Our Mutual Fellowship In God’s Presence
Let us hold fast to the profession of our faith without wavering.
(For he is faithful that promised;) and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together.
As the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
Hebrews 10:22-25
Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God
Here we find four biblical assertions: “Let us draw near to God” (Heb. 10:22); “Let us hold fast to our profession” (v. 23); “Let us consider one another” (v. 24).
And “Let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together” (v. 25). These “let us” statements mean, “Come on, we must do this.” They are words of exhortation and urgency showing us our privilege and our duty.
Such words teach us that we cannot hope to deadhead into spiritual advancement. We cannot ride on a pass.
It requires active exercise of our spiritual faculties. We simply dare not allow ourselves to hope that time will aid us. Time never helped anybody yet.
And never will. Time is the medium in which we may help ourselves or seek God’s help, but time never helps anybody.
We’re Invited into God’s Presence “Let us draw near” means that we have something to do. If I might change the figure here, the whole work of God with men floats in the sea of grace and rests upon the foundation of grace.
But it does not paralyze the human will and it does not exempt us from spiritual activities.
“Let us draw near,” He says, and it is to God that we are to draw near; and the great good news is that we can approach God.
This is the great good news of the gospel—that man can approach God again. Man, who went out of the Garden.
At the stern command of God, can now come back with all his race into the presence of God again; and yet that approach is not one of physical distance.
We must know that our approach is not one of physical distance as if God were far off. When we make a pilgrimage to find Him,
we act as though God were in some distant place on our world map, and we need to travel there, getting nearer to Him as we go.
And going farther away from Him as we leave. Do not think of it like that. To do so is to think falsely.
God is not far from any of us. “God is here, and the nearness to God that we talk about is not one of distance.
it has to do with a rich person-to-person and soul-soul relationship. It has to do with trust, love, and intimacy of heart.”
If you allow one week of your life to pass by and you have not done something to draw near to God, you are not obeying the instruction here.
We Live By Faith
The second assertion is “Let us hold fast our profession of faith” (Heb. 10:23). We would like to get a spiritual experience floating us on high, above all.
We would like to go into orbit and be sure there was nothing to do but simply ride around.
I once noticed an ad for a pair of shoes. According to the ad, you put them on and just walk around on air.
People imagine the Christian life the same way. You are converted, blessed, and then walk around on air for the rest of your life. You do nothing of the sort.
I know there is a wheel in the middle of a wheel up there somewhere, but Christians do not happen to be in that place yet.
So, we do not go to heaven on wheels as the song says, “You Can’t Go to Heaven on Roller Skates.”
We cannot go to heaven any other way but by the simple, pedestrian way: walking by faith.
The Lord does not talk about a flight of faith, nor does He talk about a tour of faith; He talks about a walk of faith.
The temptation to quit the journey comes to everybody. Some have been tempted to just give up the whole Christian life and be done with it.
I suppose you feel very guilty about that, and you are; let me comfort you by telling you that you are not guilty all by yourself.
People of God have that temptation come to them when things get tough, and they say, “What’s the use of trying, anyhow?
I can’t do as I want to do, I can’t serve God as f long to do.” The temptation is to quit. But people are ashamed to admit it.
If their testimonies were as frank as they should be, many a man, instead of getting up and saying, “Pray for me that I may hold out faithful and so on,” would say, “I was tempted last week to give up this whole deal.
But the Lord helped me, and I didn’t.” That would be frank; it would be a little difficult to do that because we are taught to win friends and influence people and never tell the truth at all.
We are trained to say the thing we are supposed to say rather than the honest thing. The pressure is just so great that we almost look up to God as Elijah did and say, “God, I’ve had it.
There isn’t any use, Father, take me; there’s nobody around that’s any good.” We are tempted like that sometimes, but I have a litde key for you.
I usually do not hand out keys, but I have a little secret of how you hold fast the profession of your faith.
It is so down-to-earth and common that it will disappoint you, but it is good. Just outlive your troubles.
I have outlived so many things, so many people who did not like me; I just outlived them. You just go right on outliving your difficulties.
That neighbor who slams the door all hours of the night and morning and turns the TV on until.
It comes roaring through the partition until you say, “Oh, God, what will I do?” Just outlive him. He will move; you just keep right on where you are.
That neighbor whose dog howls incessantly, tied to a tree out there; just keeps right on living. Go right on.
He will move, God will take him somewhere else, and so with everything else that tempts you to want to quit.
