Don't Drift
A sermon from Hebrews 2:1-4
When I was in high school back in the 80’s, I lived in north Florida, and one of the advantages of living in north Florida was that the beach was always nearby. Vilano Beach in St. Augustine was only an hour away, and it was the place to go in the summer months. Miles and miles of white sand beaches that are so wide that you actually drive your car onto the beach.
I remember one day when I went to Vilano Beach with my friends Mike and Scott for the day. Scott drove because he had the nicest car. We had taken a Nerf football with us, and soon all of us were waist deep in the water (you can actually get in the water in Florida without fear of hypothermia) playing a game of tackle football with some other guys who had parked nearby. The game must have lasted a couple of hours, and when it was done we waded out of the water to grab some lunch out of the cooler in the back of Scott’s car.
But there was a problem - Scott’s car was nowhere to be seen!
After a brief moment of panic, we realized what had happened. Waves in the ocean don’t come at you head-on - they come at an angle. When you’re in the ocean for as long as we were, getting pounded by the waves, that angle of the waves pushes you down the beach - you tend to drift. And that’s exactly what happened - we had drifted down the beach during our game about a quarter-mile! So we had a nice long walk back to the car that day.
If we had kept our eyes on where the car was while we were playing football in the surf, we would have realized much sooner that we were starting to drift, and we could have corrected before we had drifted too far. But we didn’t.
Hebrews 2:1-4 warns us about a drift that’s far more insidious than a day at the beach:
Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. (Hebrews 2:1-4)
Here’s how we’re going to break down this text. We’ve already stated that the danger has to do with drifting. What I want to do is answer three questions from this text:
• What exactly is the danger?
• Why is it so dangerous?
• How can we avoid this danger?
What Exactly Is The Danger?
Look at verse 1: “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” The danger is that there is a real possibility that we will drift away from what we have heard.
If you’ve been following along in this series, then you know that the whole point of the first chapter of Hebrews is that God has spoken to us by his Son, Jesus Christ. God has spoken, and there is a danger that we will not pay close attention to what we have heard, and thereby drift away from God’s spoken word - God’s revelation in his Son.
That word drift is exactly right here, because drifting is something that happens gradually, without any effort at all. It’s like sitting in a boat in a river. If you haven’t dropped an anchor and if you’re not paddling, what’s going to happen? You’ll drift downstream with no effort at all on your part. It takes effort to stay put.
We know what drifting is like in many aspects of life. For example, no one wakes up one day and they’re suddenly 100 pounds overweight. No, you get there slowly, gradually, a little bit at a time.
Or maybe you’ve been close friends with someone and one of you moved away. You started off calling and writing all the time, but over time, the calls and letters became less frequent, and eventually realize that your friendship isn’t what it once was. You’ve drifted apart.
Marriage works the same way, doesn’t it? If you don’t take the time to invest in the relationship on a regular basis, one day you find that you’re married to a stranger, and the feelings of love have cooled. How many marriages end in divorce because the husband and wife have put their marriage on autopilot, only to find that they’ve drifted apart?
What the author of Hebrews is warning us about this morning is that there is a danger of drifting away from Jesus Christ. Let me state this again in no uncertain terms: You are in danger of drifting away from Jesus. Yes, I mean you. That’s the danger.
And let me be clear here - drifting away from Jesus is a heart issue, not anactions issue. I don’t want you to think that just because you go to church regularly, that you can’t drift away from Jesus. The truth is that you can warm a pew every single Sunday, you can come to Sunday school, prayer time, Bible study, and your heart can be cold to Jesus Christ. You’re just going through the motions because that’s what’s expected of you, that’s what you’ve always done, but there’s no real love there - no real affections for Christ. You’ve drifted away.
Why Is It So Dangerous?
Why is drifting away from Jesus Christ so dangerous? Let’s look at verse 2 to see what Hebrews has to say: For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?
Let’s follow the logic carefully here. The “message delivered by angels” here is a reference to the Old Testament - Jewish tradition of the day held that the Old Testament scripture was preserved with angelic assistance. The message of the Old Testament proved to be reliable, and in it, every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution. In the Old Testament, disobedience to God’s revelation was punished justly.
But now, we have a better revelation - God has spoken by means of his Son, and his Son is superior to the angels in every way. That was the point of last week’s installment in the series. That’s the point of most of chapter 1 of Hebrews. Jesus is greater than the angels.
So, if disregarding or disobeying the message delivered by means of angels received just punishment, how much greater must the punishment justly be if we disregard or disobey the greater message delivered by means of God’s own Son? That’s the logic. The penalty is so great for drifting away from the Son of God is destruction - how can we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?
