I hope that you are well this morning.
If we haven't haven't met or had a chance to have a conversation,
my name is Josh. I have the joy of serving as
pastor here at the Garden Church, and I am excited this
morning to be continuing this series through the book of
Hebrews. Hebrews is one of my very
favorite books in all of Scripture.
It's complicated, it's dense, it's theological, but it also
has so much wisdom and grace for us today, and I'm excited to be
continuing our series. This morning.
We're going to be taking on chapters 3 and four and looking
particularly at the warning passages of he of, of Hebrews
this week. The big idea, if I were going to
summarize it into a couple of words, would simply be don't
quit. Don't quit.
Simple enough. And you know, I don't.
As I was reflecting on this this week, I don't imagine that any
of us sets out on our spiritual journey planning to just throw
in the towel. None of us dive in expecting to
to kind of fall by the wayside. But I think it's also true that
many of us can look back to a season in our life, to a
different moment when we we maybe prayed passionately or
sang joyfully or or dug into the scriptures eagerly in a way
that's different from what's true today.
Some of us have had an experience that somewhere along
the way of our spiritual journey, something happened and
we began to pull back in some way.
I know there have been moments in my own spiritual journey
where this has been true. Not at that.
Despite what I would prefer or you might think, it hasn't
always been up and to the right. There have been moments where I
took a step forward and then moments where I took a step
back. And, and one of those moments
when I, I took a step back had to do with sharing my faith with
sharing my faith with others earlier on in my faith journey.
My faith was incredible important to me as it as it is
today. And I, I was so aware of the way
in which Jesus had brought healing and unforgiveness,
transformation and goodness to me.
I just, I wanted everyone I knew and even people that I didn't
know to have that same experience.
I remember vividly sitting on the train sometimes and, and as
I would watch the windows pass by, especially at night when you
ever look out and see the city with just the windows ablaze
from hundreds or thousands of apartments.
And, and I remember wondering, like, do those people know
Jesus? Like, have they encountered his
love? Like what's, what is faith look
like for them? What do they know about him?
And I had a real passion for, for helping more people come to
faith. And this passion, this longing
showed up in my everyday practices.
I remember one thing that I did for for a number of years was
anytime I was out to eat at a restaurant, when the server
would take our order, I would say, hey, it's my custom to kind
of pray for my food before the meal.
Is there anything that I could pray for you about?
And, and very, very often that led to just deep heartfelt
conversations where people would share things that they were
going through or struggling with and, and we would have these
moments of prayer together. And then there was another
season that came a little bit later where there was some
friction, like some things hit in different ways that they
caused me to begin to pull back. I remember vividly, I was in JP
at a restaurant, same thing as always.
The server took my order. I said, hey, is there anything
that I could pray for you about? And I just, you know, the guy
looked like he'd been punched in the gut.
He just bristled. No, he kind of barked at me.
And then the whole rest of the meal was a little bit
uncomfortable. I was like, is my food going to
get spit in? Like, what's going on here?
Obviously, this person did not appreciate my question.
This is just one instance. I had dozens and dozens of these
conversations, but there was something about that experience
that kind of made me take a step back.
I started to become more cautious.
There were other things too, but over a period of time, this
posture where I was constantly kind of opening up spiritual
questions and conversations and and, and bringing parts of my
own faith life into dialogue with people who were far from
God. That kind of kind of waned for a
season. And I remember really vividly,
it kind of came into my awareness.
The shift that had occurred, something that had kind of
happened more gradually wasn't super conscious when I had a
conversation with a really close non Christian friend who
basically told Ally and myself, She said, you know, I've noticed
that you don't ever talk about your faith around me.
And we have these other mutual friends.
I know they're Christian too, and they're constantly kind of
bringing up their faith or kind of talking about it in passing.
And you don't ever do that. And she she was kind of like
irritated, almost hurt. She said, hey, I care about you.
I care about what's true in your life.
I'm not like asking you to evangelize me or something.
But but it seems to me that you're withholding this whole
part of your life that I know is deeply important to you.
And I feel like I'm missing out on something.
What gifts? And in that moment, first of
all, I was just incredibly moved by her care and and and value
for the friendship and all the different parts of our
relationship. But more so, I felt honestly
really convicted. I started to ask my like, what
did happen? Like how, how did I get here to
this point where something that had felt so natural, such a a
value started to shift in in chapters 3 and four of the
Hebrews, the Epistle to the Hebrews, we find the writer is
addressing something of a similar dynamic.
