About This Guide
The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.
Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.
pdf download
Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.
Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.
more Resources
Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.
Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.
Love
Teaching Text: Hebrews 3:7-19
So, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested and tried me,
though for forty years they saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”
See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. As has just been said:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion.”
Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies perished in the wilderness? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.
Themes
Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:
Hebrews
Today, If You Hear His Voice
Formation
Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:
Hebrews is a book written to help urban followers of Jesus going through immense challenges and suffering and in some cases persecution to endure in love and faith.
Hebrews is written as a manual for endurance in the furnace of life’s pain.
CS Lewis says he knows from experience what draws him away from God, what flags his motivations to love, what draws him into selfishness, how the power of distraction is often even better than some elaborate temptation to ruin your life, how small irritants in our relationships can be just as effective as causing love to die, and some great scandal or betrayal.
There are these warning passages that say basically whatever you do, don’t let go of your hope, don’t let go of your love, your confidence in God’s love and promises. Hang on. You will make it. God will hold you.
The author takes us back to the exodus (this great picture and example and narrative or God’s Salvation in Torah) and walks us imaginatively through it and then says, in the same way, today if you hear His voice do not harden your hearts
God speaks. God is a communicator. God is a revealer. God’s heart consistantly runs towards relationship. God is love.
God speaks, and Hebrews is asking if we are willing to listen?
Lewis highlighted a very similar thing in The Screwtape Letters. He says…
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
– CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Lewis is echoing Hebrews —-> Today if you hear His voice…
Do not harden your hearts as in the days of the great rebellion. NT Wright translates that “Do not harden your hearts as in the days of the great bitterness”
And so we are invited into this story of God’s salvation.
The people get bored, the people get scared, the people get annoyed, the people get comfortable quickly not being in Egypt, but they don’t live on gratitude. They turn to complaining.
The Great Rebellion. The great bitterness was basically saying we don’t trust Moses and we don’t trust God has good things for us, we’ll take care of us, we’ll protect and provide for us.
And what happened to Pharaoh’s heart, happens to the peoples’ hearts. They hardened their hearts.
Sin’s deceitfulness works along these lines. Do you really think God is gonna provide for you? If so do you really think it will be what you want?
It will be boring and dull and on a timeline you don’t control
“If you want the real deepest needs of your soul met you are going to have to do that on your own, out of your own resources.”
What the enemy doesn’t want is today you hear His voice. Today you trust His love. Today you trust His provision.
These are warning passages of Hebrews and this one in particular is telling us there is a cost to unbelief.
The people didn’t lose God’s love. They didn’t have to go back to Egypt. But they did lose their joy and the sense of their freedom and a whole generation was defined by wandering instead of receiving their inheritance.
Recognizing the state you’re in spiritually and morally is something few Christian teachers have had anything to say about in recent years, at least in the parts of the church where I work. We have heard so much about ‘following your own spiritual path’, and ‘continuing your own journey of faith’, that we can easily get the impression that we should merely do whatever feels best at the time, and hope that it’ll all work out somehow. Well, it may, but it may not.
– NT Wright
So what do we do? The passage gets very direct with us…
See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.
– Hebrews 3:12–14
Watch Your Heart - (see to it) when it turns away from the living God, it turns to things that bring death.
Death of trust, gratitude, confidence, joy, connection, love
The root of temptation to sin is always a temptation to not trust God
Encourage One Another - there is such tremendous power in this
When you are grumbling and doubting and veering towards selfishness or indulgence or back towards your addiction or towards bitterness or getting even or anger and revenge or apathy and boredom or cynicism - we need each other
Be the friend willing to say I love you but I think you are lying to yourself or believing a lie
As long as it’s called today - we only have to trust God on days ending in Y.
The present is the only point you can exercise faith
The enemy will pull you into the past, the enemy will pull you into future anxiety and worry
So we have to build rhythms to today
Ways to listen for God’s voice
Process of taking what we hear and putting it into action.
Scruipture reading, daily prayer, real community (be known enough to be encouraged), the prayer of examen. (daily inventory)
Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts
