We come now back to Hebrews and to the 12th chapter, where Ben read for us a moment ago, and to an interesting part of the text. In fact, we've been, for I guess a month or so, looking at this 12th chapter and thinking about the picture that it gives us of a race that's being run, building on the 11th chapter and the idea of these who have gone before us and have set an example for us. And we saw several things about training and about running. First, that like a competitor, we enter the race, and our desire should simply be to finish the race well. That's just an obvious takeaway that is found throughout the New Testament, but certainly in this passage. We ought to be like those who went before us. We should want to finish with a good testimony. Much of what we've been saying this morning is Richard finished his race with a good testimony, and we praise the Lord for that. As we continue to think about the text, we also see that there is a principle of training and running that we should look to Jesus as the example, the one who took on this flesh, this body, became fully God and fully man and was born under the law and lived a life according to the mission he was given by his father to redeem sinners. He did it all, including bearing sin and shame upon himself, upon Calvary's tree. And the text tells us He did it for the joy set before Him. That He would redeem people to God, to His Father. We would reconcile to Him. And so again we see this idea that we should look unto Jesus as one example. Moses is great. Elijah is great. All these figures are great. But Jesus is the ultimate example that we should look unto, and so we should keep our eyes fixed upon him. And then third, that hardship is a necessary part of training. Now we recognize that any other aspect of our life, if you're going to get better at something, you have to endure hardship. If you're going to be a good student, What must you do? Study hard. We don't say study easy. We say study hard because it means you have to put a lot of hours in and a lot of effort in. If you're going to be a great athlete, we've given that example over and over, you train yourself to do that by going through difficult things. We've talked about Brother Samuel right now going through difficult things in boot camp. prepare him for the role he'll take as a soldier, as a Marine. And so we want to recognize this is a principle that we see in life, that all things in which we develop come through hardship. And our spiritual life is no different. And it tells us that over and over again. God allows us to go through difficulties because through those difficulties he refines us. He makes us stronger. He helps us to learn to trust him more. All these sorts of things that we could find verse after verse in the New Testament to establish and have tried to do that along the way. We recognize that all things require discipline if we are to move forward in them. And so we shouldn't be surprised that that principle holds up in our spiritual walk. Now, since God is our loving Father, and one of the examples that we are given here is of a father chastening or disciplining his son to raise him properly, we don't give our children always the easy route, but the correct one, even though sometimes it's difficult, then we should expect that, first of all, God allows difficulties to come into our lives that He could deliver us from. He could deliver us from them. We know that. He's all-powerful, and yet He chooses not to. And second of all, they are for our good, ultimately. He tells us this. Ultimately, they are for our good. And then there's a second aspect, or a third aspect, I guess I should say, that we should look at. When we err, because He's our Father and He loves us, He chastens us or disciplines us. So sometimes hardships come into our life just by living in this world. And sometimes the Lord allows us to go through difficulties for our training and for our good. And so all this has been given to us, but it's a refutation of the argument of the Hebrew Christians we're dealing with in Hebrews 12 that are thinking if we are Christians, life should be easy. If we give our life to Christ and we are seen to be doing all the things that we should be doing, then everything should just go easy. There should be no bumps in the road. We should have the favor of God in all things and there should be no difficulties. Does this message sound familiar to you? It's what's proclaimed all over the world today in the health and wealth gospel. You're having difficulties? You need to give yourself more fully to God because He wills that nothing bad ever happen. No difficulty ever come to your life. No wave should ever toss you. My friends, we realize that's the opposite of what this text is telling us. If we're His, we will encounter some difficulties, just as our parents allowed us to encounter difficulties, because it's for our good. And so, my friends, as we come to this, we want to see what is the takeaway from all this? What is the believer in hearing all this to make of it? What are we to do? What is the point of this scripture for us? Well, I think we get to it today as the author of Hebrews tries to explain what this means. And so I want to read the text one more time, and I want you to listen carefully because there is an exhortation here to believers. Therefore strengthen the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather be healed. Pursue peace with all people and holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God. Lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble and by this many become defiled. Lest there be any fornicator or profane person like Esau who for one morsel of food sold his birthright. For you know that afterward, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it diligently with tears." As we think about this text today, I want us to look at three points. First of all, the command to strengthen that which is weak. Second of all, to guard that which is vulnerable. And lastly, to regard the example of Esau. And I want to say before we begin our first point, many of you are familiar with this verse or two on Esau and it's, I think we need to think rightly about what this verse is saying to us in the context of the passage so we'll understand it rightly. So we'll come to that in our third point. But beginning first of all with our first point, to strengthen that which is weak, this text immediately is practical. Immediately, it's telling us some things that we want to know. If we want to run our race well, we have to train. We've established that. We recognize that. But what can an athlete do, if that's the picture we're using, to improve his abilities, to improve his ability to run the race? Well, maybe different trainers take different approaches, but one major approach that we always take is to look to what our weaknesses are and strengthen them. If you've got a guy who's a great shooter in basketball and a terrible defender, you say, we can put a lot of hours into working on your shot to bring it up maybe a percent or two. And that's good, but the time might be better spent working on defense, making you a better defender, because that's where you really lack. You might have a coach who tells you, listen, you're great at driving the golf ball. It's probably because you enjoy doing that. But your chipping game and your putting game are terrible. And you're never going to advance in this sport until you work on those things. There are many applications that we can think of. But this is something that we note. If we have an employee who is deficient in one area of his job that he needs to do, we try to get him extra training. Maybe send him to some workshop or get some material or have another employee work with him closely to train him how to do that part of his job better. If a student is falling behind in one area, we might get them tutoring or might give extra resources, whatever it may be, to try to bring that area up because we recognize that it's important to bring up our weaknesses. And when you look at this text, it's building on that principle and we're seeing it very explicitly because immediately there's a call to train and to look for the weaknesses. Well, what are the weaknesses that are given to us in this text? Well, notice immediately off the bat it talks about a couple of things in the picture of a runner. First of all, strengthen the hands or the arms which hang down. Now, I don't know how many races, how many marathons or sprints you've watched, but you very rarely see anybody running with their arms straight down beside them. It would kind of look ridiculous for one thing, but there's a reason for that. What is it? A runner is in a cadence. And their arms are part of keeping that cadence. It's more inefficient. You think, well, I'll save energy by not swinging my arms. No, you'll cause yourself to use more energy to stay stable as you run. Your arms are a very important part of steadiness in the gait of a runner. And so we recognize that if your arms have gotten to where they're too tired and you're having to drop them to the sides because either your shoulders are burning or you just don't have the energy, this might tell us something that you need to do. You need to strengthen your arms. You need to increase your endurance. Notice the other thing that's given to us here. It's about the knees. It says the knees have become feeble. Now, it's interesting that word is paraluo. It's where we get the idea of paralyzed. So the knees are not functioning the way you want them to. In this case, it really just means they're unstable. They're out of control. You're not able to control your knees as you're running. Your knees are wobbling to and fro, side to side. Well, that's a recipe for injury, isn't it? If your knees lose stability while you're running. In fact, you can say in any athletic endeavor, when your joints lose stability, that's when injury happens. That's when injury happens. So again, this is a very practical explanation, a very practical example given to us. You're in danger of this going very badly, of not finishing the race, of getting tired. of wearing yourself out or of injuring yourself. In fact, when you look at the prescription, the very next thing that it says is you should not only strengthen your arms and not only gird up your knees or steady your knees, but you should make straight the course you're running. Did you notice that it said that? It says here again, and make straight paths for your feet so that what is lame may not be dislocated. I said joint injuries. I mean, it's giving you that explicitly there. If you're running and your legs are wobbly and now you're running off road and you hit a pothole or you hit a divot in the ground, you might dislocate your ankle. You might mess up your knee, tear an ACL or some sort of ligament. You're not going to finish the race. This is the thing that the author is saying. You will not finish your race. If the idea is to finish well, this is how you will not finish well. You haven't trained properly. It's like in many sports where you might