How about that boss you work for that you just do not know how you can continue to go to work? You do not mind the work, but you just wish you were somewhere else, and you are shopping around for another job and cannot find one.
You just keep right on walking with God, and one of these times something will happen.
That fellow will be moved to some other town; he will get blessed; he will get to like you or the problem will untangle.
You just keep on; it will not kill you if you walk on with God.“Let us hold fast,” says the Word of God.
But it also says, “to the profession of our faith.” The profession of our faith has its ramifications right down in our living; so you just wait around, it will come out right.
A dear old brother with not too much education, but he was a dear saint, said the passage of Scripture he loved was, “It came to pass.”
He testified, “When I get in trouble, I just look up to God and say, ‘Father, I remember this came to pass.’
” It passes after a while, and all of your problems come to pass. They will pass if you’ll just outlive them and keep right on.
We Urge Others to Love and Good Works
Then the other assertion is, “Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good works” (Heb. 10:24).
We have serious responsibilities for other people. God has laid the welfare of others upon us, and He will hold us responsible.
I suppose one of the most insolent and cynical statements or questions in the entire Bible was Cain’s question after murdering his brother: “Am I my brother’s keeper? Why are you asking me about my brother?
Do I have to take responsibility for him in my life?” Yes you do, you take responsibility for others in your life.
We should be responsible before all men for our lives, for our example, for our word.
We should be responsible for rousing people, inciting people, and urging people on in their Christian walk.
Some Christians have a bad effect on other Christians. One Christian will get with another Christian and they have to fight to keep up their spiritual lives, this one Christian drags them.
There are those rare Christians whose very presence is an incitement to you to want to be a better Christian.
That is what it says here: “Let us consider one another to provoke.” Provoke, of course, means to stir them up to love and good works.
We Do Not Abandon Assembling
The fourth assertion is, “Not forsaking the assembling ourselves” (Heb. 10:25). There is a significant mark of a lack of relish for the apostolic assembly.
When going to church becomes a problem, something is wrong. When the circle of believers becomes too dull, many excuses are given, but there is only one; we have cooled off in our spirit.
The thing that Christians have always done is come together to worship and pray and to reminisce and to anticipate and to search the Scriptures and to sing holy hymns and testify.
This has been done from the day of Pentecost to the present hour. When I become a Christian and I am not led by a magnetic attraction to the circle of believers, something is wrong with me.
I believe the church is the assembly, the church of God, and there are reasons for our assembling.
We are not simply doing this out of habit or because it is a custom that we cannot get over. We do it because there are reasons for it.
By nature, Christians are gregarious. “Being let go they went to their own company” is a sentence characteristic of the people of God, as well as sinners.
People always go to their own company, and so it is perfectly normal for us to want to do so.
All the beasts of the jungle meet at the waterhole, and there is a strange truce there; although they fight to the death in the jungle.
When they go to the waterhole, there is a truce; they all meet together where there is the water.
And God’s people meet at the waterhole; they meet together where the fountain flows. They are gregarious.
Those who raise sheep know the sick sheep is the only one who does not like the flock. He wanders off by himself behind the bush and dies.
The healthy sheep all like to be where the other sheep are.
The second reason is that we need each other. The individual Christian needs the company of Christians.
God can say to a company of Christians what He cannot say to an individual Christian, just as He can say to the individual lonely praying soul what He cannot say to the company.
If your Christianity depends upon the pastor’s preaching, then you are a long way from being where you should be.
If you do not have a private, secret conduit, a pipe leads into the fountain where you can go anytime all by yourself.
Whether there is a pastor there or not, whether you have heard a sermon in a year, you have nevertheless an anchor; you have a root, you have a conduit.
you can get the water from God. But over against that, and supplementing it and correcting it, is this truth that God can say to you in church what He cannot say to you all alone.
God can take a man onto a mountain and talk to him and then send him down where the people are and talk to him and say to him down there what He could not say up there.
So we must close the door and have private prayer, but we need to have our private prayers corrected and brought into symmetry by the public prayers.
We need to read the Scriptures all by ourselves, and then we need to hear the Scriptures expounded in the public assembly.
Christ went to the synagogue regularly. People write something like this, “Mr. Tozer, the town where I live doesn’t have a single gospel church.
I’m a born-again Christian; what will I do?” I write back and remind them that Jesus went to the synagogue, as was His wont.
He had the habit of going to church on the holy days and went even though He did not agree with much He found there.
He went because He wanted to be in the company of people who, at least essentially, were worshiping God.
