Tom Allen // Hebrews 4:6-7 // We must fight for faith every day to enter and enjoy God’s rest.
Emmanuel Tuscaloosa
Today
The following audio is brought to you by Immanuel Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. More information about our church can be found at ImmanuelTuscaloosa.org. Starting in verse 1, "Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest, although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way, and God rested on the seventh day from all his works. And again in this passage he said, they shall not enter my rest. Since therefore, it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience. Again, he appoints a certain day. Today, saying through David so long afterward in the words already quoted, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts." For Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works, as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living inactive, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sin. Depending on the type of church you grew up in, you may be familiar with the idea of altar calls. Altar calls were popularized in the 1800s by a man named Charles Finney. They typically would involve a special time and/or place in the worship service where people were called to come forward, to make a public declaration of their commitment, or perhaps their recommitment to Christ. Perhaps invited to respond in the privacy of their pew by raising their hand with no one else looking. They might include things like leading you to pray a specific prayer with specific words. They're intended to function as a source of assurance. Finney was known to give actual tokens to people to carry with them, to assure them of the decision they had made. And altar call might be part of your church experience. It might be part of your growing up. You might associate an altar call with your conversion. If you're not new here, it probably is not coming as a surprise to you to hear that your pastors here don't advocate for them, and we don't practice them. And I hope that today, especially if that's something that you wish were different about our church, that you'll have a better understanding of why. And more importantly, if you're here today banking your salvation on something you did in the past, our prayer for you is that you will look away from yourself and look to Jesus and who He is for you today. This section in Hebrews that we've been working through has been dealing largely with the Exodus generation. The author has brought us back several times to Psalm 95, and he's using the Israelites there to warn us about the dangers of unbelief. This generation had followed Moses through the water, but when they got across, they put God to the test. They grumbled about His provision. They failed to trust in His care for them. And then when their faithlessness was exposed, they had no appeal to God. Hey, remember, we slaughtered the Passover lamb. We crossed the Red Sea. We ate the bread. We drank the water. There was no appeal based on their past so-called faith. Their lack of faith proved itself over time, and we've seen throughout this chapter the warning that they did not enter the promised land because of it, which is why the original audience of Hebrews and we also are commanded to watch over our hearts and lives for signs of unbelief. And we are to exhort one another every day as long as it is called today. So we should ask ourselves or remind ourselves from Hebrews, what are the signs of unbelief? We saw back in chapter 3, verses 12 and 13, unbelief is equated with evil hearts that are deceived in sin. In 3, 14, we saw that unbelief is the opposite of a persevering or enduring faith that keeps hold of Christ. In our passage today, unbelief is equated with disobedience. Unbelief leads to a failure to enter God's promised rest. We've been talking and reading a lot about rest in chapters three and four. Let's remind ourselves of the definition that we've been working with when we say rest in the context of Hebrews. What does the author mean when he tells us about the rest of God? True rest is a profound trust in God's sovereign care over your life where worry gives way to peace. It's a state where disobedience is replaced by an obedient trust in his guidance. As you journey toward the eternal rest, he has promised. A rest begun by him from creation, now fully secured and guaranteed by Christ. So with that idea of rest in mind, put your eyes back on the text in Hebrews 4, specifically verses 6 and 7. "Since therefore it remains for some to enter it," that is God's rest, "and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day, today, saying through David so long afterward in the words already quoted, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts." Verse 6 begins with "since therefore," connecting it to what we just read in the verses, preceding it. The whole argument here centers on Israel's past failures and the temptation of the current audience, which includes you and I, to go the same route, to fail to enter God's rest. And he's beginning to draw this section to a conclusion by reiterating the command, "not to harden your hearts lest we also fail to enter God's rest." I see four parts to this argument that the author is making in these verses. The foundation of his argument has two components. This is how I see his argument breaking down. "Since therefore, one, it remains for some to enter and two, many have failed to enter it." That's the basis of the argument. He builds on that with three, God's appointment of today and four, his command or his exhortation at the end. So the "since therefore" has two components. He builds on that further with God's appointment