•        Introduction

When it came to settling on a ‘Motto Text’ for us for this year, my mind pretty clearly settled on a verse that focuses not so much on the common ‘bums on seats’ criterion of church health (which is NOT to say in-person attendance don’t matter), but on something that speaks more directly to our souls’ spiritual health.

Hear God’s Word, then, in Hebrews 3:12-14 …

“See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. 14 We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.”

Now, it’s not that the recipients of this book of Hebrews were unaware of the detail of their faith … the book assumes a good knowledge of the Torah and relates to ideas prevalent in the Jewish faith of the day.

Neither were they living in a remote bubble disconnected from the reality of living by faith in a hostile world … chapter 10 shows they were living their Christian faith in such a way that they were subject to persecution and even imprisonment because of their association with Jesus.

But some of them seemed to be abandoning the faith and walking away from Jesus altogether.

They were going back to the old ways in Judaism … which had the status of a religion licita, a tolerated faith in the Roman Empire which wasn’t subject to persecution in the same way.

A WINNOWING of the congregations receiving this letter was taking place … and this letter to the Hebrews is written to show how much BETTER Jesus is than any of the other options on offer, how superior He and His covenant are to the old Jewish faith which pointed forward to the fulfilment of the Old Testament promises, worship and rituals in Christ.

There are four sections in this book where Jesus is compared to people and ‘things’ in the old covenant and shown to be better.

·       Firstly Jesus is compared in chs. 1-3 with angels and the Torah

·       Secondly, Jesus is compared in chs. 3-4 with Moses and the Promised Land.

·       Thirdly, Jesus is compared in chs. 5-7 with the priesthood and with Melchizedek.

·       Then lastly Jesus is compared with the sacrifices and the Old Testament covenant.

As he does this the author has two main goals:

Firstly the author is showing Jesus is superior to anyone and anything else on offer.

Secondly, the author therefore challenges the readers or hearers to remain faithful to Jesus however much they think they would feel more comfortable sliding away from Him 

… so in each of the four sections we’ve been talking about, Hebrews includes a strong warning NOT to abandon Jesus.

Now, there’s more to come in the book as the author holds up the great gallery of faith in the Old Testament in chs. 11 ff and applies that for their spiritual benefit on chs. 12 & 13, but I’ve just spelled out to you what happens in the main body of the book in chs. 1-10 and mentioned that each of the four sections of that part of the book contains a clear warning not to slip away.

It’s the first of those clear warnings that we are taking as our 2023 Motto Text today.

God has become visible in Jesus Who is the radiance (the outshining) of God’s Glory and the wax seal impression of His signet ring … the exact representation in the world of Who God is and what He’s like.

And it is that ‘better than anything or anyone else because He’s God’ which should ensure these readers don’t fade away from Jesus, as chs. 1-10 of Hebrews are reasoning with us.

So let’s see how this text today puts that to us …

•        1. The direct appeal, 3:1

“Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest.”

Here’s the key to ‘fixing’ your Christianity, to maintaining your Christian consistency, to persevering in and safeguarding your faith.

It’s not some Christian leader’s job.

It’s not your Church’s job.

It’s YOUR job.

The rest are there to HELP you do it.

But it is for us as Christians to do this for ourselves: fix your thoughts on Jesus.

κατανοέω ‘to observe’. 

It means to pay attention, notice, observe; consider, contemplate; this word has a strong implication that the attention paid is intense, and the contemplation is broad and thorough, resulting in obtaining and retaining a thorough understanding.

And the foundational reason for that is what has gone before about the supremacy of  the incarnate Jesus, Who is … in His flesh … the visible representation of the Living God, the bright outshining of God’s Glory.

Fix your thoughts, says Hebrews 3:1, on HIM.

Have you the time for that?

You see, a LOT of people who were unable to go to Church during lockdown found other things to do with their accustomed Sunday morning Church ‘time-slot’.

They discovered that they quite LIKED getting up in an unhurried fashion on Sunday mornings, then doing their garden, washing their hair, fixing the car … taking the kids to football.

They emerged from lockdown as things into doing things with THEIR sort of people a bit more, or catching up with family time, or going for a walk on the beach.

And now they don’t have time …

For many around here, Church never really got going again after the lockdowns.

There’s too much time consuming activity involved in taking responsibility to get everything set up, people conveyed to chapel, flowers arranged, doors ‘minded’, communion prepared.

The restrictions were lifted, but when the novelty of meeting again faded … their feet dragged.

And they don’t meet now.

Life is EASIER like that.

I have had this sort of chat with a few farmers who are a bit nonplussed by the way that nothing is happening with their village chapels … simply nothing being organised, or problems being found in putting the heating on for church, or …

This can be frustrating, when you’re looking to do whatever you can to support meetings in rural Wales, and are having a horrible time trying to find a place to meet and reach out from for yourself!

