It never starts big. It starts with one small compromise, and then I look up and I am somewhere I never meant to be.

“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”

This line comes from a love poem, spoken in a vineyard where the fruit is still forming. The threat named is not a wild animal but little foxes, small enough to be ignored, that ruin the vines while they are tender. The song is not moralizing about sin. It is noticing that what destroys something still growing is usually small, repeated, and easy to overlook.

“But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.”

Hebrews was written to believers under pressure who were drifting back toward what they had left, not by decision but by degrees. The writer's remedy is oddly practical: daily contact with other people. He assumes that self-deception hardens a person slowly, and that the person hardening is always the last to notice. Someone else has to say something, and say it often.