Last week we had looked at verses 23 and 24, but they are only part of the sentence. Today we are going to focus on the next verse (25) and examine what it means for us today just as it did during the time the Book of Hebrews was written. Looking briefly at verses 23 and 24, we see that believers in Jesus Christ should hold on tight to the object of their faith, Jesus Christ. Why? Because He is faithful toward believers. Yes, He is faithful toward believers – He reaches out to the lost, those that have not trusted in Jesus Christ for salvation and He shows them great mercy – but they are not under Jesus Christ’s grace. Jesus Christ always keeps His promises and He will save those that have truly come to Him – holding nothing back in repentance – and will save them to the uttermost.

People must turn to Him and trust in Him and repent of their sins – looking to the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the payment for their sins.

D.L. Moody wrote: Professor Drummond once described a man going into one of our after meetings and saying he wanted to become a Christian.

“Well, my friend, what is the trouble?” He doesn’t like to tell. He is greatly agitated. Finally he says, “The fact is, I have overdrawn my account” — a polite way of saying he has been stealing.

“Did you take your employer’s money?” “Yes.” “How much?” “I don’t know. I have never kept account of it.” “Well, you have an idea you stole $1,500 last year?” “I am afraid it is that much.”

“Now, look here, sir, I don’t believe in sudden work; don’t steal more that a thousand dollars this next year, and the next year not more that five hundred, and in the course of the next few years you will get so that you won’t steal any. If your employer catches you, tell him you are being converted; and you will get so that you won’t steal any by and by.”

My friends, the thing is a perfect farce! “Let him that stole, steal no more,” that is what the Bible says. It is right about face. Take another illustration. Here comes a man, and he admits that he gets drunk every week. That man comes to a meeting, and wants to be converted. Shall I say, “Don’t you be in a hurry. I believe in doing the work gradually. Don’t you get drunk and knock your wife down more than once a month?” Wouldn’t it be refreshing to his wife to go a whole month without being knocked down? Once a month, only twelve times in a year! Wouldn’t she be glad to have him converted in this new way! Only get drunk after a few years on the anniversary of your wedding, and at Christmas, and then it will be effective because it is gradual!

Oh! I detest all that kind of teaching. Let us go to the Bible and see what that old Book teaches. Let us believe it, and go and act as if we believed it, too. Salvation is instantaneous. I admit that a man may be converted so that he cannot tell when he crossed the line between death and life, but I also believe a man may be a thief one moment and a saint the next. I believe a man may be as vile as hell itself one moment, and be saved the next. Christian growth is gradual, just as physical growth is; but a man passes from death unto everlasting life quick as an act of the will — “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life.”

Think this phrase in your head: “God does not care if I sin a little.” That does not sound right, does it? What did Jesus Christ tell the woman caught in adultery? “Go and sin just a little.”? No! He said, “Go, and sin no more.”

Hebrews 10:23, 24 are blessings to the believer and encouragement to the believer. Because believers can trust in Jesus Christ — because He is faithful – then we should exhort one another in love and encourage good works to be done by each other. Note again, the good works mentioned in verse 24 comes AFTER the faith in Jesus Christ. Good works are the product of faith.

Hebrews 10:23-25 Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) (24) And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: (25) Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.

How can verses 23 and 24 happen if believers are not gathering together in order to exhort one another? And what better place to come together than at church where believers should praise God and worship God and read from His Word and hear His Word preached?

Romans 10:13-17 For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. (14) How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? (15) And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! (16) But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah saith, Lord, who hath believed our report? (17) So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

We all need to hear the Word of God preached! Thus, we all need to come together and worship God together and hear His Word preached together! I imagine that all of us have been to some sort of sporting event in our lifetime. As you watch the game you get caught up in the action and the players will feel the energy coming from the crowd and it is something everybody is doing together. The crowd cheers and boos and does the wave and applauds and so forth. But can you imagine what the game would be like if there were nobody in the stands. Can you imagine the Carrier Dome being empty except for the two teams playing basketball? How much different an event that becomes. We need to be here and the more there are that are of a Godly mindset, the better. Hebrews 10:25 is for the believer and about the believer. Now the lost person needs to come to church too, because they need to hear the Word of God rightly divided, but this verse is for the believer, encouraging them to praise God and edify each other.

