Hebrews 3:12-13
We are in Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 3, verses 12 to 19. In this section, as you know from last week, this is a section that we’re in of warning as the pastor is trying to kind of get the attention of his congregation. He’s needing to alert his congregation to the danger of a drift that he is seeing in some of his folks who are leaving the Christian church to return back to the Jewish synagogues.
We’ve said this before, but I want to remind you again that the whole church, this church, the Hebrew Christian church in Rome, there, faces a social pressure and could face and will face, as we know from church history, they do face a real danger of persecution.
But there is at this point of the writing of Hebrews, there is a social pressure due to an uptick of anti-Christian sentiment in the surrounding culture in the city. And even there’s imperial intent. As we know, Nero is likely the emperor who’s on the throne, and he’s beginning to see Christians as useful to him as scapegoats for all of his devious things that he’s doing.
So the Romans, backing up and from Nero himself and maybe the imperial Senate and the emperor and all that, the Romans themselves as a people kind of viewed the rise of Christian churches from a bit of a distance, from a bit of a social, religious distance.
They kind of found it at the beginning tough to discern the difference between Christians and Jews. They saw that both Christians and Jews really came from the same source, used the same text. They both taught Moses, revered Moses. The only difference from a Roman perspective is that, the only difference that they saw basically is having different views of Jesus, this Jesus figure, this Christ figure. They saw that the Christians believe that he’s the promised Messiah, where Jews don’t. Jews would prefer to stick with Mosaic traditions.
So from a Roman perspective, looking in from the outside, they had a hard time understanding what the big fuss was about. And yet those Jews did Jewish things like fight with each other. So they just let them be.
And it was kind of characteristic of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, that they were, they had this kind of view of religions in lands that they conquered and the peoples that they conquered, they had kind of a pretty tolerant religious view toward other religions. They were very broad-minded as long as the religion, not only in Rome or in imperial lands, but also in provinces, Roman provinces, they had a view that religion, they would tolerate it.
They would let people practice their own religions as long as they didn’t usurp the supremacy of Caesar, as long as the practice of their religion didn’t slow down taxation, the flow of money, as long as religion didn’t interrupt their economic prosperity, as long as they weren’t rebellious, as long as they weren’t seditious.
So even though the Jews never really fit with the Roman social, political, religious traditions, whatever the religious factions that formed among the Jews, if they were orderly, if they basically maintained public peace, as long as nothing hindered trade, well, all is well.
But relations between Jews and Christians did not stay peaceful. As we know, as we can see in the book of Acts all the way through the New Testament, we can see relations between Christians and Jews did not stay peaceful. Though they shared a common origin and a common ancestry, shared a common text, claimed to follow the same God, there was something that did prevent Christians and Jews from maintaining peace.
I’m saying that there was something that prevented there being peace between Christians and Jews, and I just wanted to ask the question, do you know what that was and whose fault it was that there was no ecumenical peace between these two groups, why it continued to be a problem? Why did that create social disruption?
Because we have Jews in this city that don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah. We do. Because the Romans did think that this Christianity thing was just kind of a sect of Judaism, it’s just, just kind of like a, honestly like a cult, like a little bit of a faction or a cult that developed among the Jews, they’ll deal with their own issues.
From a Jewish perspective, there’s a lot of animosity about that. It’s kind of like the way we see the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and, you know, Christian Science and all these things as a perversion and a, something that is leading a lot of people astray about what true Christianity is and the Jews thought that of the Christians.
The real issue, here, is the fact that we’re commanded to evangelize. We can’t just live in toleration. We can’t. The Christians then couldn’t. They had to obey their Lord and Savior, who told them go make disciples. Go do it. Go do it with your friends, your family. Go across land and sea to get to other nations and tell them the truth about the gospel.
So this mandate to evangelize the lost, this evangelizing family and friends and neighbors and coworkers, Christ’s mandate to preach this very exclusive gospel, the prophetic mandate to confront sin, telling people they’re wrong, tell the truth, preach righteousness, this puts us Christians at odds with the world around us. Whose fault is that? Who’s to blame for the lack of peace, and who gets the blame for the lack of peace?
