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October, 2021 (Vol.55-No.10) |
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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on November 8, 1987 Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. Hebrews 2:1 IN THESE LAST SEVERAL MESSAGES, we have been reminding ourselves of the privilege of God’s call. When we begin to understand the demands of God’s call, we might be tempted to think, “I wish I’d never been called!” I am reminded of a man who often said, “I wish I were dead,” One night, he was so ill that death became a real possibility, and he decided that staying alive didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all. Likewise, being one of the called is not a bad position to be in, especially when you consider the alternative. If you are not called, that means God doesn’t want you. Not being called might be a pleasant experience, but only if you could be certain that the worst that would happen to you when you die is that you would simply cease to exist. There have been many times in my life when the thought of heaven did not motivate me very much. And if the alternative to heaven was simply ceasing to exist, then as far as I was concerned, considering the price tag attached to heaven, God can have it for Himself. I grew up in the church and remember hearing people rave about how there would be golden streets outside their mansions in heaven. But even as a boy, I knew enough about supply and demand to know that if there is that much gold in heaven, it probably isn’t worth much. I also remember being told there would be neither male nor female, which didn’t sit very well with me. The way that most people defined God, I wasn’t very anxious to see Him. The traditional church has subjected us to a number of false ideas about heaven. People entertain silly notions about angels playing harps. Frankly, I like rock ‘n’ roll music better than harps. It is not that I don’t like harp music; it is nice to eat by. But when I consider the responsibility and problems that go along with God’s calling, heaven just doesn’t sound very appealing to me. There have been many times when I would have been willing to forgo heaven. I have thought, “Take this leash of God’s calling off of my neck!” If I could only be sure that there is nothing more after I gasp my last breath on this earth, then set me free. But there is the problem. You see, my faith begins with the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection verified Jesus’ authority over my life and made me listen to Him. At one time, I had rejected the Christian faith, but I could never get around the matter of the Resurrection. If an ordinary man came along making claims about himself like Jesus made about Himself, I would think that he ought to be committed to a mental institution. But if he died and rose again the third day, as he claimed he would, and ascended into heaven, I would have to take another look at him! Jesus not only rose from the dead, He timed His own death to occur in the particular year on the lunar calendar when Passover fell on a Wednesday in order that He might be in the grave 72 hours and rise on a Saturday evening. He rose at the beginning of the first day of the week when the Firstfruits festival began, exactly 49 days before the day of Pentecost. Jesus’ death and Resurrection were perfectly timed to fulfill the Old Testament feast days. Again, if any man came along who could do all of those things, I would have to pay close attention to that individual. I am not impressed by any preacher, bishop, or pope on this earth. Only Jesus gets my attention, which is why I cling to Him. His Resurrection makes me listen to what He has to say, and what He has to say includes His teaching about hell. In this modern age, we don’t like to talk about hell. We like a God we can approve of; and at first glance, no one is prone to approve of a God who would send people to hell. I don’t preach on the subject of hell very often; it frightens me too much. Just when I have decided I have had enough of God’s calling, I remember that He might have something to say about the matter too. I can deceive myself into thinking that I can do without God, and I can sound very heroic in my decision to tell God, “I’m giving up heaven, and that’s okay with me!” But He might thunder back, “That’s not the only choice: there is another place where you can spend eternity!” When Jesus speaks of heaven and hell, He employs the same word to describe both places: eternal. If there is an eternal heaven, there is also an eternal hell. Why would there be such a place? With our sinful natural minds, we wonder, “Why does God mess up everything He creates?” Most people are willing to consider the possibility of hell, but they also have a foolish hope. They think, “I hope I die in a plane crash so I can repent on the way down. I’ll find a way to quickly say, ‘Forgive me, Lord’ before the plane hits the ground!” People abuse the teaching of God’s grace and think that they can make things right with Him at the last minute. They think, “The option is mine. As long as I am able to say, ‘Forgive me, Lord,’ He will be merciful to me as I slide in through heaven’s gate. Hell is for someone else, because God knows I don’t want to go there.” No one wants to go to hell if they have any sense. Do you know anyone who can honestly say, “I want to go to