Drawing near to God is presented as essential for navigating life's perplexities and maintaining spiritual vitality. The sermon emphasizes that access to God's presence is made possible through the blood of Jesus Christ, our great high priest, and is sustained by a sincere heart, a clear conscience, and sanctified bodies. It encourages believers to actively draw near to God through prayer and scripture, to provoke one another to love and good works, and to persevere in fellowship, rather than drawing back from faith.
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You may be turning in your Bibles again this afternoon to the Book of Hebrews. You would care to. Get harnessed up here a little bit. It'll be interesting to know how many people will remember this little incident that I'm going to relate to you many years ago here at this conference on a Friday evening. At the beginning of the conference, there was a person here who was the invited speaker for the week, I believe, although at that time this meeting was not prearranged, I think. I don't remember much of what he said that evening, but I remember a verse that he read.
He read very slow. He talked much, much slower than I do. He read very slow, and his voice quivered a great deal. He was much older than I am. And this is the verse that he read and commented on found in Psalm seventy-three. I'm going just to flip over to it, so I quote it right. But in his slow and deliberate way with a quivering voice, he said, It is good for me to draw near to God. I have put my trust in the Lord God.
that I may declare all thy works." That's the verse that stayed with me that evening. It is good for me to draw near to God. Anybody want to guess about some of you older folks? Let's check your memory system here. Oh, it sure would. William Powell. Now do you remember? Well, for my credit, I remembered the verse. I don't know if you like lettuce or not, but we're going to have a menu of lettuce this afternoon.
We're going to walk through God's lettuce garden. It doesn't sound very exhilarating, does it? Most of us have never been in a lettuce garden. We like flower gardens and we like fruit orchards and We like all kinds of beautiful ornamental gardens, but probably none of us have ever thought it would be too exciting to take a little stroll through a lettuce garden. Doesn't sound very romantic. I hope it'll be exciting this afternoon because we're going to spend some time in God's lettuce garden. But now before we do, we'll read from Hebrews chapter ten and verse nineteen on through a while.
Having therefore brethren boldness to enter in to the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say, his flesh, and having a high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering, for he is faithful that promise, and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works, and not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another so much the more as you see the day approaching.
Now we're going to go down to verse thirty-two, but call to remembrance the former days in which you were illuminated. After you were illuminated you endured a great fight of afflictions. partly while we were made a gazing stop, both by reproaches and afflictions, and partly while ye became companions of them that were so used. For ye had compassion on me and my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that you have in heaven a better and an enduring substance. I like that. Verse thirty-five, cast not away, therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward. For you have need of patience, that after you have done the will of God you might receive the promise for yet a little while then he that shall come will come and will not tarry.
Now the just shall live by faith but if any man draw back my soul shall have no pleasure in him for we are not of those who draw back into perdition but of them that believe to the saving of the soul. Now did you find your four lettuce plants in there? Well you only saw three. The fourth one is implied. In verse twenty-three, it's let us draw near. In verse, pardon me, verse twenty-two, verse twenty-three, it's let us hold fast. In verse twenty-four, it's let us consider. And in verse twenty-five, let us keep on. Let us keep on. Some of you are going to like this third point that I'm going to make because it says, let us consider how to provoke our brethren.
a little like that. I'm going to gain some brownie points this afternoon with you older people because the lettuce of verse twenty four is let us keep on going to meeting. You like that one, don't you? It's fine. You younger people can appreciate that one, too. In verse twenty two, it's let us draw near to God. In verse twenty three, let us hold fast to our hope. In verse twenty-four, let us hold fast or let us consider our brethren. And in verse twenty-five, it's let us keep on going to meeting. That's the only thing. We start with verse twenty-two.
It is good for me to draw near to God. Can you consent to that this afternoon? Would you say this afternoon that it's good for us to draw near to God? Wasn't it last evening that Cindy was playing that beautiful chorus or song on the piano, there is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God. A place where sin cannot molest, near to the heart of God. That's good, isn't it? I would hope this afternoon that in the little while that we have at our time disposal that we might feel and sense that we are being drawn near to God.
