Mar 29, 2007 - Getting past the start..

Mar 29, 2007

Hebrews 6 (AMP)

1 THEREFORE LET us go on and get past the elementary stage in the teachings and doctrine of Christ (the Messiah), advancing steadily toward the completeness and perfection that belong to spiritual maturity. Let us not again be laying the foundation of repentance and abandonment of dead works (dead formalism) and of the faith [by which you turned] to God,

I once heard a preacher say, 'when in the Bible you find a therefore, find out what it is there for.' While silly it makes a lot of sense. We can easily take some verses out of context when we go from chapter to chapter in the Word. One of the reasons is that there were no chapter and verse markings in the originals. Man added them later. Therefore at the beginning of a chapter means 'you better go find out what was said before.'

The writer of Hebrews had, at this point, just finished speaking about how these people were not passed the milk stage in their Christian walk. They were baby Christians when they had been in the Word a long time. They should have been feeding others the milk of the Word, in stead, they were consuming it all themselves.

So now, the writer of Hebrews says, let's get passed the early stages of Christianity. We do not need to keep going over and over the same things. These things are what every Christian should have laid down in his life.

• Foundations of repentance - understand that once you ask for forgiveness of sins, you are forgiven. You do not have to ask over and over again, God forgives you.
  
• Abandonment of dead works - works cannot get you in to heaven. If they could, why do we need Jesus. We are not under the law, bulls and calf's can not save us, neither can repetitive prayers over and over again. Jesus did it and we cannot add to it. As a side note, this does not mean we should stop doing good things for people, this does not say that.
  
• Faith in God - Of all these, we do not need to keep going over this one. God is God, He is and will always be. We get to Him by faith and faith only. If you had faith for Him once, you still have that faith.
  

These three things should be burned in to the heart of any believer who has been one for very long. While pastors need to teach these to the congregations, they should be doing it Sunday after Sunday. They need to move on to the meat of the Word.

A humorous, though false, story should bring to light what I am trying to say. A congregation needed a new pastor and had heard of one that came with good reports about him so they hired him site unseen. The first week in the pulpit, he preached a hellfire and brimstone sermon about the evils of certain sins. The congregation was please and told him so as they left. The next week, after visiting with them all week, he preached the exact same sermon. As they left, they were polite to the new pastor. A third week goes by with the same results. As they are leaving, one of the board members pulls the new pastor aside and says, that is a good sermon, but you have preached it three times, don't you have any other sermons. The pastor replied, you have not got the first one right yet, why should we go on to number two.

Until we get these three things right and set in our mind, we can not move forward into the other things that God wants for us in our lives. Is it time to examine your heart for them?

“Scripture quotations taken from the Amplified Bible."