The Unreasonableness of Neglecting the Fellowship

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

Hebrews 10:24-25

Exegetical Part

The book of Hebrews was written to a Jewish Christian community who were tempted to return to the old covenant system of their forefathers. They faced alienation. Many scholars believe the audience was the Alexandrian Jewish church. But they also faced persecution, and the looming threat of the siege of Jerusalem. Whether that means this book was written before AD 70 and they saw the writing on the wall, or afterwards, in the aftermath. 

At times of great upheaval, it is human nature to seek out something either novel or nostalgic. But whether the claim is that an old thing is needed or a new thing, the selling point is that what we have is “not working.” In this panic, we have a shallow logic. But its power is in the panic. Some greater order, some greater power, something more (no one really knows what) is needed to end the chaos. The author of Hebrews pushes back to them and to us: No, Christ is greater! Christ is greater than the mortal priests. Christ is greater than the tabernacle. Christ is greater than all other sacrifices. Christ is greater than all those things that are mere copies of heavenly things. And then by Chapter 13, the letter turns to a series of rapid-fire exhortations. “Let’s do this and let’s not neglect this!”

Doctrinal Part

• The ‘Special’ Reasons the Fellowship is Neglected

• The Stirring of the Fellowship Cannot Be Neglected

• The Urgency of the Day Approaching Cannot Be Neglected

The Big Idea is that with nothing outside that won’t be judged and nothing ahead but that Day, neglecting the fellowship is most unreasonable.

The ‘Special’ Reasons the Fellowship is Neglected

1. I have heard an amazing objection to the use of this passage for our application today. One person said to me, “We can’t apply this today. My pastor said that the Christians from the book of Hebrews were persecuted and scattered. So, it was a ‘special’ case.” Incredible! That is exactly why we must apply it all the more to ourselves! There is a greater to lesser logic embedded in the special example. In other words, if they were so tossed about and harassed, and yet they were admonished not to neglect the fellowship HOW MUCH MORE we who are not so scattered and persecuted! 

2. What is really happening, underneath all of history’s ebbs and flows onto the shores of the church, is that “current of unbelief” in people who simply don’t believe and don’t want to be in church anyway. And whatever latest excuse you give them will be good enough for them: ‘not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some’ (25a). Such neglect is a HABIT. That is, it is an underlying way of the man, or the woman. Give them an inch of no church—they’ll take a mile of it. This past season has proven that well enough.

The Stirring of the Fellowship Cannot Be Neglected

1. He says, ‘let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works’ (24). As a fruit of the Spirit, love is a potential grace in us, but in our sinful nature, will not be activated but by God’s means of grace. We rarely consider that one of the most powerful means of grace is each other. The imagery here is stirring — at least in the ESV. The word is ​​paroxusmos, which can be to stir, to spur, to stimulate, to provoke, to irritate, or to aggravate. The implication is that our love for God and others, our passion for working for his kingdom, would all grow cold without this regular provoking to holiness. 

2. And he adds: ‘but encouraging one another’ (25b). Christians have always needed encouragement, but in the days to come more than ever. Encouragement includes going out and gathering and re-gathering, noticing that wayward sheep and saying, “Hey, brother, you need to come back!” Calvin makes a lesser to greater argument, from the urgency of evangelism to the urgency of this re-gathering: “But if we ought to bestow so much labour on those who are yet aliens to the flock of Christ, how much more diligence is required in exhorting the brethren whom God has already joined to us?”​​

The Urgency of the Day Approaching Cannot Be Neglected

1. The punchline here is this: ‘and all the more as you see the Day drawing near’ (25c). The DAY mentioned here is the Last Day, the Day of Judgment, or the day and hour of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is often thought that fear is not a good motivation. It is not the highest, but it does not follow that it is not fitting. And the Lord uses it profusely throughout his word: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mat. 10:28). The Day is presented by Paul as the dawning of fire, a fire of testing what sort of metal we have made of the church in our own backyard. He speaks of different kinds of building materials: 

gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw — each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire (1 Cor. 3:12-15).

