Some of you here are familiar with Alex Smith, because he was for a number of years the starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.
But what many of you may not know is that Alex Smith was recently named the NFL’s 2020 Comeback Player of the Year But the award was actually an understatement—Alex Smith’s recent comeback may will be the greatest comeback story in the annals of sports history.
It was on November 18, 2018 that Alex Smith suffered the course of Washington Redskins quarterbacks. On the very same day to the day that when former Redskin great Joe Theissman suffered a similarly gruesome, and for him, career-ending injury on a quarterback sack, Smith went down with a compound spiral fracture of his left tibia and fibula—an injury so grotesque that it left his lower leg fl0pping around independently of the rest of his leg, with the two bones literally exposed.
He was 34 at the time, a veteran of a dozen years in the NFL, and anyone in their right mind on that day would have thought this was the end of Smith’s football career.
But then things got worse . . . .
Three days later Smith was battling for his life, as the exposure of his bones to the field turf had turned his body septic—in an infection was wracking his entire body. And the infection was not merely any kind of infection, it was a necrotizing, that is, flesh-eating bacteria. When doctors described the situation to his wife, she wanted the leg amputated, but Smith demurred, asking that doctors do anything to save the leg.
Anything turned out to be 17 different surgeries to clean out dead flesh and to replace what was missing in his lower leg with muscles and tendons from other parts of his body. Various braces were applied; Smith went through more than a year of rehab, eventually attended a physical therapy clinic designed to rehabilitate injured and maimed veterans from the war in Afghanistan, and after nearly two years of arduous training, incredibly, tried out for his former team and won a job as the third-string quarterback.
Late in the season, when the rookie sensation flamed out, and the second stringer went down with a season ending injury, Smith, incredibly, trotted onto the field, started six games at the end of the season, endured numerous quarterback sacks, and led his team to five victories.
All because he had resolved that he would not be defeated by a devastating injury, that had threatened not only his career, but literally his life and his limb.
Sometimes it’s exactly that kind of resolve that we need to have to rehabilitate our spiritual lives.
And it is that kind of resolve that the writer of the Hebrews encourages his readers to have in the wake the great challenges that had discouraged their spiritual lives in the first century.
Though I cannot prove it, Hebrews 12 suggests that those Jewish believers who were considering abandoning their faith in Christ due to on-going, unending persecution in the first century had likely already experienced considerable deterioration in their spiritual lives by the time they read the Book of Hebrews. Now, the writer turns to what will be necessary to turn around the spiritual backsliding they had already experienced.
The Holy Spirit’s recommendation is this: Resolve once and for all to rededicate yourselves to spiritual vitality, for it will be worth it all in the end.
And He uses an athletic, or perhaps at least, a physical analogy to what must happen spiritually for them to make up the spiritual ground they had lost in their spiritual lives.
He tells them to rededicate, reinvigorate themselves to repairing whatever is broken in following Christ.
Earlier in the chapter, the writer has compared living the Christian life to running a race, encouraging his readers to endure to the end. Now, he tells them that whatever has been broken, whatever is weak, needs to be repaired and healed to run the straight race that is before them.
Verse 12: Therefore, strengthen the hands which are weak, and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.
The writer in verse 11 has just mentioned the necessity of discipline, and the importance of our understanding that the trials and persecutions of this life represent God’s discipline toward making us more like Christ. And now he encourages his readers to apply that discipline. Do whatever is necessary spiritually to train and strengthen and repair your spiritual life, so that as a runner runs the race to finish well, you will indeed finish well.
Now none of us enjoy discipline, a fact that the writer has just noted in verse 11. All discipline for the moment seems not be joyful, but sorrowful, yet to those who have been trained by it, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. The same is true from a physical standpoint as well. We don’t exercise or train our bodies so much because we enjoy it at the time. We do so because of the end result—when we have disciplined ourselves through the rigors of exercise, we know that in the long run, it will pay off. We will be able walk or run or do whatever we need or want to do, because we have endured pain in the present to experience gain in the future.