As we discussed last week, that the audience of this letter are
are Jewish Christians. These are people who grew up
attending synagogue and studying Torah and following the law of
Moses. They had, of course, come to a
believe that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah that
they had been waiting for. And they were stoked.
They jumped into faith wholeheartedly and with great
enthusiasm and zeal. But then as we continue to look
at this letter and notice the different parts of it, it
becomes very clear, especially from some things later that we
see in Chapter 10, that they had hit some obstacles.
They had initially started out with this great fire and then
there was some friction. In Hebrews chapter 10, we read
that that they had had an experience in verse 25 where
some of them had had kind of stopped meeting together.
And this came because they had endured, the text tells us,
public reproach and suffering. They had been shamed for their
faith. Some of them, we find, had had
their property seized. Others had even gone to prison
for their faith. There had been some real
persecution, some friction which hit this initially fiery and
zealous faith. And it caused them to fade a
bit, to take a step back. The the pressure of of a society
which didn't agree with their views, didn't believe the same
things that they did. And, and often where when they
were vocal or outspoken or direct about their faith, they
actually experienced social prices began to wear on them.
Now, they weren't renouncing Jesus outright.
They weren't denying Christ, but they were definitely
recalibrating things to see if they could just reduce the cost
of following him. They'd stopped gathering with
other Christians. They, they began to wonder,
like, maybe we could just kind of, you know, privately follow
Jesus without really talking about it publicly.
And while their exact situation is different from ours, I
believe this pattern, this same dynamic is alive and well in the
21st century in our zip code. The writer of the Hebrews speaks
with urgency in chapters 3 and four, He addresses this
challenge with a pretty fierce exhortation.
He tells them to persevere, to keep going, to not quit.
And to do so, he uses an illustration that would have
been burned into his reader's cultural memory.
He references the the story from Toran and articulated in Psalm
95 to to talk about the story of how their ancestors, the
Israelites, faded in the wilderness and now their
community had been rescued or liberated, as you'll remember,
from Egypt. They've been brought out of
slavery. They've been sustained by the
hand of God, but as they walked through the wilderness, they got
to this place of promise, this land that God was leading them
to, the land of Abraham, the land of their forefathers.
And right on the precipice, just as they were about to cross the
threshold and enter in, they stopped.
They turned around, see the scouts had come back and and
named, hey, there are giants in the land ahead.
The cities are fortified like this is not going to be an easy
thing. There's going to be risk
involved. There's going to be cost
involved. And at that decisive moment,
they they looked at the giants and forgot the deliverer.
They stopped short of entering into the promise.
This is what he's referring to when he quotes Psalm 35 or 95
rather saying do not harden your hearts as you did in the
rebellion during the time of testing in the wilderness where
your ancestors tested and tried me though for 30-40 years, they
saw what I did. I declared an oath in my anger.
They shall never enter my rest. These believers had seen what
God had done. They had experience of God
delivering them, but then when it came to a decisive moment,
they they pulled back. They decided to settle for the
safety of the wilderness. Some of the Union began
clamoring for the old days of slavery in Egypt rather than
pushing through and entering in to rest.
And the consequences that we see here in chapter 3, the writer
records were grim. They heard his voice, but they
hardened their hearts. He writes in verse 15.
And as a result, in verse 19, we read that their bodies perished
in the wilderness. They were not able to enter
because of their unbelief. In 1975, Kodak was synonymous
with photography. Over 70% of all cameras made,
over 80% of all film that was on the market was produced by this
one single company. And with an R&D budget that was
in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they were on the
cutting edge, poised to enter the future.
And that's when a young engineer at Kodak, in an attempt to
develop a new light sensing chip, built the first ever
digital camera. Now this prototype all the way
back in 1975 was not yet production ready.
And admittedly it was large and clunky.
It was cobbled together from projector lenses and spare
parts. It only had this tiny 100 by 100
grainy black and white screen that wasn't very good.
But even then, it was clear, digital is the future.
This is where things going. This is going to become the
technology that leaves the dark rooms in the dust.
But the path forward was uncertain.
Kodak had the budget to chase it.
They had the talent to chase it. But would they?
The technology that needed to be developed didn't exist yet.
How good with the quality really be?
Could it be small and expensive enough to fit in your pocket?
Who would even want pictures on a screen?
These were some of the conversations that the managers
had. And so, partly because of the
uncertainty, partly because of the questions about how it might
cannibalize their very successive film business,
holding this technology in their hand, this invention that was
the breakthrough to the future, they put it on the shelf.
They chose to dig into the things that were directly in
front of them. They shelved the idea.
Of course, today, Kodak still exists.
They are a quirky outlier that licenses a few pieces of tech
and has an exactly 0% market share.
They missed the moment the future arrived without them.
Not because they weren't there, not because they weren't poised
to succeed, but because when they arrived at the decisive
moment, instead of pushing forward, they pulled back.
And this pattern isn't just ancient history.
It isn't just something that happened with Jewish believers
in the 1st century or ancient Israel long ago.
I think it's happening right now today.
Maybe you've even experienced the same pattern show up in your
life, like you jump into community and Oh my gosh, what a
joy. Like you feel seen and
connected, like you belong to something that is is greater and
and beautiful. And then you find out that
community is made of other humans.
Somebody disappoints you. You get to know somebody and you
find out that they like see the world really differently than
you do. There's some unspoken
expectations. Somebody lets you down.
Somebody shows up in a way that you read is judgmental.
Ouch. And so it's so easy, right, to
just take a step back, to pull back.
Maybe you've been trying to date in a way that honors and is
shaped by your faith. But there's a wasteland out
there, right? The pool feels small.
The apps are exhausting. And then you meet somebody and
they're great, They're charming, they're kind, but they're not a
follower of Jesus. So you start to negotiate like,
the loneliness is real. Does this make sense?
Maybe I could make it work. Maybe like I just need to go
back and revise my list of what's really important.
Maybe you're trying to practice Sabbath in a city that just runs
on hustle and ambition and, and you try to carve out that space
and your coworkers like literally laugh at you.
People keep putting things on your calendar and assigning
projects that are going to be due the next week.
You feel behind by noon. Maybe you step into leadership
with integrity and pay the costs.
You try to forgive somebody who really hurt you and find out
just how difficult that is. Fire, friction, fade.
It is so easy to hit the pain of life, the, the wounds of life,
the, the, the challenges of following Jesus and, and to just
like the temptation that we see here in the 1st century to say,
I'm not going to abandon my faith, but maybe I'll just turn
the dial down a bit. Like maybe, maybe I'm just going
to accommodate to see if I can be a little bit more like other
people. Maybe I can just sort this out
in a way where the costs aren't so painful.
Friends, have your has your faith this morning begun to fade
in some way? Most of the Christians I know
who have have have slid kind of back into an apathetic state,
did not get there because they hated God.
Often times it wasn't even a singular decisive no moment.
They haven't renounced their faith.
It's more like quiet quitting. It's just accommodation, a step
back and then to protective cynicism, a bit of syncretism,
Jesus plus the city's operating gods of, of comfort and status,
of productivity and autonomy. We get disappointed and so we
stop hoping, we get hurt. And so we stop opening up.
We get exhausted. And so we stop trusting or
asking for help. We, we get shamed.
And so we stop taking risks, we get scared.
And so we just, we reach for that which is the visible,
familiar, manageable, our survival strategies.
This, I believe, is the hardening that that the writer
of Hebrews here is warning against.
Friends, don't allow your heart to be hard.
If we miss out on, or if we allow our fire to fade, we can
miss out on the rest that God offers us.
In chapter 4, the author points forward towards what is possible
if the Hebrews do in fact, persevere.
He's not just saying don't quit. He's saying, hey, if you keep
going, you have the ability to access something incredible.
And, and in this chapter, he, he articulates it's, it's kind of
delicate. It's quite of intricate.
The three kinds of rest that are at play here as he invites his
audience in verse #1 of Chapter 4.
Since the promise of entering his rest stands, let us be
careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of
it. The first kind of rest that he's
talking about is the kind that we've already talked about here.
It's it's the rest of the land Canaan rest, if you will, the
the rest involved in a physical geography that the people of
Israel in the in the Old Testament came up to and and
initially turned back from failing to access the rest that
was promised by God. But eventually Joshua did lead a
later generation into the land. So if that was all we were
talking about here, you would think, got it, people of God
have achieved rest box checked mission success.
But the writer of Hebrews says not so fast.
