Grow Up

Are you growing as a Christian or just getting older? Spiritual maturity isn’t measured in years, but in practicing grace. When we’re prideful and judgmental toward others, we’re still infants in Christ. Knowing more about the gospel doesn’t mean much if we aren’t living it out through humility, forgiveness, and love. It’s time to grow up!

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you are visiting with us, uh guys, first of all, welcome. My name is Ryan, uh, one of the pastors here at Impact, and uh, we're gonna be continuing our study through the book of Hebrews today. So we're gonna be in Hebrews chapter five. Uh, we'll be starting in verse 11. You guys can follow along. Uh, this series we've called greater. This this is a letter, it's a sermon-style letter that was written to the early church, basically reminding them of who Jesus is, right? That he is greater than any other thing we could look to to be right with God. He is greater than any other thing in all creation. There is nothing in this life that surpasses the worth and value of Jesus. And so that constantly brings us back to that. And then we've been looking at different aspects of things that maybe sometimes we try to put before Christ, and there's challenges and exhortations where he's reminding us no, cling to the gospel, cling to who Jesus is. Uh, so today we're gonna be in at the end of Hebrews 5, and we're gonna have one of these very clear warnings that he gives us as followers of Jesus. And it's kind of a parenthetical warning that he puts right in the middle of this whole conversation about Jesus being the great high priest for us, him being the only mediator between a holy God and us as sinful people, and that it's only Jesus, we need nobody else. And so, right in the middle of all of that, he gives this parenthetical, this little statement of encouragement that's got some good depth to it today. So let's start reading Hebrews chapter 5 and verse 11. About this, we have much to say, and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore, let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings or baptisms and laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits. Pause here just for a moment. I want to summarize the verses we just read. I think I can do it in two words. You ready? Grow up. Grow up. There is no place for accepted or acceptable immaturity in the body of Christ. God has saved us, he has redeemed us to make us more like him, to bring change, where we are growing to become more like him. This is a challenge for a lot of us, even here today, who may be older in earthly age. Did I say that well? Right, we're more advanced in years. And I want to give all of us, I'm grouping myself into this little uh cohort here, right? We all need this reminder because there's something about aging where we just don't have the energy to continue to try to grow anymore. And we don't want to improve. We kind of just rest on our laurels, and we we had the energy and we had the passion and enthusiasm when we were younger. And as my grandfather used to always say, youth is wasted on the young. Because we had energy back then, and so now we're just tired and we're kind of just trying to coast with that momentum that we earned back then. We're trying to just kind of coast into the later years in life, and we stop growing. Now, we know that as we age, when you think physically, when you think intellectually or mentally, it becomes even more important to exercise those capacities, doesn't it? Otherwise, we just get rigid and freeze up. And I can hear it, every one of you, even after service ends today, for so many, there's gonna be a collective when you stand up. Because the older we get, things don't work quite as fluidly as they used to. I watch young people just get injured today, and I'm looking at them and they pop right back up and they're like, ow. And I'm looking, going, that is a two-week hospital stay for me. It is so important that we stay active and exercise. Guys, spiritually speaking, it's no different. We have to continue to exercise our faith. We can't just get rigid in it. We have to continue to press on in growth. Pastor James, I was so proud of him. He shared with me a couple weeks ago that he did his first cartwheel ever a few weeks ago. His daughter, I think, is seven. She's kind of doing gymnastics, and so she was learning, so he learned with her. And his wife was like an almost professional gymnast, and so she was correcting his form and doing all these things. But I told him, I was like, James, I'm so proud of