As most of you know, I myself experienced this sort of thing in 2020—three surgeries on an ankle and a knee that both required considerable physical therapy. I knew that at my age that if I were not disciplined, if I did not subject myself to considerable pain, there would be no gain. That it was likely I would never gain the full use of my knee and my ankle again. And so when my therapists and doctors gave me a set of exercise to regain function, you better believe I made the most of them, and I pushed things to the limit in terms of pain, so that I could again walk, and hike and fish and live a normal life. I know people who rejected the exercises and ended up being unable to straighten their or fully flex their knees so I determined I would not be one of them. And the result was that my surgeon gave me an A+ for being able to straighten my knee, and was amazed at how far I was able to bend it back. In fact, my surgically repaired left knee is actually more flexible than my other knee because of how hard I rehabbed it. And the same, according to Scripture here, is going to be true of our spiritual lives. No pain, no gain. No discipline with regard to spiritual exercises, then we will continue to be spiritually crippled, discouraged, falling for short of what we could be and the peaceful fruit of righteousness that could be ours as a result of following Jesus with a whole heart.
So what are some of those spiritual disciplines? Obviously, regular time in God’s word, meditating privately and personally on Scripture, memorizing God’s Word. Returning to regular fellowship with a determination to encourage and build up other believers, to serve Christ as we were before. To be in fellowship in some sort of Bible study, to be in prayer regularly seeking God’s face and His will for our lives.
How have things changed for you during the Pandemic? Persecution was the discouragement for believers back in the first century. In the 21st century, the Pandemic may well have been the distractin for you. Are you as consistent in the disciplines of a disciple of Jesus as you were before? If not, what kind of resolve will it take? Alex Smith made the sacrifice to enjoy the glory of a few football games at the end of a career. What kind of resolve, rededication, will you make to reinvigorate yourself for the eternal reward that Jesus will provide when you have been faithful to run the race He has set before you? Are you in prayer consistently? Are you in fellowship or returning to fellowship with other believers, or have you gotten accustomed to staying away, doing your own thing? And what about serving the Lord? How are you, or how will you return to serving God in accord with your spiritual gifts and calling?
Then in verse 14 the author outlines two specific pursuits any of us who have backslidden need to give our attention to—pursuing the love of Christ with other men, and the holiness God calls us to.
You’ve got to know that the first exhortation in verse 14 was going to be very challenging for these Jewish believers. “Pursue peace with all men.”
Now consider who was included in the “all men” that is mentioned here. It included the very people who were responsible for their spiritual discouragement—the people who had persecuted them to the point they wanted to give up and give in.
They are not being encouraged here to merely passively accept these people. No, the word for pursue indicates they were to actively seek, hunt down, chase being at peace with everyone, even those who hated them and made life difficult for them.
Kind of reminds of something Jesus had told his disciples, doesn’t it: “Love your enemies, pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44). You know there’s something that happens when we become spiritually discouraged and backslidden. This whole matter of loving our enemies, and actively pursuing peace with them tends to go out the window very quickly and is often replaced with the worldly tendency toward resentment and revenge.
You know, we’re living in incredibly fractious and divisive times. Just how divisive things are even among believers was graphically demonstrated to Jeanie and I when we met a couple of believing friends in the Costco parking lot the other day. They had what I regarded as a pretty radical view of the origins and motivation of the Pandemic and government restrictions. I casually mentioned that I disagreed. And the next thing I know the husband had turned his back on us, and without saying goodbye is pulling his wife away from us. You’d think we were the antichrist or something because we merely expressed a different opinion. What about loving your enemies and pursuing peace with all men? It was easy for me to point the finger at him, but what this verse would have encouraged us to do was to pursue them, to try to make peace with them under any and every circumstance.
Pursue peace with all men, even those who may disagree with you about masks, social distancing, vaccinations and the origins of the Pandemic. Love your enemies and your friends. Don’t resent and retaliate! What really matters in the long run loving Jesus and loving your neighbor as yourself, even as Jesus has loved them!
