A real-time blog on the Letter to the Hebrews - part III
A spiritual MOT. How’s your Sabbath observance? And I’m not talking about Sundays.
Here’s the key verse:
‘There remains, therefore, a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God from His’ 4v9,10
It may seem strange that the writer is making so much of the Sabbath…but it turns out to be vital if God is going to ‘bring many sons to glory’ or for us to push on to ‘maturity’ as chapter 6 urges.
One of the legacies of the disaster of Eden is the persistent belief that we are independent of God, expected to make our own decisions good or bad, wise or unwise. Like the prodigal son, cut off from his father who, when the son returns said to his elder son ‘Your brother was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found’. As far as God is concerned our attempts at living an independent life are considered as ‘death’ just as He said ‘in the day you eat it you shall die’, clearly not referring to biological but spiritual death.
But the truth is that:
‘it is not by might nor by power but by My Spirit’ (Zech 4 v6)
How easy it is to initially believe that salvation is a gift. And that we are ‘under grace’ only to drift away and yield to that insatiable appetite to ‘do something’. As the scripture says to enter God’s rest we ‘cease from our works’.
How easy it is to celebrate the Sabbath externally only (Seventh Day Adventists and many Messianic believers celebrate the Sabbath on Saturdays, most other denominations on Sundays) and miss the essential point, we cannot grow in the life God has given us in Christ if we insist on trying to live the Christian life from our own resources, our minds, or emotions, or will. It’s Spirit/spirit operation.
‘As many as are led by the Spirit, these are sons of God’
So, here’s the MOT. Or, to switch metaphors, consider the vinedresser, knife in hand, in John chapter 15. He’s advancing on the vine ready to lop off any branch that’s not bearing fruit AND to prune even those branches bearing fruit…for the sake of greater fruit.
Then, like Jesus, we are living the Sabbath life. ‘I only do what I see the Father doing’.
Next: On to maturity…I’m looking at a pruned apple tree, ready to grow some ripe fruit.