Two Journeys

The most expensive road that I've ever traveled on was a bridge. We were missionaries in Japan, and my wife and I were going to a regional conference on the mainland, we were on the smaller island of Shikoku and so we drove down to Takamatsu in Japan, and began our journey across the longest bridge in Japan at that time, one of the 10 longest in the world, the Seto Ohashi Bridge. 8 miles long, took us almost 25 minutes to cross. And none of that amazed me anywhere as much as the money we had to pay to cross it. It was $100 to cross that bridge. I didn't think it was worth that. It was quite an experience, but not that much of an experience. And so, we paid this fee and we went across and it got me to thinking this morning as I mentioned last week, the Latin word for priest is bridge builder, pontifex. High Priest, Pontifex Maximus, the great high priest who's in front of us in this text is Jesus, the bridge builder between us and God, and we mentioned that last time. And as I was thinking about the cost of crossing that bridge, does it even compare to the cost of Jesus, the bridge to God? For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers. But it was with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect that we are made right in the sight of God, and were brought over, crossing over from death to life. From eternity in hell to an eternity in heaven. That is the most costly bridge in history, and the price was the blood of Jesus.

Now, as we come to Hebrews 5:1-10, we're looking at the ministry and the office of the High Priest as set up and ordained and established in the Old Covenant and the laws of Moses, but then fulfilled and surpassed by the ministry of Jesus Christ, our great high priest. The priestly ministry was established at Mount Sinai in the Old Covenant and the laws of Moses, by the direct revelation of God through Moses. He chose Aaron and his sons to this role, but they were merely types and shadows of the priestly ministry of Jesus Christ on which we depend. And so, we're looking this morning and what we have is a comparison between Aaron and Jesus and we're going to continue to learn more about that in chapter seven, but what's being presented for us is the supremacy, the superiority of the priestly ministry of Jesus over anything in the old covenant.

And remember the context, these Jewish professors of faith in Christ, they'd made an outward profession of faith in Christ in the Old Covenant style, they had been living their lives, the synagogue worship and all of that sort of thing, animal sacrifices, they had heard the gospel they had made an outward profession of faith in Jesus, they'd been baptized, I think, in water, they were members of a church, hearing apostolic style preaching week after week, but under pressure, under the attacks of the world, the flesh, and the devil they were under great pressure to turn back from the New Covenant, and go back to Old Covenant worship. And this epistle, this book of Hebrews is a serious, a dire warning of the danger of doing so, because in doing that you're not just turning back, turning your back on some legalistic regulations or some abstract covenant. They're turning their back on Jesus. And so the author has been giving us Jesus in every chapter. It's Jesus you're turning your back on. It's Jesus that you're turning away from. And here he does it again, it's Jesus, you're turning away from Jesus, the superior, the great high priest and you want to go back to Aaron who's inferior.

He has to be careful as he does it because he want to... He doesn't want to diminish the glory of the Old Covenant, fading though, it was, he doesn't want to say that it was nothing, that Aaron was established and set up in beautiful priestly robes to give him dignity and honor and glory, these were good things, but Christ has a greater honor and a greater glory and that old covenant glory is fading and it soon will be obsolete and it will be gone entirely. The time has passed for it. You can't go back. And so he wants to present the greatness of the high priest, but the limitations of the high priest, and then point through the limited greatness of the Old Covenant high priest, priestly ministry and his limitations as a sinner, and as a mortal, and he wants to go over to point to the greatness, the supremacy of Jesus as our final high priest.

For me personally, what I get out of this meditation is just an ongoing realization of my need for a high priest to minister for me. That I am still in this world, I'm still in the flesh, I'm still in danger, I'm still under the assault of the devil, I still have the pull of the flesh, it's still going on in my life and I need a priest to minister for me. And so do you. And we have such a high priest, and He is right now at the right hand of God and is interceding for each one of you and for me too. He's praying for us. And the author wants to give us a sense of the efficacy of that high priestly ministry so that our trust would be completely in Jesus and we would not go back to other things.

And so, we have laid out for us initially here the duties of the high priest, look at verse one in Hebrews 5, "Every high priest is selected from among men and is appointed to represent them in matters related to God and to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins." And so what are the duties? First and foremost, the high priest, is to represent the people to God, in prayer. Though prayer is not mentioned concerning the Old Covenant priest, it is clearly mentioned concerning Jesus. In verse seven, how He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears. And so Jesus as a prayer warrior is presented and it's implied also that we're thinking of the high priest as a man of prayer. And so Aaron and Moses would frequently, as you know, stand in the gap between Israel and God and intercede for the people and pray that God would not destroy them, that His wrath would not be poured out on them. Moses in particular does this at the time of the golden calf.

