Foundational Teachings, Part 1 (Hebrews 6:1-3)

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Time To Grow Up, Part 2 (Hebrews 5:11-12)

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And now with your Bibles, please turn to Hebrews chapter 6. We're going to read together chapter 6 verses 1 through 6.

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Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity. Not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of instruction about washings and laying on of hands and the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.

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And this we will do if God permits. For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the

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Holy Spirit and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the

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Son of God and put Him to open shame. Let's pray together before we begin. Father, it is by your mercy and grace that we have your word in our own language, in our own tongue, and that we are able to have a copy in our laps and to be able to read it and understand it and to meditate upon it.

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That is a gift of your grace, and we pray that you would attend that gift of grace this morning with the gift of your

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Holy Spirit to teach us and to instruct us in your word. We pray that all of our thoughts and our meditation may be pleasing in your sight for the glory of Christ our

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King, in whose name we pray, amen. We stopped last week not just in the middle of a verse, but in fact in the middle of a sentence right before we got into those short lists of six doctrines or articles that are listed there in verses 1 and 2, and we saw that the concern of the author was for the maturity, the sanctification of his readers, fearing that they had regressed and slipped back and had come to need milk instead of meat and milk instead of solid food.

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He was concerned about their maturity and their understanding of truth, because Christians need more than just simply introductory doctrines to the

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Christian faith. Christians need more than just foundational teaching. They need robust teaching, robust theology, deep and abiding theology about God.

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Christians don't need simply to be told the gospel message every single Sunday over and over and over again in its simplicity as beautiful as that is.

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Instead, Christians must be instructed to build upon the truths of the gospel and to see that worked out in their everyday lives and to see the development of doctrine in their lives as the truth of God in all of its fullness.

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Every aspect of it is unfolded and expounded and laid bare before the people of God, the purpose being that we would come to a deeper and richer understanding of who

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God is and what He has done for us in Christ, and that building upon that, we would eventually become mature.

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We are pursuing maturity, and that maturity is mentioned at the end of chapter 5.

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It is described at the end of chapter 5 as the ability to discern between good and evil. It is the mark of maturity.

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Now, a Christian who does not understand anything more than the simplistic, basic, fundamental, elementary issues of Christianity and Christian doctrine can never be mature.

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Christian maturity can never mark the individual who has only a simple understanding of the basic elements of Christian truth.

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That comes, that maturity and that discernment comes when you understand the truth in its depth, you are exercised in the truth, you have exercised discernment, you have matured, you have grown up.

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You are no longer like a child tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, but instead you have a solid and firm grasp on the truth.

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That is the goal of all of our Christian life, all of our Christian ministry, all of Christian preaching. That's the goal of our fellowship and our discipleship and everything that we do, pursuing maturity and godliness.

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Now, as I mentioned last week, in connection with this passage, there is differences among those who are in our same theological camp, and I won't go into that too much, but I want to describe to you how those who are in our theological camp, and I'm not talking about those who believe you can lose your salvation, and in fact, for our purposes today,

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I'm not even going to talk about their take on this passage just yet. We'll deal with that when we get to verses 4 through 6, which is sort of the key to that battleground of whether you can lose your salvation or not, but for today,

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I just want to highlight the difference as we begin between these two positions within our own theological camp.

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And by my own theological camp, I mean the people who believe that you cannot lose your salvation, and just in case I have not been clear,

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I believe that you cannot lose your salvation. I'll reiterate that again. Okay, so within that theological camp, there are two different ways of handling this list of these six distinctives and doctrines.

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On the one side, there are those who would say that these six items relate basically to the

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Old Covenant and the aspects of the Old Covenant that the author is trying to get his readers to let go of and to embrace

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Jesus Christ. So they would see these six items, repentance from dead works, faith toward God, instruction about washing, and instructions about laying on of hands, end of the resurrection, end of eternal judgment, those six things, they would see those as parts of the teachings of the

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Old Testament. And so since they would understand that in that way, they would say that the concern of the author is evangelistic, he is trying to get his readers to let go of that and to move instead and embrace

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Jesus Christ. Because obviously as Jews, they had come out of that Old Testament sacrificial system.

