A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on October 10, 2021 at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on Hebrews 3:12-19. You may play the audio of the sermon here.
A mostly unedited transcript of the sermon follows the jump:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Epistle to the Hebrews, the third chapter:
Take care, brothers, 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 have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
The idea that we can fall from the grace of God is something that many people today try to debate about. But the author here is clear: it’s possible. It’s a difficult thing to hear because we must all always be on our guard. It's very easy to do this. It is so easy for David. It was as simple as seeing something that led him astray, leading him to fall out of grace and lead him into the clutches of hell. Just seeing Bathsheba bathing on that roof was enough for sin to well up inside him, enough for him to commit adultery, enough to commit murder and to try to cover it all up before the eyes of God and before the nation of Israel. It’s easy for those 2 million Israelites who walked out of Egypt. They had been led by the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire by night, walking through the parted red sea, having manna provided and quail provided in the wilderness, having water come for them out of a rock that walked around with them. And yet still they fell from grace, hardening their hearts, turning away from the God who had done great miracles around them.
Even in our Gospel lesson, we find this man who comes up to Jesus and asks, What must I do to be saved? And Jesus says, Do the law. And he says, I've done the law. And Jesus loved this man who, by the way, we think actually is the author, Mark, writing himself in to show how such a man can be saved without giving himself acclaim. And Jesus says to him, after he loves him, Go and sell all your possessions, give it all to the poor and then come and follow me and you will have eternal life. And the young man went away sad, because that meant a lot of things would be changing for him. It was easy for him to harden his heart in that very moment and to look more to his possessions than the one true God who stood before him.
For us, it’s easy. We haven’t seen the miracles. We haven’t seen the incarnated Jesus. When was the last time any of us saw a pillar of cloud or a pillar of fire that would lead us through the water? When were any of us provided for, mystically by God, where food just appeared on our table in the middle of the night? So, how much, how much easier must it be for us to harden our hearts and to fall from the faith than for those who witnessed the great acts of God? Apparently it is not any easier, nor is it more difficult for us to do this. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews knows this. And he says, be on guard.
This is written not that long after Jesus ascended into heaven, and the author here knows from the very beginning of the Church, even for the people who saw and heard Jesus or saw and heard the people that Jesus taught, that it is going to be easy for people to turn away from God, to turn their hearts towards sin, for them to fall out of grace and then into the clutches of hell, just like David. And so the author admonishes us to keep watch over one another, exhort one another day by day. How are we doing with that?
Sometimes I think about our congregation, what it is that we are supposed to do. We have been joined together in this place to exhort one another toward good works, to exhort one another to stay out of sin, to exhort one another that we might look to the gospel of Jesus Christ and find the free forgiveness given from the cross. That's our duty. How have we been doing with that? This has been especially difficult, I think, in the time of the pandemic, where we really couldn’t join together, and we’ve gotten in a rut of staying there, even with relaxed protocols. Certainly as we've learned more and more about the virus and as more and more of us have become vaccinated and more and more of us have gotten used to all the hygienic things that we do to keep ourselves safe, we’ve been able to return to this place with no issues. But it's still hard. It's like a distrust has entered into the populace and we look around at everybody and we think, Well, how dirty are you? How gross are you? Can I go near you? Can I touch you? Can I love you? Can I even talk to you?
But I wonder about the church here, despite the pandemic. Think back. When was the last time that we had an honest discussion about the things that are going on in our lives and the things that we're dealing with, the sins that plague us and the forgiveness that we find? And when was the last time we exhorted one another toward these good works? I think for some of us, it’s been a long time. And I don't think it's a recent thing. And I don't think it's even a generational thing. I think it's been going on for a long, long time.
Now, if you have a family or you've grown up in a family, you certainly know exactly what this is like when all of a sudden, one of your siblings or your spouse or your mom and dad do something wrong, and everyone knows it. It brings about some kind of family discussion. Everyone knows the issues, and even after it’s been settled, it’s still talked about, even if it’s the guise of a joke. And that’s not a bad thing, is it? It reminds you of what happened but how people can return to grace in the family.
So it is for the congregation, too.You've got to face the sin that's in front of you so that you can deal with it and move into that which is right. The congregation is supposed to be that. In fact, the congregation is a congregation. It's a group of people that God has chosen to put in a singular place that we might be a family together. And so it's good that we talk about these things even amongst ourselves and whoever it is that wrote Hebrews tells us this exhort one another every day.
