“Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.” (Heb. 2:1)
The story is told of the English explorer, Edward Parry and his crew, who were exploring the Arctic Ocean. They needed to travel north to continue their exploration, so they determined their location by the stars and began their dangerous journey.
After many hours of walking, they stopped, exhausted. While they were resting, they decided to get their bearing, to determine how far they had traveled. When they did, they made a horrifying discovery. They found that they were now further south than when they first started! “How could that have happened? How is that even possible,” they asked themselves. What they discovered was they had been walking on an ice floe (a sheet of floating ice) that was traveling faster south than they were walking north.
No wonder the writer of Hebrews gives us the warning to “give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.” See, we can read the Bible, pray, and even attend church faithfully, and still let our lives slip, spiritually. How? By not taking “heed to the things which we have heard.”
Just SEEING a Stop sign doesn’t prevent a car crash. It is only when you HEED the Stop sign that you prevent crashing into another car coming the opposite direction.
Likewise, in order to keep our lives from slipping, spiritually, we must not only READ but HEED what God’s Word tells us. Otherwise, we will find that our lives drifted further than we ever expected.