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And so they would have had an understanding of Christian truth, or not a Christian truth, sorry, an understanding of biblical truth, not distinctly

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Christian, that would have been all about the Old Covenant. So they would have seen repentance as the amount and the type of repentance talked about in the

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Old Testament. The faith toward God would have been a faith toward Yahweh, they would have understood that. They would understand these six items as being related to the, or the two items, the instruction about washings and laying on of hands, dealing with the

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Old Testament ceremonial system, the ceremonial washings as part of worship, and making oneself ceremonially clean before they went up to worship at the temple or went into a synagogue to observe the

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Sabbath. They would understand the laying on of hands to refer to either the laying on of hands of the sacrifice, where you would put your hands upon the sacrifice, identify yourself with them, and then send it off to the slaughter as your substitute, or the laying on of hands having to do with the ceremonial laying on of hands in connection with service, service in the temple as part of the

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Old Testament priesthood. They would understand the resurrection to be the seed of teaching on resurrection that you find in the

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Old Testament, not a fully -orbed, fully -understood idea of resurrection that we see developed in the New Testament, and eternal judgment the same way.

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The understanding and the doctrine about eternal judgment and hell in the Old Testament is very shrouded in mystery.

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It's not as clear as what we get in the New Testament. And so those within our theological camp who would say that this is connected to the

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Old Testament, that's how they would understand all of those six things, being the elemental of the basic teachings on these things contained in the

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Old Testament. They would say we need to move on from that to the fuller, more richly, deeper understood aspects of these same doctrines that we find in Jesus Christ.

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Let go of the old and take the new. That's what they would say. And they would say that this contrast between immaturity and maturity really is moving from embracing the old aspects of the

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Old Covenant to embracing Jesus Christ. So that's salvation. Moving from immaturity to maturity in that viewpoint is moving from holding on and being participating in the

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Old Testament, the Old Covenant, and letting go of that and embracing Jesus Christ. That's salvation.

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So that's how they would view these six things. That is not how I view this list of six things. That is how others...and by the way, that perspective that I've just given you is not heresy.

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Not in any way is it heresy, not even close to heresy. It's simply a way...and it works. It's simply a way of understanding this list of six things and what the author is getting at here, but I don't think it fits as best...sorry,

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as well...get my adverb...my word parts right. I was going to say adverb or adjective,

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I'm not sure what I was shooting for there. I'm not sure that it fits as well as the understanding that I'm going to propose to you.

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I'm going to give you two reasons why I think that understanding does not fit the context, and next week

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I will share with you the weaknesses of my own position. So here are the two reasons why

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I think that is not the best understanding of those six items in this context. First, I don't think it fits the analogy that is offered.

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You see, the analogy that is offered is not moving from darkness to light or from death to life or from being unsaved to being redeemed.

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That's not the analogy that is offered. The analogy that the author offers is moving from immaturity to maturity.

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See, that's the whole context. Not getting saved so much as being sanctified.

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Not a change of status between being an enemy of God to being a child of God. It is a change in maturity that the author has in mind in this context.

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So I don't think it fits for that reason. The second reason I don't think it fits is because it doesn't fit the expectations of the author.

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You'll notice the author talks about expecting them to have grown spiritually by this time. By this time you ought to be teachers.

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By this time you should have grown spiritually. By this time you should have been able to digest solid food and not just milk.

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By this time you should have had a firm grasp on these things and you should be discerning by this time. Now that is none of those things, none of those expectations is anything you would say to an unbeliever if you are trying to evangelize them.

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They are something you would say to an immature believer whom you expect to be more mature by now. But they are not something you would say to an unbeliever.

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In other words, it wouldn't make sense for me to walk up to an unbeliever and say, you know what, after the last 15 years I would expect you to be a teacher of Christian things by now.

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That wouldn't make any sense. But it does make sense to walk up to an immature Christian and say, by this time I would expect you to have a greater understanding of Christian truth.

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So the analogy of moving from immaturity to maturity does not fit the idea that they're moving from darkness to light or into salvation.

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It does fit a growth in Christian understanding and a growth in Christian doctrine. Now, having said all that, we have to acknowledge this, that it is difficult at times, nigh unto impossible, to tell the difference between an immature

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Christian and an unbeliever in some circumstances. That is nigh unto impossible.

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Because we expect to see some growth in spiritual things over the course of time, do we not? Some development in understanding, some apprehension of truth that you add layer upon layer upon, upon some progress in spiritual things, don't you expect that to happen over the course of time?

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And then when you find somebody who has been a Christian supposedly for a long period of time, but they have not grown in these things, and they still want nothing but milk, your concern that they may in fact be unbelievers and not just immature believers is not without warrant.

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You have reason to suspect that in that case. This is what concerns this author so gravely.

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By this time, they should have matured. And so there has to be in the minds of anybody who is biblically discerning this curiosity, this wonder, are we dealing with an unbeliever or are we dealing with a

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Christian who for whatever reason has just been stagnated for a period of time that we cannot explain?

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So even though I do not think that he's talking to unbelievers who are embracing fully the Old Covenant and his concern is evangelistic,

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I do think he's speaking to believers and his concern is their maturity, their growing in it, we do have to say that there are situations where you see an immature believer and an unbeliever, and you ask, what really is the difference between those?