of today and he concludes that with a command at the end. I'm a note-taker and I preach like a note-taker, so I'm going to go ahead and give you what I think is the main point of this passage. I'll summarize what I think is the main passage like this. We must fight for faith every day to enter and enjoy God's rest. We must fight for faith every day to enter and enjoy God's rest. But to get there, we're going to see how this sermon asks and answers two important questions. The first of those questions is why must I fight for faith? And the author is going to give us two answers to that question. Why must I fight for faith? That's our first point because God's rest is at stake. God's rest is at stake. Look at the warning in the middle of verse six. This is another reference to Psalm 95. The Israelites saw God's work. They received His law. They had His promises. But most of them we've seen were not united by faith with those who listened. They hardened their hearts and therefore did not enter the land. The author of Hebrews is telling you today, don't be like them. And this isn't the only place in the New Testament that the Israelites in the wilderness generation are used as an example, not to follow. You can hold your finger in Hebrews 4 and turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 10 or see it on the screen behind me. 1 Corinthians 10 verses 1 to 11, Paul is going to do something very similar there. 1 Corinthians 10 beginning in verse 1, it says, "For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses, in the cloud, and in the sea. And all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them, God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did, do not be idolaters as some of them were. As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and 23,000 fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction on whom the end of the ages has come. So Paul is telling us what life was like in the wilderness generation, and why they didn't enter because of their unbelief, which proved itself in disobedience, all kinds of immorality, and grumbling, and putting the Lord to the test. And we're told that it is preserved not for our information, but for our instruction. This is what it looks like for you to fail to enter God's promised rest. Therefore, you today don't harden your heart. Now put your eyes back on Hebrews 4, 6. The author continues describing the Exodus generation as those who formerly received the good news. He's already told us about this good news back in verse 2, but what is this good news that they heard? You might consider a passage like Exodus 19, verse 5 and 6. The Lord says, "Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." There is plenty of gospel like this in the Old Testament. The problem is that it's not that God's promises were flawed, but they were given to flawed people. The law, in other words, can convict sinners, but it cannot redeem sinners. For that, we need the new covenant, which was also promised to Israel and fulfilled in Christ. The old covenant we saw in Exodus 19 had to be kept by obedience, if you will indeed obey my voice. But they didn't obey his voice. They broke his covenant by disobedience. And what did God do in response? He remained faithful to his word and kept them out of his rest. We often think of God's faithfulness in terms of his grace. It's good to be reminded that God's faithfulness also applies to his wrath for sin. We have been warned about the wrath of God, keeping unbelievers out of his rest twice in the last few weeks. God is a faithful redeemer and a faithful judge. He does what he says he will do. We see this in Exodus 34, 6 and 7. The Lord passed before him, Moses, and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation. You do not want a God who is not ultimately just. But you can't stand before a God who is not ultimately gracious. The gospel is the good news of both his grace and his justice, poured out on sinners through Christ. But here, the faithless Israelites remind us that you will fail to enter this rest if you fail to trust and obey him. We must fight for faith because God's rest is at stake. The second answer we have to the question, "Why must I fight for faith?" is our second point, because God's grace is for today. God's grace is for today. You'll see this at the beginning of both verses 6 and 7. Verse 6 begins, "Since therefore it remains for some to enter it." And verse 7 says, "God appoints a certain day today." Although he has every right to, God has not shut the door on his rest. It remains for some to enter it. David, writing Psalm 95, hundreds of years after the wilderness generation, failed to enter, and the rest remained open. The author of Hebrews wrote some thousand years after David, and the rest remained open. You and I living some two thousand years after that, and the rest remains open. His rest is available to all who will have it by faith. His grace is available today. That is how we understand who the sum are in verse 6. The sum are all those who by grace receive the gospel and believe. This is immensely good news. Today, if you feel hopelessly lost, if you feel as if you have out-sined the grace of God, if you are filled with worry, if you doubt his care for you, if you are not confident that your eternity is secure in Christ, you need to hear not only the warning of where unbelief leads, but also that you do not have to live that way. It remains for some to enter. There is grace available to you today. This is also good news as you share the gospel. For missionaries sharing the gospel in hard places where Christ has not been named or where he is violently opposed, remember as you pray for them or perhaps