On to Maturity, Part 7

Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. If you are merely associated with Christ, you'll be frustrated and fall away from Him. You must surrender to Christ to move on to complete faith in Him.

Investigation is not enough. God calls us to immerse ourselves fully. Today's text from Hebrews 6, 1-8 challenges us to go beyond dabbling in Christianity, just barely dipping our toes in, and instead to dive in, making a full surrender to Jesus. He says what you need to do is you need to move from investigation to immersion.

Don't just be investigating the faith, immerse yourself in the faith. You ever go to the beach or a lake or something like that? And what happens? Inevitably, this is what happens. There's the water, here's the sand, and there's the water, and you get up close to the edge of the water and what do you do?

Right? He's like, I'm not sure I want to get in there, right? And so you're dabbling in the water. You're putting your toes in the water.

You might walk in there up to your knee caps or something like that, but you don't really want to go any farther. You're just dabbling in the water. And what some of the Jews had done, they were dabbling in the faith of Christianity. And then they said, you know what? I'm walking away from that.

I'm going to stay up here on the beach where it's warm and sunny and where I'm comfortable because that's what I'm used to. I'm not going to commit myself to the water. They were dabbling in the faith of Christianity.

They were close to it, experiencing some of it, but they never entrusted themselves to it. And the author of Hebrews here is saying, all right, get off the beach, dive into the water. That's what he's saying. All right? That's the Rich Powell translation.

All right? So if you abandon, abandon the foreshadows, you will abound because that's what he says. Let us go on to perfection. That is complete faith in Christ, where you are completely entrusting yourself to Him in faith. So when you abandon, you will abound with abandon.

When I say with abandon, that you abound with abandon, that is without inhibition or restraint. Very something very interesting that he says here in verse three, and this we will do if God permits. And this we will do if God permits.

Wait a minute. Doesn't God want us to move on to complete faith in Christ? I mean, that is His invitation, right? Move on to complete faith in Christ. Are you telling me God doesn't want everybody to move on to complete faith in Christ? I think it's very interesting how He writes this, this we will do if God permits. To illustrate what he is talking about here and why He uses this term, I want to use a couple of verses from Deuteronomy, okay? He says in Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 4, the Lord God has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear. Now, this is the people of Israel. This is Moses speaking to the people of Israel, all right?

And he's telling them, this is the new generation. Your parents have died off in the wilderness because of their unbelief. They're not going to get to go into the promised land entrusting God. So you are going into the promised land, but Moses says to them, to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear. So God gives that to them? Why would He say that?

Why does He use that terminology? Now I want you to consider this next verse. This is Deuteronomy 24 9. I want you to consider Deuteronomy 4 29. I love it when God does that, you know?

It makes it really easy to remember, okay? Deuteronomy 29 4 and Deuteronomy 4 29. But from there, now this is Moses again talking to the people of Israel and he is foretelling them that one day they're going to be off in a foreign land. And in that context he tells them this, but from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find Him if you search after Him with all your heart and with all your soul.

Isn't that a profound statement? You will seek the Lord your God and you will find Him if you search after Him with all your heart and with all your soul, which is why he says in verse 3, this we will do if God permits. God wants us to move on to complete faith in Christ if God permits.

And why would He permit? Because we seek Him with all our heart and with all our soul. Here's the Rich Pao translation. You ready for this? If you seek God half-heartedly, He's not interested in letting you find Him.

You say, Rich, that's kind of rough. You can't come to God on your own terms. You come to God on His terms. You don't set the parameters when you come to Christ.

You either come to Him or you do not. And if you seek God half-heartedly, He's not interested in letting you find Him, which is why the writer of Hebrews says this we will do if God permits. In other words, he's saying, are you ready to entrust yourself completely to Jesus Christ? If you were to look in John chapter 2 verses 23 to 25, John gives us the record of Jesus was being followed by many people and many people called themselves as disciples.

People were ready to make Him king even then, right? But it says these people believed in Him and then it says something very, very interesting. It says in verse 24 that Jesus did not commit.

The word there is pistis. Okay, it's the word that's normally translated faith. He did not commit some translations saying Jesus did not entrust Himself to them.

Why? Because He knew the hearts of all men. In other words, these people were coming to Jesus. Many of them were coming to Jesus because they were coming for what they could get out of Him. They were coming, they were dabbling in this Jesus Christian faith thing. They were not ready to entrust themselves to Him in faith. They were just coming to Him because of what He could do for them.

See, they were coming to Him half-heartedly. And if you seek God half-heartedly, He's not interested in letting you find Him. Hebrews 11 chapter 6, God is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Isn't that a wonderful verse? But you see, what an incredible promise it is. God is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. That's why we need to abandon, we need to abound with abandon.

