The pull to quit is very natural. Everyone of us has had to learn not to give up when the task before us becomes difficult or dangerous or just plain pointless. We’d rather just walk away and just do something else more productive… or maybe just pain-free! It’s parents… teachers… coaches… and mentors… that stick their nose in our faces… and tell us… “DON’T quit!” “DON’T give up!” “KEEP going!”. This December… in the throws of the hardest, most intensely painful parts of full-blown labor… my wife locked eyes just inches from my face and confessed… “Jeff, I just can’t DO this anymore!” At that point… it’s hard to find the words to say… “Honey, despite everything in you WANTING to quit… You just can’t!”

And still… we all do quit. We measure the cost and risk against the benefits and conclude – right or wrong – that continuing on is just not worth it. All of us have done it. We’ve dropped out of a class… we’ve resigned from a job… we’ve quit working out… …some of us… have quit our marriage… we’ve given up on our kids… or on our parents… or a close friend…

AND I’m not saying that all quitting is BAD! In fact, there are times WE OUGHT to quit! If drinking alcohol shapes your life… YOU OUGHT TO QUIT! If smoking or shopping or foul language or overeating takes over your life… QUITTING IS A REALLY GOOD IDEA! But if you tend to quit every time anything becomes difficult… then you ought to QUIT QUITTING! (It can get complex and confusing at this point). Not all quitting is bad, but some quitting… is horrible!

Like… what happens… when we quit on God? Don’t tell me that it doesn’t happen. Often times when a person walks out on God, especially in the church, we label them. We say, “Oh, I know, they quit God and it just indicates that they never did get it! THEY QUIT! They just never really were there!” We all know people who for one reason or another who has walked away! They were angry. They were disillusioned. Moral erosion wore away at their convictions unbeknownst to us until at some point they just imploded and they vanished and we wonder… “What ever happened to so-and-so?”

Some disguise quitting by saying they are going to attend at another church! But… they just never get around to doing it! They just… fall off the face of the earth. Some whisper to themselves, “Well, you know I really haven’t given up on GOD! I’ve only given up on… Christians!” or “on… church!” or “on… those hypocritical people WHO GO TO CHURCH!” I’ve heard people say, “You know I was a Christian, but now no longer!” “I once believed in God, but I was wrong!” THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HEBREWS IS ABOUT! It’s a letter about quitting! About quitting OBEYING! About quitting BELIEVING! About quitting the FELLOWSHIP OF CHRISTIANS! About quitting PRAYING! About… for all intents and purposes… about quitting GOD!

About now you should be thinking a couple things. 1) What happens when I DO give up on God? And, more importantly to me, 2) How can I make sure that I never do? Let me just introduce you to the book. First, the author. Who wrote it? The answer is: “We have no clue!” Pretty much all of the letters of the New Testament start with introducing the author. Peter. Paul. James. All announce their writing with their authorship in black and white in the beginning. But Hebrews begins like this: 1In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2but in these last days he has… Wait a minute… who are you? Who’s writing this? And the answer is, we don’t know! People have debated authorship. People argue Paul, Peter, Barnabas, Silas, Luke, Phillip. But nobody really has a clue. But we DO KNOW quit a bit about the author. Like 1) he was a powerful and eloquent speaker! 2) His mind was absolutely saturated with scriptures. Though no one owned a copy of the Hebrew Old Testament, THIS GUY had an AMAZING ARSENAL of it memorized! AND his GRASP of it in how it all fits together and forms an unshakable foundation for an UNQUITTABLE faith is nothing short of breathtaking! 3) He was clearly very educated. He uses the BEST Greek with the LARGEST vocabulary of ANY of the New Testament writers. You don’t have to be educated for God to use you… but if you are… it isn’t a liability. And 4) He was PASSIONATE about Christ and showed the deepest kind of pastoral concern for people’s spiritual journey. His heart BREAKS for these people he’s writing to… for the fact that they are suffering and tempted to throw in the towel… And THROUGH THIS BOOK you’ll hear him kneel down nose to nose with you… and PLEAD… NOT TO give up the fight! (my guess: Apollos Acts 18:24-28)

