Hope Blog

▶ 0:55:42

Matt picked up where Cosmo and Susie Reigns had just left off, with their
workshop on learning what actually makes the people closest to you feel loved. He wanted
the analogy, not the topic. In movies, big characters make big choices. In life, it is the
small ones — today, tomorrow, here and there — that decide where you end up.

Little choices, compounding

▶ 0:59:08

He started with the easiest version: stay up late, eat the ice cream, feel sluggish in
the morning, drink the extra coffee, decide to take it easy tonight — and taking it easy
looks like more ice cream. The choices compound, and the further down that road you get,
the less you want water and a jog.

Marriages work the same way. People in a bad place ask how they got there, and the honest
answer is rarely one catastrophe. “It’s a lot of little choices here and there on a regular
basis that can lead you to a place of great health or great unhealth,” Matt said — and the
road runs both directions. However far down it you are, the way back is also small choices,
made over and over.

Why the letter gets spicy

▶ 1:00:48

That is the doorway into 2 Peter, a letter many people find hard to read because Peter is
so plainly furious. The connection is exactly the one above: in chapter one he pleads with
the church to add virtue and goodness and self-control to their faith, because that is how a
covenant is protected — daily, in small increments. His rage in chapter two is aimed at the
people picking those increments off one by one, appealing to desire. That is why the language
is strong. Influence pulling in the wrong direction has to be dealt with strongly.

▶ 1:02:04

The first thing Peter does is level the ground. He writes
to
those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours — and Peter is a large and
looming figure in the early church. Most of the people who first read that letter are names
nobody remembers. Their faith stood equal with his. So does yours.

The stakes, before the guardrails

▶ 1:03:22

Matt lingered here on purpose, because if this were not in the scriptures you would not
accept it. Called into his own glory. Granted his precious promises. Made partakers of the
divine nature. It arrives through knowing him — this is a relationally oriented faith — and
the destiny it opens is larger than resting in the tranquil halls of eternity. His picture
for it was deliberately odd: like a positive version of a parasite, or a vampire with the
negative connotations stripped out. His flesh and blood are real. We live and grow and
persist by feeding on his life, grafted into his own body.

A fence, not a foundation

▶ 1:05:13

Which is what makes verse five a hinge rather than a lurch — for this very reason.

Matt flagged something easy to skate past: knowledge is not first and is not counted as a
virtue on its own. Peter wants the two chained together.

▶ 1:06:30

Then the image that carried the whole message. Imagine a foundation. You must not build on
anything else, not on part of it, not on it and something else. That does not mean you cannot
put a fence around it — “you can even have barbed wire on that fence if you want, armed
guards,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean you’re building somewhere else. It means you’re
protecting that place.”

So: virtue, so vice does not draw you out. Knowledge, so you are not caught unawares and
led off foolishly. Self-control, because you will be enticed in whatever way the enemy can
think of. Steadfastness, because you may simply grow tired. None of it is load-bearing. We
are saved
by grace through faith, not by grace and self-control.

▶ 1:08:47

And the failure mode is worse than a thin harvest.
“Whoever
lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed
from his former sins.” Unfenced, you are open to being misled so thoroughly that you forget
you are free — believing lies, feeling like a slave to sin, convinced you do not belong to him.
Peter is not protecting fruitfulness here. He is protecting people from
falling
away outright.

Eyewitnesses, not orators

▶ 1:11:02

Peter’s counterattack opens quietly with a contrast you might miss:
“We did
not follow cleverly devised myths” — as opposed to people who did. Paul had the same problem
in Corinth. Ancient writers like Philo of Alexandria grumbled about the whole travelling class of
men who were magnificent at talking and made a living at it, city to city, on word salad that
sounded wonderful.

Matt asked the room to feel the position that puts a pastor in. A silver-tongued man joins your
fellowship, says “brother, I have a word,” and when he finishes you cannot say what it was about —
and worse, your own people are nodding along. “Imagine how mad you would be, and how random you
would seem to the people who love that guy.”

▶ 1:12:38

That is the transfiguration —
Matthew 17,
Mark 9,
Luke 9 —
where Peter, stunned and in over his head, offers to build tabernacles. “We tease Peter,” Matt said,
“but honestly I probably would have said something even dumber.” Which is rather the point. These
are not men who agreed on a story in a back room. They are men who saw something larger than life
and are relaying it in plain speech — a real disadvantage, when the counterfeit comes with
spectacular delivery.

▶ 1:14:51

Hence Peter’s claim about where prophecy comes from:
no
prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation, but men spoke from God as they were
carried along by the Holy Spirit. God had an actual goal and an actual message. There is a right
reading and a wrong one; it is not a field for opinion and convenience. Matt caught the buried hint
in Peter’s “morning star” — Balaam, who
saw
a star coming out of Jacob, and who genuinely heard from God and chose to mislead people anyway,
for a prize. A pointed allusion, and Peter has clearly been stewing on it.

