Help with Being Holy: The Means of Grace — Other Christians

Hebrews
Written By Steve Estes

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Speaker: Steve Estes
Scripture: Hebrews 10:23-25
October 2, 2022

Hebrews 10:23-25: Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Sermon Outline

1. Great danger in Hebrews: Leaving the Christian faith

  • Falling away

  • Objection: I could never drift

  • Objection: True Christians can't lose salvation

2. Great need: Perseverance in the Christian faith

3. How Christians persevere in the faith

  • Encouraging one another

  • Spurring one another

  • Meeting together

4. Why Christians neglect meeting together

  • Persecution

  • Attraction to the world

  • Dissatisfaction with their church

  • Weariness, laziness

  • Prefers private study of scripture

  • Family and/or friends

5. Meeting together grows more urgent as Jesus' return draws nearer

Benediction

Hebrews 10:35-36: So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he was promised.

Steve Estes

Steve Estes has been senior pastor at Brick Lane Community Church in Elverson, Pennsylvania, for over thirty-five years. 

Steve’s books and other writings began with his longtime friendship with Joni Eareckson Tada. As teenagers, they grappled with why God allowed Joni’s paralysis in a swimming accident in the Chesapeake Bay. Steve left for college . . . they kept in touch . . . she liked the style of his letters. When her 1976 autobiography Joni spawned thousands of reader responses, she asked Steve to join her in crafting a follow-up. The result was A Step Further in 1978.

Later, Wycliffe Bible Translators commissioned Steve to write the biography of former college friend Chet Bitterman, a Wycliffe linguist who was kidnapped and murdered by political terrorists in Colombia in 1981. Other books and articles followed, including When God Weeps (with Joni) and A Better December (a giveaway book for non-Christian friends at Christmas.)

Steve was educated at Westminster Theological Seminary, Columbia Bible College and Jerusalem University College in Israel. He has taught homiletics at Westminster and is a board member of the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation.

But Steve would say his most significant life achievement was persuading college classmate Verna Stoltzfus to marry him in 1974.  They now have eight children and more grandchildren than can fit in a van.

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