Sermon Cloud

Intro
    “I like Jesus, but I don’t really like the church.”  “I can be a Christian just fine without having to go to church every week.”  “I’m a better Christian when I just get alone with God.  Just me and Him.”  “The Church is full of nothing but a bunch of hypocrites.”  “I like the music at this church, the preaching at that church, and the Sunday School at the other church.  So I just go to all 3 depending on what I’m really in the mood for.”  “I’d go to church if it wasn’t for the people.”  “That church doesn’t offer enough programs that meet my needs.”  
    Have you ever heard any of these kinds of comments before?  You ever said any of them before?  Each of these comments have one basic similarity that runs through them.  That is, each of these believe church is all about ME.  What I like.  What suits my personal growth the best.  What meets my needs.  What I like or don’t like.  Now hear me right.  There is a grain of truth in some of these comments.  Some are flat out false.  And some we could debate about.
    There certainly are some churches that don’t make people feel at home.  Churches are certainly full of some hypocritical people.  All people prefer certain styles and methods over some others.  You like classical I like country.  You like country I like contemporary.  You like a yelling preacher, I like a calm teacher/preacher.  You like words on powerpoint slides, I like words on hymn books.  The Bible doesn’t teach one or the other.  And so we better be real careful about taking preferences and turning them into truth.  That’s when we say, “I like country and so that’s the correct kind of music for the church.”  “I like preachers who yell, and so a preacher that doesn’t isn’t preaching right.”  
    One thing that even if we all disagree a hundred percent on everything else, we don’t have the right to disagree on, is that a Christian who is not faithful to a body of believers is not being faithful to God’s Word.  You can’t love Jesus and hate his wife as someone put it one time.  God’s Word makes it pretty clear that we are to find a body of believers, a local church, and get hitched.  There’s a great little book called “Stop Dating the Church” that makes the point that we were never intended to date, and flirt, and move from church to church without ever settling down and getting married to one.
    So if you church hop as a regular practice, you fall outside of the bounds of what the New Testament instructs Christians to do about the church.  Your church is not all about you.  Your church is not all about your family.  Your church is not all about your desires.  Your church is not all about your preferences.  Your church in fact is NOT even your church at all.  The church belongs to Jesus, and it’s His desires that really count.
    As we look at not wasting our lives this year, holding up to the light different areas of our life, we looked last week at redeeming the time.  The time is God’s, you’re a manager of it.  The overarching principle is “I will magnify Jesus in every area of my life, whether I live or whether I die.”  So not wasting my life this year means magnifying Jesus through the time He’s given me.  This week, we’ll see that magnifying Jesus, so that your life is not wasted this year means saying, “I Will Faithfully Gather with My Church This Year.”  Where do we find that in the Bible?  It’s in our passage for today, Hebrews 10:23-25.  Let’s look at it now (READ).