The idolatrous Ahab, when he saw Elijah, he said, “Is this you, you troubler of Israel?” Remember that. I love that line. All the while, when he says that Elijah, the prophet of God, a holy man, is the troubler of Israel, well, that’s calling darkness light. That’s calling good evil and evil good, isn’t it? That’s flipping everything on its head to be able to say that and with a straight face.
He’s ignoring his own vile idolatries. He’s ignoring the idolatries of his wife. He’s ignoring all his own sins, which, you remember, Jezebel helped him cook up a plan to sanction the murder of Naboth to steal the man’s land so he could build his own vineyard on that guy’s land.
Ahab was able to control the public narrative. I mean, he got a bunch of worthless men to speak up at a dinner and basically charge Naboth and tell everybody he did some foul thing worthy of death, and they took him away and killed him. So he could control the public narrative, but God knew the truth, and so did Elijah. “I have not troubled Israel,” he said. “You and your father’s house, having forsaken the commandments of Yahweh, and you followed the Baals.”
That’s bold, isn’t it? Are we reluctant or emboldened, when we read things like that in Scripture, are we reluctant or embolden, to speak to others with that kind of moral clarity? If we’re reluctant, why do you think that is?
1 Peter says that we’re to “sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts,” meaning we set him apart as Lord and we follow his commandments, follow his directive. When we know that we’re supposed to go and speak, we go and speak because he’s Lord in our hearts, not their opinion, not how it’s going to come across, not the reaction we get or don’t get or whatever.
It’s “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,” not the public, not the opinions, not the reactions. That’s not Lord. Christ is Lord, so we “sanctify Christ is Lord in our hearts, always being ready to give an answer to those who ask about the hope within us.”
We’re to do this, though, with gentleness and respect. So we are to be gentle and respect. We are to put on the virtues of Colossians 3:12 and walk around in that. I can tell you, though, from some experience, that you can still speak in those ways, with those virtues, clothed in them, gleaming white, and still get blowback from people reacting very poorly against you and finding some way to blame you. It just happens.
Why is it, then, that we are emboldened when we read the text, but then when we get up to do the text, we somehow wilt? What’s that about? But this is really, really important, that what we read in Scripture, God wants us to actually do that stuff, not just be readers or hearers of the Word, who look into the mirror and then walk away and forget what we read and forget how emboldened we felt and strong we felt and desirous to be a man like Elijah, prophetic in our witness and strong and bold because we love people, because we want them to know the truth.
We ought to look up from the words on the page that delight our hearts and give us strength and vigor and walk out and do those things because we have the same Holy Spirit who inscribed those words. That same Holy Spirit lives within us to speak those kinds of words, too, to act those kinds of ways. We need to grow in this, don’t we? I think, I think if I had a show of hands, we could all say, I need some growth to put into practice what I find written in Scripture. We all need to grow.
Trouble was always brewing there in Rome and simmering there beneath the surface in the Jewish sectors of Rome. And every now and again, there would be another round of hostilities that would break out as Christians were just simply obeying Jesus Christ, telling the truth about him.
They were proclaiming his gospel, and Jesus said man’s greatest enemies are going to be those members of his own household that he tells the truth to. The divisions are going to come up within household of mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law and father and son and it’s going to create rifts within family relationships, and that’s really going to test loyalties.
So Jesus is the one that warned us a number of times in his ministry that this gospel that we preach, and telling the truth, and being bold in our love, and humbled in our love, it’s going to have consequences. So when the Christians did this in this church that we’re reading about, these Hebrew Christians, when they did that in their context, the Jews responded with hostility, and then they turned around to blame all the unrest on the Christians. They said, They are the ones causing trouble.
The more that unrest drew the attention of the Roman authorities, the more scrutiny’s came on the Jews, the Jewish communities, Jewish businesses. And so the Jews pressured their family and their friends that had become Christians or were attending Christian churches, You’ve got to stop that. You’re creating hostility, you’re creating problems, you’re creating difficulties for us and our communities and our businesses.