you, man, because you are old now at 32. But most 32-year-olds don't go, you know what? I'm gonna learn how to do a cartwheel. It's so important that we continue to have a mindset of as long as we have breath in this life, we will be growing as followers of Christ. The author of Hebrews says, by this time, you ought to be what? Did you guys catch that? Teachers. You guys should be teachers by now, but you're still just a bunch of babies in the faith. You need milk. The milk of the of the simplicity of the gospel and who Jesus is. You don't, you can't digest solid food, the meat of the deeper truths of God. Right? Can the same be said about us? Guys, by the time we should be teachers, we still are needing that milk. I went to the men's breakfast last or yesterday, uh last day, and last happened since then, but yesterday morning and just got to worship with the guys and hear a good message from the Word from Pastor Clay. It was a great time together. Uh, and it was, I knew it was gonna be a good time because when we walked up, all these men who were just serving the rest of the guys there, and they were cooking all morning, and they had made steak and eggs. And it was glorious tri-tip. And I I it was so good, and and everybody was just raving about it. I can assure you, guys, we wouldn't have had nearly as many men there, and we wouldn't have had nearly as many happy men there if we would have come to a men's breakfast where they were serving milk and eggs. Why? Because we're men. We're men. We don't want a bunch of bottles lined up on a table unless it's Tabasco sauce. Right? What we want as men is meat, right? To feed on the solid food. That's what it means to live in maturity. Now, here's the question. As I hear from people commonly where there's a mindset of, you know, I just feel like we're not getting fed. And I know it's common when you look at different reasons people will leave churches and move from church to church. That's one of the reasons at the top. We we weren't getting fed. We just weren't getting the meat of God's word. And one of the questions I want to ask these people is, are you sure? Are you sure you weren't getting fed solid food? You weren't getting fed meat? Or was it just that you weren't yet ready to digest it? That you were still living as an infant, a baby in Christ, so that the one who was teaching the word to this church community recognized it and went, you guys just need to be reminded of what the gospel is again. We want to press on to maturity, and yet we need to understand what maturity is. We want to know more about theology. We want to dive deep into hermeneutics and the study of biblical interpretation. We want to know about textual criticism and original manuscripts. We want to study apologetics and learn how to defend our faith through the kalam cosmological argument or the moral existence or the moral argument for the existence of God. And we want to dive into all these deeper things. And I want to look at so many of us and go, you're kind of a jerk. You're rude, you're mean and critical toward people. You've got so much bitterness that you just store up and yeah, you sugarcoat it, and not everyone sees it, but you just exude it where you're cynical and sarcastic and bitter toward people. I understand and love that you want to get more knowledge about God, but what you need is God to change you. What's the statement? You don't necessarily need more of God's word in you. You need you need more of God's word to transform. You need his transformation, his work of his spirit. But there's so many of us who just want to gain more knowledge. Guys, here's the problem: it feeds into the spiritual pride and ego, doesn't it? Knowledge puffeth up, according to the King James Version of Scripture. Knowledge makes us proud. And so many of us we want to grow in knowledge so that we can stand on a pedestal and look down on everybody else who doesn't know as much as we do. We want to go deeper into God's word, and yet God's word has not gone deep into us. We're still harsh and judgmental, and we need to learn what it means to forgive, to be humble, to be kind to others, to be a Christian, right? To follow the example of Christ. But instead, so many were still infants in our faith. Guys, ask ourselves this question: how much of what you know about this? How much of what you believe in here to be true do you actually do? Think about how many things we believe and we agree with and say, oh yeah, yeah, definitely that's true. But we don't live it out in our lives. Anybody here believe that prayer is important?

