TEXT: Hebrews 12:1

SUBJECT: Follow the Lamb #14: Hindrances to Avoid

Tonight and next week, I hope to finish our study of Follow the Lamb. The book was written by Horatius Bonar, about 1840, to get new believers into the habits of discipleship.

My sermons on the book are not nearly as good as the book itself. I encourage you to get the book and to read it. In my edition, it’s only 63 pages, divided into fifteen chapters. Four pages before going to work or school—or maybe at bedtime—will do you good. There are no big words in the book, and nothing complicated or hard to understand. If you like to read, you’ll like this book. If you don’t like to read, you’ll dislike it less than most others.

Tonight’s chapter is the next-to-last one and it’s entirely negative. It’s not nasty or scolding at all, but it sounds a loud and clear warning against the sins and bad habits to which every one of us is prone. The title speaks for itself, Hindrances to Avoid.

At the top of the chapter, Bonar narrows down his subject,

From this we learn what the chapter is not about. It’s not warning us about going to hell or sending others there by our bad examples. We should beware of these things, of course, but they’re not what Bonar is getting at here. He’s not talking about the gross sins that are incompatible with being saved.

No, he’s thinking of smaller sins—sins that are often invisible to us—that, nonetheless, stunt our growth in grace; they keep us from being what we would be without them. Using another figure of speech, they cut down the fruits of the Spirit, both in the amount produced and in its quality. Think of how much more often you’d witness if you weren’t so scared! And, if you weren’t so selfish with your time, how much better your witnessing would be.

Some things hinder our discipleship. The Lord wants us to avoid them—not because He’s a killjoy, but because He wants us to find our happiness the same way He found His—by following God.

Bonar names six things that hinder us most.

The first is

Are we believers or unbelievers? If we’re saved, we’re believers, because that’s what it means to be saved—to believe in Christ. He who believes is not condemned, but he who believes not is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

Bonar is using the word in a somewhat different way. The poet Charles Williams spoke of disbelief and unbelief. The former—he said—is to mentally reject the truths of God. It is to say No to the Gospel or to deny the existence of God and so on. Christians are not guilty of this; we’re not ‘disbelievers’.

But we can be unbelievers, in the sense that we live as though the Word of God were not true. We don’t take His promises seriously. Or His warnings

The Bible plainly and often teaches that sin is hurtful; it hurts the sinner, other people, and God Himself. If I asked you to stand up now and say, Sin is hurtful, you’d do it sincerely. But—under the power of temptation—you don’t believe it. You think others cannot get away with it, but you can.

The Bible also teaches that happiness is only found in holiness. You believe this too. But, when holiness is hard—when it means giving up your money or your plans or your privacy—you don’t believe it.

You believe it’s an honor to suffer for Christ’s sake. But when the opportunity comes up, you duck it.

These are examples of practical unbelief. And nothing will more hinder your growth in grace. Mark 6:5-6, speaking of our Lord Jesus (who is Almighty God), says,

Psalm 78:41 goes even further. The Jews’ unbelief in the wilderness, ‘Limited the Holy One of Israel’.

I don’t know how to explain these verses, but I refuse to explain them away! Somehow or other, our unbelief hinders the work God wants to do in our lives. Thus, practical unbelief stunts our growth in holiness and usefulness. It is high time we started acting on what we believe!

Unbelief is the most common—and most serious—hindrance to avoid. If you want to follow the Lamb.

The second hindrance to avoid is

The love he refers to is brotherly love. What we do for others depends a good deal on how much we love them. We’ll help nearly anyone in a crisis. But what about helping others day to day? Doing the little things? Remembering them in your prayers? Watching to see if they’re depressed? Helping an overloaded mom with a day’s babysitting? Pitching in when a man has got a big job around the house? Spending a few minutes catching up with friends who moved away? Sending a sympathy card to the couple who just lost their son?

Brotherly love will stimulate good works. But if we don’t have any of it, we’ll live for ourselves alone. And that means bearing little or no fruit. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. You don’t have to hate somebody to ignore him, but to notice him, you have to love him.

Although we are commanded to love one another, we cannot generate this love on our own. Bonar tells us where to get it—

We get love straight from Christ. We get it by meditating long and hard on His love for us. It’s hard to remember Christ thinking of me and then forget others. It’s hard to think of His patience and pardoning mercy, and then stay irritated all the time and hold grudges.

The phrase I like best under this heading is, deal with Jesus personally. The Lord is a Person—a person who can be listened to and talked to. So are you talking to Him about your lack of love? It’s easy to complain to Him about your wife’s lack of love or everybody at church’s lack of love, but what about your own? The very complaint proves your love is not up to snuff. And, after telling Him about your lukewarm love, are you listening to Him for what to do about it?

Doctrinally, we say the Bible is the Word of Christ. But do we remember that when we’re reading it? Are we listening to Christ? Are we believing His promises and taking His warnings seriously? Are we simply obeying His commands? Or trying to follow His example?

If you want to follow the Lamb, you must avoid this lack of love.

