Episode Transcript
CONSECRATE
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
HEAR
Hebrews 3:12–13 (NIV)
See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
CONSIDER
It’s a beautiful and powerful thing when Scripture quotes Scripture. In fact, the only way to understand Scripture is through a wider and deeper Holy Spirit–inspired reading of Scripture. I want you to notice how the Bible regularly does this. This word, “encourage one another daily,” can be read at face value, and yet there is a much deeper context we must explore to get at what it means. If we back up yet a few more verses, we see the text quoted from Psalm 95:
So, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested and tried me,
though for forty years they saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’” (Heb. 3:7–11)
So the writer of Hebrews is remembering Psalm 95, which is remembering the story of Meribah, which is the occasion in the wilderness when the people were facing a crisis of a lack of water. Rather than leaning into the God who had provided for them every step of the way, they began to quarrel bitterly among themselves and grumble harshly against their leaders. It was a defining moment, a place where their faith was tested and where their faith failed. It turned out to be the place where their hearts began to be hardened.
Now, in light of this context, read our text yet again:
See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
Over the course of our lives, all of us have been through difficult trials. Unjust treatment, unforeseen losses, tragic deaths, life-stealing diseases, betrayals, relationship failures, and all manner of pain and suffering. These things create wilderness seasons that can go on for long periods of time. These are the places where we slowly and often imperceptibly lose faith in God. We would rarely identify it as such, but we begin to shrink back from real trust. We believe in principle but not in an everyday kind of trusting reality. We take on a wilderness wound, and our hearts slowly begin to harden. We don’t so much choose hardness as we fail to pursue healing. We allow a wall of protection to be constructed around our heart, and while it does protect us in some ways, it also slowly and imperceptibly isolates us from God and others.
This is how sin deceives us. We mistakenly focus on sin at the level of our behaviors, but our behaviors are merely the symptoms of the sickness. Sin, in its deepest essence, is the condition of an unbelieving heart, and an unbelieving or untrusting heart inevitably becomes a hardened heart. And a hardened heart is the most dangerous place on earth.
So what does encouragement have to do with any of this? Psalm 95 says, “Today, if only you would hear his voice” (v. 7).
Encouragement, in the biblical sense of the term, is about personally and particularly hearing the voice of God from another person. As we encourage one another, we learn to speak to one another in the voice of God in the humble authority of Jesus in the loving power of the Holy Spirit. This doesn’t come to us naturally. It only comes supernaturally, and yet it is a learned way.
As long as it is called “Today,” . . .
PRAY
God our Father, we want to pray with the psalmist today, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:23–24). Lord Jesus, we open our hearts to the searching, searing, and saving light of your Word and Holy Spirit. Are our hearts hardened? We wait before you in humility. Speak, Lord. Your sons and daughters are listening. We want to hear your voice. In Jesus’s name, amen.
