Hebrews: It will divide you… ·...

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved.

Transcript October 19 & 20, 2013

Hebrews: It will divide you Aaron Brockett | Hebrews 4:1-13

Good morning. It is good to see you. If you have a Bible, please get to Hebrews 4 if you would. Before we jump in, I have a couple of things I would like to share with you. First of all, over the next two-‐and-‐a-‐half weeks I am going to be traveling a little bit more than usual so I ask that you be praying for me. I am going to be speaking at a conference in Michigan on November 1st and 2nd. I am going to be speaking to about 250 church leaders up there; about 100 churches represented. I would appreciate your prayers as I prepare for that this week. I am going to preach four times in a day-‐and-‐a-‐half. So I don’t know who to have you pray for, me or them. But that is going to be going on. Then I am going to be in New York City for a board meeting with Orchard Group. Many of you know that we are excited to plant churches with Orchard Group. You can check them out at orchardgroup.org. There are some exciting things happening there. Then I am going to be in Chicago for a couple of days. Many of you know Derek and Kailey Puckett. They are a family that we sent out. They are going to be planting a church in Chicago next year. So next weekend our family is going to go up and just spend some time encouraging them. We are going to be ordaining Derek next February. He is going to be preaching here and we are going to be ordaining him the same morning. Then I am going to be in Seattle after that. There is a lot going on in the next two-‐and-‐a-‐half weeks and I ask for you to pray for me. So I am not going to be preaching the next three weekends because of all that extra stuff going on. We are a “kingdom minded” church. Jake and Matt are going to continue our study through Hebrews. Keep praying for them because I gave them the most difficult parts. That is just how I roll. Secondly, let me just cover a little bit of family business. I haven’t done this very often, but let me kind of give you a little annual report as to where we are as a church so you know how to pray. There are some things to be aware of. We have 11 more weekends in 2013, if you can believe that. Let me just kind of give you a little report here. Numbers are not everything to us but they do tell us something. Our average attendance in 2013 is 4442. That is just the number of people who are showing up here on the weekends. For sixth grade and under, we have 984 students on average on a weekend. That is just the average; a lot of times we will have 1100 or 1200 kids. So be praying for all of our volunteers in that area. Middle and high school students; we have about 348 on average that are showing up every weekend. This is a number I am really excited about, we have had 383 baptisms so far this year. It is just October so I fully expect us to end the year somewhere north of 400, which is the most ever in the history of our church. That is really something cool. And 34 of those came last Sunday night. We had 34 high school students who were baptized last Sunday night. We have just a little more than 1200 people in Life groups and 106 new groups started this year. That is something to celebrate but it is also something to work on. We have over 4000 people in attendance but only 1200 of you are in groups. This is our way of trying to help you grow toward full maturity and so I

Hebrews: It will divide you October 19 & 20, 2013

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

want to encourage you to get into a group. We had 220 people go on short term mission trips this year; we have many lined up for 2014. Lastly, our weekly budget need is $151,923. Our actual giving is $149,813. Another way of looking at that is we invest $34.20 per person per week to do ministry around here. We have $33.73 given. So we have a little bit of a deficit that we need to make up over the next few weekends. If this is your home church and you are excited about what God is going here, I want to thank you for your generosity so that way we finish the year strong heading into 2014. Let me pray and then we are going to jump in. Father, we come to You right now and I thank You for the passages we are going to work through together. Thank You for this church. I ask, in the following moments together, that You would speak clearly to each one of our hearts and minds regardless of where we think we stand with You. That everybody in this room would feel convicted to do something with the content of this passage. We ask this in Jesus’ name. And the church says, “Amen.” A couple of weeks ago our family was sitting around the dinner table eating a meal. My wife, Lindsay, really spends a lot of time preparing meals that are good for us. So you can fix food that tastes good, but you can also fix food that is good for you. All the ladies said, “Amen.” Half of you. My wife spends a lot of time doing that. My 11 year old son has not reached a maturity level where he appreciates this. Does that surprise anyone? So we were sitting around that table eating this meal. I forget what she made for us, something healthy. My 11 year old son expressed his displeasure with it. That is when Lindsay said to him, “You know Connor, sometimes you eat food, not just because it tastes good, but because it is good for you.” This might be a healthy reminder to us, as we come to Hebrews 4, that when it comes to the Bible we don’t just expose ourselves to the parts that taste good, we don’t just read the parts that are inspirational or easy to understand and apply, but we devote ourselves to those parts of the Bible that are more complicated to understand and even more difficult to apply. The book of Hebrews definitely fits into that category. It doesn’t really have a shallow end, as we have already seen, it kind of drops off rather quickly. That is the point of the whole book. The author of Hebrews is writing to a group of Christians, a group of Hebrew believers that are drifting away from Christ. They are drifting away from known salvation. He says, “Hey, man, don’t just stay at the surface, but dive toward new depths in Jesus Christ.” So far in this series I have been blessed by my personal study of the book of Hebrews. It is also challenging me. I just want to let you know that it is one thing to study a passage of the Bible and grasp the meaning of it, it is another thing entirely to prepare a sermon on that same material and to deliver it to a room full of people like this, to where everybody can grab a hold of it and be compelled to do something with it. That is a challenge. I look around the room and I see very, very young people and I see some older people and everybody in between, all in different seasons of life. There are some of you in this room that are not yet believers. There are some of you who are baby Christians and this is the first serious Bible study that you have really ever been in. Some people in this room have surpassed my maturity in Christ, maybe many years ago. So the challenge for me is to take that material, this diverse room of people, and preach a sermon



