Anchored in Truth: The Call to Community and Faith

A lot of people look at the Bible and they look at the word of faith and they say to themselves, "I'm a Christian, but yeah, I don't believe this. I don't believe all of it. I'm not one of those weird Christians who thinks it's right all the time. I don't want to be that person." And so, it's kind of a it's kind of a smorgus board. It's kind of a pick and choose. I talked to so many people um uh another part that is that the book of Hebrews that we're in talks about constantly is about people that are uh disconnected from the faith. They don't go to church. They're they're not connected with the community of faith. [00:01:19]

Now, in this case, and in the case of many people throughout the world, if you did attend church, it was a very dangerous thing. Um there would be times that people would find out where you were. They would have raids or things like that. They would go after the Christians. So it was a dangerous thing but it was important enough that the the writer of the book of Hebrews who we don't know who he is he wrote it and he said you need to keep connecting with one another you need to be connected to one another and you need to stick with the truth you can't just make up your own version and that is a I think a very common thing throughout time and a very common thing today is we want to decide we want whether we want to admit it or not we're Very similar to Adam and Eve. [00:01:53]

When we're given the opportunity to bite the apple and be gods ourselves, we take the apple. We take the fruit. We don't know what kind it is. Everybody says it's an apple. We don't know. It's just a fruit. Pick a fruit. But anyways, it's basically we take that fruit and we say, "No, we're God. We're we're smarter than him. We get to decide." And so this whole book of Hebrews is written to a group of believers and they're Hebrews. They're Jewish people. And they've come out of uh they were raised as Jews. They pro they had bar mitzvah and the whole bit. They were you know the the whole bit. They they knew the the law. They knew the Torah. They knew the Old Testament. They knew everything like that. And they had become Christians and they are be they are struggling with the concept because once they became a Christian they were disconnected from their old community and in many ways their family would disown them. [00:02:41]

This is so true about I I hear this from missionary families still today that if you convert to a a religion that's different than your family, your family will just disown you. And that's a a sacrifice that they have to make. And they're sitting to them saying, "Well, maybe it's not worth it. Maybe I'll just go back to the way I was. Maybe I'll just drift away. Or maybe I'll just be a kind of Christian. I I believe in Jesus. I I just don't tell anybody about it." Or if somebody asks me, I'm like, "Well, yeah." Or like a lot of people that I talk to when they say, "Hey, uh I I the question I ask people, they say,"What do you do for a living?" I say, "I'm a pastor." I said, ' Do you go to church? Yeah, we go to fill in the blank. Oh, I know the pastor there. And they're like, "Well, we don't actually go." [00:03:30]

So he says, "Therefore, we must pay closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?" It was declared at first by the Lord and and it was attested to us by those who heard. While God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. So his first thing he wants them to do he wants to warn them against drifting. He wants to warn them against drifting away. And you may right now be warning having that feeling of drifting. [00:04:48]

He is the master of the kingdom. He is God himself. We receive this not from just somebody. We receive this from God, the son of God. And then he says in verse 10, the quoting from the Old Testament, you Lord laid the foundation of the earth from the beginning and the heavens are the work of your hands. So we serve the God who has made everything. So when you pray to God and you say, "God, do you get it?" Well, I made it. Think about that. He's the one who laid the foundation. He's the one who made everything. He's the one who created you. He understands everything much better than we do. Um, and it it's important that we understand it. [00:06:35]

So therefore, if this is all true, if he is the one who created the heavens and the earth, he is the one who came as a person, came as a human, died on the cross, rose from the dead, and is exalted at the right hand of the father. Why would you want to step away from this?" But there's a warning to him that there's something we must do. And that's the first thing we need to see. He uses the word we must. There's things that you have to do. There's there's musts in life. One of them is breathing. Okay, I'm just using exaggerated example. You must breathe. You're like, well, yeah. Okay, but yeah, that's a must. [00:08:14]

But he's saying that it's something that is has to happen. And then he uses the word before that even he uses the word we. We must, not I must. Now this is a very nonwestern especially in American concept because we talk about the Lord is my personal savior. That's a fine term. But you know what? We're in this together. This is not single, you know, one-on-one. This is a group together. we must as a community gather together and he is going to talk about that already people are starting to drift away from the faith and they're saying to themselves I might go to church I might not you know there's a lot of things to do and said hey today's a really nice day out I think you noticed that well why would the pastor want us in church that just seems like God want us he's mean he'd rather have us out on the lake today right isn't that God and I've heard oh I've heard this from so many northern Minnesota people. My church is nature. [00:09:20]

