Provided to members of the Church of Jesus Christ in Huntington Beach.
Each of us has to give up something in order to accept the gospel of Jesus Christ—bad habits, incorrect beliefs, unwholesome associations, or something else. For Gentiles in the early Christian Church, conversion often meant abandoning false gods. For the Hebrews (or Jews), conversion proved to be, if not more difficult, a little more complicated. After all, their cherished beliefs and traditions were rooted in the worship of the true God and the teachings of His prophets, extending back thousands of years. Yet the Apostles taught that the law of Moses had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ and that a higher law was now the standard for believers. Would accepting Christianity mean that the Hebrews must give up their earlier beliefs and history? The Epistle to the Hebrews sought to help settle such questions by teaching that the law of Moses, the prophets, and the ordinances are all important, but Jesus Christ is greater (see Hebrews 1:1–4; 3:1–6; 7:23–28). In fact, all these things point to and testify of Christ as the Son of God and the promised Messiah the Jews had been waiting for.
Conversion, in those early days and today, means making Jesus Christ the center of our worship and our lives. It means holding fast to truth and letting go of that which distracts us from Him, for He is the “author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” (Hebrews 5:9).