Aaron, the high priest as he entered into the holy place, into the tent of meeting was to wear the names of the tribes of Israel on a golden plate over his heart as a continual memorial before the Lord. Exodus 28:29. And so he was also, I think, to bear on his lips, the names of the people of Israel, and to pray for them, and so he was to represent the people to God in prayer, and also to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. This of course was the animal sacrificial system, and it was the priest's job to do the various actions of the animal sacrificial system as described clearly in Exodus and in the Book of Leviticus and other places. And by which blood atonement for sins could be made in symbolic form. This was the job of the high priest, the duties of the high priest.

What were the qualifications of the high priest? Well, first he had to be human, selected from among men. Verse 1, "Every high priest, is selected from among men…" This we could take for granted, except that the author's already mentioned angels and so it can't be an angel who's going to be a priest ministering for us, has to be a human selected from among men. \

Secondly, he has to be chosen by God, he cannot take the honor upon himself. Look at verse four, "No one takes this honor upon himself, he must be called by God just as Aaron was." So it's a divine calling to be a high priest.

Thirdly, he has to be able to deal gently with sinners. Verse 2, "He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray since he himself is subject to weakness." The word gently there means not easily angered. He's able to deal gently with sinners. He'd be out of a job if it weren't for sinners. There'd be no need for his ministry if it weren't for sinners. So he should be very glad and delighted to minister on their behalf. He should be dealing gently. Imagine a high priest saying, "I never thought I'd have to deal with sin." This is exactly why he's there, and so he's able to deal gently with sinners and not be easily angered. The people he represents are sinners. And their sinfulness is described, in particular, as linked to their ignorance and their wandering hearts. They're ignorant of God's ways. They have not known God's ways. They've not known His laws. And so they're wandering away. Even those things they do know, they willfully rebel against them and so they're ignorant and wandering into sin. Wandering through ignorance. If they really knew God, they wouldn't sin. And so all of our sins are in some sense sins of ignorance because we just really don't know Him, we don't know His glory, this is eternal life, that we may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent, our sins are sins of ignorance. Not that we don't know the law of God, but we really just don't know Him.

And so, the priest I think, was to be a faithful expounder of the Law of God. In the Book of Malachi it says, "That faithful instruction is found on his lips." And so he teaches, he faithfully teaches the Word of God, but no matter how faithfully he is to teach the word the people are going to continue to wander, they're going to continue to go astray.

Though the Jewish priests may have been tempted to be frustrated with the constant sinfulness of the people, they would have been restrained. Primarily because of the imperfection of the high priest, they themselves were sinners too. They were imperfect themselves. It says, "He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he Himself is subject to weakness. This is why he has to offer sacrifices for his own sins, as well as for the sins of the people." He is subject to weakness. He himself is subject to weakness. You could go backward a little bit and say, "Well then, he's ignorant and going astray too." And he is. He is ignorant and going astray just like them, he's just like them. There's no real difference and uses the word weakness. He has a weakness to him. I think this implies a spiritual weakness, a moral weakness. He holds on to the things of God only weakly. His grip on the things of God, can be broken by temptation. He can be pulled away from the things of God. He's weak. Morally weak. And we see this again and again in the Scriptures.

Aaron is a prime example. Aaron was a weak man. When Moses was up there apparently too long in the mountain and the people were like, "We don't even know what happened to this man. It's time to get going, and move on." They're are people of action. They're tired of waiting for Moses. So they go to Aaron, and they want him to make them gods to go before them, and to lead them and Aaron caves into them. Though God has already spoken with his own mouth, the sound of the voice of God. The Ten Commandments have already been proclaimed, they've been preached by Almighty God. "You shall not make for yourself an idol…you shall not bow down to them or worship them." Yet what does he do? He gathers all of these gold brooches and jewelry and melts it, and he says to Moses, who is so angry... He says, "I threw it into the fire and out came this calf." Now, that's something I would like to have seen. "I threw it into the fire and out comes this calf, it's a miracle." No, he crafted and shaped it. He was an idol maker. He was an idolater.