say, listen, I'm the strongest guy in my class. Who can beat me in a wrestling match? Like, but your endurance is terrible. All he's got to do is stay away from you for a couple of minutes, and you're going to be on the ground panting anyway, and he'll easily score on you. You need to increase your endurance. Well, in this case, you need to increase your arm strength. You need to increase your stability of your knees. You need to be careful. And if you realize you have these weaknesses, the author is saying, you need to be extremely careful what you do now. You need to be very careful to run straight and to run carefully so that you don't tear something up and fail to finish the race. Now that's a racing analogy, of course, but this has a spiritual point, doesn't it? What's at the heart of all of these problems? Well, they're weak in their faith. goes back to the end of chapter 10 where he's saying, you haven't understood that all these things given to you in the Old Testament were pointing to Christ. You should look to Christ, believe in Christ, put your faith in Christ, and never fail to look to Christ. Never look to yourself, never look to the law, don't think Moses is your savior. Christ Jesus is the one whom God sent to save sinners. What you really need is the faith of Abraham and of Isaac and of all those we looked at in chapter 11. And now as you enter to your race, again, you need faith. But you're weak in the faith and you're in danger of not finishing. You're in danger of some sort of spiritual injury that will keep you from finishing the race. Now we know what it is. It's leaving the church to go back to Moses and the law. And the author says, this is equivalent to apostasy, and you will not finish well the race. And so again, he's telling them there, you must run in faith and train in this faith, and you must be diligent in the faith. Because if you're careful, then that which is lame, rather than being dislocated and ending in disaster, what can happen? Well, it says here, will be healed, rather be healed. You know, if you are weight training and you get an injury, you're out there bench pressing, and one of the bench presses, you hear something ripping your shoulder, and the next day you've got a big bloody bruise all across your chest and down your bicep, it's probably not a good idea to try to set up PR the next day. You might want to take a little bit of time off, maybe go have it looked at. We realize we need to be careful because now we can really injure something. And the author is using that as the thing to say here, be careful. Be careful how you run, be careful where you run, be diligent, be careful, be cautious, and all these things because you're in danger. You're in danger right now of something happening to you where you will not finish the race. One of the problems with working through a text as long as we have been in Hebrews is we can begin to lose the force for the trees. If we just gathered on a Sunday night and read this letter straight through, we would remember back in the earlier chapters that he was talking about a whole generation of people who were running a race and didn't finish. A generation of the wilderness who did not believe the promise of God and never entered the promised land. And building upon that, he says, this is you now. You're in danger of never finishing the race and receiving the glorious prize that comes with it. It's a danger right now that will be revealed that you never walked by faith, you were never amongst Christ's people and your falling away gave evidence to that because you didn't trust Him in the end. And so what you need to do is to expect difficulty in the Christian walk and with the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit, guard your walk and deal with your weaknesses and keep your eyes upon Jesus walking by faith. Now if the first point then is there's something you need to do in regards to your own walk by the power of the Spirit in terms of sanctification, we would also recognize that there's a second point in this text that's more related to one another. I have a responsibility for my own walk, no question about that. But this tells me I have a responsibility for your walk and you all have a responsibility for my walk and for each other's walk. When you look at this, you see this immediately that we don't run this race alone. We might think in some ways, because of the Olympics upcoming and the imagery of a race, that every racer in there is for himself. I don't know, we don't probably have a lot of examples in sports where we can think of team efforts. If you're a race car fan, you know sometimes race cars will work together, a team will work together to help one of the cars achieve victory. There are some things like that. In this case, as God's people, we are all on this journey together, working together, loving one another in a place called the church. We are part of a called out people called to live life together and to support one another and to have accountability to one another. Why do we say that church membership is important? For this reason. I need people kind of willing to tell me sometimes, hey, Rick, you're on the wrong track here. You know, that's not easy to do. Can we just say that? That's not easy to do. It takes a lot of love to do that because the easier thing is to say, hey, listen, not my business. Not my business. We're not talking about being a busybody here. We're talking about loving one another. In our own families sometimes, we say things to one another that we might not be as comfortable