It'll help us Monday morning when we go back to that scary world out there, back to that grouchy boss, back to those overloading professors that he may have, no, not that he may have. Back to the blind, back to that world that doesn't appreciate us being around. It'll help us an awful lot if we can learn a little bit more about drawing near to God. That's good. I wish Will Pell could say it in his own way again this afternoon as he quotes the verse.
It is good for me to draw near to God. I can recommend that it is good for us. Now why is it so good? Well, I'm thinking a little bit in the context of Psalm seventy-three. The reason that it is so good is because it helps us to understand the difficult perplexities of life. Did you ever notice that living on planet Earth in the nineteen eighties creates tremendous questions in our minds? Have you ever noticed that? You don't have all the answers, do you? Most of us have more questions than answers. There are some difficult questions in life.
You don't find all the answers in textbooks. You don't find all the answers from your ancient seers. We older folks, you older folks or we older folks, however you prefer that, we don't have all the answers. There's questions that we wrestle with just in the everyday work of day. world. One of them, the psalmist took up in Psalm seventy-three and his big question was this. Why do the ungodly prosper? And the psalmist, I don't understand this. I'm going to translate it into my own English language.
My wife and I lived across the road from a farmer. We were farmers too. We farmed our land the first eight years of our married life until the Lord called us away from that. And mind you, there was a lot of things that we didn't do right, but one of the things that we did pretty well in, got some brownie points for, I'm sure. We went to meeting when the local church had meeting, we were there. Boy, I can't remember too many times when we didn't pick up our kids and diapers and all. And away we went to meet. Wednesday night, we were there. I can only remember a couple of Wednesday nights when we weren't there, when hay was down and you had to get the hay in because a storm was coming.
I'm sure there were times that I don't recall now, but we went to meeting when it was time to go to meeting. We were good medianity people. We went on Sunday morning. We went on Sunday night. And I read my Bible. And I tried to live the Christian life. And I'm not sorry for any of this, but across the road from us was somebody who didn't go to me. Oh, he was a professing Christian, he and his wife, and they were supposed to have been at the same meetings that we were, but they didn't go near as regular as we did. I don't think, I hope I'm not being too judgmental, but I don't think he spent an over amount of time reading his Bible in private.
At least there's never been any evidence that he did. It was easy for them to miss the meetings. Anything would keep them, well, in fact, didn't take anything to keep them from coming Wednesday night. That was just not something they didn't do. Didn't go to the chapel on Wednesday night. Sunday mornings, a little more regular. Now, the problem with all of this is that here I am on one side of the road farming my hundred and twenty acres of ground, and I'm trying to please God. This guy is living on the other side of the road, and he really isn't all that concerned about pleasing God. Now it's time to harvest the crops. And it's time to sell the cattle.
And it's time to truck the hogs off the market. You know when I sold my cattle on a down market? You know when he sold his? When the market was at its peak. You know when I sold my hogs on a down market? I think you understand I'm playing this up a little bit. He sold his hogs on a better market. He seemed to always do it right. And I seem to struggle her doing it wrong, at least part of the time. He had a better farm of the two. He raised better crops than me. Now, I want you to understand that I'm not classifying that particular person with the ungodly person of Psalm seventy-three.
But I'm just trying to draw a little parallel here for you to understand what I'm trying to say. That's a perplexing question in my mind. Why should one Christian who is trying to please God not get along as well as the other person who doesn't care about pleasing God? Did you ever wrestle with that question? Come on, now be honest. Probably some time or other you have. You just don't quite understand why. The ungodly person who is Godless, careless, Why he gets along so well and you struggle. You don't understand why the godless person can abuse their body and they can waste their coins and they can destroy their lives and they seem to get along fairly well.
And here you are. Your body is sick, diseased. You're suffering financial calamity. That guy over there, he always has a job. And you just got laid off from your job last night. That's difficult to handle. Folks, there are difficult questions in life, aren't there? You know the best place to find the answer? Near to the heart of God. That's what the psalmist did. He says, As for me, my footsteps almost slipped. And then he went on in Psalm seventy-three to tell about all those questions that were just putting his mind into a turmoil.
