Hebrews 12...Running the Race

I am a non-runner. Though surrounded by friends and family who push themselves over every manner of terrain, I will never join their race...at least not at a jog or sprint. I have learned from watching my husband run his courses though. His success is a process of training, discipline, pain, sacrifice, motivation, inspiration, partnership...so many pieces to a finished race. He could never do well in his efforts all alone. He would never run again, if the rewards were not worth it all. This is why the writer of Hebrews uses the analogy of a race for the life of faith. It is a strenuous exercise with many pieces. But,
we are not alone. Like a condensed mass looming over us, those who've experienced God's faithfulness to His promises, should be an encouragement to keep on in faith. We need to be refreshed by the truth that falls from the gathering of the their testimonies...
Even more than that, we need to look to the ultimate inspiration...Jesus! Faith is His brainchild...from birth to death to eternity. Jesus, remained centered on His ultimate destiny of life with His Father and future with us. He endured more pain, more rejection, more temptation than any of us ever will...and He persevered on to His reward, His place of authority. It's Jesus' example that motivates our perseverance. It is His love that strengthens, His presence that encourages, His promise that propels us on to our finish line.
How can we expect to avoid pain or rejection when the Son of God subjected himself to this human experience? How can we give up in the battle against sin when He secured the victory? How can we lose heart when what we have waiting for us is so incredibly worth it all?
And what is awaiting us?
"22 But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, 23 and to the assembly[a] of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 and to Jesus...
28 Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, 29 for our God is a consuming fire."

Hebrews 11: FAITH

Faith is as old as the most ancient human stories.
Historic humanity has always believed in what we cannot see. The question is never: "Are you a person of faith?" but "What/whom is your faith in?".
So this is the question I pose: "What has formed your faith?
Since my foundation is faith in a loving and sovereign Creator, my interpretation of life works through the filter of His love and power...no matter what happens. I started life out in an extremely loving and protected environment so the seeds of this faith were "faithfully" formed.
And since faith is exponential...my faith has built on itself; but that is not to say it is never challenged. You only have to have eyes and ears to wonder..."Is God real? Is He in control? Is He loving?". Life challenges faith.
So what is the process of evaluation when faith is becoming crippled by life experience?
My own process begins with God's Word.

The more I dig into the grounds of my faith, the more I am convinced of the truth of it. Just as light "exploded into light", faith explodes into faith. I am not a scientist; but astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, physics (etc.) in and of themselves provide few conclusions.... they only lead to more questions. It is not science alone that proves or disproves God and creation...it is faith. It is where you find your beginning. My beginning is "in the beginning God"...from there, I am amazed and overwhelmed 
at the proof of Him. (Like an Artist-5/21/14)

Faith says: "I have confidence that what I hope for is a true reality even though I am not fully experiencing it now. I am utterly persuaded of this reality, though there is not always visual evidence of it." Hebrews 11:1 (my own words)

My life has been a continual searching out and weighing out of God's Word...and I am convinced of this: God IS real. He IS loving. He is pursuing all of us in that love and wants to help us make sense of life.
Over the years, we've heard and experienced many challenges to faith in a loving, all-powerful God. I think that is why God graciously includes Hebrews Chapter 11 in the Bible. This chapter is loaded with testimonies of real people who lived through all kinds of challenges to faith: life and death, victory and defeat, wealth and poverty, joy and sorrow, happiness and pain, success and failure...
"and all these, having gained approval through their faith," Heb. 11:39
What this chapter says to me is that faith is never impossible, no matter what your circumstances. It says that the gift of faith is offered to ALL kinds of people. This Letter to the Hebrews is a call to faith, a bold invitation to join the ranks of those who believe that we are part of something much bigger than what we see in the here and now.
Faith is a reward for responding to God's pursuit of you...faith will also be rewarded by God in fulfilling all of His promises to you.
And what are those promises?
For starters, He promises us His approval, an eternal home and life with Him, adoption into His family, victory over our destructive behaviors and a transformed heart and mind.
A life of faith is a life filled with increasing understanding, courage, humility, perseverance...
 In faith, we worship in the every day stuff, we are protected and provided for in God's purposes for us. We are blessed in order to bless others... given to, so that we may give.
This is the beauty, hope and power of faith.

Burnt toast and dog breath... Hebrews 10

"Burnt toast and dog breath",
this was the answer my son gave to the following college orientation question: "What smells remind you of home?"!
Does that mean he'll miss us?
I had to get in two more parental warnings before we left him there in that sad little dorm room;
and two more how-tos...
and two more becauses...
followed up with two more hugs;
and two more "I'm proud of and I love you(s)..."
and one big fat kiss.
As the concerns of what we failed and forgot to prepare him for set in, I am reading Hebrews 10.
This chapter (vv. 19-39) strikes me similarly.
Like a last minute parental list, these warnings, how-tos and ultimate whys of a godly life are spelled out for us:
How-to:
- Sincerely draw near to God
- Hold fast to the truth of your faith
- Consider how to encourage others in their walk of faith
- Consistently spend time with the people who encourage your faith (vv.22-25)
Why?
- Because Christ made a way for us to draw near to God (v.19)
- Because God has a reward for you if you persevere in faith (vv. 35-36)
- Because it pleases the only One who is worth pleasing (vv. 37-38)
- Because the eternal destiny of your soul depends on the perseverance of your faith in His grace and forgiveness ( v. 39)
Warnings:
(v.26-27) "For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin, but a terrifying expectation of judgment...
(v.29) "How much severer  punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God..."
(v.31) "It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

At times during the last two decades of parenting we've had to spell out the consequences of behaviors very specifically; some of the warnings made no impact at all. Sometimes a child's hope of the imagined outcome far outweighed the pain of a consequence. It has been our responsibility as loving parents to increase the intensity of the warning based on the danger of the behavior. We have found that the confidence our children have in our love and good desires for them greatly impacts their consideration of our warnings. If they doubted us, they ran to destruction faster than we could say... "I told you so!"
It is not different with our Heavenly Father. His warnings to walk in faith are dire because His love and good desires for us are so intense. But if we doubt that love and good intention, His warnings seem more like threats from an angry, vengeful, Theo-egomaniac...and we want to run away faster than He can say..."I showed you so."
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it is the way of death..." Proverbs 14:12
and so He died, that in the end He made a way to life.
If your life is not pointing you to this truth: "God loves me and has a good plan for my life", sincerely draw near by asking Him to show you. I am confident in answer, you will feel the reassurance of His "I'm proud of you and I love you(s)" and they will begin to make you miss Him...

 not run the other way.

Hebrews 8-9: Re-lig-ion

Within the context of my spiritual upbringing, "religion" has been a dirty word for as long as I can remember. After all, "...it's not about religion! It's about relationship!"
But "religion" is just a word; a word that describes making a practice of something to increase our understanding.
"re"-again
"lig"- grasp
"ion"- action
...and when we do something over and over again to try to understand or grasp hold of it, we might say we do it "religiously".
Religious motivation comes from a catalytic belief.
Hebrews 8-9 refers to the religious practices of the Hebrew priests.
Practices of apparel, washings, structures, sanctified objects, sacrifices...
practices ordered by God for the Hebrews to do
over
and over again.
...Practices set up by God to help them understand that they would never sufficiently grasp hold of Him
by what they wore or what they did or what they said.
The Hebrews understood that they needed to live in relationship with their God; so they tried
but
"...gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make the worshipper perfect in conscience," (9:9)
Nothing they practiced "religiously" was enough to wipe out their awareness that they would fail
again.
And they would have to seek atonement
again.
When Jesus was sent to die on the cross, the shedding of His blood signified that God offered them the gift of himself
again.
What was lost of relationship at the intrusion of sin, was being restored.
His perfect life, lived-lost-resurrected, became the all-sufficient, once and final offering for a secured relationship with God.
"but now ONCE at the consummation of the ages He has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself." (9:26b)
It's true. I am a religious person.
I have practices of reading my Bible, praying, going to church...
I want to understand Him better!
But I do so because He already "grasped hold" of me
through Christ.

