“The real benefit comes as you stick with it.”
That’s true in so many walks of life. It’s true in marathon running – at least, so I’m told. Keep going, and you get the satisfaction of finishing the race. If you get a stitch, run it out. It’s true in any friendship, and it’s true in a marriage – as you stick with it over many years, the friendship becomes a greater and greater blessing. It’s true for being a vicar – the longer you’ve been around, the more you’ve got to know people, the more use you can be.
And it’s true of being a Christian.
The person who’s considering starting out as a follower of Jesus will often look at what’s on offer and wonder if it’s worth it. Stick with it for the long haul and it most definitely is.
Which means that if, like me, you are a follower of Jesus, you need to keep going. The question is how. So many don’t. Most of us could name sports’ stars, musicians, or others in the public eye who once were glad to be known as Christians but now are nowhere. Many of us have friends who are in the same boat. I know of Christian ministers who have abandoned their Christianity. A friend of mine at university decided to follow Christ half way through his first year; by his third year, he’d changed denomination 3 times and then packed the whole thing in.
With so many casualties, we want to be long-haul Christians. At least, I hope you do. The question is how. If so many don’t, how do I make sure that I don’t fall by the wayside?
The letter of Hebrews was written to answer just that question. Here are Christians who were tempted to give up. Here’s a letter to help them keep going. And it’s the theme of the verse we look at this morning.
Over a month, we’re looking at verses 19 to 25. Verses 19 to 21 tell us of the privileges we have as Christians: The way to God is now open because Jesus died, and Jesus now lives as our perfect priest. And there are 3 consequences for us. Verses 22 – let us draw near. Verse 23 – let us hold fast. Verse 24 – let us consider. 3 lettuces.
And today we are looking at verse 23: Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.
We’re Christians. We’re people who’ve made a public confession that we wish to follow Christ. We did it at our baptism. We do it when we recite the creed. “I believe and trust in one God, Father Son and Holy Spirit”. So, he says, let’s hold on tight to this confession, let’s not waver.
Giving up
This verse contains 2 vital perspectives for us to hold onto if we are not to give up. Before we get to those, we need to look a little more at what might make us give up. If we see those, we’ll be in a position to see how these perspectives might help us.
People abandon their Christian faith for all kinds of reasons. But I want to give us 4 of the most common ones.
Reason number 1 is hardships. We all go through some tough times in life, and some people have it worse than others. Illness, bereavement, unemployment, childlessness, depression, and many other trials can come our way. And for some people, holding onto God just becomes too hard during those seasons. Somehow he’s allowed this, which means that walking through life trusting him to take good care of us gets harder and harder, until we give up. Hardships.
Reason number 2 is moral collapse. Some particular lifestyle starts to seem appealing. A relationship we shouldn’t be in. Helping ourselves to something we’re not really entitled to. To start with, we square the circle. We convince ourselves that God doesn’t really mind. But we know he does, and the red flag is when we wouldn’t want our friends at church to know. It’s hard to keep things hidden forever, so eventually we stop coming quite so often, because we start to dread being asked the questions. And finally, we stop coming altogether. It’s a common story. Moral collapse.
Reason number 3 is life’s pressures. A number of friends of mine from school or university days were very keen Christians when I knew them well, but since then life has taken over. Getting a job, the long hours, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a marriage, the children, the homework, the teenage taxi service, the mortgage, the longer holidays, the hobbies we take up in our retirement – they just take over. Until church, and Christ, get squeezed out. Life’s pressures.
Reason number 4 is false teaching. This is partly where the Hebrew Christians were when this letter was written to them. They’d had the pressures of life and they’d had the hardships of persecution. But the icing on the cake was the false teaching. Along come some people who say that the persecutions would lessen, life would be easier, if they followed a Jesus who hadn’t got so many rough edges. For them it was returning to the ceremonies of the Old Testament. That wouldn’t be a great draw to many of us, but there are plenty of false Christs on offer today. You still follow someone called Jesus, you still go to a church, you still find Jesus in the Bible – or at least bits of it – but it’s as if Jesus is made of Plasticine. We’ve remodelled him into something more palatable. He makes fewer demands. But we’ve slipped away from the real Jesus. False teaching.
As I say, people abandon their Christian faith for many reasons besides those, but those 4 are the most common. Hardships. Moral collapse. Life’s pressures. False teaching.
This verse of Hebrews urges us not to do that. To keep going. And we’re given two vital perspectives if we’re going to do that.
Future
The first perspective is that Christianity is all about looking to the future. Look to the future.
As the writer talks about holding onto our faith, he summarises our faith in a surprising way. If you or I were writing this, the chances are we’d urge each other to hold fast the confession of our faith. But he doesn’t. He says the confession of our hope.
When the Bible uses the word hope it doesn’t use it in the same way that we do. We speak of “being hopeful”, meaning that we think there’s a good chance something might happen. We’re a bit optimistic. Or we say something like: “Well you can hope, can’t you?” – which means we’re not very optimistic.
The Bible uses the word hope to speak of the absolutely certain future that God has for his people. When the Bible urges us to have hope, it’s not saying that we should keep our spirits up because things may turn out well. It’s asking us to live in the light of the fact that things certainly will turn out well.
