Hope Blog

▶ 1:09:58

Memorial Day weekend, a thinner room than usual, and the children still in the
service. Matt explained that rhythm before he explained anything else. On a low-attendance Sunday
it is harder to staff childcare — but there is a better reason than logistics. “We want to disciple
our kids in the way of worship.” They do not have an ornamental function. They are not there to be
looked at; they are there, small as they are, to present themselves to the Lord.

1. Where the letter has been going

▶ 1:11:31

Hope has been working through Hebrews, and Matt wanted the shape of the letter in the room
before he read a word of the eleventh chapter. Hebrews has been saying one thing in a dozen ways:
there is only one gospel, it is rock solid and true because Christ is rock solid and true, and
therefore do not depart from it. The encouragements and the warnings both push the same direction.
Keep going. Keep trusting him. He is trustworthy.

2. A witness is someone who testifies

▶ 1:13:26

Most of us picture the cloud of witnesses as a stadium — a growing crowd of the dead watching
from beyond the grave, and the encouragement is that they are looking. Matt let that reading stand
as possible and then argued it is not the point. The word can mean someone looking, but it also
means someone giving evidence. It is the word our English martyr comes from. “A martyr is
someone who has been killed because of their testimony, not because they looked at the wrong person
and died.”

So picture a courtroom instead. These are expert witnesses, called one at a time, and their
testimony all lines up: he is worth steadfast trust, and every difficulty was worth it because he
is worth it. Which is what the room had already been doing all morning. Mark Thomas had stood at the
microphone and told the church about forty years of rebellion and a God who kept reaching down and
pulling him back out. That is a witness in the Hebrews sense.

3. Not a book of hero stories

▶ 1:15:01

Matt owned this failure as a preacher’s failure first. Working through the Old Testament, it is
easy to slip into treating it as a series of hero stories — find the one good thing this strange
man did, and tell people to be like him. But the Book of Judges, which Hope worked through a few
years back, is a decline narrative: it starts high and ends low, a form of tragedy. The judges get
progressively more self-absorbed, faithless and idolatrous, each one reflecting Israel’s spiritual
condition, and the final chapters are genuinely shocking. That is not a set of examples to copy.

Who, then, is the protagonist of the Bible? Israel’s God. He is the one we root for — which also
means we are not rooting for one nation over another as though God were partisan. He wanted his
name and his greatness known by every people on earth. And there is a reason the stories that move
us most are about a lone warrior who faces death and gets the bride: “reality itself can’t help but
echo the story of Christ and his bride.”

4. Assurance and conviction

▶ 1:18:24

This is what the author is trying to produce in his readers, and it is why the chapter still
lands. Walking with Christ does not reliably make your life more luxurious, and there will be
seasons when following him is precisely what costs you. Matt put the honest question plainly: why
keep going, when I cannot see his return, cannot see his kingdom, and holding on has brought
trouble? Because faith is assurance about what is still hoped for and conviction about what cannot
yet be seen.

He paused on the commendation the ancients received, and on reward. Wanting a reward is not
greed — Jesus spoke about it as a no-brainer, that
your
reward in heaven is great. The question is which reward and whose hand it comes from. And the
theme is already built into creation itself:
what
is seen was not made out of things that are visible. Trusting what we cannot see is not an odd
demand made of believers; it is how everything already works.

5. The witnesses are called

▶ 1:20:48

Abel
gets a few lines and dies young, and what still speaks is his faith — it is his faith that takes the
stand. With
Enoch
the argument runs backwards: we know he pleased God, and without faith it is impossible to please
him, so we know he had faith. Then Noah, who is the theme in one man:

It was not raining. Imagine the size of that undertaking with no visible reason for it beyond
what God had said.
Abraham
went out not knowing where he was going, and Matt noted that obedience in the dark is one of God’s
favorite love languages. Abraham did see favor — cattle, a son — but the thing he was actually
looking at was a city with foundations whose designer and builder is God.
Sarah
“considered him faithful who had promised,” which is testimony, not spectating: I trusted God with
something impossible, and I had no natural reason to.