Three examples, and none of them go well

▶ 1:17:15

The corruption is hidden, because the words are sweet. Peter does not reconstruct their messages,
but you can reverse-engineer the appeal: being well liked, being wealthy, power, influence, freedom
to indulge a vice with a spiritual-sounding excuse. What they are exploiting is that God’s people are
trusting and want to believe the best.

▶ 1:19:41

Then the precedents. Angels
who sinned, cast into chains of gloomy darkness; the ancient world spared only in Noah. Matt noted
that “hell” there is a verb built on Tartarus — in Greek myth, the maximum-security wing
beneath Hades, guarded by things with fifty heads, where the Titans were shut away. He enjoyed the
detour and then made it earn its place: even beings with access to glory, when they deviated, were
imprisoned. And Sodom
and Gomorrah turned to ashes, with Lot pulled out of it. God has confronted false prophets, and
false angels, to preserve his people from corrupting influence. Peter’s message to these teachers is
not subtle: he got them, he will get you.

▶ 1:22:04

Matt drew a line under who is in view. Not the person saying I am struggling with this and I
want to stop. These are men who super duper know better, bold and willful, blaspheming glorious
ones that even angels will not pronounce judgment against — and leading people astray by the bushel.

That last line is the whole con in one sentence. And it explains chapter one backwards: if the
attack comes through the passions, then godliness, virtue and self-control are exactly the block. Why
not just name the man? Because there will be another, and another. It was never about the guy.

▶ 1:25:47

Better
never to have known the way of righteousness than to turn back from it — and then the proverb about
the dog and its vomit, which Matt offered, deadpan, as tattoo material.

The scoffers and the fire

▶ 1:27:13

Chapter three turns back to the church.
Scoffers
will come, asking where the promise of his coming is — behind which sits a widespread conviction
that the physical world simply always has been and always will be, so nothing you do gets judged.
Peter answers with the flood: things have not always continued as they are.

▶ 1:29:13

Then the reason for the delay, which is not indifference.

Matt did the arithmetic on
a
thousand years as a day — “so by that reckoning it’s been about two days” — and admitted it was
not a very funny joke. What follows is anything but: the heavens passing away with a roar, the
heavenly bodies dissolved, everything done on the earth exposed. God uncreates and then recreates. And
the point Peter draws is a practical one:
since
all these things are to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be? We are waiting for new
heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells — and the waiting itself is meant to be
productive: at peace, without spot or blemish, longing for his just judgments and wanting the master
to return.

He noted the aside where Peter admits
some
things in Paul’s letters are hard to understand, and could not decide whether it is a jab or an
observation. Either way it shows Paul’s letters already treated as Scripture — and already being
twisted. Not a modern invention. We just have better technology for it now.

The slow fade

▶ 1:33:11

Matt closed where he began. Some of the people in the churches Peter and Paul planted heard the
gospel, received it, walked with the Lord — and turned away. Not, he suspects, in one fell swoop. A
predator separates the isolated and the hurting from the pack, and the same sequence runs in a
spiritual life. You stop confessing your sins. You detach relationally while still standing in the
building. Or you stay home and say you are watching, and it is on in the background while you are
actually listening to Crocodile Dundee. Then when you are down, there is nobody reminding
you who you are, and a sweet-sounding voice says that thing over there will not hurt you.

“I call that the slow fade,” he said, “because it wasn’t just one day that they faded out of the
household of God. It’s like they’re getting a little more ethereal, a little less there over time.”
You can complete the entire process without missing a service — saying and doing all the right
things while your heart is somewhere else. A congregation can do it together, in lock step.

▶ 1:35:30

What these influences want is to isolate you, sideline you, and pour you into endless pointless
side projects — anything but Christ. It might be self-help. It might be something genuinely
noble-sounding. Against that, Peter’s answer is the fence: virtue against the vices that entice,
knowledge so that impressive nonsense cannot land, self-control because those passions burn,
steadfastness because one unchanging gospel year after year will bore people who want a new thing.
Practice them, and you will not fall — or forget who you really are.

▶ 1:40:47

His final instruction was to ask, right there in the room: Holy Spirit, show me what influences
are on me now, appealing to my cravings, offering freedom and handing me slavery. And then let him
teach you where to add virtue, godliness and self-control. It ends where Peter ends —
“grow
in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

▶ 1:04:45

Having finished Hebrews, Matt said he keeps meaning to start the Gospel of John and
keeps deciding not to begin it in the summer. So instead: a tour of tiny texts, one book a Sunday,
starting with James.

1. A tour of tiny texts, and why now

▶ 1:05:16

Commentators like to call James the New Testament’s answer to Proverbs. Matt allowed it as a fine
analogy and then set it aside — he does not think James sat down to write a new book of Proverbs.
He thinks James was writing a letter to encourage faith, the same thing the other authors of
scripture were doing.