unknown 10:08

Right?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

When we look at scripture, I think everybody here would go, oh, yeah, it's really important to pray. Prayer is a big deal. It's a big part of what it means to follow Jesus, submitting ourselves to Him, to His will, to His work in our life, His power, knowing we can't do this, we have to trust Him to do these things, let Him fight our battles. And so prayer matters, brings us closer to Him as we just talk to Him, to Jesus and more intimacy with Him. So we all agree with that. And yet, how many of us consistently say, I'm praying without ceasing? I'm praying always, just talking with the Lord, making time to be with Him and talk to Him about everything going on in our lives. No, we don't pray. We just stress out and freak out about it, don't we? When something's going wrong, we don't hit our knees, we just go, oh, what do we do? How many of you here believe that this is the living word of God that we need to be spending time in consistently, that we need to let Him speak directly to us. Right? We believe it, we know that's true, and yet we don't live it out. We don't spend time here every day. We're too busy. We have too many things going on, we're distracted. We look at different aspects of following Jesus, serving and caring for others, and we rarely do it because of our schedules, and we're just too tired. We look at his call to give of what he has entrusted to us, good stewardship, right? That means giving back to the Lord of our finances. Yep, we know we're supposed to do that, but how many of us don't? Why? Because finances are super tight right now. We always have a reason, we always have that excuse. We know we're called to forgive others who hurt us, but Ryan, you don't understand what they did to me. It's like, no, I may not know what they did to you, I may not know the depth of hurt it caused. What I am aware of, though, is God knows. And still, he says to you as his follower, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Forgive as you have been forgiven in Christ. Right? We know these things, but guys, we're not doing these things, and we wonder why our spiritual growth is stunted, why we are perpetually stuck in a place of immaturity. And anybody who has been in a relationship with someone who is very immature, when you're a grown-up, you understand the effect that can have on that relationship, don't you? It's time to grow up as followers of Jesus. Notice how we grow. We don't grow because we are unskilled, says the author here, unskilled in the word of righteousness. This word literally just means inexperienced. We haven't experienced it, we don't actually do it. We don't experience the things that we're learning about and growing in our knowledge of. We haven't lived it out. One of my favorite things is watching parents of teenagers when their teenagers start to drive and their teens start taking driver's ed classes. They've never once been behind the wheel and operated a vehicle, but they took some driver's education courses. And so what happens? They get in the car with you and they are very, very quick to point out everything you're doing wrong. And you're like, son, I have been driving for 30 years. Right? But they know everything, right? Because they've studied it, they've learned it. And you know what? They may not be wrong, but here's what they don't know: they don't know how to drive. They just know the rules and the laws. They don't know what it means to actually drive a vehicle. As we go to church, we study God's word and Bible studies. We may even go to a Bible college or seminary, but we never let the truth that we're learning about sink into our hearts. We get more up here, but it never makes the journey to here. And it never changes us. Spiritual maturity is not a matter of how long you've been a Christian, it is entirely a matter of how much more you're becoming like Christ. How much more you look like Jesus today than you did yesterday. That is all that matters with spiritual maturity. So if you're here going, I've been a Christian for 40 years, cool, cool. Are you 40 years more like Jesus than you were 40 years ago? Are you continuing to grow in Him? Becoming like our Savior. We don't practice grace, we don't practice the gospel. And it's the practice that matters. The practice here just means to use something with such frequency and regularity that it becomes a habit. Habit is something you don't think about anymore, right? You just do it. None of you woke up this morning, put toothpaste on the toothbrush, and thought for a second, okay, how am I gonna do this today? And if you did, come talk to me afterwards. You got some issues. No, because what most of us we've been brushing our teeth for years and years, right, our entire life. And we've been brushing our teeth once, twice a day. Some of you guys, once, twice a month, whether you need it or not. But you do it with enough regularity and it becomes something you just do. You have the same pattern, usually, don't you? You want to really mess with your brain tomorrow? Switch hands with your toothbrush, and you're gonna be like, I don't know how to do this. Because you formed this habit through constant practice. And this is not saying, hey, our our faith in Christ needs to just become routine and like robotic. No, not at all. But it needs to become so, we need to become so proficient at living as Christ has called us to live. That is just what we do. It's not even something we have to think about or wrestle with anymore. Can you imagine being in a point in your faith, in your spiritual maturity, where someone wounds you deeply, they disappoint you, they hurt you so bad, and someone else sees it, and they watch you quickly and readily just say, you know what? I don't know what's going on with them, but hey, we're good. I forgive them, everything's fine. And it doesn't affect you, you just forgive as Jesus calls you to. And that person looks at you and goes, How did you just do that so easily? What a beautiful thing in that moment to look and just go, I don't know, it's just what we do. Right? This is what God has called us to, it's what Jesus did for us, and it's just what what I've let His Spirit do in me. And so it's just what