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 3:7–15 (NIV)
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.’”
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. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. As has just been said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.”
CONSIDER
We are somewhere in the middle of a wilderness. “How much longer?” we want to ask. We know we can’t turn back. We want to press on, but we are tired and growing weary. This is why encouragement figures so prominently in the lives of those who are following Jesus and seeking his kingdom.
I wanted to revisit our banner text from Hebrews 3 in its entirety. Hebrews is not so much a letter as it is a message. It carries the freight of practically the whole Bible story in the framework of a halftime speech to a winning team who feels like they’re losing and wants to quit.
So, as the Holy Spirit says . . .
The Holy Spirit is always speaking, encouraging, comforting, counseling, helping, guiding, warning, bonding, blessing, healing, and doing all the things God does. We see this in full and perfect technicolor display in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah. As he was on earth, so he is in heaven, and as he is in heaven, so we are on earth. That’s how “on earth as it is in heaven” happens, through his people formed by his Word, filled by his Spirit, being transformed into his own image—for his glory, for our good, for others’ gain.
“Today, if you hear his voice . . .”
Here is the big if: if you hear his voice. This is where and why encouragement figures so prominently in our lives and faith. One of the everyday ways we can hear the voice of God is through the encouragement of other people. It brings us back to our working definition of encouragement.
To encourage in the biblical sense of the term is to stand in the stead and agency of Jesus, participating in the work of the Holy Spirit, to minister grace to human beings at the level of their inner person, communicating, conveying, and imparting life, love, courage, comfort, consolation, joy, peace, hope, faith, and other dispensations and manifestations of the kingdom of heaven as the moment invites or requires.
“. . . do not harden your hearts . . .”
Recall what was written on day 3 about the hardness of heart:
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.
“. . . as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the wilderness.”
The wilderness is always a time of testing. The issue is our hearts. Will we harden our hearts or allow them to be hardened? The better question is this: Will we allow our hearts to slowly and subtly shrink back and drift into the realm of unbelief? Recall, it’s not that we cease to believe in God. We just stop believing God. We go to sleep at the wheel of faith.
This is why it says: “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.”
Who will you encourage today? Who will encourage you?
PRAY
Father, we want to pass the wilderness test, and we want to help others pass through it. Would you take our calling to encourage one another to the next level? Come, Holy Spirit, and let us hear your encouraging voice speaking over other people and take the risk to say what we are hearing. We pray in Jesus’s name, amen.
JOURNAL
Tell an encouragement story that is emerging from this series in your life. Someone you have encouraged? Someone who has encouraged you? What’s the story?
SING
Today, we will sing "Knowing You" (hymn 125) from our Seedbed hymnal, Our Great Redeemer's Praise.
Now, if you've got an extra 7 minutes and 38 seconds to linger with Jesus, I LOVE Shane and Shane's rendition of today's hymn, "Knowing You." This song, originally by Graham Kendrick, is a modern hymn, a timeless anthem, and one of my all time favorites. In dwelling in this song, the Holy Spirit will literally inscribe, engrave, and emblazon Philippians 3:7–11 on our hearts.
DON'T FORGET: The Daily Reminders
Learn about the fall series—The Gospels—order the journal, grab the short videos to share, and more HERE.
If you want to help move this mission of encouragement into new fields PLEASE JOIN THE WAKE-UP CALL FIELD TEAM. I'll be in touch.
If you are a pastor or serving vocationally in ministry I'd love to be in touch. Let me know here.
Here's a beautiful downloadable/printable PAGE-SIZE POSTER of the our working definition of encouragement. I'd love to hear how you are working with it.
