Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Hebrews 10:24-25
**Reformation Covenant Church**
**Pastor Dennis Tuuri**

Sermon text for today is Hebrews chapter 10 verses 24 and 25. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Hebrews 10:24 and 25. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another and so much the more as you see the day approaching. Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your most holy word. We thank you, Father, for the gift that word represents to us. We thank you for the Holy Spirit that dwells in us because of the work of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that Spirit’s job, Lord God, is to bring us things of Jesus. May the Spirit write this word upon our hearts. May He, Lord God, in His power and strength and holiness transform us that we may indeed go from glory to glory, that we may indeed consider how to continue to exhort each other, to encourage one another, to stimulate each other to love and to good works.

Help us, Lord God, to be encouraged by Your word and Spirit to be the body of Christ today. In His name we ask it. Amen. Amen. Please be seated.

Well, I am here to tell you today that the Lord God is wonderful and great. Our lives are wonderful. Life is very good. I don’t say that out of some Pollyanna position. You know, if I look at things around me, uh, I don’t like to speak of this stuff very often, but just so you’ll understand that I’m not overlooking your problems and difficulties.

My skin, my eczema, is probably never been as bad. It’s about as bad as it ever gets. So that’s going on. Very uncomfortable. Very odd. There are other things. We have a blue roof on one of my outbuildings this morning because we have rain coming through. We thought we had the roof nicely taken care of with the moss that was growing there, but it didn’t work. The old building where all the lawnmowers and stuff are.

So that’s coming up. And all kinds of things I got to get done around the house and don’t know how we’re going to do them. You know, there are certainly difficulties in my life. There’s difficulties in the life of our country, and I’m not ignoring any of that. There’s some kind of hubbub going on that some people seemed all concerned about the last few weeks. I’m not so sure it’s quite the hubbub that people see.

But suffice it to say that the body politic is confused and distressed. Here locally, we have problems, tremendous problems with judges. I had a meeting Friday morning with Denny Woods and George Schuben Jr. to talk about trying to get together a voters’ guide for judges and start that long process. We got problems with judges, right? We’ve got a ninth circuit court ruled last week—the circuit we’re in, you know—that school was distributing a survey to elementary kids, asking them how often they thought about touching other people’s private parts.

Parents didn’t like it. They weren’t informed of it. Court said, “Too bad. You got no right to control what’s taught to your children in terms of sexual education in public schools.” Now, they’re overturned 90% at the Supreme Court, but still it’s binding law on us right now. There’s a bill in the legislature to divide that ninth circuit and create a 12th circuit up here. That’s a great thing to pray about.

It’s been attached to the budget bill in the House, which means it’s filibuster-proof. Only needs 51 votes. So that’s good. But we have bad judges. We have a judge that threw out Measure 37. Could have, you know, addressed what problems there might have been in it a couple weeks ago, but she threw out the whole thing, overturning the will of the people one more time to protect private property. We’ve got a legislature that I’ve talked, you know, to one of the most conservative members of the Oregon legislature.

Well, I know you guys couldn’t get to it at the end of the session, but next session, can we deal with this eminent domain problem the Supreme Court has given to us? Well, no, I don’t think we’ll have the ability to do that. I had another conservative senator. This man was a representative. I had one of our state senators call me a couple of weeks ago about the Oregon Supreme Court decision that live sex shows on stage are protected constitutional free speech here in Oregon.

And an Oregon state senator called me. Well, what can we do about this? And of course, the thing we should do about it is the Oregon legislature should pass a constitutional amendment, refer it to the people, and people would approve it. But he doesn’t think they have the political will. I’ve been working with guys for 20 years to elect Republican majorities. We still have one in the House.

And yet we can’t get that Republican majority to protect private property, to protect the right of parents to oversee the education of their children, or to protect uh the kind of temptations and horrible immorality that goes on in our country. I can go on and on and on. There’s lots of problems, but life is good. It really is. You know, the Lord Jesus Christ has come and that great central part of Hebrews says that we have access now.

No purification offering is going to be done anymore. Jesus has purified us in the world once for all. And the kingdom is becoming manifest. And yes, there’s problems in my life. Yes, there’s problems in the life of our country. Yes, there’s problems here in the church. As we grow, we’ve got growing pains. Literally, in some cases, with the size of people in the sanctuary and particularly the dining hall. But you know, as we move forward and take on more ministries, growing pains happen.

And we have a series of discussions that need to be entered into. How are we going to do it? Well, life is wonderful if you—my wife’s mother used to say, life is great if you don’t weaken. And that’s true. Now, when we’re weak, God is strong. If we understand that sense of the term, but if we don’t lose faith, I think was her point. We maintain faith, we have strength. So life is great if we don’t weaken.

I’m calling you to a battle today. And it’s an odd battle. You know, we had these songs we sang. We gathered together to ask the Lord’s blessing. Community is what this text is all about. What that means, the body of Jesus Christ coming together. We sang a song of repentance for our nation. Great King of nations, hear our prayers, because we recognize the judgments of God on this land going on for many years.