This is not good. And in fact, we think it’s actually not even biblical. We actually think you need to come back to the synagogue and really learn to appreciate the Moses that you’ve left, appreciate the traditions that you’ve abandoned, the prophets that you’re insulting by following this Christian faith.
So these Jews would plead with their families and friends. They’d cajole and coerce through emotions, anger, sorrow, fear. They’d reason with them intellectually. They’d argue with them about the superiority of Moses and the law, their history, their traditions, ceremonies, rituals.
They wanted to persuade them to leave their churches, to come back home, return to Jewish traditions, and take refuge from an increasing persecution and coming wrath in Rome. They’d experienced it before. It was going to happen again. All the signs were pointing to that.
If you think about it, these Jews were kind of preaching a kind of an anti-gospel, you could say. They were kind of evangelizing in reverse. It was a reactionary response to the Christian gospel and the Christian evangelism.
The Christian said, Listen, you’re sinning against God. You need to flee his coming wrath and take refuge in Jesus Christ. That’s the Christian gospel. The Jews responded with, You’re offending Rome, and you need to flee its coming wrath and take refuge in Moses and in the synagogue with us. We’ll ride this out together. That’s a pretty powerful, powerful gospel for people who are worldly minded.
I want to keep reminding you of what these Hebrew Christians are facing. It’s no small thing. And there are elements of what they faced in their time, in their settings, their circumstances that have parallels to our own time: family pressures, criticisms, you’re a cult, you belong to a cult, you are a cult people, all that kind of stuff. We hear all that stuff all the time.
I want you to see what they were wrestling with, so you can see that almost two millennia later, even though we live in different times and face different problems, challenges, circumstances, the fundamental challenge, it stays the same. The basic pressures we face are all the same.
The true church of Jesus Christ and all true Christians will always face social, political, cultural, religious headwinds no matter when or where we live. And that’s why this pastor, in writing to this Hebrew congregation, this Christian congregation, that’s why this pastor can use, legitimately, theologically, accurately, biblically, he can use warnings in the Bible against the unbelief of Israel to warn his own Christian congregation.
Look at the text in Hebrews 3 verse 6. Christians, he’s saying, are the true house of God, not the Christ-rejecting Jews. They’re not the true house of God. They’ve departed from the house of God. But he says Christians are the true house of God.
The true church of Jesus Christ and all true Christians will always face social, political, cultural, religious headwinds no matter when or where we live.” Travis Allen
And then he says in Hebrews 3:6, “if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope.” Don’t boast in Moses. Don’t leave your Christian confidence and assurance and go back to the synagogue. You’d be going back to a dead faith. Do not do that. We are the true house of God if we stand fast, hold this confidence and the boast of our hope.
And then he says this, which some of this we’ve covered. “Therefore,” verse 7, “just as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked me, as in the day of trial in the wilderness where your fathers tried me by testing me and saw my works for forty years.
“‘Therefore I was angry with this generation and said they always go astray in their heart, and they did not know my ways. As I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.’ See to it, brothers, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God.
“But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called today, so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end.
“While it is said, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked me.’ For who provoked him when they had heard? Indeed, did not all those who came out of Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were not able to enter because of unbelief.”
Last time, we looked at verses 7 through 11, the pastor’s use of the citation from Psalm 95, which is verse 7 through 11, there. David, the author of Psalm 95, it’s anonymous in the psalter, but in Hebrews 4, verse 7, David is cited as the author. But David, the author of Psalm 95, warned the people of his own time by pointing to the destruction of the generation of Israel that had left Egypt, who saw God’s miraculous power at work and yet didn’t believe.
So the pastor, in reading this Psalm 95, he sees in Psalm 95 there’s a precedent set by David. There’s a legitimate use of warning to God’s people. The Spirit’s call is continual. Whenever you pick up your Bible and read, the Spirit is speaking to you. There’s a continual call, a continual Word that we need to interpret correctly, and we need to sometimes boil down a principle and migrate it over to our own time and place and circumstances, and let that principle have its work, have its say.
