Focal Point

Pastor Mike Fabarez: If we're going to be spiritually strong, there's some basic ingredients that need to be bolstered in our lives. Here's what you need: if you're going to be spiritually strong, you've got to have spiritual food. Good food, solid food. You've got to move from the simple truths of God loves you to the deeper truths of God's Word. You can't do it without it.

Guest (Male): It's likely that many of us could get up and run or walk around the block once or twice if we really had to. But running a marathon and finishing strong, that's a challenge that takes time, discipline, and commitment. When it comes to our fight with sin, it's not a whole lot different.

Today on Focal Point, Pastor Mike Fabarez continues a study in Hebrews and encourages us to become stronger in the battle against temptation. We're looking at Hebrews chapter 12.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Some people have wondered and even asked why, in an age of grace, we would be spending months prolonging this look at battling sin. Why would we deal with this with so much emphasis for so long if God's taken care of the sin problem? He sent His Son, it's paid for, grace, mercy, all of that. Is this all that critical?

The short answer is we're prolonging our look at this for a couple of months because God's Word, as we carefully move through it, has extended sections of God's Word that deal with us battling sin. That's the practical answer. But the more personal answer is that even though we as Christians rely on the grace and the forgiveness of God, the bottom line is that sin can still ruin your life.

We can as Christians say that we are absolutely confident that we are adopted children of God and that we have the forgiveness of God, and because of the cross, all of our past, present, and future sins have all been paid for, and we're not going to encounter any condemnation for those. That may all be true, but in the image of Proverbs 6, you cannot scoop fire into your lap without getting burned. There's no way for us to mess around with sin and not get burned.

Really, I think we need to even rephrase the problem. It's usually not a one-time act that we're concerned with. The real destructive and toxic power of sin takes root in our lives when we fall into recurring patterns of sin. It's one thing to touch a hot stove; it's another thing to lay down on the grill. It's one thing to fall or stumble into a particular sin and then step right out, and it's another thing to find ourselves going back to it again and again.

If the damage and toxicity and destruction of sin come in increasing measure as we get habitually involved in it, some would think you would never commit the same sin twice. You might be fooled once, but not twice because that's not good for you. Of course, that's the real phenomenon of sin. It has, as Jesus said in John 8, this enslaving power. It's got a certain magnetism. You may fall to it once, but the second time seems even easier than the first.

There's certainly something about our fallen humanity and Satan's work to egg us on that seems to pull us into patterns. That's where the real damage often comes in the Christian life. It could be depicted as a sin that so easily entangles us. That's how our passage began in Hebrews chapter 12, about throwing it off. Cast it off. You've got that sin that so easily entangles you, get out of it.

That was the clear directive of the beginning of the series, and we've looked at several reasons why, but we really haven't honed in on the practical ways to do it. Thankfully, after a lot of motivation in the middle part of chapter 12 in trying to remember why we should do it, now here comes in verses 12 and 13 a little bit of the how. It is needed, and it's welcomed at this point.

We may be committed to doing it, but this recurring pattern of sin in my life—and we usually think of that one thing that in this season of your sanctification keeps on creeping up in your Christian life, and it's the thing you've asked God to forgive you for week after week for months—that's the thing that really comes into view here in Hebrews chapter 12. If you haven't opened up your Bibles yet to that passage, please do.

We're trying to look at this chapter for the fifth time to try and understand what it is to break these recurring patterns of sin, to fight this battle against temptation. Take a look at this text: "Therefore," and you might want to look back up at verse 11, the "therefore" comes on the heels of all this motivation that we could one day produce this harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by the discipline of God. After all of that, here's what you need to do.

Here come the imperatives, two of them: one in verse 12 and one in verse 13. He says, "Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees." Strengthen them. Verse 13, he says, "Make level paths for your feet." He says you've got to do that because there are really two options here. We don't want the lame, and in this case, it doesn't mean those that can't walk.

That is a parallelism to verse 12. That is the weak knees, the legs that aren't really walking this path as they ought, let alone running this race with perseverance as we saw in the first part of the chapter. Your legs aren't working right; you're stumbling. You're continuing to stumble. You're not running as you should. He says you don't want that to be disabled. Rather, wouldn't you rather have God heal that? Those are the two options.

Let's look at the imperatives. Verse 12 says we need to strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. That makes sense. The physical analogy runs throughout this chapter. If I'm going to be able to ward off some kind of physical restraint, I need to be physically strong. The same thing's true here. If you're going to, in your spiritual life, say no to sin that keeps enslaving you to draw back to that same failure again and again, you're going to need to be spiritually strong.

