Read the passage: Hebrews 3:7-15
This week’s passage zones in and repeats, over and over again, this idea about a hardened heart. A broken sensor for our spiritual lives.
Now, because this is our key idea today, let’s try to be clear about it. What is a hardened heart?
In this passage, we see the Israelites being used as an example where they saw the power and presence and words of God for 40 years, and they still rejected him. They rebelled against him. That is a hardened heart. To be face to face with the obvious existence, power, goodness and instructions of God, and to be unreasonably stubborn against it. To reject. To not follow it. You are unaffected and unmoved by God.
But there’s something deeper going on with a hardened heart than just being stubborn.
We see it in the parallelism in our passage.
- That none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
- None of you has a sinful (evil), unbelieve heart that turns away from the living God.
See, a hardened heart is a whole being posture that is turned away from God because it is turned towards something else; and is therefore unaffected by what he has to say or offer. That is rejection. That is rebellion. That is a broken spiritual sensor.
I believe that for Christians in our day and time, the hardening of the heart is one of the most common and dangerous pitfalls for us. Because we’re not so much angrily maliciously warring against God, we just start looking at other shiny things, and slowly de-prioritize God and forget about him.
But in our passage; a hardened rebellious heart is the very thing that keeps the Israelites from God’s promises of rest. Hardened hearts have the ability to keep us from the promises that God has in store for us.
That is terrifying. Because that’s where life is. That’s where joy is. That’s where purpose and meaning and satisfaction awaits us.
This is why our passage pleads with us, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
But how?
That’s our focus today. What keeps our hearts from hardening?
Our answer we find in our passage is a focus on:
- Truth, not deceit.
- We; not just me.
- Now; not later.
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