Partakers through Perseverance
"So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief." Hebrews 3:19
Main Readings: Psalm 27 & Hebrews 3
Supporting Readings: Deuteronomy 8 & Colossians 1
From an initial scan, it could sound like we’re covering old ground this morning, as we close out chapter 3.
Take verse 14 for example. Haven’t we already heard that self-same sentiment back in verse 6 – about holding firm?
And the quote from Psalm 95 in verse 15, haven’t we heard that in verses 7 & 8?
And the whole wilderness backdrop, haven’t we heard that in verse 10 already?
To some extent that is true. There is repetition here.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from being a parent, it’s that repetition is necessary.
It will always be necessary whilst they are children, if the message is to go in.
So maybe it’s not surprising that we find some repetition in God’s word – from our heavenly Father to his beloved children.
But there is more here than mere repetition; there is escalation too.
And which of our own parents didn’t employ this tactic with us? Not only repetition, but in the repetition, escalation as well…
So-as-to really drive the point home and get us to understand that they weren’t messing around when they said what they said the first time.
I think we understand these techniques.
I believe our Heavenly Father is a good father. I hope you do too. I believe he is wise. And so, if he repeats and escalates here, we shouldn’t dismiss that lightly.
That’s why we’re lingering in the chapter another week, rather than saying, ‘rinse and repeat – hello chapter 4!’
I hope you can get onboard with God’s word to us this morning, with this steady trust: that his word is good for us here at the end of chapter 3.
I want to structure the sermon with 4 ‘P’s this morning to help you track with me.
They proceed in a logical fashion, in that, they track with the passage as it unfolds.
But they also, take us from brass-tac facts to practical application, which I hope will help us all to live this out.
The four ‘P’s are these: Partake. Persevere. Peril. And Person.
The first three: Partake. Persevere. And Peril, will convey to us realitiesthat we need to know. And then Person will show us how we must respond to that wisdom.
So, our passage begins with the idea that we are sharers in Christ.
It’s a wonderful thought.
That we have a share in Christ Jesus, is surely what it means to be saved. To be a Christian.
I don’t know what your concept of Christianity is, but it is the bible’sfoundation-level idea that a person is a Christian who has been unitedto Christ in his death and resurrection, so that they have a share in himby faith.
If you’re a Christian here this morning, it is because Jesus represents you personally, before God, with all his own righteousness.
You have become a partaker in Christ Jesus. And that is yourconfidence before God.
If you didn’t have a share in Jesus, you wouldn’t have any confidencethat God would be for you at all.
In fact, we can say with bible precision: no share in Jesus means no hope of God’s favour. And conversely, a share in Jesus guaranteesGod’s favour.
And there’s no grey area in-between.
Anybody who doesn’t have God’s favour is destined for God’s fury.
That’s the nature of our human condition without Jesus.
But if you get a share in Jesus, then God’s fury is extinguished and God’s favour rests on that person forever. What a joy! What a gift!
This is the good news of the gospel. And we all need it.
The currency with which you obtain a share in Jesus, is not pounds; it’s not bitcoin; it’s faith.
Simply put: you believe that Jesus died on the cross for you personally and took the punishment for your real, and hideous, and unrelenting guilt.
God credits that faith to your account as righteousness.
Partakers in Jesus is what we are then, if we are Christians.
There is nothing in the world that can compare with the value of the share you have in Jesus if you’re a Christian. Nothing!
The value is an everlasting value.
It’s not a share whose value rises and falls with the mid-term election results for example!
Christ is alive. He’s seated at the right hand of the Father – he’s installed for evermore.
And nothing can separate a single one of his people from him. That means your share in him is secure.
All of this is absolutely true. I believe it. And you should too because it’s biblical.
None of its truth prevents this author, though, from making the statement he does in the second half of verse 14 when he says: ‘if, indeed, we hold our original conviction firmly to the end’.
We are partakers of Jesus only if we hold fast the confidence we possessed when we started out on this journey, all the way to the very end.
The one word we use to describe this truth is the word ‘Perseverance’. This is the second ‘P’.
Two observations for our consideration about this statement in verse 14:
The word ‘if’ in it implies a conditional basis for the reality that goes before it – namely our share in Jesus.
And second, the word ‘we’ implies the condition being met relies on us.
The verse does not say: ‘we have come to share in Christ, because, Christ holds us firmly to the very end’.
Though that maybe absolutely true.
It is in fact, absolutely true. I love that truth!