What's causing you inhibition? What's restraining you back from committing yourself entirely to Jesus Christ in faith? And we come then to verses 4 through 6. 3 is some of the most controversial verses in all of Scripture. And I'm going to give to you my understanding of it from my studies of it. I've read so many commentaries, lexicons, dictionaries, right straight out of the Greek language and everything. And I'm going to provide for you my understanding of it.

And glad to dialogue it, okay? But I think there's a very important point that the author of Hebrews is making here. And it's just as important for us today as it was back for the Hebrews in the first century, probably written somewhere between somewhere around 65 A.D., okay? Because many of them were gabbling in the faith and decided, you know what? That's not for me.

I'm going to walk away from it. They are not ready to commit themselves to Jesus Christ. So the author of Hebrews says this, if you abandon Christ, he says, if they fall away. That's the term that he uses in verse 6, if they fall away.

Now he's describing a people. This is for those who are considering options other than Christ, considering options for their faith, their religion, their eternal whatever, you know, whatever their perception of eternity is or whatever their need of religion is. They're considering options other than Jesus Christ because that's the theme of the whole letter of Hebrews, the supremacy of Jesus Christ and the futility, the vacancy of any system that marginalizes or ignores the complete work of Jesus Christ. That's why he says this.

Now, look at something with me here. Verse 4, it is impossible, for it is impossible. Now what you need to do is you need to draw a line from the word impossible. If you have the New King James or the NIV or ESV, draw a line from impossible down to verse 6 to renew because those two words are connected together. It is impossible to renew.

It is impossible to renew. Everything in there is a descriptor. All right, he's describing a group of people, it's Hebrews, that have become frustrated because this following Christ thing apparently is hard because you have to trust Christ. It's not just following rules anymore, you actually have to trust Christ. But not only that, there's a lot of people that are unhappy with me because I'm now trusting Christ. I'm ostensibly following Christ and there's people that just aren't happy with me about that. So I'm just, you know, I'm going to walk away from that.

I'd rather be someplace where I'm safe and comfortable in my own old religion. And so because of their frustration, then they abandon Christ and the Christian faith and they're kind of getting off the bus. You know, they don't have it so much here in America. You've got people, you have to get on a bus, you have to sit down on a seat and stuff like that. I grew up in a country where, you know what, if there's a bus available, if there is a fender you can stand on, you're on the bus, okay? I mean, you've seen that. You've seen pictures of that.

It's in different places, the eastern part of the world and stuff like that. And I grew up being used to that kind of thing, you know? You just hang on for the ride. In fact, when I was a kid and that lived in a little mountain town called Autancas, there would be these big trucks that would come through the town and go down the bumpy road through the middle of town like that. And they were having to go fairly slow, you know, and just as a matter of pleasure and entertainment, some of my friends and I would run behind the truck and grab onto the bar at the back of the truck, lift our legs up and there we're going for a ride on the truck. You know, were we going in the same direction of the truck?

Yeah. Were we technically on the truck? Well, yeah, in a matter of speaking, but were we going to the same destination as the truck? No, we weren't because after a while we got off before mom and dad saw us, right? So we were going in the same direction of the truck, but we were not headed to the same destination.

We were just on for a temporary ride. So there were those then who had become frustrated with Christianity and then abandoned it. They got off the bus and they went back to trusting the rituals and the morality, all those things that were pointing to Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. And here's the important thing, all those things that are good things, they were morality and they were rituals, they pointed to Jesus Christ.

But listen to this, there's a big difference here. They point to Christ, but they are not Christ. Christians, church people, listen to me. If you're counting on things that you do for God, let me be very clear, those things point to Christ, but they are not Christ. You cannot count on them for your faith.

Christ alone is the worthy and adequate object of faith, not the things that we do. So he is describing these people then. Here now in verses four through six, particularly verses four and five, the writer of Hebrews is describing people who are dabbling in the faith.

They got their toes in the water, but they're ready to walk away from it, okay? He's describing, this is what they look like, they're enlightened, okay? Those who were once enlightened, that just simply means that they became informed. Now all of these words are aorist participles.

That means they are antecedents to the main verb of the paragraph. The main verb of the sentence is to renew. We're so glad you've joined us for Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, Pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston Salem. You can hear this message and others anytime by visiting our website, www.delightingrace.com. You can also check out Pastor Rich's book, Seven Words That Can Change Your Life, where he unpacks from God's Word the very purpose for which you were designed. Seven Words That Can Change Your Life is available wherever books are sold. As always, tune in to Delight in Grace, weekdays at 10 a.m.