God's Final Word to Humanity  | Hebrews

Hebrews 1:1-3


If you have your Bible with you, I am going to read from the book of Hebrews this morning, Hebrews 1.

There are Bibles in the rows if you don’t have one with you.

And I want to begin a series looking into this book today. I think that Hebrews is one of the richest books in the New Testament.

And its primary purpose and benefit to us is that it builds a bridge from the Old Covenant, recorded in our Old Testament, to the New Covenant inaugurated by the Lord Jesus Christ about which is the theme of our New Testament.

And so, if you want to understand how the Old Testament relates to Christ, this is the book we need to look at and to understand and to read.

I am going to read just the first three verses of Hebrews 1, and then we will talk about some of the key themes that are here.

“In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.”

Now keep your Bible open there.

A man was once given a hearing aid by his doctor but it only seemed to make his hearing worse. So, he went back to visit his doctor who removed the device to check it and immediately when he removed the device, his hearing improved. And they discovered he had put it in the wrong ear.

Now Hebrews warns us about the danger of spiritual deafness. It opens with this theme of the fact that God has spoken in the past, God is speaking in the present in His Son, and then various ways through he stops to remind the people and warn the people about the danger of not hearing.

Hebrews 2:1:

“We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.”

If we are not listening, we are not static, we are going to drift away, he says there.

Hebrews 3:7:

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…”

Because if you are not receptive, you are resistant.

And there are other phrases similar but I am going to look at those two in a little while this morning.

When we become exposed to the truth of God, we either become more responsive and more tender or we become more resistant and harder, but we don’t stay neutral.

Now the book of Hebrews was written to Hebrews – no prizes for working that one out. And of course, the Hebrews were another name for the Jewish people. In fact, the word Hebrew was used before there were any Jews, used of Abraham.

Abraham was not a Jew; Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldeans, which is in today’s Iraq. And he came and of course his descendants became the chosen race named after his grandson Israel. But the Hebrews was an ancient name for them.

Now we don’t know who wrote this book, and therefore it is not relevant to us to speculate because we don’t know if that speculation is valid or not.

But we do know why he wrote it. The early Jewish Christians had some difficulty with aspects of the Gospel because the Gospel, the work of Jesus Christ, claimed to be a fulfillment of Judaism. And yet it seemed to many of them to be denigrating it.

The Jewish believers had been used to an elaborate system, you will remember, that centered on a magnificent temple in Jerusalem that involved a very comprehensive, sacrificial system, that involved a priesthood and weekly and monthly and annual celebrations and numerous rituals. And the life of a Jewish believer who took his faith seriously was built around these buildings, these people, and these ceremonies. And it kept them busy all year.

Now the Gospel of Jesus Christ has swept all these things away. And to the Jew this was a massive downsizing of what they had believed to be the revelation from God. There was no temple now that was valid, central, or even existed by the time this letter was written because it was demolished in 70 A.D. and has never been rebuilt since.

There is no priesthood now. The moment on the cross Jesus said, “It is finished,” and the curtain in the temple dividing the Holy of Holies from the holy place was torn from top to the bottom. A place accessed once a year by a priest, by the High Priest, with blood. That curtain was ripped from top to the bottom. It was a divine act – not from the bottom to the top by some human, but a divine act.

And at that moment every priest was out of a job. At that moment every blood sacrificed had no validity. And so now there was no priesthood, there were no sacrifices, there were no festivals, there were no rituals that were significant. There weren’t even the celebrations; these had been replaced by only one thing, only one thing. They had all been replaced by Christ.

And that was a problem for some of them. All the symbols that had been a necessary part of the Old Covenant were now defunct.

Now circumcision is never mentioned in Hebrews but it was a problem immediately in the early church. You remember in the early part of the book of Acts there were those Jewish believers converted to Jesus Christ who felt that you should not leapfrog over this sign that God had given His people. Every male child at eight days of age was circumcised.

The reason for that was that God had set Abraham apart as the father of many nations. That’s what the name Abraham means – the father of many nations.

And so, God’s purpose through Abraham was to come through fatherhood, generation to generation to generation, until the Seed that He had promised, which was the Messiah, would be born.

And because the promise was all about descendants and about fatherhood, the male sex organ was marked off as sacred to that purpose that the Seed of Abraham would come.

And now that the mission was accomplished, the Seed had come, which was Christ. And as Paul makes clear in Galatians 3, it was not the seeds, not the multiplicity of people, it’s not the Jewish race; it’s the Seed, it’s Christ Himself who was the promise.