But, you know, it it's just kind of this concept of But there's also we have this individual idea. I get to choose when and where I go. I'm not about the community. It's about me and I'm more of an individual and I want to have my own focus. No, it's a we together. There's a reason we gather together and that is to encourage one another and to raise one another up because we need to be there. So when we come to church, when we gather together, we are here to raise up other people. Did you realize that your purpose of coming today was not necessarily for you? It's going to help you, but it's to see how you can minister to somebody else. And it says outdo one another and showing honor to one another. So, it's like a big contest. [00:10:41]

We have to pay attention to the gospel of Jesus Christ and it has to be a focus because we're going to pay close attention to something. It's just a matter of what we're going to pay close attention to. We may be have a close attention maybe to our toys. I use this as an example and this is another northern Minnesota thing. We and I'm not talking about the toys in the nursery. I'm talking about the ones they sell down the road. All right? We pay attention to our toys. the ones they sell across the road. I mean, all over the place here. There's all kinds of toys being sold here. Hey, we ought to have the best this. And that's what your attention is on. Or I'm have to have this, I have to have this, I pay. And what you pay attention to is what's going to drive your life. [00:12:41]

And he is calling them to say, you must pay attention to what you have heard. And what you have heard came from the son of God who is seated at the right hand of the father. So don't think that you're getting it secondhand. Don't think that you're getting something that is poorly given. You're getting something that came directly from him. And we must pay a close attention to that. And if we don't, we're going to drift away from the faith. We're going to be drift we're going to drift away from it. And the term that he uses here is the image of a ship missing a harbor and intended to enter because it was a strong currents or winds. It's basically this is I think so true. [00:13:36]

If you talk to a Christian maybe somebody who said I used to be in I used to be a Christian. I used to go to church. They weren't sitting in a service listening to the worship service and go oh we love you God and then five minutes later I hate God. That does not happen. It's a slow drifting away and it's missing the harbor. It's missing this opportunity. It's missing this chance because you're drifting away from the gospel. We talked about that concept of missing church or missing gathering together. You stop. Yeah, I don't need to pray today. H I don't need to study God's word. Um I don't really need this. Oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna separate myself from that stuff because it's not it's not popular in Christian. I don't want to be the unpopular. I don't want to be one of those weird Christians that believes everything and you kind of drift away. [00:14:18]

And I think this is so true about our life. Understand society is going this way. We're going this way. We're always going to have to fight against that current because that current is trying to take us and drift us away from our faith. It could be a relationship. It could be a friend. It could be uh you know all of these things that pull us away. We have to be conscious what is it that we're not paying that we're giving more attention to than we are giving to God. And then he gives motivation and he says in verse two he says in the Old Testament the angels brought the message and this is something that came up in Galatians. Paul talks about it that the angels are the ones who carried the good news and the last chapter we talked about the fact that uh Jesus is greater than the angels. [00:15:57]

He says the Old Testament was great. It was brought to you by the angels. It was they were sent by God and they were sent to you. And guess what? Every one of them proved to be reliable. The word of God is still true today. The Old Testament is still true. He says they were reliable. They were they were something we could be founded on. They were something. But every time somebody went against God for a transgression or disobedience, there was a just retribution. And I like that term just. Remember God is just and he punishes sin and the punishment of sin uh for for many for most for all sin is death. But Jesus of course takes that on the on him. [00:17:04]

And in the Old Testament what happened was if you did a if you did the crime except for first-degree murder you could have a sacrifice that was done for you and that could be atoned for. there was an atonement that was done so you didn't have to have the punishment and that was pointing to the future. And he says, "We all thought that that was just and true." Now, here's the thing. We're not Old Testament people, though. We're New Testament people. We serve Jesus and he's all about love. Love, which I've heard so many people tell me that are not Christians. They tell me, "But Jesus just said,"Love everybody, except what they do and float around and have flowers in your hair." [00:17:46]

Actually, it is incredibly loving because it's saying that he will judge. We have a righteous judge. It's not us. We've talked about this many times. We're terrible judges. We should never be allowed to judge. We're not good at it. But Jesus is the righteous judge. And what we need to understand is just like in the Old Testament when he had the sacrifice system, in the New Testament, his once-for-all sacrifice takes the punishment. So, we never have to pay the cost for it. we have this hope in Christ. And so we have uh the gracious work of Christ that he's doing this. And so for these transgressions and disobedience, these are throughout the book of Hebrews, he's going to talk about people that are unwilling to listen to God's voice and follow his will. [00:19:13]

