Heb 2:1 Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. ________________________________________________________________________

I'm glad to know that we serve a God that is alive and all powerful! Our God is not a God who is limited by height nor depth. There has never been nor will there ever be a situation that is to hard for Him to work out! There is nobody like Him in the universe and He does not have to answer to anyone! He is God and God alone and all power and wisdom belongs to our great faithful and just judge of the earth, Jesus Christ! It is human nature to immediately point out why something will not work. It is human to try to find a flaw in a miracle. It is common for humans to assume that their problem is inevitable and much too hard to be fixed or resolved! But I'm here to remind us that God is able to do "exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think:"

But God is only able to do such great things in our life "according to the power that worketh in us!" That is, God is not limited by your problems but by what is or is not working inside you! God is limited by a lack of faith in Him! He cannot move in your life unless you have faith! And so we find that this great God of glory who knows no bounds and who can calm the hurricane with a single command can yet be limited to work in people's lives simply because of their unbelief! You must have faith to please God! You must have faith even in bad situations! God is not asking for you to work it out on your own or come up with your own answer: He is asking you to simply have faith! And yet it's when most Christians are going through something in their life that they tend to not have faith! I've had people tell me "I can't understand what's going on or see how it's going to work out!" And fret and complain about things in their life. Of course you are not going to understand how everything is going to work out: if you understood the future, then you would not be living by faith! Scripture says that "the just will live by faith." "The just" are those who will live right with God. The first step to living right with God is to relinquish control of your life to God and place it in His hands and to be able to do that, you've got to not be able to have everything figured out! And that's why when people begin to draw closer to the Lord, the more topsy-turvy their life becomes! It's when you are doing everything that you know to do that you tend to be the most uncertain about the future. It is when you are closest to God that you will be the most unsure. People who already have their future mapped out and have figured out where they are going and what they are planning to do spiritually in the next three to five years and are extremely confident that they will perform exactly as they have said tend to miss the will of God because when you live by faith you know in the back of your mind that it will probably not work out according to our fleshly plans! Not that planning is wrong, but I have found that when I am closest to God, I tend to be skeptical about my personal plans and am a lot less disappointed when my plans fall through. Only when I am eagerly pushing my fleshly goals am I devastated when they fall through! Walking by faith does not mean that everything will go smoothly but that you will continue to trust God no matter what!

So faith is everything in God's kingdom and the scripture says that we get faith by "hearing the Word of God:"

There is power in hearing the Word of God! There is power in responding and submitting to the preached Word of God! Why? Because it brings faith, and faith removes the limitations in our life of what God can do! With faith ALL things are possible! And many people limit God in their life because they do not know much of the Word of God. The vast majority of people walking around this earth never feel the presence of God and have never received the gift of the Holy Ghost! The vast majority of this earth will die without ever having felt the cleansing power of being baptized in the name of Jesus' Christ and learn the true meaning of Calvary! Most people alive today will never see a notable miracle in their own life! Why? Is God not able to save them, forgive them, or to work out the situations in their life? NO, that 's not the problem! The problem is that they have limited God in their lives by not hearing and understanding the Word of God and implementing it in their lives! They do not understand what God can do, so they do not have faith for what God wants to do! The easiest way to limit God in an unbeliever's life is to keep them from hearing the preached or taught Word of God and so the devil tries his best to keep the vast majority of people from ever hearing it! If they do not hear it, they will not have faith. If they do not have faith, then they limit God in their lives! The devil is convinced of the power of the Word of God so he does not want people to hear it! That's why the devil will always provide an excuse if you are looking for one not to come to Bible study or come to church! He knows the power of the Word of God!

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But what about us here today? Most of us have heard enough scriptures to save the world! My heart was touched by the story of the man in a missionary report from ???????. He has been faithful to God and trusted in God despite having only heard the truth preached to him for ?????? days! Do you know why he was able to hold on? Because he never forgot was had been taught to him in those few precious days!

Can I preach to myself a little? With as many sermons and studies that I have heard, there is no reason for God to be limited in my life. I should see the supernatural in my life with no limitations. I got to thinking this week about how many sermons that I have heard in my life. Next month I will be exactly 26 years and 10 months old. I have missed going to church three times a week in my life maybe 10 times. That is 156 sermons a year which adds up to 4,096 sermons in regular services in my lifetime of 26 years and 10 months. From the age of 2 to 18, I never missed a yearly Camp Meeting or Youth Camp which adds 384 sermons. Also, I have been to at least 13 ministerial conferences, 15 men's conferences, 4 women's conferences, and over 20 various conferences and retreats. With an average of 8 sermons per conference, that adds 416 more sermons. I can remember four notable revivals of great length in my life where we had church on off nights, and they add 80 more sermons. In Bible College, we had 6 services a week for the 9 months of the school semester and I had at least 10 hours of Bible classes a week. That adds at least 1,080 sermons to the mix for a grand total of 6,056 sermons that I have heard in my life not counting any tapes or videos of services that I have listened to!

