A Hardened Heart Results from a Lack of Church Community

April 23, 2015 | by: Dale Thiele | 0 Comments

Posted in: Pastoral Encouragement | Tags: Community, perseverance, Hebrews, hardening of the heart, deception

Perseverance is a Community Project: Part 2
Last week I began writing this three part series reflecting on the nature of God’s grace in perseverance and the church community’s responsibility for her members’ perseverance. Our Confession of Faith states that “perseverance of the saints depends not upon their free will, but upon” God himself (WCF 17.2). Yet, God’s sovereign grace in our perseverance does not abdicate our responsibility to persevere and help one another persevere. The following paragraph in the WCF states that “through…the neglect of the means of their preservation, [the saints] may fall into grievous sins.”

Other than a regular diet of the Word and Sacrament, what are the “means of their preservation”?
The Confession and its accompanying Catechisms do not specify. In this brief treatise I am making the case that the church community (more specifically, the membership of the local church) is one of the necessary means that God uses to preserve the saints, thereby giving the local church the responsibility to strive for the perseverance of her saints.

We are focusing our study on the teaching of Hebrews 3:12-14:
Take care, brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. (ESV)

There are three principles from this passage that support the idea that the church community is a necessary means of the perseverance of the saints. Last week we reflected on the fact that God’s grace of perseverance is the ground for church community. Because God is faithful to preserve his saints, the saints are charged to look out for one another. God does his preserving work through the means of the church community. What else do we learn from this passage?

2. The hardening of the heart is the potential consequence for the lack of church community.
If the grace of God is a positive motivator for doing church community, the hardened heart is a negative motivator. In verse 13 the writer of Hebrews states that the purpose of church community life (take care and exhort one another) is “that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” These community activities must be happening in order to fight against the hardening caused by sin. The WCF states that through “the neglect of the means of their preservation… they have their hearts hardened” (17.3).

Sin, by its very nature, is rooted in deception (cf. Gen. 3:1-5; Rom. 7:11; Eph. 4:17-22). By capturing the mind with distorted truth, sin and temptation redirect the desires of the heart to lesser satisfactions (idols, if you will). A heart that repeatedly chases the desires of a lie becomes hardened to the truth. This hardened heart and mind are so submerged in the lie, it cannot see the devastation of the sin.

The writer of Hebrews puts the responsibility to fight this deception onto the church community, not the individual (the individual is not without responsibility, however, as we will come to see). The nature of the deception requires an “outside” voice speaking into the situation to uncover the lie; it cannot be self-diagnosed. The commands for church community life are given in order to avoid this disastrous result.

Now, the individual’s responsibility is evident: Christians need to be members of a local, gospel-proclaiming church and allow themselves to be known. As much as the church community needs to be “watching out” for her members (more on this next week), the individual Christians need to let themselves be watched. We need to acknowledge this is very counter-cultural. As much as we post everything on Facebook or Twitter, there is a guarded privacy of the inner heart. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every member needs to bear their heart to everyone. We need an environment in our church where people are not tempted to hide the truth of their lives. Faithful and regular gospel proclamation can create that environment (more on this next week as well).

Are you known in your church?

More next week.

 

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