And I think this is so true today. We are just saying to ourselves, you know, God says I shouldn't do that, but I feel like I should. And or what does God know? What does God know? He what did he ever? And we're going to see this later, which is really interesting. Jesus came to earth, lived as a human, suffered like we did, was tempted like we did, and he can actually understand what we're going through. I Every time I talk to youth groups, I'm like, "Jesus was a 13-year-old awkward teenager." You're like, "No, he floated around. Everybody knows that." No, he understands exactly what you're going through. Probably more. You think he didn't get picked on a little bit? You think he didn't understand all this stuff? [00:20:04]

And so, we have this, but we need to understand he has our best interest in mind. We must follow. And this is a a point of saying that we're just not going to follow his will. And so he says, if we're not going to follow, if the Old Testament had punishment, how then, he says in verse three, how shall we escape if we neglect this great salvation that we have now? Such a great salvation. The salvation, like I said, once and for all. We no longer have to do the sacrifices over and over again. We no longer have to figure out, is it two turtle doves and a pig or not a pig, a cow? Sorry, that was a mistake. Uh, a cow over here. Do we have to bring that? Wait, where do I No, the sacrificial system is over because Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice. [00:20:49]

We have such a great salvation. So, if we choose to turn our backs on it, how can we escape judgment for that? And you, here's the interesting about judgment. And a lot of people would say, well, I'm okay with that. Judgment is separation from God. That's the ultimate judgment that we have. It's not that you get to be tortured in hell forever. That's what some people have said. The torture we've talked about is a psychological thing of you were created to be in God's presence. You were created to be in communion with him. And when you were taken away from that, I find it very similar. If I ever catch a fish, which is not very often, I know when you take them out of the water, they are not happy because they want to be back in the water because that's where they belong. [00:21:40]

That is the punishment for those people who do not want to be with God. If we if we say that we're just going to give up on salvation, our escape is we're separated from God and we're a fish out of water and we're living that whole our whole life not having that peace. And so what's so great about the salvation message? It says he says it was declared first by the Lord and it was attested by those who heard. And so it's interesting that uh they heard this from people that were there. I here's the thing that I've discovered and in our online era is don't trust anything that's in a meme. If somebody puts together a meme, most of the time they're they haven't told you the full story is what I'm trying to say. [00:22:28]

And we need to be very clear that we have the message that was from the beginning. And where did that message come from? The one who created the heavens and the earth. The one who is sitting seated at the right hand of God. He gave the message to the apostles who preached it to us. And that is the message that we follow. We do not follow a different message. We do not follow our own understanding. We follow exactly what it came from. It what the source is. What's your source for that? The word of God. It's not my opinion. I always tell young preachers this. You want to preach, you're not going to be very good when you start. Okay? I'm not sure that anybody's that good, but I'm just saying when you first start, people are like, "Oh, Lord, just help them get through that." [00:24:20]

But this is what's going on. Preach. Let people know what the word of God says and let that do its work. Because the message that was preached by Jesus that the apostles then told to us is the word of God. I've preached some bad sermons. And please don't I see some nodding. Don't do that. No, I'm kidding. You're like, boy, wow. Never mind. So, but what I'm trying to say is I have preached some where I've thought to myself, man, that just didn't go well. I I thought I had that point nailed. And I'll just walk out going and somebody will come up to me and go, "Oh, pastor, that just changed my life." And I know what it tells me. The word of God is more powerful than I am. The word of God has the power to do that. [00:25:11]

But if I preach the word of God, it has the power to change things because it has the authority. And I'll hear people say today, well, you know, you can't trust the Bible. It was written by a bunch of people that they didn't know biology. They didn't know that the earth, you know, actually, you know, rotated. They didn't know this, they didn't know that. I'm like, it was given by the son of God who created the heavens and the earth. He knows more than you. And there are people who think, "No, I know more than God." And I want to step back and just think of a job moment here. If you ever read the end of the book of Job, where God just sits them down and goes, "Where were you when I was putting the earth together? Tell me about it." [00:26:01]

And he just kind of tells him. Job's like, "I don't want to argue anymore. I'm done." Because that's what it is. If we want to argue with God, I go ahead. It's not a good move. You need to follow what he has laid out for you because it is attested and we have this. And so it's a great salvation declared by the Lord. The kingdom of God is at hand. The kingdom of God is here and we have hope in him. And then we have this. Well, God bore witness by signs, wonders, and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. So it says right here that there are signs and wonders and miracles that come to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. [00:26:44]