Well, that’s the writer, but who was this writer writing to? Well in chapter 13:24 it just hints that the people with the writer who are from Italy say, “hi”. 1) So, they were Italian. And, they must have also been very Jewish. What the writer expected them to know from Jewish culture makes it fairly certain. 2) They were clearly under fire. 10:32 32Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. 33Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated. 34You sympathized with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions. What the writer is referring to is the expulsion of Jews and Jewish Christians from Rome in AD 59. The emperor at that time named Clauduis had gotten just fed up with Christianity and Christians altogether and he said, “Okay, that’s enough. Everybody out! No Christians in Rome! Get out of the city!” And those people who had been there… left with a few possessions… and if they owned property… it was seized by the state… And if they asked, “Hey, what do we do? Where do we go?” Claudius pretty much said, “Mmmmm… Don’t know… don’t care!” And this wasn’t an isolated event! Over the next five years they began to smell persecution in the air. SOMETHING ELSE WAS LOOMING ON THE HORIZON. A man by the name of Nero was ascending to the throne. He was not only wicked… He was insane! The stuff he did to Christians… I can hardly describe… I could probably tell you… and I will… but not today. It’ll turn your stomach.

And 3) They were wavering in their faith. Look at 12:3 3Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Apparently… the Jewish Christians HAD been experiencing opposition up to this point… and THEY WERE growing weary… and THEY WERE on the verge of losing heart. And so he says something quite profound, verse 4 4In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. He says, “Look, you’ve had persecution hit you in the face… HARD… but to this point… NOBODY’S DIED… yet! You’ve lost property… you’ve been severely hated… and slandered… you’ve been expelled. Okay… but you haven’t DIED… yet.” Implying… you may have to be prepared… And by 65 AD… they DID DIE! BRUTAL DEATHS! And in LARGE NUMBERS. It’s clear that not just a few were very tempted to revert to some form of belief system that would allow them to blend back in. “I mean, is this Messiah thing really certain?” “Maybe we should just bag the whole thing and call it a day.” The persecution… rejection… losing of possessions… being disowned from family… all began to wear on them over time… and at some point… some of them were saying, “I don’t know if I want to DO THIS any longer!”

Okay, so, what makes the letter unique? 1) First, it’s a sermon. 13:22 22Brothers, I urge you to bear with my word of exhortation, (my message of encouragement) for I have written you only a short letter. In other words, he’s calling this document a “word of exhortation.” We would say, “It’s a sermon. It’s a message intended to inspire!” So what we have here… in the book of Hebrews… is unlike anything else in the New Testament (except maybe the Gospel of Mark which may be a compilation of Peter’s sermons). Hebrews is a transcript of one of the earliest Christian sermons (10 pages in my format). 2) It’s peppered with OT quotes. 39 direct quotations from the OT, about 40 allusions indirectly to the OT, 19 summaries of OT events, and 13 mentions of an OT name or a topic. If you ever wanted to know how Christians ingrained the OT as the foundation to their entire religious thinking… Hebrews… would tell you. 3) It engages us with all sorts of questions and urgings. 18 times he engages his audience with questions. (1:5, 13, 14; 2:3; 3:16ff) His point is he’s using questions to provoke their thinking to drive home a truth. He’s saying, “People THINK!” And in addition to nearly three dozen commands in the letter, 13 times… he URGES people with this form of an urging… He says, “LET US DO SOMETHING!” He doesn’t say, “Just do this!” He says, “LET US DO THIS THING TOGETHER!” It’s a very soft, but persuasive way of saying, “LET’S DO THIS! FOLLOW ME! I’ll HELP YOU! LET’S DO THIS! YOU AND ME! TOGETHER!”

So what do I need to know? Have you ever tried to read the OT and go through Genesis and about then… it all starts just getting weird? It begins to all make absolutely NO SENSE AT ALL! I mean, all of a sudden you have guys wearing jeweled bathrobes and head-coverings… a big building with courtyards all around it and levels of access granted to certain people in certain areas at certain times of year… you have this perpetual barbecue going on on the side with various kinds of animals being slaughtered… blood being drained into pans… people flicking it all over… “HOLY COW? Who in the world thought this whole drama up? What does it mean?” If you’re like everybody else… you know little to nothing about what all that meant… And to understand Hebrews… 1) you’re going to have to take a stab… at learning some.

It is short-sighted to think… that the whole OT rigmarole… was for another culture and another time… and has nothing to say… to 21^st century people trying to find their way to God… NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH.

For example… GOD IS UNAPPROACHABLY HOLY! This is a message… our culture… has never learned! In the OT… that message is made ABSOLUTELY CLEAR! When the writer of Hebrews says, “Our God is a consuming fire!” The point isn’t, you know, “We light our cigarette with God!” Or that when candles are lit… God shows up.” The whole point of saying that is… it is a very POWERFUL figure of speech… to clue us in… that there is something about God… and His holiness… and his glory… that’s like watching… a raging fire… out of control…… I think we’ve missed that!