hell?” And all of us who entertain the slightest thought that hell might possibly exist and be someone’s destiny carry the hope that we will squeak by and miss it. Whatever hell is, it is horrible. The New Testament uses three different Greek words to describe hell, and all of them describe an awful place. It is an eternal existence, and the worst part of hell is that you would be there with Satan where he can work his evil designs on you. No one wants to go there. I have not emphasized hell much because I was not sure we were ready to learn about it, but this message builds on a lesson we already know: the parable of the sower. There are many passages in the Bible that teach about God’s calling and what theologians call “prevenient grace.” Prevenient grace means the initiative starts with God. Even though faith is the catalyst or trigger that releases God’s Spirit to do His saving work, even the capacity to faithe is God’s gift and the fruit of his call. If you have the capacity to respond, you can be very grateful that you were in God’s mind before the worlds were formed. Only the called go to heaven. Some Christians might say, “I thought that ‘whosoever will’ may come to God.” That is correct, except God determines who the “willers” are. Those who are not called have one destiny, and it is not annihilation. It is not simply ceasing to exist. It is not just empty blackness in which one’s consciousness disappears. Jesus the Christ, the Authority for Christianity, assigns the same eternal duration to each individual in each place. And God’s word says, “I put before you two ways.” There are only two. This is the kind of message that makes some people wish they had not come to church today. Someone might be thinking “I take back what I thought earlier: God’s calling looks better all the time!” It doesn’t pay to trifle with the call of God. I don’t have much regard for most of organized religion, and I sure don’t think much of institutionalized, traditional Christianity; but I have come to think very highly of the call of God. I was being honest when I said I am not yet spiritual enough to get very excited about heaven, but I wish I were. The apostle Paul was excited about heaven, but he had been there. That gave him an unfair advantage. He did not know whether he was in the body or out of the body, but he told of an experience of being caught up to the third heaven. I have not even been to the first heaven, and it is difficult for an earthbound, earthy person to get excited about it. Not only did Paul’s experience give him an unfair advantage, he treated the subject unfairly because he said that it was not lawful for him to speak of it. So why did he bring it up? John the Revelator was also called up to heaven and he described it in a strange way. He saw unusual-looking creatures flying around saying, “Holy, holy, holy.” I wish I could be more spiritual, but that doesn’t excite me at all. Some of the angels he described terrify me. I confess that I am still more afraid of hell than I am excited about heaven. You might ask, “Are you going to give some details about hell?” No, I am afraid of hell without knowing the details about it, and I am not very excited about heaven with the details I know. What does that make me? Smart. You would have to be a fool not to be afraid of hell. Whenever I preach about the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, I talk about the clams He made about Himself. Jesus made claims about Himself that were made by no other founder of a major religion. These unique claims are indigenous to and inseparable from His sayings, regardless of the source that you use for the sayings of Christ. The same is true about Jesus’ teaching on heaven and hell: regardless of your source, Jesus will be found teaching about an eternal hell for those who are not His called ones. It is an eternal hell where one will live for eon after eon after eon. There are some denominations that hold the doctrine that God will save everyone, including the devil. People who believe such things take a few isolated verses of Scripture out of context and then build their whole theology upon them. They quote from Colossians where Paul said that God by Christ will “reconcile all things unto himself,” and they use that verse to prove that God will one day restore all things, including Satan. I cannot believe that doctrine because there are many other verses in the Bible that disprove it. But even if that very weak concept were true, I still would want to avoid hell. The time between when someone arrives in hell and the time when God ultimately restores Satan would still be too long for me to want to have any part of it. I taught in the last several messages that God does the calling, that the gifts and calling of God are without recall, and whom the Lord calls, He enables. In the parable of the sower, the sower sows the seed, but only one-fourth of the soil of this world is good. Three-fourths of the soil will not respond to God’s word. Jesus taught in parables because He did not want some to be converted. If you have been pricked in your heart with a desire to respond to God’s word with faith, as God’s word defines faith, then you are the luckiest person in this world. If you have not had that response or if you are not maintaining that response, it might mean you are not one of the called and hell is your destiny. If you have responded, now how do you