where everybody can scoot their chair up to the table, both high chairs and rocking chairs, and feed on this and say, “Hey, I understand that and I am going to do something with it.” That is the challenge. As we come to Hebrews 4:1 of our study, we are still in the middle of a warning that started in Hebrews 3:7. So there are five warnings in the book of Hebrews. We have already covered two of them. One of them came in chapter 2 and said, “Hey, don’t drift away from Christ.” The second one was last week in chapter 3 and said, “Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.” So the illustration that he gives is of the Israelites as they come right up to the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. They are about to go in and they are afraid. So two spies come back, Joshua and Caleb, and they say, “Hey, you can trust us. We have heard from the Lord. We can go in and we can conquer the land.” Even though God had proven Himself trustworthy, the Israelites failed to trust God. They hardened their hearts and as a result they didn’t get to go into the Promised Land. This is still in the middle of all this warning talk that has now transferred to you and me. Who in this room can tell me what the great thing is about a warning? The great thing about a warning is that it is just a warning. Do any of you remember growing up and going to the public pool? The life guard would blow the whistle and give you a warning. They at least didn’t kick you out of the pool. That would come later. But it is just a warning. In other words, a warning means you still have an opportunity to turn this thing around. You still have a chance to change. With that in mind, we come to chapter 4, verse 1 together, “Therefore, while the promise of entering His rest still stands.” One of the things I have taught you before is that when you see the word “therefore” you know an application is coming. In this section of Hebrews, we see one “therefore” stacked upon another. It is as if the author is layering one application over another. He says, “Therefore, while the promise,” so this is a promise given to us, entering God’s rest is still on the table. Now what does God’s rest mean? This is the first time that the word “rest” is mentioned in the book of Hebrews. It is going to be mentioned 10 times in the next 13 verses. So this is a significant theme in this section of the book of Hebrews. The automatic question is, “What does God’s rest really mean?” Well, for the Israelites it would have meant that there was no more slavery in Egypt. It would have meant no more traveling aimlessly through the desert. It would have meant they could finally own their own land. They finally have a home. That is what it meant for them. For us, there are two meanings for God’s rest. There is an eternal rest that means Heaven is coming. Here is the thing we need to understand: God desires to give you rest. That doesn’t mean that everything would be perfect after that. Jesus even said it in John 14, “In this world you are going to have trouble.” What God desires to give you is rest. One of the conditions of fallen mankind is that we have a tendency to be suspicious of God as if God wants something from us rather than something for us. Right here it says God is giving us this promise of rest and yet many of us feel as if God is trying to trick us into something. This was kind of solidified for me this last week. I came home late one afternoon and my youngest daughter, Cadence, she is 21 months old, her left eye was beet red and she was fussing; kind of crying and in a bad mood. Lindsay said, “She was in the bathtub and he got some shampoo in her eye and her left eye is really irritated.” So I went into the room and leaned her back in my recliner. I had this bottle of artificial tears and I was going to try to use to flush her eye out. Have any of you ever tried to do that with a 21 month old? Did that go well, because if it did I need to talk to you after. I leaned her back and I am talking to her and I am explaining this to her and it was like talking to a brick wall. She just doesn’t



