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[Music] Christians Hold Fast, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the book of Hebrews, the tenth chapter,

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beginning the reading at the nineteenth and continuing through the twenty-fifth verses. Let us pray and ask God's blessing upon us as we hear his words. Let us pray. O Lord, as thou didst send thy Spirit to illumine thy Word,

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so now send thy Spirit to illumine our hearts, that we might hear and hearing obey. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. So now, my friends, the blood of Jesus makes us free to enter boldly into the sanctuary

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by the new living way which he has opened for us through the curtain, the way of his flesh. We have, moreover, a great priest set over the household of God. So let us make our approach in sincerity of heart and full assurance of faith, our guilty hearts sprinkled clean, our bodies washed with pure water.

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Let us be firm and unswerving in the confession of our hope, for the giver of the promise may be trusted. We ought to see how each of us may best arouse others to love and active goodness, not staying away from our meetings as some do, but rather encouraging one another,

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and all the more because we see the day drawing near. May God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word, and to him be the honor and glory, dominion and power, not only now but always. Amen. Jack's introductions, I'm sure you are aware, are very much like perfume.

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They are to be smelled but not swallowed. Really, the art of introduction is a difficult one to master. He does it with grace because he's very personal. But one of the interesting aspects of traveling as much as I do, and I do that for safety's sake,

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if I stay in any one place very long, I'll be a goner. The only way I can keep up is by keeping moving. But one of the interesting things that happens is the various introductions that you hear. I was introduced once in a black church with these words,

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"And now I'd like to introduce to you Dr. Thielman. He may have a white face, but he has a black heart." And I remember once on the boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey, where they have the services on Sunday evenings in the movie theater,

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and you have the title of the movie, and then below it there's a sign that lists the preacher. And that Sunday it said, "The Ugly American, Bruce Thielman." And this summer I was in South Dakota, and a fellow who many of you know, Ray Knott, who I understand was here not too long ago, he introduced me.

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He said, "I took Bruce down to the local tent company to buy a new suit today." "Oh," he said, because they laugh there too, "you don't have to laugh. He got a nice striped one, and the vertical stripes help a little, you know." "It isn't funny," he said, because he got the tent poles and the flaps for nothing.

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And as if that wasn't enough, he said, "He's the only fellow I know whose crotch is lower than his cuffs, and he wears bell-bottom trousers upside down." And then he crowned it by saying, "The only difficulty was we couldn't find a belt for him, so I tied a shell pest strip around his waist, which was okay except that his fly died."

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So you see, I have been ridiculed and abused. When Ray Knott gets done with you, you've really had it. And so it's nice to come here and hear words of love and encouragement and support from Brother Jack. And they're meaningful because I know whether they're true or not, he thinks they're true.

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And that's what makes them very helpful. Will you pray with me? In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I suppose of all the books of the New Testament, after the book of Revelation,

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the book of Hebrews is the most difficult to understand. It is a book which begins with the theoretical, but it concludes with the very practical. It begins with its head in the clouds, but it ends with its feet planted firmly on the ground. It begins with the heavenly. It concludes with that which is eminently earthly.

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Now, the place at which the book makes the transition from that which is sublime to that which is everyday is here in the 10th chapter. And very specifically in the 23rd, 24th, and 25th verses, which I read in your hearing just a moment or two ago.

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At this point, the author of Hebrews lays out for us a kind of paradigm of what the life of a congregation of God's people is to be like. And it's that paradigm, that outline, that I want us to pause to ponder this morning. We begin in the 25th verse, where it is pointed out that Christians

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are not to forsake the assembling of themselves together, as is the custom of some. We sometimes get the attitude that the first century church was a perfect church in every way, not having the difficulties which we know in the church today. That was not at all so.

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There were those in the first century church who absented themselves from worship and other experiences of Christian communion, just as there are those today. But the writer is at pains to point out that Christians don't miss opportunities to be together with other Christians, to enjoy one another, and to worship God.

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What he's saying is this, that every time a Christian writes the word "I," the Holy Spirit crosses it out and substitutes the word "we." There is no such thing as isolated Christianity. I was on a bus traveling from Jerusalem to Bethlehem,

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and as we drove along the road, up on the side of the road was a hill, and at the top of the hill, a collection of huts or shacks made out of cardboard and bits of wood, scraps of all kinds. And I said to the fellow I was traveling with, "Shafiq, what is that up there?"

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And he said, "That is a colony of Christian hermits." Now think about that for a moment. If you're a Christian and you're going to be a hermit, you have to do it with others. There is, as you can see, no such thing as isolated Christianity.