Am I trying to impress you with my scriptural upbringing? No, actually I'm preaching conviction to myself! If faith cometh by hearing the word of God, and the Word of God comes from preaching, then I ought to have enough faith to trust God through anything! Why do I limit God in my life? Why do I not see the hand of the miraculous in my life more often? Am I really successful? Actually what I have achieved in my life seems pretty small when I realize how much Word has gone into my life! Actually my preaching seems sort of boring and not really dynamic when I realize how much I should know! Actually the amount of people that we have seen filled with the Holy Ghost this year looks small compared to what I have seen in my life! With so much preaching having come into my life, then why are their times that I have doubted the will of God and had a moment of weakness in my faith!? For that matter, why do I still have to work continually to trust completely someone who has never let me down!? A lack of the Word isn't the problem so why is God been limited! Because of this one thing: Human beings tend to forget about what they have learned and tend to forget about what God has done! Even though I have seen a lot and heard a lot, yet in my humanity I tend to forget about the promises of God in a time of need! The easiest way to limit God as a Christian is to forget what He has said!

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In Genesis chapter 40 and 41, we find that Joseph was in prison in Egypt for a crime that he did not commit and the king's baker and butler were throne into jail with him. They both had dreams and, realizing that God was with Joseph, came to him to ask him to interpret their dreams. Joseph told the baker, that his dream was bad news and that he would be killed shortly by the king. But Joseph told the butler that his dream was good news and that the king would soon forgive him and restore him to his position. But Joseph added one thing: "when God does this for you and you are back in the palace, remember me to the king and mention my plight to him." The scriptures say that:

It was not until two years later when God had sent another dream to Pharaoh, that the butler remembered Joseph and his promise to him in the prison! Through his remembering, Joseph was given an opportunity to be used by God and interpret the dream and eventually become second-in-command of all of Egypt! The man worthy and able to rule Egypt for Pharaoh was sitting in prison because of one man's forgetfulness of what he had heard!

Can I preach to us today!? Some of the people in your family and at your work that you think are hopeless cases are only in prison because you have forgotten that God can save anybody! There is a tendency to look at others and their faults and how they are bound up in the prison of sin and we immediately decide for ourselves that they are not interested in God or are not able to be changed! But have you forgotten where God brought you from? Have you forgotten that we serve a God that is ALL powerful!? That person in your family that seems locked up permanently in sin's dungeon could be the very person that God has ordained to be the greatest preacher that ever lived!!! That druggie that has never amounted to anything could be the key to end-time revival in America! That businessman that is so consumed with making money and doesn't have time for God could be God's chosen spokesperson for this area! But our problem is that we limit God by focusing on our situation so much that we forget about what God has promised and what God can do! How many people are locked in sin's prisons today because a Christian has forgotten that the scriptures say that Jesus can change anybody and every situation!!? In the words of our text, we have "limited God" because we "remembered not" what He has done and promised to do!

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Don't beat yourself up too bad: it's a common trick that Satan has pulled over everyone's eyes! But do your best never to forget that the easiest way to limit God is to forget about what He has said and done!

Think about the Israelites. God delivered them from Egypt with 10 great plagues. After the frogs and the lice and the locusts and the darkness and the flies and the death of every first-born male in Egypt, Pharaoh finally did the unthinkable and let millions of people, his free labor, go! Moses follows the direction of God and leads them to a place where they are between two mountains and the Red Sea in front of them. Pharaoh rethinks his decision and sends every soldier and chariot in Egypt after them from the backside! The people began screaming "have you brought us out here to die?" It's been less than a day and they have already forgotten about the great miracles that God has done! They got so focused on their situation and the hopelessness of their situation and they began to remember how mighty the Egyptian army was that they forgot about God's promise to them that "I will set you free!"

One of the easiest ways to limit God is to get so focused on how strong the situation is against you or how hopeless it seems in your life that you forget about the fact that God has promised you victory! God had promised to deliver Israel from Egypt, so forget about how hopeless it looks, can God lie!? Did He change His mind? No, it's just that the children of Israel FORGOT exactly what He had said! They were so focused on their situation that they could not focus on His Word!