Then he finally said, he said, about verse sixteen, he said, it just went on and on and it got worse and worse until he says, I got in to the sanctuary of God. Now where's the sanctuary? Is this building the sanctuary? Or is your local church chapel the sanctuary? Not really. There's a sense in which we can think of this as a sanctuary, but I'm talking about a sanctuary in a different dimension. I'm talking about that sanctuary that you can go to tomorrow morning when you're not going to church. I'm talking about the sanctuary of your bedroom. I'm talking about the sanctuary of your breakfast table. I'm talking about the sanctuary of the office where you work. Any place where you can draw near to God, that'll become your sanctuary, presence of God.
It's good. It's good to do that. It's good to do that on Sunday, but it's good to do that on Monday too, because there you are more prepared to handle the perplexities of life. Why do the godly suffer? It's kind of the other side of that coin. Why do the ungodly prosper and why do the godly suffer? Why do I experience all these tumultuous things in my life? Well, when you're getting into the presence of God, I just want to throw out a little suggestion for you. Take the Bible. into that room or into that place where you're going to go into the presence of God and open it up to First Peter and he'll help you out a lot. First Peter answers a lot of questions about why the God they suffer.
You read it on your own. You might want to do that tomorrow if not today. Don't do it right now. Why should we draw near? Well, there's some real good basic answers given to us in our text. I want to suggest to you, I want to say to you, verse nineteen, that we should draw near because we have boldness to enter in to the holiest by the blood of Jesus. And he's telling us that there is a new and living way. He's telling us about the blood of Jesus. Beloved, when you came to God the first time in your life, that was the moment of your salvation experience.
When you came to God the very first time, how did you come to God? You came to God on the basis of the precious shed blood of Christ. And if you didn't come to God on the merits of that precious blood of Christ, you didn't get there. Because there is no other way. You can't come on your own merits and you can't come on your own. Parents's apron strains you. You have to come on the merits of the work of another, the Lord Jesus at the cross. That's the way you came to God. And you know when you came as a repentance sinner to God, you found out that he accepted you because of the merits of the precious blood of Christ and the value that God places on his son.
Let me just throw this in. It's not the value of your faith that gave you admission to God's presence. Not the value of your faith. Certainly not the value of your works or your character. It's the value of the precious blood of Christ that gives us title into God's presence. And we came as poor lost sinners, ignorant as could be perhaps. But we knew that our admission to God was on the value of the precious blood of Christ. Has everybody made sure that you have come to God that way? If you've never come to God that way, you better get down to serious business with God because that's the only way you come to Him. through Christ and His shed blood. But now how do I come to God as a Christian?
Well, I still only have one avenue of approach. I still approach God into His sanctuary, which is called here, the holiest of all. Some of you probably understand that. Maybe a few that don't, and I can't spend time this afternoon going into the details of that, but just enough to say that that's that innermost sanctuary of the tabernacle, the temple of old, behind the curtains where God dwelt. The holiest of God was the place where the high priest entered in once a year and not without blood. But you and I are told here that our admission into the holiest of all, God's presence, is not through an earthly high priest, because we're the priest.
And our high priest has already entered in for us. That's the Lord Jesus Christ. And we come at any time because the veil is rent. Lo, Jesus stands before the throne of God. Isn't that good? Don't say your amen is too loud now. Don't want you to frighten anybody. He might wake somebody up if you do that. Well, let me say it again. It's good. It's good for us to be able to draw near to God. Now, now we've got people woke up. We're starting to get somewhere. It's good for us to draw near to God and beloved, you can draw near to God any time because the veil is rent and the admission into God's presence through Christ is open for us as believers.
You know what that does? That eliminates the idea of having to pray through. You don't have to pray through. Pray through what? I hear people talking about praying through. They don't have to pray through anything. The way is open. All you have to do is come through. The invitation is there. The blood has been shed, and it avails before God today the preciousness of the Word of Christ. I can't enlarge on that too much, but time doesn't need to move on. We have a great high priest. That's another good reason for coming. Not only do we have the blood of Christ, but we have the great high priest. Now, I want to say something, and I want to be understood. Are you all awake? Good. I'm going to use an illustration, and I don't mean for my illustration in any way whatsoever to be ugly or to look down or in any way to involve someone who could be here from the Church of Rome.