That is not what the verse is saying though. The verse says, ‘we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end’.
The author, under the leading of the Holy Spirit of God, is writing this verse conditionally and he is writing it dependently on Christianaction.
We can re-state it negatively like this, so it carries its full force. ‘We are not partakers in Jesus, if, we fail to hold fast our original confidence to the end’.
And we could furnish lots of other New Testament texts that speak this way, to show this is not an isolated expression.
But I’m not going to do that because I want this text to smack us between the eyes - like it’s meant to!
When we came to faith in Christ, we said that we had a confidencethat Jesus alone was our hope of finding God to be for us and not against us.
Every initial confession of that reality sounded a little different, but in principle that’s what all Christian professions have meant: ‘Jesus alone is my hope of finding God to be for me and not against me’.
What does it mean, then, if someone, two, four, ten, twenty years down the line, even on their death bed, no longer has that confidence?
Whether they express it or not!
What does it mean?
Does it mean that their original profession is the difference-maker?
Does it mean that, whether or not they continue to be confident in Jesus, matters nothing whatsoever for the outcome of this eternal relationship?
Does it mean that God is like: ‘they have no confidence in my Son whatsoever anymore, but I guess they said they did at beginning, so that’s kind of ok’?
No! It doesn’t mean that! It means they forfeit! It means they rejectGod’s Son. It means they moved their confidence elsewhere!
And the author says, anybody who does that does not have a share in Christ.
It’s not difficult to understand.
If I bought a share last month in open Ai and then the mid-terms come along and that share is tanking, and I sell it – like folks are doing right now – if it turns out, down the line, to be a really good share;
just because I had confidence in it at the beginning, doesn’t mean I’ve got that share now. I got rid of that share!
I don’t have it, because I sold it! I didn’t persevere with it. Its real value - that is really there - has proved to be of no value to me!
I think we all understand that!
But this we find so hard to accept. Why?
We thought we had something valuable. We exchanged it. Now we’ve got nothing. And we want to say, ‘I once had it’.
‘Yes, but you didn’t persevere with it’.
Christian perseverance – that unshakable confidence in Jesus for God’s favour – is necessary so that today you can say, ‘I have a share in Jesus’. And then it’s going to be necessary tomorrow, so that you can truly say, ‘Today, I have a share in Jesus’.
If you were to exchange your confidence in Jesus for confidence in something else, you could not say you have a share in Jesus.
The Holy Spirit says here, you don’t have a share!
Imagine you’re down a well and you’ve got a lifeline to get out – a ropedangling down from the top.
Somebody saw you down there and said, ‘I’ll send a rope down for you’.
Imagine you have confidence in that rope. And via that confidence - a share in freedom from this dark dank pit of a well.
And you take a hold of that rope, and you start to climb it to freedom.
But then halfway up you think, ‘this rope isn’t going to hold me, I’ve got to get off it!’ And you exchange the rope for the wall of the well and start climbing that instead – but it’s all slippery and slimy and you just slip, and you fall all the way back to the bottom.
You’ve got no share in freedom after all.
The rope of perseverance connects your confidence to your share in Jesus. So that, you can say every single day, you truly have a share in Jesus.
Get off the rope of perseverance and you can be sure, according to thisverse, there’s no connection between you and a share in Jesus.
This reality is shown to be true, by this writer, from Israel’s history.
Which is why in verse 15 he invokes Psalm 95.
Psalm 95 references and summarises what happened in the wilderness events.
The Psalmist says that the people of God back then 1/ Heard God’s voice. 2/ Hardened their hearts towards him. And 3/ In so doing, rebelled against God.
It’s like they heard the words, but they rejected what they heard.
That’s what ‘hardening their hearts’ means.
You know what it’s like when someone is telling you to do something, and you just don’t want to do it. You can set your face like a flint, can’t you?
You are just resolutely going to resist what this person is telling you.
Children do that with parents sometimes. People do it with each other.
And people are prone to do it with God too.
They think they’ll be ok, because other things – more palatable things that God also tells them, they’ll respond to those things.
‘But these ones that are less comfortable, I’ll resist at all costs’.
‘But I’ll be ok in the end, because I was open to some of what he had to say to me at least’.
That’s a way bigger problem than they realise. That’s a hardening of heart to God. It’s a rebellion against him.
The Psalmist urges all those who started out with confidence in God: ‘do not do that’.
He says, ‘Today, if you here God’s voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion’.
And it leads the writer of Hebrews to ask the obvious questions of his readers.