So, the direct appeal Hebrews makes here to us addresses this creeping desire to fade into the background spiritually and is based on the absolute supremacy of Jesus Who in His incarnate self is the exact representation of the image and radiance of God.

And the direct appeal is to address that by fixing your thoughts no lower than on Him.

Complete and thorough contemplation of HIM.

Now THAT is the foundation of what we’re being urged to do, to produce as the fruit of our focus on Jesus.

There are three things that facilitate that and effect drift-prevention.

         •        2. Guarding your heart, 3:12

“See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.”

Hebrews 3:12

You keep your fixed gaze ON Him … not turning away from Him.

It helps us, I think, to understand this if we think for a minute about where He’s to be found so we know what and where not to turn from … does that make sense?

We meet Him in His Word … where He speaks clearly.

We meet Him in time spent with Him, speaking with Him, and in contemplating Him and fixing our minds for a while on Him.

And we meet Him where the Temple of His Holy Spirit is found … in His Church when it assembles together.

That is absolutely what 1 Corinthians 3:16 is about when it challenges the Corinthian church: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?”

You are God’s temple refers here to the church, since the pronoun you is plural in the Greek text. 

In 6:19 the same imagery is used in a different context to refer to the individual believer.

Those three places we meet Him and we are being exhorted here on the basis of the supremacy of Jesus our of the whole Creation to fixate on Him … where we meet with Him.

When you consider what the Gospel entailed in the first place for us … turning from sin to Christ and being saved … you can see that not turning AWAY from Him is crucial to our salvation.

When you come to Christ you come TO Him, and if you have authentically done that you stay.

And key to facilitating our staying is … 

         •        3. Encouraging one another, 3:13

“But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”

Hebrews 3:13

We need to understand what that ‘encourage’ word is about there.

The word is παρακαλέω 'to plead/comfort'

to ask, beg, plead; to comfort, encourage, exhort, urge; to call, invite.

This is not a word to describe the self-pleasing nonsense so many seem to understand to be encouragement in our therapeutic culture.

It is NOT the sort of talk that tells you it is perfectly justifiable and appropriate for you to ‘just be you’ … to remain the way you are.

You could tell that from the context if you had a mind to:

“ … encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”

The whole point of what’s being said is that your encouragement of one another is to produce this effect of NOT just ‘going with the flow’ but being transformed from the status quo thinking that would allow you to go on in sin because you’ve learned to swallow its deceitfulness and swallow it whole!

It is a call to promote one another’s spiritual transformation, not one another’s conformity with one’s current situation.

It’s an encouragement we are being asked to provide for one another in pursuing godliness in the strength and the fear of the Lord!

Daily.

Every day.

As long as it is called ‘today’.

There seems to be a reference there to the shortness of our earthly life and pilgrimage.

It implies an urgency in the need to exhort one another daily NOT to harbour a sinful unbelieving heart that turns away from the Living God.

In the New Covenant, due to the  outpouring of the Holy Spirit, God is more ‘alive’ in our experience than ever He was in the experience of the Old Covenant people of God.

It’s another example of the ‘better’ experienced in the New Covenant … another reason not to turn back to the Old Covenant.

But look … spurring one another on … in fellowship together … once more, here’s where we meet with the Lord in the mutual encouragement of our fellowship.

Is that on our radar at all?

Hebrews here says it should be at the centre of the screen of our radar ‘every day’.

But let’s move this forward by asking: 

Why is this mutual encouragement to a closer walk with God … rather than a more distant one … so important?

         •        4. The assurance of firmly held conviction, 3:14

That’s so important because of the assurance it brings about in the life of the believer.

You see …

“We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.”

Hebrews 3:14

We’ve just said that turning from sin to Christ is what we do because we have come to trust Christ.

It’s what we call ‘repentance’ … turning from the old ways and thoughts, motivations and aspirations to Christ Himself and to following and being delighted by Him.

It’s the package that leads to and evidences our salvation … showing that God has graciously, by His Holy Spirit, stepped in and securely saved us.

But look, it’s the evidence of LASTING faith and LASTING repentance that evidences salvation by grace through faith alone.

It is the lasting quality that is the key.

Once saved always saved?

YES!

Absolutely.

And what EVIDENCES that assured salvation?

Persevering to the end.

That’s how you can tell apart the seed sown in good soil from the seed that falls on the path and gets eaten by the birds or the seed that falls in shallow soil only to spring up and then keel over in the heat before bearing fruit, or the seed that falls among thorns and gets choked before it gets to harvest.

Authentic salvation is characterised by PERSEVERING to the day it brings fruit in reaching Heavenly Glory.

But every crop needs TENDING if it is to bear fruit.

Guard your own heart, encourage your brethren and do everything possible to hold on to and preserve your initial conviction … and the key to all of that is to hear His voice with a tender heart.

         •        5. Hearing His voice with tender, attentive hearts, 3:15

“As has just been said:

“Today, if you hear his voice,

    do not harden your hearts

    as you did in the rebellion.””