we're supposed to do. It's this habit that is formed as followers of Jesus. We're called to leave the elementary doctrine of Christ, these basic tenets of the gospel message, repentance from from our religious performance and turning from our sin and turning to faith in God, that we're saved by grace through faith in him. It's the message of baptism and change, transformed life, of judgment if we don't turn from our sin, of the resurrection, and it's not just the resurrection of Jesus, our future resurrection with him, to be with him forever in his presence. Just to make sure we understand this correctly, when he says, let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ, in no way does he mean to leave it behind and not remind ourselves of it anymore. He's not saying that we don't need that anymore. We need to preach the gospel to ourselves every single day, don't we? Let us leave. It means not to leave behind the gospel, but that we leave behind our need to constantly be reminded of it. Because we just live it out as a part of our life every day. My son, when he was really little, uh, got his first little mini football, he was like two, and so he wanted to play catch. And dad, you guys remember the phase where your kids really want to play sports with you, but they're terrible? Because they're like two and they have no coordination. And so you're not playing catch with your kid, you're like taking the ball and trying to hit them in the hands with it, right? So they can hopefully hold on to it and be like, yeah, you celebrate. And then things start to progress, they get a little more coordination. Now I remember when he first started playing flag football, and I got to coach, it was so much fun. And I'm just trying to like, you know, herd together all of these rambunctious little boys, and they're trying to learn football, and they were just out there having fun. And all I was trying to do was teach them the basic principles of the game. Here is how you run without tripping over your own feet. Here is how you catch the ball, here's how you hold the football and throw the football, right? Trying to walk them through the fundamentals of the game of football. Now my son is 17, he's a senior, plays quarterback for his high school, and he's now teaching me things about the game where I'm like, oh, really? I didn't know that. The whole thing's different. Right now, he's learning deeper things about how to compete at that level, right? He's he's reading defenses. Are they in zone? Are they playing man? And how do we adjust accordingly? You know, we got a guy coming to blitz, so I'm gonna call an audible and check something on the line and call a different play. He's doing all these things run there, just like, I hope it works out. He's learning, he's growing. Now, here's the key Did he leave behind the basics of the game? Did he say, I don't need to throw, I don't need to catch, I don't need to run anymore? No. The assumption is that he does those things without thinking. It is so innate, it's now second nature because of how often he did it. So now he can grow in the deeper aspects of what he's supposed to do. Because this is what the author's calling us to. Are we growing in our faith? All right, all of that being said, we come now to a very solid food passage that's been discussed and debated in the church for centuries, and we're gonna dive in today. And really, I apologize because I'm trying to squish two sermons into one this morning. Let me start reading verse four. For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, and keep in mind, he says, it is impossible to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be what, guys, burned. Should we just all hold hands and close in prayer now? This is a little intense, isn't it? This is that solid food type teaching that that the author was referencing earlier in this passage. There's a parallel here that I want to point us to. And we don't have time to go back to the Old Testament, the book of Numbers, chapters 13 and 14. But do me a favor and write that down, make a note of it. And at some point, even today, just go back and read through that passage. You're gonna see some parallels there that the author draws between Israel's rejection of God and his promises in this passage. This is the story of God's people being freed from slavery and Bondage to Egypt, which is a type of this world and all that is in the world. And they're led through the wilderness to the edge of the land of promise, right? This land that is flowing with milk and honey and all the goodness of God's provision. And they're right at the edge of the promised land. And so they send in spies to go scope out the promised land. And these spies come back and they say, It is indeed what God promised, a land flowing with milk and honey. Here's the fruit from that land. Taste it for yourselves. But here's the thing: there's some really big, intimidating people that are already living there. And I don't know if we can take them. And so all the people go, Oh no, what should we do? Even as they tasted the fruit of the promised land, and they said, No, we can't fight these guys. We're gonna turn back and we're gonna go back to Egypt. We're gonna go back to bondage and slavery in Egypt. And we read that God therefore rejected those people and said, They will never enter my rest, and they will never enter my land of promise. So there's this parallel that the author is clearly drawing here. It is impossible, he says, to restore them again to repentance. Now, here's where things get unsettling. Is this teaching us that you and I can lose our salvation? Right? This is the theological dilemma or question. Can we lose our salvation? Some of you guys have an immediate response, like, well, yeah, we can. No, absolutely not. We can't. There's a reformed theological paradigm that is Calvinism and followers of Calvin, and they would emphatically say, no, absolutely not. It is impossible to lose your salvation because salvation is entirely a work of God. They focus on the sovereignty of God, his control and power, and they say God elects and chooses those who are saved. So those he has chosen cannot be unchosen. It's called the perseverance of the saints. They will endure till the end.