And now that that mission is accomplished, the symbol of circumcision was no longer necessary.

And you might remember Paul on his first missionary journey was plagued by what they called Judaizers who followed him around and when Paul had led people to Christ, they came to these new converts and said to them (these were Gentile converts), “You can’t start in the middle with Christ; you have to start at the beginning with circumcision.”

And they began to re-introduce circumcision and it became quite a divisive issue, so much so that in Acts 15, you may remember, they had a council in Jerusalem to discuss the reception of Gentiles into the Christian faith without having to go through circumcision. And they concluded that this was the way they were to move forward.

Circumcision was no longer necessary, and they sent a letter around to all the churches saying that, but adding a proviso, they said, “But abstain from sexual immortality.” This does not mean that sex is no longer sacred, but it no longer is designed to fulfill this purpose of bringing the Seed, the descendant of Abraham, but it is still sacred, so they added that provision.

And actually, it is because of this issue that Paul wrote Galatians because that had been the scene of his missionary journey.

And by the way, I think it is wise to say that every Jew should read Galatians to understand the limitations of Judaism in Christianity, and every Gentile should read Hebrews to discover the riches of Judaism in the history of Christianity.

Well, circumcision is resolved by the book of Hebrews, but other aspects have developed. And this sense of downsizing that the Jewish believers had was something that they were uncomfortable with. Human nature is less comfortable with that. We gravitate towards our rituals and our regulations and our rules so that we can measure that we are getting somewhere.

And that’s why it seems human nature even for believers to come into a living relationship with Christ and before long you are building icons and you are building cathedrals and you are making crosses and you are wearing crucifixes and you are wearing vestments. You have got a hierarchy of people who are further up the ladder than the ordinary Christian.

And when these themselves become important, we are not increasing the message; we are actually decreasing it. We are not protecting it; we are destroying it. And that really is part of the message of this book.

Anything that requires Christ plus something is erroneous because any addition to Christ is by definition a subtraction from Him. Because if you need Christ plus something, you need a plus in the area in which He is deficient.

That’s why our message is Christ Himself in His fullness.

And the writer to the Hebrews says to them that far from downsizing what God required, the New Covenant actually is upsizing, it is better, it is fuller, it is richer, it is more far-reaching, it is more satisfying than the Old Covenant.

And if you read through the book of Hebrews in one sitting, and I was talking to somebody this week who is reading through the New Testament in 30 days, and that is big chunks of it. He said, “You know the remarkable thing is when I read through the big chunks, there are things that reoccur that I have read in isolation before and didn’t know they reoccurred.”

So, there is great value in reading a book through in one sitting and you see something that keeps reoccurring.

If you do that in the book of Hebrews, you will discover that Jesus is better than the prophets of Israel, He is better than the angels of heaven, there is a better rest than the Israelites found in Canaan, there is a better priesthood than Melchizedek (you don’t know him perhaps but we will maybe comment on him later – not today; another day). There is a better priesthood than Melchizedek’s whose priesthood was better than Aaron’s.

There is a better covenant. It is founded on better promises. There is a better law that is written in our hearts, not on tablets of stone. We have a better sacrifice. There is a better mediator between God and man. There is a better remedy for sin – not just forgiveness but cleansing from a guilty conscience that is internal.

We have a better hope of drawing close to God. Those who lived in the Old Testament by faith were all looking for a better country. Those who died were looking for a better resurrection. God had planned something better for us that only, together with us, would they be made perfect.

There is a better new and living way to God and the blood of Jesus is a better word than the blood of Abel.

Now this is all from the book of Hebrews. So far from saying, listen, this is downsizing, you have lost something in all their paraphernalia that belong to Judaism. No, no, no, everything in Judaism is now increased in its value by being replaced with Christ. It is better, better, better, better, better, better, better – I didn’t count how many times, but lots.

Now the better way begins with a better revelation, and so in Hebrews 1:1, he says,

“In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways.”

Well, they all were very familiar with that, of course, the way that God has spoken to them in the past.

“…but now in these last days, He has spoken to us by his Son.”

Now one first thing that we can pick up from that is, of course, that we only know what God has revealed to us. And God is in the business of revealing things to us.

There is a general revelation that Scripture speaks of where God reveals Himself in creation, He reveals Himself in conscience. I mean everybody who has got an eye to see will recognize that.