get it. She doesn’t have the perspective. She doesn’t have the reasoning skills to understand that what I want for her is her rest. I want some relief for her. But she doesn’t get it. So I am trying to drop the eye drop into her eye. That first drop hit her eye and she freaked out. She started screaming. Lindsay walked in and said, “What are you doing to her?” I am like, “I am trying to help her.” This comes to mind as I read this passage. God desires to give us rest but many of us don’t see it. We think God maybe wants something from us. The rest of God, if you are taking notes, just means three really practical things here on earth. Number one, it means no more self effort. So you don’t need to continue to work for God to approve of you. Salvation is a gift that comes by God’s grace. That should be great news. You don’t have to work for this. The second thing that it means is to be at peace with God. This means to be free from whatever worries disturb you. Some people can just never fully relax because their mind is always running a million miles an hour. The rest of God means you can finally take your hands off that and relax. The third thing, just really practically, it just means to be secure in your identity. Part of resting means lying down and being still. Sleep is a great gift, not just for the physical benefits of sleep, but for the emotional benefits of it. For those of you in this room who are control freaks, sleep is an involuntary tapping out for an eight hour period of time. So you wake up at the end of your eight hour sleep to realize that the world is still turning and you had nothing to do with it. That is a great gift. The rest of God means you can be secure in your identity. You lean upon Jesus Christ. That is what it practically means but this is also talking about Heaven. Heaven is our destiny and Heaven is our reward for those of us who put our trust in Christ. This offer is still on the table. Going on in verse 1 he says, “let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.” This is reference to this Hebrew congregation, the ground we have already covered. They had heard the Gospel, many of them had responded to it, and now they were showing signs of letting go of it. They were showing signs of drifting away from it. He says the appropriate response to that should be fear. You should be afraid. You might have been raised in the church, or you might have been exposed to the Gospel, that maybe you made some sort of response, or that you grabbed a hold of the Gospel and now you are beginning to show signs of drifting from it. The only appropriate response to that should not be apathy, but fear. To some of you that may sound a little bit strange. You know the number one command in the Bible is to fear not. Here it says specifically that we should fear. You need to understand that the appropriate definition of fear here is the attitude of heart that seeks a right relationship with God. That is what the fear of the Lord means. It is the attitude of heart that seeks a right relationship with God. This is fear that makes you feel safe. How many of you would agree that instilling a little bit of healthy fear into the lives of your kids to keep them from harm is a good thing? Do any of you ever do that? Look both ways before you cross the street. You could say that a little nicer but not if a Mac truck is coming. So we instill a little bit of healthy fear to keep them safe. Let me just go ahead and apologize. It feels like I am using my kids as a lot of illustrative material this week, but what can I say, it has been a heavy kid illustration week. My wife has been out of town since early Thursday morning and it is a miracle I am here today. I just wanted to get here without my underwear being on the outside. That was the goal. You can pray for my kids. Last night they were like, “When is mommy coming home?” and I am like, “I want that just as much as you do.”



