Don't Take It For Granted

Don't Take It For Granted

Hebrews 2:1-4

Introduction:

Do we ever take things or people for granted? I guess we're all guilty of this. It seems that we don't know how to appreciate what we have in our hands or who we have beside us. When we wake up in the morning and we see breakfast already prepared on the table, are we grateful that God gave us the food and that there are people who took the effort to prepare the food for us, or do we look at the food and complain that you don't like it so much, taking for granted that you are tremendously blessed to have food on the table everyday and for at least three times a day, when someone out there struggles to even have one meal a day? When we turn on our computers to use the internet, are we thankful that we have such a powerful technology which we can use to enhance our work and communication, or do we think nothing of it, forgetting that some twenty years ago, there was no such thing as internet connections to talk about? What about the people whom we say we love? We work hard and late into the night, coming home when everyone is already asleep and you say to yourself, “I'm doing this for my family”, but you take for granted that your children misses you, your wife misses you. You see, we take a lot of things in life for granted. This stems from a lack of gratitude or from a misguided priority.

We do take things as well as people for granted. We neglect the fact that we are tremendously blessed or that we have much more than what our parents had. We neglect the fact that life is more convenient nowadays compared to before. We neglect those we love because we think they don't mind our behavior and actions. Yes, we all have at one time or another taken things and people for granted.

This morning, we continue our study on the Book of Hebrews and this morning's passage, Hebrews 2:1 – 4 is all about never taking something and someone important for granted. What and who exactly are we talking about?

Our passage this morning is actually one of five warnings the author wanted the readers to heed. You see, the believers whom the author was writing to were feeling the pressure to give up their faith and return back to Judaism; thus, he had to warn them not to allow the pressure to overwhelm them. In giving his warning, he gives his rationale why they should not turn their backs on Christ.

In our passage, the warning given is that they should not drift away, and that they should pay careful attention to what they have heard. What exactly was the message that they have heard? The answer is in verse 3 where the author talks about salvation. The believers were probably in danger of ignoring God's gift of salvation. By ignoring our salvation, it is but natural that the next thing to happen is that one will drift away.

The phrase “drift away” gives us the picture of a boat whose anchor has not been lowered or poorly hooked, such that the boat is pushed by the waves to places which are dangerous such as rocks or sandbars. When one neglects God's gift of salvation, he is in effect like a boat without an anchor. Now, when we talk about God's gift of salvation, we're not just talking solely about what God does, namely his justifying work, but we're also talking about the person responsible for our salvation – Jesus Christ. In other words, if we take the Lord Jesus Christ for granted, the source of our salvation, we will bring about a lot of dangers on ourselves, dangers that will harm us spiritually. There are three ways in which we neglect the Lord and his work of salvation. There are also three dangers that will come upon us when we neglect our salvation.

Now, I do not believe that a true believer will ever lose his or her salvation, and there are Scripture passages that will prove this. But true believers can drift away from the Lord if they don't secure their anchors properly. The author pointed out that God's salvation is a great one. The question we must answer then is “how is it a great one?” I believe there are at least three reasons as to why our salvation is a great one.

So, this morning, we will be answering three questions. I would like to first answer the question, “How great is our salvation?” The second question will be, “How do we neglect this salvation?”. The final question will be, “What is the price of neglect?”

How Great is Our Salvation?

So, how great is our salvation? There are three reasons as to why our salvation is a great one.

(1) The Scope of Salvation

The first reason why our salvation is great is because of the scope of our salvation. People often have the wrong notion that salvation is simply all about the forgiveness of our sins and the ticket to heaven. While it is true that when a person repents of his sins and receive Christ as Lord, his sins will be forgiven and he will be made right with God, that it just the first part of salvation, which is called justification. However, we need to realize that salvation doesn't end with our being justified. Salvation continues on in the process called sanctification. Sanctification in simpler terms means we become more like Jesus Christ in holiness. In sanctification, we are being redeemed from the world and being changed more and more into the image of Jesus Christ. Everyday, as we faithfully follow Jesus Christ, we will see ourselves being saved by the Lord from worldliness and sin, from conforming to the ways of the world to living a transformed life. Finally, there is glorification, the process where we receive our new, incorruptible and perfect bodies, thus a salvation of our physical bodies. Although I do not have the time to elaborate on the entire scope of salvation, we can see that the Lord is not yet finished with us. We may have received Jesus Christ as Lord, but that is not the end. That is just the beginning of the process of complete salvation.

(2) The Person Responsible for Salvation

The second reason why our salvation is great is because of the person who made salvation possible. It was none other than the Lord Jesus who, through his life, death and resurrection, made possible for us to be saved. God did not send just anyone to save us; he sent his own son. The task was not given to the angels or to righteous men and women whose names are recorded in the Bible. The angels could not die for us for they are spiritual beings. Righteous men and women cannot die for us because they, too, are not perfectly sinless. Thus, God sent his perfect Son to become perfect man. Our salvation is great because Jesus is the source of our salvation.

(3) The Price of Salvation

Finally, our salvation is great because of the price that had to be paid in order for us to have this salvation. Jesus did not just live a holy life here on earth for us to have a pattern for living; he died on the cross in order that his blood would wash away our sins. That is the extent of God's love – he sent the very best in order to save unworthy people like you and I. This is why we say that our salvation is a great one. It is because God paid a very high price – his own son. If you were given the opportunity to completely save a person from his life-threatening illness but the price will be the life of your son, would you do it? God did just that. He gave up his son in order to save us.

How Do We Take Salvation for Granted?

The second question we will tackle is “How do we take salvation for granted?” There are three ways in which we take salvation for granted.

