Exhortations

Warning to Pay Attention

We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. Hebrews 2:1

A Call to Persevere in Faith

...let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Hebrews 10:24-25

Warning and Encouragement

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up." Hebrews 12:14-25

Concluding Exhortations

Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Hebrews 13:1


The Book of Hebrews is a great source of teaching regarding doctrine, but is also sprinkled with trinkets of warnings and pleadings and exhortations. As such, its contents are must reading like any other book of the New Testament.

And of all the exhortations, we have read above, the one regarding guarding against the growth of a bitter root is most intriguing if not the hardest to understand. I will not attempt to be a learned professor and give out a dissertation. But I will attempt to shed a little flashlight or magnifying glass as to what this warning might mean.

All these being warnings to whoever reads it, it is wise to get some clarification, if not magnification and/or illumination.

Now all these warnings originally written to the Hebrews all center on love for one another as well as meeting together (coming together as in our different services, discipleship and life group meetings)

But this one part regarding a root that should not be allowed to grow, adds the component of peace and "God's grace". My understanding is that as brothers and sisters in Christ, we should not only love one another, encouraging one another as opposed to discouraging and pulling others down, but we should also be able to understand how to live "right" within the grace and the freedom that our Savior have gifted us with, and not losing the peace and the joy that He first handed to us when He took our place by suffering and dying for us.

Let us not allow a small root of bitterness to take ahold of our individual and personal circumstances because even a small root will grow and sprout and will bear fruit. And when it does, this fruit (will be a bitter one) and will not be from the Lord -- of which we know to be as: love, joy, and peace, but also patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

If the fruits we have now are not one of these, then we have failed to guard against watering a bitter root and we have been unknowingly subjecting people we come in contact with, with fruits bitter to the taste and it might be why some people are avoiding us altogether.