“We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away….How shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him” (Hebrews 2:1,3).
The greatest danger we face isn’t that we will openly denounce Christ. We may even say good things about Him, such as He was a great teacher. That isn’t the message He brought. He was a good teacher, but His message was that He came as a Savior to die in our place and cleanse us from sin. We drift away from that message when we ignore it or misrepresent it.
C. S. Lewis made a telling comment on the pure message of the gospel. “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must take your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” Jesus came to bring us salvation. Here it is described as a great salvation. What could be greater than a salvation that changes our position from being enemies of God to being part of His eternal family?
Why do we encourage daily Bible reading and prayer? Because during the course of a day currents will come that could cause us to drift and neglect the most important truths to us. It’s important for all of us to continue to “pay careful attention to” the message we have heard about Jesus and His great salvation.