Brief Context
    Some people will tell you Paul wrote this book, others say it was Luke, and others say Paul’s friend Apollos wrote it.  We don’t know for sure b/c the author doesn’t identify himself by name.  We do know he’s writing from a very Jewish perspective, and he compares all throughout the book the differences between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant found in Jesus.  He tells us Jesus is a better priest, a better sacrifice, lives in a better temple, and on and on.  And near the end of the book he gives us some very practical instructions on being the church.  He tells the church to persevere in persecution, to obey the leaders, and in what we just read he tells us how important it is that we meet regularly.
    The tradition in the early church was not to recreate a new Sabbath to compete with Saturday.  Saturday was the Jewish day of rest, but in the New Covenant, the time to meet together became the 1st day of the week, or the day that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.  So really Sunday, the 1st day of the week, was a regular, weekly celebration of Easter.  A day to meet together to hear the Scriptures taught, to sing together, to take the Lord’s Supper, to have what they called a Love Feast, or an Agape Meal.  
    Now nobody imagined for one second that this was the extent of what it meant to be a Christian.  Being a Christian was NOT for the early church, and not for us today, meant to be a one day a week affair.  We come on the 1st day of the week, get all the God stuff out of the way, and then go live.  Being a follower of Jesus is now as always an every day, every hour, every minute, every second thing.  
    So you live your life throughout the week, worshiping God by yourself, as a family, learning the teachings, sharing Jesus with those you come in contact with, serving others, and on and on, and then as you’ve prepared yourself each week by living out your faith each day, you come together with the other believers on Sunday, usually early in the morning with a heart that’s ready to do 2 major things;  Worship God and Edify the believers.  We’ll mainly look at edification today since that’s primarily what the passage is about.
    One of the major problems in our church today is that too many believers come empty to get full every single week.  In that way church is all about ME.  I am hungry and I want to eat and it is the job of teachers and preachers to fill ME.  So church is then nothing but a big buffet line of people coming to eat.  Contrast that to what we see here in Hebrews 10.  Remember these letters, apart from what we call the Pastoral Epistles, are written to the church, meant to be read in the church, and meant to be heard by the church.  The instructions we’ve read today are meant to be followed by the church.  
    Hebrews 10:23-25 tells us very concretely what a great responsibility we have for one another (Key Phrase) in assembling together.  Look at our lives together church.  You’ll see that there are seasons of great need we have and seasons of great fullness we have, and not everyone always at exactly the same time.  You may come together on a Sunday full of the Spirit, encouraged, blessed, at a time of plenty in your life.  At the same time, there are others who come exhausted, frustrated, discouraged, and beaten down by life.  When you are weak others are strong on YOUR behalf, and the other way around too.  What does that mean?  It means we’re here for one another.
    Look at how this passage should affect us every single week.  (READ AGAIN).  “Hold fast.”  That means to cling on to.  Imagine yourself in the middle of deep waters, and waves are all around you, and you find yourself going under.  In the midst of that you see a rope thrown out to you and here a voice telling you firmly to grab the rope and hold on tight.  We’re in just such a place as believers.  We’re drowning in a world without life, without hope, and the rope that’s been thrown out to rescue us is Jesus.  And God says to us in His word to “Grasp on to Jesus like our lives depended on it.”  And we can trust Him to bring us safely back to shore b/c look at the end of verse 23 (“For He is faithful that promised”).  The Gospel will never let us drown b/c the God of the Gospel is faithful in His promises to us.  Faithful that b/c of Jesus (Explain the Gospel), we can have abundant life, eternal life.  The promise that our sinful rebellion can be forgiven b/c of Jesus’ faithful obedience, that all of us would just cling to that Gospel with all the power of the Holy Spirit in us.
    But we’re not called do go it alone.  We’re not called to cling to the Gospel in isolation from one another.  When we’re saved, when we’re baptized into a local church, we’re saved into a community that shares the most important truth in common.  Whether we like the same things or not makes no difference.  We’re saved by the same God, through the same savior Jesus Christ, and bound together by the same Holy Spirit, what does that mean?!
    It means this church made up of God’s people, have the call to join together in unity for the advance of the same purpose.  And it breaks my heart when I see the church Jesus died for NOT being the people HE calls us to be.  That we could all catch a glimpse of what a church is meant to be.  How many years I wasted thinking it was all about ME.  How I complained b/c of it.  I don’t like this music.  These teachers are not up to my standards.  These deacons don’t pay me enough attention.  This pastor doesn’t preach the way I want him to, and all to come to realize later on that GOD never ask for my opinion, and guess what?  He didn’t ask for YOURS.
    What a royal waste of life’s precious time to get caught up in opinions of men.  WHAT DOES THE SCRIPTURE TEACH?  That is the key question.  Verse 24, “And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works.”  Let us consider one another.  What a concept.  We are called to think hard, to dwell on, to chew on, reflect on, to ponder, to deliberate “ONE ANOTHER.”  For what reason?  
    B/c it is so easy to lose heart.  It’s so easy to fall back into old patterns of living.  So easy to isolate yourself from others and forget to consider what their needs are.  Why?  B/c you know how much you and I think about ourselves, and so we’re so certain that everyone else is doing the same thing.  Guess what?  They probably are.  B/c we’ve got it all backwards.  Church as buffet line.  Church as full service restaurant complete with waiters, waitresses, managers, and cashiers, and janitors, all there to meet my every need.  
    We lose heart, we fall back into patterns of sin, then we come together to meet each week and expect others to do all the work.  I know, I’ve been there.  How different from this passage.  How different from the NT.  But you say “What about the pastor?  Isn’t he called to feed us?”  Yes, among other things, but if you eat my sermon once a week, twice a week, it’ll leave you hungry in the same way you can’t eat a big steak on Sunday and expect it to last you until the next Saturday.  I’m not enough.  Your teachers aren’t enough.  Your deacons aren’t enough.  What does verse 24 say, and to who does it say it?  
    The church as a body of believers is instructed here.  That means all of us who call ourselves members here.  We’re all told that we all must consider, think on, find ways to do what?  What does verse 24 say?  (Provoke unto love and good works).  If I provoke you to some action, it means I’m spurring you on.  I’m trying to get you to do something.  Here the spurring on, the actions I am to try to get others to do is “love and good works.”  WHY those things?  B/c we tend to let ourselves slip into gossip, envy, jealousy, backbiting, wrangling for power, greed, love of self, love of money, love of sin, and a multitude of other things that are carnal, fleshly things.  
    And we need other believers to come alongside us regularly to provoke us to those things and wake us up when we fall into the other stuff.  When’s the last time you, a regular old church goer, and the subject of this entire instruction provoked someone to love and good works?  We provoke a fight a lot of times.  But to provoke and spur one another on to good works.  That is a completely other centered theology and idea of what church is meant to be about.  
    What is edifying?  What builds up?  Whatever actions that might be, that is what we’re called to do for one another.  And you can’t do that, and I can’t do that if we get in the bad habit of verse 25 (READ).  Already within a few years of Jesus’ death and resurrection we find people being unfaithful to come together on the Lord’s Day.  It’s interesting how some things never change.  Today, coming together weekly is optional.  It’s if we feel like it.  It’s if we don’t have any better plans.  This could’ve been written today.  Look around this morning.  I can look out right now and see who could be here but isn’t.  Who says they’re a member of Little Mountain, and isn’t faithful to come together.  I can look out and see who is here but always come to eat and never comes to feed anyone else with encouragement, with spurring on or provoking.  
    Finish out the verse (READ to end).  Some got out of the habit then.  Some are out now.  And then, just like now, we don’t have time to waste.  If the Day was approaching then, how much more now?  It’s a picture of people gathered together cheering each other on to the finish line, which is Jesus’ return.  Do you see that happen?  I’ll keep feeding as Jesus calls me to, but I can’t do 1/100th of the spurring on that we can all do together.  We ALL need each other.  You have gifts, you have talents, you have abilities, and you have calling, and the place where God calls you to work out those gifts is within Christ’s body, The Church.
    This year if you want to waste your life, don’t be faithful to God’s people here.  Come every week only to take and never to give, and pretend God’s church is your personal service station.  Otherwise, (READ WHOLE PASSAGE).

INVITATION