In verse 7, he quotes Psalm 95, written by David, which happened
centuries after Israel settles in the land.
And David here is saying today, if you hear his voice, do not
harden it, harden your hearts. In other words, even after this
rest of the land has been achieved, there is still another
kind of rest available. To explain that, he points to a
second kind of rest, Sabbath rest, which we see here in verse
#4. All the way back to Genesis we
remember that on the 7th day God rested from all his works.
He entered into Shabbat to Sabbath and then set up a
pattern for his people that we too might on the 7th day rest
from work and enter into his presence.
This was built into the very fabric of creation that the the
the the way in which our weeks are set up a moment to rest.
And it wasn't simply about a pause from exhaustion, but but
the deep settledness of things being as they ought to be.
But the author also points us forward in verse 9 to a future
rest, a rest that is still even now open, available and
enterable by the people of God. Verse 9 says there remains a
Sabbath rest for the people of God.
The door has not closed. And in this case he's pointing
not only to the weekly practice of Sabbath, but he's also
talking about that future age, that space when we will be with
God and all will be right, where Shalom will characterize the
world. Here's the writers logic.
If rest were fully achieved in Canaan, David wouldn't be
inviting people into it. Which means that God has always
been offering something bigger than a land place.
He's been offering a person himself a future.
So what does it look like to actually enter this rest?
What are, what are we talking about?
For those of us who may not be that familiar even with a, a
practice of Sabbath, I mean, I, I think what a lot of us think
about rest, we think about PTO. We think about a vacation with a
swim up bar. Maybe we think about a nap,
right? And I am not against any of
those things. I'd just like to go on the
record saying I'm pro nap. OK, Like these are good things,
awesome things, yes, but but this, this vision that I think
we have culturally falls deeply short of what it is that God is
describing when he talks about Sabbath.
Sabbath is is a picture of what's coming, and it's an
invitation to live in the reality of the future, in the
present. Mark Buchanan talks about it
this way. He describes Sabbath as the one
day when we stop trying to make something of ourselves.
Not the reward for a productive week, but rather a declaration.
And here's what makes Sabbath so subversive.
Sabbath doesn't begin after you've finished your To Do List.
It doesn't arrive after all the books are closed, everything is
clean, everything is sorted. Sabbath comes whether you're
ready for it or not and invites you to stop even when the work
isn't done. Especially when the work isn't
done because as Ritual Otis talks about, like the work is
never finished. How many of you can relate to
that? Like the work is never finished.
There is always more to do, and yet once a week we carve out
this space to actually pause even in the incompleteness, to
recharge, to enter in, to have a slow meal with people we love,
to take a walk without a destination, to light a candle
for no reason other than to to welcome and remember the
presence of God. These are not like indulgences.
These are are practices that help to rewire and repattern our
soul on the schedule of the Kingdom.
They invite us into the rest of God that that isn't something
that we have to work our way into or fight our way into, but
something that we from Him receive not in a place, but in a
person. This is what the rest of God
feels like, Settled trust in His presence.
Life without the burden of proving our own worthiness.
Freedom from frantic striving. The exhale of someone who just
knows that they are loved. A reminder that we don't have to
carry the weight of the world. That we are worthy of delight,
of joy, of knowing that we are enough because of what Jesus has
done. Of entering into a space of rest
with our souls, with our bodies, with our nervous system no
longer ruled by the taskmasters of Egypt, but by the grace of
God. And this friends, is an
incredible gift. And also, I can say somebody who
often struggles to receive this gift, that it's hard.
Maybe you know this for yourself as well.
Because so often the ways that we operate on that we believe
are, are our pathways to accessing rest look like working
more, doing more, pushing harder, going faster, trying to
reach for other things. And so to actually enter into
rest that isn't manufactured by us but is received from God is
very counter intuitive. In fact, it can feel scary.
Does anybody else know what I'm talking about here?
This is the kind of rest that we are invited into.
Look, I know some of us have experienced this deeply.
Some of us, this feels fleeting. Some of us are like, I have no
idea what you're talking about right now.
So I want to take a moment just to pause and to actually attempt
to create for just one moment an experience of rest.
Go ahead and and just in your body, I'm going to slow down my
talking. I'm going to slow down this
moment. And I want you to just get
comfortable in a posture that feels good to you.