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Now our example in this, as in everything else, is our Lord Jesus Christ. If you want to understand the life of anyone, you don't just look at the moments of triumph, the moments of victory, the moments of greatest accomplishment. You look at the everyday experience.

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You see how the man walks not only on the mountaintops, but in the valleys. Now as we study the life of Jesus in the Gospels, it is revealed to us very early that it was his custom to worship with others, that in fact he missed no opportunity. It was a habitual experience in his life not to miss occasions

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when he could be together with others to praise God and to enjoy them in the fellowship of the faithful. I think of one illustration in the fourth chapter of Luke. Jesus returns to his hometown, and it is noted, "As his custom was, he went to the synagogue to worship." Now he could have said, "Fellows, I just got into town, and I'd like to spend a little time with my family."

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That would have been a legitimate excuse to offer, I suppose, but he didn't offer it. He was present for the act of worship. Or he could have pled physical and emotional exhaustion. He had just come from the 40-day temptation experience in the wilderness.

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If anyone had ground for pleading exhaustion at that point, it was Jesus. But he did not do so. He was present with those who were worshiping God. He could have said, "I know the people who go to that particular synagogue, and I know that the way they live on the other six days of the week is not the way they talk on that seventh day."

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And I'm sure, since those were human beings, that that was a valid accusation, had it been made. He could have said that, but he didn't. Instead, he was present with them to worship. He could have said, "Well, I've gone before, and I don't get much out of it."

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I think it's reasonable to assume that there wasn't going to be anything taught in that synagogue that day which was going to be spiritually edifying to the only begotten Son of God. Jesus could have said that, but he didn't. He was present with those who were worshiping.

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And as Jesus found this necessary in his life, so it ought to be a very basic and fundamental part of our Christian experience. A few years ago, a President of the United States, on the first Sunday after his inauguration, received a call very early in the morning from one of the members of his cabinet.

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This cabinet secretary explained that a matter of some national urgency had arisen, and he asked the President to call an immediate meeting of the cabinet. And the President responded, "No, I can't do that. I have a previous appointment." And the secretary said, "Mr. President, forgive my boldness,

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but what appointment could you possibly have that would be of greater concern than this matter of national urgency?" And Dwight David Eisenhower responded, "Why, my appointment with God and with the people of God." We ought not to forsake assembling ourselves to worship God, holding fast to our fellowship. Now, we're told in the 23rd verse that when we come together,

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we are to hold on to the promises of God. Now, promises kept are always beautiful things to see. I mean, it's a very happy occasion when a man and a woman who took the vows of matrimony 50 years before now stand before a congregation of their friends and renew their vows after 50 years.

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It's a beautiful thing to see promises kept for a half a century. Or when you know two people who've gone into business together and have so entangled their lives that there's a perfect trust and confidence and faithfulness there. That's a beautiful thing to see.

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But there are no promises so faithfully kept, and no promises, therefore, as beautiful to see and be reminded of as the promises of God. So what we're to do when we come together is to hold on to those promises. A long time ago, Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to the Middle Kingdom in China,

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suffered a heartbreaking bereavement. And in his personal devotions the next day, he came across a phrase in the Greek New Testament. He always had his devotions in Greek. A phrase which somewhat puzzled him.

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It's in the 11th chapter of Mark, and it reads in the Greek, "Ekata piston theou." Now, if you translate that phrase literally, it reads, "Have faith of God." "Have faith of God." It doesn't make much sense. So he went to his English Bible, and he saw the phrase rendered there, "Have faith in God."

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Well, we've all heard that phrase. Which one of us has not encouraged someone, or been encouraged by someone, to have faith in God? And that was what was so difficult at that moment. Because this bereavement had left him hurting so, there was in him hurt and some anger against God.

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And it was difficult to have faith in God. He went back to the Greek, and as he studied the passage once more, he became convinced that the way he'd read the passage originally was the way in which it should be understood. That is, that the real sense of the passage is, "Have or receive to yourself or accept the faith of God."

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"The faithfulness of God." That is, build your faith not on the promises you make to God, which we will break every day of our lives, but upon the promises which God makes to us. Depend not upon the commitments which we make to Him, but upon the commitments which He makes to us.

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Rest your confidence not on any pledge you offer, because those pledges are tattered and fractured at best, but upon the pledges which He makes. For His pledges, never shadow of turning seen in them. Never any deviation from that which is faithful.