saying to somebody outside of our family because we love our family members and we're guarding them. Hey, you need to be careful here. Or hey, my gut doesn't like this situation that you're in or whatever it may be. If we're truly a family in Christ in a congregation, we ought to love each other that much as well. Hey, listen, just a little concerned about something. If it's coming from a loving place, then we shouldn't take it wrongly. And I know that you can have bad experiences from time to time where maybe it isn't done in love, but it should be done in love. Our motivation should be in love. We see this in the verses that call for us to pursue peace and pursue holiness. they're clearly presented in a community context. It says, pursue peace with all people and holiness without which no one will see God, looking carefully lest anyone fall short. We're watching out for each other. In fact, that word in the Greeks is more like guarding. I mean, it means looking out for one another, but the idea of being on guard, standing guard for each other, watching for each other, watching carefully for each other, lest anyone fall short. You know, it should be one of the worst things we can imagine, a brother or sister in this church slipping away from their walk with Christ. That ought to be something that would be like almost the worst thing imaginable. You know, we hate to lose a brother in Christ. We've been talking about that this morning, and in a very earthly sense, we're going to miss Richard greatly. But it's not the worst thing, right? He's gone to be with the Lord. He wouldn't want to be back here with us this morning. He's in the ultimate place of worship and in the presence of the Lord. And so my friends, we recognize that we ought to be guarding each other, watching out for one another, loving one another, caring about one another, lest anyone fall short. If we see anybody's knees bobbling, We ought to be saying to them, hey, maybe you need to be careful here. Maybe you need to watch out. Maybe you need to have a more steady gate and maybe get on more steady ground. Whatever that would look like in the spiritual example we would get to, we ought to care enough to do that. And we ought to remember also that our pursuance of holiness while in honor of God and while certainly we're commanded to be holy as God is holy and to understand that as a people being sanctified by the Spirit, there is a call to holiness. It's not just for our benefit. Oftentimes we think about caring about holiness as something that I'm doing, but actually it's something we're doing. And actually my misstep in a lane of holiness can cause other people to stumble more than I do. I can come in here with some crude joke or talking about some scene in a movie that I saw that was inappropriate, and maybe it only causes me to stumble a little bit, but maybe that causes someone else to stumble greatly. Or I recommend something that I shouldn't have recommended to them, and they have more of an issue with it than I do. We don't often think about those things, but our responsibilities are to each other, to love one another and protect each other and guard each other. And so there is a call here to watch one another and to love one another and to care about one another that none of us would fall, would stumble, would fall short of the promise. Now, as we've said along the way, that would give evidence that they were never Christ. And that should be heartbreaking to think about being around brothers and sisters and say somebody passed away and you say, well, I just don't know. I don't know about them. We should know about one another. We should love one another. One of the things that I love about Richard was he was telling us in Sunday school one day about, you know, at his work, he's retired from working for the power board, but he had a part-time job just to stay active. And he said, oh, everybody at work knows I'm a Christian. He's like, if you're going to be around me, you're going to hear about what I believe. And praise the Lord for that. Praise the Lord for that. He was one who was out giving his testimony and always willing to talk about Christ and the gospel. But if you see here again, the point, the fear here is of apostasy, of stumbling and not making it to the finish line and not being a part of the people of God and seeing the end of the race and running it well. We can see that our author speaks of that very thing. If you look at verse 15, he says, looking carefully, lest anyone fall short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble. Any root of bitterness cause trouble. That's a direct reference to Deuteronomy 29.18. Here's what it says there. I make this covenant and this oath, not with you alone, but with him who stands here with us today before the Lord, our God, as well as him who is not here with us. For you know that we dwelt in the land of Egypt and that we came through the nations which you passed by. And you saw their abominations and their idols, which were among them wood and stone and silver and gold, so that they may not be among you, any man or woman or family or tribe. whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of the nations, that there may not be among you a root bearing bitterness or wormwood. And so it may not happen when he hears the words of this curse that he blesses himself in his heart saying, I shall have peace even though I follow the dictates of my own heart, as though the drunkard could be included with the sober." Now, what's Moses getting at here? It's a warning