feel about God’s call? Hebrews 2:1 says, “Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.” Here is a paradoxical reality: God does the calling, but the witness of His calling is the capacity to faithe, which is to grab hold of God’s word and hang your body on it. That is the lesson of the parable of the sower. Some seed fell on the wayside but did not penetrate the ground. Some seed fell on rocky soil where there was not much earth; therefore the seed did not take root. And some seed fell upon thorny ground, where it was crowded out by the cares of this world, including riches. It is significant that out of the various cares of this world, Jesus felt it necessary to specify the deceitfulness of riches. The more money you get, the greater the danger. Riches will not do a thing for you in eternity. That is why in Deuteronomy 8, when the children of Israel were about to enter into the Promised Land, God told them, “Thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth.” In my opinion, the most tragic of the rejected grounds in the parable of the sower is the thorny ground. The seed that fell by the wayside did not even penetrate the ground. The seed that fell on rocky soil penetrated and blossomed but did not take root. But the seed that fell on thorny ground actually took root. That means there was a response to the word, but the cares of this world crowded it out, and specifically singled out was the deceitfulness of riches. There are many shipwrecks on the sea of faith. Some people started out putting God first: they started tithing and responding to God when they did not have much. But when blessings came, the deceitfulness of riches crowded out the word. That is why tithing must be consistently maintained. Riches will deceive you into not recognizing that it is the Lord who gives you the capacity to get wealth. The regular pattern of tithing keeps your focus on your relationship with God, but the cares of this world can crowd out the word if you let them. God lays a responsibility on us. You might mistakenly think that you have no say in the matter: that you are either called or you are not. But the witness that you are one of the called is the capacity to take a grip on God’s word of promise and not let go. It is the capacity to act on God’s word in defiance of every circumstance that contradicts His word. Now look back on the last seven days. Was your life routine? Did you allow yourself to be deceived into focusing only on your problems and on the things of time? Or did this past week give occasion for you to reach up through the stuff of time and say, “Lord, I am claiming Your promises?” That is why God said to the Israelites, “Thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness . . . that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.” The New Testament says we ought to examine ourselves. We are not to examine ourselves to determine whether we are measuring up to some traditional preacher’s cookie-cutter behavioral pattern but to see whether or not we are in the faith. The word of God concerning the tithe falls on a “wayside” person: they hear God’s word and they say, “Oh, maybe when I make a little more money, I’ll start tithing.” The word does not penetrate the soil and is gone. The word lands on a “stony ground” person and they eagerly respond; but when a little heat comes, the flower of the word dies. I speak now to the third group: Have you let the cares of this world remove you from faithing? You might say, “Well, if I’m honest, I must admit that describes me. Does that mean I’m doomed?” It depends on how you respond to the word today. This is one of those truths from God’s word that is hard to explain but easy to understand. It is like trying to define love. Can anyone define love? Someone said to me, “I don’t know if I should get married, because I’m not sure I’m in love.” I said, “Don’t get married; you are not in love!” You don’t have to define love to know that you are in love. You know today. There is hope for you if the word of God can still frighten you, even a little. But if the word just passes you by and you think, “Aw, this is just another sermon,” you should be worried. If you still have a little responsive chord, God is not done with you yet because Jesus said, “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” The Caller starts the process, but being called does not remove the need for effort, which is faith. Why would Jesus describe some soil as rocky, shallow ground where something springs up at first but is not able to survive the heat? Or why would He describe some soil as thorny ground where the word takes root but other things crowd it out? Paul wrote in Philippians 2:12, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” The Greek words translated “fear” and “trembling” are phobos and tromos, which are the source of our English words “phobias” and “traumas.” I hope to traumatize you with a phobia about hell because if you are not one of the called, you will not make it into heaven anyway. You are not one of the called if you don’t have the ability to respond with faith. Again, Hebrews 2:1 says, “Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed . . .” The Greek word translated “heed” involved making an effort. Paul often made analogies to training for a sporting event, and I will do the same. No one ever became a great basketball player without some effort. No one ever