(1) When We Choose to Sin

Pay attention to the phrase “every violation” in verse 2. In other translations, the word used is “transgression”. Transgression means a violation of the law or an overstepping of a set boundary. The idea behind the word is that we made a conscious choice to sin against God and against others. It is something that we have deliberated in our minds to do and we carry it out. Now, when we choose to sin against God, it is to take salvation for granted because we are refusing to turn away from evil. Salvation is not just about going to heaven, its also about turning away from our sins and turning towards God. So, if we choose to sin and to keep on sinning, we are in effect taking for granted that Jesus paid a very high price just to save us from our sins. Furthermore, to continue sinning against God is to treat with contempt the blood of Jesus (see Hebrews 10:29).

(2) When We Refuse to Obey Him

Choosing to sin is what I would call as the sin of commission. Refusing to obey Him, on the other hand, is the sin of omission. In verse 2, the word used is disobedience. We do not do what God wants for us to do. He wants us to go this way, we want to go that way. He wants us to do this, we want to do that. When we refuse to obey Him, we are actually treating his salvation lightly because when Jesus died on the cross, it was in order to purchase us from the grip of sin and to make us his children. In 1 Corinthians 6:20, we are told that we have been bought with a price, therefore we are to honor God with our bodies. By refusing to obey Him, we are denying his rightful ownership over us. By denying that ownership, we are insulting his act of salvation.

(3) When We Fail to Be Grateful

We can also take God's salvation for granted by failing to be grateful. By this, I am not just referring to our verbal expression of gratitude. I am also referring to three things. First, we fail to be grateful to God when we still long for the old life. True, we may not commit sins of commission and omission, but we sometimes may sigh and say to ourselves, “How I wish I were not a Christian.”. By saying that, we are declaring that we don't appreciate being God's child. Second, we fail to be grateful when we are ashamed of being his follower. We don't want people to know that we are believers and we hide our identity. We don't talk about our faith openly to people because we don't want to be called “Jesus freaks”. However, by failing to identify ourselves as followers of Christ, we are actually being ungrateful. To the single ladies here, would you want to say “yes” to a guy who courts you but tells you beforehand that he doesn't want to let others know that you're his girlfriend if you should say “yes” to him? Of course not! You want him to acknowledge you publicly. The same is true with Christ. We believe and trust Him, thus we should also be willing to publicly acknowledge Him before others. The third is, we don't cherish our relationship with Him. If we are truly grateful to someone, we want to spend time with that person. We value that relationship. If we are truly grateful to Jesus Christ for the salvation He has given to us, we will want to spend time with him in prayer and in reading the Word. If we are always in a hurry in our lives and we don't take time to meet with Him, we are being ungrateful by not valuing our relationship with Him.

What Will Be The Price of Our Neglect?

We come to the third and final question that needs to be answered. It is the question, “What will be the price of our neglect?” Again, let me reiterate that a person who is genuinely saved will not lose his salvation. However, he can go through a period of his life where he neglects his faith and suffers because of that neglect. When a person continues in sin, when he disobeys God and when he fails to be grateful, the following will happen:

(1) His Spiritual Life Will Be An Empty One

The person who neglects his salvation will be running on empty soon. You can compare your spiritual life to a car. A car needs gas to run. If your fuel meter hits “E” or the warning light goes on, you know you're supposed to fill up on gas. I am not of the habit of letting my car's gas tank hit “E”. I usually gas up when there's still around ¼ gas left. In the spiritual realm, your “gas tank” needs to be filled everyday. When you neglect your faith, what happens is that your tank gets empty. You will find yourself becoming fruitless and frustrated. You will find that you're not growing in faith. God seems distant to you (actually, you were the one responsible for growing distant from God).

(2) He Does Not Have the Joy of the Lord in Him

When we neglect our salvation, we will find that there is no joy in life. We will simply go through life existing but not really living. We will find that the things we do feels like drudgery. Remember the Fruit of the Spirit? One of the characteristics of a spirit-filled person is that his life will have joy. The person who neglects his salvation will lose his sense of joy. Remember David in Psalm 51? His prayer was that God would restore the joy of salvation to him after he had confessed his sins. You see, when David persisted in sin and strayed from God, he lost his joy. Likewise, if we stray from the Lord, we will find ourselves listless, without a trace of real joy in us.

(3) He Will Be Spiritually Stunted

Finally, when we neglect our salvation, we will be spiritually stunted. In other words, there is no growth whatsoever in us. When we are not growing, but declining instead in our spiritual life, this will not bring pleasure to God. What it brings is sadness to Him. Who among you parents, upon seeing how cute your baby is, would ever wish that they would stay that way forever? Of course, none of us would ever make such a wish. Yet, that is how we are before God when we neglect our salvation. We stop growing. It's like someone who's 20 years old already but whose body is still that of a 5-year old. God desires that we grow spiritually. If we are already believers for 20 years, our maturity should match the years. Unfortunately, many believers are spiritually stunted. It is because they have taken their faith for granted. After more than 20 years of being a Christian, they still don't know how to pray and they don't even pick up their Bibles to read it. This results in a believer being spiritually stunted.

Conclusion:

Don't take your salvation for granted. That is the warning given by the author of Hebrews. We've looked at the scope of our salvation, as to why it is great. We've learned of how we can take our salvation for granted. Finally, we know the consequences of taking salvation for granted.

Salvation is a free gift. It is also a gift once given to us, will always be ours. However, it is never to be taken for granted, nor should it be neglected and abused. Have you and I been abusing God's grace by taking his gift of salvation for granted? If we are truly saved, we should not neglect God's grace. May the Lord help us all to cherish our salvation dearly.