To God be the glory, great things He hath done! So loved He the world that He gave us His Son, Who yielded His life an atonement for sin And opened the Life-gate that all may go in.
Refrain Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, Let the earth hear His voice! Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, Let the people rejoice! O come to the Father thru Jesus the Son, And give Him the glory, great things He hath done!
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O perfect redemption, the purchase of blood! To ev’ry believer the promise of God; The vilest offender who truly believes, That moment from Jesus forgiveness receives.
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Great things He hath taught us, great things He hath done, And great our rejoicing thru Jesus the Son; But purer and higher and greater will be Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.
See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. (Heb. 12:25–26)
Time and again, God sent prophets to warn His people—and all too often, the people refused to listen. Their willful ignorance eventually resulted in exile. If God did that to people who refused His earthly prophets, then we surely should think twice before we refuse the word of His very Son from heaven.
We certainly need to point to specific steps of obedience for clarity’s sake, but generally speaking, we always return to this foundation of the faith: hearing what God says and putting it into practice. It’s profoundly simple, and simply profound: don’t refuse Him who speaks.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Essentials of Christian Maturity” by Alistair Begg.
See to it … that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears. (Heb. 12:15–17)
The original hearers of Hebrews lived in an overwhelmingly pagan society—perhaps not unlike ours, in which promiscuity outpaces modesty nearly everywhere we look. In such a sexually charged setting, it is imperative that God’s people demonstrate how we are both set apart to God and set apart from sin. As the apostle Paul commends, we must “flee from sexual immorality” (1 Cor. 6:18).
We must not sell out to sin. The tradeoff is never worth it, no matter what temptation promises in the moment.
How does Esau fit in? His story serves as a parable of an outsized physical appetite. In the heat of the moment, he exchanged his heritage and home for something cheap. Like him, you can build your life for decades and throw it away in five minutes in a fit of unchecked lust—or rage, pride, or greed, for that matter. We must not sell out to sin. The tradeoff is never worth it, no matter what temptation promises in the moment.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Essentials of Christian Maturity”by Alistair Begg.
See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled. (Heb. 12:15)
How can we miss the grace of God? We may be surprised how easy it is to do so! When the Scriptures are taught, when the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper and baptism are practiced, when the church fellowships together, it is still possible for us to sit around with our fingers in our ears.
The phrase “root of bitterness” in this verse draws its language from Deuteronomy 29, in which Moses warns Israel about their hearts: “Beware lest there be among you a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit” (v. 18). This is someone “who, when he hears the words of this sworn covenant, blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart’” (v. 19, emphasis added). James echoes this warning with the command to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22, emphasis added).
When we hear without really listening, then we end up having all the trappings of Christianity while worldliness is still rooted in our hearts. Envy, bitterness, anger, rage, and despondency begin to make our souls impervious to what God really wants for us. We must pull these destructive weeds up by the root and instead let the grace of God fill our hearts so that we can be hearers and doers of His Word.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Essentials of Christian Maturity” by Alistair Begg.
Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. (Heb. 12:14)
“Strive” is an appropriate translation for the imperative here. It communicates concentrated, vigorous effort. The author is saying, I want you to pursue this with the passion of a hound pursuing a fox. And the fox we are to pursue is the twofold goal of harmony and holiness.
Maintaining peace requires serious striving. Christ purchased peace, and “he himself is our peace” (Eph. 2:14). Discord is inevitable in our fractured age, even in the church—but this is no reason to give up! We strive to grow in harmony and to shed the burdens and sins that hold us back from it. Jesus Himself told us, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). We won’t have perfect harmony before Christ returns, but in reliance on the Holy Spirit, we can be a small taste of heavenly community.
And how do we foster such harmony? Well, holiness provides the steady framework, the fertile soil, for the harmony that we enjoy. As we grow in holiness together from the shared wellspring of the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts, we will also grow in harmony with one another and with God. Neither harmony nor holiness is an optional extra. They come from the work of Christ’s Spirit in us and thus are evidence that we really belong to Him.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Essentials of Christian Maturity” by Alistair Begg.
Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. (Heb. 12:12–13)
Despondency is one of the great avenues of attack from the Evil One. Our discouragement is his delight, and he can use it to great effect, even for those involved in ministry. To serve Christ is not to walk around in blissful unawareness of life’s realities. The Christian life involves serious struggle.
Therefore, this call to step forward—in “the strength that God supplies” (1 Peter 4:11), as it were—must not only ring in our ears but reverberate in our hearts. Those who seek to follow Christ must be prepared to declare, I absolutely refuse to gratify the devil by staying downhearted. He would love nothing more than to see our arms enfeebled, our knees buckling, and our paths veering off the course of obedience.
Despondency is one of the great avenues of attack from the Evil One.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Essentials of Christian Maturity” by Alistair Begg.
This week “Morning Moments” will be sharing with you from an article in which Alistair Begg discusses the essentials of the Christian life.
The Christian life is not a series of a few special performances; it is steady persistence for a lifetime. Many of us can produce a burst of enthusiasm now and then. That’s not particularly difficult. The real challenge is to stay the course over the long haul—not a flash in the pan but steady, stable, and persevering in the essentials of maturing faith.
The second half of Hebrews 12 presents us with a to-do list of sorts for the Christian life. It’s not a quick-fix, three-easy-steps-to-success kind of list, but it does offer us six important ways to walk in enduring Christian maturity.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Essentials of Christian Maturity”by Alistair Begg.
Because it is a faith ina trustworthy Savior, genuine faith begins with asking and persisting and proceeds with walking and sharing. Have you asked the Lord to save you? Have you asked as one who knows deep in your heart that there is nowhere else to go, since He alone has the words of eternal life (John 6:68)? Have you set out on a path of obedient trust, walking where His Word has directed you? And have you found this faith you’ve walked in worth sharing?
These are the attributes of a true faith that has the Lord Jesus Christ as its object. But we must remember that we can’t manufacture it. It doesn’t come by verbal manipulation or human constraint. It comes by the work of the Holy Spirit, who alone is able to turn us in faith to the only one worth believing in. The Scriptures tell us, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9). Believe in Jesus, confess Him, and be saved! He is trustworthy, and He will do it. “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame” (Rom. 10:11).
This article was adapted from the sermon “An Illustration of Faith” by Alistair Begg.
As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering. So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” And he himself believed, and all his household. (John 4:51–53)
As the official made the long journey home on the basis of Jesus’ word, his servants arrived with the astounding news that his son was living and well. They expected him to be dead. They had no explanation. But the official had the answer—and he couldn’t keep it to himself.
This was no time for secrecy! A happy, relieved father, he now had the privilege of sharing his faith with his household, who believed along with him. It may not have been easy to do so. Just like his going to Jesus in the first place, his proclaiming faith in the Galilean peasant may have come with a social cost. But genuine faith will always, sooner or later, become vocal.
We ought to be skeptical of any approach to Christianity and proclamation of the Gospel that does not first confront men and women with the necessity of seeing their sin and their need of Christ.
In Acts chapter 4, when the religious officials in Jerusalem told the apostles not to preach anymore of this man called Jesus, Peter and John replied, “We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). It’s completely understandable that having faith for faith’s sake is not much to talk about. It is, after all, an empty faith. But when our faith has an object as wonderful as the divine Word who became a man to save people from their sins and welcome them into the life of God, it would be strange for us to keep quiet.
This article was adapted from the sermon “An Illustration of Faith” by Alistair Begg.
Sandra Bivens Smith 