We recognize these things. We’re repenting because of the horrific judicial decisions that are going on and the inability of the legislature to protect the people and their property and their kids. What else is there to life? You know, your money, your land, your children. This is what life is and it creates the future. And when the government takes more and more control of those things, we’re in a situation where this ninth circuit makes this decision.

And I talked to different groups of pastors, for instance, and they bemoan the fact that while 60% of the youth used to be Christian and now it’s the last generation was 30% and the trend is the next generation will be 6%. I was told this by a pastor amongst a group of pastors this week. And the entire point this guy was making was we got to support Young Life Ministries at the local public high school. That will not do it, folks.

What’s doing it is what’s going on, as I mentioned before, in Moscow, where 33% of the people had their kids in private and home schools. What’s going to do it is when people take the sacrifice and time and energy and effort to oversee directly their children’s education either in home schools or in private Christian schools. That’s the only thing that’ll do it. And the pastors don’t know this. We’ve lost the robes, the pastoral ministerial robes.

We’ve lost the judicial robes. We’ve lost the robes of academia. And we’re in a—But that’s bad news. But life is good. And here’s why. Because I’m standing up today and the Lord God has birthed this church and many other churches across. We’re in a denomination where all, you know, 50 or so churches, more growing. It’s growing fast. More every year. It’s growing to become one of the biggest Reformed denominations. It will be shortly.

They’re that small and splintered. Where every one of those churches knows that our children cannot be raised in a godly sense if they’re turned over to the public schools for training. Isn’t that wonderful? That’s a movement of the Spirit of God. And you know, while we’ve kind of given over these robes of academia, we’re taking them back then through private Christian schools, home schools, and now, you know, Christian colleges such as NSA.

And we’re getting involved slowly but surely in terms of the judicial area. And pastors, I’m trying to use whatever opportunity I can, you know, so when things are mentioned like I just said, I talk about the 33% in Moscow and I talk about the kids in our church. You know, Love Inc Friday night, we got a message on the phone machine, probably maybe we ought to try to play it through the loudspeaker system or something sometime, but this woman said that there were all these young people serving at Love Inc Friday night and what a blessing these young people were. She said she just felt so encouraged and blessed by it. She had to call us and leave a message saying, boy, just thank them, those young people.

Well, praise God, huh? On one hand, it’s sad because they stand out compared to many other churches. But on the other hand, praise God that His Spirit is birthing things. The Spirit of God is alive. I’m calling you to warfare as well. Who follows in His train? The Son of God goes forth to war. And the warfare I’m calling you to today is seemingly insignificant. And yet it is, what some could say, it is the key to winning every one of these battles and many others that we’ve talked about.

The warfare we’re calling you to today is to be able to enter into Christian speech in a way that is godly, edifying, and produces the kind of good works in academia, in political action, in the business arena, in the politics of the church, in the community of the church, in everything that we’re doing. Good works is what we are attaining to. And this text tells us how to grow in love and good works.

But it’s hard. This is, you know, what I’m going to say today is quite simple in terms of understanding what you’re supposed to do. But it’s very hard to put it into practice. The text before us—and we talked about the context a couple of weeks ago, not going to go back over that except to say that remember one of the scariest passages in the New Testament immediately follows this text. It’s that important.

It’s that important. See, it’s the very purpose for which the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and all that christological, you know, study of Christ in the middle of Hebrews and the wonderful things that were described about Him, all that now finds its application in this section before us. And I’ve chosen the last little bit of the application. The application addressed faith, hope, and now love. And this last little bit is what I want to focus on.

So the context is important. It’s what the work of Jesus Christ is aimed to produce. And it’s what, if we don’t do it, we’re subject to the most horrendous of curses. God is a consuming fire.

Okay. Now, what does the text say? Well, it’s pretty simple. It’s got three things we’re supposed to be doing: considering one another, stirring up each other, and exhorting one another. That’s it. Three simple little things. It’s got one thing we’re not supposed to do. We’re not supposed to forsake, stop getting together. There are two goals of these three specific commands. What is it?

Love and good works. That’s the end of considering one another and exhorting one another and stirring each other up. The purpose is love and good works. And then there’s a motivation at the very end. Do this the more as you see the day approaching. So we have the approach of the Lord Jesus Christ, the day of the Lord, the Sabbath day, the eschaton, all of that kind of in view here, that God brings judgment and that’s part of what’s going on.

So we got motivation. I’m going to start with the goal. The two things, the two goals of these things. Then we’ll talk about the three positive commands. Then we’ll move to the one negative command. And then finally we’ll look briefly at the motivation.

So we start first with the three positive commands. Love and good works. Now if you look at your Bibles—okay, so you know we’re going to be looking at this text and the three commands are given to pertain a particular end: love and good works. But what is love and good works?

We mentioned before and we can’t look at this. Well, yeah, we won’t look at all the specific verses, but if you look at Hebrews 10, you’ll remember that this text in summary fashion addressed faith, hope, and love. Do you remember that from last time we looked at this text? It’s not our text for today. But we’re supposed to hold fast the profession of our faith, for He is faithful that promised, considering one another to provoke unto love and good works, not forsaking the assembly.

So actually in verse 22, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, our bodies washed with pure water. So this is talking in the first instance, it is talking about the worship of the church. So the application of the text is come to worship.