And there’s this whole matter of sanctification, or holiness, that is to be our goal as well. “Pursue sanctification (or holiness) without which no one will see the Lord.” Now this whole matter of pursuing, chasing after, God’s holiness, or sanctification, doesn’t sound all that attractive to the carnal mind, or even to most of us Christians. It sounds remarkably, unattractive, until you realize that Jesus was the most beautiful and attractive human being that ever lived, and the reason His character was so beautiful was precisely because He was holy—He was perfected in love for God and for others. So, if you’re backslidden, strengthen your resolves to become like Jesus—it is after all a qualification for seeing Jesus. Going to heaven, will necessarily require all of us to be made holy before we can be in His presence. So it is our goal and should be a determined goal to be more like Jesus if indeed we are following Jesus.
And then we come to an incredibly significant statement in verse s15-17. What is the alternative for renewing our commitment to love others and love God, to seek peace with all men When we backslide for whatever reason, we lose our appreciation for God’s grace demonstrated to us. And we, as a result can easily become embittered, with great consequence for ourselves and others.
Verse 15: “See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness spring up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.”
Pay attention to this command. It is so incredibly important. Many relationships have been destroyed, many churches split, and many spiritual lives terribly compromised because of lack of attention to this. This verse could be epitaph written on the tombstones of thousands of churches destroyed by a root of bitterness through the centuries.
It’s a command addressed to all of us. All of us are responsible, whether we are personally embittered or not, to be sure that someone who is embittered does not remain so.
You see, bitterness is as deadly to the church body, and to the relationships of believers to other believers to believers as that necrotizing bacteria was to Alex Smith’s body. It is absolutely destructive and deadly. How? Because someone who takes offense invariably takes revenge. And they take revenge often through their tongues, by the complaints, and grumblings, and accusations and slanderous statemenst made about others in the presence of their friends, all intended to discredit someone who has not treated us as we would prefer.
And it’s precisely because I either have not been aware, or did not confront someone who had become embittered against me or others in the church that there have been so many that have been defiled, that so many began to participate in and contribute to the bitterness, hatred and revenge that can destroy churches, and discourage believers.
How can you see to it that there is no root of bitterness that causes many to be defiled? First, examine your own heart, see if you’re holding a grudge. But more than that, someone begins to complain, to gossip, to slander another believer, don’t dare tolerate it. Insist that they take their grievance to the person their offended by and get it resolved, or someone who can properly help resolve the dispute, an elder or a pastor after first following Matthew 18:15, which tells us if your brother offends you, go to him, not someone else, privately, to try to make things right. Matthew 5:23-24 tells us that whether we are the offended or the offender we are responsible to attempt to be reconciled to our brother. So important, and so dangerous if we don’t attend to it.
And the other danger is to be godless or immoral like Esau, who never demonstrated a speck of interest in a relationship with God, and whose spiritual values were so distorted that he traded his birthright, the blessing of God upon himself and his descendants, for a single bowl of soup.
Watch out for bitterness and godlessness before it defiles and destroys.
Why resolve to return to spiritual vitality? Well, what the rest of the chapter tells us is this, it comes down to a matter of how things will turn out in the end. Either we seek Jesus’ grace and eternal blessing or we experience God’s wrath.
Now the writer in verses 18-29 deliberately includes references to the experience of Moses and Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai when the Law was given, because it was to the Law that these discouraged Jewish believers were thinking about returning to. What happened at Sinai when God spoke the Ten Commandment from the consuming fire that represented His presence at the top of the Holy Mount? Israel, and even Moses, were so terrified of the Holy God that they begged they would hear no further word from Him.
But this is not the attitude of the God we seek under the New Covenant. Verse 22 tells us that rather this God’s wrath has been satisfied by the sacrifice of Christ, so that now only grace and eternal blessing remains for those who will continue to follow Jesus; Verse 22: “But you have come to Mount Zion, to the City of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better that that of the first man to offer a blood sacrifice, Abel—it’s Christ’s blood that has satisfied the potential of God’s wrath against us.
So, follow Jesus, don’t refuse Him who is speaking through this book from Heaven! We have the final warning passage of this book, encouraging us to seek the Kingdom to come through Jesus, rather than to experience God’s wrath. We’re told God will shake the earth, and the heavens, once more. The passage conclude with these sobering words in verses 28-29: “Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe, for our God’s is a consuming fire.
Well, if that isn’t motivation enough to get with the program, I don’t know what is.
Resolve, determine to rededicate yourself to spiritual vitality, because it will be worth it all in the end.