If you're here, I appreciate you being here. Thank you for coming. But let me just say something, and I think probably you would admit to the truth of this, and if you don't, we can talk about later yesterday let's see yesterday was Saturday Friday was it Friday or was it Thursday when Pope John Paul was in Miami was that Friday Friday morning I think it was three hundred thousand people many of whom came at midnight in order to be there for his appearance in this public place in the morning Three hundred thousand people met together for the occasion of the Pope coming in to that place.
I would imagine that a crowd of three hundred thousand people where they said some people had to walk as much as three miles in order to park their car. I don't imagine a lot of those people got very close to the Pope, do you? I'm sure the binoculars were... Everybody wanted to catch just a glimpse of the Pope. Well, that's fine. But you see how much better we see it from the Scriptures. The Lord Jesus Christ is our great high priest. I don't want to call him the Pope. He's our great high priest. And he's gone into heaven, and he invites us to come to him. And we don't have to wrestle with midnight hours, one hundred degree weather, in high humidity, which turned into be a drenching rain.
with a thunderstorm that even drove the Pope indoors. Now that's not exactly the kind of high priest that the Bible talks about, is it? The Bible talks about something a little bit better than that. And we want our Romish friends. We love them. We want them to understand this. We don't want to knock them out. We don't want to look down our nose at that. We want them to understand that there is something so much better than that. And I'm so thankful today that we have a high priest who has entered into the presence of God. Good old Elvis Presley, when he was around, had quite a few fans. I wasn't one of them. There was a young fellow who was a real fan of Elvis Presley, and he bought every record that Elvis Presley had ever produced.
He had every picture that he could ever find of Elvis Presley. His walls of his bedroom and his house were lined with them. He even picked up leaves that fell off of Elvis Presley's tree on his yard. And he kissed the ground that Elvis Presley walked. A real fan, wasn't he? Real fan. Hey, I just lost the button. I guess I can preach without that. I mean, as good as I could with it. And... This fellow had one great desire in life, and that was that he would have an opportunity to get close to Elvis Presley so he could see him with his own eyeballs.
He wanted to get close to Elvis Presley. He even sat at one occasion on the wall that surrounded Elvis Presley's palatial gardens. He sat there for twenty-four hours. Hoping to get a glimpse of Elvis Presley, just a little bit closer up. And then one day Elvis Presley died. And that young man was heard to weep and to wail and to cry and say, Oh, I never got to see Elvis Presley. Isn't that terrible? What a disappointment. Tell you what, it'll be a lot worse for us if we miss getting to see the Lord Jesus. It'll even be worse for us if we miss seeing the Lord Jesus as our great high priest.
Because there's a lot of people that like to talk about the Lord Jesus as their Savior. But just as soon as you talk about the Lord Jesus being the high priest, they check the preacher out and go to sleep. They say, oh, that's too deep for me. I can't understand that. Well, no, it isn't. It isn't difficult at all. You just need to open up your mind and your heart to the blessed truths of God's Word and just appreciate the fact that you have a high priest who has gone into the presence of God. He's there for you now. And you have... accessibility into his presence. How? By faith. What we were looking at yesterday, Hebrews eleven six, it says by without faith you can't do anything in a way. You can't please God without faith.
So our access into the presence of our great high priest is by faith. Now when's the last time, you don't raise your hand, shake your head or blink your eyes. When's the last time that you really entered in to the presence of God by his invitation He said, it is good for us to draw near to God. And you got into the presence of God and you sat there long enough to tell the Lord about some of your problems in life. Don't be apologetic about that. Don't feel guilty if you spend some time there. You get into the presence of God and you know that you have a hearing with God and that your great high priest has bent his ear to you.
And you know that you can just tell him all the aches and the pains of your heart and your soul, some that you couldn't tell anybody else. He even puts your tears into his bottle. I've never put my tears into a bottle. The Lord says he puts your tears into a bottle. Isn't that wonderful? He thinks a lot of our tears. You know the scripture tells us in Ephesians chapter two and verse thirteen that we were afar off. But we've been made nigh by the blood of Christ. I'd like to preach the gospel for a while, but I guess I'm supposed to wait until the night. But that's where we were. All of us as Gentiles, we were afar off from God.