And so we see the weakness of Aaron there just very clearly displayed. In the time of Malachi the priests were offering up blind and crippled and lame sacrifices thinking God wouldn't notice or care. What does it matter? It's just an animal, it's... And then God sends Malachi, the Prophet. "How dare you do this to me? Try offering those to your governor and see if he'd accept them. See if you can slip a blind animal past him, don't you know who I am, I am a great king and my name is to be feared among the nations. But you're trying to cheat me. Cursed is the cheat who tries to trick me by bringing blind or crippled animals." And the priests were sniffing at the burden of doing this ministry, they were, "What a burden it is to be a priest." They were weak and sinful men and so they have to offer sacrifices for their own sins to even be fit for the office.

The very first thing that had to happen with Aaron and his sons is that they had to be consecrated by the sacrifice of animals. Clear implication, "You are sinners, and apart from this sacrifice you're not fit for duty." And yet, for all of that, they offered up imperfect sacrifices to cover their imperfections. They offered up animals, but the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins, the imperfection of the high priests and of their ministry. And so therefore the Law of Moses appointed imperfect men to an imperfect ministry and yet for all of that it was a helpful preparation for the coming ministry of Jesus.

And so we have depicted for us so beautifully, the perfection of Jesus as high priest. In verse 5 it says, "So Christ also did not take upon himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to Him, 'You are my son, today I have begotten you' And He says in another place, 'You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.' During the days of Jesus' life on Earth He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death and He was heard because of His reverent submission. Although He was a son He learned obedience from what He suffered and once made perfect became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek."

Well, Jesus' high priestly ministry is developed only here in this one book. It's alluded to a little bit, I think, in the Book of Revelation, by the way he's dressed, but here, his high priestly ministry is just very potently unfolded for us. We can get a clear description of the high priestly ministry of Jesus. Other books focus on Jesus as King, as the coming Messiah, as God incarnate, in John's Gospel. But here in the Book of Hebrews, as our great high priest. And as we look more deeply into Jesus as the perfect high priest, we see the fulfillment of the symbolic priesthood set up by the Old Covenant. And also just how insane it would have been for these Jews, these first sensory Jewish Christians to turn back away from Jesus, and go back to Aaron and animal sacrifice. And that's what the author is trying to do, trying to show us that we must go on ahead and embrace Jesus' ministry because it's all there is. And all of those are just types and shadows of it anyway.

And now we have the reality in Christ. So we see the author and what he's trying to do here, he's trying to help us to see the greatness of Jesus, so that they will embrace His ministry and not fall away.

1) Perfect in His Person: The Son of God AND Son of Man

So first, we see Jesus as our great high priest, is perfect in His person. And we've seen this before but we can't say it enough. Our high priest, is both son of God and son of man. So the author begins with his statement in Psalm 2:7, "God said to him, "You are my son, today I've be gotten you." We've already seen this verse quoted in Hebrews 1:5, referred to again in the last chapter. This word today, I think when it says today I've begotten you, a deeply mysterious word, but whenever this is quoted it seems to be linked to Jesus' incarnation, specifically. So we see it in Hebrews 1:5-6, "For to which of the angels did God ever say, 'You are my son, today, I've begotten you.' Or again, 'I will be His Father and He'll be my son.' And again, when God brings His first born into the world, He says, 'Let all God's angels worship Him.'"

So it's speaking of His... The time of His birth. When Jesus took on a human body, when He became man for us. He was begotten Son of man. And we see it again alluded to when Jesus is raised from the dead at His resurrection. The same scripture, Psalm 2:7, the Apostle Paul preaching in the city in Antioch at the synagogue. He quotes the same thing, but this time connects it to the resurrection, not to the birth. "We tell you the good news." Paul says, "What God promised our fathers He has fulfilled for us their children by raising up Jesus," as it is written in the second Psalm, "You are my son, today I have begotten you." Oh the mysteries of the Word of God. But you see the common link. The common link is Jesus as human, Jesus in a body. Jesus of like family with us. And so when He's born and when He's raised again in a human body the Scripture is brought out. Jesus therefore, is our perfect high priest because of who He is, He is both son of God and He is Son of man. As the Son of God, as we've mentioned before, He has His Father's heart, He has His Father's ear. Anything that this perfect high priest could ever ask of His Father, the Father will most certainly grant Him and with great delight.