against idolatry. It's a warning against turning away from the covenantal beliefs of Israel toward the beliefs of the nations. Now this is a really complicated thing because the author is using this to say if you turn away from the gospel back to the law, you're doing the same thing, the exact same thing. He says here that what you've done is introduced a root of bitterness. And what will that root of bitterness do? It will not only cause trouble, but by this many become defiled. in preaching this gospel of works, if you will, that's no gospel at all, or a turn, if you will, to Moses and the law as a means of justification before God, you undercut and corrupt the entire message of the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation. You preach a false gospel. You don't have to wonder if I'm interpreting that right. That's what Paul says in Galatians, that the Judaizers are preaching a gospel which is no gospel at all. It's a message of hope, which has no hope at all. Because all it does is reduce us to having to earn our own salvation, which is impossible. And so he says, if you leave the track and go off-road and go over toward the law, you will stumble and fall and you will not make the finish line. You will fall short of the prize. You will not have run your race well. And my friends, realize that you think that you're just playing with it at the peripheries, you're just over here, maybe I'll go back, maybe I won't, let me think about it, and you're causing your brothers to stumble. Because they say, even Pastor Rick's talking about going back to the synagogue. He wouldn't do it if it wasn't okay. He's saying, apparently we can be justified by the law. And Paul says an anathema is to be declared against anyone who says such things. So my friend, do you understand the heaviness of this warning here? There is a serious warning given in this text to say, listen, this is going to cause your knees to buckle and blow out and you will fall flat on your face. Now, if we didn't understand that that was the clear message here, he goes to an example. Now you see here in verse 16 he says, Now I said a moment ago we want to deal with this rightly. on several fronts because the author of Hebrews knows he's talking to Jewish Christians who grew up hearing the story that he's talking about and referencing a thousand times. They knew it like the back of their hand. And so he didn't have to go into the kind of depth that maybe we need to sometimes because we missed the point he's making. And you can come out and maybe not have a good grasp on what's being said here. What we need to recognize immediately is that Esau is the elder son of the patriarch Isaac. They're twins, but he was the elder, the firstborn of those. Esau was. And Jacob comes second. And that would mean in Jewish culture that Esau is the heir. He is the one that has the birthright. And whatever you would expect to happen will happen through Esau. But we know before they were ever born that God declared sovereignly that it would not be that way. that there were two nations at war in their mother's stomach, in their mother's womb, and that the older would serve the younger. God declared it before any of these things came to pass. We can go to Romans 9 and see God declared much more even before any of these events took place. But what we want to recognize here for a moment is He was, what would seem like at least in terms of Jewish culture, He was the one who should have been the heir. Now we know God had declared from the beginning that the promise would not go through Esau but through Jacob. That's irrefutable. It will be through Jacob. God has declared it. God has set Jacob apart for that mission, that cause. It will be through Jacob. We're not saying anything that happens in this story is what made God decide, oh wait, I can't use Esau. God had declared it beforehand. But just because we see that God has sovereignty and He declares it, doesn't mean we can't also see the kind of person Esau is. Esau is not a godly man, and that's what this text wants us to recognize. As you look at this, you know that there was an account in Genesis where Esau goes out hunting in the fields. He comes back empty-handed. He comes back hungry. And like anybody dramatic, it's not just, I'm really, really hungry. It's like, I'm going to die if I don't eat. Now, maybe he felt he was near death. I don't know. But we've seen people that anytime they're hungry, they're, I'm going to die if I don't eat something, right? And so he comes back and he's like, I'm famished. I'm going to die. And Jacob, seeing an opportunity, And having a bowl of stew there that Esau smells and thinks, this is the greatest smelling thing I've ever smelt, says, give me some of that stew. And Jacob, seeing an opportunity, says, okay, trade me your birthright. I'll give it to you, but you trade me your birthright. Now immediately we see something. If we even think it's possible that Esau would do that, that means what? He doesn't value his birthright very highly. And Jacob, who probably is hungry too, or he would not have been making stew, by contrast we see as someone who, no matter how hungry he is, he values that birthright that's not his. And so he says, give me the birthright and I'll give you the stew. And Esau says, sure, let's do that. Now the Bible says Esau despised his birthright. He hated it. He didn't value it. He thought it was a worthless thing to be traded for a bowl of stew. Think about that for a moment. Now the thing that this text is playing on is, a short time later, we