Not Neglecting Our Salvation

Salvation is a continuing process. We American Christians need to be exceedingly careful that we pay full attention to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us in the present hour.

This morning (8/15/2004) I preached from the second chapter of the Book of Hebrews. I spoke of the fact that the new covenant is stricter than the old, and we will suffer under the hand of God if we drift away from our intense serving of the Lord; if we neglect our salvation.

Notice, in Hebrews 2:2,3, how much stricter the new covenant is when compared with the Law of Moses.

The Jewish Christians to whom the Book of Hebrews is addressed were saved and filled with the Spirit, as we use those terms. In fact, they were ahead of us in doctrine, for they regarded the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and the doctrine of eternal judgment as elementary teaching.

We of today are preaching an unscriptural "rapture" in place of the resurrection of the dead, and we know little or nothing of eternal judgment because we have made Divine grace an alternative to godly living.

The thesis of Hebrews is entrance into the rest of God. The rest of God, the eternal Sabbath in which the Lord Jesus always lives, is the goal of our redemption. All the other acts of redemption lead us into the rest of God.

The rest of God is that state of being in which we are at perfect rest in the center of God's Person and will. This is where Jesus always is and He wants us to be with Him where He is.

I spoke also of the need for holiness. We American Christians to a great extent are oblivious to the necessity for holy living. We go to see worldly movies, such as the Titanic. We join in the worship of the Statue of Liberty. We gaze at the Olympics as though we were watching the glorifying of the Lord Jesus. Someone said we are not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed through the renewing of our mind.

We are not to be weird, peculiar, or odd. But we do belong to the Lord Jesus in a special manner, a manner not true of the majority of people in America or in the world. We are to be attending to our worship of the Lord and our service to Him, not to the pleasures and pursuits of the world.

I believe difficult times are coming to our country. I think the only hope of avoiding wholesale destruction is for the Christian people to turn away from the pleasures and ease of life in the United States and begin to press forward into the fullness of God through the Lord Jesus Christ.