unknown 24:09

Right?

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Then there's Arminians who would come in and say, Yes, of course we hold to the sovereignty of God, but we also hold to the free moral agency of man. That man has been given by our sovereign God a will where we can choose to submit to him, to walk with him, or we can choose not to. We can reject him and his grace. And so they would say, Yes, you can, right? That you can walk away from your Savior that you walk toward at some point in your life. And so theologically, there's tensions there, and we want to debate and argue about it. However, I believe that the question most of us would wrestle with as we read a passage like this isn't theological first and foremost. It's personal. It's the question of is this teaching that if I fall away from Jesus, I won't ever be able to come back? And that's kind of a terrifying prospect, isn't it? That if I'm walking with Christ and then I start making bad decisions and I walk away from him and I fall away from Jesus, he's saying, nope, can't come back. Is that the heart of God? There's an analogy that he uses here about this land that has drunk the rain and yet it doesn't bear fruit. It bears thorns and thistles, and its end is to be burned. And we could point to this and argue that this analogy that the author is using here is means that those he's describing in verses four and five who have tasted, partaken of the Holy Spirit, who have been enlightened, who have tasted of the heavenly things, right? That these people he's describing, they weren't really Christians. That they tasted of these things, but they didn't actually nourish themselves with it, right? Like this land that received the rain of the gospel, the rain of the truth of God's grace, but it never took root and it never produced fruit. There was never any true salvation or regeneration. And so some would argue to say what this is referring to, it's known, by the way, as the phenomenological view of this passage. In other words, those that they're describing were never really true believers. The problem with this is that as you read the description of these believers in verses four and five, these other descriptive phrases would strongly suggest an authentic faith and inclusion in Christ through that faith. When you look at words like enlightened, it means illuminated, the new light of Christ shining on the mind. The apostle Paul uses the same word repeatedly in his letter to the church in Ephesus to describe those who are genuine, authentic followers of Jesus, who have who have received the truth of the gospel and are part of the family of God. We also read that they have shared in the Holy Spirit. It means to partake in. It's the same word used in Hebrews chapter 3, verse 1, to describe holy brothers and sisters who share in the heavenly calling of God in Christ. Right? So those who have been holy and set apart by God. Very clearly a part of faith in Christ in the body of believers. So there's room to maybe argue each of these individually, but you pull them all together, and the simplest understanding here is that the author is describing those who are genuine followers of Christ, genuinely called by God. And then what happens? They've fallen away. Fallen away, to fall away from true faith in Christ. The word here it means literally to become apostate, not to be confused with a prostate. Very different things. Right? To become apostate. The word means an intentional, decisive, and culpable decision to walk away from our only Savior. The implication is without question, someone who belonged to a group and willfully chooses to defect, which seems to reinforce that we're talking about genuine Christians. So this would be known as the irreversible apostasy view. That if a true believer willfully falls from Christ or walks away from Christ, then they can't come back. And so we feel that tension, don't we? Because what is this teaching us? And do we need to be freaked out here? The question that we need to ask, as we're so focused on, well, can I come back if I fall away? The question we need to ask is fallen away into what? Right? Fallen away as a follower of Jesus from the truth of the gospel, from clinging to Christ and his grace, that we are saved by that grace through faith in him and nothing else. Right? But we fall away, we let go of that grace, and we fall into what is the question. Our default is falling into sin, doing wrong things. But I do not believe that's what the author is talking about here. Guys, remember the context. He inserts this in the teaching of Jesus as our great high priest. Remember this from last week? Right? The only mediator between a holy God and sinful man. Jesus is that great high priest forever. We don't need anyone else to be that go-between. And then he gives this warning. And if you remember, last week he starts talking about this guy named Melchizedek from Genesis chapter 14. And Melchizedek was recognized as a high priest, and he wasn't someone who was even a descendant of Abraham or a Jewish person. Because there were people, even in the church, who would object to this idea of Jesus as our high priest because he wasn't born from the tribe of Levi, he was from the tribe of Judah. And people from the