▶ 1:07:35

Then a word about why this letter lands now. We take a barrage of data through screens, and much
of what we do all day does not feel especially human. Before the internet, Matt guessed, the truly
bizarre theories stayed contained to the local tavern; now those people find each other worldwide
and broadcast at you. His own observation, from a job that involves talking to a great many people:
nearly everyone feels ostracized by the world around them — secularists, Christians, Jews, Muslims,
the dreaded straight white male, and the person who is none of those things. Which is exactly why
being rooted in the wisdom of scripture is worth the time. “The scriptures are grounding — an
extremely grounding experience.” His encouragement was to go home and read the whole letter, chapter
numbers ignored, the way you would read anything: get comfy, get your cookies and your milk, and ask
the Lord to speak.

2. Ask for wisdom — after admitting you lack it

▶ 1:08:36

God is inclined to give it. It is good for you, it is good for everyone near you, and it pleases
him. “It’s a total 360-degree win when you grow in wisdom.” And yet we mostly don’t have it, because
we mostly don’t pursue it.

▶ 1:09:35

Matt’s picture for the problem: the sign taped over the office sink. The people who read signs
were already doing the right thing; the people the sign is for do not read signs. Wisdom works the
same way. “It’s an incredibly wise thing to stand before the Lord and say, I need your wisdom. And
it’s often our foolishness that drives us to the opinion that we already have God’s wisdom.”

3. All of it fades, so live now by what will last

▶ 1:10:09

The lowly brother boasts in his exaltation and the rich man in his humiliation, and both are set
in parallel with grass whose flower falls
(James 1:9–11) —
an echo of the older line that
the flower fades but
the word of our God stands forever. Both men die. Both stand before the Lord without their
possessions or their lack of them. Matt imagined the sting of amassing a treasure and not getting to
spend it, and set it beside riches that surpass anything the poor man ever longed for.

▶ 1:12:34

The point of the contrast is not the accounting; it is the reordering.
Blessed is the man who
remains steadfast under trial, because God’s standards and rewards move to center stage. In this
life his opinions get treated as peripheral and our desires take the middle of the room. If we have
any sense, we would rather orient around what he thinks now than later.

▶ 1:13:42

God does not want us walking in evil, so why would he prompt it. We can try blaming him and we
can try blaming our brother, but the chain lays the blame at human desire — and that is one more
reason to distrust our natural inclinations. Follow whatever we happen to want at any given moment
and the reaction ends in death. Better to ask.

4. Doers, not hearers — and what the mirror actually shows

▶ 1:14:57

▶ 1:16:42

Matt flagged the double meaning in word. In Hebrew and in Greek alike it can mean a
single word, a whole message, even an event. And one of Jesus’ own titles is the Word of God — which
is why he could tell people
they pore over the
scriptures thinking they have life in them, when the scriptures point to him. The implanted word
that saves souls is at least the gospel message, and probably the person himself.

▶ 1:17:49

Some read James here as pushing back on
Paul’s insistence
that we are saved by grace through faith and not by works. Matt would not have it. Look at what
the man is staring into: the law of liberty. Not a funhouse mirror, not an Instagram filter — a real
one, showing what is really there. So what is he forgetting when he walks away? “That you are really
a child of God. That you are really free.” The blessing is walking in a freedom you actually believe
in, and that freedom was established by Christ alone.

5. Religion worth the name

▶ 1:19:27

The word religion has been surrendered, Matt said — we joined the world in saying we are
spiritual, not religious, and conceded linguistic ground we did not need to. In Greek the word
carries an attitude and a behavior that come out of the fear of God, which is not a bad thing at
all.

And then James attaches a test to it, which is where the tongue comes in: you say you fear God,
but you do not control your mouth. Matt turned it into a question about honesty — “think about what
you’re confessing. Is what you confess true?” If you confess the Lord, then you want to walk in the
real fear of God, and this is what walking it out looks like.

▶ 1:20:25

He noted, as a pastor, how often only the first half of that gets quoted at him. It is both — it
is not just caring for the widow and the orphan in their distress, and it is not just staying
unstained from the world. And the phrase in their affliction is doing work too — “we don’t
want to just bother widows all the time. We want to help them, not never leave their living
room.”

6. Partiality, and the mercy that triumphs

▶ 1:21:24

Keep the royal law
and you do well; show partiality and you are a transgressor — and whoever fails at one point is
guilty of all of it. Matt read that as another indirect proof that James writes from the kingdom of
grace: he is not saying you could probably mostly make it.
We all fall short of
the glory of God, and failing at one point puts you opposite his word. That is not a man handing
out partial credit. Matt’s picture: two prisoners comparing which section of the legal code they
violated. You both violated it. And elsewhere in the letter James is after preferential treatment of
the rich in particular — as though the church had a velvet rope for big givers up front, and the new
or the poor or the smelly could watch from a screen in the foyer. Partiality treats people by what I
happen to like about them instead of by an objective standard. Matt put the standard plainly: we
were his enemies when he died for us; he pursued us though we spat at him, and laid a table for us
though we bit his hand.