Who was it who, having heard God’s voice, rebelled? Verse 16.
And, who was it whose bodies fell in the wilderness? Verse 17.
And, who was it whom God swore, would never enter his rest? Verse 18.
Was it the Philistines? Was it the Amorites, or the Hittites? Was it the Egyptians or the people of Nineveh?
No, it was the Israelites.
It was those who came out of Egypt with Moses leading them through the red sea, verse 16.
It was those who sinned against God – grumbling against him and distrusting him - and he was angry with them until they died forty years later. Verse 17.
It was those who disobeyed his voice of command. Verse 18.
In short, it was God’s people – the Israelites. That’s his point!
The whole point of invoking the Israelite story is to prove to people, like you and me - who had confidence in Jesus at the beginning - that we are not immune from peril.
Christianity from the perspective of this text, is not like a vaccination – take it and forget about it.
Christianity is like an antibiotic – you’ve got to keep taking it!
Christians are besieged with assaults from every angle in this life.
There are Perils at every turn. This is the 3rd ‘P’.
But because these are spiritual attacks, we so often don’t perceive them as we should.
The heart is wicked and deceitful who can know it.
Sin is deceptive.
Satan is an angel of light.
The world is seductive and full of alternative and seemingly secureoptions.
It’s all so under the radar!
And all the time, the name of Christ carries offence and scorn.
Carrying our cross with Christ often looks weird to the world – and sometimes even offensive to family and friends.
Being a Christian in a way that listens to his voice in every aspect of what he says – not just some – is inherently uncomfortable.
Restrictions, disciplines, sufferings, temptations, offences, competing values – can all be factors which subtly are used by Satan to undermine confidence in our God who speaks into our lives about all these things; and demands confidence.
Think of the wilderness generation for a minute.
Could God have conquered all the enemies of Israel in a heartbeat, with zero help from them? He could.
Could God have given them, in the desert, melons, cucumbers, onions and leeks, instead of manna? He could.
Could God have provided water for them every step of the way in abundant glistening cool pools at every mile post? He absolutely could.
Could God have given them everything they could possibly have wanted and needed and so prevented a single grumble or a singlecraving? He could.
He did not. He tested the sincerity of their confidence. He tested the sincerity of their love. He tested the sincerity of their faith.
Look at verse 19 with me.
‘And so, we see, they were not able to enter, because of unbelief’.
Their sinning. Their rebellion. Their disobedience were the expressions of hearts that were unbelieving. And God said, they will never enter my rest because of it.
So, what is the author of Hebrews giving us this for? Except to draw a comparison between us and them and warn us: this Christian life between rescue in Jesus, and death, is a long and arduous and Perilous journey.
It is repeatedly attended with testing. And, if we do not listen to God’s voice, perilous temptations - which compete for our confidence - will overtake us.
If we are not alert, we can fall for them. We can drift into a state of resisting God’s voice.
Oh, it might start with the odd unrepented sin; the odd preference for competing pleasures; a little self-indulgence in the face of suffering. A little self-preservation when under the gun for the name of Christ.
But that’s how the drift begins.
And, if left unchecked the result can be a hardened, unbelieving heart that no longer has the confidence in Jesus it once had.
His point is: ‘they didn’t enter God’s rest – that is the promised land. Don’t think you will either – not the promised land, but the presenceof God – if you give way to the same unbelief they did’.
Trifling with sin is no small thing!
Peril is knocking at our doors!
That’s how we’ve got to see it.
I think it’s easy to think these Hebrews are in some dire straits that we’re not in.
I don’t think so.
I think they are just starting to show some signs of ducking the cost of following Christ; embracing some sinful attitudes; leaving off God’s word. They’re exactly where we could be!
And that’s why this word is in our bible. It’s designed to serve us, allthe time.
Every new day is A ‘today’.
Every ‘today’ affords us God’s voice.
There is no ‘today’ that doesn’t have God’s voice in it.
Every one of them has God speaking.
Are we hearing his voice today? And if we are, are we ever hardenedor resistant to what it’s saying?
If the answer is yes – we might have a problem, based on this reading!
Ongoing faith is that steady-state confidence in Jesus that hears God voice and every time, says, ‘precious!’ That hears and every time, says, ‘lovely’. That hears and every time, says, ‘amen’.
Those are the opposite kind of responses to those of unbelief and hard heartedness.
These three ‘P’s then are the realities of the Christian life.
We are Partakers.
Perseverance is necessary if we can truly say, ‘today, I share in Christ’.