But Tuesday night at 1:45 in the morning, my six year old, Kennedy, woke up screaming. She was sitting up in bed. She woke up her older sister, who she shares a room with. She woke me up. So I went down the hallway, half asleep, and she is in the room sitting up and she had had a nightmare. So she is just wailing about it uncontrollably, can’t be consoled. I walked up and tried to reason it out of her. She is not listening to me. So finally I had to break out my scary daddy voice. Do any of you know what I am talking about? I said, “Kennedy Rain, stop it.” She got really quiet at that point. She looked up at me and I said, “Look right at me, sweetheart. Repeat after me, ‘It was just a dream, it is not real.’” She looked back at me, “It wad jus a dweam, it wad not real.” She repeats the whole thing. I said, “Sweetheart, do you not wake up in bed safe and sound every single morning?” She is like, “Yes sur.” I am like, “It is SIR!” No I didn’t do that. Pray for my kids. Once I was able to scare her enough with a healthy kind of fear, she calmed down so that I could console her. I laid down behind her and I wrapped my arms around her. I said, “Daddy will lay right here until you fall back to sleep.” This is what I am talking about. This is a healthy fear that places our trust in Christ. You know the Bible says the world that does not know God, does not fear God. We just kind of dismiss Him with sort of a brass attitude. In Romans 3:18 it says, “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” But in contrast to that in Proverbs 9:10, it says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So here is the question I have for you. Do you have this? Do you have a healthy fear of God, a fear that seeks a right relationship with Him? This is the understanding that, “There is a God and I am not Him.” So I approach Him with a meekness and humility. If not, today is the day to begin. If not, today is the day that you begin a healthy fear of the Lord that brings about your own safety. Going on in verse 2, it says, “For good news came to us just as to them.” So who is us? Us, right? That isn't hard to understand, “ ... just as to them.” Who is them? That is the Israelites. “But the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened.” So this is a very technical verse with a simple meaning. It is basically saying that there are those of us in this room who hear this and believe it because we unite our faith with it. There are those in this room who hear this and don’t believe it because we don’t accept it in faith. That is all that it is talking about. This is what divides two groups of people. There are those who know and believe and those who know and choose not to believe. So look, sitting here and listening to a sermon without applying any of it is worthless. You might as well go do something else with your time. If you are not willing to come in and hear a message and say, “Here is one thing that I can apply to my life from this,” you might as well do something else. In fact, coming here week after week and listening to this and not doing anything with it is probably just heaping more condemnation upon you. The Bible says, “To whom much is given, much is required.” So the challenge for each of us is to hear this and say, “I am going to do something with it. I believe that and now I am going to unite my faith with it.” Belief is more than, "I hope so." How many of you believe that the Colts are going to beat the Broncos tonight? That is not very convincing. That is what I am talking about. Most of the time when we say, “Hey, I believe that” what do we mean? We mean I sure hope so. Belief is much stronger. Belief is I believe that so much I have united my faith with it. Something is going to change. I am going to invest myself. Something dramatically different is going to take place.



So the attitude here is fear and the action is faith. Unite your faith with what you believe. The urgency is today. When should we do something about this? Today. That is what we should do. I love that. As we come to verse 3 -‐ verses 3-‐11 are a little complex. I think it is a little too difficult for us to understand so it must be meant for others, so let’s skip it. You don’t want to do that? In all seriousness, verses 3-‐11 are really complex and you are going to feel like you are on a roller coaster getting jerked around a little bit, but it has a really simple meaning. So hang with me. I am going to try to read through it and I am going to try to reduce it down to its basic meaning. It is very complex. The author here uses a long winding road to basically say one thing. Hebrews 4:3, “For we who have believed enter that rest,” we have already defined what rest means, “as he has said,” so he is talking about God here, God says, “‘As I swore in My wrath, They shall not enter My rest,’” he is talking about the Israelites, “although His works were finished from the foundation of the world.” What that means is that God is already in a position of rest. He was and is and is to come. So God is already experiencing the rest that we need to take by faith. That is what that means. Verse 4, “For he has somewhere spoken,” does that sound familiar? “For he has somewhere spoken,” what is he talking about? The Old Testament. He is quoting the Old Testament. He is just humble. He doesn’t tell us exactly where this is, but this is a quote from Genesis 2:2. So he says, “For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: ‘And God rested on the seventh day from all His works.’ And again in this passage he said, “‘They shall not enter My rest.’” Verse 6 is the application. How do we know that? Because the word therefore is right there. “Since therefore it remains for some to enter it,” he is talking about us, “and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience,” he is talking about the Israelites. Anybody have whiplash yet? “Again He appoints a certain day.” What is the day? Today. “‘Today,’ saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, ‘Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.’ For if Joshua had given them rest,” Joshua was the leader of the Israelites, urging them to go in, and he is talking about the promise land, “God would not have spoken of another day later on.” All that means is that the Promised Land for the Israelites was temporary. Even if they would have gone in, it wasn’t eternal. There is an eternal rest that is coming for us. Verse 9, “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God,” he is talking about Heaven, verse 10, “for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works,” in other words, religious works. You don’t have to work for this to earn it. “As God did from His.” So God is the model showing us how to rest. Verse 11, “Let us therefore strive,” that word, strive, is great. It means to pursue, hang on to, get after it. “Strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall,” no one may stumble, no one may fall by the wayside, “by the same sort of disobedience.” Hey, that is a long winding road to basically say this. Today, it is not too late to enter the rest of God. That is all that means. It is very complex, verses 3-‐11, but all it means is that today, if you hear the voice of God, don’t harden your hearts like the Israelites. It is not too late to enter the rest of God. I love that word, strive. It doesn’t mean strive to earn God’s salvation; it means strive to grow to full maturity in Christ. We have, a lot of us, come to the foot of the cross and received salvation from the Lord. We are still sitting at the foot of the cross with our Heaven card stamped, and we are waiting for the shuttle to get there, and we need to get moving. This is why I am traveling so much over the next two-‐and-‐a-‐half weeks; striving. I am trying to expand the Kingdom of God. I am trying to let as many people know -‐ striving towards full maturity in Christ. So we get after it with urgency to do this.