▶ 1:23:24

There it is again — the law of liberty. Even in a letter about faith in action, our works are
judged under freedom. Matt read the verse as a statement about God’s disposition before it is a
demand on ours: his inclination is to show mercy. “Long live the mercy of God — therefore we should
show it to one another.” It is
the servant
forgiven millions who throttles a friend over a few dollars: something in you revolts at it,
because he plainly did not understand what he had just been given. Treat people the way you are
longing for Jesus to treat you — with the leniency and affection you want from him.

7. The faith James is actually attacking

▶ 1:24:28

Read the phrasing, Matt urged. Not can faith save — can that faith save. He is
casting shade on a particular kind of so-called faith, one you can spot because it has no
transformative effect. Which is exactly Paul’s point when he says
what really counts
is a new creation.

▶ 1:25:38

Notice who is talking. The man dividing faith from works is James’ opponent, not James. And
notice what James promises to show: my faith. “He’s not poo-pooing on faith. He’s dusting
it off and polishing it and defending what faith really is, because that’s still the main program.
You’re going to look far and wide in the kingdom of God, you’re only going to see one program —
grace through faith.”

▶ 1:26:56

What he is attacking is lip-service faith, faith in word only, just facts. And who holds
facts about God without trusting him? Demons. They know who is in charge and they know who to be
afraid of — and James’ response to that creed is a flat “you do well,” an atta-boy, good for you.
Matt named the danger for us: reduce the gospel to a road and a prayer and a checkbox, and “you only
need two ministries at that point — an evangelist and an assassin.” He called the joke terrible and
retired it on the spot, but the warning stands. His better picture was the glass-bottomed walkway at
the Grand Canyon. Standing fifty yards back saying you are confident it was built to code is one
thing. Stepping out on it is another — different levels of trust entirely. There will be times
Christ says come this way, or do this, and the question is whether you trust him.

8. Wisdom you can see — and passions you cannot feed

▶ 1:28:30

Chapter 3 runs the identical argument about wisdom.
Who is wise among
you? Let him show it by his good conduct, in the meekness of wisdom — and if what is actually in
you is bitter jealousy and selfish ambition, do not boast about it. Matt tracked the rising
intensity of the verdict: earthly, then unspiritual, then demonic. All three describe the same
thing, wisdom that struts and never shows up in a life. Then he turned it on us: all the more reason
not to be ruled by our natural appetites, because our appetites can be exactly that — earthly,
unspiritual, demonic.

▶ 1:30:11

Submitting our desires to God for his feedback, correction and provision is wisdom. Taking what
we want is the oldest pattern there is:
in the garden he saw,
he desired, he took; on the roof,
David saw, desired
and took. “This is not American. We didn’t invent that. We just have more technology to do it.”
The alternative is to ask: if he does not want us to have a thing he can say so, and if we need
something he can provide it — but either way the passions get handed over for feedback first.

9. Friendship with the world, and the opponent you cannot beat

▶ 1:31:58

Saying yes to the Lord means saying no to some things, which is why
friendship with the world
is hostility with God. Matt went after both ways of mishandling that verse. Some, he suspected
especially on the conservative end, use it to license combat — “I’m going to attack you to show my
friendship with God.” Others are so anxious for everyone to be comfortable with Jesus that they let
the verse fade into oblivion. What the verse asks for is humility and strength working together. And
the world here is not the clouds and the trees, or even necessarily the people. It is the system,
that earthly and unspiritual wisdom, and to that we get a firm no — “we can’t say yes to everyone
and we can’t straddle the fence forever.”

▶ 1:33:58

Humble yourselves
before the Lord, and he will exalt you, because
God opposes the proud but
gives grace to the humble. Matt loves talking about spiritual warfare — people say they feel
under attack, and we pray, and we ask the Lord to clear the roadblocks. But he named the exception.
“There is a kind of spiritual opponent you will never overcome, and that’s God himself. We’re not
going to cast out that devil, because that’s not the devil. God’s resisting you — and I don’t think
you’re going to win.” Sometimes it takes us a long while to notice; sometimes we back off right
away. There is nothing wrong with dignity and honor. We just want him doing the exalting.

10. Grumbling, and going after the one who wandered

▶ 1:34:56

Do not grumble against
one another, brothers — behold, the Judge is standing at the door. Matt admitted he was tempted
to preach instead on the most quoted verse of our moment,
“judge not,” which
gets twisted into a demand that nobody hold a conviction out loud — and pointed out that the same
Jesus said
to judge rightly.
Judge is one of God’s titles, and we should serve and worship the one who holds it without
apologizing for it. His picture of the verse was siblings mid-fight when Dad fills the doorway. Take
inventory: who am I grumbling at lately, and why.