That’s why all religions do share some things in common. We all see God as Creator, as Almighty, as Eternal, as Transcendent. Every religion will tell you that.

But to observe that, simply by looking at the vast universe and looking at all the wonderful expressions of His handiwork, it doesn’t answer the question that we really want to know.

Is He just? Is He kind? Is He loving? Does He care? May I know Him? Can He actually know me?

Observation is not enough for that; we need revelation. And without revelation we only have speculation and no grounds on which to assume it might be true. Without revelation we know nothing.

I am going to think about something for a moment. Pardon me, but I’m just thinking. Do you know what I am thinking? Anybody have any idea what I might be thinking?

Actually, I was thinking of a gold mine in southern Africa. I went down on one occasion, three thousand feet below the ground – just to think of something obscure.

You have no idea what I am thinking unless I tell you. Now you know exactly what I am thinking – I have just told you.

It tells us in 1 Corinthians 2:11,

“Who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”

We cannot guess the mind of God, we cannot close this book and just speculate, conject what God may be like or what God may be saying. Or we say, “Well if surely God might do this or surely God wouldn’t do that.”

I’ve heard that said about things that God does do. And if they opened the Bible and read it, they would see this is what God is revealing.

Now of course there are lots of things we don’t understand – we know that. And God has not revealed to us everything.

In fact, in Deuteronomy 29:29 it says,

“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever.”

There are secret things that belong to God. Those are none of our business. But there are things He has revealed which belong to us. Those are our business.

And so, the opening of this letter is saying that God has spoken. We are not left to guess and speculate and work out what’s He thinking.

The things we need to know He is thinking, the aspects of His character that we need to know, He has revealed, first through prophets, because we will talk briefly about the nature of this revelation.

First it was through prophets – and a prophet, by the way, is best defined in the book of Exodus as “the mouth of God.”

Moses couldn’t speak. He said, “I am tongue-tied; I can’t speak.”

God said, “Take Aaron with you and you will be as God to Aaron and he will be your prophet. You will put words into his mouth and he will speak for you.”

So that is a great definition of prophecy – God putting words into someone’s mouth and they speak for Him.

And through the Old Testament Scriptures these prophets and those with them, in many and various ways revealed the mind, the purpose, the heart of God to us.

And it was in many and various ways. You read through the Old Testament prophets and they are preaching sometimes, there is poetry that they write sometimes, there are laws that are given to us.

There is drama that enacts truth. Some of it wasn’t easy. Isaiah had to walk around with a bare backside for a while to let the people know, “you are going to be humiliated before the Assyrians.

And Ezekiel; he had to make a little fort, a little model of Jerusalem and then tie himself up or be tied up and lie down on one side for 390 days (that’s more than a year), looking at it, just looking at it.

And people walked by, “Man alive, Ezekiel is still there; what’s he doing? He’s just looking, he’s just looking, he is sending the message this place is in trouble.”

And he had to get up, turn around and lie on his other side for 40 days.

But there was drama by which God revealed His truth to people.

There were events. There were stories. There were people’s lives. Hosea married a woman who went off and committed adultery, in fact became a prostitute. And God said to Hosea, “How are you feeling?”

“I am feeling terrible about this.”

“This is how I feel, Hosea. My people whom I love are committing adultery with other shrines and other gods.”

And their experiences – all these were ways in which God speaks to us through the Old Testament.

But now a new era has dawned. In these last days - by the way, that is a technical term in Scripture for the period between the first coming of Christ, from the ascension of Christ, to the second coming of Christ. They are called the last days.

So, when people say, “Are you living in the last days?” the answer is yes, we have been for 2000 years. It doesn’t mean the last ten weeks before Christ comes back, which is how it is often popularly used. It is a phrase concerning this whole era.

And in these last days, in this last era, God has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed all things and through whom He made the universe.

Now in what ways has God spoken to us by His Son?

I suggest two ways. In His person, the person He was; in His work.

In His person, first of all; in Hebrews 1:3 it says,

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.”

Now when the writer writes that statement that is not about His deity; that is about His humanity. This is what a truly human being was supposed to be - the radiance of God’s glory.

What is sin? How is sin defined in the New Testament?

Roman 3:23:

“All have sinned and come short of the…glory of God.”

That’s what we have come short of.