6. They were all after the same country

▶ 1:26:24

Some of them got a foretaste. None of them got the thing itself, because the most precious
inheritance available is God himself. Matt named the practical use of that: when faith does not
build the checking account, or hand you friends, or make you healthier and younger — the sort of
thing the world advertises, and the sort of thing a version of the gospel will sometimes advertise
too — this is what you are actually longing for. And the world around you will rarely say amen to
that.

7. Abraham, Isaac, and who is playing the father

▶ 1:28:13

Hebrews
11:17–19 says Abraham considered that God was able even to raise Isaac from the dead — and the
wording on the mountain hints at exactly that confidence:
“the
boy and I will go over there and worship and come again to you.”

Matt drew out something easy to miss. Isaac’s own story is oddly unmemorable because he repeats
his father — the same episode with Abimelech and his wife, the same wells redug and given the same
names. There is a foreshadowing in that: a promised, miraculous son who does only what he sees his
father doing. Which puts Abraham, in this scene, in the role of the Father. That is a brutal part to
be handed. God stopped him and provided a substitute, because he would not ask that of us — and
then did it himself.

The line continues:
Isaac,
Jacob and Joseph, each blessing what they would not live to see. Joseph gave instructions about
his bones because he was confident of a deliverance a very long time after his death.

8. Moses, and the ones who never got a receipt

▶ 1:31:39

Moses
refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and counted the reproach of Christ greater wealth
than the treasures of Egypt. Matt headed off the objection that this is anachronistic — Christ is
the God of the Old Testament made flesh, so aligning with God’s purposes at cost is bearing his
reproach. Then the phrase that holds the whole chapter together: “he endured as seeing him who is
invisible.” Passover, the Red Sea,
Jericho
and Rahab follow in a rush.

9. And then Samson

▶ 1:34:07

Matt enjoyed the author’s trick in
Hebrews
11:32 — time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah — and then he names them
anyway. But he wanted Samson pressed on, because Samson is where the hero reading collapses. Samson
delivered Israel largely out of self-interest, over a girl or because he was angry, and he seems to
have simply assumed the strength would be there. “That’s like a version of faith. This is really
bizarre and twisted version of faith — but he just took God for granted.” Held up as an example of
character? No. Held up as evidence that God is who he says he is, even when the person banking on it
is, in Matt’s word, scummy? Yes. “We’re kind of weird and deviant and creepy and idolatrous kinds of
people, but he is solid.”

10. The witnesses who did not escape the sword

▶ 1:35:50

The chapter turns hard, and Matt refused to soften it. Some conquered kingdoms and escaped the
edge of the sword. Some did not.

Where we see rescue, we see God’s favor. Where we do not, we see their testimony holding to the
end — which is the same testimony. And then the strangest line in the chapter:

11. Therefore, run

▶ 1:37:13

The verdict has been returned across ages, languages and cultures, over and over: God is
trustworthy, he keeps his word, and you can cling to what he has promised because he is true. Jesus
is the trustworthy part of the whole plan — not the founder only, but the perfecter.

▶ 1:40:30

And the cloud is not closed. It is joined by the witness in your small group, in your family, in
the row behind you — the people who will say, yes, God does seem to be the faithful one in this
relationship. We are not being recruited into a story where we are the main characters. We stray, we
stumble, we do what we know we should not; Matt was not excusing it, just naming it. The point is
that he is the steady one, the unshakable one, and as Christ is formed in us we see it more clearly.
“Keep going even through the pain, because he is worth it. Everything he said is true. You can bet
your life on it — although I hope you don’t get sawn in half.”

▶ 1:18:27

Hope paused its survey through Hebrews for a Sunday, because the Western church was
keeping Pentecost. Matt gave the quick orientation — the Jews called it the Feast of Harvest, or
Weeks; fifty days after Passover, which is where the Greek name comes from — and then admitted the
difficulty of the subject. “When you talk about the Spirit of God, words fail.” He said he would
stumble through it and do his best.