▶ 1:35:31

An extremely noble thing, Matt said — and then he asked the practical question: what are the
mechanics of it? Props to you if you have ever actually done it, because it takes bravery. You are,
by definition, at odds with the person — they are walking away and you are asking them to turn. So
you run a real risk of being called divisive or judgmental. We don’t want to be either. But we
should be willing to be called both for doing what is right. “People’s labels shouldn’t deter us.”
You might be insulted briefly; you may have helped a brother avoid death. It is worth that.

Four things to carry out the door

▶ 1:37:05

First, see James clearly as coming from the kingdom of grace — pointing to true faith, not faith
plus. He was attacking fake faith, not faith. Not one ounce of deviation from the message that we
are sinners saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and it is his loving sacrifice that set us
free. Second, pray for wisdom, which starts with the hardest step of all: admitting you need it.
Third, fight for humility, or expect opposition from God — the right answer is obvious and doing it
is very hard. Fourth, refuse friendship with the world’s system, or expect the same opposition.

▶ 1:38:41

He skipped around, and he knew it — there are verses in James you love that did not come up. So
read it this week. It will not take long; out loud is better if you can. If you don’t own a Bible,
take one out of the pew as a gift or download it. Next Sunday the tour continues in
2 Peter, and since
it is shorter he promised to cut less.

▶ 1:39:58

Then something new, which he and Andy had been “colluding” about: worship ends earlier, the
message runs the same length, and the time saved goes to prayer at the end rather than the exit.
Andy came back up, the Heart Ministry teams came forward, children’s ministry kept going, and the
room stayed in worship — sit and reflect, pray for God’s wisdom, pray with a friend, or go stand in
for someone the Spirit brings to mind. It is experimental, and they want feedback. Matt’s sending
words were the old ones: go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

▶ 0:58:28

This was the last message in Hope’s walk through Hebrews, and Matt’s hope for it
was modest and practical: that the letter would end up more precious and more
approachable than it was in January. People avoid Hebrews, he said, because they cannot
find the structure or the main idea in a given chapter. Chapter 13 has no such problem. It is a
list.

1. Let brotherly love continue

▶ 1:00:39

▶ 1:02:24

The whole letter has been one long case that the gospel is trustworthy because the person at
the center of it is — our perfect representative in heaven, tempted as we are, our great high
priest, our mediator, the propitiation for his people. Now the author turns to response. Matt
put two guardrails around it before going a step further. Brotherly love is not the
only response to the gospel. And brotherly love is not the gospel; it is something that
flows from it.

▶ 1:04:04

Travel in that world was expensive and dangerous and there were no motels, so believers
hosted believers they had never met. The second-century satirist Lucian noticed and sneered:
learn just enough Christianity to pass, and you can tour the empire on free dinners and free
beds. What dupes. “In hindsight that’s not that bad of an insult on us,” Matt said, “because
that’s kind of a cool reputation to have — that we would put up brothers for no reason other
than the fact that they are our brothers.”

2. Don’t lose your supernatural roots

▶ 1:04:43

Since the Enlightenment we have worked hard to show the world that our faith is reasonable —
the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, William Lane Craig in front of a large
crowd. Matt was careful to say he was not mocking any of it. But the author of Hebrews has just
said something that ought to strike you as slightly crazy: some of you have had angels over for
dinner and never knew it. The natural and the mundane are blended with the mystical and the hard
to explain, and believers walking out practical love are sometimes playing host to powerful
beings on assignment.

▶ 1:07:06

Then a step further, because Jesus goes further. In
Matthew 25:35–40
people are commended for visiting him in prison and feeding him when he was hungry, and they have
no memory of it — whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. That is the engine
under the reputation Lucian laughed at. It also applies, Matt noted, to the person in front of
you right now who is not the most interesting person in the room, and to the brother who is the
wrong kind politically in an election year: treat them as you would treat the Lord, for the
Lord’s sake.

3. Remember the prisoners — you cannot unplug

▶ 1:08:44

Hebrews 13:3
asks us to remember those in prison as though in prison with them, “since you also are in the
body.” Matt pressed on that rationale with Jesus’ own agricultural picture:
I am the vine, you are
the branches. The branches are not plugged into each other. They are plugged into the vine —
which makes the connection inescapable. “The only way to not be connected to them is for one of
you to walk away from Christ himself.”

4. Marriage, and the race to the bottom

▶ 1:09:57

Hebrews 13:4 —
let marriage be held in honor, let the marriage bed be undefiled. Christians get a reputation,
from the world and from each other, for being fixated here. Matt’s answer was blunt: it was not
our idea. As in
Hebrews 12:16,
we are on assignment. Shift the complaint back to Christ, where it belongs.

