This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Hi, this is Pastor Tom and I want to welcome you to Hebrews chapter 6. This is
day one of our look through this great chapter. We're going to look at verses 1
to 3 today.

And as we look through this chapter, we're going to focus this week on our need
for hope. Particularly the last part of this chapter talks a lot about hope, but
really when you take a close look at it, the beginning of the chapter is also
about hope. It doesn't seem so at first glance, but we're going to see that
there is a depth to hope that is in the often confusing words of the first part
of this chapter that can really make a deep impact on your life.

So let me begin by reading verses 1 to 3 of Hebrews chapter 6. "Therefore, let
us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying
again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death and of faith in
God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the
dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so.

" How do you have hope in your life? How do you live with hope? Well, in these
verses we see one of the first keys.

We're going to see five of them this week, one each day. First thing, if I'm
going to live with hope, I have to number one, I have to go on to maturity. I
have to go on to maturity.

When you look at this passage, these three verses, there are really two
important things in this passage. First, you need an essential foundation, but
second, then you need to move on. First, you need an essential foundation.

He says we need to leave the elementary teachings about Christ, not laying again
the foundation. But that doesn't mean you don't need the foundation. We all have
to have the foundation.

We have to build our lives on a foundation that guides the decisions that we
make and the direction that we take. And it has to be the right foundation.
Sometimes, oftentimes, we try to build on the wrong foundations.

People try to build their lives on the foundation of the opinions of others, and
you get a lot of different opinions. So there's a lot of foundations to build
on. Or sometimes, many times, people try to make their feelings, their emotions
the foundation of their lives.

Do I feel like doing it? That's the foundation for the direction I take, the
decisions that I make. Very popular foundation.

Sometimes I feel like doing the wrong thing, don't you? Sometimes I feel like
not doing the right thing. We're all like that.

So if I make that my foundation, it's not a strong foundation. Sometimes we try
to build on the foundation of traditions. It's worked for others, so it should
work for me, but that's not a strong enough foundation to build your life on.

The only foundation and strong enough to build on is the knowledge of God. Just
like you have to know your ABCs before you can read and write, you have to know
the truth about G-O-D before you can live right, before you can live the kind of
life that God wants you to live. And the foundation here talks about very
clearly, the writer of Hebrews, he says, "Here's the foundation.

" He says, "Here's the foundation. It's the start. How you start it.

" He talks about repentance. He talks about faith. The foundation, he says,
"It's in the church.

" And he talks about baptism, becoming a part of the, recognizing that you're a
part of the body of Christ. He talks about laying out of hands, which has to do
with the ministry that we have in the body of Christ. The foundation he talks
about here is about eternity.

He talks about resurrection. He talks about judgment. Now, this isn't the entire
foundation.

He's not saying these are the only foundational things that we have to believe,
but he talks about things that we believe. And you have to build a foundation
for life. And to build a good foundation, it takes time.

It takes effort. It takes energy. To be honest, it's some tough work to build a
foundation.

To build a foundation, in reality, for a building, you have to get down, you
have to dig. But once you've built the foundation, you don't stop there. Some
people have put so much work into the foundation, it's like they want to stand
back and just enjoy the foundation the rest of their lives that they've built.

No, you build a foundation for a reason so you can build something on it. If you
and I are going to have hope, we have to move past the foundation. You have to
do this next thing.

You have to move on. Learning the elementary teaching. What if every day, in
order to learn something new, what if every day you had to go back and learn
your ABCs again?

You'd be spending all your life, all your time learning your ABCs. You couldn't
ever learn anything else. And the question behind what's being said here is, are
you having to learn the same lessons over and over and over again?

Or are there some things that you've learned that now you can build on? You can
go on to other things that God wants in your life. Things are meant to be built
on.

To move on is to build on that foundation. How do you build on that foundation?
You build on it in rich relationships, loving relationships.

You build on it in serving, in ministry. You build on it in personal growth and
change in your life. There's other ways that you build, but these three are
very, very strong ways that you build on the foundation.

In your relationships with God and others, in your ministry, and in your
personal growth. In those areas, you move on from what you believe to what you
become and how you serve. Now let me just say, as someone who has written a
doctrinal study called "Foundations," it's about building these foundations into
your life.

And so you would know, as someone who's written that, I deeply believe in laying
that foundation. But I just want to say that you can get stuck on the
foundation. You can get stuck on just looking at the foundation.

How do you know you're stuck? You know you're stuck when you're questioning and
arguing all the time about the foundation and the foundational thoughts. This is
what they were doing.

They were arguing about what these things meant rather than letting them bring
meaning into their life. They were arguing about what these things meant rather
than allowing them to bring meaning into their life. I understand we have to
discuss doctrine sometimes.

I understand we have to talk about what things mean sometimes. But I also
understand there are many people that's all they ever do. And why do we get
stuck there?

One of the reasons we get stuck there is we don't want to go on to the meaning.
We don't want to serve. We don't want to love.

We have a hard time serving and loving, so we get stuck on the arguing. Satan
would love to get you stuck in arguing. He'd love to get you stuck in
questioning because it keeps you from doing what the Lord has for you.

And we're talking about hope this week. I would say that the hope is in the
doing. The hope is in the living out what God has for you.

The hope is in seeing the fruit of what God wants to do in your life. And those
who get so stuck on arguing about beliefs that they can't live out the meaning
of those beliefs, those are people who are living a hopeless life many, many
times. They may not be honest about it.

The truth of the matter is, though, there is a loss of hope when you're not
living out who God has made you to be and what he's made you to become. So as
you and I begin this week of looking at how hope's going to happen in our lives,
one of the keys to hope is moving on, building on that foundation in your
relationships, building on that foundation in your personal growth, building on
that foundation in the way that you serve others. Let's pray right now that that
would be happening in my life, your life this week.

Lord, help me, help us to build on the foundation this week. Thank you for the
foundation. And if it hasn't been built yet, give us the diligence, the wisdom
to build it, to listen to your word, to listen to other believers.

But as it gets built, Lord, Lord, release us from the prison of learning the
same lessons over and over and over again, and then arguing about those lessons
over and over and over again. Instead, release us to that place of growth,
moving on to maturity, growing in our relationships, growing in our character,
growing in the way that we serve. I pray that for my life.

I pray that for each of our lives this week, Lord. Fill us with hope as we grow
in you, we pray. And we ask this in your name, amen.

Tomorrow, we're going to talk together about a healthy fear that leads to hope.