Jesus told the disciples to get in the boat and "let's go to the other side." While the disciples steered, Jesus went to sleep. This huge storm came up and all of a sudden we see the disciples frantically waking up Jesus from a perfectly good nap saying "how can you sleep, don't you even care that we are about to all die!?" Jesus gets up and rubs His eyes and calms the storm:

In other words, Jesus was saying "did you forget that I told you we were going to the other side?" Where is your faith in my Word? They got their eyes on the storm and forgot that when Jesus says you are going to the other side, then it doesn't matter how bad the situation, you are going to the other side! In Matthew, the account of Jesus being woke up to calm the storm is in chapter 8. In chapter 14, we find that Jesus tells them to get in the boat again and cross the sea. Jesus says "I'm going to pray alone for a while and I'll meet up with you later, you guys go on across." They start across again and another monster storm comes up and again the disciples are "spazzing" out with fear and this time Jesus comes walking on the water to them and the scripture says that they were "troubled." Why were they freaked out? Because they had already forgotten the other storm! If Jesus tells you that you are going to the other side, then you are going to the other side! And I'm here to tell somebody here something: just because you have lived for Jesus Christ a while does not mean that you are not going to have trials or storms! But stop looking at the storm and get your eyes on the promises of the Word of God! If God has spoken to you in His Word that you can have joy, then there is not a devil in hell that can stop you from having joy! If God has promised you that you can have peace and victory, then no enemy can take it away from you! If God has said that you are going to make it, then as long as you do not limit God by doubt, you are going to make it! But the easiest way to perish in the storm is to limit God by forgetting what He has said and done in the past! Don't forget about what God has said! Our text said that the Hebrews "limited the Holy One of Israel" by "remembering not His hand!"

You know, some people get into a situation and talk about how bad it really is until they convince themselves that it is hopeless! Where's your faith!? Have you forgotten that God is able!? Why don't you start talking about what God is able to do, and how great He is!?

You've seen those "worse-case scenario" books? I can think of several scriptures in the Bible that would be my "worst-case scenario" to be in. One is the story of Jonah. He has disobeyed God, got thrown over board into the ocean, swallowed by a big fish and is in the belly of the whale at the bottom of the ocean in the dark being digested! That's a pretty bad situation! I can't say that I've ever been in a bigger jam than that one! And the crazy thing to me is the following scripture that Jonah wrote:

I want you to realize that three verses after Jonah prayed this prayer, the fish vomited him up! Yet the scriptures say that he was in the belly of the whale for three days!! It was three days before Jonah "remembered the Lord!" You know why and what Jonah's problem was? He didn't understand the mercy of God! He didn't want to go preach to the Ninevites because he couldn't understand why God would forgive such a wicked people! And for two days, the devil beat him up with "God won't forgive you because you rejected His will and you messed up!" The problem was that Jonah got so caught up in thinking about the mistake that he had made, that he forgot about how great God's mercy was! When he finally remembered, God forgave him, the whale spat him up, and Jonah went to preach forgiveness to Nineveh, but then did only a half-hearted job and got mad at God when God forgave them! He still smelled like whale insides and already he had forgotten the power of the mercy of God! Oh, church we can never forget the power of God's mercy or His ability to reach to the lowest point and save someone! You haven't gone beyond God's mercy today: He will forgive you, but you must not limit Him by forgetting about how He said "His mercy endureth forever!"

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We know how that God delivered the Israelites out of their quandary. God parts the Red Sea, drowns the Egyptian army, speaks to them from the mountain and gives them His commandments on how He wants them to live. There are 10 of them that are especially important to remember each day and everybody will be fine if they will concentrate on remembering 10 commandments! Even today, the world would be a better place if people would live by just those 10 commandments, but that's another sermon. Out of the ten, only one gave a commandment to remember something, the fourth one:

Not to hard to remember, right? One day a week you do not work and you spend it at the house of God. Yet, you do not have to look far for somebody to forget about it. In Numbers chapter 15, we find some idiot that decided to gather sticks on the Sabbath day. They catch him and they stone him to death! Don't tell me that not remembering the Word of God can't hurt you! Keep in mind that this man has seen Miriam get leprosy for murmuring against the man of God. He has seen thousands killed because they murmured for the quail. He has seen the thousands killed for worshipping the golden calf. He knows that obeying these commandments openly will mean death, and he's not in a forest where he can be hid, but in a wilderness in the open! This man was not trying to be secretive and purposefully break the commandments of God, he just forgot! But by forgetting the Word of God, he brought judgment into his life!

And after this man forgot the commandment of the Lord, God spoke to Moses and told him this:

That is, the Israelites will now add a fringe of blue cloth around the bottom hem of their garments as a reminder that they must remember ALL the commandments of the Lord! From that day on out, the Israelites were to always place a blue fringe on their hems. As they looked at the hem, they would be constantly reminded of God's Word! Can I tell you that this is the exact reason why you need to pray every day?! Blue is the color of the heavens and the sky. Every day you need to take time and look toward the heavens in prayer and remind yourself of God's Word! You need to take time out and meditate upon His Word every day! You not only need to remind yourself constantly of the promises of God but also of the commandments. The Psalmist said:

That's why we need a daily prayer and devotion of God's Word it is a reminder to us lest we forget the Word of God! The blue hem around the edge of the garment was a constant reminder of God's Commandments! It represented the need to remember what God had spoken!