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We expect some visible difference. And if we don't see it, our concern that we may be dealing with an unbeliever is warranted.

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So I would say that these six things that we're dealing with here are aspects of Christian truth that would be taught to a

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Jew when they first get saved. This is the introduction to Christian teaching, these six things. So now we're going to go through them.

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And I told you last week that this list of six can be divided into three groups of two. Repentance and faith seem to go together.

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The instruction about washings and laying on of hands seems to go together. And the resurrection and eternal judgment seem to go together.

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So we can group those two together. So we'll start by doing that. We'll handle repentance and faith. We're going to group them together and I'm going to deal with them separately first and then

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I will show you how they go together, repentance and faith. And we'll do this with each of these six as we work our way through. So first of all, repentance and faith.

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These are the beginning elements of Christian doctrine. This is where the Christian life begins at the point that one repents and believes in Jesus Christ.

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That's the beginning of it. That's the initiation of it. And from that point forward as a new creature in Jesus Christ, you are growing and developing and maturing and progressing in your sanctification and holiness.

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But it all begins with repentance and faith. And the type of language that he uses is symbolic or is indicative of what he means by repentance and faith.

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Look at the language that he uses. We're not going to lay again this foundation. We're not going to go over all the basics time and time again.

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You have had that done. Now you need to build on those things. And here are the foundational elements, repentance from dead works and faith toward God.

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Notice the directional language, repentance from something and faith towards something.

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You notice that? There is repentance from something and a faith that is towards something. We saw this a few weeks ago on Easter Sunday when

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I preached from 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 verses 9 and 10, and Paul commends the Thessalonians because they turned from idols to serve the living and true

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God. That's repentance and that's faith. In other words, repentance and faith are not used in that context, but that describes exactly what salvation involves.

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It is a turning away from something, in this case, repenting from dead works and a faith toward a turning in an opposite direction and a faith toward God.

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Now here's what repentance is not. Repentance is not simply a change of mind. It involves that. And some people will say that, that the word repentance here, metanoia, only means a change of mind.

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It just means that you think differently about sin. You used to not think that this is sin and now you do think that this is sin.

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And that such repentance doesn't involve any kind of change of life, any kind of change of your conduct or your behavior or anything like that.

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You can actually change your mind about sin in this sense and continue to live in it and continue to engage in sin and dive into sin.

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It's just the means that you think differently about it. Well, it's true that the term metanoia does and can mean change your mind, but that is not how the

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Bible describes repentance. Repentance is always a turning away from something. It's not just a turning of my mind, a turning in the way that I think about something.

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It is a change in course, a change in direction so that I have a different orientation toward sin.

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And that's an important word, a different orientation toward sin. Repentance is when my affections toward sin have changed.

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So it's not just a change of mind and it's not simply a ceasing from a certain kind of sin. Rank pagans can stop sinning, they can.

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A rank pagan can stop being a drunkard and he can stop his drinking because of health benefits because the drinking threatens his life.

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That's not repentance. A drunkard or an adulterer can stop committing adultery on his wife because he doesn't want to break up his family.

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He may cease committing adultery, but that's not repentance. He may stop beating his children because he's afraid of going to jail.

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He may stop that sin, but his orientation toward sin, his love for sin, his nature and his affections for sin have not changed.

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He has just simply exchanged one sin for another or he has stopped a particular sin for reasons other than a godly sorrow.

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That is not biblical repentance. Biblical repentance is having a heart affection and orientation toward sin changed.

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Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones offers this vivid and practical description and definition of repentance. He says this, repentance means that you realize you are a guilty, vile sinner in the presence of God, that you deserve the wrath and punishment of God, that you are hell bound.

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It means that you begin to realize that this thing called sin is in you, that you long to get rid of it, that you turn your back on it in every shape and form.

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You renounce the world, whatever the cost, the world in its mind and outlook as well as its practice, and you deny yourself and take up the cross and go after Christ, your nearest and dearest, and the whole world may call you a fool or say you have religious mania, you may have to suffer financially, but it makes no difference.

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That is repentance, close quote. That's it. It's not just that I stopped committing a certain sin, it's not just that I have a little bit of a different outlook towards sin.

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It is that repentance is a radical reorientation toward sin itself.

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And I see it not as something out there that affects me once in a while, but as something inside of me that I long to be rid of.

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In the core of my DNA, it exists. And if sin were the color blue, every cell and molecule and atom in my body would be some shade of blue.

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That's how I see sin. I want to be rid of it. I hate it. And so we turn from it.