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He is absolutely dependable in every circumstance. This is why when we come together to worship God, we read the scriptures, the record of the promises of God. We preach a sermon which should be nothing other than a rehearsal of the promises of God. Every hymn that is sung, every anthem that is caroled, every prayer that is prayed,

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every act which takes place in the fellowship of Christians should be nothing less than, and nothing other than, the promises of God renewed. One of my most vivid memories of Cincinnati, Ohio, was coming here some years ago for the celebration on evangelism.

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I was called by Howard Blake, who was serving as the director of that celebration, and asked if I would lead one of the models of evangelism that were being given. They had 57 models, just like the Heinz Company. And 57 ways in which you could evangelize, and he asked me to lead the model on preaching.

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And I told him I didn't want to do it. And I told him that the reason I didn't want to do it was because, well, it was because I knew there were going to be many people there who were far finer preachers than I, and at whose feet I should be sitting rather than their sitting at mine.

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Now that was half the truth. The other half the truth was that I didn't think anybody was interested in preaching, and I'd be darned if I wanted to be here and be teaching the smallest model in the whole darn celebration. Vanity prohibited my saying that now. Humility is always good after the fact.

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In any case, that was the real reason. But Howard Blake held a lot of my ecclesiastical IOUs, and he called them all in at the same time. And so I had to do it.

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Well, I came, and they had me in a room in the Neanderthal--or Netherlands Hilton. And it was not a very large room, and I was kind of pleased at that because I didn't think there would be very many people at this particular model. And the first day, the room was packed.

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And I thought, "Well, each model is being repeated three times, three days in a row, so those who are interested in preaching have been here the first day, and there won't be anybody the next day." And I was horrified the next day when I found they had moved me into a room

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that was four times the size of the room for the first day. But amazed when I discovered that room was filled to the door, they were sitting on the floor and out in the hall. And the third day, it was the same way.

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Now, I want to hasten to add, this was not because of what I was offering, because, in point of fact, I did very little talking. I conducted a sort of a group discussion in which I invited everybody to contribute. They were not coming there because of anything I was giving.

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They were coming, and this is what moved me and impressed me so much, because of the tremendous desire there was in the hearts and minds of the preachers and the laymen in attendance to hear about preaching, which is the announcement of the promises of God.

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And that light went on in my mind then, and as I have traveled around the world since then, I have become more and more convinced that there is no hunger in the world's mind today that is greater than the hunger to hear what God has to say to these times.

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That's the reason we are told in a document 2,000 years old words which are as appropriate today as the words were the day they were written. We are to hold fast, to announce, to proclaim, cling and clutch to the promises of God.

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Then we are told in the 24th verse that we are not only to hold fast to worship and hold fast to the promises in worship, but we are to hold fast to each other. Now that, of course, is a far harder thing to do. If you have ever thought much about it, all of the groups of which you are part

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are groups, probably, in which you have some say about who becomes a part of a group. You have a vote in the Rotary Club. You have a vote in the Bridge Club. You have a vote in your Country Club.

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You have a vote, at least in the setting of standards, within your professional society or organization. Just about every fellowship of which we are a part, we have some say over who becomes a part of that group

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until you come to the Church. And when you come to the Church, we have no vote. For we understand, as Reformed Christians, that the Holy Spirit moves in the hearts of whomever he will, calls to faith those whomever he will,

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and he does not ask for our advice before he does that. And that means that he oft times calls people who are different from us. He calls people whose skin is a different color from ours. He calls people whose economic level is different than ours.

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He calls people whose intellectual accomplishments may not be as impressive as ours. He may even call a Democrat. Someone has said, you know, that the Presbyterian Church is nothing other than the Republican Party at prayer. Well, it is conceivable in the providence of God that he might call a Christian Democrat.

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And if he did, are you ready to hold fast? The point is, we're to cling to each other, regardless of what other differences are there. And that's difficult, but necessary. I remember my church that I serve in California,

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there was a lady who left the Church because she couldn't stand me any longer. I know that was true, because she told everybody in the Church about it before she left. And she told me also. She said she was going to a church where people felt the same way about things that she did.

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I had three thoughts when I heard her say that. My first thought was, "How dull." To be a part of a church where everybody felt the same way about things that you did. My second thought was, "It isn't true."

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Because I knew people in that church, and I knew that they didn't feel the same way about things that she did. And my third thought, and the only one that was really worth thinking, was, "You could not really have ever been a part of this fellowship if you could separate yourself from it now,

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just because of your antagonism to one part of it, so readily, so easily, to go to try to become a part of another group." When your life has been woven in to the wharf and whoop of a life of a Christian congregation, the personality of the preacher, or of any other individual,

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no single decision by an individual or by the group is going to be sufficient to cause you to break away. The love that is to exist within a fellowship of God's people is to be a far deeper thing than that. Our holding fast should withstand that kind of trauma. We had a family in the congregation I served in California named Cow Sills.