The Spirit is a him, not an it

▶ 1:19:36

Everything downstream depended on this. The Spirit is not a tool or an object for us to grasp or
manipulate or earn with our piety. “You can no more earn the presence of the Spirit of God in your
life than you could earn forgiveness for your sins through righteous deeds.” You cannot pray loudly
enough to obtain a spirit of adoption. It is a work of Christ — and Matt said that if the room zoned
out at any point, that sentence was the one to keep.

He also named who is at fault when people believe otherwise, and it was not the people in the
pews. It is preachers like himself who get lazy with their words.

Ezekiel 36, and who the active agent is

▶ 1:21:02

An odd place to start a Pentecost sermon, but it does something the Acts narrative assumes.
Ezekiel was a priest of Judah whose life’s work was predicting the captivity in Babylon and the
return that followed it. God’s opening line to him lands as an insult until you sit with it:

Matt read it as comfort. This is not a neutral people who merely failed to earn something — they
had actively profaned God’s name among the nations, and he moves anyway, on his own initiative, for
his own sake.

▶ 1:22:35

“Do you see, just even by the grammar alone, who’s the active agent?” Matt asked. I will take
you. I will sprinkle. I will cleanse. I will give. I will remove. I will put my Spirit. Judah had
not sufficiently repented; their track record deserved nothing. God goes on to promise grain and the
end of famine — and as far outside their control as the harvest was, that is how far outside their
control this was too.

How does it work? Lucky socks and rabbits’ feet

▶ 1:25:09

Naturally we want the mechanism. Matt compared it to athletes and their superstitions — the
lucky socks, the rabbit’s foot, the unusual breakfast on the day you scored the most points. Maybe
it’s the chicken. We laugh at that, and then do exactly the same thing as Christians: how do I get
the Spirit, how do I make that happen.

The Bible’s answer points at a person, not a procedure. John the Baptist, the most popular
preacher of the day, drew the line himself:

That is not church filler to pad out Matthew’s book, and it is not an honorific. If you wanted
baptism for repentance, you went to John. Jesus is the baptizer in the Holy Spirit. So where do you
go now?

Acts 2 — and Peter’s explanation of it

▶ 1:27:01

The sound like a mighty rushing wind, the divided tongues as of fire, the disciples speaking in
other languages as the Spirit gave them utterance
(Acts 2:1–4).
Parthians, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Judeans, Greeks, Arabs — all hearing the mighty works
of God in their own tongues. Some in the crowd concluded they were drunk. Peter stood up with the
eleven and made the case that this was
what Joel had said:
God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, male and female
servants alike. Note the agent again. God pours out his own Spirit.

▶ 1:32:50

Then the sermon turns, and it turns toward Jesus — attested by God with mighty works, delivered
up by God’s definite plan, crucified by lawless hands, and raised because death could not hold him
(Acts 2:22–24).
Peter quotes David — “you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption” —
and then points out the obvious: David died, was buried, and his tomb is still down the road
(Acts 2:25–31).
So David was speaking as a prophet about a descendant he would also call Lord.

Which is not a bunny trail. It is the argument:

Peter quotes David once more —
“The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand”
— the Father glorifying the Son, conquering the Son’s enemies, entrusting the Spirit to him for his
own name’s sake. It closes where Ezekiel opened: not for your sake, but for mine.

A purpose, not a paradigm

▶ 1:40:03

Here is the version Matt was preaching against, and he did the voice: the Spirit was kept in
abeyance until enough of the right people in the right place prayed long enough and hard enough and
got their breakthrough. Were they fasting real good? Was there an invisible threshold?

No. The Spirit fell when he did because Christ was raised, ascended and exalted. The chronology
and the purpose were both things Jesus was doing. And when the crowd was cut to the heart and asked
what to do, Peter did not send them back to start — no wandering, no being sent out, no years of
cryptic sayings before the Spirit arrives:

Far off covers us — generations later, half a world away. This was not a special occasion where
everything was at discount price because Peter happened to be standing there.

▶ 1:42:15

Matt flagged the pastoral cost of getting this wrong. Men in his position tell their testimonies
and, carelessly, convey that they were Christians who believed in Jesus but did not have the Spirit
until they went out to the wilderness and camped and prayed and fasted by a river. What they mean is
that they had a powerful encounter with the Lord. What the listener hears is “that’s when I got the
Spirit.” The cautionary tale is
Simon the magician,
who tried to buy the Spirit with money. “Now, is it any better when we say in exchange for shouting
Hillsong tunes in my closet? It’s not any better.”