But the verses here before us take worship into the week. It takes what goes on in worship into the rest of our lives. The same thing—turn to chapter 13 verse one. And we see the same thing here. The same movement. See verse 28. We receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved. Let us have grace whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. And when we get to this text in a few weeks, we’ll see the context is worship.

So again the application is coming to Mount Zion and worshiping God, serving Him liturgically. But then it immediately goes on in verse one. The next section starts with let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers. Thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them, and they which suffer adversity as being as suffering yourselves also in the body.

Marriage is honorable in all, the bed undefiled. Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. Let your conversation—that’s your business, your walk, your vocation probably—be without covetousness. You see, your business practices. Be content with such things as you have. So what this tells us, and then verse seven finally, remember them that have the rule over you.

What are the love and good works? Well, this text is a summary statement of that. But this love, this link from worship to love, will be expanded in chapter 13 when again we’ll move from worship to our week by way of love and love of the brothers, showing grace to other people, building solid families on godly marriages, having vocations that are free of covetousness, motivation to work based on transforming the world and showing grace to other people, and then submission to the authorities God has in place in the various spheres.

These are the good works that chapter 13 will articulate for us: love and good works. And so chapter 13 will show us what that love is and what the good works are that are involved with it. So we have this summary statement in our text today, love and good works. And we can look and we will look at more detail at another time in chapter 13 for the articulation of what those good works and love are.

Love is agape here. It’s living in community with grace and gifts to one another. In chapter 13, we’ll make this more abundantly clear. It’s the doing of the commandments, of course, but love is more than just the exterior obedience to the commandments. It’s living paracoetically. It’s living in each other’s lives in ways that gift each other, receives and gives to one another. Love is dwelling in community in the same sort of community the Trinity exists in, the context of, because we’ve been placed in that heavenly relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the bride.

So this is what love is. And good works can be articulated and will be in chapter 13. But let’s briefly look at some other texts that tell us, and I won’t have you turn here, but I will just have you listen real close. In Titus 2:13, we’re told that the Lord Jesus Christ gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from all iniquity, purify unto Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works. So Titus tells us just what this text tells us, that the end result of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ is to have a population, a citizenry, a Christian community that exhibits good works.

So, you know, we don’t want to get so hung up with the idea that we’re saved by grace through faith, okay, to not understand that the whole purpose of that salvation is good works. And that really is tied directly, right? According to James, of course, if you have faith without works, there’s no true faith. Faith is faith that works. This is what the Reformed divines have always taught. And good works are essential. They’re essential to who we are.

And Titus 2:13 tells us that. In Hebrews 13:20, the benediction at the end of this book we’re reading, and you’ve heard it over and over from me, is that the Lord God bless you to the end that you might be perfect in every good work. So the blessing of God comes upon you at the end of the day that you may do good works, that you may do things that are good works.

John chapter 10 said that He had done good works and the Jews had seen them. He said, “For which of my good works does the Father, or that I’m doing for my Father, do you stone me?” So if we want to know what good works are, we can read the Gospels and we see a whole list of things that the Lord Jesus Christ does. And these are ways to meditate on what good works are.

Again, in the Gospels in Matthew 5, we’re told that our light is to shine before men. City on a hill, you don’t put a lamp, a bushel basket over your light. You let the light shine so that your good works may be perceived by the world and that they might glorify God in heaven. So good works are not secret works. Good works are public works. More often than not, people are supposed to behold what you’re doing in terms of good works.

These 1 Peter 2:11 talks about these good works as well. In actually in verse 12 it says that the Gentiles may see your good works which they shall behold and glorify God. So again it’s visible. Well what are the visible things in 1 Peter 2? Well it says this. Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conversation honest okay, among the Gentiles.

And I think that if we see these two things and we just read about them in Hebrews 13, it’s a sense of morality and purity and chastness in terms of male-female relationships. And then it’s tied to business practices, your conversation being honest in the sight of men. So the way we live our lives in our families, we could say, and the way we live our lives in the context of our business sphere—these are good works.

It’s a summary statement of good works in 1 Peter 2. And so all the things we’re talking about protecting our families, protecting the, you know, the integrity of our children and the marriage bed and all that stuff, focusing on the ability to, you know, make wages, to earn a living, to honestly exercise your vocation—these are also good works.

1 Thessalonians 4, same kind of thing. Here again, it’s talking about the works that we’re supposed to do. And here’s what it says. Furthermore, then we beseech you, brethren, and exhort you by the Lord Jesus that as you have received of us how you ought to walk and to please God, so that you would abound more and more—you know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus, for this is the will of God, even your sanctification. And what is it then in terms of specifics?

That you should abstain from fornication. That every one of you should—move. Every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification. That’s talking about marriage. So again it addresses the foundation of the family and the marriage relationship. And then it goes on. It says in verse six, let no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter. And I think that’s again a reference to vocation and economics.

So family life and economics are the two headings again that our sanctification is described as in this chapter. And these are the good works the text tells us that God wants us to engage in. Verse 9 is touching brotherly love from the same text. We need not that I write unto you, for you yourselves are taught of God to love one another, and indeed you do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia.