But the Word of God is living and active. The Word of God is always applicable. There’s always something to pick up and apply in the Scripture to our own time. So the Spirit’s call is continual, and that tells this pastor that the warning for God’s people is a perennial warning. It’s always applicable to warn the people of God, and the Lord’s ruling on unbelief is always the same. It never changes. His warning against unbelief is immutable.
So as in the days of Moses, as in the days of David, as in the days of the pastor, here, of these Hebrew Christians, so also for our day and our time right now. So the pastor is going to turn his attention to applying the text, here in verses 12 and following in Hebrews 3, and notice how he enlists his congregation in verses 12 to 13. “See to it, brothers, that there not be in anyone of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But you, church, encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called today, lest anyone of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
We’ll just take these two verses, 12 and 13. They divide into two points according to verse 12, verse 13, following the two main verbs. There’s one main verb in verse 12, see to it; and then another main verb in verse 13, encourage.
So first point, number one if you take notes, is, following verse 12, your daily duty to pay attention. Number one, point number one: your daily duty to pay attention, verse 12. The pastor says there, “See to it, brothers.” He’s identifying his readers, his congregation, his fellow church members as his brothers and sisters.
That is to say, he considers them to be Christians. He’s got every belief that they are genuine, not just professing Christians, but professing Christians who are genuine Christians. That’s what he believes about them.
And yet in observing the times and the culture and his own congregation, and then observing some people’s behavior, and then as he’s educated by his reading of his Bible, pastorally it gives him kind of a heavy heart. It gives him a deep concern about some people and what’s going on in their midst.
So this leads him to choose this verb at the beginning, the verb blepo. We’ve seen this before in Colossians 2:8 about watching out for worldly philosophy. This leads him to choose that verb blepo; see to it, watch out, take care, take heed. As we’ve said before, it can refer to the visual sense of sight and visual perception of physical things. But here, in this context, very clear, it’s the faculty of mental judgment that’s the issue.
So this “see to it, brothers,” is about making careful observations. Yes, going from what you see, but then processing that, thinking about that, being watchful, paying close attention. And it’s because there’s a lurking danger that they’ve got to pay attention.
So what’s the danger? He identifies it here as “an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God.” The concern is about the heart once again. The concern is always the heart, isn’t it, in ministry? And my concern is about my own heart, too, about the hearts of my kids, my family, about the hearts of my church members.
The concern is always about the heart. And as we’ve said many times, I’ll repeat it again, the heart has an intellectual function, the mind, thinking. It’s got an affectional function; that is, the feelings, the emotions; it’s also got a volitional function, the will. So the heart, the mind, the emotion, the will, our inner self, our processing center, this is what we must watch carefully. This is what we must pay attention to and carefully observe.
This is nothing new to Bible readers. This is nothing new to these Hebrew Christians. This is ancient, ancient wisdom coming from, say, Proverbs 4:23, “Guard your hearts with all vigilance.” Another translation says, “Watch over your heart,” same kind of idea here, “with all diligence,” for the heart is so important, “because from it flow the springs of life.”
Now in this verse, verse 12, there is an adjective that describes the heart, and this is the heart that must be watched out for. It’s this kind of heart we need to watch out for. He says, “Pay attention and look out for an evil heart.”
Our translation, “an evil, unbelieving heart,” turns both evil and unbelieving into adjectives, but it’s really only the word evil that is the adjective, here. A slightly more accurate translation would be “an evil heart of unbelief.” That treats, unbelief as a noun, and it helps us to see what makes the heart evil.
He calls this heart evil because the source of this heart, the influence of the heart, the thinking intellectually, the feeling emotionally, the willing and the volition, it all comes from and is sourced in unbelief. That’s the problem with this heart. The mind does not believe the truth. Ultimately, what makes the heart evil? Evil is the adjective; unbelief is a noun, there.