But the scripture says we've been made nigh. But it's always through the blood of Christ. Woe be gone those people who mock the blood of Christ and call it the slaughterhouse religion. God will never quit talking about the blood of Christ. And I'm never going to quit talking about the blood of Christ. Not even when I quit talking upon earth, because when I get to heaven, I'm still going to be talking about the blood of Christ. You might be tired of me preaching now, especially since I've lost my button, but I'll tell you what, you'll never get tired in heaven about listening to me talk about the blood of Christ, because that'll be my only boast. And I'll not get tired of you.
We're going to be talking about the blood of Christ, the work of Christ, the person of Christ. You can't divorce those things for all eternity. People are sitting around saying, what are we going to do in heaven all this time? No problem. No problem. You know the people in the Old Testament couldn't come close to the Lord. They stood at Mount Sinai when the mountain was rumbling and the lightning was flashing and the thunder was rolling around and the cloud was over the mountain. You know those people, those... hordes of people down here called the Israelites who had been taken through the Red Sea, delivered out of Egypt so miraculously, and here they are, a whole host, thousands of them, of God's people standing around the mountain. My, what experiences those people had had.
They've been redeemed by blood through the blood of the Paschal Lamb. They've been redeemed by power, taken through the Red Sea. And they are God's people in the wilderness. And here they stand around the mountain of God. And they're trembling. They're afraid. Because God said, you don't touch this mountain. Even if a dog were to touch this mountain, it's to be stung to death. You don't touch this mountain. If you want a little bit more of an explanation of this, look at Hebrews chapter twelve. He says, we're not come to the mountain where we fear and quake. Chapter twelve, verse eighteen and twenty. The people of Israel were told to keep their distance. Now drawing near to God, as we're told to do here, let us draw near to God.
That implies reconciliation. Just want to take your minds for a moment, way back to the Old Testament, with Joseph and his brothers. Remember that? What a story that is. Man, that's a beautiful story. You know the infraction of their relationships? You know how things progressed, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, until you get to the climax of the story in verse forty-five, a chapter forty-five. And it's time for Joseph to make himself known to his brothers. You know when he did that? Now listen. Joseph never made himself known to his brothers until there was complete repentance on their part. Those brothers had to be brought to repentance.
That's why Joseph did what he did and took so long in doing it. He just kept putting it off. Pushing them back. making them feel guilty. Oh, he said, he surely didn't make... Yeah, he made them feel guilty. You know why he made them feel guilty? Because they were guilty. And when you are guilty, you ought to feel guilty. I don't want to be guilty of taking anybody's guilt away from them when they ought to be guilty. Neither do I want to be guilty of making somebody feel guilty when they ought not feel guilty. Now, if you can keep that all straight, you do well. Joseph said, My brothers are guilty, and they've got to be brought to repentance.
And so he kept working and working and working and pushing them back and pushing them back until finally those brothers were brought to repentance. And one day those brothers stood in Joseph's presence. And he said, Everybody else, now you folks get out of the road. And he said to them, I am Joseph. What? I am your brother Joseph. And then you read down a verse or two further, and he said, Come near me. my brethren. Do you think there was any hugging and kissing and brotherly love going on at that time? Oh, that was a family reunion like you've never seen before. Beautiful. Come near, my brethren.
Coming near into the presence of God implies reconciliation. But it does something else for us. Look at verse twenty-two. Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. You know what drawing near to God does for us, besides helping us to understand the entanglements of life? It keeps us clean. It keeps us clean. It says that we are to come near, we are to draw near with a true heart. That word true is really a sincere heart. There is no place in the presence of God for insincerity. This is where the mass has to come off. This is when we quit playing games. The word sincere really is a word without wax.
If these people are invited into the presence of God, the writer, who I assume to be Paul, says, you have to come into God's presence with a true, you have to come with a sincere heart, you have to come in without wax, without hypocrisy. You don't play any games of hypocrisy in the presence of God. Because he knows all about it. And he'll take the mask off. And you've got to stand clear. Sincere heart. Conscience clear. That's what he's saying in verse twenty-two. Having their heart sprinkled from an evil conscience.
