Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (89 page)

Reread Lamentations 3:22–33. Does the significance of this passage change from your previous reading? In what ways?

TODAY’S PASSAGE:

Hebrews 12:1–13

TIME COMMITMENT:

45 minutes

“What happens in a lot of Bible study and Bible teaching is that we keep breaking it down and breaking it down, until we have nothing but baskets of fragments. What we need today are people who can put the parts back together again into a meaningful and powerful whole. So every time you read and analyze Scripture, every time you take it apart, realize that you’ve only done half the job. Your next task is to put it back together again” (p. 132).

T
he author of Hebrews wanted to encourage us to endure hardships and be more disciplined. Read Hebrews 12:1–13 and summarize in a single sentence what you think he was trying to say.

We hope you noticed that the assigned passage had a couple of
therefores
in it—one at the very beginning and one near the end. They are clues that the telescope of Scripture is quite close. In order to back it up a bit and get our bearings, first review chapter 11 of Hebrews.

• How far back did the author go to set up what he was saying in chapter 12?

• What does Hebrews 11 have to add to what the author said about discipline in chapter 12?

The
therefore
in Hebrews 12:1 seems to be a link between the sufferings of people in the past with those of us in the present. After exhorting us to “endure hardship as discipline” (v. 7
NIV
), what does the
therefore
in verse 12 connect to? To find out, read the rest of Hebrews 12 where you’ll get to a third
therefore
(v. 28). The author is leading us from the heroic characters of the past . . . to our current sufferings . . . to what?