If We Neglect….

By Pastor Craig Sicilia

Good morning brothers and sisters,

Today my topic is neglect

And the neglect in our lives

First lets discus the definition of neglect

Its definition is to abandon, desert to ignore-

Neglect means to over look to pass over to disregard

Neglect means to forget and to avoid

How many things in our life do we neglect

If we neglect to pay our cell phone bill what happens it gets turned off don’t it

If we neglect to put gas in our cars what happens we run out of gas and stop some where in route

If we neglect to pay our rent or mortgage what happens we loose our home don’t we

But today we our going to talk about the neglect of our souls

I am going to take us to Hebrews 2 

Those of you with your bibles open up to Hebrews 2 and lets look at the first paragraph

Now this is a warning to us a warning to pay attention

We must pay more careful attention, \

Therefore, to what we have heard

So that we do not drift away

Fir if the message spoken by angels was binding and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment

How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation

This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord

Was confirmed to us by those who heard him

God also testified to it by signs

Wonders and various miracles

And gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will

Now I want to study just one part of that Hebrews 2:3

Heb 2:3

How shall we escape, IF WE NEGLECT so great salvation?

One winter day a carcass was floating down the Niagara River upon a cake of ice.

An eagle soaring above the river saw it and dropped down upon it.

He sat there leisurely devouring his easy prey.

The swift current began bearing him rapidly downward to the fall.

But was he not safe?

Could he not leap in a moment into midair from his dangerous post?

Could he not stretch his great pinions and float off into safety at the very brink of the awful cataract?

Had he not done that a thousand times before in his bird experience?

So he floated on.

But by and by came the thundering roar of the great cataract.

The cloud of white mist that marked the fatal brink of the fall was towering almost above him.

It was time to leave.

So he stretched out his great wings for flight, but he could not rise.

Unnoticed by him his talons, sunken in the ice and the flesh of his prey,

had frozen hard and fast in the bitter winter day,

and his fate was sealed.

He flapped his great wings.

He struggled with all the power of muscle and strength,

But all in vain.

In a few moments he was swept over into the abyss to his death.

He had delayed too long.

Suppose you are on top of a burning building.  The flames have cut off every avenue of descent.

A ladder is hastily run up by the firemen.

It is your last and only hope of rescue from an awful death.

How will you escape if you neglect it?

Suppose you have fallen overboard from a ship in a raging tempest.

A rope is snatched and quickly thrown by a nearby friend.

It falls within easy reach of your despairing clutch.

It is your only hope of salvation.

How will you escape – if you neglect it?

If you don’t reach out and grab it?

Suppose you rise at midnight sore athirst.

You grab a nearby glass and drink.

But confused from sleep, you make a mistake and swallow a deadly poison.

A friendly had swiftly puts to your lip a sure antidote.

It is your only hope.

It must be taken quickly,

For every second means life of death.

How will you escape – if you neglect it?

So it is with the salvation of your immortal soul.  It is in instant and unceasing jeopardy of eternal death.

God offers His Son, Jesus Christ, as your escape.

It is a great salvation brought out from the great heart of God Himself with tears, love and agony unspeakable.

It is your ladder in the burning building;  it is the rope in the awful storm; 

It is the antidote to the deadly poison of sin.

How will you escape – if you neglect Him?

Let us note some of the perils of this neglect.

A Scotch botanist sallied forth to the hills one bright day to study his favorite flowers.

Presently he plucked a heather bell and put it upon the glass of his microscope.

He stretched himself at length upon the ground and began to scrutinize it through the microscope.

Moment after moment passed, and still he lay there gazing, entranced by the beauty of the little flower.

Suddenly a shadow fell upon the ground where he lay.

Looking up, he saw a tall, weather-beaten shepherd gazing down with a smile of half-concealed amusement at a man spending his time looking through a glass at so common a thing as a heather bell.

Without a word, the botanist reached up and handed the shepherd the microscope.

He placed it to his eye and began to gaze.

For him too moment after moment sped by while he gazed in enraptured silence.

When he handed back the glass, the botanist noticed that tears were streaming down his bronzed cheeks and falling on the ground at his feet.

What’s the matter?  Asked the botanist.   Isn’t it beautiful?

Beautiful?   Said the shepherd.

It is beautiful beyond all words.

But I am thinking of how many thousands of them I have trodden underfoot!!!