tribe of Judah could not be priests, according to the Jewish people. Only descendants of Levi. And so when he brings up Melchizedek, he's trying to bring up another example of this high priest that you recognize to be such. And he wasn't Levitical. He wasn't a Levitical priest. Those who would object to the idea of Jesus as our high priest have clearly come from this whole system where they were entrenched in the Mosaic law, operating under the legal and religious system of Judaism. Think even, guys, to whom is the author writing here? The name of the book is what? Hebrews. Hebrew is another name for a Jewish person, an Israelite. That heritage, that's what a Hebrew is. They were raised in Judaism. They knew the law of Moses. They were taught growing up that we are accepted by God because of how well we keep God's law. That was their whole way of thinking. And then they hear the gospel. And they're rescued from that self-righteous, religious performance mindset in life. And they're redeemed by the grace of Jesus. And so the author is writing to those, warning them once you've tasted of the gospel and the goodness of grace in Christ, don't fall back into this religious mosaic system of performance and earning the favor of God, earning his acceptance. Don't do it. There were those at this time who claimed to be Christians, but also demanded adherence to the Mosaic law. So what they would claim and teach is that we need Jesus and Moses to be saved. And so they were actually following the Apostle Paul and Barnabas and those that were preaching the good news of Jesus. They were going and they would follow up after they left and say, hey, it's good that you heard about Jesus, but you also have to become Jewish. You also have to keep our law in order to be saved. And it's likely that the author is dealing with those same Judaizers here. I don't know if you caught this phrase, that they're crucifying once again the Son of God to their shame and harm. Do you guys catch that? And I was wrestling with that, going, okay, well, well, if we sin too much or if we if we're too religious, like how do we crucify Jesus again in some metaphorical symbolic way? I think very literally, what the author means is if you fall back into the religious law and that religious system, you're crucifying again the Son of God. Just like those who crucified him the first time. And who crucified him the first time? It was the Jewish religious leaders. It were those that hated Christ because he upset and unsettled their religious system that they found so much comfort in. Paul and Barnabas dealt with this group of Judaizers, constantly opposing them and the gospel. Acts chapter 15, verse 1. Let's read this together. But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. You guys catch that? Very blatant. And after Paul and Barnabas, verse 2 had no small dissension and debate with them. I love how the Bible phrases things. Let me translate, guys. After Paul and Barnabas went off on them, and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question. And then we have what's known as the Jerusalem Council, where they decide, no, you don't need to be circumcised. Jesus is enough. The grace we have in him is enough. Paul's challenge to the believers in Galatia was to avoid this group. Galatians 5, verse 4. He says, You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law. You have fallen away from grace. We use the phrase, oh, he fell from grace very differently, don't we? When there's a church leader who commits adultery or commits some terrible sin and they're no longer in the fit for ministry, we say, oh, he fell from grace because he fell into sin. Paul uses it here very differently. Falling from grace isn't falling into sin, it is falling back into religious performance. Falling back into the legalism of Judaism and trying to be right with God on my own merit. He says we've fallen from grace if we go back to these things. And Paul certainly had a strong opinion about these Judaizers in verse 12 of chapter 5 of Galatians. He says, This, I wish those who unsettle you, meaning the Judaizers, that they would emasculate themselves. Now, here we miss a little bit in the English, and they really toned this down. In the Greek, here's what Paul is saying all of these Judaizers who are insisting that you are circumcised and cut off the foreskin. I wish they'd just finished the job and cut it all off. And we're going, the Bible says this? Yeah. Paul was very clear when it came to threats to the gospel. Jewish legalism and the gospel of Christ are entirely incompatible. Because one is about me earning God's favor, and the other is about me receiving it as his gift that I've not deserved. Still, today, religious performance and the gospel, guys, they're incompatible. I know that there's probably nobody here today who's really been considering converting to Jewish legalism. Right? No one's going, should I become, should I do the proselyte thing and go into Judaism? Most people, no. But can we not also acknowledge that we have our own form of Christian legalism still today? Right? Things that we look at that are behavioral based and we gauge our standing with God based on how well we're doing with these boxes that need to be checked. We still do this