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That's biblical repentance. This is the consistent call of the Old and New Testaments and scriptural revelation talks about repentance in the

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Old Testament and in the New Testament. What do you think the Old Testament prophets meant when they would go up onto the high places where the children of Israel were committing idolatry and fornication and all of the abominations that they would do, sacrificing their children to idols and all of those things?

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What do you think that the prophets went up there? Do you think they went up there and said, you know what, you just need to think differently about what you're doing? Or did they say, you need to stop what you're doing and turn from that and serve

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Yahweh the one true and living God? That was their call, the Old Testament prophets. They didn't just ask people to change their mind about sin, they said, you need to stop doing what you're doing, turn from that and embrace

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Yahweh, return to God. That was the call of John the Baptist. In Mark chapter one, it says in verse four, that John the

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Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In Mark's gospel, the first words that come from the lips of the

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Lord Jesus is a message of repentance. The time is fulfilled, he said, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.

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Repent and believe. Those are the first words recorded by Mark of Jesus from the lips of Jesus.

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His message was a message of repentance. And so it should not surprise us that the apostles continued in the tradition of the

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Old Testament prophets of John the Baptist and of Jesus himself, when Peter stood up on the temple mount on the day of Pentecost, and he said in Acts 2 verse 38, repent each one of you and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and receive the gift of the

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Holy Spirit. And Paul, when he went into Athens, said God has overlooked the times of ignorance in the past, but he now commands all men to what?

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To repent, because God has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness, having furnished proof to all men by raising that judge whom

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He has appointed from the dead. And so the message of the New Testament is repent. Repentance and faith, they go together.

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They are the gospel message. We are called to repent and to turn from sin. Spurgeon said that we must repent and we are commanded to repent because he said sin and hell are married unless repentance proclaims the divorce.

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Sin and hell are married. You are bound to hell unless your repentance proclaims the divorce.

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That's why we must repent from the very things that bring about God's justice. Repentance is a universal command in Scripture, and it's not only that,

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Scripture also says it is the gracious gift of God. In Acts chapter 5 verse 31, repentance is called a gift.

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In Acts chapter 11 verse 18, repentance is called a gift from God. In 2 Timothy chapter 2 verse 25, in Acts chapter 2,

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Peter speaks of God, the prince of life, turning us from our wicked ways. This gift of repentance is a universal command to all men, and it is at the same time a gracious gift from God.

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Because you see, sinners, though they are responsible to obey that command, have no ability to obey that command in themselves.

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We are slaves to sin, and it is our taskmaster. And Satan is our father, and we are bound to sin, we are married to sin, sin is in us, sin is everything we think, it is everything we do, it is every motive that we have, it is every aspect of our being, we cannot be rid of it, it flows through our veins, it is us, we are in sin, under sin, in that condemnation, and we can no more change our orientation towards sin, from sin, and toward God than a leopard can change its spots.

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It cannot be done. I cannot take my heart of stone and make it a heart of flesh, I cannot do that. I cannot set myself free from sin.

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It is a universal command that all men must obey, repent and believe the gospel or you will perish.

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At the same time, it is a gracious gift of God, because God in His magnificent and matchless and merciful grace, grabs the sinner and turns him from his sin, granting him that gracious gift whereby he is able to believe.

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It is a divine command, and it is a divine gift, and the sinner that is so gripped by the grace of God, and is granted the gift of repentance, will have a godly sorrow over his sin, and he will have that orientation towards sin that I described from Martin Lloyd Jones just a few moments ago.

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And what is it that we are to repent from? Dead works. We are to repent from dead works. What are those?

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Well, really, dead works would be anything that it is that we think, any deed that we do that warrants the wrath of God, for one.

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Let's look at it generically. And generally speaking, dead works would be any deed that we do that warrants the wrath of God.

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It brings us death. The wages of our sin is death. And so a dead work would be any work that we perform, any deed that we do, however righteous or unrighteous we may view it to be, that warrants the wrath of God and that brings about death because that is the just reward for deeds of death.

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More specifically, it would also be any deed that we do that we think merits God's favor or warrants His grace.

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This would be particularly true of the Jews who would have thought that all of their fastidious Sabbath keeping and law keeping and their circumcision which they wore as a badge of honor and all of their lineage and everything brought them merit and righteousness before God.

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Every Jew would look at all the things that he did, the ceremonial cleansings and the ceremonial observance of the Sabbath laws and the traditions of men.

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He would look at all of that and view that as those things which heaped up for him merit before God, gave him righteousness that he needed to stand before God.

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This was Paul's big revelation in Philippians chapter 3 when he came to realize that being born on...circumcised

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on the eighth day and born to the tribe of Benjamin and a Pharisee and fastidious in keeping the law, he said, I turn my back on all that righteousness so that I might have a righteousness that is not my own.