...someone's said it first! Hebrews 6-7

     For a month and a half I've been stuck in Hebrews 6-7 with nothing worth writing. This is not to say that these chapters are not filled with profound hope and truth...just that I've found no way to write about them. It occurred to me today that what should be said has been said by someone else and so I share these thoughts...not my own, except that I wholly agree!
"...original sin leads us to doubt the benevolent love of the Father and to close our hearts to the gift of his '...proposal' (offer of Himself). John Paul II wrote that 'faith, in its deepest essence, is the openness of the human heart to the gift..." This life is poured out for us in Christ's self-gift to His (people) on the cross. In essence, Christ's self-gift says to us: 'You don't believe in my Father's love? Let me make it real for you; let me incarnate it for you so that you can taste and see. You don't believe that God wants to give you life? I will bleed myself dry so that my life's blood can vivify you. You thought God was a tyrant, a slave driver? You thought he would whip your back if you gave Him the chance? I will take the form of a slave; I will let you whip my back and nail me to a tree; I will let you lord it over me to show you that the Father has no desire to lord it over you. I have not come to condemn you, but to save you. I have not come to enslave you, but to set you free. Turn from your disbelief. Believe and receive the gift... I offer you." Christopher West, prologue to: Theology of the Body Explained
     In this description of God's intense love for us and the communication of that love through Christ; we read of the powerful hope the life of Christ provides us. We read and are reminded to accept God's love, initiated and secured by Him through his Son.
He purposed to love us when He created us. He fulfilled His promise to love us in the gift of Jesus' life. THAT is the nature of our God. Unchangeable in His purpose; unmovable in His promise.
Heb. 6:19 "This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil," ( veil...the depth of God's existence that we cannot see and remains a mystery to us apart from the intercession of Christ). "...where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us,"
And there, before God, Jesus continues to act on our behalf.

"Therefore He is able to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting for us (exactly what we need) to have such a high priest (facilitator of forgiveness and restoration with God), holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners (un-compromised by sin) and exalted above the heavens;" Hebrews 7:25-26

That was harsh! Hebrews 6:1-9

Hebrews 5:11-14, that was harsh; why was it necessary? Because it's time to grow up! What happens if an infant stops growing? He/she cannot survive.
Grow or perish.
So, is the provoking talk necessary? Absolutely.
The Hebrew believers who've understood the message of the Gospel of Christ and experienced God at work, MUST continue to grow in that understanding and experience. No matter how discouraging and defeating the times feel, if a Christian stops growing, He/she cannot survive.
Grow or perish.
If there is anything I have learned about the "Christian" life it is that it is an ongoing process.
We must be brave.
We must battle on.
There is no life in going back.
The harsh words of chapter 5: 11-6:8 are an intense warning, not from judgment or disgust but from godly men who love God's people:
v.9 "But, BELOVED, we are convinced of better things concerning you, and things that accompany salvation, though we are speaking in this way...
v.10 For God is not unjust..."

Christians have been brave for millennia. We will read this in Hebrews 11. But for now, be encouraged by these:

"I have given Him my faith and sworn my allegiance to Him, how then can I go back from this, and not be hanged as a traitor?" John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress -1678

Christian's journey to the "Celestial City" takes him over the "Hill of Difficulty", through the "Valley of Humiliation" and through "The Valley of the Shadow of Death". Those whom he met along the way, in choosing other paths, never made it.

1	I’m pressing on the upward way, New heights I’m gaining every day; Still praying as I onward bound, “Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.”
2	My heart has no desire to stay Where doubts arise and fears dismay; Though some may dwell where these abound, My prayer, my aim, is higher ground.

                                                                                               Johnson Oatman- 1898

Heb. 5 :12-14wah...

"For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil."

Though written to the Christian Hebrews in the first century, this passage is for the church today-

You've been a follower of Christ for quite some time; plenty of time to have learned enough to pass on. But now it seems you need to start to learn all over again, the wisdom God has shared with you. Just like a newborn, instead of gaining head control...your's wobbles about. Instead of feeding yourself, chewing and swallowing the new things God has to teach you, you have go back to the basics: You are a sinful human being who is in need of God's forgiveness, based on Christ's righteous life, death, and resurrection, to establish your faith. Aren't you hungry? Aren't you yet craving something more substantial...something to chew on? Aren't you ready to take the nipple out of your mouth and say, "I am not a baby anymore?" How has this happened to you...
this reverting back to infancy?
You've been lulled to sleep and nothing seems to wake you.
Groggy
Dull
Thick-headed
...membranes must be still clogging your ears!
Claiming to be a Christian is about becoming skilled in the knowledge of what is good and right and godly AND in the practice of living it out. Trials can make living our faith out a real challenge; but until your persevering and disciplined faith lines up with your doctrine, you cannot expect to be wise and godly people.