▶ 1:44:30

Paul lands in the same place, and with visible heat —
“Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?”
Peter denies the template by widening the promise; Paul denies it by asking one question. Same idea,
different language: you have the Spirit because you believed the gospel.

And Jesus, on the last day of the feast, said it before either of them —
rivers of living water for whoever believes,
with John’s own footnote that the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus was not yet
glorified. Matt let the room finish the syllogism: has there been a single day since Pentecost
when Jesus was not glorified?

Don’t confuse the gifts with the Giver

▶ 1:47:45

Matt named this as the root error. The gifts are like power tools — things we employ in faith.
The one who gives them is a person, and he does not arrive in percentages. There is no starter pack
where the basic Christian plan gets you his pinky and singing the whole worship set gets you an
upgrade. “Jesus Christ is your forty-day fast. He is your perfectly lived life. He is your
absolutely flawless death and resurrection.” Treating the Spirit as manipulable material — Play-Doh,
Star Wars, Dragon Ball Z — is not a quirk to laugh off. It is a matter for repentance.

▶ 1:50:33

Then, having spent the message arguing against a charismatic misstatement, he handed the
charismatics and Pentecostals their due. They are absolutely right that most Christians leave far
too much on the table — saved, resigned to a moral life, and that is it. The correction is only in
how we say it. If what you want is a power gift, ask for it;
the Spirit distributes gifts according to his own will,
and Paul still tells us to
desire the greater gifts.
Feeling powerless is not evidence that the Spirit is absent.

Be honest instead: you heard a missionary’s testimony about shouting at the moon, you want that
too, and you do not feel what he described. Say so. “There’s no harm in asking. He’s super generous.
He did all of this for free to us because of his own desire.” The idea that you might finally
inconvenience God with one more request does not survive contact with the sermon’s own logic — the
whole endeavor, start to finish, had surprisingly little to do with how much we have earned.

▶ 1:52:22

He ended by praying it rather than concluding it — asking not for the Spirit to come, since he
is already in the room, but for confidence in his nearness, for gifts distributed generously among
the body, and for eyes to see what is already there. He asked for all of it, in keeping with
everything he had just preached, for God’s own reputation’s sake.

▶ 1:08:28

Hope Chapel is working through Hebrews, and Matt said plainly why he preaches through books: it forces him not to avoid the hard passages, which is easy to do when everything is a one-off. Last week’s text carried a gentle rebuke about why we gather — not as legalistic routine, and not as the place we come to be filled up, but to pour ourselves out for one another. This week the rebuke is not gentle.

The verse everybody remembers

▶ 1:10:23

It could sound, Matt admitted, like the author is saying: it is wonderful that you are a Christian, but from your conversion forward, if you ever sin on purpose, God will hurl you away from his grace with disdain. That is how it feels on a first reading.

“What I’m going to try to show is that what the author of Hebrews is warning us against is not God’s careless and callous disdain, but our own. And when we engage in a careless, callous disdain of the only lifeboat there is, all that remains is death.”

1. Start with what the rest of scripture assumes

▶ 1:11:53

James writes to the sick among the brethren and says that if the one prayed for has committed sins, he will be forgiven — and then, therefore, confess your sins to one another (James 5:14–16). What is the point of confessing sins you cannot commit without being finished? Paul writes the same assumption into church life:

That gentleness reflects God’s heart rather than contrasting with it — “just in case we ever think we’re better than the Lord.” Jesus assumed the same, giving instructions for confronting a brother who sins (Matthew 18:15–17), and answering Peter’s question about seven times with seventy-seven — a number meant to break the accounting rather than replace it (Matthew 18:21–22). In Corinth, the man disciplined in the first letter is restored in the second:

2. Measure it by the gospel

▶ 1:16:24

Matt borrowed the rubric from the church’s earlier work in 1 Corinthians on discerning prophecy. You weigh the words and you weigh the life, but the real test is: what gospel is this built on? An angel could show up curing headaches and making rain, and Paul’s standard still holds — even if he himself came back preaching another gospel, do not believe him (Galatians 1:8–9). Run Hebrews 10 through that filter and the rejection in view is not God turning on people who fail. It is people whose desire to fail is so tenacious that they will spit at the cross and walk away from it even when walking away is hard.