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So he had to turn from all of those dead works that he had as a Jewish Pharisee and embrace a righteousness that is an alien righteousness that is given as a gift of God in grace by faith instead of thinking that his righteousness would...and

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all of his deeds would merit him righteousness before God. You see, the Jews would think that all of their fastidious law -keeping and observance of all of that old covenant would gain them a righteous standing in God's sight.

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And in comes the gospel and says, all of it is dead works. All of it. It is dead works done by dead sinners as part of a dead covenant that cannot bring life and cannot bring cleansing.

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It's all dead. And so the call of the gospel says you have to turn from those dead works and to embrace instead the work and righteousness of another individual who fulfilled the law on your behalf.

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So we are to repent from dead works because salvation comes not on the basis of deeds done in righteousness, but by his mercy he has saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the

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Holy Spirit, not according to deeds. So we are supposed to turn from all of the deeds that merit

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God's wrath. Is the lying, our stealing, our gossip, our slander, our lust, our hatred, our envy, our strife, our pride, our disobedience to parents and authority, all of those things, they all merit

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God's wrath, every last one of them, and we turn from those dead works which can only kill us and embrace the life that is in Jesus Christ.

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Dead works cannot produce life and they cannot atone for sin. And the repentance that we are to exercise is both a gracious gift of God and a command that all men must obey.

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And so we are instead to place our faith toward or in God. That is the next thing, not only repentance from dead works, but faith toward God.

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And repentance and faith are always coupled together in this way, unless an author for some reason is handling one of them specifically in Scripture.

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They are coupled together oftentimes in Scripture as being really two parts of the same command or two aspects, two sides of the same coin, as it were, and I'll show you how they go together here in just a moment when we deal with now faith toward God by itself.

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Faith is directed toward God and is always in an object. It's away from trusting in our...it is a faith that is toward God away from our trusting in our works and our own self -righteousness and our own deeds and our own merit.

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And so the one true and living God who was revealed in the person of Jesus Christ is the new covenant object of faith.

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Okay, catch that. In the old covenant, they didn't understand the doctrine of the Trinity. They didn't understand Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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It is revealed in the new covenant. In the old covenant, the command to turn from sin and to embrace salvation by faith was always a turning from idols, from themselves, and from a trust in themselves to embrace

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Yahweh as He was revealed in the old covenant, as He was worshiped in the land of Israel and revealed in the text of Scripture.

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It was an embracing of Yahweh, the God, the living God of Israel, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That was the call.

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But in the New Testament, having had the second person of the Trinity incarnated and walking and dwelling among us, we understand that our faith is in the person and work of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. So in the new covenant, our faith is not in Yahweh, generally speaking, but in God who is revealed in the person of Christ.

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It is a specific Christocentric faith that Christians have. It's not just of God, generically in some sense, but specifically the

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Yahweh who is revealed in the person of Christ. And we see Jesus asserting this time again in the

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Gospel of John, you believe in God, believe also in me. He who believes in me has life. He who does not believe faces wrath. Believe in me and you will have eternal life.

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Believe in me, I will raise you up. Come to me and believe in me and trust in me and I will give you life. I will give you living water.

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I will give you the bread of life. I am the light of the world. Come and believe in me and you will have light and you will have light living in you.

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This is the constant, repeated refrain of the Gospel of John. Jesus held himself up as the object of men's faith and belief and he did so without any competition whatsoever with God the

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Father. Jesus never came and said, believe in me and not Yahweh. He said, believe in me because I am

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Yahweh in human flesh. And so the object of Christian faith is very Christocentric. And biblical faith is a saving faith, it's a trust, a confidence placed in Jesus Christ.

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It's not wishful thinking, and this is how you hear the world talk about faith. It's not wishful thinking, as if we believe something that is contrary to reason, contrary to what we know or have good reason to be true.

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That's not biblical faith. Biblical faith is not wishful thinking, it's something we have every reason or no reason to believe is true and every reason to believe might actually be false.

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And it's not a generic faith, like the sage of our age, George Michael, used to say, you just got to have faith. Not that generic faith, you just have to have it.

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You have to believe in something higher than yourself, something outside of yourself, just have faith. Faith is a great thing and you need to have it.

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Even in some Christian movies, that's how you see faith presented. It's pathetic because the biblical faith is not a faith that you just have in something outside of yourself that's out there, nameless and faceless reality.

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It is a Yahweh -worshipping, Christocentric belief and trust that Jesus Christ is who

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He said He is, He has done what Scripture says He has done, and that His work is sufficient for me.

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That is biblical faith, not a generic faith. Biblical faith is a trust in a person.

