Hebrews ~ Everything Starts with Jesus: Cut by the Kingdom - Audio
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(upbeat music) - Let's jump back into our series on Hebrews, Jesus. Everything starts with Jesus. Let's check out our text for today. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest so that no one will perish by following an example of disobedience. For the word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Hebrews is definitely an intense book because the author is speaking to fellow Jews and trying to convince them to follow Jesus and then to convince them not to quit if they're already on that path. And so the language gets pretty intense. Let's pick it apart. See exactly what's going on here because it might be a little bit confusing. What does it mean to make every effort to enter that rest so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience? We've skipped down a little bit because the bit about rest makes a lot of sense, very easy to understand for first century Jewish people but not so easy to understand for us. And the reason for that is that rest to the first century Jewish people sounded like the time when the Israelite people escaped slavery and moved into the promised lands. And that was supposed to be their rest. They were supposed to finally have the confidence and the life of freedom that they had been promised from an early time. However, when they actually did that, when they actually moved into the land, things went badly pretty quickly. And because of a number of different problems with leadership, we just did our series and first and second kings showing how the leadership of the country had ruined it as well as just people going their own way. They never really experienced the full rest of being in the promised land. And the author of Hebrews says, what's gonna happen is that rest was not final.
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The Message of Kingdom Life always cuts right to the core of us.