Applying the Perseverance of the Saints | Clip from Perseverance of the Saints

Well, in the last section, he gives us some directions. So, Chuck, of the directions, which one did you feel most helpful for you?

I thought several were very helpful, but one that caught my attention was about guarding your heart strictly.

We know that the Bible tells us the heart is deceitful above all things. It's one thing to read the verse and to agree with that intellectually, but then to really believe it.

So that you do run to Christ and keep a closeness to him and watch out for, you know, kind of invasive sins that would pop, that would come in and steal away your focus from him and steal away your joy and his honor.

But I find it easy to agree with that intellectually and yet think that it's not that bad.

That's a temptation to avoid, to guard your heart. Yeah, the heart is not only deceitful, he says, so you can't really trust it.

We can't look to our heart or to our moods or to our present desires and our impulses as the measure of our perseverance.

But he also says the heart is the fountain from which every action will flow. So another point he makes in this section is give great effort to increasing in your love for Christ.

So really, I mean, that kind of is the simplest way of saying it. If you want to persevere, if you want to run the race well, then love

Christ much. Love Christ more, always more.

And we talked about this last week, love to God. So if we will go back and look at those things that were suggested there, how do

I grow in my love to my God and I give great effort there, then basically persevering will be occurring.

We will be intentional, we will be careful, we will guard our heart. I thought that direction along with the direction to make sure that you're using

Scripture as a guide went well together. How do we know that we're loving Christ well and increasing?

Well, we look to Scripture. So it's not just, you know, kind of be thinking that I'm loving

Him well, but not really in the ways that He appreciates or wants.

Yeah, another key direction he gives is that we should shun every known sin.

And he points out you cannot enjoy the sweet nearness of Christ on this

Christian journey. You cannot really grow in Christ's likeness if at the same time you are treasuring sin.

He says, if you say you are walking in Him, with Him, but treasuring sin knowingly, then all you have is a fiction.

It's a fantasy. It's not real. First done one. Yeah, and he gives here a whole list of sins that you must be careful to avoid.

In a sense, at the very first sight of them, flee them. You know, don't let them come close and don't hold a conversation with them.

You know, don't argue with them. Don't say, what are you offering me today? I'm not so sure it's worth it.

As soon as you see it, flee it. And let me just read the list of sins that he mentions because I find it quite unnerving that these are not sins that I might have listed here.

And, you know, I think his sermon here is really helpful because it gets behind our religious armor.

So here's what he says. He says, here are sins in particular he would warn his people against, allowing harsh thoughts of God to remain in your heart and mind.

You just don't think about that. But if you do harbor harsh thoughts that God has treated you wrongly, that God has failed to be honest to you, you know, that He has not been all

He said He would be, you will quit running. You know, you just despair. Why would you?

Doubting God's promises, again. Or, he says, doubting God's threatenings or His warnings.

You know, treating these as if these are wonderful words for church services, but they aren't as real as what happens

Monday morning. Third, make sure, he says, you guard your thoughts, but also your speeches and your actions, guarding them against any unclean thing.

Unclean, careless talk will destroy any hope of walking intimately with a clean

Savior. Next, be swift to flee every temptation, he says. So, in a sense, we could say the temptation is to kind of be sluggish, is to kind of delay in our response to temptation, but immediately, like Joseph, run, crying out, how can

I do this great wickedness against God? And then finally, he says, beware of cowardice.

Again, not necessarily a sin that we would think, if you allow this sin to creep in and have a safe spot in your life, it will prevent you from persevering.

But spiritual cowardice is listed in the Bible as one of those damning sins.

If a man will not trust God enough to risk everything, then he will not be able to follow

Christ. You will always reach a place where eventually you say, I'm not ready to risk that, and the spiritual coward turns backward, and leaves his profession of faith, so to speak.

Yeah, he also mentioned getting entangled with the everyday stuff of life, and that's such a trap.

I find it so easy to get enamored with something, some idea or product or whatever, and start kind of going down this wormhole of researching it, and trying to figure out, is it better to do it that way or that way, and what are the accessories that go with that?

And this stuff can just consume your mind and your heart. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we were talking about this before the service. You're talking about me, aren't you, Chuck? How do you know? I'm not talking about me.

You're in the process of getting a house ready to sell, and looking to move, and so that just has a lot of things that could just consume 24 hours a day.

And we were talking about something that I was looking at on the Internet. I thought, well, I'd like to get one of those. And my wife said to me, look, do me a favor, just get it.

Do not talk to me about it. And I did exactly the opposite of what she said. I said, no, we have to research this, you see.

And then you look back and you think, where did the hours go last night? Did I waste those hours?

Right, and that's stuff that's wrong in itself, just the time wasted for me, or thoughts given to that that should have been given to Christ.

Yeah, or like William Tennant, to hate a slothful moment. Yeah. Thank you for watching the clip.

We hope that it was helpful for you. If you want to hear the full audio of that podcast, you can find it on any of your favorite podcast apps.