3. Every warning in the letter says the same thing

▶ 1:18:07

The first warning is about drift: pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it — how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation (Hebrews 2:1–4). Nothing there converts grace back into performance. There is one gospel, it is reliable because the Lord it rests on is reliable, and the instruction is not to leave it.

▶ 1:19:25

The second is about hardness, drawing on Israel in the wilderness: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion” (Hebrews 3:7–11). Matt drew out the contrast the text itself makes. God is not the fickle party. “He’s not hot and cold on you. He’s so all in that Jesus already incarnated, became one of us, truly and profoundly, and died and rose again, and that will never be undone.” God wanted them in his rest; their hearts went astray.

Hold fast to your original confidence; do not fall away from the living God. Both halves are about the direction a person faces, not a tally of failures — which matters, because nearly everyone who names the name of Jesus has at some point lashed out from fear or hurt and known perfectly well it was a choice. You did not trip and fall into it. Matt has met two men who claimed they no longer sin, and noted he would have liked to ask their wives.

4. Hebrews 6 and the verb that changes the passage

▶ 1:23:26

This is a person who knows everything there is to know — tasted it, seen the exhibits, read the book, went to the prayer meeting, had the tinglies — and then walks away because he does not want it. The Greek verb here is active, not middle-passive. Some English translations render it “they cannot be brought to repentance,” which makes the person sound like a hopeless case. The active voice puts the impossibility somewhere else: there is nothing left for you to say to him.

“Oh, well, you don’t want the regular gospel? Well, there’s this appendix and there’s this secret book and there’s extra special stuff that Jesus keeps just for such an occasion.” There is no break-glass edition. You can pray for him and you can remind him, but you cannot repent for him.

And Jesus will not be crucified twice — he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he is not coming back to die because someone leaves. To crucify him again is to take your place alongside the crowd that did it, hurling insults.

5. Then what does “go on sinning deliberately” mean?

▶ 1:26:32

Given all of it — the passages on restoring the fallen, the gospel as filter, and three prior warnings saying drift, hardening and falling away — this phrase is the dynamic equivalent of walking away. It is not the sincere believer clinging to the cross and still failing through addiction, brokenness and immaturity. It is the person rejecting the sacrifice itself.

▶ 1:29:27

Can biblical language really be that absolute about someone who leaves entirely? John writes exactly that way:

That letter is famously simplified — light and dark, no gray, as if speaking to children. Two camps, and John names both captains: the one in whom there is no sin, who appeared to take sin away, and the chief sinner. By this it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. John is not unaware that Jesus told us to confront a sinning brother. He is painting impressionistically: there is a way of destruction and a narrow way toward Christ.

6. Two soldiers

▶ 1:32:02

Matt pressed John’s picture into an image worth keeping. Stand in the war camp of the Lord Most High, wearing his colors and his banner. You may stumble. You may fall. You may lash out, and be bitter enough that you keep lashing out for months. Your brothers in arms will tell you to cut it out. That is not what Hebrews is warning about.

“What Hebrews is warning you about is the kind of person who on purpose says, I don’t want to wear this color. I’m going to take this off. I’m going to wander away from this camp. I see the light over there, I see the dark over here — I want to go here. I took off the banner of the Lord Most High and I put on this one on purpose. I know what I’m doing. I’m doing it anyway.”

God has left us more ways back than we can count: brothers and sisters who rebuke gently and then less gently, the church itself, the conviction of the Holy Spirit, prophetic words that put a person on his face. “His goodness and his mercy are like attack dogs that will hound you.” He speaks in dreams. He burns the conscience.