This is the Day that is drawing near, if we could only see it: a Refiner’s fire that is pulls out better metal that sticks together, a Temple of the Spirit, he goes on to say that only makes sense, going together, as Peter envisions as well: “you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:5). The structure will not stand unless the pieces stick together. 

2. In particular, the return of Christ is held out in the New Testament as a call to urgent kingdom living and readiness in the present. We see this in 2 Peter 3,

Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! (vv. 11-12)

But we also see it in the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25, where the five had gotten oil for their lamps and the five others did not, and were shut out of the wedding feast when the bridegroom came: “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (v. 13). This is what the author of Hebrews is urging upon us. You set a better watch for that Day together, than if you drift apart.  

Polemical Part

Objection 1. “The charge to meet together and not neglect the fellowship doesn’t mean this idea of the Lord’s Day! Where does he say this in the passage?”

Reply to Obj. 1. While it doesn’t say so in this passage, Hebrews 4 speaks of the future dimension of the Sabbath, that, “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (v. 9). It is true that the Promise Land was being talked about as a type and shadow of the saints’ everlasting rest; but it is precisely that symbolism, that keeps the ultimate fulfillment in the future, that makes the symbolic day remain in the church age. Now a full argument for the continuation and change of day of the Sabbath is a massive study — and I would very much recommend the sermon preached by Jonathan Edwards on “The Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath”1 — so instead I will have to content myself with a pragmatic argument, but one that is frankly tough to get around. In order for the elements of worship to be present for the maximum number in any church body, there has to be a regular meeting and it must be at the same time.

To the degree that either of those are missing (the elements of worship for the whole body, and the body itself) it is, to that extent, not a properly constituted church.

The truth is that without the Lord’s Day, there is no church. 

Objection 2. “If no one knows the day or the hour (Mat. 24:36) and it isn’t for us to know the times of seasons (Acts 1:7), then what sense does it make to suggest that we can see the Day drawing near?”

Reply to Obj. 2. Here again there are several answers that can be given. One is a bolt of common sense lightning. The Day is always drawing near without fail. Since the beginning of the church, either you die sometime in your first hundred years on the planet, or you will be alive when Christ returns. Either way, the Day is always pretty near, isn’t it? 

Practical Part

Use 1. For a rebuke to the “lone ranger” Christian. At the end of the day, the lone ranger Christian is no Christian at all, because you cannot say that you love Jesus if you don’t love what Jesus loves. And Jesus loves his church. How do we know that? Paul says that, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). It is his church we are talking about, and so we don’t get to pick and choose, or wait until the church meets all of our specifications.  

Use 2. For the strengthening of our ranks as we are chased into the wilderness. “Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also” (Jn. 15:20). The world must hate the church. This brief little bubble of freedom that just the past few generations have known in the West is a vapor and a dream and moment, and when the moment is gone, and the normal Christian reality sets back in, then what? Will you go to jail for Christ if you cannot go to church for him? Will you stand with the saints in the firing squad tomorrow if you can’t bear to sing next to them today? 

Use 3. For the collective learning of the hope of the Second Coming. Many of us have long been in the school of the gospel, and yet one course has often been missing from our spiritual curriculum. When you think of what to include in your gospel, do you think of the return of Jesus? I didn’t ask you when you think of your prophecy chart, where do you put the return of Jesus. I mean, where do you put the return of Jesus in your gospel? The author of Hebrews had said at the end of the previous chapter:

so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him (9:28).

Are you eagerly waiting for him and for that Day? Your worldly relations will not help stir you up to that eagerness, but to other, competing eagerness; but your brothers and sisters in your local church family will tend to point you forward to that Day. And as the world presses in, and so no longer appears as if you have any home in it, eagerness for another city will rise.

Conclusion 

So, yes, it is true that no church saves, and that no one is saved because of any merit in going to church. But it is also true that the gospel that does save is proclaimed clearly and repeatedly here, and that Jesus has promised to meet you here like nowhere else, with his means of grace. 

With nothing outside that won’t be judged, and nothing ahead but that Day, neglecting the fellowship is most unreasonable. You want to spend your days of rest where Christ is found. 

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1. Jonathan Edwards, “The Change and Perpetuity of the Sabbath”