You got a bad conscience today? Check it out. Do you have guilt today? I'll go back to my little expression while ago. Should you have guilt today? Well, let me rephrase that. Are you guilty today? Could be guilty of a lot of different things. I just ask you, do you feel guilt today before the Lord? What are you guilty of? Now let me meddle just a little bit here. Husbands, do you feel any guilt for the way you treated your wife today? Yesterday? day before. You feel any guilt about that? You were nasty to her.
Oh, I won't pull anything to her. You were ugly to her, weren't you? Ladies, how about it? Do you feel any guilt about the way you have spoken to your husband? Do you feel any guilt about the way you have responded to your employer this past? Oh, we could go on and on and on and on. How about this now? Is there any guilt there? Now look. If you're going to get into the presence of God and you're going to draw near as He invites you to, that guilt had better be taken care of. Because you can't enjoy God's presence with a guilt complex. Now, if you are guilty, then you ought to deal with that.
And you can. You can deal with that. You and God. You don't have to deal with it with me. Aren't you glad? You can deal with that. With God. Now, if you are not guilty... And yet some preacher comes along and no preacher here would do that. But some preacher comes along and he puts you on one of the worst guilt trips you have ever felt in your life. Preachers are good at doing that. Preachers are expert at people feeling guilty even when they ought not. You have to decide whether your guilt is studio guilt or whether it really is a true guilt. All right? If it really is a guilt problem, Then you can have your conscience sprinkled from the evil.
And you can come into God's presence with a clear conscience. You'll never get anywhere with God with a bad conscience. Okay, we'll go on. Now we've got a real one to wrestle with in this next one. Bodies washed with pure water. Never, never before in my lifetime of thirty-some years preaching have I ever stood in a congregation of people as large as this and tried to tell them what that verse meant. What am I going to do now? Which another button would come off. I could sit down. I looked at this and I thought, wow. What in the world does taking a shower have to do with coming into the presence of God?
What does it have to do with it? Well, I think we're all smart enough to know that's not what he's talking about. He's not talking about me cleaning my fingernails and combing my hair and taking a bath and getting myself print up for the presence of God. You all know that you can come to God with your dirty overalls and you can come to God with dirty hands and dirty face. There's nothing to do with it. What does he mean here? Well, we wouldn't have near as much problem with this if we were a Hebrew. The Hebrews would understand this without any explanation. Milo wouldn't have to explain it to them at all because they understand this business of sprinkling and washing. A person, a Levite, could not be fit for his service unless he was put to the washing.
Literal body washing. He knew that he could not be serviceable to God unless he had been through the body washing. So he would understand this. Well, how do we understand it? Well, it's pretty clear, I think. It came clear to me anyway. I hope you will appreciate this. Now look. Are you all with me? Good. You're all awake. Thanks. How do I serve the Lord in this world? through my body. Did you ever try to serve the Lord without using your body? That's ridiculous. The only thing that we have with which we can minister to God in this world is this body that God has given us.
That's obvious, isn't it? Romans chapter six deals with this. By the way, Romans chapter six was not told written to tell us to get baptized by water. Now, don't throw your shoes yet. Romans six was not written to tell us to get baptized by immersion. Romans six was written to tell us that we are dead with Christ to sin. And he goes on to say, and your bodies are the vehicle of righteousness. Look at it again. It's right there. He's saying, your body is your vehicle for righteousness.
If I'm going to do anything righteous in this world, I'm going to have to do it in my body. And when God is done with my body, I won't be doing any more righteousness in this world. By the same token, Romans chapter six says, if you do any evil, you're going to use your body to do it. Do you ever see anybody do any evil in this world, apart from using their hands, their mouth, their eyes, their body? They use their body as vehicles of unrighteousness. Now, it's all pretty clear, isn't it? If we're going to come into God's presence, we want to come into God's presence, clean every wit, and we want to be able to present God's clean bodies.