▶ 1:11:58

And it is not arbitrary. In
Ephesians
5:25–32 Paul grounds the whole thing in Christ and his bride, which means, Matt said, that
“we have the honor and the privilege of, in our own homes, playing out theatrically the gospel.”
You can stage it badly. One way is the husband as Boss Hog: I have the size and the gun, so in
exchange for protection you submit — reasoning Matt compared, wincing at his own illustration, to
a mafia boss offering a restaurant a deal. The test is simple. Who got more out of the original
than they put in, Jesus or his followers? The church, by an infinite margin. So in the
reenactment, if it is done right, the wife should be the one who benefits far beyond anything she
could repay.

▶ 1:14:29

“I like to refer to this as the race to the bottom,” he said. Around us it is usually a race
to the top — a girl boss and an alpha male duking it out for best position in the household. Not
here.

5. Money, and the coveting nobody admits to

▶ 1:14:59

▶ 1:16:07

Notice the verse does not single out the rich, and Matt would not let anyone hand it off to
the wealthy person one row over. “We poor people who worry about bills can also lust after money.
We just don’t happen to have it.” You can love a thing you do not possess; that is called
coveting. He granted what
Ecclesiastes
10:19 grants — money does answer things, and a little more of it really would make some
problems easier. That is true, and it is not permission.

These four practices have an inherent good and a protective function. Walking faithfully in
the will of Christ leaves you less exposed to distraction from the enemy, which is why the
passage can arrive at verse 6 and say confidently.

6. Leaders who are gone, and a Christ who is not

▶ 1:17:55

Hebrews 13:7
looks backward: remember your leaders, consider the outcome of their way of life, imitate their
faith. They sound departed — martyrs, or people faithful to the end. And the thing to copy is not
their deeds but their faith, which puts this verse in a straight line with the long list of
witnesses in
Hebrews 11, all
testifying to the same thing: it is right to trust him.

▶ 1:19:43

Whatever the food controversy was, it is lost to us; the logic is not. The central character
of the faith does not change over time, so the message about him was never designed to evolve.
Worship styles and prayer habits carry cultural application. The core does not.

7. The temptation to be an elite Christian

▶ 1:20:49

New and shiny teachings are fun and tempting and they do not lead to life, because only Christ
does. So stay nourished by grace — which sounds obvious until you notice how bored we get with
it. “I’m bored with grace. I want to do something strict with food.” The appeal was never
dietary; it was religious. “There’s always a temptation to be like, all right, y’all are cool,
but I’m going to be an elite Christian — and I’m going to do that by weird, bizarre, hard to
understand rules that I’ll never fully explain to you.” It puffs up an ego that is usually
discouraged and confused and looking for a shot of adrenaline.

▶ 1:22:34

If you genuinely have extra energy and want to go radical, Matt pointed out, the chapter has
already given you four options: devote yourself to hospitality, avoid sexual immorality all the
more intensely, be content with what you have, and proclaim the gospel with your words and your
deeds.

8. Outside the camp — and a sacrifice that was never about sin

▶ 1:23:37

The chapter answers the hunger for specialness by pointing away from us. We have an altar. The
bodies of the sacrificial animals were burned outside the camp, and so Jesus suffered outside the
gate to sanctify his people through his own blood
(Hebrews
13:10–12). You want to feel pure and holy? Recall your Lord and what he has done.

▶ 1:25:37

Then a detail worth keeping. Most Old Testament sacrifices had nothing to do with sin. They
were honor, respect, joy, generosity — a way of saying I love you, I’m loyal to you, I’m with
you. That is the category
Hebrews
13:15–16 puts us in when it asks for a continual sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that
acknowledge his name, and for doing good and sharing what we have. Offering ourselves as a
living
sacrifice is not a sin offering. It is an honor offering. And Matt made a point of the two
words verse 15 opens with — through him.

9. Obey your leaders — and where authority actually comes from

▶ 1:26:48

Hebrews
13:17 is awkward to read from the front and Matt said so. If it helps, hold the board in mind
instead of him: at Hope Chapel the buck stops with the board, who in unanimous agreement can hire
and fire the senior pastor and direct the church. He has to walk this verse out from both sides.
For a fuller treatment he pointed to
1 Peter 5:1–4,
and, for a jolt from another world entirely, Pope Gregory I’s Book of Pastoral Rule,
written before 604 and startling in the deference it demands.

▶ 1:28:59

Some locate authority in the community that holds texts sacred; some in the antiquity of the
tradition; some in the documents themselves. Matt was not persuaded by any of them, “because it
is God himself who has all authority.” Jesus is the head of the church, and that is what makes
submission to middle management survivable: you can offer it for his sake, because he may well
have put that person there on purpose, and may use them to challenge or even anger you for your
own good.

▶ 1:30:46

It is no easy ride on the other side either. The verse describes someone keeping watch over
souls, carrying an extra burden, and giving an account. And the arrangement is symbiotic — the
request to pray for the leaders in
Hebrews
13:18–19 is the same relationship running the other direction. A body that produces groaning
and contention benefits nobody in it.