Jesus taught that one day he would come back. He’s in heaven now, and when his friends die, they go to heaven as well. But he won’t stay there forever. One day he will come back and he will bring his followers back with him. The ultimate future for God’s people isn’t in heaven, but on earth. When Jesus comes back to this earth he’ll renew it, transform it into the glorious place it was meant to be.
We’ll be able to enjoy work without pain or tiredness, rest without boredom, food of the best quality and plenty of it, company of friends who never sin to spoil the relationship – and neither do we, and a permanent end to all sickness, sadness and suffering. And the best bit of all will be that Jesus himself will be here with us, right at the centre, and we’ll enjoy it in fellowship with him.
This is the certain future for everybody who knows and trusts Jesus Christ.
So it is that the writer of Hebrews does not just want us to hold onto our faith. He wants us to hold onto our hope. The recipe for giving up is losing hope. The way to keep going is to hold onto our hope.
One of my friends at university had attended the Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore. It is a prestigious school that prides itself in preparing its students to live out their potential. The whole of your time at school is supposed to be a preparation for the rest of life. It is not an end in itself. And so the motto of the school is part of the first line of Robert Browning’s poem: The best is yet to be. The best is yet to be.
That would be a fine motto for any Christian. Because as blessed as we are to be following Christ in this life, the real blessings come when Jesus returns.
The hardships in life may conspire to knock us off course. So we need to hold onto our hope, and not lose sight of the day when Jesus will take away every hardship. We may be tempted by a lifestyle that does not please God, because greater satisfaction is to be found in that relationship or this business endeavour than in following Christ. So we need to hold onto our hope, and not lose sight of the day that any pleasure we have in this life is only for a few decades at most, and is miniscule compared to how good life will be when Jesus comes back.
The pressures of life may weary us and distract us, so we need to hold onto our hope and lift our eyes above the pressures of the current day or month or year. And false teaching may offer us a more palatable Christ, but we need to persevere with the real one precisely because only the real Jesus can bring about the wonderful future that is our certain hope.
And so we must talk of our hope often with one another. We need songs in our services that lift our eyes to the future. When friends share their anxieties with you, please pray for them, please help them where you can, but don’t forget to remind them that it won’t always be like this for the follower of Jesus. The person with a bad back needs regular reminders that one day sickness will end. The person in debt needs reminding that when Jesus returns we will lack nothing. The person who is depressed needs to keep longing for the day when they will have a joy unlike anything on earth now.
That perspective doesn’t magic our problems away. We’re reminding each other of the hope we have for the future, not solving things for today. But if you’re like me, you forget so quickly, that we need reminding of these things.
So let’s encourage each other with the future. More on that next time. But we must keep this perspective: Christianity is about looking to the future.
Faithful God
The other perspective in this verse is that Christianity is about a faithful God. A faithful God.
Have another look at verse 23: Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.
The reason we need to keep hold of God is because he is faithful. He will keep hold of us.
God will keep every promise that he’s ever made. There’s not one that will fail. He is the ultimate dependable one. You don’t get more solid than him.
Which means we can depend on him – we can keep hold of him.
Tomorrow morning I’m expecting to have a parcel collected from home. I wonder if you’ve ever had any frustrating experience with parcel delivery companies. They promise to deliver your parcel between 12 and 2 on Tuesday. You work nearby, so you arrange a slightly longer lunch break, arrive home at noon sharp, and wait until 2pm. 5 to 2 comes, then 2 O’clock, and still nothing. Finally, you have to give up and return to the office. They didn’t keep their promise. So waiting for them was a misplaced use of your time.
If God wasn’t going to keep his promise, waiting for him would be a misplaced use of our time. But God is not like that one bit. He is faithful. So we can wait for him, knowing that he always does exactly as he says.
So we keep hold. We hold onto our hope. We hold onto our hope without wavering. Because he who promised is faithful.
So if life is getting hard and we are tempted to let go of God, we need to remember the reliability of God’s promises. He is the one person we can rely on. If we’re tempted to drift from Christianity into a lifestyle that does not honour God, we need to remind ourselves just how reliable this God is. We’re throwing back into the face of the one person who can truly bring us blessing.
If life is pressured and we’re being driven by a thousand demands, that’s not a time to let go of the one stability that remains in our life. And if false teaching tempts us to follow a more amenable Christ, we need to remember that the real one will always do exactly as he promised. A make-believe one is no use at all.
Christianity is all about a faithful God.
Conclusion
The temptation for all of us is to be people who are driven by the instant. We want everything from coffee to credit instantly available. We no longer wait for an airmail letter to reach Australia; modern technology allows us to communicate instantly.
When we do that with Christianity, the result is disastrous, and it leads to Christians with no staying power. If you’re someone who is still investigating the Christian faith, then assessing it by what it can deliver this instant would mean you miss out on the wonderful things God has promised.
Those of us who follow the Lord Jesus need to keep hold of our hope in him. God is absolutely faithful. So everything he’s promised for the future will surely come about. So let’s not let go of him, and so let go of it: Let’s hold tight – without wavering.