Sunday Sermon … Move Toward Maturity in Your Christian Life
A quick note before I do this sermon: Next week, we will start the “One Month to Live Challenge” series on Word Keeper. The one month to live challenge is a thirty day study that encourages people to live their entire lives as if they only have one month left to live. You can learn more about it and get the book at onemonthtolive.com.
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Dr. Cox starts this sermon talking about a squirrel in the middle of the road. … Squirrels can’t always decide if they want to cross the road or not, so they get halfway across and turn around and start back, then they around again to cross the road, and this cycle continues until the squirrel decides which side of the road to go to. … It’s also a good image that depicts many Americans. A lot of have made a commitment to follow Jesus, but then as we start to follow Him, we think that we want to go back to old life. So we start to backtrack and then we think we really should follow Jesus, so we move toward Jesus again. We have to decide what side of the road we want to be on.
If you’re in the middle of the road, the book of Hebrews is for you. Hebrews was written to Jews who had become Christians, a few were probably priests. They were caught in the middle of the road, crossing from Old Testament to New Testament, from sacrifice to salvation. The book of Hebrews was written to say to them “make up your mind who you are and move towards maturity in Christ.”
There are three areas in our lives that we can self-check and will help us grow in maturity.
1. Grow in Service (5:12). – Move from being taught to teaching others. … Do something with what you’ve learned. The Disciples followed Jesus around for three years, but they were preaching to others about what they knew throughout the three years. After the three years, Jesus turned leadership over to them. … When we first become Christians, we are like newborn babies and need to grow before we can start eating solid food. New Christians need to drink milk so they can grow (1 Peter 2:2), but there comes a point when we outgrow the milk bottle. We need more solid food, and we can help feed others. … (if you’re listening to audio, I don’t have the pictures of the baby.)
2. Grow in righteousness (5:13-14). – Train yourself to distinguish good from evil. … You need to exercise your morals and your character. Start out making the right choices in the simple things in your life, and you will eventually be consistently making the right choices the complex things too. When you start working out regularly, you don’t start lifting a lot of weight, you start pretty low and then your muscles grow stronger and you start lifting more weight. Also, in football, if a team has a new quarterback, they’re going to give him a lot of reps (repetitions) so he can become a better quarterback and grow more accustomed to his teammates.
3. Grow in doctrine (6:1-3). – Nail down your basic beliefs. … You don’t want to forget the basic beliefs; you should still review them, but you don’t need two foundations under one building. You don’t change a house foundation, it’s established. … Here’s three pairs of basic beliefs that all Christians should have nailed down. First, repentance and faith. This is how to become a Christian; we repent of our sin and put our faith in God. Second is baptism and the laying on of hands. This is slightly different today than it was in Paul’s time. Many of the Jewish Christians received John the Baptist’s baptism before Jesus’s death, but after Jesus’s death, they needed to be baptized in the name of Jesus (Acts 19:1-6). After they were baptized in Jesus’s name, they would lay hands on the new Christians and they would receive the Holy Spirit. We don’t still do the laying on of hands, but we certainly do still do baptisms and we believe you receive the Holy Spirit when you are baptized. Third, the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. … We need to have these nailed down so we don’t have to continuously decide what we believe about them.
Look at the squirrel again. If you’ve been a Christian for a few years, ask yourself: Am I serving like I should be? Is my character one of righteousness? Do I have my basic beliefs nailed down? … If you are the squirrel in the middle of the road, what is going through your head? What is distracting you?
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