So you go ahead, the Lord will arrange it somehow, and you will hear the truth. Christ went to the company regularly, and so should we.
Christ promised a special blessing to the company where two or three are gathered in His name (see Matt. 18:20), and the assembly of God’s people is a historic tradition.
Why Christians go to the assembly only occasionally is beyond my comprehension. Suppose you were in Russia and did not like the way they were doing things.
You did not like their communist system or their secret police; you did not like anything about Russia at all.
Then, while walking one day in the country you noticed a little, old building that looked forsaken. While walking by you heard a noise and said to yourself, “I believe that’s English.
I believe they’re singing.” When you went close to the door, you noticed what they were singing.
They were singing “God Bless America.” As you peeped in you recognized American faces all around you.
They’re all by themselves, shut away, Americans from here and there gathered together for a little while in fellowship. Huddleÿ together were a couple of dozen Americans.
And you burst in on them with a big smile and some of them recognize you. Soon they sing a hymn together and you begin to talk.
“Oh, yes, I used to live in Chicago. Have you ever been down at such and such a place?” Soon you have a fellowship way across the ocean, way over in that big continent there where it snows.
Oh, how good you would feel! Then you would shake hands and say, “I’ve got to go back to the grind, to the secret police.” You would shake hands and part and say, “Next week let’s meet again.”
Don’t you see how perfectly normal that would be? Don’t you see you would live for it?
You would say during the week, “I have to be out here with people whose language I do not know or like, and people who are suspicious of me.
Out here I don’t like this, but, oh, I live for the time when I can go back into that little building and sit and chat and reminisce and talk over old times and sing good songs with my friends.”
That is a natural thing, nothing wrong with that; that is delightful. And isn’t it true that here we Christians are a minority group in a great big sinful.
Godforsaken world, or almost Godforsaken, for they have driven Him out and refused to have His reign over us.
During the week, we go to school, we work, we sell, we buy, we tend to store, we drive trucks, and we do something all week long under the pressure of it.
But if we know where there is a company of people who think as we think, whose hearts are like our hearts, who love what we love, who are our people.
Whose faces are recognizable—we know who they are and we like to shake their hands and smile at them.
Don’t you think that is reason enough for everybody to go to church every time they can, allowing only sickness to keep them away?
I love the people of God. Sometimes I have to get after them a little bit, but I love them. I love the kingdom of the church.
But when people do not practice it, when they go infrequently or intermittently and say, “I can serve God under the trees,” that is a bromide, a cover-up, an excuse, and it only hides a cold heart.
Usually, when a Christian loses his love for the company of saints, he rationalizes; he blames the minister.
The music, the unfriendliness of the people, the hypocrites in the churches, or the church building.
The people draw him, the people whose spirit he has, he is with them. The wife pops in their little car and drives off to the church and she goes among her people.
Why is she faithful? Because she recognizes her people; she loves them. I love the church of Christ. I am commissioned to love it, to scold it, to warn it, and to feed it and pray for it.
Corporate Delight in God’s Presence
So now there are four assertions: “Let us draw near to God”; “Let us hold fast to our Christian profession”.
“Let us consider one another” and be responsible for helping each other; and “Let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together,” for the sweetest place in all the world is the assembly of the saints.
Thank God, for freedom in a land like this where there are no secret police listening to what we say, ready to catch us and condemn us because we dared to talk about God to a people who wanted to hear about it.
Thank God for freedom such as ours. Let us not sell it out or neglect it. Let us take advantage of our freedom to worship God among the people of God.
The worship of God’s assembled people is a collaboration of individuals committed to God’s presence, and He to theirs.
What we have experienced individually, He has connected when we come together to delight in God’s presence among the assembly of believers.
Ten Thousand Times Ten Thousand by Henry Alford (1810-1871)
Ten thousand times ten thousand,
In sparkling raiment bright,
The armies of the ransomed saints
Throng up the steeps of light:
This finished, all is finished,
Their fight with death and sin:
Fling open wide the golden gates, find let the victors in. What rush of hallelujahs
Fills all the earth and sky!
What ringing of a thousand harps
Bespeaks the triumph nigh!
Oh, a day for which creation
And all its tribes were made!
Oh, joy for all its former woes
A thousand-fold repaid!
Oh, then what raptured greetings
On Canaan’s happy shore!
What knitting severed friendships up,
Where partings are no more!
Then eyes with joy shall sparkle,
That brimmed with tears of late;
Orphans no longer fatherless,
Nor widows desolate.