A couple of quotes from a John Piper sermon I am reading:
Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we share in Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. Hebrews 3:12-14
Three observations from this tremendously important text:
- Sin wages a constant battle to deceive and harden the hearts of professing Christians. If it succeeds, a person slips into unbelief and falls away from the living God.
- The evidence and confirmation of whether we have any share in Christ is whether we hold our first confidence firm to the end. Hebrews sees two possibilities for professing Christians: either they hold fast their first confidence to the end and show that they have really become sharers in the life of Christ, or they become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin and fall away from God with a heart of unbelief and show that they did not have a share in Christ.
- The means appointed by God to enable the saints to persevere to the end is daily exhortation from other saints. “Exhort one another every day as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
…and…
If we knew that the Gestapo was closing in on us, if we knew that at any time some could disappear from our number never to be heard from again, we would gather often in our homes and in secret rendezvous to strengthen our hands in God. And love would cover a multitude of sins, and our handshakes and embraces and the meetings of our eyes would be like gifts of roses and lilies from the bottom of the heart. Well, we are in war time. We are in enemy territory. Thousands of lives hang in the balance. The danger of hard hearts and unbelief and cool love and American luxury lurks everywhere. O, how we need to exhort one another every day to have strong confidence of victory in Christ, and to dream of new strategies of love to sabotage the enemy’s concentration camps of unbelief!
As I was reading this sermon, I was drawn to think about “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Schindler’s List.” I love both of these movies, but I have never thought of them quite the way I am thinking of them this morning. I remember the first time I experienced these films, having a tension and tightness in my chest. I can still recall the mixture of suspense and fear and joy and survival that these two films brought me. A real wartime mentality in the Christian life is not to far from these two films. A real spiritual war is at hand, and a Christian has two choices…play along with the enemy and eventually be swept away, or buckle down, build camp, and resist with all my might, in view of the kingdom I am looking forward to, and the power amply supplied in the grace of Jesus Christ.
There is no place in a wartime fellowship for light pleasantries and chit-chat, but rather laying hold of the means of grace supplied to us…Spirit and word. As if our lives and the lives of future generations depended on it.
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