Father loves the Son and will give Him anything He asks. And what better high priest could you have than that? Son of the King, Son of Almighty God, interceding for you. Oh, you ought to meditate on that dear brother and sister in Christ. Picture it, that Jesus is speaking your name to Almighty God right now. Praying for you, interceding for you. Praying that your faith won't fail. And you know what? It won't. It won't fail until you don't need it anymore. Hallelujah. He's going to keep praying for you and keep praying for you. He's going to keep protecting you and marshalling your experiences and filtering your temptations and providing ways of escape and dealing with you if you should sin. You have an advocate with the Father, even if you should sin. He is going to minister and minister and minister at the right hand of God and He is speaking the whole time to His own Father. And how great is that?

2) Perfect in His Calling: Called by God

Secondly, Jesus is perfect in His calling. He was called by God to this ministry. The author makes it clear that Almighty God alone can appoint the high priest. The glory of being a high priest cannot be seized by force. It would be an invalid ministry, it would be artificial, it would be fake, it would be man-made, it would be idolatrous, as the northern kingdom of Israel sought to do in the days of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, when the kingdom was divided. And Jeroboam, son of Nebat, made Israel sin by setting up idols and forbidding his people from going to that one place that God had chosen for all those people to go worship because it was in the southern kingdom, in Judah. He didn't want them going there. So he set up his own priestly ministry and as someone later said, "Anybody can be a priest in your kingdom Jeroboam, he's got enough money and he's got a linen ephod, he can be a priest." Well, listen, you can't be that kind of a priest. No one can take this glory on themself and have a legitimate ministry. No, he must be called by God.

And so Aaron didn't one day come up to his brother Moses and say, "You know, I'd love to be a priest, of some sort, maybe even a high priest. We could have a special priest above all the other priests and if I could be him, I would love that." Neither did he say, "I'm not going to live forever, it'd be great if my sons could take over after me, be a hereditary kind of thing, where you could just pass it on from generation." He didn't take this honor upon himself. God told Moses in Exodus 28:1-2, "Have Aaron your brother brought to you from among the Israelites." Do you hear those words? "From among them I'm choosing out this man and his family, he is chosen by God from among all the Israelites along with his sons Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, so that they may serve Me as priests. Make sacred garments for your brother Aaron to give him dignity and honor."

Well, Aaron didn't take that honor upon himself. He did it the right way. He was called by God and so he fulfilled that ministry. Jesus in the same way, just like Aaron, was called by God to be a high priest. "Christ also did not take upon Himself the glory of becoming a high priest, but God said to Him, 'You are my son today, I've begotten you,' And He says in another place, 'You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.'" He was designated by God to be a high priest forever, He was called by God to this ministry.

3) Perfect in His Humility: Not Seizing What is Not His

Thirdly, we see Jesus perfect in His humility. He wouldn't think to do it. He didn't seize this honor, He didn't glorify Himself, it says in the NAS verse five. "Christ did not glorify Himself so as to become a high priest." This reminds me of the general perfect humility of Jesus in every respect. How He waits for things to be given to Him by His Father. Don't you see that again and again? He doesn't teach anything except what the Father gave Him. He doesn't do anything except the works the Father has laid out for Him to do. He only does what His Father wants Him to do and He does everything the Father wants Him to do.

Do you see His humility then celebrated so beautifully for us, in Philippians 2? Just as Jesus didn't take the glory of becoming a high priest, He doesn't take the glory of deity upon Himself either. Philippians 2 says, "Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross, therefore, God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God, the Father." The humility of Jesus flowing through that passage. It's why Paul quotes it there in Philippians 2. In the same way here he is humble and will not take anything except what the Father gives Him and that's His glory. And what a contrast to, for example, Nadab and Abihu who arrogantly went into the holy place and offered unauthorized sacrifice of incense to God, contrary to God's command. They were arrogant, and might have been drunk, it seems, because soon after that in Leviticus 10, God commanded that they not take strong drink before they approach Him.

And so they were arrogant, they were sinful, they were wicked and God struck them dead. Fire came out and consumed them. They were great sinners. But Jesus isn't like that. Jesus is humble when He approaches His Heavenly Father. He is humble and meek and lowly in the presence of Almighty God. Though He is the Son of God, yet He is humble in His presence. So He is our perfect high priest.