I don't talk about the external cleanliness. I'm talking about bodies that are sanctified and clean and usable. and righteous before Him. God wants to use our bodies. Our bodies need to be sanctified. Boy, there's a whole sermon in that for all of us and especially people who are bad about abusing their bodies with drugs, alcohol, chasing around late nights. We won't talk about diets. Well, we are out of time. I'll just run through the rest of them and then you can put the meat on the bones. Number two is, I didn't plan to get through this anyway, let us hold fast to our hope.
What is he telling us to hold fast to? Oh, he tells us to hold fast to the truth somewhere else, but here he tells us to hold fast to our hope. What is our hope? I know what my hope is. My hope is the blessed hope, the return of Jesus Christ. And I believe that's what he's referring to because that's the context of this. You notice in verse thirty-seven? He said, He that shall come will come and will not tarry. Now how many of you are guilty of saying if the Lord tarry? Well, could it? He said he wouldn't tarry. Why are you talking about the Lord tarry when he said he wouldn't? Being a little facetious, aren't I? But, you know, there is a point there. I take it to mean that the Lord will not be behind time.
You'll not carry a moment too long. There's going to be that precise moment when praise God the heavens are going to open and the Lord Jesus is going to come. And you know what this whole chapter is really telling us. He says, in view of that day, he closes up with the coming of the Lord in this chapter. Now, folks, in view of that day, don't cast away your confidence. You just keep hanging in there. You keep plugging along. But you'll only be able to do that in the strength of the presence of God. You can't do it on your own. The coming of the Lord. It was a secret of endurance with the people as outlined in verse thirty two and thirty four. He says they stood their ground when publicly exposed to insult and persecution.
That's what he's saying in those verses. He says they even supported others. They pulled up alongside of others and supported them when they were in trial. And he says the reason they did that is because they had a better and a lasting possession. Beautiful. The third one, let us consider our brethren to provoke them to what? Not to anger. We're to consider our brothers to provoke them to love and good works. If you want to provoke your brothers and sisters, do that. That's good provocation. Provoke them to love and to good deeds. Now the last one, just to get a couple of brownie points for myself, from all of us who really do believe in mediocrity.
He's saying, let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together as a manner of some is. I translate that. I put my own translation. That's a BK translation that says, let's keep on going to meetings. He's telling us here that there are some people who don't do that. You're not guilty of that, are you? Well, there's some people who are guilty of that. In fact, I deal with people all the time who are guilty of that. They don't come to meeting very much anymore. So you have to go out and find out, well, now why haven't you been at at the chapel for the last three weeks, anyway. Where are you at? Why don't you come? Well, I went out to make a call on someone not very long ago, just a week or two ago, and I haven't seen you at the chapel. You just don't come to a meeting anymore.
Well, I hear all kinds of excuses. That particular night, that one said, well, I've heard all that stuff before. Oh, I thought I'd... I thought I taught you something once in a while, and other speakers here at this particular chapel surely teach something that you could learn from. And besides, it says in the Bible that the Lord brings out of His treasures things new and old. I would imagine that if you're there with an open heart, you're going to get something new and something old. And both of them are good. Somebody else says, oh, it doesn't meet my need. That's that disease that we have that I spoke about yesterday.
It doesn't mean my need. I don't care what anybody else's need. My presence there, that isn't important to anybody. Folks, it is important to other people that you're there when your church comes together. That's all I can say with time. It's important that you be there when the church comes together. You will get some needs met and you will minister to somebody else. Unless you come like a grumpy old bear, of course. But you come with a big happy smile and a warm handshake and say, Brother, I enjoy that. Hey, it's good to see you today. You're going to bring blessing to somebody. All I'm talking about is encouraging people. We can be in the business of encouraging one another and we don't want to give up. Now, the passage closes out with verse thirty-five.
He says, Don't throw away your confidence. He says, You will receive a reward. And we are not of those who draw back. We are of those who just keep pressing on. He says, God is not pleased with those who draw back. My little word of encouragement to you this afternoon, folks, is let us draw near. It's good to draw near to God. My little encouragement to you this afternoon is get busy provoking your brothers and your sisters to love and to good works. My exhortation to you today is encourage yourself in the Lord and encourage your brothers and sisters in the Lord. It's great business. It works. And it's a needed ministry today.
I'll tell you we don't need any more discouragers. We've got plenty of those people.