Then he says that you study to be quiet, to do your own business, to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk honestly toward them that are without. So again it’s loving the brothers, it’s building strong families on the basis of the marriage relationship itself, and it’s engaging in sound business practices. And all of these things will become evident to the Gentiles around you just as our children, you know, were evident to the to the ministers and people Christians gathered together to support Love Inc.

Our families become evident. The way we conduct our businesses will become, you know, is different from the way a pagan would conduct his business. The love that we have for one another. These are all the good works that we’re supposed to attain to and glorify God by. Submission to civil magistrates is included in this list of good works in Titus verse three. Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work, to speak evil of no man, to be no brawlers but gentle, showing all meekness unto all men.

So our good works include relationship to authorities. And it includes our speech that we enter into one to the other. And then of course the thing that we’re a little more familiar with—good works—these things may not have come to your mind when I mentioned it, but almsdeeds in 1 Timothy 6:17. You, the pastor, is supposed to encourage the rich in the congregation to be do good, that they may be rich in good works. And it goes on to say what that is: ready to distribute, willing to communicate, to give to the people in the congregation that have need.

So there’s supposed to be almsdeeds that are part of these good works as well. In 1 Timothy 5:8, we read about uh a widow who’s put into the roles of the church. Well, she’s supposed to be well reported of for good work. She’s supposed to have done things that are obvious and seen. And then it says some of these things, I think. If she’s brought up children—again, the emphasis on family being a good work. If she’s lodged strangers, and we’ll see that again in Hebrews 13, benevolence to other people, washed the saints’ feet, a euphemism for loving each other and serving one another.

If she’s relieved the afflicted, diligently followed every good work. You see, there’s a commonality of how good works is described to us in the Bible. The goal of the strategy here today are these love and specifically the good works—family, vocation, benevolence, authority, and then brotherly love and helping one another.

Again, Dorcas in Acts 9, the woman was full of good works and almsdeeds which she did. So helping the poor. 2 Corinthians 9:8: God is able to make all grace abound toward you that you always having all sufficiency in all things may abound to every good work. As it is written, He hath dispersed abroad, He hath given to the poor. So their good works is specifically laid in relationship to benevolences.

So good works has an eye toward benevolences. But more than that, there’s another aspect of this. Jesus—when the sinner puts the fragrant ointment worth 300 pence on His feet, some people then complain that the money should have been given to the poor. And this is what Jesus says. He says, “Let her alone. Why trouble you her? She has wrought a good work on me, for ye have the poor with you always.” So you see, good works isn’t restricted to benevolent actions.

Good works includes doing things to Jesus, which this table reminds us of—is good things to the church. Brotherly love is an essential component of good works. And then finally, one reference in the Old Testament in Nehemiah 2:18. The building of the temple is going on. The restoration of the city and the wall and the temple by Nehemiah. And the hand of the Lord, Nehemiah says, was good upon me, and also the king’s words that he had spoken unto me. And they said, “Let us rise up and build.” So they strengthened their hands for this good work.

So there was a good work involved with the construction of the worshiping edifice and the city itself. These are all the good works in the specific denominations that the text of the word of God tells us about.

So we have good works that we need to put our hands to do. Good works—plenty, lots of them. We have benevolent need right now in the context of this church to help the Evans with their adoption of two young women and bring them into the church of Jesus Christ and to bring them into a household of faith, to take, you know, folks from outside of the church, to bring them in and to bless them through Christian family, and that they would be part of the body of Christ.

It’s a benevolent work. It’s taking orphans—a specific benevolence work the Scriptures commend to us. And so we want to give money in these baskets up here at communion time. It’s a good work you would do. We have the good work of finishing off the construction of this worshiping edifice, this base of operations, this little foothold on the island of Oregon City. We don’t want to be in debt for this.

We want to have been out of the debt for this building. So there’s a good work, as in the time of Nehemiah, to build this structure and to finish the debt off that has been given to us, and we want to get that done. You know, it’s a good work you can do these last two months of the year to give money for that particular project. We have a good work that we’re putting our hand to do in terms of these judicial races, trying to protect and promote righteousness. It’s a good work that people can put their hands to do.

We have the good work of equipping men to perform vocation to accomplish that in the context of their lives. Well, how do we go about accomplishing all these things? Well, there are three positive commands and I want us to meditate on each of these for just a couple of minutes.

The first positive command to fulfill that task is to consider one another. Before we race on to stimulating each other and exhorting each other, let’s think a little bit about considering one another. That’s where it begins. Here in terms of this movement from worship to our week, in terms of equipping us, you know, the idea here is it is a community obligation. We have good works to do and it’s not the elders alone who will equip people. It’s everybody in the church considering one another, stimulating each other, and exhorting each other when needed.

This is what will produce the demonstration of love and good works. This is what changes the world. This is what builds godly families. This is what builds proper relationship to governing authorities. This is what builds the church as a building, but more importantly, the church as the people who are the building. We’re all equipped to good works, but only as we interact with one another. See, this is a corporate text.