The automatic question we have is how? How do we strive? This brings us to verse 12, which is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Look at it with me. Verse 12, “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-‐edged sword,” and so he is going to transition here to talk about the power of God’s Word helping us to grow deeper in the understanding of Christ. He describes it as “living and active.” The author of Hebrews really believes this because he quotes the Old Testament 35 times in the 13 chapters of Hebrews. He alludes to it 34 times and he summarizes Old Testament concepts 19 times in the book. So he is practicing what he preaches. He believes the Word of God is enough to convince you and that it is living and it is active. What does that mean? Living and active means that it is not dead or dull. It means it is not stale or static. It has the characteristics to produce life in you and me. The Word of God is alive and active. And, sadly, there are a lot of people who struggle to believe this. There are a lot of people who say, “Well, let’s not just teach the Bible straight up because the world doesn’t really accept it is authoritative. Let’s start with a reference to the Lord of the Rings and let’s build a bridge into the Bible. Let’s get out really quick before we lose people because the Bible is dead and dull.” That is a bunch of garbage. We say, “Let’s don’t teach the Bible straight up because people don’t accept the authority of it.” Listen and look right at me. The Bible is powerful even if you don’t yet believe that it is true. It has an impact and then you experience a healthy respect for it. Hey man, I am all about reading about all the evidences for the Canon of the Scripture and all the evidence for the authority of the original documents. It is a very interesting read and a very compelling conversation. My experience is that it doesn’t yield as much fruit as we’d like. The most powerful defense of God’s Word is to just open it up and teach through it. You don’t need to defend the lion, let it out of the cage. Here is what will happen. For those of you who have experienced this in this room … I had a conversation with a guy last Saturday night. He came to me and said, “Hey, I was an atheist and had very little church background. I started attending the church. I was interested in what you said but I just kind of circled the runway for two years. Finally the Word of God became living and active in his life. He never came to the arrangement where he said, “I finally believe in the authenticity of the original documents.” No, the Word of God became living and active. There is a guy by the name of John Newton who was raised in the mid-‐18th Century in a Christian home. After leaving home, he joined the British Navy where he could indulge in all kinds of sin and rebellion. He eventually made his way to Africa where he became a slave trader. He got mixed up with the wrong group of people and he became enslaved himself. They put him in chains. He escaped and boarded a British merchant ship back to Scotland. Because of his experience on the open seas, he earned the confidence of the ship’s captain. He took advantage of that confidence and broke into the ship’s supply of rum and got drunk. The captain was so mad at him that he punched him and he fell overboard. He would have drowned if it wasn’t for some of the crew who rescued him and brought him back aboard the ship. Right after that they got into a really large storm on the open seas and John Newton found himself in the bowels of that ship working the pumps, scared out of his mind that this was the way he was going to die, "Man, the ship is going to sink and I am going to die in a watery grave." It was in those moments, in the midst of that storm, that he began to remember some of the Scripture verses that his mother used to read to him when he was six years old, she died when he was six. He began to just rehearse some of