young people as you aspire to be one of them, it remains for some to enter. If you are surrounded by unbelievers at work or at school who mock your faith, remember it remains for some to enter. As you pray for the lost people in your family, maybe your children, maybe your own spouse, remember it remains for some to enter. Continue sowing gospel seeds, continue praying gospel prayers with confidence that God is able and willing with his powerful voice to call his people out of darkness and into light. As he works providentially, the good shepherd calls to his sheep and they hear his voice and they follow him. By the grace of God today, it remains for some to enter. And his grace to you today is both sovereign and active. Look at verse seven. It says, he appoints a certain day. God is the appointor of this day in which he speaks. So your life, your even being here today is not by chance but by the appointment of God. And this is not a past action. This isn't an appointing that simply happened in the past as if God wound the world into existence and said it loose to go about its own business. This is a present reality. God appoints. He is active in his creation today. He is not uninvolved. He is not uninterested. But he is also gracious and rather than wiping us out yesterday, he sovereignly and graciously designates today. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. Hold your finger on chapter four, verse seven, and look back perhaps a page or so in your Bible to chapter three, verse seven. There's something important lying on the surface of both of these verses that we need to be careful not to gloss over in our exploration of this text because it's how God makes his grace known to us today and every day. Quoting Psalm 95 in chapter three, verse seven, the author of Hebrews says, "As the Holy Spirit says." And in our passage today, it says, "He appoints a certain day today saying through David so long afterward." God speaks his grace to us, through his inspired word, the scripture. When David, or what David wrote in Psalm 95 is what the Holy Spirit says. What the author of Hebrews wrote as he quoted it, the Holy Spirit said. 2 Peter 1, 21 explains it like this, "No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." We have the word of God as the Holy Spirit says. We have to be careful then with the voices that we listen to. The command is, if you hear his voice, what voices are you listening to today? Where you and I are guilty of hard-heartedness, we will ultimately find that the voices we're listening to are lying and deceitful. Grumbling, as we saw in the Israelites, came from believing the lie that God was not for them and that it would have been better for them to perish in Egypt. Idolatry comes from believing the lie that God is not preferable to other things that might satisfy you. At the root of your sin is belief in lies. What voices are you listening to? Surround yourself with the voice of God. As a church, we gather around the word of God. As individuals, we have to do the same. If you have symptoms of hard-heartedness, somewhere you are giving heed to voices other than the Lord's. So today if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. Some of you may have heard his voice in your ears, maybe for a very long time. You've heard sermons, you've heard the Bible taught, but there is not heart-level trust in Jesus. There is hard-heartedness and unbelief. If you have come here today, unbelieving, our plea is for you to look to Christ and live. Jesus, as we have seen, the Word of God incarnate, the true Son of God who lived sinlessly, taking the wrath of God for his people, that we might enter his rest and share it with him. How did he do that? By his own death for sins, by taking the wrath of God that we deserve, in his resurrection, securing that promised rest. And it's open. It's open to all who will trust in him, but the command is for today. You are not guaranteed tomorrow. Now we are not going to ask you to walk an aisle and we're not going to ask you to raise your hand. There is not an altar call, first and foremost, because this is not an altar. If you will have him, Jesus has already died there for you. You don't have to come here. You go to Jesus. And you don't have to come through me or another pastor because we are not priests. Jesus is your great high priest. He is your mediator. That's not to say that your life of faith is a matter between you and Jesus alone. We've seen in Hebrews that faith is like a team sport in which we cheer each other on and build one another up. The church is the body of Christ here to spur one another on in our walk of faith. But we do not bestow the gift of faith in response to your decision. And you will not leave here with a token in your pocket of what you have done. God opens eyes of faith for you to see and treasure Christ. Run to Christ. In him, you have access to the throne of grace today. But you may be asking, what must I do to be saved? It's a legitimate question. Our answer is, believe. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. In practice, will that include prayer? Of course it will. Prayer is a gift to you every day. We call on the Lord in dependence and trust every day as long as it is called today. Will it include outward actions? Of course it will. The Lord has ordained baptism and the Lord's supper for us to publicly display our trust, our initial and our ongoing faith. He has prepared good works for you to walk in. Does it come with assurance? Absolutely it does. But it's not the assurance from something that you did. It's the assurance of who Jesus was for you on the cross. Who He is for you now, raised and glorified. Who He will be for you when He returns. Your assurance of the Lord's grace and saving power in your life is demonstrated as you display His gift of faith. If you remain skeptical today, my encouragement for you is to read the Bible. Start with one of the Gospels. See who Jesus is. See what Jesus has done. I shared in building blocks this morning that as an unbeliever in college, I was gifted a Bible and encouraged to read the Gospel of John for myself. And I thought I was searching it out for meaning. And I found that it was searching me. Christ was compelling to me. I heard His voice to the unbelieving and skeptic. I urge you, explore the Bible, consider Jesus. But this is a text addressed to people who are already in the Christian community, to church people, people who have walked aisles, people who have prayed prayers, people who grew up in church, who know the hymns, who've memorized the verses, people who would say they have believed. The decisions of your past, although they're not irrelevant, are not what's in focus here. There is encouragement, don't get me wrong, to be had from reflecting on the fruit of God's grace to you in the past. And Hebrews is going to show us that when we get to chapter 6 verse 10 and chapter 10 verses 32 and 34, you'll see God's grace in the past is a source of encouragement to us. We're not throwing out your past. But remember, He's writing to a group of people who are persecuted presently and tempted today to run from Jesus. The balance in this section and in the book as a whole is not to bank your confidence on decisions that you made in the past, but to walk in the rest of faith now, every day, today. The question is not, did you trust Him? But are you trusting Him? Or are you showing signs of a hard heart? It may be that the Lord will use His Word today to show some that have been going through the motions at church. I come, I sing, I listen, I'm quiet when I'm supposed to be quiet. Maybe you're seeing this morning that you have been acknowledging Jesus with your lips. But your heart is far from Him. And if that's you, today is the day to repent. Don't heart in your heart any longer. Humble yourself before the Lord. Repent from self-righteousness. Repent from hypocrisy. Trust in Jesus alone. This is a warning to the church. There's a warning here for churches as a whole too. If we as a church don't maintain a healthy view of church membership, if we are not careful in our examination of people for membership, if we don't watch over our ongoing discipleship and discipline, we run the risk of turning even something like baptism into just another token that people carry in their pocket. We can unintentionally provide false assurance to people who think of themselves as Christians, but who actually aren't believing. We have to be careful in our membership. How do we do this? Well, we call each other to repentance when we see hard-heartedness. We don't teach people to believe that they're good as long as they were baptized and as long as their name is on our role. You might call that altar call theology. Altricall theology talks about when I got saved. It necessarily creates a backward-looking faith. It causes you to look at your past decisions for confidence. So rather than simply asking you, when did you get saved? We'll ask you about what your life of faith is like now. We're going to direct you not to your past, but to Christ, who He was for you on the cross, who He is for you now, who He will be for you when He returns. How He intercedes for you. When you're battling sin, we will ask you, what are you believing? What voices are you listening to? How are you trusting Him now? And we will help one another walk in repentance. When we walk through the valley of sorrow, we remind one another, the good shepherd didn't just love us once. He loves and leads us now. That's what you commit to do for your brothers and sisters in church membership. Your life now is a daily fight for faith. Notice how the author of Hebrews has repeated the word today twice in short order, emphasizing this daily fight for faith in the battleground of your heart. God is not in this text commanding your yesterday's. He is commanding your today. And if by grace you wake up tomorrow, tomorrow will be your today then. Believer, if you hear His voice today, do not harden your heart. Unhelped by 1 Timothy 6, 11 and 12, you're familiar with this passage. Paul tells Timothy to fight the good fight of the faith. But I want you to notice how he does it in verse 11. He defines this fight of faith by telling him to pursue righteousness, godliness, faith underlying that love, steadfastness and gentleness. Faith is not merely something that you professed in the past. It's something that you must pursue and fight for today, every day, which brings us to our second question. How do I fight for faith? Based on everything we've seen in Hebrews up to this point, let me suggest three ways. First, look to Jesus in His Word. Look to Jesus in His Word. When we're tempted to drift from faith, we're told we have to pay much closer attention to what we have heard. We have to hold fast to Christ, our anchor. We have to pay attention to the voice of God speaking in His living and active word. Very simply feed your soul and edify your brothers and sisters with the word of God. Read it. Pray it. Meditate on it. Memorize it. Ask the Lord to help you submit to it. By faith, even as Jeremy prayed this morning, grab hold of God's promises to you. In Christ, God promises to be for you, to keep you. He promises not to condemn you. He promises to raise you on the last day. He promises to work all things together for good for those who love Him. So faith looks to Christ in His Word and seizes