4) Perfect in His Priesthood: The Order of Melchizedek

Fourth, He's perfect in His priesthood in the order of Melchizedek. He says in another place, "You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek." The mysterious figure of Melchizedek is mentioned now for the first time. He pops up here. Suddenly appears just like he did in Genesis 14. Suddenly appears when Abraham was going back after his defeat of the kings and he just suddenly appears and Abraham gives him a tenth of everything. We'll talk about it more in depth in Chapter 7. This mysterious figure of Melchizedek. Then he pops up in the Psalter just in the middle of Psalm 110. Melchizedek, who's that?

Psalm 110:4, "The Lord is sworn and will not change His mind. You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek." Now this whole thing is going to be developed more fully in Hebrew 7, and we'll get to that. The foretaste is I want to give you right now is Melchizedek, the thing that's unique about him is that he is both priest and king. He's a royal priest. There's a combination of priest and king, that a priest sits on the throne, that's what we've got with Melchizedek. Now again, in His perfect humility Jesus would not presume to take upon Himself the role of the high priest. Why not? Well, because in the Old Covenant, He would have been forbidden to do so. Hebrews is going to make this very plain, Jesus descended from Judah. And He is fulfilling the Davidic Covenant in which a Son of David would never be lacking to sit on the throne. He is clearly the lion of the tribe of Judah, He is descended from Judah, but only Aaron's descendants could be high priest. He was from the tribe of Levi, and so there was a very strong wall of separation set up between the kingship and the priesthood.

And yet, some arrogant individuals from time to time would try to broach that barrier. Like for example, King Saul, you remember how he was waiting for Samuel, and he was going to... Samuel was going to offer sacrifice and all that sort of stuff and he's waiting and waiting. Sometimes God makes you wait just long enough to show how sinful you are. Hang in there dear friends, don't give in to temptation. Just wait another six minutes King Saul and Samuel will show up, but he didn't. And so he takes it upon himself to do this priestly ministry of offering sacrifice, and he is rejected by God on that basis. Or then again, King Uzziah you remember Uzziah, very successful king, in many respects a Godly king, blessed in every respect. At one point though he became arrogant, he became filled with himself, and he took upon Himself the glory of entering into the temple and burning incense to God. As though God would accept that.

And it says that Azariah, the priest and 80 other priests, courageous men, confronted this powerful king and they said to Uzziah, "It is not right for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord. That is for the priest, the descendants of Aaron, who have been consecrated to burn incense. Leave the sanctuary for you have been unfaithful; and you will not be honored by the Lord God." Well, when Uzziah heard this he was in rage and was about to throw the censer, the burning censer at Azariah and the priests, but at that moment, leprosy broke out on his forehead and Azariah pointed it out, all the priests saw it, they were stunned. And it says they hurried him out of the temple. Indeed he was eager to go. Oh my. Eager to go, lest he be killed. How many times does it say concerning the priests, so that they will not die? Do you see the grace of God to Uzziah there? The grace of God that God didn't strike him dead on the spot for his arrogance. But what I say to you is Jesus did not presume to be a priest king, a king priest, He didn't presume. There was a wall of separation. But, well, what are we going to do about that?

According to the Old Covenant, the two will be forever separated. Well, then the author to Hebrew gives the resolution: we need a new covenant. Amen. We've got to have a New Covenant and in that New Covenant, we can have a new order of priest and that new order is going to be the order of Melchizedek. And the Old Covenant, it will become obsolete, and aging, and will pass away. And that wall of separation will be broken down, and there will be a union. On the throne, there will be a priest, the priest will be a king and they will be united. Jesus did not arrogantly take this upon Himself, this was planned by God that He would be a high priest in the order of Melchizedek.

5) Perfect in His Eternity: A Priest Forever

Fifth, Jesus is perfect in His eternity. The single word forever gives us that. Do you see the word forever? Verse 6, "And He says in another place, You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek." All the descendants of Aaron, they're all mortal. They all died one after the other. In fact, the death of the high priest was built into the Old Covenant, it's built into the law. You remember that if you accidentally murdered somebody and an avenger of blood was coming after you could run for your life to a city of refuge, and there you would be safe and secure. But you had to stay there until the death of the high priest. So I mentioned in Bible for Life early today, woe unto you, if he's a young man. 37-year-old high priest, you're going to be there a while, get used to the city. Look around, you need to stay right there, because in that place alone, there is safety and security. Friends that's the picture of Jesus. Those cities of refuge, were a picture of Jesus and so also this whole rule that they had to stay there until the death of the high priest. How is that a picture of Jesus? Well, we have a permanent priest, He's never going to die, so we're never going to leave the city of refuge, we'll be there forever. It's called the New Jerusalem, it's called the home of the living God, and you'll be safe there forever.