Believers need to spend time together and lost people should be among them to see the difference Jesus Christ makes in their lives. Is going to a football game the same as watching it on TV alone? Is going to a NASCAR race the same as watching it on TV alone? No, to both of those. We need to gather together as part of the body of Jesus Christ to help each other and to encourage each other and , yes, sometimes rebuke each other.

Hebrews 10:25 Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.

Sunday mornings are special times because that is when we gather together here at God’s house. We should look forward to being together and look forward to spend time together with God. Can a person be a Christian without joining the church? Yes, but it is like a soldier without an army; a student who will not attend school, a salesman without a customer, a sailor without a ship, a bee without a hive, an author without a reader, or a baseball player without a team. These situations might exist, but they would not be very satisfactory. And a lost person should come to church as well – how else are they going to get to know God if they do not spend time with His people? For example, none of you have met Dr. Crowley, but each of you know at least a little something about him. Why? Because I have talked about him. We have him and his wife on our prayer list. I have quoted him. The same is true for a lost person and God. The lost person does not personally know God, but they can know more about Him by hearing about Him through His people. Statistically, being in church is one of the safest places to be.

1. Do not ride in an automobile (or get in the way of one), as automobiles cause 20 percent of all fatal accidents.

2. Do not stay at home; that’s where 17 percent of all accidents occur. 

3. Do not walk across the street; pedestrians are victims of 14 percent of all accidents.

4. Do not travel by air, rail or water; 16 percent of all accidents are the result of these activities.

5. Only .001 percent of all fatal accidents occur at church and almost none of these during worship and Sunday School.

Obviously, the safest place to be is in worship and Bible Study with your family and fellow Christians.

God wants His people to gather together to worship Him and hear His Word. Jeremiah 7:2 Stand in the gate of the LORD’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the LORD, all ye of Judah, that enter in at these gates to worship the LORD. Psalm 5:7 But as for me, I will come into thy house in the multitude of thy mercy: and in thy fear will I worship toward thy holy temple. Believers should need to come to God’s house to sing songs of praise and hear His Word preached. The result is Psalm 138:3. Psalm 138:2 I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.

Hebrews 10:25 Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.

Note the last phrase: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching. What does this mean? What day is approaching? Again, this book was written to believers in Jesus Christ who were also Hebrews. They were meeting daily at the Temple (Acts 2:46 And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple,). They were at the Temple for the Day of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Peter and John were going to the Temple when they met and healed the lame man at the gate. But there was coming a day when the Temple was going to be destroyed. Jesus Christ had prophesied that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. So the writer to the Hebrews was telling these believers to continue to assemble together after the Temple was destroyed. The believers were not to forsake each other in the difficult times. I think those times are coming in America. There may be a day coming when it will be against the law to have churches. At this point, the school board in New York City is moving forward to evict churches from school property, but the New York City Housing Authority has backed off and will continue to allow churches to meet in city-owned community centers. If our meeting place is outlawed, then we will find another meeting place. Why? Because believers are not to forsake the assembling together to worship God and hear His Word.

An Israeli news article in 2007 by Paul E. Marek, brings current events into sharp focus. He remembers a wealthy German who survived World War II describing the situation that led up to Hitler. He said very few of the German common people were actually Nazis. They were quietly going about their lives, considering Hitler’s crowd just “a bunch of fools.” “So,” he said, “The majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”

Marek goes on to describe how we are told that Islam is a peaceful religion. He says that the “peaceful” Muslims are irrelevant: “The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or execute honor killings. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard, quantifiable fact is that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority,” and it is cowed and extraneous.”

Besides Hitler, the “peaceful majority” slept while the communists took control of Russia and China. Marek further reminds us of history. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us, watching it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Soul winners, we cannot be part of that “silent majority.” Too many Christians are like the German common people: going about their lives oblivious of the gathering storm. Americans have been given a freedom to witness that is rare in history. Most Christians over the centuries, have had to hide their faith, or risk imprisonment or death to share it. Today, more than half the world is basically hostile to the gospel. Some have estimated that over 50,000 Christians are martyred every year.

The burning question is: what are we doing with the precious freedom that we have? History tells us that that freedom was bought with blood and lost fortunes. Many Christian leaders are beginning to question how much longer we will have that freedom. Only God knows but His commission still stands to go and make disciples.

Sharing our faith with another person is our top priority as believers. But Satan has us moving so fast that it is difficult to stop long enough to personally share the gospel. But it only takes a second to hand someone a gospel tract or plant it where it will be noticed. We must share the gospel with anyone who will listen, and not forget to put a copy of the good news in their hands if they are too busy to listen.