became a great football player without some effort. In the sporting world, effort alone will not enable you to achieve greatness; you must also have talent. By analogy, effort alone will not enable you to succeed with God; you must be one of the called. If the teaching on God’s calling only makes you miserable, you will never realize, demonstrate, or fulfill your calling. Indeed, you are not one of the called if you are not capable of putting forth the effort of faith. Faith is an action, based upon belief, and sustained by confidence that when God has promised to do something, He will do it. We are a people who find the promises of God in His book and we activate them by faith. You might say, “I’m tired of faithing! I haven’t seen enough results.” Then quit and take the alternative. You need to be reminded of the fundamental purpose of faith. Satan, if he can’t stop you from faithing, will try to convince you to act in faith in order to get results down here on earth. No, you must faithe in order to prove up your calling, which establishes your contact with God, who places you in Christ, seated in heavenly places. The Holy Spirit is placed in you as the earnest of your inheritance to come. His life in you is saving you and will get you into heaven. We might be tempted to ask, “Why can’t I ever graduate from the life of faith?” I have been tempted to ask God that question many times. It would be easier if we could reach some plateau of achievement and then make the new Christians carry the burden. Most traditional churches have their own method of salvation, but it is not God’s way. There are churches that teach “eternal security.” Everyone comes every Sunday hoping that some poor soul will drift in, because the sermon is always directed toward the “sinner.” The church members think that they have already “arrived” and they put all their psychological pressure into getting that one poor soul to come up to the altar and repeat a prayer. And once he repeats the prayer, he can stand alongside the rest of those who think they have arrived and hunt for a new convert. The charismatic churches have their own version of a goal to attain: the new converts must be filled with the Holy Ghost through some kind of felt experience. And once the new convert has had that experience, he can sit down and watch others be worked on until they also receive it. At almost any church in town, there is a point where you can sit down and say, “Finally, the congregation is no longer focused on me. We can work on someone else!” The truth is that we are no closer today to having arrived than when we first started, and we will not be any closer next year than we are this year. Isn’t that awful? Well, why don’t we quit? Because quitting means hell! Again, you might ask, “Can’t I ever graduate and be let out of the pressure cooker?” The answer is no! We might not be any closer to having arrived, but we rejoice in tribulation knowing that tribulation produces endurance, endurance produces triedness, and triedness produces hope that we will one day be glorified. If we understand Paul’s words in Romans 5, the good news is that we could never have made it this far if we were not “endurers.” At some point, the constant enduring produces the realization that we are “tried ones,” and triedness gives us hope. Will triedness ever give us certainty? Not completely, but it does give us hope, which is why this message ought to excite you. If you are just starting on your Christian journey, the good news is that whom the Lord calls, He enables. Those who have endured are the proof of His enabling. In most churches, you must be brought to some kind of a graduation point. There are the “holiness” denominations that teach there is something called a “second definite work of grace.” They teach that if you seek God long enough, He will give you some kind of definite experience that will deliver you from sin. You thereafter can stand up in a testimony service and say, “I remember the time when God delivered me from sin, and I haven’t sinned since I was sanctified.” There are other denominations where people are supposed to walk down an aisle to an altar and repeat a prayer like this: “Lord, I am a sinner. I know my sin, I have failed You, and I come to You now. Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner. I confess my sin to You.” All that matters to those churches is that you repeat the words: It would not matter if you could not even understand English; as long as you could phonetically sound out the words, it was the formula that saved you. Romans 10:10 says, “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” Some denominations misquote that verse and reduce salvation down to a recital. They do not understand that Paul was quoting a passage from Deuteronomy about the people’s attitude toward Moses when he was up on the mountain receiving the commandments. In Paul’s day, there were people who were trying to make their salvation somehow dependent upon a new Moses who could go up or come down the mountain of God. Paul was trying to help them understand that the word was already near them and they could live in it and act in faith. But people have taken those verses out of their context and have reduced salvation down to a formula. How can a preacher compete with all those churches that offer graduation ceremonies? Most traditional churches are not trying to save sinners or even