……God is UNAPPROACHABLY HOLY! And the whole OT sacrificial system… that Hebrews assumes you know… taught man… that you DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT APPROACHING GOD… on your own terms. You know we take for granted our approachability before God. We think we can pretty much say anything we want anytime we wish to God. “Today, God, I’ve got a list of things going on in my life. I’d like you to look them over. See what you can do about them.” “I’m not real happy with these things that are going on in the world today. Maybe you could change a few of them.” But the average Jew… never thought so recklessly.

In our culture today… if we sin… we typically just consider it a social hiccough… we might have to point out to a few people that we were out of line… we put a moral band-aid on it… and move on. But that’s not how a Jew looked at it! If you attempted to approach God on your terms… carelessly… dealing casually with sin in your life… JEWS KNEW FULL WELL… that kind of flippant attitude in approaching God would spell spiritual disaster for you! JEWS KNEW… if you EVER… ATTEMPT… to approach God… HE… WILL… show Himself to be Holy! It’s a mindset… that made their NEED FOR A SAVIOR… iron-clad! God WAS HOLY… and to FAIL TO RECOGNIZE THAT… justly WARRANTED judgment!

THAT’S WHY… when the SAVIOR CAME… Jews left and right embraced JESUS… It just made perfect sense! They knew CLEARLY… THEY NEEDED a Savior! The problem with so many people today… is that WE don’t have that background! We BARELY begin with any concept of GOD at all! We don’t know what He’s LIKE… We don’t know what WE are like… We INVENT understandings based on what SOUNDS good. We have no BASIS or EXAMPLE to answer questions like, 1) “Who is God?” 2) “What is He like?” 3) “What does He want?” 4) “Doesn’t He just want me to be happy?” And so, what Hebrews does for us is just make the whole foundation… FIRM! SO we can understand more about God… and ourselves… and Jesus. It answers a number of questions for us. 5) “How can I have access to… and a relationship with… the LIVING God?” 6) “How can I make sure I’m not inventing Him the way I want Him to be?” 7) “Are there alternative ways to God other than Jesus?” “And what will keep me moving forward in my faith when it gets really hard to do so?” 9) “How do I know… I won’t just cash in my chips… and go home?” 10) “When my convictions… fall under the assault… that threatens to shake me loose from them… what will keep me… from just letting go?” 11) “Why not take the path of least resistance?” Good questions… Hebrews will answer.

The summary question… the question that pervades almost every page is this. “How can I be sure that I won’t give up on God?” I don’t have any problem in the world about answering the question, “How can I be sure God won’t give up on me?” That one is easy! …The question that I’m worried about… and if you’re thinking… you’re worried about too… “How do I make sure I don’t give up on Him?”

1) by understanding who Jesus is. The answer to that question… Is spelled out in Hebrews… by introducing you to… by far… the best description of who Jesus is… what He has done… what He represents… and what it all means to you… than you could possibly find anywhere else in Scripture. The writer understands that you’ll more likely give up on your faith… if your convictions aren’t solid… and you have no clue… who Jesus really is. If you’re mushy in your picture of Jesus… you’ll be soft when your convictions come under assault.

And it’s more than just KNOWING the right things… and HAVING the right convictions… The second answer in Hebrews to the question… “How can I be sure I won’t give up on God?” …has to do… with 2) being diligent to grow in Christ spiritually… Chances are… if you settle for superficial… if you’re a lazy learner… and you take on the loafer’s version of the Christian life… if you think spiritual growth happens by osmosis… YOU WON’T GROW! And chances are… when your faith comes under fire… you’ll be VERY TEMPTED… to quit God.

The last answer to the question, has to do with with 3) connecting with other believers… or how closely we determine to shoulder the coming trials… and carry them… together. A person who WALKS AWAY from the fellowship of believers… and no longer receives encouragement through relationships with other believers… is likely… to walk away from their faith! I’m not just saying… go to church… I’m saying… you MUST FOSTER DEEP, MEANINGFUL, POWERFUL relationships with people who will encourage you to face the trials that are coming… And throughout this book you’ll hear the writer… deeply passionate and overwhelmed with concern… kneel down and look you in the eye… and tell you… “Don’t give up!” “Don’t quit!” “We’ll do this together!” (Sam/Frodo)

So, will I ever give up on God? The answer… is this. “If you have a clear picture of Jesus… and you allow Him to work in your life… if you embrace growth in Him and act out what you know… and you connect deeply with other people… YOU WILL NEVER GIVE UP ON GOD!” It just won’t happen. Hebrews will teach you… what it takes… to NEVER quit on God.

1. Awe, the Lord of the Rings had to come into these blogs at some time Great post Jeff, all true.

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