And Perils lurk around every corner on this Christian journey.
But let me show you the practical help that THE Person brings to all this. I have in mind, of course, the person of Jesus himself.
Because the question now – after everything we’ve just seen – is: what resources can we depend on to persevere in the confidence we had at the beginning, and so have that sure expectation, every day, that we do have a share in Jesus?
Or another way of saying it is: What resources do we have at our disposal against unbelief?
Or to say it a third way: What can we look to in the face of sin’s deceitfulness; or life’s pressures; or Satan’s temptations?
And the answer comes up out of this chapter loud and clear: verse 1 – ‘Therefore holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling[same sentiment as verse 14], fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest’.
Fix your thoughts on Jesus!
Rivet your attention on the one who you want to have a share in – do that your whole life long!
The answer is not: look inwardly. The answer is not: turn to this vast reservoir of resource that is yourself. The answer is look away and look unto Jesus.
In Jesus we find the faithful Son who is even greater than Moses – remember that?
In Jesus we find the one who suffered for us and defeated death.
In Jesus we find the one who brings many sons and daughters to glory.
In Jesus we find the one who calls us, his ‘brothers and sisters’.
In Jesus we find the one who sinlessly represents us to God.
In other words, in Jesus, we find countless reasons to maintain our confidence in him and not to divert to competing confidences.
Earlier, I said the Christian faith is not like a vaccine, it’s like an antibiotic.
No one, having taken the full course of antibiotics and having got better, would say ‘I made myself better’.
But, neither would they answer ‘yes’, if someone said, ‘oh so you put the bottle of antibiotic pills in the cupboard and two weeks later you just got better’.
No! They would say, ‘the doctor said take these pills every day for two weeks and you’ll get better. I did that, and now I’m better’.
And if someone said, ‘so you did make yourself better then’. They would still say ‘no’. They’d say, ‘the antibiotics made me better’. ‘What the doctor prescribed me, made me better’.
Perseverance is like you taking your antibiotics every day.
The share in Christ that is ours when we’ve run our course, will be all of Jesus.
And we will have that share because every single day we partook of Jesus – like a sick person partakes of antibiotics.
The patient, themselves, do something in a persevering-type way, but the power lies elsewhere.
And that’s us!
When we deliberately gaze on Jesus every single day, his surpassing beauty, and worth, and merit, and blessings grip our hearts more than any competing promise that sin offers; or pleasure the world can offer; or security people can offer; or even taste melons can offer.
Like the man in the parable who sold everything he had to buy that field with the treasure in it, we will be increasingly convinced that nothing in this world is worth having at the expense of Jesus.
This is why the warnings are means of grace.
The warnings expose the dangers which are really there.
But instead of leaving us all anxious looking at ourselves to find the answers, they exhort us back to Jesus as THE only answer for our ever-wandering unbelieving hearts.
This is not new stuff. The puritans thought this way and they were so on it when it came to the bible.
John Owen in his exposition of Hebrews 12 says: ‘Nor shall we endure any longer than the eye of our faith is fixed on him’.
Not just at the beginning. But as long as it is called ‘today’ the Psalmist says - let our eyes be fixed on him today!
It’s good to know that this isn’t a lonely task.
Why is that good to know? Well because if sin is so deceitful, there’s a good chance we might not spot it in ourselves.
Verse 12 - we had it last time: ‘See to it brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart [the very thing he has been exhorting us to this morning] that turns away from the living God. But[verse 13] encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today”, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness’.
And the question is: what should we encourage one another daily in? The answer is: the beauties and the excellencies of Jesus.
I think it’s a pretty good measure of how benign we really think the perils of the Christian journey are –
or maybe how dispensable perseverance is for our share in Christ – the fact that we do so little of this for each other.
Brothers and sisters, the perils are real! The perseverance is necessary.
And we all, therefore, have a role to play in directing one another to the excellencies of Jesus.
How often?
‘Every day’, he says.
Today we have to hear the voice of God and not harden our hearts – therefore today we need our eyes directed to Jesus.
If you see me drifting into sin, or hardening my heart against God’s voice, or getting besotted with some pleasure of the world, I want you to love me enough to come and confront me with it and show me Jesus again.
No amount of Britishness could convince me otherwise.
I need you all for my journey. And I know, you need me for yours.
Let’s encourage one another, then, as long as it is called today, to look to the person of Jesus. That will be perseverance for us in the midst of countless perils. And ultimately, for the partaking of our share in Jesus!