Fast forward to Jesus' day. We find one day a certain woman that had an issue of blood for twelve years. The scriptures say that she came to Jesus because "she had heard of Jesus!"

This woman had come to Jesus because she heard someone tell her what Jesus could do! She had been to every doctor and she had nothing to lose! But I want you to notice that she was healed not just because she touched Jesus' garment, but because she touched a particular part of His garment:

She touched the "hem of his garment!" She touched that part of His garment that was a reminder of God's Word! And when she touched that blue fringe upon His hem, virtue flowed out of Him and she was instantly healed! There is power in remembering the Word of God! There is healing that comes when we go back and remind ourselves of what God has done for us!

It was later that others heard about what Jesus had done for her and begin to follow the same pattern:

Where did they get the faith to be healed? By remembering what God had done for someone else! If you are in a situation today where man says that it is impossible, you cannot forget what God has done in the past!! You also need to remember His commandments! The easiest way to limit God is to not remember what He has done for others! If God healed someone else, then He will do it for you! It does not have to be something that you've faced before! The scriptures say that God is no respecter of persons! That means that what He did for someone else, He will do for you IF you will take the limitations off of Him! Remember what He has done in the past and realize that He is able to do the same for you!

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The easiest way to limit God is by forgetting! Sometime we forget about what He has done because we are too focused on our situation. Other times we limit God by forgetting what the Word of God says. Some times we forget what God has done for others, but the final point is that sometimes it is the BLESSINGS of God that cause us to forget!

In his farewell speech, Moses told the children of Israel right before they went into the promised land:

Moses knew that after they children of Israel got past focusing on the giants of the land and had made sure that they knew His laws, that they could forget about what God could do simply because of the blessings! The fact that you are here proves that you can live for God during the fight, but can you live for God during a good week!? Will you still pray and come to church even when there is no obvious enemy against you!?

That is why the writer of Hebrews warned the Jewish Christians in our other text not to let the things which they had heard "slip."

The word "ought" here means "absolutely necessary" or "must." There are seven things in scripture that the New Testament says that a Christian "ought" to do: Love one another (I John 4:7-21), always pray (Luke 18:1-14), pay tithes (Matthew 23:23), wash one another's feet (John 13:1-17), walk as Christ walked (I John 2:1-6), to be holy (I Peter 1:14-16), and to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard! We cannot let the Word of God that we have received in our life to slip! We must guard them with great care!

Christians tend to be careful when they are in a struggle but tend to let things slip when things are smoother! But we must give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at ANY time, we should let them slip! You've constantly got to be on guard against forgetting the promises, word, and commandment of God! For it is possible to limit God in a storm, but it is also possible to limit God because of the blessings causing us to forget what God want to do in our life! It was while he was resting that David sinned with Bathsheba. It was after the flood was over that Noah got drunk. It was after the persecution had subsided somewhat in Asia that Demas backslid and left the Apostle Paul. If things are going great in your life, you still need to be faithful and praise God and give him more of your heart: we cannot let these things slip! Do not be like Israel who allowed the blessings of the Promised Land to cause them to forget about God and His commandments and His will in their life! Why do so many Christians who have the "promise," the Holy Ghost, not see the unlimited power of God in their life? Because God delivers them from sin and begins to bless them and then they do not feel as if they need to be as faithful to God as they used to be! They don't see the need to praise God like they used to or give God as much! But remember what God has done for you and don't ever forget it! When you allow yourself to forget, you have limited God in your life!

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There is so much more that I could go into but I don't have the time. Needless to say, every time somebody turned their back on God or limited Him in any way, it was because they "remembered not!" I want to have the testimony of the writer of Psalms 44 when he said:

I must not forget God and what He can do and has done in my life!

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I close with this: After Jesus fed the five thousand with just two loaves and fishes, they had twelve baskets of bread left over! One basket for each disciple! They got on the ship to cross over to the country of the Gadarenes and the scriptures say the disciples forgot the bread! When they became hungry, Jesus asked them how many baskets that they had left over! If we are not careful, we can get so used to the blessings of God that we forget to take the bread of God with us! Bread represents the Word of God in scripture! It is a holiday weekend and God has been moving mighty in our services! We must realize the seriousness of giving a more earnest heed to what we have heard! When we come to church we need to realize the importance of what God is trying to speak to us! No sermon or study is ignorable! No lesson learned or miracle can be forgotten!

If two loaves and a few fishes could feed 5,000, then what could Jesus have done with twelve baskets full of bread!? We do not know because the disciples limited Jesus by forgetting to bring them! The easiest way to limit God in our lives is to forget about His ability and His Word! Hopefully after this sermon, you will give the more earnest heed to the things which you have heard!