The Ability to Keep Going • Hebrews 10:35-39
55:54 Teaching begins
Notes
The prophet Jeremiah complained to the Lord about how dark the times were that he lived in. The wicked get away with everything. What’s the deal?
God replied, Jeremiah 12:5 “If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace, how will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?” If you think it’s tough now, just wait. It’s going to get worse. You need endurance.
We live in tough times, too, and it’s going to get worse. That means we need endurance.
Endurance is the ability to withstand hardship or adversity, especially : the ability to keep going and not quit.
Endurance overcomes exhaustion, discouragement, and all difficulties that we face, until we receive what God has promised.
I’m reading in Hebrews 10:35-39
Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise: “For yet a little while, and He who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; but if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him.”
But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul.
1. What are we waiting for? For God to fulfill His promise.
A. Christians emphasize Jesus return because His coming will fulfill the word of God.
1. All the promises of God. He will fulfill the covenants with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David. God made promises to them that are still unfulfilled. He said to Abraham, to you and your descendants I will give this land forever. He never received that promise. He’s still waiting. Jesus fulfilled some of the prophecies in the Old Testament but there is more about His second coming that is still to be fulfilled.
2. When Jesus comes He will also vindicate the name of God. Who is God? You can have your own opinion now. But when Jesus comes it will be obvious who is God and who is not God. All the other gods will be exposed as not gods. All the philosophies will be exposed for what they are—speculation, but not the truth.
B. Jesus’ coming will fulfill everything that He promised for you.
1. 1 John 3:2 Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. You will be glorified with Jesus, with the very glory of God Himself. Your body will be made, heavenly and eternal.
2. Revelation 21:4 And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” You will be repaid for all your suffering for Jesus. He’s going to make it up to you so that you will never have scars, never feel like you were disappointed in any way.
3. You will rule the earth with Jesus. You will live with Him in the New Jerusalem.
4. The second death will not hurt you. You will never come into judgment, you will live with God forever. No more sorrow, no more pain, no more separation.
5. In the ages to come God is going to show us the riches of His glory in Christ Jesus.
C. These are tremendous promises. We believe they are worth waiting for. But here’s the rub: you do have to wait for Jesus to come. That’s what demands endurance.
1. Jesus said he who endures to the end will be saved. There are no promises for if you don’t endure to the end.
2. God promised Abraham some 1800 years before Christ. 3,822 years later he’s still waiting. That’s a long time to not get discouraged. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, Proverbs 13:12.
3. You might die before Jesus comes again. Then what? You have to keep on waiting. Remember no one has received the promise yet, not one believer.
4. Some people might say, “You’re done when you die. You go ‘poof’. No more waiting. Do you really believe that everything Jesus said is true? Are you really ignoring your happiness right now while you wait for fairy-tales in the future?”
5. It’s not easy to wait for God’s promises.
2. The second reason you need endurance is for the present, as the writer to the Hebrews says, in order to do the will of God.
A. There are two aspects to this: what God does in you and what God does through you.
B. The will of God in you is to make you like Jesus.
1. He is already at work, transforming you in your thoughts and your character. This is called sanctification. He is acting as our Father to discipline and train you to share His holiness. Without that holiness no one will see the Lord. He brings us into difficult and painful situations. We have to suffer. That’s discouraging.
2. Part of being a Christian is coming to know that you are not like Jesus. He is humble, faithful, loving, good, kind. As you realize how little you are like the Lord that can be discouraging.
3. Have you found it easy to follow Jesus? You really have to oppose yourself. Lay down your life, pick up your cross, follow Jesus. Pray not my will but Yours be done.
C. Then there is the will of God through you to other people.
1. He saves you for His purpose. He is the Lord Jesus so you obey Him, you serve Him. He gives each one of us gifts of grace. The purpose is that we can serve one another in love and build up the church.
2. We also reach out beyond our church to share the love of God with those who don’t know Jesus. So we pray, we look for opportunities to talk with people about how they can receive the love of God in Jesus. They can be unreceptive.
3. We are even supposed to love our enemies. People can say awful things to us, do awful things to us, because we follow Jesus.
D. But people are not the enemy. We really fight against spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
1. These spirits can use people who are their slaves to oppose us. They can be unreasonable. They despise believers, they ridicule them.
2. The devil directly attacks us in our minds. He uses fear, discouragement, lust, anything he can to turn our lives away from following Jesus. And the devil runs this present world. He is a power that we have to resist.
E. Here is the temptation: to shrink back from all this conflict. The danger is as we shrink back our grasp on the promise grows weaker. It doesn’t seem real.
F. Wouldn’t it be a shame to not be ready for His return? It would be awful to give up the fulfillment of all the promises of God. You don’t want to be overcome with evil. You want to overcome evil with good.
3. We have the need for endurance, the ability to keep going through suffering and difficulty. So where do you get endurance? How do you get it?
A. The question is answered by this word, “faith”.
1. You might think that you have to make it alone, that the strength has to come from within. People say, “You have to believe in yourself, have faith in yourself. But if that’s true it’s just a matter of time before you fail. No one has the strength to continue the effort it takes to reach heaven.
2. Faith means I look outside myself for someone to help me and I receive His help. Jesus did for us what we could never do on our own. We depend on what He does.
B. Jesus has already done things for me that I could never do for myself.
1. He took on my humanity and He paid the price for all the sin of the world. That means He paid for my sins.
2. He rose again from the dead to new life.
3. He shared His death and His life with me. So now in Christ I’m dead to sin and alive to God. When Christ is revealed in glory, I will be revealed with Him. I am in Christ.
4. Faith means depending on Jesus. It means I am no longer on my own. That old life on my own is ended. My new life is really sharing the life of Jesus and receiving what He is giving right now.
C. The promise has not been fulfilled yet. We are still waiting for the fullness. But there are certain things God gives us right now. Our life now is to receive all the help He is giving.
4. So what?
A. Next week I’m going to talk about three things God gives right now that enable us to have endurance.
1. The first thing God gives right now is His word and His promises that He answers right now. If God promises, then we can depend on that promise.
2. The second thing that God gives right now is His presence. Jesus said, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” We’ll look at how His presence works to give us endurance.
3. Third is suffering and difficult times. We think, “How can that be? Difficulties wear me out!” That’s why you have to come back next week.
B. But for right now we want to notice that He is working in our lives, and that’s why we are going to learn endurance.
1. We are not of those who shrink back. Even though you might feel like, yes, I am a shrinker, no, you’re not.
2. If you have received Jesus, you are born again of the Holy Spirit. You are not the person you were before with a little religion cello-taped to you. God has given you a new nature.
C. That new nature overcomes this world.
1. Revelation 12:10-11 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, he who accuses them before our God day and night. And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death.”
2. You know in the Garden of Eden the devil overcame Adam and Eve. But here ordinary people overcome the devil. That’s because Jesus is in them, and the devil cannot overcome Jesus.
3. 1 John 4:4 You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.
4. 1 John 5:4-5 For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
D. For now you get to consider this: you are going to receive God’s promise because He is working and you are not alone. God Himself will give you the ability to keep going and not give up.
Let’s pray.