The man of God says, Let us, therefore,
and you will note that let us is
one of the, uh, the characteristic expressions of
the book of Hebrews, exhorting.
Let us, therefore, and the word therefore is
a word meaning because of what went before.
Because of what I have said before, let
us fear, lest a promise being left us
of entering into his rest, any view should
seem to come short of it.
For unto us was the gospel preached as
well as unto them, that is, the Jews
of olden times of whom he had spoken
in the third chapter.
But the word preached did not profit them,
not being mixed with faith in them that
heard it.
For we which have believed go enter into
rest.
As he said, I have sworn in my
wrath, if they shall enter into my rest.
Which means they shall not enter into my
rest, as it says above in chapter 3
.11. So I swear in my wrath they
shall not enter into my rest.
If they shall enter into my rest, I
understand is, uh, Hebraism for meaning not.
Although the works were finished from the foundation
of the world.
For I speak in a certain place of
the seventh day on this wise.
And God did rest on the seventh day
from all his works.
And in this place again, if they shall
enter into my rest, that is, they shall
not enter into my rest.
Seeing therefore it remaineth that some must enter
therein, and they to whom it was first
preached entered not in because of unbelief.
Again he limited a certain day saying in
David, Today, after so long a time, as
it is said, Today, if you will hear
his voice, harden not your hearts.
For if Jesus, that is, Joshua, had given
him rest, then would he not afterward have
spoken of another day.
There remaineth therefore a rest to the people
of God.
For he that has entered into his rest,
he also has ceased from his did from
his.
Let us therefore labor to enter into that
rest, lest any man fall after the same
example of unbelief.
For the word of God is quick and
powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing
even to the dividing asunder of soul and
spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and
is a discerner of the thoughts and intents
of the heart.
Neither is there any creature that is not
manifest in his sight, but all things are
naked and opened unto the eyes of him
with whom we have to do.
Sing then that we have a great High
Priest that is passed into the heavens.
Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold
fast our profession.
We have not a High Priest which cannot
be touched with the feeling of our infirmities,
but one who was in all points tempted
like as we are, yet without sin.
Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne
of grace, that we may obtain mercy and
find grace to help in times of need.
This chapter deals with a certain kind of
rest.
It is a moral rest, a spiritual rest,
an inward rest, and a rest that satisfies.
And this rest springs out of a labor
finished, and in this case finished by someone
else.
The Bible is very clear that no one
has any right to rest until his work
is done.
The Lord never wants his children to take
unnecessary breaks from their labor, but to finish
the work David, after that he had by
the will of God served his generation, fell
on sleep.
And our Lord labored till he could say,
I have finished the work which thou gavest
me to do.
Rest follows labor according to the will of
God.
According to the will of man, rest and
labor are so intermingled that the average fellow
never gets tired.
But in the Bible this is not true.
We labor, and when the labor is finished,
then we wash our hands and say, thank
God that's done, and we can properly sit
down and rest.
Now, the argument from scripture here is that
God once did a work and rested from
it.
That's in Genesis.
And he entered into his own rest after
he had done a necessary work.
Then he entered into his own rest, that
is, a cessation of labor.
For you will notice that rest is a
negative thing.
Rest is not a positive thing.
I remember once a gentleman who hoped that
he could help me, he said, Told you
what you need is an intensive rest.
I've always smiled about that.
I can just see a man with his
muscles tense and his knuckles white trying to
rest.
He was intensely trying to rest.
And we do that, but don't get rested.
Now, God entered into his rest, that is,
he ceased from doing something.
That's what rest is.
It is a cessation of labor.
Then rest is automatic after that.
Now, when a work is to be done,
I say that no man has any right
to rest till it's done.
Either the man has to do it, or
someone has to do it for him.
Now, God offered Palestine to the Jews.
That's in the chapter here, that's the argument
of the chapter.
God offered Palestine to the Jews, and he
said, Now this is yours, it's all yours.
You will not need to plant a vineyard,
it's all planted for you.
You will not need to clear a field,
all the fields are cleared and fenced.
You will not have to start herds, the
herds are everywhere.
