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in Hebrews chapter 2. Lord, thank you for today. Thank you for an opportunity to unpack your holy word. Lord, what an opportunity to just immerse ourselves in so many reminders that come from our scriptures today. And Lord, may they all be applied to our lives. And Lord, I pray that we start first by saying, what do I need to know? One of the biggest mistakes, Lord, and convict us to the core, is when someone is teaching your holy word, our mindset goes to people we wish heard it, as opposed to saying, no, I need to hear it.

What do I need to glean from it? And may that be our attitude today. In your holy name we pray. Amen. All right, so let's take a look at Hebrews chapter 2. Now, you're going to hear a very important word, and we talk about this a lot studying the Bible in our Wednesday Bible study, and what happens is I've been discipled by people that have played a huge role in my life, growing me spiritually, and then I take those things and what?

Then I pass it on. So I learned that if you see the word therefore in the Bible, there's an old saying, we need to look what it's there for. So therefore always means based on what I just said, based on what you just read, therefore, based on last Wednesday, so that's what I want you to know. If you missed last Wednesday, you're missing a big therefore here. So the writer is saying, therefore, based on what I just said and what we're calling chapter one, I now move to my next point.

So what did we say last week? What did the writer say? What did the Holy Spirit say last week?

And that was what? Christ, his supremacy. And you're going to see that throughout this letter. So we can't forget that Christ is supreme.

We can't forget that Christ is above the angels. We can't forget that Christ is above the prophets.

We can't forget that Christ, as you're going to see as we go on, is above Abraham, is above Moses.

That theme is going to develop a little more as we go forward. But just understand that's what he's saying. So based on us knowing that, look what he says, therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, and here's the key in verse 1, lest we drift away from it.

Now, some of you that are in here that we go to church together, you know, we're studying Hebrews in our small groups right now. So we just went through this this past Sunday. So y'all are really going to get a lot out of Hebrews because we're going to be studying this thing twice a week, not just once a week. And we'll find out different things that each teacher pulls out of it. So lest we drift is based on what we know. How can we then drift from Christ if we declared his supremacy? Why would we drift from that? How can we know who Christ is? How can we understand that but yet still drift?

Meaning, don't ever forget it. Don't ever forget it. Now, how would you apply that to your life? I'll tell you how I applied it to my life this week.

Because Scott Dawson, who taught it Sunday, made a great point. He said, the thing about drifting is it requires nothing.

If you want to drift, just do nothing. That's how boats drift. You just send them, and you don't do anything, and you don't paddle.

You don't turn the motor on. And if you do that, you have to make no effort to drift. It'll just drift on its own.

So a lot of ways for us to drift spiritually is also what? Do nothing. Don't study the Bible. Don't have a prayer life. Don't make a priority. I promise you, you'll drift. That's just our nature. We drift if we're not doing it. And the thing that I took away is what the writer of Hebrews is wanting the Hebrews to get is anytime I'm about to put something ahead of Christ, what the writer of Hebrews is teaching me is to be reminded that whatever you think is better than Christ isn't.

It just isn't. So my sin isn't better than Christ. If I think that, then I don't know Christ.

We had something happen, and I repent of being surprised by this, and I don't think I covered it last week.

I had an opportunity. Well, I'll tell you why we haven't talked since then. I had an opportunity on Friday, and full disclosure, full disclosure, if the person who's asking me doesn't have the connection to me personally, I don't do it. Just so y'all know. Okay. And, and it was, Hey, there's a high school that's not far from your house. I could, I could almost hit it with a rock. Um, um, and it's that close. We, as our church, our church is, our church is investing, the church that I'm part of, we have developed a relationship with this team, and we're going to feed them today as they get ready to start spring training.

The whole team is going to be there. We're going to do some team building with them. Would you do a 15-minute message? And I was kind of like, don't really want to do that.

I've got to – Sherry and I had a dinner we had been working on that night. I had a weekend of nothing coming up.

It was literally a weekend where Sherry and I were going to take a break because we'd been speaking quite a bit over the last five weeks.

But this person – I'll tell you what I don't want to do is then go back to the local church and start getting on people for not engaging. And then I won't engage. You know what I mean? So, so I thought, well, that's, that's good. That doesn't look good. That that'll hurt my credibility. And, and it, and it was, it's, it's not a, and I did what I should.