So what makes the heart evil is that it’s sourced in unbelief. Mind, will, emotions sourced in unbelief. So the mind doesn’t believe the truth. The affections and the emotions are not governed by the truth, and the will is not bound to the truth and doesn’t submit to the truth.
And we asked the question, why is that? It’s because this heart was never believing to begin with. This heart was never converted. And so because it was never believing and never converted, this heart is always bent toward straying and self-will and unsubmissiveness and doing whatever this heart wanted according to the flesh, according to the fallen nature.
So now let’s trace this. The heart that we are to be paying attention to and watching out for is one that was never believing. It’s an unbelieving heart, which is by definition and in God’s eyes an evil heart. And the pastor ends the verse with the inevitable result, is a heart of apostasy. It’s a heart that ultimately falls away from the living God. If you fall away from the living God, what is that called?
If you turn from the living God to go to any other kind of God, what’s that called? Idolatry. It’s apostasy to idolatry. It’s a leaving the living God to go to anything that’s not the living God is a, an idol, an unliving God, a dead idol. It’s mute, it can’t speak; it’s deaf, it can’t hear; it’s blind, it can’t see. It has no mind, has no heart, has no life in itself. So he says any apostasy from this one true, exclusive Christian faith, any apostasy from the living God is a drift into idolatry, period.
Sorrowful strokes that this pastor, his writing from his pen comes from an aching heart of a man who’s watched this pattern time and time again in his ministry, just as Moses experienced, which was recorded in Numbers: Grumbling and complaining. Man, so clear, isn’t it, in Numbers?
Grumbling, complaining reveals a hard and stubborn heart. A hard and stubborn heart sins and offends God deeply. That sinful offensive heart to God is a proud self-willed, unsubmissive heart which inevitably leaves, which inevitably walks away, which inevitably apostatizes. That’s the end result. And that is proof positive of the origin of the evilness of that heart, which is unbelief. That’s where it comes from.
Simon Kistemaker, he says this about apostasy. He says, “It finds its origin, development, and impetus in unbelief. Unbelief, characterized by mistrust and unreliability, first comes to expression in disobedience, which in turn results in apostasy,” and then this, “The signs of apostasy are a hardening of the heart and an inability to repent.”
You want to see the signs of apostasy in living color, in flesh and blood, right in front of you? Find somebody who can never admit fault, who will never confess sins, who will never acknowledge guilt, who will never take ownership. They harden their heart and they will not repent and they will not change. They will not abandon their old way and put on a new. That’s a clear sign apostasy is taking an effect. If you’ve been in pastoral ministry for almost any length of time, that’s what you see. You see hard hearts refuse to repent.
So this pastor is saying, and he’s saying to the church, he’s enlisting the whole church and saying we all have a daily duty to pay attention to hearts, to watch out for an evil heart, which we know from Scripture, which you can get the sense in the experience of Christian living that the pastor goes a little bit further here in verse 13 and takes us even further outside of our comfort zones.
He says, number two, first, your daily duty to pay attention, and then second, your daily duty to give exhortation. Your daily duty to give exhortation. So he wrote, verse 12, “See to it, brothers, that there not be in any one of you, an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God.”
That sounds like it could be in the realm of the subjective, like just a matter of, I just need to pay attention and I kind of keep that inside and my judgments inside. And this is kind of my own private life, personal business. I can do verse 12 in a subjective sense. I can do verse 12 individually, privately, just me and my own thoughts, and I’ll just pray about the matter.
But then the pastor pushes you out of the private into the public square. Verse 13, “But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called today, lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
The daily duty to pay attention has also a corporate, public, and communal application, as well. In fact, that’s really the emphasis, here, and it provides a corrective, I think, for our time, a time that we live in, in which the private and the personal and the subjective take such priority so as to exclude and eschew and even reject outright the public and communal and objective duty that we have as Christians.
