The church needs people who have battled and are continually overcoming who they are in order to be who God has created them to be.
Throughout this letter the Pastor will pause from the main subjects to bring a warning to the people. This is the second time in the letter. This time the warning passage is quite long starting in verse 7 and continuing into chapter 4 v 13.
The battle is the same in 2024 as at the time of Israel’s Wilderness years:
- Listen and obey His voice;
- Know His ways
- Watch your heart.
“See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. 14 We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. 15 As has just been said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion” (Hebrews 3 v 12-15)
The battle is not necessarily in the order I have given above. In fact the reason why we sometimes do not listen and obey and know His ways is because our hearts have hardened. One thing the Israelite story tells us is that you can have a hardened heart and not know it. You need accountability to tell you. You need a friend who is not afraid of you.
If they had been asked, ‘do you have a hard heart’ then they would say ‘No, their hearts are open to God’. They were worshippers and held to the laws of God. They were not Gentiles, unbelievers.
But they were locked-in. They were closed off from any further revelation from God other than that of Abraham and it would happen again post-Moses generation even right until the time of Jesus.
It is still possible today. We can hold to a revelation of God, an experience, a moment in time, a move of God’s Spirit that was so special and historical that it changed our lives for ever and we live in that experience for the rest of our lives. Of course we can also hold onto a hurt that happened to us. But anything new can then be rejected. What happens unbeknown to us is that the beautiful experience has become a calloused place in our lives. It has trapped us and we now no longer hear and see and understand what God wants to do today. We cannot see the open door set before us.
We need to unlock our heart. We need to change our prayers. We need to use new vocabulary. We need to search again. We need to focus on something new of the nature of God. If our God is a Holy God who demands our repentance and our submission then perhaps it is possible we can become so locked in to that revelation that it hardens us to the truth that He is a God of new things.
If we ever become locked-in then we will be locked-out from progressing in knowing God. This is what happened to God’s people in the Wilderness years and the Pastor does not want this for their community of believers in that generation.
Watch your heart. Ask someone you trust if they see danger there.
Missions Paul 