Now Jesus, as a man, is the radiance of God’s glory. And the thing we have come short of, He now demonstrates and the exact representation of His being, which is exactly as Adam and Eve were created to be in the Garden of Eden, in His image, an exact representation of His being.

In the fall of course, they lost that, they became separated from God. They no longer showed what He is like.

And so now Jesus comes as a human being, the exact representation of God’s being, and the radiance of God’s glory demonstrating what true humanity is designed to be. More than that, what true humanity is going to become in Christ when we come into that union with Christ.

Because Hebrews 2 says that He is bringing many sons to glory, which is not heaven; that is what was portrayed in Jesus – the glory of God.

We are going to heaven, but that isn’t what glory is about; it’s about the moral character of God. And this is why, of course, the goal of the Gospel is Christlikeness. As Paul wrote in Galatians 4:19,

“My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…”

Because the humanity of Christ demonstrated in His person is that which God is going to make us and remake us in, in the process of time.

But Jesus is both humanity and deity mingled together.

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being” (that’s His humanity), “sustaining all things by His powerful word” (that’s His deity).

In Hebrews 1:2, He is the One through whom God made the universe and is appointed heir of all things.

This is not a man now; we are talking about God now, co-equal with the Father.

We haven’t time to talk about the mystery of the Trinity here but certainly if there are any doubts in your mind as to the actual deity of Jesus Christ, it is in these verses, not least actually in Hebrews 1:8 where the Father is speaking to the Son and He says,

“Your Son [throne], O God, will last for ever and ever.”

This is God the Father speaking to God the Son and He says,

“Your throne, O God…”

He calls Him God.

This is a good verse, by the way, when somebody knocks on your door and wants to talk to you about how that Jesus is not co-equal with the Father. Do you get those knocks on the door? Some of them have a Bible that they have twisted this, but this is true to the text that we have.

“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.”

Jesus Christ lived with a dual nature. He was never less than God. As to His identity, as to His being, He was completely and totally God, equal in the Trinity with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Yet although He was never less than God, He lived on earth as though He was never more than man.

He was subject to all the limitations of humanity. When He was a little baby in His manger, He wasn’t thinking with the mind of God and thinking, “Oh those wise men should be here any minute now.”

He grew in knowledge, He grew in stature, He grew in favor with God; He grew in favor with man. He didn’t come in; this was already locked in 100%. He grew because He was a real man.

He was dependent on God His Father because He was a real man. “I Myself can do nothing,” He said on three occasions, “The Father in Me; He does the work,” demonstrating again what true humanity is intended to be, living in dependence upon the Father.

But in His humanity, God speaks to us by demonstrating to us the life that we are called to be and live, and demonstrates His deity, which gives Him the right to do it and to make this possible.

But also, as the perfect man, he speaks about His work in offering a sinless sacrifice because there in Hebrews 1:3,

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.”

He offered purification for sins. That’s a much richer thing than was offered under the Old Covenant – not just cleansing, but purification.

And we are going to see that later in this letter as well. To be made pure is what that means, which is deeper than being purified. It is to be made righteous.

And the fullness of this message strips away all the necessity for the rituals, the symbols, the laws, the sacrifices, the buildings, the priesthood of the Old Covenant because it is better than, it is greater than; in fact, it fulfills it, is the message.

Now an important thing always in Scripture, and certainly here, is this: that revelation must lead to responsibility. When God reveals things that creates with us a responsibility - even if that responsibility is simply to hear, but it is more than that; it is also to appropriate, it is also to obey.

But let me talk about two aspects of the responsibility, the nature of our responsibility in the light of the fact that God has spoken and revealed Himself.

What do I need to do in the light of God’s revelation?

Well Hebrews 2:1, and you will appreciate we have to skip some sections to go through this book because it is rich enough to spend many, many, many weeks in, but in Hebrews 2:1, having talked about this superior revelation that has come to us in the Lord Jesus Christ,

“We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.

“For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore” (or neglect) “such a great salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him.”

Now he says if God has spoken, here’s the first thing you must do: you must pay careful attention to it.

Why? Because if you don’t, you will drift away - so that we do not drift away. And we will neglect, and how shall we escape, he says, later in that verse, if we neglect such a great salvation?

The biggest struggle perhaps for many of us – and I speak for myself as well – is not that we are ignorant of things that God has said, but that we do not appropriate things that God has said, we do not obey things that God has said, we not believe and receive and enjoy things that God has said to us.