It is not okay to be a lone ranger Christian and just to do you and leave everybody else to do what they do. That is not Christianity. This is not Lone Wolf McQuade or Outlaw Josey Wales or whatever vision of manliness you have in your head from the movies or from romantic stories about some isolated island and rock of a man who just walks through life slinging guns and taking names.
That is not Christianity. Christianity is communal. It’s lived together. It’s lived in fellowship with one another. In this text, in verses 12 to 13, it’s very clear in the original that they’re joined together by what’s called a superordinate conjunction, which can have it, like an adversative, a but, like an adversative kind of a sense.
In this context, it’s not used that way. Same word, but a superordinate conjunction in this context just strengthens the sense. So here’s how it reads from verse 12. “See to it, brothers, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart” or an evil heart of unbelief, “that falls away from the living God,” here comes this conjunction, “indeed, encourage one another day after day.”
Indeed, you must. Indeed, get after it. Encourage one another. The verb actually is parakaleo, which, here, I think a better translation, here, it means exhort one another. So “Exhort one another day after day, as long as it is still called ‘today,’ lest anyone of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
Whenever you pick up your Bible and read, the Spirit is speaking to you.” Travis Allen
Remember back to the start of our study of Hebrews when we talked about the whole thing, of what kind of genre is this? Is it an epistle? Is it history? We said that this is kind of an epistolary exhortation. It’s an exhortation put into letter form.
According to Hebrews 13:22, the author identifies what he writes as “a word of exhortation,” a logos of paraklesis, which, when a paraklesis in exhortation is delivered by a pastor who is the author, it’s called a sermon. So he’s written a sermon, put it in print, made it a letter, and put it in the post and sent it to his church.
Now the pastor is here, enjoining his congregation to this sober duty of his, to the daily duty that his church has to exhort one another. Again, it’s Kistemaker who says, “In a sense, Hebrews 3:12 may be called the summary of the pastoral exhortations in the whole epistle.” It’s true. The pastor is enlisting his people. He’s calling this believing church, believing church members to join him in this sacred duty of exhortation and encouragement, sometimes even admonition.
Remember, the pastor has identified his readers as his brothers in verse 12. And so these are fellow Christians. They’re professing Christians, and the duty is to pay attention, which is, of course, practiced privately and subjectively, but more to the point it’s to practice it publicly and objectively in the context of the corporate body life, in the communal life of the church.
So he calls them brothers, in verse 12 and speaks of exhorting one another in verse 13. That is to say, brother exhorts brother. And then he uses, in verse 13 “any one of you.” He uses that term, expression, “any one of you” in both verses 12 and 13.
In verse 12, the expression is, “See to it, brothers, lest perchance,” it’s kind of a little expanded translation, there, “less perchance there will be in some one of you all an evil, unbelieving heart.” Okay, so, Be looking out for your fellow church members because you never know if someone has come into our midst who’s not truly converted, is what he’s saying.
Hard to fathom such a thing among us, brothers, but pay attention. We need to be on the lookout. We know it’s not unreasonable to assume not all have faith. Not everyone here is truly converted. Okay, so watch out for that evil heart, the one that’s sourced in unbelief. It’s going to take time to see.
In verse 13, the expression is encourage or exhort one another daily in order of that, and there’s a purpose clause, here, “in order that not anyone from you,” or no one out of your number, or from among the midst of you, so that “not any one from you should be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
Okay, so that part can happen to a Christian and non-Christian alike, right? Become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin? Whenever we commit a sin, it’s because we’ve been deceived. Whenever we commit a sin, it’s because we’ve chosen unbelief over belief. We’ve faltered and failed to believe strongly. We’ve been deceived. We think that the pleasures of the moment are going to have a payoff better than righteousness in the moment, than standing firm and not sinning. We’re always wrong about that.
The idea in verse 12 is in this community of believers whom we believe to be, you know, predominantly made-up of converted people, there’s a possibility that some may be unconverted. It’s a very real possibility. It’s not pervasive, not majority, but we also ought to be paying attention not only to everybody else but also to our own hearts.