Rob Bell’s latest book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians (Zondervan, with Don Golden), is his most substantive yet. It’s nothing less than a holistic, biblical theology of salvation—written, paradoxically, in Bell’s typical sentence-fragment style. CT senior managing editor Mark Galli sat down with Bell, founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to probe him on some of the more striking statements in his book.

You say that “something has gone terribly wrong with humanity.” What do you mean?

I was born in 1970, a child of the Enlightenment. We put someone on the moon. We’ll figure out cancer soon enough. Look what we can do. And yet more people than ever have died in the last 100 years from bombs. So, we have been taught, give Steve Jobs enough time, and he’ll come up with something.

At the same time, Rwanda, 1994—we didn’t step in there. Then Darfur—didn’t we learn? So we have this profound sense of empowerment coupled with a profound sense of disempowerment, and I think you have a lot of people with a profound sense of angst.

Note the mentions of Rwanda and Darfur. In both cases, America was sending food and medical supplies, but there were major problems with the dictatorships there. My impression here is that Rob Bell would have liked to have seen the U.S. step in with our military. I agree that we should have.

As for his last sentence, that it really mean anything? If anything, this country has a profound sense of apathy toward anything that it is not interested in. People came out of the social experiment of the Sixties and discovered that sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll did not solve anything. Because they had already turned away from God and did not turn back, Americans have become apathetic to anything that does not affect their personal comfort.

Are you a pacifist, or do you think that a truly Christian church has to be a pacifist church?

My dad is a U.S. Federal District Judge and gets lots of death threats. On Father’s Day a couple of years ago, there were bodyguards in the driveway at our house. And I am okay with that. But I sit right in that tension. Sometimes people say no police, no armed forces, no anything. And the truth is, whether I am falling short of Jesus’ teaching or not, there are situations where I am really glad that there is a policeman standing right there and that he has a gun. So I don’t know how exactly you work that out in detail.

But my hope would be that as a Christian, you would have a larger imagination. Take Saddam Hussein. Your first impulse would be, “Man, if he wasn’t in power, it would be great—and the only way is to bring in a hundred thousand troops.” To me, the third way of Jesus is always asking if there is an imaginative, subversive, brilliant, creative path.

Here it would appear that Rob Bell would have rather that we did not step in with our military in Iraq. The dictatorship of Hussein was just as evil and potentially more destructive to the world. Why didn’t Rob Bell want the “the third way of Jesus Christ” to be used in Rwanda and Darfur? “Blessed are the peacemakers” sometimes means that the peacemaker has to carry a gun as Rob Bell showed us while talking about the threats to his father.

To be continued.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/april/26.34.html

“The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

“The reason that Christianity is the best friend of Government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.” – PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON

“The Bible is the Rock on which this Republic rests.” – PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON

“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” – PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON (on September 17th, 1796)

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said in 1824: No free government now exists in the world, unless where Christianity is acknowledged, and is the religion of the country.

An 1853 House Judiciary Committee conducted a one-year long inquiry when a group petitioned the government to remove Christianity from our government institutions. On March 27, 1854, that Committee brought the following conclusion:

“Had the people, during the revolution, a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that revolution would have been strangled in its cradle… At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and its amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, but not any one sect… In this age, there is no substitute for Christianity… That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.”

Two months later, The House Committee added these words to their previous ones: “The great, vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and the divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Now can you picture the leaders of our government today making those same types of statements? Can you picture Nancy Pelosi or President Obama saying these same words? Four times in his speech in Cairo, Egypt, President Obama referred to the Koran as being “holy.” Would a true believer in Jesus Christ (as President Obama claims) make that kind of statement about a book that denies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? No! People work very hard to draw comparisons between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. Listen to what Abraham Lincoln said about the Bible:

“I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man. All the good from the Savior (Jesus) of the world is communicated to us through this book.” – PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is fond of quoting from the Old Testament when she is speaking about environmental concerns. She has quoted the same verse at least six times since 2005. In April 2009 Nancy Pelosi said: “The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’” I do not know what book she is quoting from, but it is not the Bible.

America needs to get back to God and we need to do it today! This country needs to get back to blessing God and not expecting God to bless us! Why should He bless the United States when the United States refuses to have anything to do with Him? America needs to fall on its collective knees and cry out to God and repent!