Hey babe, Sherry, what role do I play in this dinner tonight? Does anything involving 330 to 345?

this dinner tonight. Does anything involving 330 to 345? She goes, it's a non-factor. Go do it. It's no problem. All right. So, so, so I go there. I've only got 15 minutes. Okay. And so I simplify the message and the message really is kind of what we're talking about here. I won't go through the whole message, but the message was talking about sin's just not better than Jesus. It's just not. And I talked about how, which we covered in the devotion I was talked about. I told him about my life when I was a deliberate perpetual sinner and how sin was not good to me. And one of the things that sin absolutely robbed me of is peace. There's no peace.

You're constantly worrying about what? The repercussions of your behavior. I hope this person, if you compromise your sexual purity, hope somebody I'm not married to is not pregnant. If you're drunk, hope I don't get pulled over and put in jail. Hope I don't crash and kill somebody. Hope I don't get in a fight at a bar. Um, okay. Uh, you know, what did I do last night? Uh, Hey man, there's people upset with you. This, this kind of stuff, not that I can relate to you. I'm sure I'm just doing random examples. And, uh, and so, and so the, I said, does that really sound like a good life? I mean, you know, uh, I did, well, my parents find out, uh, Will somebody look at my phone and see the porn I'm looking at?

Will I get caught on my computer looking at porn? You know, and I said, then you take that out into marriages. And I said, so sin is just waiting to really rob you of peace.

You know, but Jesus on the other end provides peace. And, you know, John 16, 33 and all.

And then I talked about the narrow gate and, you know, the, the way is, is hard and only a few find it. And then I did the wide and the easy and, and why it's easy.

Cause it doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't cost you your sin. You don't have to be under the authority of Christ. You know, you don't have to deny self all that.

And I did all that 15 minutes, 15 minutes. Uh, and, and so we have three guys that say, you know, if anybody wants to make a decision today, they're here plus me. And, uh, there's 130 players roughly. And, uh, so I said, so here it is, uh, who here is ready to repent of your sin, turn away from it, leave faith in yourself, play, place your faith in Jesus, and enter the narrow gate.

And I literally went back like this. Like, I looked to see if any players weren't up. And I look around, and I literally see maybe 20 to 30.

So there's 100 players saying, that makes a lot of sense now now does that mean that every one of them is going to follow through or i don't know the sincerity of hearts i don't know any of that that's not my job my job is to when when god says go tell them about me and me go yeah i don't know man you know in 15 minutes i can't develop my message you know i can't thrill people with my theology and my depth of scripture and uh you know 15 minutes you're limiting me don't limit me god and uh and god then said no you're limiting me and so what's fun and it is fun is to turn around and see everybody going, there's only four of us. Uh, and I said, well, let's divide them in 25 a piece.

So we divide them in groups of 25. We try to vet out what's going on. No shock here.

90% of them, nominal Christians, you know, a demonic faith. I believe these things, but I live a life of deliberate perpetual sin.

It has not transformed me, to which we said, if Jesus hadn't transformed you, he ain't a problem. So just a minute ago, dropped by 100 of our transformed devotionals, and those groups are going to divide up, and they're going to start studying that tomorrow night.

So we're going to go. But if you want a humorous side of this the coach ain't from around here he came from california and he's new he literally started screaming i'm going to get fired to which our andrew varvudis of our team said lighten up you're in alabama ain't nobody gonna fire you you know what i mean and you're not in california they're not gonna come drag you off you're you're you're you're good man and uh so uh so anyway so but but the point was like the writer of hebrews how it ties to this message is it really should be a pretty profound message.

Jesus is better than fill in the blank. He's better than that relationship. He's better than fornication. He's better than adultery. He's better than porn. He's better than lying.

He's better than drunkenness. You know, so he's talking about to Hebrews, how he's better than the old covenant, how he's better than the old covenant how he's better than the prophets how he's above the the angels i should say above above the angels but we can break that down to why do we knowing that would then not say he's also greater than sin because he is speaking from experience so uh so drifting means that we forget that.

And, you know, Dawson used this example, and I've heard it a lot, you know, how back in the Cold War, how that Korean airline drifted into Soviet airspace.

