Hebrews 3:12-14 (NIVUK)
12 See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today’, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. 14 We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.
I recently popped into the Doctors aware that it might be a good idea to have a health check now that I’m past 50. Being skinny, I always felt smug about my health until I watched a documentary by Jamie Oliver that showed how you could be fat on the inside whilst skinny on the outside. Perhaps it was time to check my cholesterol levels (the levels of bad fat in my blood) and try and eat more healthily. Thankfully the tests all came back normal. Today’s passage has a similar warning to keep an eye out not for fat levels but for sin levels so that our heart doesn’t become hardened by them as it can by cholesterol. If we pay attention to our lives now, it saves us from trouble later when damaging living becomes ingrained and difficult to change. Of course, developing good habits is not always easy on our own, it’s always easier if we’re doing it with others – this is one of the many reasons why it is good to be part of a community such as the church, where everyone shares that ambition, and to have a God who wants to help us.
Spirit, help us today to get into good loving habits rather than bad ones – both in what we eat and in how we live.
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