That’s why drifting is so dangerous - because drifting is really neglecting the great salvation God is offering, and the penalty for neglecting it that you don’t escape the judgment of God - in other words, you miss out on God’s salvation.
I bet at this point, some of you are thinking, “wait a minute. That sounds a lot like you’re saying that someone can lose their salvation. What about eternal security? What about ‘once saved, always saved’?”
That’s a very good question. I think the confusion comes in because we sometimes misunderstand the nature of salvation, and because of that, we misunderstand what is actually happening when someone drifts away from Jesus.
You see, many of us have heard “salvation messages” that go something like this: Jesus is standing at the door of your heart, waiting to come in. All you have to do to escape the fires of hell is to pray this simple prayer after me, and then you are absolutely guaranteed to go to heaven when you die.
Now, there are many, many people who come to true saving faith in Jesus Christ after hearing a message like that. I’m one of them. But there are also many, many people who hear that message and pray that prayer but are never truly born again, but because they did what the preacher told them to do - they prayed the prayer, they walked the aisle, they may have even been baptized - they think they have eternal life. They think they’re good with God. They’ve got their fire insurance.
Maybe some of the people hearing the message of the book of Hebrews in the first century were thinking something similar. Maybe they were thinking, “You know, if I go back to practicing the Jewish religion, then I won’t be persecuted by the Romans. It’s OK, because I made a commitment to Jesus, so I’m eternally safe and secure no matter what I do.”
But that not what the idea of eternal security is. Eternal security says that all those who are truly saved are saved forever, and that is absolutely true. But what we’re forgetting is that salvation is not something that we do, but something that God does. Salvation isn’t praying a prayer. It’s not walking an aisle. It’s not being baptized. None of those things can save you!
Do you want to know what salvation is? Salvation is a heart transplant. Salvation is when God replaces your unrepentant, unbelieving heart with a heart that mourns over sin and turns to God in faith and repentance. Both faith and repentance are not something that we muster up or manufacturer within ourselves - they are gifts from God.
Sure, you can manufacture devotion to God - for a while. You can clean up your life - at least the more visible parts. You can learn the lingo, attend the services, you can fool absolutely everyone, including yourself. But if you drift away from Jesus, then what awaits you is judgment, not salvation, not because you once had salvation and lost it, but because you never had salvation to begin with!
Listen to the words of 1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” In other words, those who turn away from the faith, those who drift away from Jesus Christ, were never really Christians in the first place! In Matthew 10:22, Jesus himself said “He that endures to the end will be saved.”
That’s why drifting away from Jesus is so very dangerous. You may find out that the faith that you thought you had was not a genuine, God-given faith.
How Can We Avoid This Danger?
So how do we avoid this danger? How do we keep from drifting away from Jesus?
Well, if you’re in a boat, how do you avoid drifting? You keep from drifting by paying close attention to your surroundings. How do you avoid drifting apart in your marriage? You pay attention to your wife or your husband!
You keep keep from drifting away from Jesus the same way. Look at verse 1 again:
“Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” The solution to drifting is to pay much closer attention. Literally, it says “it is necessary to pay attention more closely, very much more so.” That sounds awkward, but you get the point - this is something that you really, really need to pay attention to, much more closely that you are right now.
This is a theme we’ll see again and again as we make our way through the book of Hebrews. In chapter 3, verse 4, we are told to “consider Jesus”. And that doesn’t mean “consider Jesus as one option among many”, but to study him closely! In chapter 12, verse 2, a verse many of you know, we are told to “[fix] our eyes on Jesus” - start looking at him and don’t turn your gaze away from him!
That’s the solution. You either look at Jesus, or you drift away from him.
Conclusion
My aim is not to remove all your assurance of salvation. My goal, and the goal of this text, is not to make you spend your days in fear that you might not be paying close enough attention to Jesus, and therefore your conversion wasn’t genuine.
True assurance of salvation is possible for you today, but before I can point you to that assurance, sometimes it’s necessary to tear down false assurance. If you want to build a new house on the site of an old shack that’s falling down, you have to rip down the old shack and clear the debris before you start building.
Some of you have assurance because you’re trusting in a decision you made, maybe years ago, but that’s not the right place to put your trust. Because if you’re trusting in your decision, then you’re trusting in yourself, not in Jesus Christ.
Here’s how you can have true assurance: Take your eyes off of yourself and fix them on Jesus. Consider him. Pay close attention to him. Are you trusting in him NOW to save you from your sins? Are you clinging to him TODAY? If you are, then have great confidence that you are truly His, and you can never fall away, because He holds you in His hand.