The third hindrance to avoid is also the hardest to see,

He has a good deal more to say on the subject, but these few lines could keep us thinking—and repenting—for some time. Nothing gets in the way of your spiritual growth more than…you. Bonar names seven things about you that hinder your holiness.

The first is self-will. This means doing what you want to do rather than what Christ wants you to do. Doing your own thing doesn’t have to mean doing a wicked thing. Take spending. There’s nothing wrong with buying gadgets (if you can afford them). No man can tell you to not buy them. But before you do, you should inquire of the Lord. Ask Him if He has any objections to buying that cell phone with built-in microwave oven. Or, if He’d rather you spend your money on something else.

If you mean it, He’ll answer you. He may not speak the answer, but He’ll find a way to let you know. A verse in the Bible; a godly example; an urgent need; a new contentment with your cell phone without built-in microwave, a news report that the hand-held ovens are dangerous, and so on.

Jesus Christ never had an impure thought. Not once in His life did He want to do something wrong. But He didn’t pursue His own wishes. He was not only free of sin, but of Self.

The second is self-sufficiency. If doing what you want to do is bad, trusting yourself is worse. But many Christians do this. Like the Pharisees, they trust themselves that they are righteous and despise others.

Theoretically, they don’t believe this. They believe All have sinned and come short of the glory of God; they believe Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of Lights with whom is no variation or shadow of turning.

But their attitudes contradict their words. Because they’re not tempted by the noisy sins of lust or anger or profane talking, they don’t notice the quiet sins to which they are subject. Like pride, self-righteousness, contempt, and being judgmental.

If any man were sufficient unto Himself, it was our Lord. Yet He put His trust in God and lived graciously with sinners.

Self-glory, self-importance, and self-seeking speak for themselves, but look at the last one: self-brooding.

This is to feel sorry for yourself: to go over the wrongs others have done you, to blame your failures on other people, and to excuse your sins because you’ve been kicked around all your life.

At first glance, the self-brooder seems to be the opposite of the boaster, but in fact, they’re one and the same: for both think only of themselves. One loudly, the other quietly, but both are turned inward.

If you want to grow in grace, you have to deny yourself—not denying things for yourself (like gum or beer or TV), but something way harder to give up: Yourself. High self-esteem and low self-esteem are not opposites; what’s opposite to both is no self-esteem. Forgetting yourself and living for others—both human and Divine.

The fourth hindrance to holiness is

By ‘covetousness’ Bonar means both overspending and underspending—throwing your money away and also hoarding it. Why does this stunt growth? Because it fixes your attention on money (or the things money can buy) rather than on God and other people.

Oh, what doesn’t the love of money do to you? It makes you worry, for one thing, or feel too secure for another. It makes you look down on those who have less than you do and envy those who have more. It makes you work too many hours and spend too little time with your family. It make you unable—or unwilling—to give, and, consequently, less interested in the church, in missions, and the poor. It’s bad for you health and your church life, and like all other idolatries, it finally demands a human sacrifice.

If the love of money is hindering your holiness, do something about it! Put a check in the offering box before you go home tonight. Throw the catalogues away, get on a budget, help somebody.

The fifth hindrance is

Many strong things could be said against pride—not just the arrogance of unbeliever, but our own as well. Christians are not immune to pride; Satan is so cleaver, he uses grace (which demolishes pride) to build it up. We’re proud of ourselves because we know that salvation is by grace alone—and that no one is worthy of it.

But, if salvation is by grace, and if no one is worthy of it, why do we pose and speak and feel as though we are?

But of all the awful things we can say about pride, none is more on-target than what Bonar says: the more pleased we are with ourselves, the less pleased we are with Christ.

And anything that pulls us away from the Lord Jesus has got to be deadly to growth in grace.

The last hindrance to maturity is

By ‘easy-mindedness’, Bonar means ‘lukewarmness’. A lukewarm Christian is for holiness and against sin—kind of! He wants to be holy, but not to ‘pursue holiness’; he wants to avoid sin, but not to ‘flee temptation’; he favors missions, as long as he doesn’t have to pay for them; he’s for evangelism, as long as others are doing it. We may not admire the lukewarm Christian, but we find him tolerable.

But the Lord Jesus doesn’t! He says to the lukewarm church, ‘I wish you were hot or cold. But because you are lukewarm, I am going to spew you out of my mouth’.

The world, the flesh and the devil mean business. We will not overcome them unless we do too. That does not mean fanaticism or hysteria, but it does mean zeal and guts. We will not grow in grace until we are on fire for God.

Are you growing in grace? Are you following the Lamb better today than you were last year? If you’re not, you need to ask yourself: Why not?

Backsliding differs from person-to-person, but Bonar’s chapter is surprisingly complete. Nearly all spiritual decline is the result of the things he names—either one of them in particular, or some combination of them. Which one has got a hold of you?

Unbelief? Lack of love? Selfishness? Love of money? Pride? Lukewarmness?

These are not the sins of other people; they’re our sins—my sins, your sins. These are the things that make us less than what we could be—and should be. These are the things that dishonor Christ and undercut His Lordship. So, it’s time to repent of them. The love of God be with you. Amen.