10. The God of peace

▶ 1:31:59

Matt lingered on the honorific — the God of peace — and hoped the room knew him that way. Then
on the mechanism: his will works in you by the power of Jesus. “It is a grace when we labor in
our strength for him. It is a grace when we labor in our weakness for him.”

11. Read it like a letter

▶ 1:33:47

The author signs off in
Hebrews
13:22–25 by apologizing for writing at such length — briefly, he calls it. “I don’t know if
you’ve ever read Hebrews out loud,” Matt said. “Takes about an hour. So if that’s brief, I could
probably get out with preaching longer.”

His closing counsel was to read the Bible in several ways, not one. Study it microscopically
if you like — word studies, whole books on a single chapter. But also ignore the chapter titles
and the verse numbers and read it the way you would read any other literature, straight through,
because that is how it was written and how its first audience received it. He admitted that
preaching a chapter at a time interrupts the flow. Hope once had a small group that did nothing
but read a book of the Bible aloud, beginning to end, no discussion — and books he had read five
or six times without retaining a thing finally opened up. “I didn’t need a PhD for that.” Not an
irreverent familiarity with scripture, he said, but an approachable one, where you sit and read
and enjoy it and ask the Lord how to walk in what you find. Next up is a tour through the tiny
letters, read that same way, before the church starts the Gospel of John in August.

▶ 0:43:19

This was a compressed Sunday with a party at the end of it, and Matt said so
plainly: he would preach about baptism briefly, the room would pray, the youth testimony videos
would play, and then everyone would walk out to the corner where a very large tub of water was
waiting. “It’s going to be a little bit on the warm side, but some of you will be wet,” he said,
before promising water slides for the ones who weren’t. The service had opened with the
congregation reading Romans 8:14–17
aloud — the Spirit of adoption, the cry of Abba, heirs with Christ — and a reminder that
under Roman law a man could disown a biological child but never an adopted one. That is the ground
the rest of the morning stood on.

1. The point is not the water

▶ 0:47:36

Matt started where Paul starts.

“Our hope is that as we join in Christ’s death, we join also in his resurrection life,” Matt
said. “That’s the focus. That’s the goal.” And it is precisely because the focus sits there that
Hope Chapel hands the baptizing to parents, friends and deacons rather than reserving it for
clergy. The grace of it is on Christ, not on the arms doing the lowering.

He named the anxiety people bring to him — am I ready, can I do this, I got in a fight with
my brother on the way to church — and answered it with an illustration worth keeping.
“Calculus was never less true when your professor was having an off day. Calculus is just true,
even if your professor was rude or weird.” The confession of the gospel is like that. It does not
fluctuate with the confidence of the person making it.

2. So how does it actually work?

▶ 0:49:57

For the practically minded, Matt went to Peter, who reaches back past the church to Noah and
the eight people brought safely through water.

▶ 0:51:38

Two things follow, and Matt drew both out. First, the mechanism is the resurrection — an event
already completed and completed perfectly. So if you trip over your words, or the pool is slick and
you dunk somebody early, none of it needs redoing. Second, “not a removal of dirt from the body”
means what it sounds like: you are not taking a bath. Your conscience is not clean because you got
washed.

3. “But my conscience already feels fine”

▶ 0:52:18

Then why would such a person need Jesus at all? Matt’s answer was that feelings make poor
evidence here, and that self-justification almost always takes the same shape — I may not be
the best, but have you seen those people? Paul closes that exit:
all have
sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift.

▶ 0:53:29

Here Matt slowed down to make a point about how to read the passage. John says the same thing
on either side — if we claim we have no sin we are lying to ourselves — and that repetition is a
structure, not the message. “The parallels on the outside are not the main point. It’s the core
that’s the main point, in the middle.” And the core is he is faithful. The verse is not
finally about the quality of our confessing. It is about the reliability of the one receiving
it.

4. The genealogy of death

▶ 0:53:58

If everyone has sinned, why is it a big deal? Because
the wages of
sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Sin is not
merely regrettable; it has been earning something.

Matt traced the argument Paul builds — opening in
Romans 1
with God’s wrath against sin, arriving in Romans 5 at Adam — and then pointed at the genealogies
themselves. Every entry runs the same way: he lived, he had a son, he lived a while longer, and he
died. And he died. And he died. The one exception is
Enoch,
who walked with God — which Matt read as foreshadowing rather than an accident of the record.

▶ 0:56:16

▶ 0:56:51

Most of us, Matt allowed, could imagine dying for a stranger on a good day. That is not the
comparison. “God died for his enemies — people who spit at him, insulted him, belittled his glory,
demeaned him, turned away and fought against his very mercy. These are the people that Christ died
for. In other words, you and me.” He died for us in the sense of benefit, and instead
of us in the sense of the penalty.