upon all of the promises of God to His people, which are yes and amen in Jesus. And don't miss here in Hebrews that the author is quoting the Old Testament. There are some Bible teachers encouraging us to unhitch from the Old Testament, saying it's not relevant for us today. It is the Word of God. In Luke 24, Jesus says the entire Old Testament, the law, the prophets, and the Psalms, all of it, testifies to Him. To unhitch from the Old Testament is to unhitch from Christ. He did not come to abolish it, but to fulfill it. The New Testament makes absolutely no sense without the Old. Hebrews would make no sense without the Old Testament. Hebrews has been arguing chapter by chapter that the people and institutions of the Old Testament are shadows of Christ. By understanding them, we will understand more of Him and His work on our behalf. Scripture in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, as we've already seen, is not meant to inform us, but to transform us by cultivating our relationship with the risen Christ. He is your Redeemer. He is your guide. Immerse yourself in His counsel as all of it directs your eyes of faith to Jesus. Look to Jesus in His Word. Second, look out for sin. Look out for sin. The command in this passage is a do not. Do not harden your hearts. We've seen what this looks like in the last few chapters. It looks like sin that causes us to go astray. So where we see evidence of sin and unbelief in our lives, we fight for faith by looking for hard-heartedness and walking in repentance. A hard heart will prefer other things to the Lord. A hard heart will grumble and complain. A hard heart will put God to the test. A hard heart walks in disobedience. Where you see evidence of that in your life, you look out for it, you confess it, and you turn from it by grace. You and I, even in Christ, will continue to struggle with bouts of hard-heartedness, this side of glory. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. So we have to confess them to the Lord. And like Jeremy mentioned, perhaps the harder thing of confessing them to one another. But God's kindness and grace is available for you today to do that. Look out for sin. And that means we have to evaluate the voices that we're listening to. Evaluate your media intake. Evaluate the kind of counsel you pay attention to. If you want to get to the bottom of the lies that you're believing that lead to hard-heartedness and unbelief, you need to discern what you're listening to. Where are you hearing them in the first place? Lastly, look up in prayer. We fight for faith by praying for faith. Faith is not something that you muster up inside of yourself. You cannot grit your teeth hard enough and create faith. Coming on the heels of this passage is a beautiful reminder of Christ's present ministry to His people. Through Jesus, we draw near to the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need. Your time of need requires faith. Ask Him for it. It is a gift of His grace. Ask the Lord today, every day, to bolster and grow it. Your trust, your reliance on Him, your rest in Him. The prayer I believe helped my unbelief is the kind of humble posture in prayer we should all take before the Lord every day. Look up in prayer. Years ago, in the Lord's providence, we had a next door neighbor who I was able to engage in a spiritual conversation. Something as simple as remarking on the weather outside turned to a conversation about the Lord. And when I asked Him about His relationship with the Lord, His response to me was that He had been baptized five times. Every time He felt the guilt of His sin, He ran to the baptistry. He ran to rededication. He ran to decisions. But it never washed His guilt away. He was running in His own strength, and He was clinging to what He had done in the past, and He lived in constant guilt. I'll tell you what I told Him. Don't rest on the laurels of the decisions that you made in the past. Maybe you walked the aisle. Maybe you prayed the prayer. Maybe you have the card. Maybe you passed through the waters of baptism. Maybe you've tasted the bread and drank from the cup. But if you've done that, only to come out on the other side, living in hard-heartedness, yesterday's faith will be of no avail to you. God's rest is at stake. His grace is available for you to fight today. So continue that fight of faith every day. Look to Jesus every day as long as it's called today. I think as we do that, that'll change even the vocabulary that we use to talk about the Lord's work in our lives. I got saved, and I have the card to prove it. Turns into something like this. Jesus Christ is my only hope. He died not just for sins, but for my sins. He rose from the dead, defeating death for my justification. He sets His love on you and me with lavish grace every day that we might know Him and make Him known. We walk by faith every day in the one who loved us and gave Himself for us. We say, "I am not perfect, but by grace I have come, and by grace I am coming, and by grace I will come." I'm resting in Him. Let's pray. Oh Lord, we ask, we ask for more grace. You tell us to fight the good fight of the faith, strengthen our hands for that. The salvation that we have by your grace through faith is a gift. Not only do we have no grounds for boasting, we're relying on you to give it and to keep it. You are faithful. We trust that what you have begun in us, you will bring to completion at the day of Christ Jesus. And it's His name we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening. If you live in the Tuscaloosa area and are looking for a church, we'd love for you to visit. Our service times are Sunday mornings at 1030 and Wednesday nights at 615. [BLANK_AUDIO]