those Scripture verses in his mind and the Word of God became living and active. In the bowels of that ship, he gave his life to Jesus Christ. When he got back to Scotland he devoted himself to the study of theology and he later became a Puritan minister. He wrote a little tune. It might sound familiar to you. It’s called Amazing Grace. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I am found, was blind but now I see. How did he come to see? It was the Word of God. It became living and active in his life. The Word here is powerful. Well, how powerful is it? I think the author of Hebrews thought that we might ask that question so he gives us a metaphor for how powerful God’s Word is. He says, “It’s like a two-‐edged sword.” And for a two-‐edged sword, the sharper the sword the deeper it penetrates. The word here is penetrates. So if you are taking notes, the Bible is powerful. It is also penetrating. The Bible gives several metaphors itself to describe how penetrating it is. So I brought a few props with me this morning. Some of you are wondering what this table is for. The first metaphor that the Bible uses to describe itself, I have been looking forward to this all week [picking up a sword]. I am going to hurt myself. The Bible describes itself as a “double-‐edged sword.” This is the image in Ephesians 6:17, “For the Word of God is like a sword.” The sword is what penetrates my sinful spirit. The sword is what you use in up close, personal, hand to hand combat. You don’t pull out a sword when your enemy is 200 yards away, “I am going to get you! ” You don’t do that. You pull out the sword when your enemy is up close. So this is how the Bible describes itself. When you get up close and personal with it, not just what other people say about it, but when you get up close and personal with it, it goes to work on you. Once it defeats you, in the best sense of the term, you pick up the sword of God’s Word to defend yourself against discouragement and temptation. Some of you are going weaponless into a battle you can’t win because you don’t know this book. So how did Jesus defend Himself in Matthew 4 when He was tempted? It was with the Word of God. It was with the sword of the Spirit. And if Jesus had to use this, don’t you think you do? Hey, I better put this down. I am going to hurt myself. So this is the sword of God’s Word. As we look through Scripture we see that another metaphor that the Bible uses of itself, it’s like seed. In Luke 8:11 Jesus said, as He was explaining the parable of the sower, “The seed is the Word of God.” So if you are taking notes, seed is what penetrates my fallen nature and shows me Christ. Now how many of you have ever planted a garden and looked at it and said, “Man, is anything good going to come of that? Is a plant or a bush really going to come from this seed?” But you plant it into the ground with an element of faith. You water it, and you wait patiently, and eventually there is something that gets produced from this. This is like the Word of God. This is like the guy that I told you about. For two years he was coming here, exposing himself to the seed of God’s Word. It took a while for there to be a return. Some of you have read the Bible and have given up on it because you didn’t understand it. Yet, it is like seed and you need to continue to stay after it.



What does the Bible say about itself? “Hide God’s Word in your heart.” This is why the warning about hardening your hearts is so severe. You can’t plant seed in hard soil. It doesn’t go anywhere. So your heart has to be soft enough to receive that seed. Another metaphor that the Bible uses of itself is that it is “like milk.” In 1 Peter 2:2 it says, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation.” So milk is what penetrates my spiritual immaturity. Is there anything more dependent than a little baby nursing milk from its mother or from a bottle? Is there really such a thing as an arrogant baby? “I don’t need this. Give me a T-‐bone.” No the only way a baby can receive that is by, and you don’t think of it in these terms, but by humbling themselves. The baby is not going to get it on it’s own. It needs to be put in a bottle and it needs to be given to them. The way you grow is by nursing on spiritual milk. The opposite of that, and what God is trying to progress us to, is the meat of His Word. So you start with milk and you go to meat. Aren’t we thankful that, as adults, every time we are hungry we don’t just burst out and start crying? That would be kind of odd? Are any of you hungry right now? Like you would just start wailing. Aren’t we glad we have learned to suppress that? But many adults in this room are acting out due to discouragement, anxiety, fear, and worry, because they are not nursing on what God wants to give them to nourish their soul. They are neglecting the milk of His Word. Another analogy that the Bible uses to describe itself, or a metaphor, is that of a light. In Psalm 119 it says, “God’s Word is a light unto our path.” So if you are taking notes, this penetrates my uncertainty. How many of you have ever tried to walk around in a room that was pitch black? Here is the question. Were your steps timid or secure? They were timid. If you have ever walked through a room that is pitch black, you are walking very timidly because you don’t want to stub your toe or run into anything. When somebody flicks on a light, you can walk confidently. That is what God’s Word is for us. Another metaphor, there are two more here, is that God’s Word is for us is “like a mirror.” In James 1, it says, “If anyone is a hearer of the Word and not at doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.” So the Word of God penetrates my false sense of identity. In other words, God’s Word shows me who I really am. Have any of you ever gone around all day long with something hanging from your nose and you didn’t know it? You are having all these animated conversations with people up-‐close and then you walk into the bathroom and you are like, “Oh no. Why didn’t somebody say something?” Yes, God is love. Yes, God is gracious. Neither one of those things mean anything until you have an understanding of who you are. So the Bible holds a mirror up to your face so that you see who you really are. That is the only way for us to truly experience change. One last metaphor for God’s Word. This one might surprise you. This comes from Jeremiah 23:29. God’s Word is like a hammer and this penetrates my stubbornness. Are any of you stubborn? This seems a little unnecessary, maybe even kind of brutal. Some of you might not like this one. This is actually a symbol of God’s grace. This is why the Bible tells us over and over again, “Do not harden your hearts.” This is kind of like the last resort. I am thankful that there have been some seasons of my life where I have hardened my heart to God, and I have been somewhat stubborn and the sword of God’s Word could not penetrate, and the seed of God’s Word couldn’t take root. So God pulled out the hammer of conviction and the hammer of change. This is actually a symbol of God’s Word.