Have your ever thought how many opportunities to accept Christ you have trodden under-foot in your lifetime??

God’s opportunity is now – Now is the accepted time.

He has no other it only takes one short minute of time to make one of God’s now's of opportunity.

So we have sixty now's every hour of our life.

That means a thousand for the waking hours of each day.

That means hundreds of thousands for every year of your life,

And many millions during your span of earthly existence.

Opportunity with her millions of now's,  will be against you in that last great assize .

I dread hearing her voice on the witness stand:

A thousand times a day I came to him.

I was with him in the tender hours and influences of youth.

I came to him in the pleadings of his sainted mother.

I drew near him in the hours of bereavement and sorrow.

I spoke to him in the tender solicitations of devoted friends.

I touched him in the prayers and pleadings of his dearest ones.

I sounded the warning hundreds of times from the pulpit.

I whispered to him in the night watches as he lay in the silence of his own thoughts and convictions of his own accusing conscience.

Yet for all these years has he unceasingly trodden me under foot.

If you are unsaved or don’t know if your saved, I say to you unsaved friend,

There are souls in the awful place of the lost who would give a million worlds for just one more or the precious now's you are treading underfoot.

And when you see these trampled now's in the light of eternity, you too will weep with unspeakable agony in the realization that not one of them will ever return.

We are hardening our hearts.

I remember a man in my childhood who was the object of our boyish hero-worship.

He was the finest athlete in the community.

This splendid specimen of physical manhood towered head and shoulders above his fellows and was known and admired in the entire neighborhood.

But he was not a Christian.

He never truly accepted Christ as his savior with his heart and soul, only with meaningless words.

I can remember one night he sat in a meeting where the power of the Spirit of God was consciously and graciously present.

He was approached by loving friends and importuned to make his decision for Christ 

There was every evidence that he was deeply moved and convicted by the message and the atmosphere of the hour,

But he steadfastly refused to make any decision.

He could not commit him self

At last he arose and left the meeting.

Years afterward, while walking the street he was stricken with dread apoplexy, staggered, fell to his knees and thence prone to the pavement in the agonies of sudden death, still an unsaved man.

Back of the tragedy of it all was this sobering fact:  before his death he had told someone that never since the memorable night in the meeting when he had decided against Christ had he ever had the slightest inclination or conviction toward accepting Him as the Savior of his soul.

He had neglected too long,

And he bore to the hour of his death a heart which had grown utterly hardened to all the appeals of the Spirit of God.

Continuous resistance to the Gospel of Christ steadily hardens the heart against it. 

Whether the appeal is to the conscience, the emotions or the judgment,

The result is the same

The voice of appeal becomes like the voice of one that mocks.

The heartstrings once responsive to every tender touch are now like loosened bowstrings.

The soul once soft and plastic as wax is now like case-hardened steel.

The will, which moves promptly and decisively in the trivial affairs of life,

Is bound with fetters of iron to the rock of procrastination in this eternal matter.

Delay becomes a disease.

Once it was only functional:

Now it is organic and malignant.

There is only one remedy.

It is to break the hardened heart crust by definite acceptance of Jesus Christ,

Whose blood alone can make atonement for the soul and bring peace to the heart,

And whose resurrection life alone can fill your life with the precious fruitage of the Spirit and with power to love, to suffer and to serve.

Brothers and Sisters we are drifting away from Christ.

Imagine sitting one day by the faraway shores of the Great lakes listening to a tragic story from the lips of a white-haired fisherman.

Years before, he said, when the village was but a hamlet,

The mail was carried from the distant shore of the bay to the fishing village by an Indian and his son-in-law.

One bitter day in the midwinter they set out from the south shore for the long trip across the great lake.

All day they traveled on the ice, skirting the frozen shore of the bay.

As night came on, they pitched their tent and went ashore for firewood.

Gathering what they needed, they started back from the mainland toward camp.

Just as they stepped upon the ice, it broke loose from its moorings and began to drift out from the shore.

The boy, quick-witted and alert, immediately dropped his bundle of wood and leaped ashore across the fracture in the ice.

The father-in-law hesitated for a moment, and in that moment the gap widened to much to overleap.

He paused in hesitation and uncertainty,

For the waters were black and forbidding in their deadly chill.

The boy shouted to the older man to leap in and swim to shore,

As that was his only chance for life.

But the man still delayed.

Then the lad began to cry out in earnest appeal for the father-in-law to leap,

As it was his only chance to be saved from a dreadful death.