come to Genesis 27, and there's events there. It's time to bestow the blessing upon the eldest son. And you'll remember that he says to Esau, go get my favorite game, prepare it, bring it to me, feed me what I love to eat and then I'll bless you. And Esau's mom hears this and says, Jacob, this is your blessing. Come and I'll prepare this meat for you and you'll go and you'll get it. And of course, we know the whole story. He'll know it's not me, Esau. I don't have hairy arms. And so they, you know, all the things that happen here that if we go through all of it will take us quite a bit of time. They deceive his father, and he gets the blessing. And when Esau comes after the blessing's already been given, he says, here, father, here's the food that I've prepared for you. Eat and bless me. And Jacob says, who is this? Excuse me, Isaac says, who is this? And he says, it's Esau. And immediately, everybody knows what's happened, right? Someone else has come and taken your blessing, son. Now the reason I want to go through all of that for a moment is some people will say what's happening in this text is it's telling us Esau desired to spiritually repent before God and it wasn't possible. But that isn't at all what the text is telling us. It's asking us to go back to Genesis 27 and read the events that happened there in which in Genesis 27 he begs his father, can't you still bless me father? Can't you still give me the blessing? And his father says, no, it's been given away. It's been given to another. You cannot receive it. He gives him a different blessing, but he can't receive the blessing. The blessing. And what does it say? And Esau wept bitterly. Bitterly. Now, the word used here in Hebrews 12 for repentance is metanoia. That's the main word used for repentance. It means to change your mind or to want something different. What did Esau want different? He wanted his brother not to get the blessing and him to get the blessing. It wasn't that he suddenly valued his birthright. He just was thinking, I wish I hadn't given it away now. That's what he wished he could do was repent and change that. Not because he now valued the covenant promises of God or he loved God or he somehow wanted to honor God. No, it's all about his position. He wanted the goods now and he couldn't have them. And if you look at it, it's clearly what he says. For you know that afterwards, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected. He could not inherit it. Why? Though he sought it diligently with tears. I think I skipped over it there, didn't I? Sorry. But he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it diligently with tears. He couldn't get it changed. He couldn't rework it to where he could now receive the blessing, because it was too late. And no matter how much he bitterly wept, he couldn't change it at this point. Now I ask you, why is the author of Hebrews going there? Esau didn't care about the covenant that was before him. He showed he didn't care about it because he threw it away for nothing except a little bit of temporal comfort. And then when he realized what he had lost, he wept bitterly, but it was too late. This is an eschatological message to these Hebrew Christians. If you throw away the covenant that's before you, if you say, yeah, I hear everything you have to say about Jesus, I understand the gospel, I understand everything you're saying, but you know what? It's not safe there. I'm going back to synagogue and to the law and to Moses. There'll come a day where you'll realize the extent of your error, but it will be too late. It'll be too late. My friends, heed the warning now. Gird your knees. Watch where you're running. Watch how you run. Strengthen your arms. Run carefully while there's yet time. Realizing that the covenant that Christ is offering in His own blood is the one we need. Moses cannot save, Sinai cannot save, Christ alone saves. If you realize that, brothers and sisters, run carefully with your eyes upon Christ. Finish the race well for the glory of Christ. Anything that you might endure for the time, our temporary light afflictions, as Paul says, it will give way, must give way to an eternal weight of glory. That's true. You know, I've been thinking about Richard a lot the last couple of days as I was kind of finishing up where I wanted to go with this. And all that kind of took us all by surprise, of course. And a little bit sad, selfishly, thinking about what we lost in our Sunday school class and just some conversations that I've loved to have with him over the last few years. And if he were here this morning, he'd be like, Pastor, you know the Bible says that none of us are promised endless days. There will be a time that we have to give an account and we need to be ready whenever that would come. And I think the author of Hebrews is warning about false gospels, about false hopes, about trusting in your own goodness and your own works. and not realizing that our only hope is in Jesus Christ. So trying to honor the gospel this morning, I just want you to think about that. Brother Richard was here last Sunday. He's here every Sunday. He's not here today. He's with the Lord. But it's a reminder that none of us are promised tomorrow and that we need to know that we are right with God by believing the gospel of Jesus Christ, that what we sinners could not do, Christ did for us on Calvary's cross. and that by putting our faith in Him, we are joined to Him and we stand in His righteousness before God. My friends, there's nothing more important that I can say today than that.