▶ 0:57:33

And there is another face on that coin. Since
God alone
possesses immortality, giving us eternal life means giving us something only he has — Matt’s
picture was a divine blood donor, losing his life in the act of handing life over. It is why Peter
can say we
become
partakers of the divine nature. We live forever hidden in him, mysteriously, because of our
union with Christ.

5. “What must I do?”

▶ 0:58:08

Bottom-line people, Matt said, are welcome here — and they have company in scripture.

The apostles were not withholding a larger, more complicated answer for later. That was the
whole answer, given to an earnest, straightforward question.

▶ 0:58:50

“Sometimes we make it more complicated,” Matt said, “but Jesus encouraged us to come to him
like little children do, in a simple, trusting attitude.” Which is exactly why baptism is a
confession rather than a mechanism: “There’s not a power in the water, but a confession, because
we’re making an appeal to God for a clean conscience.” Belief is what the whole thing is aiming at,
and it is why Hope goes to the trouble of recording, captioning and amplifying the youth
testimonies — so the younger ones can articulate that belief with a little help, in front of their
peers. The adults get the same care in a different form: out at the water they will be asked to
make a confession too, led through it with questions rather than left to improvise.

▶ 1:00:05

He kept reading, and pointed at the clock in the text:
that same
hour of the night, the jailer washed their wounds and was baptized at once, he and all his
family. Meaning there was still time this morning for anyone who had not signed up. “The most
last-minute request I’ve ever had was on the way to the pool. So if you want a new record, you can
ask at the pool.”

6. Am I ready?

▶ 1:01:27

This is the question Matt says he fields most in the baptism classes, and his answer was blunt:
“If you’re waiting until you’ve reached one hundred percent maturity in the faith — you will die
waiting.” If you are wondering whether you are ready and you want to be baptized, you are ready.
Jesus held up a child and
told them
to let the little ones come. It sounds too easy, Matt admitted, too good to be true — but
the yoke
really is easy and the burden really is light. His concern was the opposite failure: “Men like
me overly complicate. I don’t want to get in the way, stand in the doorway and not enter myself,
or let others enter.”

▶ 1:03:18

What he did not do is oversell the day. Since relationship is the goal, expect him to keep
working after the water. Most people who have walked with the Lord for any length of time know the
pattern — a stretch of victory, then trouble, then genuine shock at your own immaturity, and then
the Lord picking you up and using
his rod and
his staff to comfort, guide and redirect. Sometimes it stings. It is not the day you graduate.
“Don’t hang up your certificate of Christian and retire.”

7. He did not hand off the job

▶ 1:04:59

The last stretch got interrupted — a small phone tree of texts going out from the front row to
get the next person back up — and Matt simply let the room have it. He had joked that nobody wants
a long sermon on a June baptism Sunday; someone had already told him the congregation’s honest
answer to that: “We wouldn’t be mad, we would just start leaving and start doing the baptisms
without you.” “That’s fair,” he said. “We are a very congregational church.” Then he went to the
one verse he had left.

▶ 1:05:41

▶ 1:06:17

Matt wanted the room to notice what the text does not say. “Christ did not say all authority in
heaven was briefly given to me, but I have now hot-potatoed it to the church, because I really want
to get out of here. I have stuff to do. Finish the job.” We supply a verse 18-and-a-half of our own
making, he said — and I therefore give you all authority — and it isn’t there. Go look for
it. He retains it. The reason we walk in his authority at all is that we are walking in him: a very
present captain, a shepherd who has not left and will not.

▶ 1:07:54

Two more things came out of the commission. First, baptizing is in the sentence, which makes
this an act of obedience — “one of his love languages,” Matt said — for anyone still weighing it.
Second, the verb is observe, not know: “It didn’t say teach the world everything
I’ve said, as if we’re mere conveyors of facts. He said teach them to observe all that I have
commanded you.” Jesus is the project manager of the church and of your life, and the church is his
bride, not his outsourced contractor.

▶ 1:08:41

And he put the weight-bearing clause on Christ rather than on us: “Our job, as we are
mysteriously hidden in him, walking in him, is to do what he said — to teach to observe all that
he’s commanded, knowing that in our weakness he will be strong.” Learning to observe is not a
curriculum you complete. It is the rest of your life, “as God in his rich mercy and grace forms
Christ in you.”

How the morning ended

▶ 1:09:51

Rather than fill the gap while the children’s and middle school ministries filed back in, Matt
broke the room into groups of three or four and gave two prayer points: that God would strengthen
the conviction of everyone being baptized, and that
he would
send more laborers into the harvest field. If you forget one, he said, someone in your group
will remember; if nobody remembers, pray anyway — “the Lord will lead you in your prayers.”

He also apologized to the guests for how loose the hour had been, and then declined to sell the
apology: “I would say we’re not usually this silly, but that wouldn’t be true.” Which was, in its
own way, the argument of the whole message. Nobody in the room had to be impressive for any of it
to hold. Then the testimony videos, then the walk outside — to a warm tub of water that was never
where the power was in the first place.