It’s not a text given to the pastors to do this. It’s a text given to each and every one of us. And the first positive command is this word to consider. This word is two words—there’s a preposition and then there’s a noun. The noun means to look. Just to look, to see something. And when the preposition is added to it, it’s an intensified form of looking. To consider means to look at somebody, to meditate on it a bit, to think about it, to think about that person.

Let me give you a few other verses where this word is used. We know about, you know, you haven’t considered, looked upon the beam in your own eye when you’re trying to take the beam out of the other person’s eye. So you’re supposed to think about your problems, meditate on them before you go correcting somebody else. That’s one way the verse is used. Jesus said to consider the ravens. Consider the lilies.

Look around you and don’t just look and don’t just look real hard, but look meditatively upon the ravens and learn the lesson from the ravens for our purpose. Consider the lilies and be at peace about how you’ll be clothed, because God closes these lilies. Won’t He clothe you? You’re much more worthy than lilies. So a meditation of the lilies helps us. Jesus, when they came to trick him about the tribute unto Caesar, it says He perceived their craftiness.

He looked at them. He considered them. And he recognized what they were trying to get him to do by perceiving it, by meditating, by considering them—you see, by slowing down, taking a look and perceiving what their hidden agenda was in what they were trying to accomplish, here in a in a physical way. In the book of Acts, they’re in this land. They don’t know what the land is, but they discovered they perceived a certain creek.

So they’re looking in the landscape. They’re looking for water and they see, they perceive, they search out by way of looking meditatively on the structure of the land. They perceive a certain creek river. We were told earlier in Hebrews that we’re to consider the apostle and high priest. That was told us in chapter 3. And that’s what we did for six chapters or more, seven chapters. We considered the apostle and high priest of our calling.

We meditated on Jesus Christ. You see the great exemplar for us, the forerunner. We thought about that. We meditated on it. We took months to consider the Lord Jesus Christ. And we’re to consider one another. We want to encourage each other to love and good works. We want to we need to exhort each other on occasion. Sometimes we need to talk to each other about problems. And it begins with a consideration of that person.

I was listening to a summation of a book this week about how to get people to do things for you. It seemed a little manipulative to me, but I understood the basic flow. And when you’re in a situation where you don’t have authority over somebody, one of the keys—this man said—to knowing how to motivate him is you’ve got to understand his world. I called my mom yesterday and oh, she’s all worked up about George Bush and things are horrible and the country’s falling apart, and you know, I thought to myself, she just lives in a different world.

She’s in a whole different world than me. Well, there’s a sense in which we’re all in our own worlds. We don’t see everything the same. And that’s for good reason. It’s the diversity of the wonder of creation that God has given us. You do have to think of the other person’s world. What are they looking for? What would help them? What would motivate them? It’s not the same for everybody. What motivates one person is going to demotivate somebody else.

Some people need all encouragement. Some people need all shouting. I mean, they really do. I’m one of those guys. You need to shout at me or I’m not probably not going to hear you too well. So everybody’s different. And if we’re going to get to the place of working through the difficult problems we have, opportunities, great opportunities, we want to begin by considering one another, thinking about each other.

You know, you sit here for a couple hours with each other. Look around. Who are these people? Watch them as they come up to the Lord’s table. Think about them. Think about their world. What difficulties, trials, blessings, successes? Maybe you don’t know them. Think about them. So we consider one another, and there’s certainly not just an objective meditation. There’s a care. There’s a love that’s already in that word to consider each other, right? That’s the first step.

The second step is to stimulate one another. And when I preached on this text before, I mentioned that this stimulation is almost always a bad thing, you know—it’s stimulating people to anger. Don’t you know, stimulate people to anger. Stimulation here is almost always in the Greek a bad thing. It’s provoking people to anger.

Well, here though it’s used in a positive way. And the idea is that people won’t do love and good works unless you kind of stimulate them to it, prod them to it, exhort them to get involved somehow. And again, this is not written to pastors. It’s written to us too, to the elders. And it’s not written to the officers of the church. We are all supposed to be stimulating one another. That’s an active word. Doesn’t just mean suggest testing.

It kind of means pushing a little bit, provoking. You know, think about it how you provoke people to anger. You make fun, you make jokes, you know, they’re getting a little riled up. You keep doing it. Well, that’s the same idea that we’re trying to be exhorting each other to love and to these good works. If we need workers to help us with the judicial races, we got to stimulate some folks. You see, we consider them.

Are they? Is it something they want to get doing right now? Are they looking for ministry? Maybe they are. If they are, let’s try to push them a little bit and see if this might be the ministry for them. Stimulate one another. We are going to have a series of what one author calls crucial conversations. Steve Sykes—I know I’ve mentioned him a lot. We had dinner with Steve the other day and he loaned me this book.

I recommend it to everybody here. It’s not Christian. Now, probably some of the authors are the way they write, but it’s not explicitly Christian at all. I’ve even thought about maybe sometime this next year doing maybe a 13-week Bible study through it or something and taking the basic ideas because what they end up articulating are good sound biblical principles. Crucial conversations—that means a conversation that’s important, not the normal sort of things conversations we have. A crucial conversation is where high stakes get involved.

