Hebrews 6:9-20
March 30, 2025
preached by Pastor Ryan Bouton
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Time of Reflection Quotations

“Religion tells us that we do not have power over the world, and that we must learn to accept our limitations and to recognize that our salvation depends on the God who will rescue us. When we pray we do not command the world to obey us; on the contrary, we humbly acknowledge our lack of power, and ask God to intervene on our behalf. Prayer is a recognition of our weakness, and a resolve at the same time to deserve God’s help.

In this respect prayers are the very opposite of spells. The one who casts a spell is assuming power over reality. He has no need of God since he is God: he is assuming the powers of the creator and subduing life and matter to his will. Magic, in this sense, is a kind of blasphemy, and when alchemy was condemned by the medieval Church it was as an attempt to dispense with God.”

~ Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption by Roger Scruton (1944–2020), an English philosopher, a social critic, journalist, and musician

“When we think his mercy is clean gone, and that we ourselves are free among the dead, and we think of the number that he remembers no more, then he can reach us, and cause that again we stand before him. He can reach you, even then, when you think your way is hid from the Lord, and your judgment passed over from your God. O the length of the saving arm of God! As yet you are within the reach of his reach; do not go about to measure arms with God, as some good men are apt to do: I mean, do not conclude, that because you cannot reach God by your short stump, therefore he cannot reach you with his long arm. Look again, ‘Have you an arm like God’ (Job 40:9), an arm like his for length and strength? It becomes you, when you cannot perceive that God is within the reach of your arm, then to believe that you are within the reach of his; for it is long, and none knows how long.”

~ John Bunyan (1628-1688), an English writer and Puritan preacher, Sermon on Ephesians 3:18,19

Sermon Passage

Hebrews 6:9-20 (ESV)

⁹ Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation. ¹⁰ For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do. ¹¹ And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, ¹² so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

¹³ For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, ¹⁴ saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” ¹⁵ And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. ¹⁶ For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation. ¹⁷ So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, ¹⁸ so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. ¹⁹ We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, ²⁰ where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.