today, don't we? Don't do certain bad things. We can't watch those movies, can't listen to that music. I can't cuss anymore, or at least not out of my mouth. I can think it. I just can't say it. I need to make sure that I'm reading my Bible every day. I need to be praying every day. I need to give a certain amount to the church. I need to serve a certain amount of time at the church. I need to dress a certain way where I'm modest, and people know that I'm a Christian based on my modesty. I need to cover up that tattoo. What are they gonna think? I've got my tribal, you know? Are they gonna wonder if I'm really saved? And they may think, well, that's ridiculous, but there are some with still this mindset that think God cares more about somebody wearing a hat in church than they do about their heart. And it doesn't work that way. God cares about the heart, not this system of checking boxes of morality. And guys, as the author is speaking here, he's not speaking to one specific individual. Everything in here where it's like, let us, you know, that even when he says you, you know, you are this and you are that, the you there, it's plural. It's plural, it's not a singular you. This person, right? I'm pointing at one person, sorry. Right? But y'all, all y'all. Right? It's that reminder yet again, as he's reminding the body of Christ collectively. Guys, we as the church, we need to cling to the truth of the gospel. Don't fall away back into whatever version of our faith becomes about religious performance. So that we feel better than other people, because look at how much holier I am than them. And all that is is finding our holiness in other people's lack of it. Right? It's feeling good about ourselves because we're comparing ourselves with other people. That's so easy to do. I think back to when one of my buddies in college, God bless him, he was hanging out with me and some other friends, and you know, we had we had done some like different like song stuff at work church and all that, and he heard me sing it. I remember there were a couple times he was like, dude, Ryan, you're like, you're a great singer. Now I knew the truth. There's no way I'm auditioning for American Idol anytime soon. But him, this guy's tone deaf. So for him, I was a great singer because I could just carry a tune. Right? So I could feel really good. There was a moment where we were hanging out with somebody, a friend of his, who was actually a professional actress and singer. She was incredible. And we were in this environment, and out of nowhere, he's like, Oh, yeah, I know you're really good, but you should hear Ryan sing. I could not shrink enough into my couch, wanting to just disappear. Because, of course, she's going, oh, Ryan singing. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Right? I might feel pretty good about my vocal capacity and capability with my tone-deaf friend in the room. But not when you got someone who actually knows what they're doing.

unknown 39:32

Right?

SPEAKER_00 39:32

We don't want to compare ourselves to those individuals. Like, we just feel better about who we are in our self-righteousness because we're better than them. And so the author's exhortation here is don't fall away from the gospel of Jesus. Don't fall away of remembering who we are apart from him, of reminding ourselves that we can never be good enough. We can never earn what he freely gives. We just have to receive it in faith and cling to it and grow in it by being willing to say, Lord, I didn't deserve it, and so help me give grace to others who hurt me and wrong me. Yeah, they don't deserve it, but that's what you did for me. Guys, we stand together. Verse 9, he says, Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation. Guys, that's what I'm sure of as well here at this church. I know so many of us here. We've been through it and we've known the love of Jesus. We've received it. You know what scriptures say, those of us who have been forgiven much, we love much, don't we? If we've been forgiven little in our own minds, maybe we love little. I'm grateful for those in a church family who have loved much because of what they've been forgiven of. Let's continue to remind ourselves of that. Lord Jesus, we're here today as those, as a church family and community who collectively have determined we're not gonna fall away. God, we're not. And we're not gonna be like those self-righteous individuals who they're not gonna be renewed to repentance because they don't think they need to repent. God, they think they're fine with you, they're good people, and everything is great because of how moral they are. God, may we never fall into that mindset of self-righteousness. God, remind us of what you've done for us. May the gospel just be a part of our lives so that everything we do, every interaction we have with others, Lord, we're showing them that gospel. God, make us teachers of the good news of grace that we have received and that we live out every day of our lives. We thank you for your goodness toward us. Thank you for getting all of this crammed in, Lord. I pray that even though we kind of drained from a fire hose this morning, God, that your word has promised it will not return void. Keep us in you, Jesus. We pray this in your name. Amen.