Alan Redpath, whose name some of you know, used to say the biggest need for most Christians is not to know more but to do what they already know.

It is possible to be here in a place like this week by week, to be attentive, to be rich mentally in the realm of ideas and thoughts and doctrines and theology and Bible knowledge, but to be poverty stricken in life.

If we do not pay attention to the Word of God, if we neglect the Word of God, the warning is given that “how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?”

That certainly applies to the initial salvation, I’ll say in a moment, but it applies to the ongoing growth in the Lord Jesus Christ. If we neglect what He is saying, we are going to disintegrate spiritually.

To neglect the Word of God is no different in its end consequence than rejecting the Word of God.

If I was sick and went to my doctor and, having explained my symptoms and he having examined them, he then prescribes for me some medicine which he tells me, “Take that twice a day and that will put you right in three months.”

I could say to him, “I am not going to touch your medicine. I don’t believe in putting poison into my system. I am going to go on a natural diet and do this, that and the other and I should be okay. Sorry, but I am not going to do it.”

“Fine.”

I would never do that though. But I might say, “Well, thank you very much. This is the prescription. Thank you. I will go and get it on my way home today.” And I get the bottle of medicine and I take it home and I show it to my wife. “Here’s a bottle of medicine that will fix me in three months.” And I put it on the side, but I never take it.

The neighbor comes over and I say, “Oh this is my medicine sitting over here. Yes, this will fix things in three months.”

“How often do you take it?”

“Well, I’m supposed to take it twice a day, but I don’t take it at all.”

You see, neglecting – you can be here in a church like this and you can be hearing the Word of God week after week. You don’t reject it; you don’t go home and shout about it and complain about it. You just ignore it.

Maybe you are here this morning with no expectation of meeting with God and meeting with His Word. Maybe you are here this morning because it is a habit, maybe even a bad habit.

Maybe you are here because you have always been here, because it is a tradition in which you were reared. Maybe you are here to please your wife, because you know, it makes life easier if you go. But you are totally switched off from anything.

Or you are here to please your husband, or you are here to please a parent or you are here to please a child. Maybe you are here for seemingly better reasons – you enjoy the music, you enjoy the worship, you might even enjoy the preaching.

But out this door you totally ignore it. You go on back home and facing a crisis on Monday morning, you say, “What did we learn from the Word of God that may help me in this situation?”

Your Bible is a closed book; it is not an open book.

And we can be physically present but spiritually absent. There is no growth, there is no progress; there is no trying to work out how do these truths become real in my life? There is no wrestling through this; there is no fruitfulness that is growing in our lives.

The book of Hebrews gives a number of warnings and they are very direct and most of them have to do with hearing. And this is the first one: “we must pay more attention therefore to what we have heard so we will not drift away.”

Why - because we like this kind of thing? No, because of Who is saying it. This is God who is speaking in His Son – we had better take it seriously.

That’s the first nature of our responsibility.

And by the way, let me just say this, that this particular danger is a huge danger for people like me and people in ministry. It is easier to take the Word of God and try to think of how to apply it to other people, not to ourselves.

That’s why those of us who handle the Word of God as a living; it is an incredible privilege but it also has incredible pitfalls. And pastors and missionaries and elders and leaders and Sunday school teachers and youth workers can keep going externally but fall away and wither internally.

Because the great challenge is always what does this mean in my life today, in my circumstance, in facing my issues? How shall we escape if we neglect this? says the writer.

That’s not a threat. He is asking a basic question there – how are you going to escape? It could be, and it’s very likely so, that there are those here this morning who have never been born again of the Holy Spirit. You have never come in humility and said, “Lord Jesus, I realize that I am a sinner and that You died for my sin and I want You to forgive me and cleanse me and come to live within me by Your Holy Spirit.

And you have never been born again, not because you have not been here before and heard it, but because you have ignored it and neglected it. And I challenge you this morning, if you are in that situation, then confess that to God and deal with that and say, “What is it You want me to do? (“What must I do to be saved?” in the words of somebody in the New Testament.)

You repent and receive Him.

But the second and last thing about our responsibility in receiving the Word of God is in Hebrews 3:7:

“So, as the Holy Spirit says: ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”

And then he talks about how they did that in the wilderness, and we will talk a little about that next time, next week.

But he says don’t harden your heart; they did so in the wilderness. And in Hebrews 3:10 he says,

“Their hearts are always going astray,” because God said that of them.

If we do not pay attention, we actually harden our hearts.