But the older man seemed paralyzed with fear and indecision.

He began to call out farewell messages for his wife and children across the watery waste now rapidly widening as the wind kept driving the great ice floe out into the darkness.

The last the boy saw of him, he was standing with outstretched hands drifting to death in the bitter cold and darkness of the night.

He was never heard from again.

He perished a victim of deadly indecision.

Heaven lies above us in our infancy,   says the poet.

And it surely dose.

It seems as though we could pluck down its nearby stars with our childish hands:

Toy with its silvery moon:

Play hide-and-seek in its fleecy clouds.

But that is not true today for you who have neglected.

Now it has receded like a faraway land till you no longer hear its music.

Dream its dreams,

Or see its angel faces in your childish visions.

In those sweet days of childhood Christ seemed as close to you as the other side of the tiny pond in which you gathered the white and yellow lilies.

Now he seems as distant as the unseen shore of a vast ocean,

So far and so steadily have you drifted from Him with the swift flight of passing years.

Is your heart conscious of this awful sense of aloofness from Christ.

Do you seem to yourself to have drifted out into a weary waste of distance, darkness and death??

Then remember the lonely figure drifting to his fate on the great ice floe.

Remember too that the one thing which would have saved him will save you.

That one thing is decision no longer to neglect this so great salvation.

Brothers and Sisters there will come a time when it will be too late…

A lady, who was one of the survivors of the Titanic disaster,

Drew a graphic picture of the end of that awful tragedy.

As the great ship reared herself in the air

About to take her last plunge into the deep,

Scores of dark figures could be seen falling from her decks into the icy waters.

For a few terrible moments after she had taken her plunge,

A wail of despair rose from the lips of these drowning men and women.

One by one the cries ceased until at last there was but one voice heard calling in the night over the watery waste.

It was the voice of a man.

In unspeakable agony of soul he was crying out, My God, My God…

Fainter and fainter grew this last wailing cry of a departing soul,

And then that too ceased,

And all was still as death.

Often have I tried to picture what must have gone through the mind of that last man struggling in the darkness against a certain doom.

Perhaps the sweet sound of the church band floated to him in the darkness, and he realized the many moments he had let the gospel call pass by unheeded.

Perhaps the tremulous voice of a mother’s prayer, as he bowed,

A thoughtless boy, at her knees,

Now rose up from the depths of memory,

And he saw what God had meant him to be in all his wasted life.

Perhaps in the blackness of that awful night he felt again on his shoulder the loving touch of his boyhood’s dearest friend,

As a voice said, My boy why don’t you decide for Christ.

Perhaps some old Scripture text he had scoffed at and spurned seemed blazoned across the starlit sky above him

How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation.

But now it was too late.

The icy waters were claiming their awful toll.

In a moment the end had come.

Every man is drifting swiftly toward that inevitable moment when the curtain of life drops.

When the drama ends,

When the scene shifts form the follies of time to the tremendous realities of eternity.

When that last crisis moment comes,

It may be to late to get right with God with whom you have trifled all these passing years.

When the wild crash comes in the railroad collision and you are pinned fast under the grinding crushing wreckage---

It is too late

When the great ship is staggering and reeling from the deadly wound in her side and is settling down in the sea for her last awful plunge into the abyss of an ocean grave ---

It is too late

When the last agonizing pang is shooting like a knife through your heart and you catch your breath,

Throw up your hands

Gasp and fall

It is too late

When the steel fetters of paralysis bind you hand and food and all your dazed

Beclouded brain can grasp is the low sobs of loved ones who gather about your bed in the agony of parting ---

It is too late

Then some white faced mother will bow in the silent chamber of death over your motionless form and moan

O God, is my boy safe

Or a brokenhearted wife will steal in and stand alone by your side and looking down into your face,

Will cry out in agony

O God is it well with my husband

Or a silver haired father will sob out his agony of doubt as he cries aloud like one of old

My son, my son… would God I had died for thee,

o… my son

and your dearest friends who would give their right hand if you had only decided

will walk by your bier with bowed head and go forth to whisper to themselves in bitter suffering

there is no repentance beyond the grave.

The golden bowl is broken

The silver thread is loosed

The mourners go about the streets

And once more has been enacted the solemn tragedy of a human soul lost through all eternity because it would not break the fatal spell of indecision.

How shall we escape, IF WE Neglect