So this is how God’s Word penetrates us. These are the metaphors that God’s Word uses of itself. Some of you, inevitably, are saying, “Aaron, I have read God’s Word several times and I didn’t really experience any of those things.” I would simply say, very kindly but very directly, “Have you really? Have you really? Have you sat down and gotten up close with God’s Word yourself?” I am not talking about a theology class you took in college. I am not talking about a Sunday school lesson many years ago. I am not talking about getting on an atheist website and reading passages that have been ripped out of their context. I am talking about, have you gotten up close and have you checked your smug and your arrogant attitude at the door and come to God’s Word with all humility and said, “God, would You give me the eyes to see what is only spiritually discerned?’” Have you ever done that? Because if you haven’t, then of course you have not experience these things. If you come to God’s Word with meekness and humility, and I promise you if you do that, God’s Word will penetrate your heart like a sword, a seed, milk, a light, a mirror, and a hammer, because it is powerful. Well, how penetrating is it? Look with me in verse 12. “… piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Here is another way of saying it. God’s Word gets to the heart of the matter. It knows you better than you know you. Here is what happens. Here is how you know that God’s Word is penetrating. You start reading it and all of the sudden it starts reading you. You say, “Wait a second. I just came to the Bible trying to cross examine it and all of the sudden it is cross examining me.” That is when you know it has begun to penetrate you. When Lindsay and I were in pre-‐marital counseling while we were engaged, we took one of those personality tests that kind of assess how you respond to different scenarios. It is a line on a chart that shows you how you respond. Then the other test is how your spouse reads you in those moments. It was almost comical. Lindsay’s line like shadowed mine. She could read me like a book. The counselor said, “Aaron, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that your future wife knows you inside and out. The bad news is you will never be able to keep anything from her.” That actually turned out to be good news. She can read me. She can understand me. This is what God’s Word does to us. I’ll never forget about 10 years ago I was in Zambia doing some mission work. I met a lady who was a full-‐time missionary there. We sat down in her house and we were talking to her. She told me that in her former life she was an attorney and she was an atheist. She and her husband were both atheists, they were both attorneys. They made a lot of money. They got to the point where they were able to retire early. They were able to retire at 50 years old. She said that, as soon as they retired, as soon as they were set, they were going to travel together. He left her. She woke up one morning, he’d cleared out the closet. She had nothing left. She said in that moment of her life, she’d made all the money in the world she ever cared to make, she said she just sat down. She had never really read the Bible for herself. She said, “I just decided to read the Bible.” So she started in Genesis and started to read through it. She said at first she kind of read it as if it were a nice little fictional novel. So it was a novel about the Jewish people, the Israelites. So she read through the Old Testament and then she decided to go on into the New. She started reading Matthew and she thought to herself, this is literally what she thought, she thought, “Man, this is great. The Jewish people finally have a Messiah.” That is how she was reading this. Then she said this, and I’ll never forget it, she said, “About half way through the Gospel of Luke, it hit me. He died for me too.” So you start off reading the Bible and eventually the Bible starts reading you. How does it do this? Well, the Bible gets to the root of the problem. You and I have a tendency to deal with fruit. The Bible deals