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This faith is the consistent message of all of Scripture, going all the way back to the book of Genesis.

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Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. What saved Abraham? He trusted in Yahweh, that's it.

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Abraham was declared righteous before he was circumcised, before he had a child, before he had done anything.

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God said, Abraham, I will do this, this, and this for you and your descendants, and Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

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Abraham was saved on the basis of faith. David was saved on the basis of faith. He wrote Psalm 34, blessed is the man whose transgressions are not imputed to him, but instead are imputed somewhere else.

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Blessed is the man who can be counted as not guilty in the presence of God. This was David's faith, that he believed in God and God gave him that righteousness and saved him.

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All the way through the Old Testament, consistently through the New Testament, Yahweh is the object of faith.

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In the New Testament, Yahweh revealed in Jesus Christ is the object of our faith. And just as with repentance, this faith is called in Scripture a divine gift.

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Ephesians 2, 8, 9, for by grace you have been saved through faith and that, the faith, is not of yourselves. It is the gift of God.

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Now, some people say, well, it's not the faith that is the gift of God, it's the grace that's the gift of God.

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Well, we know that the grace is not of ourselves. That's patently obvious. Paul wouldn't need to clarify that. For by grace you have been saved through faith and that, the faith, is not of yourselves.

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So that no one can boast. No one can stand in the presence of God and pound his chest and say, yeah, but I believed. I had the faith.

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You didn't. That's why you're perishing. But I had the faith. No, that's a gift from God. Philippians 1, 29 says that it has been granted to you to believe in Christ and to suffer for his name's sake.

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That is God's gift. Why? Because dead men cannot exercise saving faith.

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It has to be granted to them. We are dead in our trespasses and sins. We can't declare our divorce from sin or change the nature or our heart or even muster up that belief.

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That is not the call of the New Testament. The call of the New Testament is not to muster up some man -centered faith and place it as feebly as you can in God in hopes that he might see it and measure out and look at that faith and say, yeah, that pleases me.

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That's enough faith. You can get in. That's not enough faith. You're out. That's not the biblical description of faith.

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It's the gracious gift of God. God in his mercy grants both repentance and faith. Now, these are two sides of the same coin, repentance and faith, and they must and always do go together.

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Spurgeon said, these are the two wings that must fly us to the Savior. Repentance and faith, the two wings that must fly us to the Savior. Repentance on one side and faith on the other because biblical repentance always issues in saving faith.

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The man who says he has turned from his sin but has not placed his faith in Jesus Christ, that is not biblical repentance.

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Biblical repentance always issues in a faith toward God. It has to. Otherwise, it's not biblical repentance.

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And faith toward God is always a repenting faith. The person who says he has faith in God but still lives and loves his sin is not biblical faith.

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That faith cannot save. The biblical faith that saves is the gift of God. It's the command to all men, and it is a faith and repentance that go together so that it is a repenting faith that saves.

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It is a faith -filled repentance that turns from sin. So the repentance always turns me from one object of my affection to another object of my affection.

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And those are two sides of the same coin. It is repentance that turns me from sin, faith and obedience to Him.

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And the faith that is placed in God is a faith that has turned me from sin. You cannot separate these two things at all.

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They have to and always go together. Now given the prevalence of repentance and faith all the way through Scripture, it is sad that these, and these things which are both fundamental to biblical and gospel preaching, these things are the foundational teachings of Christianity.

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Given the prevalence through all of Scripture, you would think that it would be more central to the life and preaching of your average evangelical

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American church. Would you not? You would think it would be. But the American gospel is never presented as I have just presented it to you.

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Never presented that way. The gospel, the American gospel is always presented like this. Jesus can make you the best you that you ever thought you could be.

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Now there are some sin issues out there around the fringes that He will mop up if you give

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Him some time. But really it is all about you having the best life that you can have now.

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That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Your best life now, that's the American gospel. And I think sin is somehow tangentially, marginally, briefly mentioned somehow in connection with Jesus dying on a cross.

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I think there's some connection between a cross and boo -boos and mistakes that I've made and the resurrection is all about me getting a mulligan, a redo, a do -over.

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But really it's just being fulfilled. And I want to have every morning when I wake up that warm fuzzy feeling on the inside that not even a cup of coffee can get you.

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That kind of power to go through your day and enjoy your work and say hi to your coworker and always be smiling at your wife and kids, that kind of power can only come when

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Jesus is in your heart. And if He's in there long enough, He'll deal with the mistakes that you've made around the edges, the parts of your life that you wish you could do over those things, somehow

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He'll clean those up. That's the American gospel. And you know what the response to such a message is, always given?