Jot this down. Number one: you and I need to get strong. That's just the basic analogy here. Our spiritual life has to be stronger if we're going to conquer this recurring pattern of sin in your life. We just have to be more spiritually strong. If you are the same spiritual strength this year as you were last year, then you're probably dealing with the same sins. If you don't get any stronger by next year, you're probably still going to be dealing with the same kind of sin.

We need to get stronger. It doesn't mean we're not Wesleyans here. We don't believe that you're going to reach this level of perfection. You're going to continue to fight the good fight like Paul did in 2 Timothy, his last book. On his deathbed, he says, "I fought the good fight all the way to the end." We're going to be at some other level of sanctification, but let's get past this level.

Let's deal with this recurring sin. Let's make the current sin that you are entangled in this year a point of history. Let's make that something that is not going to happen next year or the year after. Let's move on to something else. In our Christian life, we need to understand we've got to be stronger. If you don't get stronger, we're going to be stuck.

How do we do that? It doesn't tell us, just gives us the imperative. You need to strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees, which is an allusion to Isaiah chapter 35 verses 3 and 4. It's not only found in Isaiah 35; it's a common biblical analogy. You don't want faltering feet. You don't want to fall down. You don't want to stumble. So you need to be strong. If you're not going to get entangled, you've got to be strong.

The passage doesn't tell us, but the book has talked a lot about it. Take a look, for instance, in Hebrews chapter 5. If we're going to be spiritually strong, there's some basic ingredients that need to be bolstered in our lives. You can't be spiritually strong without these things. He's already talked about these and we've preached on them at length. But take a look at Hebrews chapter 5, verse number 11. Here's one basic component.

He says in this text, starting in verse 11, "We have much to say about this," and that little demonstrative pronoun points back to this discussion about Melchizedek. They all went, "Who? Oh yeah, that's right. He's some character back in the Old Testament." Then somebody else says, "Oh yeah, isn't he referred to in Psalm 110? He's in the Psalms somewhere too. But I don't know, that's hard, that's difficult. We don't quite track with you there, writer of Hebrews."

He says, "Yeah, I know, it's hard to explain to you guys because you're slow to learn." That's not a compliment. You're just not keeping up here. And you're not keeping up, it's not because you haven't had time. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers. If you remember when we taught through this, we made the distinction of two often-used Greek words for this. This is not Kairos; it's not like you've had lots of opportunities.

You've had enough Chronos. You've had enough years or months to be spiritually mature and to know these things, but you don't. By this time you ought to have enough mastery of biblical knowledge, but you don't. You need someone to come in and teach you the elementary truths of God's Word all over again. It's like you need milk and not solid food. Anyone who lives on milk, still being an infant—and the problem with infants is they're really weak.

You don't ask the infant to go out and cut the lawn; they can't do it. They're helpless. They need someone to help them, and that's the problem with just drinking milk. He says you're not acquainted with the teachings about righteousness. But solid food, that's for the mature. Solid food in this context is the deeper understanding of God's Word that you should have, that when you say Melchizedekian priesthood as it relates to Christ meeting our need, standing in the gap, you know all about that.

"I've mastered some of these deeper truths of the scripture." He says that's for the mature. By constant use, they have trained themselves to distinguish between good and evil. There's the real practical point of connection to chapter 12. When it comes to the path of either taking the off-ramp of compromise and sin or staying on the path of righteousness and saying no to temptation, it's those who have had solid food and have constantly ingested that solid food.

They're able to do that. If you're still sucking the bottle, you're not really apt and strong enough to resist the temptation. That's the real issue here. Letter A is simply this: if you're going to get strong, here's what you need: you need more spiritual food. If you're going to be spiritually strong, you've got to have spiritual food. Good food, solid food.

You've got to move from the simple truths of God loves you to the deeper truths of God's Word. At least move into something more than the formula. You've got to move in the direction of something more challenging. You need more spiritual food. You can't do it without it. As a matter of fact, he says in chapter 6, verse 1, "Let's leave the elementary teachings about Christ." Some people love that. They want someone to tell them the stuff they already know because it makes us feel smart.

It's interesting how many people don't want to go to a church or be a part of a Bible study or even have Christian friends that are going to challenge them to go a few levels deeper because we like to be affirmed in what we already know. A lot of people just give me the gospel again. They want every sermon to be all about the gospel because they've got that one mastered. There's not a lot of conviction in that for the Christian.

Those are the kind of churches easy to fit into, and what you don't realize is if all the message about is repentance and faith, which is what verse 1 is all about, all you're doing is sucking on the bottle. You need more than that. Let's move on from verse number 2, the whole issue of initiation into the body of Christ, baptism, and the laying on of hands, and initiation into ministry. Let's leave behind the basics of eschatology: the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.