Now, even if you were not to confront the sin that other people were committing, how are we doing with exhorting people to just say, Look to Jesus, or to say, Turn from evil and turn to the good. It’s hard, for sure. But I think it’s a good practice, and I think it is because the Bible tells us to do it. It's something that we're going to have to work on and something that we all have to work on. It's why I tell people that, Well, if your heart is still beating inside your chest, you still have work to do in the church. You don't get out of it. There's always something that you must be doing, whether it's to pray for the brothers and sisters, whether it's to actually do work within the church, whether you are the chief exhorter of the congregation. Your work may change over the years but the author of this book to the Hebrews tells us that we should do one thing over everything else, exhort one another day by day. This is our every day work. And it's hard if we don't know one another. So I'd encourage you that if there's people that you don't know well, get to know them so that you can do this for them.
The author says we do it as long as the day is called today. The day comes, the day goes, you sleep, you wake up, it’s a new day. You can’t functionally talk to anyone while you’re asleep, so do it during the day, because you never know when sleep may come, whether it is the sleep of the night or the sleep of death, exhort one another, as long as it is called today. Every time you open your eyes, it is now today. And you must go forward in that. This is an every day kind of thing, because, if we share in Christ, if we exhort one another to look to the cross to find that forgiveness of sins that he has so richly promised us if we are holding fast and him, we're holding fast to the original confidence that he's given, that we are his children, that we are brothers and sisters of one another and that we have been blessed by God to go into that promised land.
It wasn't true that all of the Israelites would go into the promised land. In fact, everybody in that generation had to die off before God would allow any person to walk into the promised land now led by Joshua. Even Moses, their preeminent prophet of all prophets, the prophet by which every prophet is judged, he wasn't even allowed to go in for, they had hardened their hearts against God. They had disobeyed in every way that you could possibly imagine.
But for you, God has promised that you will see his promised land. It's not some land that we are sojourning to in this life, where we're all walking along and God is guiding us by his pillars every day. We're not walking into some place to take it over and kill all the inhabitants there that we might have the land of milk and honey, but it's a land that has already been won for you by Jesus Christ.
Your bodies may fall in this life, but the promise is still true. Sure and true. That promise that was given to you in your baptism. The promise that everlasting life is yours in Jesus Christ. This is what we exhort one another in. This is what we have to exhort one another in, because it is so easy, especially in this world today, to forget this, it is so easy to make Christianity the last thing that matters. I was teaching my students over at Concordia this week and was telling them that Christianity is about centering our lives on God and everything else falls into place. Whether it’s the money we give to God, which is first from our income and not the last morsels of the month, or whether it’s how we spend out time and attention, we make God first and foremost because He is preeminent. And when we do this, we find great joy, for our lives are fulfilled in following Christ, and we can give this same fulfillment and joy to others as we guide them in the same way.
When we don’t do this, when God is last or least in our lives, it’s easy to get hung up on the things we do as something that makes us righteous, something that earns the favor of God. And that’s not the way the cross works. For people focused this way, there is no hope of salvation. You though have the hope of salvation. You have been reentered on Christ in your Baptism. You have been strengthened through eating his body and drinking his blood in the Supper. You have been forgiven and set free to follow after the one who has redeemed you. You will enter into that promised land, not a land of this temporal world, but an eternal land, a land of life that goes beyond anything we could imagine, a land of perfection, a land without death, a land without grief or sorrow or shame or pride, a land that is centered around Jesus Christ and the worship of him.
The world is going to attack you and try to take your eyes off Christ. It is going to work to get you to fall away from faith. But, in the Church, strengthen by God and through the exhortation of the brotherhood, we remain strong, with our faces firmly set toward the promise of what is to come. Still, we don’t always know what to do or say. We need to be shown what is the good thing to do in this place. We need the Word preached rightly and the Sacraments administered properly. Only when these are done can we truly know how we are to exhort one another. As we study the scriptures together, as God's word is preached to you, as you're strengthened through the sacraments, you find the strength to do this. You find the knowledge and the wisdom to do this, to help others along their path, because these are the people that will stand next to you in the life which is to come.
These people who are around you, even now, are those who will stand with you before Jesus Christ, giving praise to the one who has redeemed us out of this world and into his marvelous light. This is why we exhort one another so that we would leave unbelief behind and grasp on to that thing that is delivered to us by faith, which is the promise of Christ for you.
Our Lord has indeed redeemed you, and you will see him and stand with him on the last day. Even through this life, as we approach that day and pray for it's coming, we know all of this is true for our Lord has himself risen from the dead and has shown us that this is coming for us. Hold fast to this, my friends, that you may leave unbelief behind and, instead, hold fast to him in faith. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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