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You need to ask Jesus into your heart, you need to make a decision for Jesus, make yourself a Christian, invite

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Him in, to quote another sage of our age, let Jesus take the wheel. And if Jesus takes the wheel and you can just reach over and flip the

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Jesus switch and add that light to your life, oh, how much better it will be. And that's not how the

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Bible presents the gospel message. What does the Bible say is the response to the gospel message? Repent and believe.

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You cannot improve upon that. Nobody can improve upon that. In a couple of months, I'm going to teach evangelism training out at the camp for the staff that will be there over the course of the summer.

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And I will nail this home a hundred ways from Sunday in every conceivable way that I possibly can with those kids to the point where they will hate me.

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And they usually do by the time I am all done, because I tell them, you're not telling kids this summer to invite Jesus into their hearts, to make a decision, to go forward, to check a box, to raise their hand, to fill out a card, to pray a prayer.

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You're not asking them to do any of that. The biblical command is clear, repent and believe. And you cannot improve upon that message.

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You are not wiser than God. You're not smarter than God. He doesn't need you to translate anything for him. You just command the kids to repent and believe.

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You show them their sin. You tell them what they must do in response to that. And it is turn from your sin and believe upon Jesus Christ.

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Embrace that message. Turn from your sin and believe upon Christ. That is the gospel message.

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And I will tell them, if a hundred kids hear that, and nobody gets saved or goes forward or raises their hand, that is not your responsibility.

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That is not your concern. Your concern is to simply present that message, to speak that truth and tell kids what

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Scripture commands that they must do in response to this good news. And if you can't count any fruit of that at the end of the day, it's not your job.

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Your job is to present the message. How does Scripture present the message? Repent and believe. And our real problem is not that we need to flip the switch and invite

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Jesus in and let him take the wheel and have a more abundant life. Our real problem is that we have violated the law of God and we deserve his wrath.

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That is our fundamental need. Not that my life could go a little bit better, not that I have a better job, not that it'd be easier to raise my kids, better parking spot, better marriage.

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Those things might happen, but that's not the central concern of the gospel. The central concern of the gospel is repentance and faith.

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I have a sin problem that needs to be resolved. And the sin issues that I have and that you have are not around the fringes of our life.

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They are right at the center of our life, at the core of our being. And we need to be rescued from that.

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And God is not interested in rescuing us from our bad days and our dour, sour Sundays and a frown on our face and all that.

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He's not interested in rescuing us from a bad job that we like or a bad spouse that we don't like. He rescues us from our sin.

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And the command is repentance and faith. So that is the biblical presentation of the good news. And the gospel in our nation, unfortunately, is so woefully inadequately presented that even in churches which say that they focus on the foundational issues, do you even think they get to these foundational issues?

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See, what I've just presented to you is the foundational teachings of the Christian faith. And when people say that we're just teaching the basics here and they don't even teach what

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I've just given to you, they're not even teaching the basics. They haven't even gotten to that. Which means they haven't even gotten to the gospel yet, because that's the gospel.

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Well, by this time, you probably guessed that we're not getting on to the next two. The instruction about washings and laying on of hands, and last week,

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I kind of stopped the message short because I wanted to deal with all six of these in one message.

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But obviously, we're not going to do that. So we'll save the next four for next week. And I would just wrap this up with answering a question that I think will lead us quite naturally into our observance of the

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Lord's Supper. What does it mean when the author here says that we must leave these things? When he says that you need to leave verse one, therefore, leaving the elementary teaching about the

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Christ, if repentance and faith is the elementary basic teachings about Christ. What does it mean that we leave those things and what do we leave that for?

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I suggested last week that he's not talking about turning your back on those things and abandoning them, he's talking about leaving them in the sense that you're building on them, you're moving on to them.

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That's what we're describing. It doesn't mean that having repented and believed in Christ, now we don't talk about repentance and faith anymore, we're walking on to bigger and better things.

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No, it's just we're...rather than laying the foundation of what repentance and faith is all over again, we're building on that with greater and deeper understandings of what those two doctrines are.

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So when we leave, in this sense, the teaching about the foundational teaching of repentance from dead works, it means that now as a

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Christian, I understand that my repentance, which was given to me by God, was not just a once and for all repentance that I never have to repeat and I never have to revisit again.

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It is a gateway to a life of repentance. So that now as a Christian, the same repentance that saved me then is a repentance that I do every single day when

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I'm confronted with sin, when I'm given the opportunity to sin, and when I see sin in myself, I turn from that sin.

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I turn away from that sin. So as Martin Luther says, the Christian life is a life of repentance. We are constantly turning from sin.

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Why? Because it's within us, it's everywhere we go, it's everything we think, it's everything we are. We're still in this unredeemed flesh.

