perseverance and patience

125 Year Celebration / Perseverance / Hebrews 12:1–4  

• To pursue the best thing we can think of for as long as possible.

• In order to do that we need to endure. We need to be able to do that thing or pursue that idea for awhile because nothing that is really worth doing happens quickly.

To Endure is to determine that Christ is more trustworthy than anything else

Hebrews 12:1 ESV

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,

• If we look at the first verse we see a couple of things in play. One is the reality of the cloud of witnesses. He is referring to the chapter before where we get a list of a whole bunch of people who have gone before us who have lived faithfully. They are a cloud of witnesses. We come from that. We are formed from that. People who have gone before us, who cheer us on heavenly.

• We endure by first understanding that we can run without all the extra weight. We don’t have to carry the sin that so easily entangles. We don’t have to carry all the stuff we hang onto.

• We don’t just try harder.

• We depend on someone else.

Hebrews 12:12–13 ESV

Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

We can run with endurance because we have a founder and perfecter of our faith

Hebrews 12:2–4 ESV

looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

He is the founder and perfector of our faith

Notice to, He is the perfecter of our faith, not protector of our faith

• Christ works to sanctify us and make us faithful to Him. He grants us the gift of faith and works to perfect it in us. We display the fruits of the Spirit, the gifts He gives us. Even in trials and suffering, James says, forms us into Christ’s image.

• Meaning He has not promised us easiness and complete removal from things that are not like us or that we don’t like in order to preserve something that resembles faith in our lives.

• To endure is to determine that what Christ knows and how He is working in the world at this moment, is sufficient

• Our uncertainty itself is endurance because we can understand Christ who Himself already endured.

Notes available Sat July 29