is the Greek word
mimetes which is where we get our word
mimic. You can hear it in the sound of
the Greek word mimetes. It means to imitate someone, to follow their
example as we see how they live. How are
we to imitate them? We are to imitate those
through faith and patience inherit the promises. We don’t imitate them in their carnality,
because every human being who is a believer has carnality and failures. Paul had failures. We don’t imitate them in that
area. We imitate them in the way that
they are imitating Jesus Christ. This is
what Paul says in a number of passages.
NKJ 1 Corinthians
Now he is not on some kind of
approbation trip where he wants everybody to live just like him. He is imitating Christ as he makes clear in I
Corinthians 11:1.
NKJ 1 Corinthians 11:1 Imitate me, just as I also imitate
Christ.
He is a mature believer.
He is so sold out to the plan
of God and the agenda of Jesus Christ and serving Him in the Church Age that he
can say, “Do what I do.”
This is because he is doing
precisely what Christ said to do. That
is the Apostle Paul.
In Ephesians 5:1 he says…
NKJ Ephesians 5:1 Therefore be imitators of God as
dear children.
That is the ultimate standard
that we are to mimic.
He says to them….
NKJ 1 Thessalonians 1:6 And you became followers of us and
of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy
Spirit,
So we are to be imitators
ultimately of the Lord Jesus Christ. But
this concept of imitation is further defined by this prepositional clause. It is to be done through faith and patience. I
already pointed out that this is primarily a reference to Old Testament believers,
Old Testament heroes of the faith; but secondarily it would also include the New
Testament leaders of the church.
Now the word here translated
patience is the word makrothmia which has the idea
of long suffering or forbearance. Makro means long.
That is where we get our English word macro. It means big or long or large. Thumia is
the word for anger. It takes you a long
time to be irritated, to get angry or impatient. That is a good word. It makes a lot of sense. Most of us are still struggling with
that. We are to be long suffering. It is through patience and waiting. We aren’t going to see that inheritance
tomorrow or the next day. That is part
of the test – learning to wait on the Lord.
This is a different concept from the word for endurance which is hupomone which has the idea of staying under
the pressure. This is the idea of waiting
calmly with a relaxed mental attitude, not getting impatient because we are
living in the devil’s world and we are getting so frustrated all the time with
having to deal with a lot of sinful people around us.
Turn to James 5. James 5:7-11 gives us this same idea in an
expanded sense. James is one more book
to the right - Hebrews and then James. This
is the last chapter of James. James 5:7 is
where James begins the conclusion of the epistle. In James 5:7 he says…
NKJ James 5:7 Therefore be patient, brethren,
until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious
fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and
latter rain.
He is going to repeat the
word for patience or use it as a synonym for endurance several times from 5:7
to the end of chapter 5. That’s the
theme. He introduced the theme of
endurance back in James 1:2 where he said….
NKJ James 1:2 My brethren, count it all joy when
you fall into various trials,
NKJ James 1:3 knowing that the testing of your
faith produces patience.
Our doctrine gets
tested. Our belief system gets tested. We are to be consistent in application of
the Word. It wraps up in his
conclusion. He says…
NKJ James 5:7 Therefore be patient, brethren,
until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious
fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and
latter rain.
Again we see that James has
that same future focus that the writer of Hebrews has and Paul has. We need to live today in the light of what is
coming. We don’t want to be like the
person John refers to in I John 2:28 of having shame at the Judgment Seat of
Christ. So we need to be patient, long
suffering, not get impatient until the coming of the Lord.
He uses an illustration from
agriculture. Whatever you do, you can’t
make the corn or make the tomatoes or whatever you are growing, grow
faster. It proceeds at its own
rate. You can’t make yourself grow any
faster spiritually. You can’t hurry it
up. You can’t go out there and try to
make things happen. It takes time. I am
convinced that a certain amount of spiritual maturity is going to take place
because you become more emotionally mature.
It just takes time and you can’t rush it.
This is not a reference to
the coming of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of the Church Age and then a later
manifestation for some end time. I just
have to throw that in because there are a whole lot of people out there that
believe that. As soon as they see latter
rain they start talking in terms of the Holy Spirit because this is a big
charismatic doctrine. It’s not talking
about that. It is just using an agricultural
analogy. In
NKJ James 5:8 You also be patient. Establish your
hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.
He repeats the concept
again.
Eggizo - it is at hand.
