Bible Studies
Make Straight Paths for Your Feet (Heb. 12:12-13)
Series: Additional StudiesIntroduction:
1. This summation follows the writer’s admonition that we need to have endurance (10:35) and not shrink back. We need to live our life all the way to the end in faithfulness. 2. The summation follows chapter 11, the great chapter on faith that presents examples of individuals who endured great challenges and yet persevered. 3. In the first part of chapter 12 Jesus is presented as the example par excellenceof endurance even of the cross. He says we are to fix our eyes on Him and not grow weary and lose heart. 4. He says that God deals with us as sons disciplining us for our good because of the great love that He has for us. Therefore we should endure the discipline and allow ourselves to be trained by it that we might finally enjoy the peaceful fruit of righteousness. 5. But discipline is not easy to endure. Thus we must strengthen ourselves. He says, “Make straight paths for your feet.” It is about the making of such “straight paths” that I want to talk to you about. 6. Welcome (and appreciation for those preaching and teaching classes in my absence). Note Vacation Bible School beginning tomorrow evening.Discussion:
I. Make straight paths for your feet. Straight paths must be made.A. This means that there is an acceptance of personal responsibility in our acceptance of the discipline of the Lord.
B. We are not to regard it lightly, nor to faint when we are reproved by Him (12:5).
C. We are to “lay aside every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles us” (12:1).
1. Lay aside the doubts of “things not yet seen.”
a. Noah embraced what God told Him even though it was outside of his normal realm of experience (11:7).
b. Abraham embraced what God told Him, even though he did not know where he was going (11:8). He lived in a foreign land and dwelt in tents with his children (9).
c. Sarah received ability to conceive even beyond the proper time of life as she considered God as faithful to His promise (11). Nothing like this had happened before.
d. You are called on to believe what God says about things “you have not seen.”
1) You have not seen the creation.
2) You have not seen Christ.
3) Never experienced a miracle, nor a resurrection from the dead. Abraham trusted God even though fulfillment of His promised may have entailed raising Isaac from the dead (17-19).
4) Have never experienced the second coming of Christ.
2. Lay aside the encumbrance of delayed promises, of promises not yet received (11:13).
a. The fathers all died in faith without receiving the promises, but having only welcomed them from a distance.
b. We sometimes become impatient and want God to give us what He has promised us now. If He does not, we may question His faithfulness (cf. 2 Pet. 3:4).
c. Joseph trusted God’s promise for the long haul and gave orders for his bones to be brought from Egypt to Canaan (11:22).
3. Moses laid aside the encumbrance of riches and the pleasures of sin. He accepted instead ill-treatment, and the reproaches of Christ (11:24-26).
4. Others endured various kinds of difficulties (32-38).
5. You will experience difficulties too.
a. The difficulty of forgiving others.
b. The difficulty of disappointments and losses in life.
c. The difficulty of dealing with expectations not met as quickly as you want.
6. Will you lose faith and deny the Lord? Or choose to make straight paths for your feet?
II. Make straight paths for your feet.A. What does it mean to make straight paths?
1. In Matt. 3:3 similar language is used of the message of John the Baptist.
a. His work was to “Make ready the way of the Lord, make His paths straight!”
b. It is a quotation from Isa. 40:3-4: “Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness; make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Let every valley be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; and let the rough ground become a plain, and the rugged terrain a broad valley.”
2. A straight path is one that is level and smooth. Mountains are lowered, rough ground leveled, and debris is removed.
a. When kings traveled roads were often improved for their benefit.
b. The idea fits well with “laying aside encumbrances and the sin which so easily entangles us” (12:1).
B. Why is it that we seem to want to clutter up our way and make our road difficult? We make strait (difficult) paths rather than straight paths.
1. The way of wisdom does not impede our steps and it is not the way of stumbling (Prov. 4:10-13).
2. But the way of the wicked is the way of hardship and stumbling (Prov. 4:14-27). 3. Psa. 1.
C. The paths of life are difficult enough without our cluttering it up foolish choices.
1. Things can go from bad to worse.
2. We are to make straight paths so that the limb that is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Weak hands and feeble knees need to be strengthened not destroyed by foolish choices.
D. A straight path is made by “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has set down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Heb. 12:2-3).
John Dicus uses the illustration of a helicopter pilot trainee who was learning to fly. He was able to perform all the tasks satisfactorily except hovering. As he tried to hover he kept moving the controls, making adjustment after adjustment as the machine seemed to dance in the sky. “Look at the horizon!” his instructor said… and he began to hover.
Often we are so busy manipulating our circumstances that we fail to fix our eyes on Jesus. He is our anchor point, our horizon.
III. Make straight paths for your feet.A. Paths have been made for our feet by the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us, the men and women of faith who have fixed their eyes on Jesus.
B. The way is easier for us because they have gone before us. It is easier to follow the trail.
1. Many of the roads that we use today were originally buffalo trails.
2. Men found it easier to follow these trails than to cut new paths.
3. We are familiar with the history of the Cumberland Gap trail and the Wilderness Trail.
C. We need to follow the path of faith laid out by our fathers who have gone before us.
D. We need to consider the path that we are making for those following us. Once there was an man who had gone to worship for many years, but had not obeyed the gospel. This particular Sunday morning he came forward and requested to be baptized. The preacher just had to ask what was different this morning as opposed to all the other Sunday mornings for so many years. Seems the man had been surprised in his older years when his wife became pregnant. A son was born that had become the apple of the old man’s eye. This Sunday morning the man had gotten up early and was on his way to the barn. He was walked through the dew when he heard his young son behind him. He turned to see him jumping from one footstep to the other through the dew. “Make ‘em big daddy I’m right behind you!” The man said, “I thought to myself… and if you follow me I will lead you straight to a devil’s hell.” And so he chose to be baptized and chose a different path.
E. Make a path folks, but make a path that is going to lead others in the way they ought to go.
Conclusion:
1. Do you need to adjust your direction? 2. Do you need to change it entirely? 3. Make straight paths for your feet.