The idea is even stronger in verse 13, though, more direct because the concern is an abiding concern, namely that anyone, anyone of our own number, believers in our midst, can succumb to sinning and then become hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. What comes to your mind when you hear that phrase, “the deceitfulness of sin”? What sins do you envision as particularly powerful in deceiving our own hearts? What is more deceptive than lusts and covetous desire, pleasures, titillating distractions?
I think it is religious pride and a religious pride in particular. It’s not just pride in self-accomplishment, ambition, money, status, fame, whatever. Religious pride is being enamored with one’s own goodness, justifying what you do as okay because you have a good end in mind.
The idea of evangelism: Well, I need to not come to church for these weeks because I’m trying to evangelize this certain person. Sounds like a really good reason, right? You’ve got a religious reason now, a religious justification for what you do.
Martin Luther says it this way, “The phrase ‘the deceitfulness of sin’ ought to be understood in a much wider sense so that the term includes,” now he’s not excluding, but he says, “so that the term includes even one’s own righteousness and wisdom, for more than anything else, one’s own righteousness and wisdom deceive one and work against faith in Christ.
“Since we love the flesh and the sensations of the flesh, and also riches and possessions, but we love nothing more ardently than our own feelings, judgment, purpose, and will,” and then listen to this, “especially when they seem to be good.”
Luther goes on to say, “Love of their own righteousness blinds them, hardens their heart.” Well, why might that be? Luther answers, “Because they think it a good thing to glory in their own righteousness and be pleased with it, though that indeed is the very worst of all vices and the extreme antithesis of faith. Faith rejoices and glories in the righteousness of God alone, that is, in Christ himself.” And thank you, Martin Luther; that’s so poignant.
There’s a deception in all sin, a deception of our heart whenever we sin, the sensations of the flesh, riches, possessions. But we tend to love nothing more ardently than our own feelings, judgment, purpose, and will, especially when they seem to be good.
We elders here in this church, or in previous churches where I’ve served as an elder, we can’t count the number of times that some proud, self-righteous person, deceived thoroughly into thinking himself or herself as righteous and the elders as unrighteous and uncompat, and fill in the blank of what they are, people fail to see in those judgments, in those comments, the redwood-sized logs protruding out of their eye sockets.
In many cases, these kinds of self-righteous complaints and criticisms and subtle little jabs and slanders against church elders, not just this church, every faithful elder I’ve talked to, every pastor I’ve talked to, exact same thing. They see it everywhere.
But they’re not often known by the elders or known to the elders until the people have one foot out the door. But how often we find that these ungodly, unrighteous sentiments are known among the members of the church who often times say nothing.
On the other hand, I’ve known in a number of cases church members who’ve gone to sinning members and confronted them in their sinning and called them to account for their slanders and their gossips and their complaints and their grumbling and their disloyalty.
At times, it didn’t stop the sinners from their sinning. They were far too self-righteous and enamored with their own goodness and good for that. But it did check them. It did stir their remorse, inform consciences, even if it generated no repentance, generated no, even confession.
This is why the pastor in Hebrews, of these Hebrew Christians, he’s enlisting his church to the duty of paying attention, to the duty of exhortation, and that they must do this duty daily, be at it all the time “while it is still called today.”
Who’s using the word today? The Holy Spirit? And the Holy Spirit is giving you not only duty, but he’s given opportunity. Who’s the author behind the human author of Hebrews? Who is it? Who enlists the church members to the daily duty of paying attention and the daily duty of exhortation? It’s the Spirit of the living God. We have to pay attention. We have to exhort one another daily. To not do so is to defy him and to disobey him.
What makes church members, what makes you, what makes us reluctant to practice the daily duties of paying attention and exhortation? What makes us reluctant? Why would we not do that? We fail to see the church for what it is; it’s a training ground, a proving ground. We don’t come here expecting stress. We come here expecting, I don’t know, good religious feelings, good conversation, smiles.
What we really need to come expecting is confrontation with the Spirit of the living God, maybe some discomfort in ways we need to change. But obviously there’s also tons of encouragement and tons of hope and joy and satisfaction.