7. If you are afraid, that is the answer

▶ 1:34:50

Matt reported the conversation he has had more than once. Someone says: I’m scared the Lord won’t take me back. So you want him? Yes. You want relationship with him? Absolutely. You would like to repent? Yes, I’m just worried it is too late. “This is easy. He wants it more than you do.” A heart that soft is one God is already speaking to. The other conversation sounds entirely different: yes, I know all about the gospel, and I hate it. Those are not the same person.

The Hebrews audience had already proved which camp they were in — publicly reproached, standing with prisoners, joyfully accepting the plundering of their property because they knew they had a better and abiding possession (Hebrews 10:32–34). They stayed, out of loyalty, which is the core issue.

Do not throw it away

▶ 1:37:40

Matt’s conclusion was pastoral. God’s mercy is immense, even scandalous — and if you are worried you are one of his enemies, the response is to repent and draw near to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16). The whole operation was never built on the confidence that sheep would sort themselves out and pick the right direction. That is why there is a shepherd, and why he carries a rod and a staff (Psalm 23:4). The goat is the one who hates the staff and will do anything to avoid it — and there is nothing a fellow sheep can offer him that he has not already refused.

You will need endurance; Matt called that an understatement. But every ounce of the pain and embarrassment and shame, carried while clinging to Christ, turns out in hindsight to be treasure — part of a crown you get to throw at his feet. “We may even wish we could have done more, but it’s worth it.”

▶ 1:09:22

Matt opened by conceding that this was, in his own estimation, “an okay sermon,” and that he should probably at least start it. What followed was a careful dismantling of the way most of us argue about church — and a passage that answers a question we mostly skip.

First, an unusual invitation

▶ 1:09:40

A rabbi from an Austin synagogue reached out to Matt because his congregation feels alone and vulnerable as tensions over Israel and Palestine spill into American life. The two have already met. The plan is deliberately vague — some evening where anyone can come ask a rabbi anything, then the same in reverse, maybe bowling after that — because, as Matt put it, “the goal is relationship, which is why I can’t tell you what it’ll look like long term.” The synagogue chose Hope because of its reputation for being willing to do wild stuff.

The story every church tells about itself

▶ 1:12:42

Matt used the word propaganda, and not entirely negatively. Every tradition claims the early church was a single unchanging thing, that its liturgy is discernible from this distance, and that — conveniently — ours is basically it. He aimed the critique at his own Protestant side, and the reason he knows nobody is doing what they did is that the first two claims are wrong on their face.

▶ 1:14:22

Jesus’ earliest followers came from everywhere — Medes, Parthians, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Africans — and when three thousand were added in a day, they took the gospel home with them. Study what happened next and you find what Matt called liturgical chaos, with consistency about the things that mattered. Some celebrated the Lord’s Supper with a little bread and wine, some with an enormous meal. Baptism came fast or slow, by immersion or by pouring. Prayers were led by different people for different lengths in different ways. But they broke bread, they baptized, they prayed, and they did it in his name — because “do this in remembrance of me” never specified the menu.

We did not invent immaturity

▶ 1:16:30

American Christians are fond of diagnosing the American way of doing church. Matt’s correction: anything touching the human heart — temptation, vanity, fallenness — turns up wherever you find people. “We may have invented fog machines,” he offered, before two people texted him mid-sermon that the fog machine is German. He took it hard, then recovered when someone texted that the disco ball is ours. The serious point stands: you can have a passive congregation and a performing minister with no technology whatsoever. Passive congregations are at least as old as Hebrews, and preachers with mixed motives are as old as Philippians.

The passage, read for its purpose statements

▶ 1:19:33

This is where people plant the flag: see, it says go to church. Yes and no. The yes is real — there is a strong call not to neglect fellowship. The no is the phrase itself, which is ambiguous enough that for many it means a box checked passively. Read for goals instead and the passage gives you several: confidence in the blood of Jesus, drawing near in full assurance, holding the confession without wavering, stirring one another toward love and good works, meeting for the strengthening of the body.

What the rest of the New Testament says we do when we gather

▶ 1:23:11

Matt walked a list, and Hope’s long-standing rally cry came first — the apostles’ teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers — noting again that it says nothing about how long, how often, or who leads.