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And you may have heard of the Cow Sills. They were a singing group. They made a lot of records, and some of them were hits, and they traveled around the country and sang at various places. They're not so popular now.

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But back in those days, they would always be on the road except at holiday time. They would always be home for holidays. And I remember one Christmas Eve when I was walking from the place we were worshipping across the street to our other building, and suddenly Bobby Cow Sills loomed up in front of me in the dark.

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He was built like a middle-aged gorilla. And he grabbed me, threw his arms around me, and he said, "You know, we travel all over the country, and everywhere we go people applaud for us and the spotlight is on us. But the time when I feel the most loved, the time when I feel the most wanted,

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the time when I feel the most happy is when I'm right here in the midst of God's people in this place." And that was Christmas, because that is what the love that exists within the fellowship of believers is supposed to be. And we're told here in that passage that's before us that we're to hold fast to each other. And while we hold fast to each other, in the 24th verse we are told that we are to arouse one another.

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Now, as you go to different versions of the Bible, you find that word appearing in different ways. Sometimes it says "stir" one another. Sometimes it says "prod" one another. In one version it says "provoke" one another.

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The Greek word is a very interesting word. It's the word "paroxysmos." And every time that word is used in the New Testament, with this one exception, it is used with a very negative connotation. The word refers to a sharp, wounding, or cutting weapon.

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For example, when it says that Paul goes to Athens and he sees the idols to false gods, it says he was cut to the heart. And the word for "cut" is a variant on this word "paroxysmos." Or when Paul and Barnabas got into an argument, and it's recorded in Scripture, that a sharp contention arose between them, a wounding contention,

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that word for "sharp" or "wounding" is a variant on "paroxysmos." Or one with which you'll all be familiar, in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the great love chapter, when it says "love" is not easily "provoked." The word for "provoked" could be more literally translated "not easily wounded" or "cut,"

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because it's a variant on this word "paroxysmos." Every place that it is used in the New Testament, it is used in negative sense, except here, where it says that what Christians are to be doing to one another is "paroxysmos." You see, the image changes from the picture of the wounding bayonet to the healing scalpel.

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And what we are to be doing is to be performing heart surgery on one another. We're to very gently and tenderly open the way to one another's heart, to reach down inside and to massage one another in terms of our love. And of course, that kind of encouraging massage takes place best when you're in a group.

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You know how it is when you watch all in the family by yourself. You may chuckle a little bit, but that's all. But if there are five or six other people in the room and you're watching Edith have a Tupperware party, well, everybody laughs and they laugh out loud. We turn each other on.

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Have you ever celebrated Christmas alone? I remember one year that I was by myself in a foreign country, and that year I received 39 Christmas presents. I'm enough of a Presbyterian to know exactly how many I received.

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And they were very nice. But it was no fun, because I opened them alone. There was nobody to whom to say, "That's just what I wanted," or, "How did you know?" or, "Where do I take it back?" or whatever.

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There's got to be that opportunity to communicate, to make it real. That's where it begins to really happen. That's where we stir one another. And the purpose of the stirring, according to the 25th verse, is encouragement. I think the greatest difficulty that Christians have to face is discouragement.

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You remember how in Pilgrim's Progress the most difficult moment he has is when he gets caught in despond and despair. And it's when he finds the key of hope and encouragement in his pocket that he's enabled to go on.

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What we're to be doing with each other is to encourage each other. Let me give you one illustration of what that means, and then I'm done. A few years ago, a young man in a congregation I was serving came to the session. He explained that he'd completed two years of college

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and that he had pretty well decided that he wanted to go into some form of ministry. But he wanted to take a year off from school to discover whether his feelings and surmises were correct. That is, was he being truly sensitive to the way in which the Spirit was leading him?

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And he wanted to go to enter into black ministry in the state of Mississippi, which at that time, and still today, is the most closed state on racial matters in the Union. The session gave him a little support. The mission commitments for the year were largely made,

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and so only a little support was available, and he went off on a one-year commitment. About three months later, I received a telephone call from his father, and he reported to me that the boy was home. And he asked me if he could see me, and I said, "Certainly."

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And I said, "When does he want to come over?" And he said, "No, he'd rather have you come to the house." I thought that rather strange, but I said, "Fine," and that afternoon I went to the house. The boy did not meet me at the door; his father did.