It is imminent. It can happen at
any moment. So he repeats this command
to be patient and then he says to establish your hearts. This again is an imperative form of the verb sterizo
which means to set it in place. It
is setting something in concrete, to make it firm, to establish it. You need to take your decision to make the
Word of God a priority in your life and set that in concrete. There are a lot of people who 20 years into
their Christian life they are still trying to figure out if they are going to follow
Jesus. It is okay to follow Jesus as
long as His agenda is my agenda and as long as He stays in my comfort
zone. But as soon as He gets me out of
my comfort zone, then I better find something else to do. We don’t want to get too fanatical about this
Bible doctrine stuff. The idea here is
you have to establish your heart. You
have to make a decision that “what matters to me is the Word of God. It doesn’t matter what else, because I am
going to do what the Word of God says to do.
I am going to make that the thinking of my soul.” So the command here is to set it in place, to
fix it so that it doesn’t move, to make a permanent decision in terms of the
course of your life.
The coming of the Lord is near.
Then we have the reason given
based on a hoti clause. It is because the Lord’s coming is near. This is a reference again to II Corinthians
5:10 that we will all stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ.
This brings us to the
doctrine of works that we studied a couple of weeks ago. I just want to remind
you of Ephesians 2:10.
NKJ Ephesians
You are not saved just so you
can go to heaven. You are not saved just
so you can sit in Bible class and accumulate 25 doctrinal notebooks from A to Z
of all the important doctrines of the Bible and be able to correlate everything
together. Not that there is anything wrong
with those things, but that is not the purpose for your salvation. The purpose of your salvation drives through all
of that. It is to get through all of
that to application. We are to be living
evidence within the framework of the angelic conflict. That means a production of divine good that stands
on record for all of eternity
NKJ Ephesians
That is manifesting these
good works. Part of this affects our
basic attitude. This is one of the
verses in the Bible most of us would like to say that we believe in the
inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture every word comes from the mouth of God
except for this verse. There is a verse over in Philippians that says do all
things without grumbling or complaining.
We say, “Let’s go to the next
verse.”
This says not to
grumble. The word is the Greek stenazo which means to complain, to groan or to
gripe about whatever it is that other believers are doing that irritate
you.
NKJ James 5:9 Do not grumble against one another,
brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door!
Now I don’t know about you,
but there are a lot of things about other believers that irritate me. This is not an easy verse.
Don’t complain about other
believers. Whatever it is they are doing,
don’t complain about them. Don’t gripe
about them. That is between them and the
Lord and the Lord is going to handle it.
You are going to be
accountable for that. They may be doing
things in an irresponsible way. They may
be doing things in a foolish way. They
may have lower standards. They may be messing
up by the numbers, but that is between them and the Lord. Your job and my job are to apply doctrine
consistently so that we are going to be accountable before the Lord.
He wants us to realize
this. We need to live in the immediacy
of the rapture, the immediacy of the coming of Jesus for us and taking the Lord
us to the Judgment Seat of Christ so that it is so real to us that it is more
real than anything else that we are doing in life.
NKJ James
He is saying the same thing
that the writer of Hebrews is saying.
Look at Abraham, how long he waited before he realized the promise of
Isaac. Look at Jacob as he is out of the
land for 20 years before he returns to the land. Look at Joseph as we are studying now and
look at the years he spends as a slave and then in prison before God promotes
him. And look at David and the years he spent out in the wilderness waiting on
the promise of God before it was finally realized.
Look at Paul who is called an apostle as one out of
season in Acts 9.
Yet he has to spend 14 years back in
So he is set aside in
training for a long period of time before Paul finally gets involved in the
ministry. So there is a period of
suffering and training and patience in verse 10.
NKJ James
There is hupomone. It is related to patience.
So the writer of James takes
Job as his example. But there is one
other thing that is going on here.
You see when we look at these
examples and you say, “Okay. I hear what
you are saying. I need to look at Adam and Noah and Abraham. But God appeared to them. What about Jesus appeared to Paul? And you have Peter and Andrew and James and
all the other disciples. They walked
with Jesus for 3 years. Now if I had
that, then maybe that would make a difference.
These guys - there was something different about them.”
That is the rationalization that
people adopt to justify mediocrity in their spiritual life.
“I can’t have the impact of
James or John or Peter or any of the Old Testament believers because they had something
special.”
The lie is that they were
different from us. We tend to think that
they were different; but they are not.
The truth is that there is no difference whatsoever. James
NKJ James 5:17 Elijah was a man with a nature like
ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain on
the land for three years and six months.
The point is that Elijah is
not any different than you or me. Isaiah
wasn’t any different than you or me. Daniel
wasn’t any different from you or me.
Don’t say. “It was his
environment.”
Don’t say, “God appeared to
him.”
That is garbage. There is no difference. The only difference is their volition. You see when you look at Old Testament saints
which is where both Hebrews and James are going here for their point of
comparison, you have got so much more.
