Why Do We Ignore this Bible Verse?
I’m in Sunday School this morning; we’re engaged in a study of Jeremiah, and it’s a good class, taught by a well-prepared teacher and filled with folks fluent in the Bible. The teacher referenced Hebrews 3:13-14, which reads,
12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
My hand shot up to ask a question (which I admitted was really only tangentially related to the topic he was discussing, which centered on falling away from God), and it’s basically this:
Why do we effectively ignore the first part of verse 13, which says that we are to “exhort one another every day“?
I have an answer, but first I’ll run it up the flagpole for those of you who may have rediscovered my blog and would care to comment.
Thanks for the verses, and welcome back!
Right now I’m most interested in verse 12, since I have a friend counseling two friends who are struggling with their faith. I see verse 13 as the preventative medicine to keep away the problems of verse 12. I wonder what “exhort one another every day” actually means. In a family living together I could see this being straight forward. In today’s church, people often live far from each other and the local church making it harder to have meaningful interaction daily, but I suspect the author is intending more than just the pastor emailing everyone a Bible verse of the day.