And so this what you need to understand is when he's writing the author is writing to him he says you saw the signs and wonders. The way he is writing this if you see it in the Greek it's saying you saw them right you saw this. The other thing you need to know is that they bear witness. This is a legal term that is used to say that is a witness. God is saying you want proof of this here's your proof. I'm going to give you a witness. Now you may ask this question and I think this is a question that needs to be asked. So why don't we see more signs and wonders and miracles? Why don't we see more like this? And I think it's important to understand that the last uh words in this verse are so important according to his will. [00:28:00]

But understand this that doesn't mean we never pray for it. Because some people would say, "Well, I'll just wait till God tells me exactly when to pray and then I'll pray and it'll be exactly 100%." No, I I had this example of a pastor. I was reading a journal and he was talking about the fact that uh he was really struggling. He went to visit somebody in the hospital and he was praying with them and he gave the normal pastor prayer. Oh Lord, comfort them in this time of need and and like that. He says, you know, whatever. He did his thing and he walked out and the guy says and he said God just spoke to him and said why don't you pray for the person to be healed and he went well okay I felt kind of stupid what if they're not healed I don't want to pray for them so he goes back in he goes reluctantly well I'll listen to what God said oh God if it's your will and he of course that's we will you heal them okay God lady jumps up and he gets this whole impression of you know what maybe we should be praying for more things like that because it says in James 5 that we're supposed to pray for this. [00:28:40]

But the other thing that's very important that we need to understand about this whole thing, it is always according to his will and is and you can even see in this example right here that it is to bear witness to the gospel. Okay. Paul himself prayed for healing for himself and he was not healed. I am not Paul. I am not at that level. Paul told Timothy to take a little medicine for his stomach. You're like, why didn't he just heal him? Because Paul can just heal everybody. That's not how it works. But we need to understand this. When God moves into a new zone and God wants to save people, he's going to use signs and wonders and miracles to attest or to bear witness to what he has done. [00:29:48]

And I think the best example is Acts 4. Acts 4 is something I go back to all the time, especially with prayer. So Peter and John are walking along. They see a person that's been lame since birth. He's sitting there. He's he's begging for money. And they say, "Look at us." And so the guy looks at him. He's like, "I'm going to get some money." So what is the first thing they say? "We don't have any money." Well, that's not very nice. He says, "We don't have any money, but he says,"In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk." And he was healed. He jumped up immediately. And what I love about this story and I and if you look at the Old Testament temple, it's a very formal place. You could just see like priests walking in and doing their thing. So what does he do? He runs around walking and leaping around the temple. [00:30:37]

That's going to grab some attention. All right. So he's walking and leaping and praising God. I'm healed. I'm healed. I'm healed. And running around. Now, if that happens in our church, feel free to jump run around. I'm I'm for that. Okay. But and so then the leaders of the temple, the lead the religious leaders go, "Oh, we can't allow this. He's not doing it right. He he's not following our system." So they arrest him. They arrest Peter and John. And they bring Peter and John in and they want to charge him with something, but they have a problem because the witness is this guy is healed. They know the guy. He's never walked and now he's running around the temple. I can just imagine him still running around while they're talking. In my head, that's how it works. [00:31:27]

And they and they start uh doing this and people are coming to know Jesus. They keep preaching and so they arrest him, but they don't know what to do with him. So, they tell him to stop and they says, "Well, we have to keep going because Jesus said we're supposed to do that. We'll let God be the judge." And they say, "Well, we really want you to stop." But all the people started to accept him to accept Christ because they saw the witness of the person that was healed. And then this is the that happened after this. This is the prayer that I like to pray. Acts 4:29-31. This is the church, not Peter and John preaching. And now, Lord, look upon their threats. They're talking about the religious leaders. And grant to your servants, continue to speak your word with all boldness. [00:32:11]

So they said, "Make us bold that we preach while you stretch out your hand to heal and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus." They asked for these things to happen, but they asked for them so that they could preach the word of God with boldness. So many times, I think we don't see signs and wonders like this because we're not doing it in an evangelistic way. We're not praying for our unsaved friends. We're not going to somebody who says, 'You know, I'm I'm dealing with this. Can I pray for you? Right. Well, well, I'm not a Christian. Well, that's even better. I'm going to pray for you because I know if that happens, it's going to change your faith. And it's a whole different dimension. [00:33:04]