with root. This is more than just a fancy little rhyme. This is the idea that we think we have a substance abuse problem, and we do, but until we get to the root of the emptiness of life without God problem, then we are never going to get to the root. Some of us in this room have an anger issue. But until we get the root of some tension or some unresolved un-‐forgiveness in our lives, we are never going to deal with the root of the problem. Some of us in this room have a spending problem. We have a credit card problem. We need Dave Ramsey, right? That is just the fruit. Until you get to the root of idolatry and a priority issue, you are never going to experience significant change. So I just want to ask you this morning. Do you really want to be changed? If you do, then make this [the Bible] top shelf. Read it, memorize it, meditate up on it. This is spiritual food for your soul. Let me challenge you with this. If the only time you are being exposed to God’s Word is when you come here, it is not enough. How many of you only ate one meal this last week? I didn’t think we would have any takers on that. If you only had one physical meal this last week, you would be physically dizzy right now, unable to concentrate. You would look peaked. Many of you are only eating one spiritual meal a week and you wonder why God doesn’t make any sense. You wonder why you are confused. You wonder why you are stumbling through this life. It is because you need to feed on this [the Bible] more. That is if you are here every week. Statistically people say they are a regular church goer if they are just here once a month. So some of you are just eating a spiritual meal once a month and you need to get into this [the Bible] more. Look with me at what it says in verse 13 as we finish up. “And no creature is hidden from His sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.” So the three words for God’s Word is it is powerful, it is penetrating, and it exposes us for who we really are. You cannot hide from the eyes of God. You might write this down. Exposure to God’s Word is exposure to God Himself. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is breathed out by God, profitable for teaching, for reproof, correction, training, and righteousness, that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Have you ever had somebody come to you and they ask you a question, and you start to answer them and they quit paying attention to you? Isn’t that like the definition of parenthood? Have you ever had someone come up, they ask you a sincere question, you start to answer them, and then you look at them and they are looking somewhere else? Isn’t that so annoying? I think this is how God feels on a daily basis. We come to God in prayer and we ask God for something. He is communicating to us through His Word. How many of us have a Bible sitting on a shelf collecting dust because we fail to open it? Let me give you four real practical questions that you can discuss in your Life groups before we close. Here we are. When it comes to God’s Word, am I neglecting it? Are you neglecting it or are you getting into it? Here is the second question. Am I prioritizing it? Am I making it a priority in my life or am I reading other things first. Here is the third question. Am I maximizing it? I had a lady just last night that came up to me and said, “I just can’t read the Bible. I just don’t understand it.” Well, get some helps for this. The best study Bible I think on the market is the ESV Study Bible. Get an ESV Study Bible and use those helps. The Message is a paraphrase of the Bible. I never recommend doing Bible study out of it but I have a copy of the Message on my desk because Eugene Peterson writes a description of the book, it is like two or three paragraphs, and it is worth the price of the book. He gave some of the most masterful descriptions of the Book of Hebrews in three paragraphs in the Message. So, are you maximizing it? Fourthly, I might ask you this question. When it comes to your weekly routine, what are you taking in? Here is the word for that – spiritual calories. What are you taking in? Now I am not the kind of guy that



says you should ban TV altogether, but I am the kind of guy that says if you are watching a Bachelor marathon or the Voice marathon, if that is all you are exposing yourself to, then it is spiritual junk food. So what are you constantly and consistently taking in? The Word of God is living and it is active and it helps us to strive to maturity in Christ. We are going to take Communion and respond in worship together now. So I want you to ready yourself as we prepare for this time together. Father, we come to You right now and we thank You for Your living and active Word that penetrates us. Lord, there are weekends when the preaching doesn’t do Your Word justice, but still just a reading of the Word is powerful. May we trust that and may we be people who have a hunger for it. We know that a meal tastes the best when we are hungry. So develop that hunger within us to pursue Your Word as the milk and the meat that will nourish us. God, I pray that we would not let go of this known salvation that has been declared to us, but that we would abide in it, we would hold on to it, that You would honor that devotion to Your Word, as we strive to mature in Jesus Christ. So I pray that Your Spirit would meet us in this room now as we take Communion, as we take a little time to reflect on Your Word and what it says, and how to apply it. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Hebrews: It will divide you… ·...

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