And so how did they drift? They just put in the wrong coordinates. It'd be like you not knowing the word of God.

And all they did, they weren't trying to fly in Soviet airspace. That was not their intention at all. They drifted.

And they didn't know they were drifting. They put it on autopilot. They just entered the wrong information. So as they're sitting there probably talking about what they're going to do when they land, they get shot out of the sky and 260 something people are dead simply because they drifted they just drifted into the wrong airspace and you know in those days the soviet union you didn't drift into their airspace because they thought it was a spy plane or something like that they shoot it down so uh and though you can say they shouldn't have shot it down but what we should have really said is now they shouldn't have been there well i remember that and and my days of sin how many times i would look around and go oh i shouldn't be here how did i get here because i drifted so this is a warning from the writer of hebrews lest we drift away from it so now we're going to go into verses two two through four and this is one of those things is this always helpful for you when somebody's talking to you he's going to do what i find very effective let's talk about what we know okay this is going to be helpful for us let's remember what we know i can't tell you here at the office adlerler can back me on this, how many times on the show, if there's a story out there or people are talking about something, I say, I think the best place to start an investigation is let's talk about what we know.

Okay. You know, when I, when I think about the OJ case, let's talk about what we know. We know that he abused his wife. That's not up for debate. Why? Well, because she had signs of it, and the police got called over there all the time. So right now, we can start with that OJ Simpson was a wife abuser. Okay, so let's start there. And then you go, well, the police framed him.

Okay, let's talk about what we know. The police usually came over and got their picture made with him, and they never hauled him off to jail for beating his wife.

I don't think they have a vendetta against O.J. They never act like they did. Now, they might have had a vendetta against people of color, and there were serious problems with L.A. police.

That's true. But did that mean they had a vendetta against O.J.? They never showed any signs of it. So that's what we know.

So then you kind of develop, you know, when sometimes you don't have all the pieces of the puzzle. Well, use the pieces you got.

And you usually can get a pretty clear picture of what probably happened. So in this case, he starts and says, so verse 2, let's talk about what we know.

For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution so he says here's what we know the angels and now now don't this is going to get a little deep here and it's going to require that you paid attention and took good notes when we studied the revelation okay i'm glad y'all just laughed at yourself so I didn't have to say anything do you remember and some of you were confused about it as I was and we worked it out that the angel of the church at Laodicea the angel of the church at Ephesus and and and in that case it wasn't just talking about angels, the created beings that are servants and some of them rebelled.

It also stood for the minister of that church. That's the messenger, because angels are messengers. The messenger to the messenger of the church at Ephesus.

That meant a minister. Well, here we're using that again. Well, here we're using that again. Yes, we're talking about that there's a message that is declared by, you know, when we see the Christmas story and all the things like that, that angels declare things. But he's talking about more than that. He's saying that there's the spoken word that you have been taught by ministers and angels, also the prophets.

They're all included in this word angels right here. angels um also the prophets they're all included in this word angels right here and and he says because because we the message declared by angels or messengers proved to be reliable meaning it it was it was steadfast and some of your english translations it may say steadfast here it was certain it was sure so it says so those who received the message were proven over and over again that they were reliable so we know that what we've been taught about jesus is true because this turned out to be reliable information from these reliable messengers and this is this is the the part part he goes and he says so every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution so what he's saying is since since what they said is true if you reject it and you drift or transgress from the truth then whatever happens as a result of that, you didn't have an excuse. You knew better.

Remember, woe to the churches, I mean, woe to the cities that Jesus talked about in Matthew 11, and he starts going through all these cities, and where he did 90% of his ministry, and he's got Capernaum, and he's got Bethsaidaida and he's got, is it Chorazin?

And he said, hey, there's no way y'all don't know who I am. Y'all saw miracle after miracle. He goes as far as to say, if Sodom had seen what you saw, if Tyre had seen what you saw, if Sidon had seen what you saw, they would have repented.

They didn't hear and see what you did. Now they still received their judge because God did warn those cities, but hey, they didn't see me. They never saw me doing miracles. They never saw the things I've done.