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And so every day we are turning from sin. We see it and we turn away from it, we walk away from it. I'm not talking about just walking from temptation, but a turning from sin.

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Lord, I see this in my life and I hate it and I want it gone. And I ask for grace to mortify this until you come back.

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I ask for grace to live in victory over this until you return. Help me to put this to death, to kill it, and to turn from it, and to wage war against it until my dying breath, that's repentance.

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And every day as Christians, that's what we do. So the repentance that starts our Christian life characterizes us until we breathe our last.

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We're living a life of repentance. So we're building on that understanding of repentance, that it is a turning from sin, that is something we do every day, and it is the gift of God, and we need

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His enablement to do it. You see, as Christians, we need the enabling of God to give us that gift of turning us from sin.

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We need God to enable us, to strengthen us, to turn from sin. That's why as unbelievers, we still need that enablement of God to do the exact same thing.

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That's why the repentance of an unbeliever is no less of divine gift than the repentance that a believer exercises in turning continually from sin.

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And what does it mean to leave the teaching of the faith toward God? It means that having understood what faith is, and how that saves us, and how that is the consistent message of the

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Old Testament, and New Testament, and how all men are commanded to repent and to believe, now understanding what true and genuine faith is,

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I keep on moving on in my understanding and building upon that. Do you think the author of Hebrews is done talking about faith?

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There's a whole chapter coming up, right? And that whole chapter coming up is not just about how faith saved people, and regenerated them, and brought them into the kingdom of God.

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That whole chapter is about how faith is walked out daily in the lives of God's people over time, until they are sawn into, until they give their lives, until they lay it down for Christ, and are martyred.

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That whole chapter of faith is all about the life of those saints, not just the salvation of those saints, but the life that those saints lived in faith.

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Just as we have believed in Christ, so now we still walk in Him. Each and every day. So we leave it in the sense that we have laid that foundation, and now we build upon it, understanding of what it means to live by faith.

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So that by faith, I embrace the afflictions and the sufferings that God brings my way. By faith in His sovereignty,

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I trust Him and His rod of discipline when He brings it into my life. By faith, I believe that each and every day is laid out for me, that He knows the words that I speak,

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He knows the thoughts and tensions of my heart, and by faith, I continually am repenting and turning back to Him constantly. The same faith and repentance, the two sides of that one coin that marks us at the beginning of our

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Christian life also carries us and characterizes us all the way through until we breathe our last. That's how it needs to move on.

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You don't need to be told again the basic elements of faith and repentance. A mature believer builds upon that and begins to understand how that is exercised and practiced and lived out in the day -to -day life.

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And in terms of the Lord's table, every time we come together and observe communion together, guess what we are doing? We're repenting and believing.

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That's what we do. So we examine our hearts, we examine our hearts for sin in ourselves, and we turn from that, and we ask for God's grace, and we do so believing and trusting that He is righteous and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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We turn from that sin, and we mortify it, and we confess it to the Lord, to ourselves, and see it for what it is.

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We turn from that, and we repent. Having begun on that path, we repent again before we observe communion, and we know that He is righteous, and because He is righteous,

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He will keep His word, and because He keeps His word, He sees me not as Jim Osmond in my own sin.

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He sees me as Jim Osmond in the righteousness of His son. That is an exercise of faith. And in our observance of the

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Lord's Supper, we do this, Paul says, until He comes, because every act of communion is also an exercise of faith that we are doing this until He returns as He promised and takes us to be with Him, where we will live with Him and be with Him forever.

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He is coming again to receive us to Himself, and He has promised that He will not eat and drink until He eats and drinks with us in the kingdom.

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So communion is repentance and faith, believing that because of what

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Christ has done on the cross, I can be righteous, you can be righteous, that all your sins can be forgiven, every last one you have ever committed.

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There is no sin too great, there is no debt too great that is greater than God's grace, and it is an act of unbelief to say,

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I don't believe that I can be forgiven for this. It is an act of unbelief to say, I'm not going to give this to the

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Lord, that you don't do that. We confess that in the death of Christ, the full price for sin has been paid for all who will trust in Him, every last sin, and we get, by faith, all the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ as a gift.

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So if you're in Christ today, you stand in Him righteous, completely righteous, as righteous as the divine

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Son ever was, ever will be. And because you did not do anything to earn that righteousness, you cannot do anything to tarnish that righteousness, to forfeit that righteousness, it belongs to Christ and is given to you as a gift.

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So before we partake of communion, we'll have a time of prayer, ourselves, quietly, and then I will lead us in prayer.

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And I would just caution you, if you are not a believer in Jesus Christ, don't partake of communion. This is not for you.

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You need to repent and believe and embrace that gospel. This is for the people who embraced the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and received