Hebrews 3: Don't go back

I think there's a temptation every time you go forward.

When you're making progress, things always seem to be harder before they get easy.  Try to hit a baseball for the first time.  It's hard.  Keep at it long enough and it becomes easy (well...not for me...but I've been told it's easy for some people).

In his great book, The Dip, Seth Godin talks about this resistance.  He claims - and I think he's right - that you have to go through the resistance to get great at something.  And the resistance knocks people off of the path right and left.  That's why so few people are great, are at the top of their fields.

In Hebrews 3, the author of Hebrews is writing to people who are in the midst of the dip, who are experiencing resistance and are eye-balling the door.

I don't know what they were tempted to go back to.  Maybe it was a legalistic religion.  Maybe one that worships angels or gods in plurality.  Whatever it was, the temptation to go back was strong.

I feel that same temptation sometimes.  I catch myself, rarely but often enough, daydreaming about a different life.  "If I hadn't decided Jesus, what would my life look like?" I ask myself.  But that daydream is a lie.

When I imagine that life, I don't see the times God intervened, helped me.  I forget the crippling depression in Trent Drive Hall.  I forget the nightmares and loneliness at St. Margarets Place.  I forget the rising anger, the crimson haze over my eyes, the near fight off of Gunn Highway.  God impacted my life in each of those place, for the better.

In Hebrews 3:13, the author of Hebrews talks of sin's hardening deceitfulness.  Sin lies to us, tells us that we can go back, that it will be better back there, wherever "back there" is.  This hardens us to what God would have for us in the present and calls us to in the future.  But the gospel of Jesus calls out to us: "Don't go back.  It isn't better back there.  Life is here.  Life is forward.  Hold fast to Christ.  Don't go back."

Don't go back.