The heart that does not pay attention to what God says to us becomes a hardened heart. And a hardened heart becomes a straying heart, speaks of them going astray.

You know when we listen to the Word of God, something happens with our hearts and something happens to our hearts. We are not just engaging in a mental exercise here. Our heart is either softened or it is hardened. It is either kept in line or it goes astray.

That’s why Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:18,

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”

Not “I hope that your mind will be aware of these things,” necessary as that is, but don’t stop there, “I pray,” says Paul “that the eyes of your heart will be opened and enlightened.”

David wrote in Psalm 119:11,

“I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”

Not in my head; in my heart, in the very center of my being. It has been hidden, buried; it’s gone deep.

The sad thing is when we harden our hearts we can get to the point where nothing penetrates, we don’t hear anything anymore.

Many of you remember that Pharaoh in Moses’ day was described as having his heart hardened. There are 14 times it says Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. On eight of those occasions Pharaoh hardens his own heart; on six of them, including the last five, it is God who hardens Pharaoh’s heart.

Why does God harden his heart? Is it because He arbitrarily said, “I am going to give you a hard heart, Pharaoh”?

No, because Pharaoh has already six times hardened his heart, or eight times hardened his heart, and now he has built such resistance, such hardening that every time God speaks to him, it has that instinctive response of only hardening it even more.

Don’t blame God for it though. It is the devil who blinds the minds of unbelievers, we are told.

It is Pharaoh’s hardening of his heart that means every time God ever tries to speak to him, it gets even harder and harder.

Harden it once and it’s still breakable. Harden it twice, harden it three times, four times, five times, six times, and the only time God seemed to break Pharaoh was when it was in his self-interest, when all his kids were dying, the firstborn of every family, including the heir to his throne was dying.

He called Moses in, “Get out of here as fast as you can.”

That was self-interest, and when in a day’s time, he began to think more about it, “I am going away free labor here,” he sent to bring them back.

It wasn’t before God that he was acting; only his self-interest.

And if we do not respond to the Word of God, if we do not take it into our hearts, if we do not allow it to accomplish its end, we will only harden towards Him.

And three good questions, just to finish, to avoid a hardened heart: we say to the Lord Jesus, “What do You want me to know?” What do You want me to know about Yourself, about myself, about my resources in You, about my purpose in life? What do You want me to know? And learn it.

Second question: “What do You want me to receive? Is there some wisdom You want me to receive here? Is there strength? Is there love I need to receive into my own heart? Is there patience, is there kindness? What is it You want me to receive?” Then receive it.

And then thirdly, “What is it You want me to do? Is there an act of obedience that I should engage in here? Is there something I need to do? And as I act in obedience coupled with dependence, you step out to do it, depending upon Him.

Now these are not questions you ask your spouse or your neighbor; they are questions you ask God. “What do You want me to know? What do You want me to receive?” What do You want me to do?”

And this will avoid the neglect of the Word of God and will avoid the hardening of our hearts to the Word of God.

God has spoken to us. We are not – we are not in ignorance. God has spoken to us and His final word is in His Son. It is a better word, it is a fuller word; it is a more complete word than He had ever given before Jesus.

So, pay careful attention to what we have heard, do not neglect it. Beware of the hardening of your heart because your heart will go astray. His voice will get less and less and quieter and quieter until you are deaf to God.

I don’t know how God may have spoken to you or has been speaking to you – this is only one little part of the process of God working in your heart and life.

But if you have been resistant and you have been hard towards God, would you this morning, in a moment of quiet prayer we will just have now, say, “Lord, break the hardness of my heart. Break the detachment of my life from Yourself and Your truth and pour into me Your presence that I too will begin to display something of the glory of God as You live and fill my life.”

Let’s just pray together, have a moment of quiet. And then I am going to pray.

Our God and Father, we thank You so much that You speak to us, You reveal to us. We don’t need to grope around with a million possible ideas and speculate as to which may be more likely.

We can turn to Your written Word and we can turn to the Living Word, the Lord Jesus Himself and allow Your Word to speak our minds, to allow Your Son to mould our hearts. And we pray that You will break any resistance that there is for those who have confessed that to You, who prayed for that.

Lord, I pray that having asked that You will break the hardness of their hearts, I pray that they will have the courage and the discipline to go into Your Word and to read it as a letter from Yourself to them, to receive its truth, to receive its provision for our lives, and to live in enjoyment of it.