Those are basics and they're good and we've got to have them, but that's just the milk. We ought to be going a little further than that. If all you're counting on is a meal served up for you at the Sunday restaurant of church, I hope you recognize that ain't going to last all week. That is not someone who is constantly being trained by the ingestion of this book to be able to resist temptation on Thursday night.

It's not going to happen. You've got to get into this book yourself. I know some of you are going, "I heard that a million times." We want the shortcuts, but there aren't any. If you want to be strong and leave behind the sin that so easily entangles you, if you want your reoccurring pattern of sin to change, you need more of this book, and you need a deeper encounter with this book on a more regular basis: constant use.

Which means that in the morning, if you spend time in this book, you're not just going to your favorite verses and reading about the simple truths of God. You're willing to move systematically through it. Just like we do on Sundays, you ought to be doing on your own: moving systematically through the Bible. I suggest you take no more than one or two verses a day. You want a prescription? Here it is. Write this down: TAN.

If you want to know, carve out the time, and here's how you deal with that time. T stands for "then." If you don't open your Bible and get ready as the initial encounter with that one or two verses in the morning, if you're not ready to put on the ancient cloak of a Greco-Roman world in the New Testament or ancient Judaism in the Old Testament and slide into the sandals of the ancient historic context of the text, then you're just drinking milk.

You're probably doing violence to the text as you try to look for words and phrases and themes that apply to your afternoon meeting. You've got to start in a historical setting. That's why you buy those big fat books in the Christian bookstore: to learn something about the historical context of the Bible. Those verses also are made up of words and sentences. You need something of the grammatical setting of that. That's called the "then."

If you don't spend 10 to 15 minutes just dealing with the ancient world in which those verses are set, I guarantee you you are not going to be able to understand what God is saying on any level other than just the surface level of the text. You've got to invest in your library; you have to invest in going a few levels deeper. Not just on a church that tries to make you think for half an hour on a Sunday morning, you've got to do this on your own in the mornings. You've got to do this on your own every night.

There has to be an ingestion of the word that begins with "then." The next step is A: "always." You've got to be able to pull out principles. This is a difficult part, but you've got to train yourself to do it. To be able to look at a text after spending 10 to 15 minutes in one verse on the ancient context, to be able then to extract from that the eternal truths that are true for all time, the universal truths.

They're universal principles of that text. That's something you've got to get in the habit of doing all the time. Don't rely on someone you're hearing on the radio or your pastor on Sunday. You can never be a Berean who gets into the word and ingests that word on a level that's going to strengthen you to be able to face temptation unless you do the "then," the "always." That's going to take brain work for at least five to seven minutes.

Then we can get to the N, which is the "now." Now we can start talking and thinking and processing that passage for the sake of my afternoon client meeting that I have, dealing with the neighbor next door, dealing with my marriage, focusing on the ways that this might change my relationship with my kids, the way it might adjust my values. You're going to spend a good 20 to 25 minutes dealing with issues that are preludes to accurately applying the depth of that passage.

That's work. That's going to cost you. If you spend 15 minutes just dealing with the application of that text, which has to wait until the "then" and "always" steps, that's 35 to 45 minutes a day just to do that in one verse of the scriptures. We've got some work to do. That's what it means to go a little deeper than just sorting through the Bible, reading a proverb, looking at a psalm, or cruising through the Bible in a year. Reminded of a few things about God.

If you want to change that pattern of recurring sin, it's going to take a new relationship to God's word. The problem for Christians is not the knowing usually, it's the doing. We've just got to put this into action. We've got to become students of God's Word. It's there, you're literate, we've got printed Bibles, we've got electronic Bibles, we can do this work. God has given us the tools.

You need more spiritual food if you're going to be spiritually strong. Here in Hebrews chapter 5 and 6, look across the page at the beginning of chapter 5. There's another element we learned about spiritual strength in the book of Hebrews, and it came from the pattern of Jesus's life. Look at verse 7 in Hebrews chapter 5. It says during the days of Jesus's life on earth, he offered up—what's the word? Prayers.

Prayers and petitions. What kind of prayers? With loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. We've already seen in this series that if we're going to conquer sin, it's going to take this second basic biblical ingredient, and that is that our prayer life has to be happening. Number two on your outline: you not only need more spiritual food and better quality of spiritual food; secondly, you need more times of focused prayer.

You need more focused prayer. I know we all pray. I know you say a few words before a meal, and I know you probably pray with your kids before you put them to bed, and maybe pray with your wife in the morning. That's great. But a lot of that is just real simple, surface checking in with God kind of talk. We need this kind of stuff. Take a look at it.