▶ 1:25:26

Then the chapter that is explicitly about a church meeting, where the purpose statements come three to a verse:

Notice the direction of travel. Paul assumes people arrive carrying something — “each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation” — and rules the whole thing with one sentence: let all things be done for building up. Even the outsider walking in and being convicted counts as fruit you would hope for from a gathering of saints. And prophecy goes one at a time, with the others weighing what is said, “so that all may learn and all be encouraged.”

The negative examples are just as instructive. Corinth turned the Lord’s Supper into everybody’s own dinner:

And earlier, the reason they could not handle solid food was jealousy and strife — infant dependence dressed up as spirituality. Peter closes the loop:

A free liturgy is only free if you use it

▶ 1:31:49

Hope’s Sundays do not have to run song set, announcements, sermon. They can be punctuated by testimony, by a word, by whatever the room brings. Matt’s warning was pointed: what is the use of a free liturgy if you never engage the things scripture actually outlines? “Then you have actually just developed a new liturgy that you’re then uptight about, but you say it’s free.”

▶ 1:32:21

He punctured one more piece of nostalgia on the way past. The early church did not always meet in cozy living rooms — that math does not work with thousands of believers per city. Sometimes it was a house that seats fifteen; sometimes a wealthy acquaintance’s courtyard that could hold all of Hope Chapel and then some. Sometimes a forest, a riverbank, a cave, a rented ground-floor space in a Roman apartment block, a synagogue. The venue moved. The purpose did not.

Three ways of skipping, ranked

▶ 1:33:14

Matt started with the least irrational: I will do an outreach during that time instead. Hold it against the list. Does an outreach encourage the saints, build up the church, deliver a lesson or a hymn to the body? Possibly, depending how you do it. Most likely not. So do it — and gather too.

▶ 1:34:25

Spicier: I will stay home and have a quiet time, because that is what fills me up. Every reason given for gathering concerns someone else being served. The only place scripture sets a precedent for focusing chiefly on your own filling is inside a correction.

▶ 1:36:13

Spiciest: the live stream is the same, because I sing along, get fed and stay caught up. Same test, same result. Underneath all three, Matt said, is not a bad argument but a missing motivation — and he was candid that this is his opinion, not a ruling. “I think we as people are the least likely to be motivated to fellowship with the saints when our attitude is, how can I be served by them.” Going to church passively is authentically boring, and he said so as the preacher. “It is more blessed to give than to receive” turns out to describe how commitment actually works.

▶ 1:36:56

Giving sacrificially also quietly kills judgmentalism, the way a potluck does. “It’s weird to go to a potluck and just be like, ah, that’s overcooked, that’s underdone. You’re like — well, what’d you bring?”

The exceptions, and the giveaway

▶ 1:37:30

Some people arrive chewed up and spit out by the world or by another church, and they need to heal and receive. Some are sick and cannot come — and, Matt noted, they are the first to say a stream is not the same. He would rather send a prayer team to your house than send you a link; the teams are ready, or nearly. There will be seasons of mostly receiving. It is a dead giveaway that something is wrong if you stay there. He also named the trope every pastor hears: I attended for years, I dropped out, nobody called me. That would genuinely be shocking if you had been mentoring, being mentored, and serving on a team. Sitting anonymously in a row and then vanishing is the in-person version of the thing he had just been needling about the stream.

What the prize actually is

▶ 1:40:39

Strength and encouragement for your sake. A greater ability, because you are engaged and committed, to hold fast the confession with full assurance — which is exactly where Hebrews was driving. “Not only is self-focus super boring, it’s also not very satisfying,” Matt said. “We don’t feed ourselves very well by giving ourselves ourselves. That’s a bad meal, and you know it. I’ve been there.”

▶ 1:41:24

He offered the practical version. Isolation pulls the eyes down, and everything in the world is a moving walkway away from Christ. Often you do not know what encouragement you need until someone else operating in their gift lands it on you. He was walking in discouragement one day when Marty came up with a prophetic word: “I didn’t even know how much I needed that. But I needed that.” The prize is having your eyes drawn back up, so that we feast on his flesh and drink his blood and walk in the abundant life he keeps offering. That is the why.