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And when I asked where Doug was, his dad said, "Well, he's upstairs in his bedroom. He'd like to talk to you there." I went upstairs, and when I got to the door of his bedroom, I looked in, and he was in bed. And I was shocked when I saw him.

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All of his hair was gone. His scalp was lacerated at several points. His face was swollen and discolored. His lips were broken, and three of his teeth were gone.

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I went in, and I said, "Doug, what happened to you?" [Bell rings] "Please turn your cassette to the other side." He said, "Well, one of the things I had to do was to help in a remedial education program. I would borrow a truck from a black contractor, and every morning I would go out and I would pick up the kids.

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I would bring them back for remedial education and Christian education during the day. Then I would load them in the truck, and I would take them home again. Well, one night, just after I dropped off the last kids, I was stopped by the police. They must have had a plan, because three police cars converged on me at the same time from three different directions.

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I knew the police were not sensitive to what we were doing, and were not at all happy about it. So I was on my good behavior. I did everything they told me to do. I got out of the truck, and then they searched me.

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And then they searched the truck. And in the straw in the back of the truck on the floor, they found one half of a broken brick. Which isn't an unusual thing to find in a contractor's truck. They described that as a concealed weapon, and put me under arrest.

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They took me to jail, and the first thing they did when they got me in jail was to cut off all my hair. He was a California kid, and this was about six years ago, and he had hair down to here. In the process of cutting off his hair, they lacerated his scalp at three points with a razor. Then, he said, they stripped me naked, and 13 out of 14 police officers beat me into unconsciousness.

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In the process of that beating, one of them actually took a fork, and bent down the middle two prongs, and ran the other prongs up the boy's nostrils. Now, I want to say at this point that I don't offer this as any indictment of our law enforcement personnel across the country. I support them and encourage them in every way I can. I want to say at the same time, this is a very clear, open, and frank indictment of the police force in Mendenhall, Mississippi,

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which is still under question because of this incident. We're still waiting in federal court for this thing to come up six years later. But nonetheless, that's what the boy endured. A pastor has a deep commitment to his people, and especially to his kids.

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When he's a bachelor pastor, like I am, the kids become particularly important. So I was broken by what he said, and I said, "Doug, what are you going to do now?" And he smiled, and he said, "Well, I'm going to go back as soon as I feel better." And I said, "My God, Doug, why are you going back into the midst of something like that?"

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And he said, "Why, because with Jesus, we're going to set them free." And I couldn't think of anything to say. So I just walked across the room and put my arms around him and kissed him. He so massaged my heart.

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He so massaged the hearts of our people by his example and his testimony that from that day until this, that church has made that particular task in Mendenhall, Mississippi, its special mission concern. Every year they send more than a dozen young people to work in the same town where that happened to Doug.

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Medical doctors in that congregation give portions of their vacation to work in the clinic of that ministry there. Two young people from the church have gone to work there full time, and between $30,000 and $40,000 a year of that church's mission commitment

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goes to the support of that effort with Jesus Christ to set them free. Now that is what the ministry of encouragement is to be. And we are to be holding fast to each other so that we can demonstrate in the way we live and testify with the words we utter to the fact that Jesus Christ means something like that to us.

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And why? Why, because, and the passage concludes with a roll of the drums and a blare of the trumpet, why, because the day draws near. Christ is returning.

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Some people say it will be next Tuesday and some people say it will be a hundred years, some are premillennialists and some are postmillennialists. I'm a panmillennialist. A panmillennialist simply believes that Christ is coming,

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and when he comes everything's going to pan out all right. That's me. But until that time, we have our instruction. James says we're to pray for one another.

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Thessalonians says we're to comfort one another. Galatians says we're to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Colossians says we're to admonish one another. In Ephesians we are told that we will know the length and the breadth and the height and the depth

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of the love of God when? When we are together. And here, in this letter to the Hesiods, we are told that we're to hold fast to coming together. We're to hold fast to the promises of God when we come together.

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We're to hold fast to each other as we come together. And we're to hold fast to each other in a ministry that serves and arouses and encourages. Because you see, we're like islands. And waters separate us.

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And sometimes the waters are deep and silent. And sometimes there's storm talks and turbulence. But Jesus is the bridge over the waters. And he unites island to island until you have an archipelago.

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And archipelago to archipelago until you have a continent. And continent to continent until you have a kingdom. And the name of that kingdom, the name of that kingdom, my brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, why the name of that kingdom is the kingdom of God.

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Let us pray. O God, make us one in the power and love of Jesus Christ. For it is in his name that we pray it. Amen.

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(crickets chirping) You