offering the opportunity for sinners to be saved. They want to transplant saints from one church to another. They try to fill their churches by offering something that other churches do not offer. All those churches suffer to some degree from what A.W. Tozer calls destination-oriented salvation. Once you have it, you can then sit back and pay a preacher to bring someone else into your position of graduated Christianity. Do you know what is wrong with the true church? You never graduate. It can wear you down. Be honest, have you ever felt worn down? And here I am starting my thirteenth year as the pastor of this church, saying, “You are not any closer than when you started.” And when you get worn down, you might want to find another church. People don’t say it this way, but they start to think, “I was convinced that I needed to be a Christian, but I’ve decided to gamble a little. The premiums I’ve been paying on my eternal insurance policy are consistently too high. I want to switch to a prepaid policy and just settle down.” That will not work. Christ is formed in your heart through faith. The words in Hebrews 2:1, “we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip,” mean we must intensively keep our grip. The Greek word translated “slip” could be described figuratively as snow slipping off of a limb of a tree, or a boat coming loose from its moorings. Imagine a boat that is moored in a current. As the current tugs on the boat, its rope begins to untie and eventually the rope falls into the water as the boat drifts away. It is almost an imperceptible slippage until suddenly the boat is lost. When a tree’s limbs are covered with snow, the snow melts from underneath and everything looks fine until suddenly, with a whoosh, the snow falls off of the limb. We must never let that happen to our faith. We ought to keep intensifying our grip lest at any time we should slip away. Many people have slipped away from the church, but they are the losers. The writer of Hebrews is exhorting us to maintain our grip, even it at times it seems like we are only holding on by a fingernail. You are no closer than you were when you started, but if you lose your grip of faith, you are gone. If you maintain your grip, you are sure. And if you keep taking your grip, you increase your ability to take a grip. A person who has been holding on to God for a long time can re-grip with more strength than the one who takes his grip for the first time. You are no closer than you were because you can only be as close as God in you and you in Him. But if you have been walking with the Lord for a long time, you are able to more quickly regain your grip than someone who has just started. Someone who has been a Christian for a while is like a professional athlete who can recover from a fall more quickly than someone who has not kept himself in shape. As I start my thirteenth year, there is no new message. My message is the same as the previous message: “Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art.” Arise and walk! Look, walk, and claim God’s promises from where you are. Let’s walk into this thirteenth year the same way we started. I am saying today, “Take your grip.” Hebrews 2:2-3 says, “For if the word spoken by angels was steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation . . .?” The gospel was not brought by angels but by God’s own Son, and you have been blessed with His call to hear it. Ephesians 2 says that God broke the wall of partition between man and God, not that we might get to God, but that He, consistent with His own righteousness, might now come into us. He covered all of our sins, past, present, and future, in order that He might move in and dwell in us. We have become His habitation. God wants those whom He has called and who demonstrate that calling by their faith, not by the old Puritan concept of performing righteous works. Only God can produce righteousness, which He will do in and through us as long as we are acting in faith. If you have fallen into a state where you are neglecting the things of God, it is time for you to get out of it. You have a choice today: take your grip of faith or slip away due to neglect. We will all stand before the Lord one day and give account. That is why Paul concluded in Galatians 6:9 that we shall reap in due season if we faint not. Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott | December, 2021 Wingspread | November, 2021 Wingspread | October, 2021 Wingspread | September, 2021 Wingspread | August, 2021 Wingspread | July, 2021 Wingspread | June, 2021 Wingspread | May, 2021 Wingspread | April, 2021 Wingspread | March, 2021 Wingspread | February, 2021 Wingspread | January, 2021 Wingspread | | Year 2019 Wingspreads | August, 2016 Wingspread | 2016 Wingspreads | 2014 Wingspreads | 2013 Wingspreads | 2012 Wingspreads | 2011 Wingspreads | 2010 Wingspreads | 2009 Wingspreads | 2008 Wingspreads | 2007 Wingspreads | 2006 Wingspreads | 2005 Wingspreads | 2004 Wingspreads | 2003 Wingspreads | 2002 Wingspreads | 2001 Wingspreads | August, 2001 Wingspread | November, 2001 Wingspread | December, 2001 Wingspread | 2000 Wingspreads | 1999 Wingspreads | 2015 Wingspreads | Year 2017 Wingspreads | 2018 Wingspreads | Year 2020 Wingspreads | Year 2021 Wingspreads | Year 2022 Wingspreads | Year 2023 Wingspreads | | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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