Apostles Church

Growth and Assurance. Hebrews 5:11-6:20. 

Christians should mature in their faith. Pastor is confronting lack of maturity. They have stalled at the basics. (6:1-2). They are not building on this foundation. Those basics have brought about new life, the bible calls it a new birth. They're spiritual infants with a lifetime of discovery and growth ahead. But, they were experiencing arrested development, they were no longer discovering the gospel and growing in their walk of faith. The Pastor rebukes them. By now they should be teachers, but they still need to be taught the ABCs. What is the mark of maturity? Live in steady rhythm of Openness and Responsiveness to God. Openness: Requires an attentiveness to God's voice in the Scripture. But they were lazy, sluggish, disengaged when it came to hearing God's word. God and his Gospel had become a bore to them. Growing indifference to Jesus and were proactively pursuing other things with greater passion. Maturity is marked by a longing to know God more, a pursuit of him and an openness to him. Responsiveness: an obedience to the things that God reveals. Inhaling truths about God, exhaling response to God. Inhale truth; Exhale worship, repentance, trust, risk. Response to revelation is what brings about growth. This rhythm of openness and responsiveness to God produces a growing capacity to discern what God desires and a growing capacity to happily do it (v14). KEY: The mark of maturity is that one can distinguish what is honoring to God and what is not honoring to God. Maturity is not mainly intellectual, but ethical. If you know the word of God, but do not do the will of God, you are not mature, you are an educated spiritual infant. As we hear and respond to God, our capacity for hearing and responding to God grows and we mature as Christians (this is why he says solid food is for the mature; maturity increases your capacity for greater truths). When that process stops so does our growth. This kind of growth is normative. You should be teachers by now. Halfhearted Christians: They know enough to feel guilty, they don't go far enough with Christ to be happy. – Ray Ortlund.

Some professing Christians will leave the faith (6:4-8). Some who by all outward appearances have an authentic experience of the Christian faith will fall away. Enlightened (heard, understood, and even saw it as believable and appealing), tasted heavenly gift (possibly communion), shared in the Holy Spirit (witnessed the working of the holy spirit in the church and even felt his influence upon their lives and hearts), tasted the goodness of the word of God and powers of the age to come (gospel and the signs and wonders that accompanied them often in the early church - 2:4) - experience all this and yet, decisively walk away from it, renounce it, no longer embrace it and consider it of little importance or relevance. There will be some for whom Jesus is a fad or phase, a big deal for a season then he gets pushed to the margins and considered of little importance, no longer worthy of love and loyalty. They started the race, but quit. Just like Israel who was enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift of manna, the power of the Holy Spirit, signs and wonders, but did not enter the promise land because of unbelief  - not trusting that God was good to them and better than Egypt. Result: Repentance is impossible because they are despising the very one repentance is toward. If you reject Jesus and despise him as Savior, you are retroactively siding with those who crucified him and you are utterly rejecting him. You cannot repent toward one you are rejecting. You have come very close, up front, you have tasted what it is like to belong to his people and you have tasted what it is like to know his love and forgiveness and you have rejected it, despised it, refused it. This is the worst possible place to be - “For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. 21) For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. 2 Pet 2.20–22 ESV

Professing Christian? Hebrews and the rest of the bible is clear that we are saved by faith, but that the faith we are saved by is a persevering faith. Heb 3:6, 14. This is so because of the nature of salvation (new heart with new affections) and because God works to preserve our faith, and Christ is praying, interceding for us that our faith will not fail (Heb 7:25). There will be those who have a flash of faith, or a spasm of belief, but time will reveal it as temporary, transient, and fickle. We see this in Jesus' ministry. John 2:23-25 - Jesus knew their hearts, that their faith was fleeting, momentary. Matthew 7:21-23. Judas. Parable of the soils. Here we see that same imagery (6:7-8). The rains falls on both with the ultimate result is that some do not bear fruit, no real enduring spiritual life with judgment as the final end. For others, they drink the rain and bear fruit, enduring spiritual life that last to the end and is blessed. 
What is our response to these things? Mixed audience, so we will all hear this differently.   

Promote the faith of some. There are many who live right on the edge of saving faith and never cross the line of faith and entrust themselves fully to Jesus. This passage is smelling salt to wake people up out their casual approach to Jesus and in a sense say, "This is not a game. Your life and eternity are at stake here. You've come to the edge, been exposed to the beauty of Christ and the Gospel, don't walk away, cross over. This is not manipulation if the danger is real and Christ is true.

Preserve the faith of true believers. Just like God uses means to brings us to faith, he uses means to preserve our faith. God promise to keep us in the faith, and he also exhorts us to keep the faith. God is sovereignly preserving our faith, but that does not exclude us from diligence, alertness, and strenuous perservance. He preserves our faith by the use of means that we are responsible for laying hold of. One of these means is warnings of what would happen should we abandon Christ. He makes promises to us and gives warnings to us; the warnings help bring about the fulfillment of the promise.  When we come to saving faith, God does a work on our hearts that makes us responsive to these warnings and thus these warnings are one of God's ways to keep us safe and close to him. "When I hear the threats and warnings of Scripture, I take them seriously. That is, when I read Hebrews 6 I realize that this is a word directed to me. I tremble at such a prospect and I say to myself, 'I do not want to suffer such a punishment. I want to live with God forever.' This warning reminds me that life's choices are serious. It reminds me that I must persevere in the faith to be saved. I pray, 'Lord, give me the desire and strength to continue on the journey of faith.' I find that the warning provokes me to follow the Lord more ardently. It snaps me out of my slumber and incites me afresh to love and good works." - The Race Set Before Us, Schreiner. So the warning is a means that preserves our faith.

Produce our Assurance. 6:9-20 is about our assurance, our confidence in our standing with God. "Better things." Assurance - we should pursue it (v11); two evidences. Our Work (vv10-11). They love the Lord's name, worked for the kingdom, and served God's people. They look at the kinds of things coming out of their lives and they are filled with confidence that God is at work in them and they are perserving in faith and that they will inherit the promised salvation. We can't say that someone is not saved, but we cannot give assurance to one who is not showing love for the Lord's name and bearing fruit. The Work of Christ. (vv13-20) Ultimately our assurance is wrapped up in the work of Jesus for us, not our work for him. He is the sure hope, the anchor for our souls. God has made us a promise in Christ and he does not lie to us. When i do good i feel good when i do bad i feel bad and that is my religion" - Abraham Lincoln. Our religion is not based upon our work, but Christ's work. He is our hope. So, we hold fast to this hope. We trust in him. So we hear these warnings and they cause to us to cling even tighter to Jesus and that response of holding tighter to him, increases our assurance - see, I do trust him, I do hope in him, I am convinced in Him.  Conclusion: Let this warning have its intended result.