This letter to the Hebrews is meant to get us thinking more deeply about who Jesus is and how he shapes our
faith and lives. Faith is not just believing the right things; faith needs to
be active and practiced in our daily lives and how we interact with the world.
He’s echoing James, “What good is it, my brothers and
sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save
them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one
of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing
about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself,
if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
The writer to the Hebrews is concerned
about people
in the church who’ve been passionate and serious about their faith but who’ve
lost that passion and began to take their faith and God for granted. C.S Lewis
warns of this dullness of the soul in The Screwtape Letters, a series of
letters from a senior to a junior demon advising him on how to draw people away
from God. The senior demon writes, “Your job is to make the person acquiesce
in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with
it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all. In a week or so you
will be making him doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not,
perhaps, a little excessive…A moderated religion is as good for us as no
religion at all—and more amusing.” I’ve had parents tell me that the
excitement of their teens after service projects and mission trips is all fine
and well, but that it’s good it wears off so that they can concentrate on
getting a real job in the real world.
As you read this part of the letter,
there’s a sense of frustration creeping in
here. He’s got so much to share with them yet, but he’s starting to wonder if
he should even bother; he’s wondering if they’ll even understand what he’s
about to share with them. Our Bible is very polite in how it translates this
verse, “it’s hard to make it clear to you because you
no longer try to understand,” a more literal translation is, “it’s hard to make it clear to you because you’re lazy or
sluggish.” There’s a lack of effort among them in continuing to learn
more about Jesus and growing deeper in their relationship and faith in Jesus. It’s sad that the letter writer needs to challenge them on
their attitude to Jesus. Yet, if we’re honest, Hebrews is just as relevant
today as it was 2,000 years ago. Faith is rooted in a trust relationship with Jesus
marked by obedience to walking Jesus’ way, and this takes effort.
“By this time you ought to be teachers, yet you need
someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You
need milk, not solid food.” Ouch! John Stott, talking about the lack of people sharing their faith
writes, “Nothing hinders evangelism today more than the widespread loss of
confidence in the truth, relevance, and power of the gospel.” We may have
accepted the gospel, but we’ve accepted it only as a promise of a future in
heaven for ourselves, confident we’re saved because we believe in Jesus’
sacrifice on the cross for our sin, his resurrection, and the forgiveness of
our sin, but then we set it aside so we can live in the world according to the
world’s way.
We
often don’t make the effort to do the hard work of reflecting on how the
gospel story empowers us to engage our culture and community and why. Too many
followers of Jesus don’t work at seeing the world at a deeper level. The gospel
is given to us to help us understand God’s universe, the foundation from where we interpret history, the present, and the
future. As Christopher Wright says, “Basically, they (many followers of
Jesus today) have “added Jesus” to provide a happy ending to an otherwise
unaltered personal and cultural story.” Jesus is only part of a chapter in
many Christians’ story.
The entire Biblical story is the gospel
story; creation is rooted in God creating order out of
chaos, humanity is created to be in relationship with God, created in his image
to develop the potential in creation according to God’s design. Sin ruptures
our relationship with God, so Jesus comes to bring salvation and healing and
set us on his way, using us to bring order out of the chaos sin creates,
bringing healing and hope, and being the blessing to the world God called
Abraham to be. The gospel is not about escaping this world to get to heaven,
it’s about this world and life here; it’s about sharing the gospel story of
forgiveness, hope, and renewal found in Jesus and his way; it’s about living
out the hope and healing that comes through Jesus so the places the Spirit
leads us into begin to experience the gospel.
Why do you come on Sunday mornings? Most of us come to worship God, a good thing! Many
of you come to be fed. Nothing wrong with that, and we get fed in many ways,
from the worship, the fellowship, being able to encourage and build each other
up, and from the sermon. While we’re blessed with much biblical knowledge and
have so much knowledge at our fingertips, still the church is struggling in Canada,
so more knowledge doesn’t seem to be the answer. At some point we need to mature
and feed themselves into maturity. If you’re only getting fed once a week,
that’s not nearly enough to become mature followers of Jesus. The writer of
Hebrews challenges the people, “You ought to be
teachers.” Do you come on Sunday and go to Bible study with the goal of
learning in order to teach someone else, or is it just about learning more, never
passing on what you’re learning? Who are you teaching the gospel to, who are
you mentoring in the faith?
The
writer talks about solid food for the mature, those who by constant use, have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
They have basic knowledge of Jesus; the knowledge of repentance and faith,
baptism and laying on of hands, of resurrection and eternal life, but those who
are mature do something with it. It’s
the “by constant use” part that gives us a hint
to what being mature is. Bible study, praying, meditation, and learning more
help us learn about Jesus, but they don’t make us mature. We learn so we can
teach others, we learn so we can recognize good from
evil and mentor others to also recognize good from evil and how to live
out the good while challenging the evil. Mature comes from the word “teleion” which means perfection as our end goal;
meaning that we’re growing into the people God has created us to be. Mature
looks like living the fruit of the Spirit, Paul’s definition of love as found
in 1 Corinthians 13, and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, and shaping our
values and lives by them.
Maturing
our souls happens as we take the foundational truths to interpret our
culture and apply them to engage our culture as followers of Jesus; engaging
the world through gospel lens. The word practice is the word “gymnazo” where we get our word gymnasium from, a place
to practice and train. Training is about doing something repeatedly, guided by
coaches so that we can become skilful at whatever we’re training to accomplish.
Practicing studying our culture with gospel lens takes training: Sunday worship
together, studying Scripture, prayer, seriously inviting the Holy Spirit to
take charge of our hearts and minds and studying our culture and community in
order to engage it. This week at our worship meeting, it was wondered if we
should address Pride month here in Lacombe, and I will admit that my first
reaction was to resist as it creates so much conflict, but as I reflected and
prayed, I recognized we fall into identifying the LGBTQ+ community the same way
our culture does; that their gender and sexuality is their primary identity.
Gospel
shaped engagement with the LGBTQ+ community begins with recognizing that each
person is created in the image of God, the primary way we should see them. They’re
among the people Jesus calls us to go out into the world to share the gospel with.
Peter writes in his second letter, “The Lord is not slow
in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with
you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” He also calls us to gentleness and respect as we share the gospel. When we
look at how Jesus interacted with those who sinned, such as the woman caught in
adultery, we see Jesus first protecting her, challenging her accusers, and then
lifting her up, telling her he’s not going to judge her, but he also commands
her to go and sin no more. We also need the world to call us out on our sins,
which we often find hard to see in ourselves.
Mature
looks like doing hard things, entering the messiness and hardness of
life with a soul shaped by deep love and commitment to God and love for our
neighbours. It means studying our culture through the lens of Scripture, being
with our neighbours to hear their stories, often hard stories of brokenness,
feeling their hurt; listening to their stories of loneliness, seeking love and
acceptance. As you listen, you’ll begin to recognize opportunities to speak
Jesus’ invitation to come to him and rest, to share his love for them, shown in
Jesus’ willingness to die for us so we can have new life; sharing with them
Jesus’ way, inviting them to journey with us into holiness, turning together from
our sin and trusting in him and his way.
God
uses real life challenges and struggles to deepen our faith in him. Maturity
recognises that everything God has created is potentially redeemable, that all
of life is about faith. Learning and challenging each other to live our faith
in Jesus out together is how we gain a mature faith.
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