They didn't see Lazarus, which by the way, that was my day. If you're wondering, that's the day I'm in. Okay. If, if okay if if you know i might think i don't know about this blind thing i don't think i was really blind and all this but i'll tell you one thing when i know that lazarus stinks and and everybody the sister saying too stinky don't open and all of a sudden jesus calls him out there that's my day i am in on that day but uh but he said you know y'all saw this kind of stuff and you. So he says, how much worse will it be for you on the day of judgment than those other three cities that my father destroyed?

Why? Because you should have known better. And so this is the writer of Hebrews saying, no excuse if you reject the message, the results are on you.

So now he says, and he goes further with that, three, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?

It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard.

Can't escape such a powerful word. He says you can't escape the truth of redemption.

So take your Bible right now and go back to Matthew. Come on, speaking of Matthew. We're reading Matthew, by the way, our family right now.

We just finished it today. All right, so let's go to Matthew, and let's look at chapter 23, and then let's look at verse 33.

23, 33. And you'll see a little cross reference here okay it says uh he says so in verse 33 of chapter 23 you serpents you brood of vipers how are you to escape being sentenced to hell now this is the very hippie Jesus, not be very nice, talking to the Pharisees.

There's a version of Jesus out there as if he never said this, that he never called people out, that he never said things.

I mean, he just told them that because of their rejection of him and that they're these false teachers and there's, there's so pious, but, but they, they actually live a double life.

And you know what? He just told them you're standing before the one that is going to judge you to hell.

And if you are judged to hell for rejecting me, you deserve it. You want to escape it. And so now you see the writer of Hebrews, um, of course, this also gets back into that luke thing again you know that is it sounds like somebody's heard heard this before uh but anyway i'm just having fun with y'all uh but we don't know who wrote hebrews god wrote hebrews and and that's the bottom line but it sure is fun to speculate in it uh but as long as we acknowledge we're speculating uh so what what was what the what the writer of Hebrews is saying here is just what Jesus said.

How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord himself, and it was attested to us by who?

The apostles. And so he's those who heard it. Remember John? Don't you want to favorite things about 1 John? I love 1 John.

Very difficult book. They're very difficult letter because you talk about talking about transformation and the lack of transformation is a lack of, of, of truly being redeemed first John because he's, he's tired of the Gnostics.

He's sick of this and he goes crazy on this justification of perpetual deliberate sin. And you know what he says?

I was with him. I was there. I touched him. And this is not what he taught. And he's talking about John 15.

Abiding in him produces much fruit. And he starts referencing John 15 throughout that first John in chapter two and three. And you know what he is saying is, I was there. That's not what he said.

So the writer of Hebrews is saying, not only did the Lord tell us himself, those that were with him documented what he said, and they told us too, and they were there.

So he says, so if you reject what? Don't you love this? Such a great salvation. Don't let that get by. He didn't just say if you reject salvation.

If you reject such a great salvation, do y'all realize that we have the greatest story in the history of the world? No one has ever come on the scene and says, by the way, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. I am God in human flesh, and I am here to redeem the world for all who repent and all who will leave faith in themselves and place their faith in me. And what did he say? I am the truth. I am the way. I am the life, eternal life, and no one comes to the father except through me. Period.

And you know what the writer of Hebrews says? You reject that, you deserve what you get. If you tried some other way, it's going to be problematic and you'll get your just reward. So let's move on to four.

While God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

This is important. This is important. So the Lord said it has been verified by the Lord himself.

It's been verified by those who heard what he said and have done the job and passed it on.

But it's also been verified by god himself he has confirmed it himself and so remember why this is important okay because he's saying God has shown signs. God has shown wonders.

And he says, and then the Holy Spirit was given by God, and it has been distributed, what, in different spiritual gifts by his will to individuals.

And he is saying, here is God. Here is God the Father. Here is God the Son. here is the Holy Spirit.

The whole trinity is at work. And what is the trinity, the triune God saying to us? Be redeemed, be redeemed, be redeemed, so that my wrath will not come upon you.

My wrath is coming on all who refuse to be justified. It's coming on all who won't be sanctified.

It's coming on all who are not made fully righteous by my son. So it's life, life, life.

And then what's the adversary saying? Death, destruction. I want to steal.

I want to kill. And I want to destroy. So, I mean, I want you to think about that.

Now, let's look at John 10.10 quickly, speaking to John. Let's look over at John 10.10.