So we have both. It’s just we tend to, I think here in America, we tend to amplify the things that make us feel good. We’re pleasure-seekers: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness; not stress, challenge, testing of my heart to see where I’m sinning.
But Matthew 18:15 is not just for pastors. It’s not just for leaders, it’s for everybody. It’s for “if your brother sins, go and show him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens, you’ve won your brother.”
Very important, though, to pursue that, and we do tend to have a hesitation in our hearts saying, “Well, maybe I don’t have all the facts. Maybe I will make my case put together. Maybe I will be mistaken, and . . .” But what prevents you from just going to ask the question at all? You know, what’s the worst that could happen? You confront your brother, and your brother says, Oh, I think you got the facts wrong on this.
You know what your heart should be like? Awesome! I’m so glad to have the facts wrong and you’re exonerated. Forgive me. I just love you, and I wanted to try and ask this question, but you’ve cleared up the whole thing. Thank you. Boom. Done. And you’ve loved your brother, and your brother’s loved you.
We just need to have more courage, I think, and kind of test one another’s forbearance and forgiveness and realize we’re not going to bite each other. We may nibble a little bit, but it’s okay.
What would it take to actually obey this command to exhort one another daily? What does this require of us? I mean, think about it. You don’t just walk up to somebody you don’t know and start exhorting, you know, encouraging, to say kind things. But even there, your encouragement will fall, will sound pretty hollow if some certain foundational basic things are not in place, first.
So what does it take to actually obey this command, put it into practice? What does it require of each one of us? Friendship. If we’re going to obey these commands, if we’re going to take this seriously, like look up from the pages and not just cheer it on, but say, Okay, let’s go. Let’s actually do this, it requires friendship. It requires us getting into one another’s lives.
See and be seen. Know and be known. We need to add one more: Love and be loved. If it’s just see and be seen, know and be known, that’s really 1984, that’s Big Brother, that’s George Orwell, that’s Orwellian. See and be seen, oh, Big Brother’s always watching; know and be known, all your stuff is known, and it’s scary unless you add a third: Love and be loved.
We want to be seen and known, so that we can give and receive love with one another. It’s so important. That’s the practice of friendship. That is what fellowship is. We’re to see and know and to love one another.
That’s what this text is requiring of us. You have to have that in place and build that all the time in order that you can meaningfully encourage one another and meaningfully exhort one another. We need to be building those relationships, investing.
And it is true, I’ll just try to caution for those one, two, or three of you out there who might be that ham-fisted sword-thrust-coming-out-of-the-mouth kind of a person, you know, like the Sons of Thunder breathing down fire on the Samaritan village, this is not that. Don’t mistake me. Don’t misunderstand me. You do need to grow in the graces, the virtues that are talked about in Colossians 3:12.
And here’s where I want to just encourage you, church. You all take up this duty and pay attention daily and exhort one another daily, encourage one another daily. Do this. And then treat your pastors, elders, more mature, seasoned Christians in your life as coaches. They’ll guide you through it.
You’re not on your own. You’re not out there on a limb. You can find help, you just need to open up and raise the issue. Sometimes you’ll find there’s really not even an issue to address. Other times you’ll find, oh, this is something we coach you in and and help you through. Let’s pray.
Father, we just ask that you would help us all to put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience; that we would be a forbearing and forgiving people, forgiving whatever complaint arises; and even if sins are committed against one another, that we would see it as the, as the test and the stress that you’ve put into our life to test the clothing that we wear, and that we would find that this clothing you’ve given us is sufficient to bring us through that.
We do pray that you would help us to pay attention daily and to give our exhortation daily, to encourage and at times to admonish, but to really know each other well, to be in each other’s lives, to be friends and friendly, and to invite that kind of attention, those kinds of questions and that kind of relationship and friendship. Help us to stand out in that way, and I pray that you would grow us in our maturity in our church to be able to practice this together. For the sake of your glorious name, Father, we pray. Amen.