“Take care brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.” Hebrews 3:12 ESV
What is the consequence of an unbelieving heart?
According to this scripture in the book of Hebrews, the unbelieving heart leads us away from the Father; the Living God. The consequence of an unbelieving heart is leaving when instead we should be staying.
We are shown early on in scripture that where a man’s treasure is, is where his heart will be found also. So, if the living God is not our treasure then our hearts will be led away from Him, because He has not yet truly captivated our hearts and our attention.
We can only treasure something we have believed in; in the same way we can only have faith in something that we have calculated will occur with a reasonably comfortable degree of certainty. Is God believable? Will He come through?
There is no formula to know this. There is only faith.
How do we even begin to believe in the One that we cannot see? Because I reckon it would be much easier to believe in that which we can see, because then we would not need faith. This would be the easier option, but then we miss out on learning trust and gaining the sweet experience of getting to know a God who chooses to walk and commune with us rather than give us the answers that will satisfy the pangs of our curious hearts.
He often chooses to answer our curiosity with Himself.
Knowing this helps us realize that He Himself is the answer to our curiosity, and helps us place our treasure in Him until our hearts delight in staying rather than leaving.
Therefore, we are called to faith. A faith that works in tandem with an unseen God who chooses to make unseen promises to us that can only accessed through our journey of faith with Him.
So how do we respond? How do we hold onto faith and avoid an unbelieving heart?
The author of Hebrews tell us to “exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today’, that none of [us] may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” Hebrews 3:13 ESV.
The quickest remedy, therefore, for an unbelieving heart is to surround ourselves with a community of people that will exhort us and remind us of our faith and convictions.
Because sin is deceitful, and on our own we may not be able to see past it and our own misplaced loyalties.
The tendency for sin to lie and our tendency to think of sin lighter than it should, creates a toxic combination of misplaced trust and naivety that leads us further from the warm and safe embrace of the Father.
We need each other, and we desperately need a life-giving community. We need to be held by a community that has devoted its heart to the communion of God, not as a novelty, but a living standard that produces life. The same living presence that finds its source in a living God.
So we link hands, break bread, and continually present Christ to and for each other.
Faith is a communal journey, who are you walking with?
_ Takunda
Comments