We are about to embark and we’ve already begun embarking on some crucial conversations here at Reformation Covenant Church. We got a lot of stuff going on. We’re birthing this loving thing in the context of Oregon. And there’s crucial conversations that have to be had about how to make sure this birth lives, that the baby crawls, eventually toddles, and learns to walk and run. It’s a process. And if that entity isn’t, you know, carefully nurtured, it won’t fly. It’ll just die on the vine, so to speak.

We are birthing something I think is very important at King’s Academy. I, you know, I know that private schools aren’t for everybody. I know that home schools and private schools are the answer. But understand, if you’re getting a little sensitive about hearing about King’s Academy, it’s because it is being birthed. It’s a little tiny baby. Homeschooling in this church, man, that’s a warrior, guy. We’re running in that area. We’re doing well. Yeah, you need encouragement. We’ll give you encouragement.

But you see, King’s Academy is being birthed right now. And we’re in a series of crucial conversations, some of us, about how to make that birth successful and how to make it not just a living person but one that would glorify God and then how to use what we’re doing there and use it to even mature homeschools using the worship model of education. We’re being forced to think through it all the time here, and when, and those who homeschool will receive the benefits of that in terms of exhortations to how to apply the worship model to homeschool.

So there’s a series of conversations we have. Crucial conversations coming up in this church about where we’re going. We’re too full downstairs. The pews are starting to fill up and everybody’s here. There’s no room to sit anymore. What are we going to do? Are we going to have two services? Are we going to build another church? Are we going to buy another church that’s bigger? Are we going to start another church on the west side? Or maybe something else?

We have crucial conversations to enter into about that. We’ve lost to a degree the sort of community that we used to have on the Lord’s day by buying this building. You know, we used to sit around and talk in little groups. Now we’re sort of all fanned out downstairs. It’s tight. You can’t really talk to too many adults. Maybe you hang around till 4 and you’ll get some conversation going.

But we’ve got some questions that we got to think through how we can engender better community where we’re stimulating and exhorting one another in the context of our agape, the love that’s there. Some people think the goal here being love and good works, that the love agape may be a reference to their love feast to the Hebrews. I don’t know. But our love feast always needs attention. You know, these things don’t just happen.

Crucial conversations have to happen in the context of this. We’re trying to stimulate one another to make good decisions that we might actually engage ourselves in effectual good works, right? And there’ll be conversations about these. And a funny thing happens in some of these conversations. Some of these conversations will be structured. Let’s get together at so and so’s house and talk about the future of the church. Talk about the future of the school, talk about this, talk. Some will be structured, some will be informal conversations that we have in the church.

And this author points out that something happens. You know, you have a conversation. Well, of course we’d never buy a new building. That’s ridiculous. Or of course we wouldn’t go to two services. That’s horrible. You see, people and all of a sudden, without intending to, you’re going to get involved in a conversation that could rub you wrong and the emotions can go quite high.

And the author points out that two things happen when we get into one of these crucial conversations. Now, it isn’t just about the stuff in the church. It can be talking about political matters. It a crucial conversation could be when you get together with your wife after a party and she says, “You were looking at the other women too much.” And boy, you sure were friendly to that person. And it’s a crucial conversation that you didn’t plan, but there it is.

And you have a conversation going and you can either, you know, make that a good conversation or you can make it a lousy one. Our tendencies are flight. We run from you know, hard meetings, or we fight, we attack because we want our ideas, right? So that’s our tendency. And that tendency, God sort of puts a stumbling block in our way to bring us to that tendency. What normally happens is you got these adrenal glands and when you get into one of these conversations, they start pumping chemicals into your body and you get all like this, and then at the same time your body does an odd thing.

Apparently this is physiologically true. They say the blood tends to drain from your brain and comes into your limbs and it’s preparing you either to run or to fight. See, so it’s putting the blood where it thinks is necessary. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what they say. Studies have shown. I don’t know. But the end result of that is you get dumbed down and doped up. And what you’re going to do then in these crucial conversations is you’re not going to stimulate each other to love and good works.

You’re going to stimulate each other to bad works. You’ll either run away or you’ll fight. You’ll defend your own ideas. Now, that’s a problem because God says that we are corporately to stimulate each other to good works because we don’t know individually what the best of these works is. If you if you insist on this solution or that solution at the beginning of one of these meetings, you’ve left out the better solutions that may come from the discussion of the whole group.

You go in, I gave three options for what we do about the growth here at church. There could be four, five, six options. I don’t know. But if all we do is go to a meeting about it and defend one option, we’re never going to encourage people to come up with alternative solutions. So if we don’t handle these conversations in a way to stimulate each other to good works that we may not know what they are yet, we’re going to number one lose out on the best of works.

We’re going to lose the best solutions that might have been brought up had we produced freedom in the context of these discussions instead of fear. Okay. And then secondly, if I go into a meeting with a group of people and say, well, there’s three options and you know, I want this option and all I do is press for that option, I may well get it because people, oh, he’s pastor. He’s a full-time guy. He knows best about the church.