You have the indwelling of the Spirit. You have got the filling of the
Holy Spirit. You have been sealed by the
Holy Spirit. You have the completed
canon of Scripture. You have this vast
array of both Old Testament and New Testament and Church Age witnesses who have
set an example before you. You don’t
have an excuse. I don’t have an
excuse. The challenge here is that with
all of this we need to follow their example. The only difference is that they
were willing to trust God and walk by faith and not by sight. We’re not. It is a matter of volition. Are you willing to do what they did, make the
decisions they made, because for them God was more real and the plan of God was
more real than anything that they experienced – anything in their background.
Now that leads us to a
question. That is - what is it that really
made them different? What made it
possible for those men and women to be the spiritual giants that we think of to
have impact that they had and to serve the Lord to such a great degree? How can we imitate that?
Well, the first point is that
it boils down to their faith. They had
the will, the gumption, the guts (whatever word you wan to use) to really
believe God, to truly trust Him and take Him at His word and take up the
challenge to walk by faith and not by sight.
NKJ 2 Corinthians 5:7 For we walk by faith, not by sight.
That means that the Word of
God and the principles described in the Word of God have to become more real to
you than anything you experience whether it is emotions, pressure from those
who are outside. Think of all the
rejection that Jesus went through. John
1 says that He came to His own, but His own received Him not. For 2,000 years God was preparing the Jewish people
to receive and accept Jesus His Son as their Messiah.
He came and they said, “We
don’t want you.”
Did He react? Were His feelings hurt? Did He get all upset and go home?
Did He say, “I am just going
to go home now?”
No, He just kept at it and
kept at it and kept at it. No matter how
they mistreated Him, maltreated Him, abused Him, falsely accused Him, Jesus never
vacillated, never changed and never waffled. He kept His eye on the mission. The mission was to serve God completely.
So for Jesus in His humanity
the Word of God was more real to Him than all of the opposition, all of the
rejection, all of the hostility, all of the insults, all of the gossip, all of
the slander. They called Him a
drunk. They called Him a glutton because
He went to parties and He would eat and drink.
Obviously He has to be drinking alcoholic wine or they wouldn’t have had
a basis for calling him a drunk. It
didn’t mean he got drunk. He ate food so
they called Him a glutton. That means He
had to have had a glass of wine and then they called Him a drunk. The reason was that John the Baptist came and
he didn’t. He fasted. He did not partake of any pleasantries. You see people are always going generate an
excuse to be against you if you are a believer – if you are standing for the
truth. They are always going to take
something that has a little core of truth and then twist it all out of
proportion. So Jesus came and for Him
the Word of God was more real than anything that people did.
That means that you have to
do what Jesus did, what Paul did what Moses did and what everybody did. They lived on a totally different code of
conduct. What was in their head and why
they lived and why they made the choices they made was not like anybody
else. They had a different standard of
thinking. They were operating (you are
going to love this) on a Mac operating system while everybody else was on a
PC. They had something better going for them. They had the truth. Now some of you PC people don’t understand
that. I have been using Mac’s for 20
years and any given Mac I have ever had never broke. Every PC I have had gets a new everything
every year. They had a superior
operating system. They had the truth,
divine viewpoint. They were completely
sold out to it. People who continue to try
to operate on both systems – human viewpoint and divine viewpoint when it is
comfortable - always crash. It never
works. That is what made the heroes of
the Old Testament better. They operated
at key points on divine viewpoint. Their
core values whether we are talking about Jesus or whether we are talking about
Old Testament prophets whether we are talking about New Testament heroes - their
core values were always shaped completely by the Word of God so that the
existence of God and accountability to Christ at the Judgment Seat of Christ
was more real to them than any temptation, than any physical pleasure, than any
personal agenda item that you can come up with.
The fact of the Judgment Seat of Christ was so real to Paul. Just read what he says I Corinthians 9 and in
II Corinthians 5 in places where he talks about running the race and how he
beat his body into submission as it were, using a tremendous metaphor there. You
feel the energy there of how he is almost physically grabbing himself forcing
himself to do that which he knows he must do because of the real danger of
being disqualified. So the existence of
God and accountability to Christ was more real.
They were walking by faith and not sight.
That is the first. I have 5 things that made it possible for
these people to be the spiritual heroes that they were. It all starts after salvation with that
willingness to make the Word of God the number one priority and to walk by
faith and not by sight where what God says is more important to you than what
anybody else says or thinks. No matter what anybody does, the only thing that
matters is what Jesus said I need to do in this kind of situation. That is the starting point. We will get to the other 4 when I come back
from
One of the points is that
they all have a passion for evangelism. While I am gone Ike is going to be teaching on
Tuesday and Thursday night related to principles of evangelism and
communicating the gospel in a pagan world.
So you are going to want to pay attention to what Ike says at that time.
Let’s bow our heads in
closing prayer.