Milk and honey are flowing, the bees are
there, and the vines are bearing.
Everything is prepared for you, and I am
driving out the unworthy inhabitants who are unfit
to live, and I am going to turn
this whole thing over to you free of
charge.
The work has already been done.
But Israel refused, and they failed, brought all
down the way.
In unbelief they refused and forfeited their rest.
And so, after all these years now, the
book of Hebrews is written, and the man
who wrote it argues from this history of
Israel.
He said there was a rest that could
have been the possession of the Jews, they
could have had it, it was theirs.
God was offering them Palestine because a work
had already been done.
All they had to do was move in
and unpack their things and settle down, because
it was all done for them.
The rest was theirs by the labor of
others.
Now, he said, Israel met this in unbelief
and they never occupied all of the land.
And they were in and out of the
land, they were sometimes in bondage to the
people of the land, and they never had
the faith nor obedience to go in and
take over the land and enter into God's
rest.
Now, that's the argument.
It goes on that there is another rest
offered to us in the gospel.
And this is not a rest by having
herds of cattle and houses already built and
fountains already flowing and orchards already bearing.
This is a spiritual rest of which the
others were symbolic.
This is a rest of the heart.
This is the rest of the question of
what am I going to do about sin.
It has to do with holiness and how
am I going to face the great God
Almighty in that day to come.
How am I going to stand up there
in that awful judgment day before the blazing
throne with sin on my heart?
How am I going to satisfy justice which
demands that I should die for my sin?
How am I going to pay the moral
debt?
I am a man under deep debt.
If you were in debt to the Canadian
government for unpaid income tax, you would be
worried, and you should properly be worried.
And yet, if somebody came along and said,
Now, here, you owe $10,000 in back
taxes, and they're breathing down your neck, but
here, I'll take care of it for you.
It'll be paid.
It is paid.
Here's the receipt.
You'd rest.
You'd relax for the first time, and you'd
sleep well at night.
You'd say, Now, I'm not worried when I
see a Mountie.
I'm not thinking he's after me.
I know better now.
He's just going down and walking down the
street looking for bad men, but I'm all
right.
I have entered into my rest.
Not mine, but the rest of another.
Now, that's exactly what the Bible teaches here.
The rest of the Christian is based upon
the work of another.
It is not his own work, for that
he could never do.
It is done by another who is capable
of earning that rest, capable of procuring it.
The Christian isn't capable.
Nobody's capable.
That is, I cannot deal with the matter
of holiness outraged.
I cannot deal with the matter of justice
violated.
I cannot take care of the question of
sins committed and of moral debt.
I can't.
It's impossible that I should, for the best
I could possibly do, and I can't do
that, but the best I might do in
a remote way would be to stop sinning
now and not add any more.
But I can't pay one penny on the
debt I already owe.
And the debt I already owe is so
great that it would sink me into hell.
So now I've got to pay that.
I've got to pay that before I can
rest.
I owe not to a government, but to
God Almighty, the Eternal God, a debt I
can't pay, and it's weighing me down.
And when the conviction of that strikes the
sinner, we call it getting under conviction.
And that's the only place anybody ever was,
was under conviction, weighing conviction, weighing him down.
Now, either we've got to pay that or
somebody else has to pay it.
And I say when I can't pay it,
the best we can do, the best we
can do, is to pay from here on.
But we couldn't even do that.
And so all the back tax is still
owing, and all the moral debt behind us
is still owing.
What happens then?
There is someone who comes and lays down
his life just for the unjust, pays the
debt he didn't owe, and includes in that
debt all of our debts, propitiates for violated
holiness, attunes for justice that is broken.
He does all of this.
Now, he's capable of it, and the whole
book of Hebrews argues for the capability of
Jesus.
Is he able to do it?
It's one thing to make a promise, it's
quite another thing to be able to carry
it out.
And our Lord Jesus Christ came and said,
Lo, I come in the volume of the
book it is written of me to do
thy will, O God.
Was he able to do it?
The whole book of Hebrews declares loudly with
logic that he was able to do it.
By himself he purged our sins and sat
down on the right hand of God.