I may get it, but I’m not getting you involved in that project, am I? You’re not going to be stimulated to good works to help move toward that solution. But if we use these conversations to draw each other out, to give each other glory, right? One of the three great things we want, glory from each other. You see, if we give each other glory, weight, this is the Christian way of interacting. And when we do that, we get better solutions that come out of meetings and we get everybody buying into what the group has come up with.

Now, leadership is there. You have to have leadership. I’m not saying it’s a democracy and egalitarianism, all that stuff. No, but I am saying that we’re the body of Christ and our stimulation of each other to love and good works will involve an understanding of the community that we live in the context of. You know, we’re I’m involved in all kinds of crucial conversations these days trying to get an elder or two in Salem at the church there.

Trying to work and get an elder installed in Sacramento. We’ve got a little tiny baby now that’s been birthed in Grant’s Pass. Six families want to start a CRC church. They’re going to be brought into membership at TRC in Salem. We’re trying to figure out how do we take care of these people? How do we birth these people? And they’re crucial conversations. When we talk about these things, I remind myself now, be careful. Don’t discourage people. Encourage them. Stimulate them to love and good works.

Maybe we can’t do and our elders at this church have decided we cannot maybe do everything they’d want us to do for them. We’re stretched very thin. But but we want to engage in these crucial conversations in a way to encourage them in the baby steps that little church, that baby now will start to take. So these conversations are all around us. You know, I talk mostly about the church and political action, but in your vocations, you men know that these crucial conversations are a part of your normal work.

Whether it’s a customer you’re working with as your own business, group of people, corporate entity. It’s all about how to handle these conversations, right? And ultimately, it’s about what this text tells us to do, to consider each other, give them glory and weight and consideration of them, and then to try to stimulate them to love and good works.

And that involves drawing people into the discussion, giving them honor. We all want to get to life. We want to get to the table. We want the sermon to be over. We want to just rejoice and then, you know, we leave. But you know, we get there through knowledge, the word mediated to us through Jesus Christ. And we won’t get to the knowledge component unless we have the glory of forgiven sins at the beginning. That’s the way worship tracks. Glory, knowledge, life. And in our meetings, these crucial conversations, trying to stimulate one another to love and good works, they track the same way.

We give each other glory. We enhance knowledge by encouraging discussion, free flow of ideas, and not either lining ourselves up for our idea or against somebody else because then what we’re going to do is we’re going to ignore people or worse yet we’re going to attack them and try to make our idea the dominant one or we’ll try to belittle them in the context of the group. You see, that’s the stuff that’s the horrible, wicked, fallen man sort of stuff we fall into when we fail to consider one another and to glorify one another and thus to stimulate one another to love and good works.

We go from that glory to increased knowledge and that will lead to the solutions that cause rejoicing, life together in community in this church. It’s a—you know, these are—but it’s hard, right? It’s very difficult to do this. We have to do it by being prepared for these discussions, being committed ahead of time to avoid on the one side flight, silence, and on the other side fight, violence.

We have to understand when we get into these meetings, our tendency is going to be to do that. We have to remember what we’re there to accomplish—life, increased knowledge, glory to one another—so that we don’t argue for our position or just defend ourselves to our wives and that kind of conversation or just clam up. No, we want good, flowing Christian communication that we might stimulate each other to love and good works.

We want maturation. And this maturation will be accomplished as we apply these principles of consideration of each other and stimulation of each other as well. And as I said, this is not the job of the elders. This is the job of the community.

Okay, this is the job of the community. In this book, these authors that I mentioned, Crucial Conversations, these authors say that you know in in poor companies. They observed corporate entities and businesses and saw what worked and what didn’t work over 30 years and wrote a book. And what they said was in companies that don’t work, when people don’t perform well, they’re either ignored for a period of time and then they’re fired or transferred. That’s what happens in good companies. Okay, in good companies, leadership sees problems and tries to attend to them as they perceive them.

But in the best of companies, they said, Everybody is involved in holding each other accountable. And if they see poor performance, they try to encourage people to better performance. If they see somebody committing something that’s going to be dangerous for other people, they don’t wait till the leaders see it. And they don’t run off to the leaders. They deal with it themselves. You see, that’s the best of companies. That’s what this text says.

The text doesn’t say when problems come up, go tell the pastor or go tell somebody else. The text says you address it. You consider that person and you see it as your obligation to stimulate them to maturing love and maturing good works. It’s a corporate text.

What’s the negative? The only negative in this text is don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves. I’m going to leave the exhortation for another day. We’ll just cut it off today with these first two commands: consideration of each other, stimulation of each other. But there’s a negative that’s given to us and I’ll talk about that for just a minute here.

The negative is do not forsake the assembly. And now in the first instance, you know, we’ve talked about this a couple of weeks ago and we went through the text, the whole big section here, but what it means is keep coming to church. But what it says is beyond that, if we take it in its context here, keep coming to a church where mutual edification, where stimulation and consideration and exhortation of each other is ongoing. It doesn’t do any good to come here if you don’t engage into the community life of the church.

Now, I’m sad to have to say this, but I think there’s an awful lot of churches, at least a few of them, and maybe quite a few of them, where the text would end with just come to church on Sunday and pastor will encourage you to love and good works. But that’s not what this text says. It’s moving us from worship into the week. And what it’s telling us is that when you come to church, go to a church where you are being stimulated and considered and exhorted not just by the pastor but by the community to love and good works.