Like lean back in your chair, perhaps put your feet on the
ground, whatever. Whatever is comfortable for you,
for your body. Notice right now if you are
carrying tension in your body somewhere.
Maybe your jaw is clenched. You don't even notice it until
you pay attention. Maybe your your shoulders are
just tight. Maybe your gut is tight.
You don't have to fix it right now.
Just just name it and try to gently bring calmness and rest
to that space in your physical body.
And then as we, as we breathe, as we pause, I want you to to
not only hear, but to, to really try to open yourself up for just
this one moment to this invitation that you don't have
to save yourself. You don't have to prove
yourself. The world is not going to fall
apart if you don't check your phone right now.
Just whisper this prayer as you breathe in and breathe out.
God, I trust you help me receive rest.
So you breathe in. God I trust you help me receive
rest. Again, God, I trust you.
Help me receive rest. I want to invite you to just pay
attention to what this feels like in your body.
How long has it been since you've actually just been still
in the presence of God? You've allowed your body, your
soul, to come into the present moment and to notice what's
real. Friends, this morning, the
invitation for us, just as it was for the original audience of
this letter, was to enter into the rest of God.
And the key here is that the rest is it's not just a place,
it's not just a destination, it's a person.
Going back to the very opening of chapter 3, the first thing
that the writer here does is he says, fix your eyes on Jesus.
Look to him, look to him. See, Jesus is the place where we
can access rest. His argument at the beginning of
the chapter is that because Jesus has been faithful, you can
enter into rest, you can trust him, you can receive from him.
Jesus has already created Shalom, we just have to to
access it by believing. The writer is clear here,
though, that we do have a part. Don't fall short, he says.
Let us make every effort, he says in verse 11, to enter that
rest. It kind of sounds paradoxical,
doesn't it? Like make every effort to enter
rest? Like what are we resting?
Are we striving? What's happening?
But I think the key here is that entering rest isn't isn't
earning rest. It's more like receiving a gift
that has already been placed in your hands, that has already
been one for us, and then and then holding on to it.
Not drifting, not not dropping it to chase other things.
And persevering, in this case, I think, can look different when
when I think about persevering, the first place my mind goes is,
is grit, trying harder, muscling up, focusing, hitting that
willpower button and pushing the lever as far as I can.
But I wonder if very often the key to our perseverance isn't
isn't just trying harder, but it's actually attending to some
of these wounds that are keeping us stuck.
See for the the people of Israel long ago as they prepared to
face down giants for their for the folks in the 1st century
that this epistle is written to, they had some wounds they hit
some friction along the way that caused that initial fire to
fade. So I wonder what that looks like
for you. Like is there a place in your
life where you know that there's something that's unresolved?
Like maybe for you, that the the the problem in maintaining that
energy, that fire, that vibrancy is the fact that we haven't yet
figured out how to like navigate conflict with that person who
created the Ouch. Like we don't know how to
forgive or how to hold a boundary.
Maybe we were actually deeply disappointed by someone or even
by God and we haven't yet learned how to grieve, how to
process it, how to enter into lament and and stay connected to
Jesus even in it. Friends, persevering in our
faith, maintaining our vigor, pressing through entering into
race, into interest isn't just about training.
It's not just about intensity. It's also about the things that
addressing the drags on our soul, that slow us down, that
pull us away, that keep us from continuing on.
What does that look like for you?
Having a hard conversation, doing some forgiveness works.
This is not weakness. It's actually how we get our
legs back under us so that we continue to run, so that as
chapter 3 and verse 14, we're exhorted at that as we have come
to share in Christ. If indeed we hold our original
conviction firmly to the very end.
It's not about doing it perfectly.
It's about continuing to show up.
And so as we continue this morning and and enter into a
time of reflection and response, I just want to ask like, where's
the rub this morning for you as you think about your faith
journey, whether you're at the very beginning of it, maybe you
haven't even taken a first step of faith or you've been on the
journey for a while. And honestly, you're pretty
clear that you've taken somebody shots along the way.
A lot like this first community that we read about here in
Hebrews. What would it mean for you not
to not to lose that love, to stay connected to that
transformational encounter with Jesus that had changed your life
or or promises to change your life?
Friends, what would it look like to really enter in accessing
faithfulness by way of faith? Jesus is the model.
He is the example. If we fix our eyes on Him and
follow Him, we will experience that Sabbath rest, that Shalom
that exists only in His presence.