Jesus himself was dependent on this to face his trials. What kind of prayers? Look at it again: petitions, loud cries, and tears. That's a different kind of praying than most of us are used to. You want to conquer this recurring pattern of sin in your life? It's going to take a deeper relationship with God's word, and it's going to take more fervent and focused prayer.

Remember that very classic passage on fighting temptation in Ephesians chapter 6: the armor of God. One of the elements—and it's unfortunate and it's just counterintuitive in the text too because we think the important things are all analogized by a part of the armor that we're supposed to put on to fight the attacks of the evil one, to stand firm on that evil day. They are all important: all the breastplate, the helmet, the shoes.

The one that he doesn't analogize is really one of the most important ones and it comes at the end. I know Paul thinks it's important because he repeats it five times after the analogy of the armor is complete. The very last thing he says after all the discussion of the armor: you need to pray. You need to pray, you need to pray, it needs to be about prayer, it needs to be fervent prayer in the spirit. He makes it clear.

If you're going to put on the armor of God, don't forget the thing that Paul resonates with at the end of the discussion. And that is: how's your prayer life? Maybe the reason you're falling to the same sin over and over and over again is because there's not a lot of this kind of praying going on in Hebrews chapter 5 verse 7. Think about that. Spiritual strength comes from the two basic ingredients of the Christian life.

It comes through better relationship and a deeper relationship with God's Word, and it comes through more fervent and focused prayer life. That's what Jesus said in the height of his temptation, saying to his disciples in Matthew 26, "You want to avoid temptation? Watch and pray." That's what you've got to do so that you will not fall into temptation. You want to get spiritually strong, you need more spiritual food, you need better food, you need more focused prayer.

Thirdly, look at Hebrews chapter 10. Want to talk about spiritual strength? If we're going to make our arms that are feeble strong and our knees that are weak, if we're going to make those sturdy and stout, then here's what you need: you need a third ingredient at least. Look at verse 23. "Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess." That's a great statement about being strong, standing up, not compromising, holding on to this Christian commitment that we have for he who has promised is faithful.

You want to do that, here's a good way to do it: a little conjunction to tie these things together. "Let us consider how we may spur one another on to love and good deeds." You need to do this as a team effort. "And let us not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another and all the more as you see the Day approaching."

Let's just put it down this way, Letter C: you and I, we need more time with strong friends. If we're going to be strong, we need some strong friends around us. We've got to have those friends around us in increasing measure, all the more as we see the Day approaching. The Bible predicts the closer we get to that Day, the worse off the world will be, translation: the more temptation you're going to encounter.

So what do we need? We need more strong Christian friends around us in increasing measure as the world gets to be a more tempting place. That's an ingredient that I cannot ignore. I've got to have that as a part of my life.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez and the start of a message called Breaking Recurring Patterns. You can revisit these messages anytime at focalpointradio.org or take them with you wherever you go, whatever your schedule looks like, through the free Focal Point app. Somewhere along the way, a lot of Christians quietly gave up on the idea that they're supposed to look different from the culture around them.

Pastor Mike wants to push back on that with a book he's chosen for this month: *Making a Difference: Impacting Culture and Society as a Christian* by R.C. Sproul. Sproul isn't interested in culture war tactics or nostalgia for a Christian past. His point is simpler: a follower of Christ carries influence into every room they enter, and Sproul walks through what it looks like to carry it well. Pick this book up and ordinary decisions—where you work, how you vote, what you tolerate—start looking like part of your calling, not separate from it.

We'd love to put this book in your hands when you give a donation to Focal Point today. Call our team by dialing 888-320-5885 or give online at focalpointradio.org, or mail your gift to Focal Point, Post Office Box 2850, Laguna Hills, California 92654. Nobody stumbles onto Focal Point by accident. Somebody, somewhere decided this ministry was worth keeping on the air long before you ever tuned in.

That's exactly why we're asking you to become a Focal Point partner with a monthly gift. It's support that does more than cover today's costs. It reaches the listener who hasn't found this teaching yet, the one still searching for solid biblical teaching. Sign up today at focalpointradio.org or call 888-320-5885. And if today was your first time tuning in, we'd love to welcome you with something free: a brand new booklet called *Battling Sin* by Pastor Mike Fabarez.

It's yours just for reaching out at focalpointradio.org. I'm Dave Drewey. Come back tomorrow for the second part of our lesson on breaking recurring patterns here with Pastor Mike Fabarez Tuesday on Focal Point.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hey there, Pastor Mike here. We're almost out of time, but before we go, I wanted to personally invite you to contact us here. Let us know how we can be praying for you. Head on over to focalpointradio.org and click the contact page, or send me a note on Facebook (facebook.com/pastormike) or X (x.com/pastormike). Can't wait to hear from you.

Guest (Male): Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.