And the implication, the clear implication is that the assembling together must move into the week. If it ends with our day, and our day is better than most, we have a meal, we have a little bit of discussion, we ought to think of ways to increase that discussion in my opinion. And we’re losing a lot of that. We moved into the building here. We need to think about. We need to have a crucial conversation. We need to mature. But in any event, it’s good here.

But still the community, this is all about moving into the week. And when it says stop forsaking the assembly, don’t forsake assembling yourselves together as the habit of some is, it means that people are just sort of drifting away from community. You see? And so what we want to do is take this text as an exhortation from God. Jesus is telling us live as the body of Jesus Christ, not just on Sunday, but as you go into the week as well. Try to find opportunities to come together for fellowship, Bible study, just get together for a cup of coffee during the day with one another and use that time to encourage and stimulate.

Now, the text, by the way, all these things is keep doing this, keep considering one another, keep stimulating each other. And I tell you that too. I’m not, you know, I know that this goes on all the time in this church. Praise God for it. But I also know that this text says we need to keep hearing it. And we need to be encouraged to do this more and more.

We need meetings in the context of the week to talk through and have these crucial discussions about the future of our church, the future of our country. We need to have crucial conversations, good communication going on to stimulate the businessmen here to continue to move in terms of a Christian view of the workplace. That needs to be redeemed every bit as much, more so—it has a greater emphasis there than the reformation of the civil government.

The civil government is just supposed to let you quietly build your Christian business and family. That’s the whole point of it. So yeah, some people got to get involved in that now because they’re impinging on the family, the school, and the workplace. But you see, vocational development, professional development should be ongoing in the men of this church. And part of the way you do that is by attending, getting together with other men that will stimulate you and consider your particular situation, and you’ll get stimulated to loving good works.

Now, an awful lot of you say, “Man, that’s just what I want, but I’m not getting it.” Well, yeah, that’s right. We have a long way to go in this area. And as this church grows, it’s going to be harder, not easier. We’re going to tend to go off with people that are kind of like-minded. And that kind of gets against the whole point of the thing, which is cross-pollination of members of the covenant community.

So the exhortation is to not stop assembling. Old guys like me, you know, like it’s too easy to get tired, not do something in the evening. I did that twice this week. You know, I got health stuff going on as my wife, but still, I got. I’m looking back in my week. I’m considering it. Well, I have to remember not to just drift off in the middle of the week, as busy as I might be.

And so this text tells us that there’s a motivation at the end, right? Even more as you see the day approaching. Martin Luther, you know, supposedly said that if he knew Jesus was coming back tomorrow, what would he do today? He’d plant a tree. Future-oriented. I talked about this last week. Future-oriented. Well, you know, if you know that Jesus, the Lord of the church, is coming back tomorrow and will hold you accountable for what you did with the life he redeemed, then it seems like you’d want to prioritize the things that he told you to prioritize.

This text is it. See, for the book of Hebrews, this text is it. This is how you move from the wonderful consideration of what the Lord accomplished. Our job is to encourage each other, to stimulate one another, to think about each other, that we may grow the trees that we are, that we may prune each other, that we may develop each other as the garden of the Lord. What does Psalm 1 say? You know, the righteous man is the one planted by rivers of living water that bears its fruit in its season. Its leaf also shall not wither. We’re the trees that we’re supposed to be planting.

And if Jesus is coming and if the idea of His coming is the motivation to fulfill this text, it fits perfectly with what Martin Luther said. You ought to plant trees. You ought to prune the trees, help grow the trees, and encourage the deepness of the roots of each and every person here in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ that they may be fruiting out to love and to good works in the context of their lives.

We have a corporate obligation to do these things and we have a corporate privilege to do it. What wonderful work, isn’t it? Great. Look at the fruits God’s given us. Look at how encouraging God has already made us today with that phone message from Love Inc. And before I got the phone message, I heard various people here telling me what, you know, how people were so impressed by the youth of our church. And they were positive what RCC did Friday night.

I had other people tell me this week how great Monday night was. You know, what an encouragement it was to them in the faith of the Reformation. We’re doing it. We’re encouraging. The Lord is encouraging us and building us into, you know, trees individually and as the planting of the Lord here in this garden. It is joyful, delightful work. The world is a great place to live. Jesus is accomplishing His purposes. And we have the high privilege and joy of considering each other and stimulating each other to love and to good works, to entering into these crucial conversations in our homes, our workplace, the church, political arena. These crucial conversations to have the world exhibit more and more the kingdom of the one whose coming is what we point our lives toward.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this day. We thank you, Father, for this text. We thank you for the wonderful encouragement of today and the report from Friday night. We thank you for the encouragement of the CRC meeting here a couple of weeks ago. And we thank you, Father, for the encouragement of the churches that you’re bringing up and out in our country, committed, Father, to recovering those robes that we have lost.

Forgive us, Father. Now help every one of us as we come forward to you, Lord God, to offer ourselves afresh and grateful obedience to what Jesus has accomplished for us by committing once more to live our lives in the context of true Christian community. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.