Hebrews 3:15

Oh, we have all sat through sermons convinced that they were CLEARLY for the other person in the building, haven’t we?

We can all fall foul of the sort of confirmation bias that says, ‘I’m doing fine, this is right, right for ME’, a sort of exceptionalism that says ‘this all applies to everyone else, but not to me’.

See that for what it is.

It’s hardening your heart against hearing the voice of God YOURSELF.

It is all too easy to define our rights and wrongs according to our own preferences, aligning what is right for us to do with what we want to do.

And, you know, it’s ever so often the case that when we harden our hearts against what God is saying to us, He doesn’t behave like your mother.

If you don’t listen or if you didn’t listen to your mother or whatever mother figure was raising you when you were young … what happened?

She raised her voice.

Mebbe raised her hand!

But SHE prevailed.

It is ever so often NOT like that with God.

I remember my uncle saying to me about the days after my father died that now I was going to be responsible for myself and now if I burned my butt I’d have to sit on the blisters.

Something less than subtle in the way he expressed himself certainly impressed what he was saying on my consciousness!

It’s much more like that with God.

He’s ever so often not going to shout.

Why should He?!

He is GOD and we ought to be listening to His every word!

We ought to be fixing our eyes on Jesus … Who we acknowledge as our Apostle and High Priest.

He is faithful in His role as Son over God’s house. And we ARE that house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory.

So, obviously, “Today, if you hear his voice,

    do not harden your hearts

    as you did in the rebellion.””!

         •        Conclusion

But just before we go, in conclusion, please notice there’s a little twist in the tail here in vv. 16-19.

“Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? 17 And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies perished in the wilderness? 18 And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? 19 So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.”

The Old Testament example that underlies what Hebrews is saying here is taken from the experience of those who DID have a history of God’s redemptive activity that they had been corporately involved in.

Now, things are different under the new covenant.

Hebrews 3:14 highlights the identification characteristic of those who have come to share in Christ … the identifying characteristic of believers … as being holding the faith they’ve come to, to the end.

But vv. 16-19 root that in a concrete example from the history of the Old Testament people of God at a time when the people 

·       DIDN’T fix their eyes on God Himself, 

·       DIDN’T guard their own hearts so that they did so, 

·       DIDN’T encourage and stir one another up to fix their eyes on the Lord, 

·       DIDN’T hold on securely to the conviction they’d had at the first when they were redeemed out of Egypt and 

·       DIDN’T listen to what God had said back then with eager and attentive hearts.

These verses root what they are saying in this major historical event in their nation’s past, back in Numbers 14.

What happens in Numbers 13 is that God instructs Moses - as he stands near the boundary of the promised Land fresh out of Egypt, freshly ‘redeemed’ - to send spies out into the land God had promised He’d give them and then return with a report on what they found.

So off they went and back they came.

They all agreed it was a GREAT place but ten of them said it was full of giant-sized  people they’d not be able to drive out and two (Joshua and Caleb) came back saying ‘yes, there are giants there, but God can keep His Word and deliver on His promises’.

Well, that night (Numbers 14 tells us) there was a LOT of faithless grumbling:

“That night all the members of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. 2 All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this wilderness! 3 Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?” 4 And they said to each other, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.””

Numbers 14:1-4

Back to being NOT redeemed.

Back to the land of slavery.

Can you see how that parallels the things we’ve been looking at up until now in Hebrews 3?

Caleb and Joshua addressed the assembly, saying: “If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.””

ALL of that could usefully have been said to the Hebrew Christians reading this letter to the Hebrews!

But the next bit is the absolute kicker that they need to be reminded of:

“the whole assembly talked about stoning them. Then the glory of the Lord appeared at the tent of meeting to all the Israelites. 11 The Lord said to Moses, “How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have performed among them? 12 I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they.””

Now, Moses went straight back to the Lord and pleaded with God not to do that, and at the end of the day all the faithless Israelites were told that they would NOT after all be destroyed there and then but that their punishment would be that THEY would never enter the Promised Land.

And THAT is the Old Testament example-story that the author of Hebrews wants these Hebrew Christians who were loosening their grip on their great God and His glorious Gospel to be instructed by.

So here is our motto text for the year:

“See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.”

Hebrews 3:12

God’s churches in our land have had a kicking through COVID.

There is no doubt at all that there has been a time of winnowing, evidenced by a widespread letting go of God as things have turned a bit more difficult for those who would 

·       guard their hearts, 

·       spur one another on to walk with God, 

·       maintain their first convictions and 

·       continue to hear God’s words with tender and attentive hearts.

All the more important to maintain our initial repentance, turning consistently and continually towards God.

All the more important then to hold our original conviction firmly to the very end … and not allow our hearts to be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

Because it is the one who perseveres to the end who is saved.

So I commend this verse to you as a motto text for the coming year:

“See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.”

Hebrews 3:12