Now, if you will hear his voice, that's
the vital question.
Shall we be like Israel in those days
when they heard the gospel, that is the
good news, that there was a place prepared
for them, that they didn't have to cut
down a tree or blow out a stump,
nor clear a field, it was all theirs?
They didn't have faith to believe it, and
so they never enjoyed it.
They entered in, but as I've said before,
it was always under a shadow and they
never got it all.
Shall we be like them and so feel
completely, or shall we try to do our
own labor and enter into our rest?
For any man who knows his own heart,
who would dare to stand and say, I
am morally capable of earning my own rest,
we'll put that man down as being a
moral fool.
For a man who knows his own heart
knows better.
We either have to do this, we either
have to satisfy God's holiness and satisfy violated
justice, deal with the sin question and pay
the moral debt, or we have to have
somebody do it for us.
The book of Hebrews declares that somebody did
it for us.
That work was done by the Eternal Son.
It's a dual rest that we rest from.
We rest from the labor of Egypt and
we rest in Canaan from the labor of
trying to make ourselves good or fix ourselves
up.
Now from what do we rest?
Let's look at that for a little bit.
Now a lot of people don't want this
kind of rest, they want another kind, but
those of you who want a moral rest,
want to know what it is to rest
in the heart, you're concerned.
What is it?
What is it that I rest from?
Well, you rest from the yearning for character.
From the time I was a boy I've
heard an expression I've never liked, and that
is character building.
I've never liked it.
The liberals use it a lot and educators
use it.
They're building character.
I suppose it's all right.
Really if you're oppressed I guess I would
have to admit that it's a valid phrase,
but you usually like or dislike a phrase
because of the context you've heard it in.
I used to hear it uttered by men
that I knew didn't know what they were
talking about.
So character building has never pleased me.
You can't build a character.
You can take a man dying of cancer
and you can teach him Greek and Hebrew
and Latin and sing grand opera and enjoy
great music and art, but he's still a
dying man and you're not building anything in
him.
He's a dying man.
You can take a sinner and you can
teach him to be honest and be a
square shooter and to be a good Canadian
or a good American or a good Britisher.
You can help a man.
There's no question about it.
Our schools can help the characters of our
children.
And I think that when we're criticizing everybody
we ought to stop one minute and salute
and stand in salute to the teachers that
have helped to train our young people of
the world and teach them that it's better
to be good than be bad, and it's
better to be honest than to be crooked.
It's better to tell the truth than to
lie and find fault with the teachers, but
they've done a pretty good job.
If I had been as good a young
fellow as my teachers taught me when I
was going to school, I'd have been much
better than I was.
I think we ought to thank God for
the teachers.
But all you're doing is building is teaching
a dying man how to speak good English.
All you're doing is making a cultured man
out of a dying man.
He and his culture are going to die
together.
That's what character building is.
It's all it is.
It's better than nothing that it isn't enough.
Meritorious deeds.
People want to do meritorious deeds.
Did you ever dream?
Now, I won't ask you to put up
your hand because I know you have.
Did you ever dream of doing noblights?
I used to when I was a young
fellow in my teens dream of going to
war and coming home a hero.
You know, when I'd hear the Star-Spangled
Banner I'd get goose pimples on my wrists
and I'd say, oh, I'd just love to
go out and die for something or come
back.
You know, I wanted to die for my
country and then I wanted to come back
and enjoy it.
But it didn't work out somehow or other.
I never got any higher than a buck
private in the rear rank when I was
in the service.
Never had a gun in my hands.
So I sort of fizzled on that one.
But we all want to do meritorious deeds,
you know.
We want to go out and do something
big.
And then when we come to think of
God and things of the eternal world, we
want to do virtuous deeds.
We want to be known as virtuous, we
want to be good.
Benjamin Franklin, as you remember, was so eager
to be a good man that he made
a sheet of paper, divided into squares like
a tight checkerboard, and he had Monday, Tuesday,
when seven of them.
Then he had the virtues on the left
-hand side.
Honesty, modesty, humility, truth.
He had all the virtues he could think
of down on the left-hand column.
