Pastor John will be preaching this morning from Hebrews 6, 9 through 12.

If you'd like to follow along in your Bibles, if you don't have them, there are Bibles in the pew in front of you.

Again, the text is Hebrew 6, 9 through 12.

Though we speak thus, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things that belong to salvation.

For God is not so unjust as to overlook your work and the love which you showed for his sake in serving the Saints as you still do.

And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness in realizing the full assurance

of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those

who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

The reason I chose this text is because on Tuesday of this week at the Pastors Conference,

Sam Storms, the Pasker from Oklahoma who was speaking to us used it as the foundation of his lecture and what

leaped out of the text to me was something I'm always on the alert for when reading the Bible, namely the texts which show the combination

or the relationship between God-centeredness and sensitivity to people. We are always prone to separate these things. We're always

being tempted by Satan to put asunder what God has joined

together. We're always being pressed to think that if you're going to be a radically God-centered people, you will probably not

be very good at serving people, loving people, being sensitive people, caring for people.

Or if you are radically people-oriented people, you probably won't be very good at worship,

and you probably will use God rather than worship God.

Satan really wants us to make this an either or proposition.

He wants us to opt. He really doesn't care which one you go for either. I don't think.

He didn't care if you'd be a God-centered person who doesn't love people or a people-centered person who doesn't worship God and just uses God, just as long as you don't get it together.

Say it be just fun.

You'll be happy.

...