And then each day he'd go down that
list and check off where he'd failed.
If it was a blank spot, that meant
he'd been all right.
But if he failed, he checked it off.
Well, he was wanting to be good.
And I thank God for everybody who would
rather be good than to give up and
sink into the mud.
But that still isn't enough.
You never find rest.
You never find rest when you're only building
character, because you're never done building.
You never find rest when you're only seeking
to do virtuous deeds and the warfare of
the flesh and the spirit.
We can only be delivered in that warfare.
We can only win if we take deliverance
by resting.
I was at a gathering of preachers at
Knox Christian Church Thursday.
The Gray and I were there, and I
was one of the speakers briefly.
And there came into our meeting, without our
knowing anything that he was coming, or we'd
have asked him to speak, no doubt, but
he just wandered in and had lunch with
us, Norman Grubb.
Most of you know him or know about
him.
And he stood up there and gave us
a little talk just after we'd eaten, while
we were still around the table.
And he said something that interested me.
He said that he thought that we ought
to arrive at a place where aspiration had
given over to realization.
The person that aspires all the time, that's
a good person.
The person that doesn't aspire is a finished
and finite club.
There's no hope for him.
But you can aspire for a lifetime, but
never realize.
He said, let's lay aspiration aside and begin
to realize.
That is, enter in.
Not only want to get into Palestine, but
cross the river and get in.
Not only want to give up the struggle,
but to actually give it up and trust
the Holy Ghost to take over.
He didn't add that, but I'm adding that
and explaining what he said.
The man who writes in the Spirit says,
Let us fear that the promise being left
us of entering in, we as they, should
seem to come short of it.
The promise still holds good, but somebody said,
Didn't Joshua lead them in?
Well, the argument is, if Joshua had led
them in and they had obtained that rest,
then why should, centuries later, God repeat it
in David and say, If therefore you will
hear his voice, harden not your hearts?
No.
He said, Joshua could not give rest to
Israel because of Israel's unbelief.
But there is a rest spoken of by
David centuries after Joshua.
Therefore he talked about rest, not the rest
that Joshua could bring to the people by
taking them into Palestine, but another rest.
The writer makes the application and says, It's
an inward rest.
It's a rest of the soul.
It's a rest from our labor.
The promise still holds good.
We are to attain God's rest.
What have we to be afraid of?
It is that there may be some among
you who will be found to have missed
this chance.
We've fooled with religion.
We've played with Christianity.
We've been in and out of churches.
We've heard this and that speaker.
We've read this book and yonder book.
But in unbelief, we've blocked any effort of
the Spirit to lead us into rest.
We get mental habits.
They get fixed.
Our hearts get tough and unresponsive.
And then we should plow deep, our fowler
ground, and seek to be able to respond
quickly, to be responsive and sensitive to the
voice of God, calling us to cease from
our labors and trust in Jesus Christ completely,
wholly, that we might be able to rest
from our struggles.
I'm afraid that most Christians are not very
restful about this matter.
A Methodist bishop said once in a sermon
that he had found as a pastor that
70 percent of his parishioners were not ready
for heaven.
They had to cram for the examination at
the last minute before they felt free to
get in.
They weren't resting in what Christ had done.
They were vaguely hoping about what they might
do or had done.
Somebody said, Bishop, were you not a bit
wrought up there when you said 70 percent?
He said, Is that right?
He said, I am telling you the truth,
it's 70 percent.
He said, I counted them.
Only about 30 percent of my parishioners were
ready to go.
Two-thirds, over two-thirds, of those who
went to church for a lifetime and sang
the hymns of Zion and heard the scripture
read and listened to prayers and engaged in
them and heard great preaching, for there were
great preachers in those days.
When they came to die, they hadn't entered
into rest, and they couldn't go without fear.
I want God to lead me to a
place where there is no fear in dying,
because you are resting in God, resting in
what Jesus Christ has done for you.
God did his work and entered into his
rest.
His Son, Jesus Christ, did another work, and
we enter into that rest.
Let's see that we do it.
I pray that this may be a heart
-searching morning as we continue with the service.
Let's search ourselves before God.
Amen.