These Aaronic high priests, they were mortal, they died one after the other, and each one of them died, because they were sinners, they were sinners in Adam, and they were sinners themselves. And the wages of sin is death. Jesus only died as a substitute for us who are sinners, so Jesus is forever our priest. And sometimes forever, can be just overwhelming and difficult. So let's just say Jesus will be your priest, high priest, later today. And He'll be your high priest tomorrow too. Let's just start there, okay? He's also going to be your high priest forever, but He's going to be your high priest for the rest of your life. He is your priest forever, and He will never leave you and he will never forsake you, and He will keep praying for you. And He will not lose you.

6) Perfect in His Intercession: Fervent Prayer to God, Heard by God

Sixth, He is perfect in His intercession, fervent prayer to God heard by God, look at verse 7, "During the days of Jesus' life on Earth, He offered prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the One who could save Him from death and He was heard because of His reverent submission." I've mentioned the two great ministries of the high priest are the offering of sacrifices, and making of intercession for sinners. Jesus is the perfect high priest when it comes to intercession. He is the best prayer warrior, in history. There's none better than Jesus. And this passage clearly refers to Jesus' prayers while on earth despite being beset by great weakness in His physical body, He was mighty in prayer. The author speaks, I think, of the days of Jesus' life on Earth because He uses the name Jesus. He's not ashamed to speak this name, Jesus. Not merely Christ, for Christ is a title like king, he's the Messiah. Christ Jesus, like King Jesus. But he speaks of Jesus, the human being Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the son of Mary, Jesus the man, Jesus the one who died on the cross. During the days of Jesus' life. Friends, can we say the name Jesus more frequently? What do you say? Let's say the name Jesus a lot this week, let's celebrate the name Jesus, let's love the name Jesus, let's say that sadly offensive name to our lost friends and co-workers, and neighbors, let's say the name Jesus a lot. Let's be Jesus' people, Amen. Let's speak the name of Jesus.

The author celebrates that. And during the days of Jesus' life on Earth, He made prayers with intensity. Prayers and petitions it says, the repetition gives you a sense of not just prayers but petitions and not just petitions, but He also prayed. What's the difference? I don't know, but He did both. Just the repetition, gives you a sense of the comprehensiveness of His prayers. And He does so with loud cries and tears. There's a passion and intensity of His request, they're pouring forth these requests, are pouring forth from Him like molten lava out of his heart. How many human pastors and priests have defiled the act of prayer with the coldness and formality of their prayers? Prayers intoned, prayers droned, prayers that are as dead and lifeless as we fear their hearts may be. How many times have I been like that or you? Mailing it in, the time of prayer. Well, friends, I hope you're still praying through the phone book. I hope you're still praying for each other. We need to do it as much in February as we did in January, and maybe even more in March. So please keep praying for each other, and if you've dropped this practice, pick it back up again, look at the date and go to the page, pray for some people.

But the thing is, Jesus continues to pray, and He prays with passion. Thomas Brooks, a Puritan pastor put it this way, about praying with passion. He said,

"As a painted fire is no fire, a dead man is no man, so a cold prayer is no prayer. In a painted fire, there's no heat, in a dead man there is no life, so in a cold prayer, there is no power, no devotion, no blessing. Cold prayers are arrows without heads. They're like swords without edges, they're birds without wings, they pierce not, they cut not, they fly not up to Heaven. Cold prayers do always freeze before they get to Heaven. Oh, that Christians would chide themselves out of their cold prayers and chide themselves into a better and warmer frame of spirit when they make their supplications to the Lord."

Well, that's for us. Jesus doesn't need that admonishment. He pours out prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears.

And it says He did so to the one who could save Him from death. I think this is bringing us right to Gethsemane, that holy ground, where we have been before. Where Jesus falls down before His Father and is praying with intensity, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup be taken away from me, yet not what I will but what you will." And he's praying with such intensity that great drops of blood are flowing from His face. You see this intense man on the ground, this is the one who's praying for you. That's what the author is getting at here. And He was heard, that's the success of His prayer. God always hears Him. We want a high priest whom God will hear, a sinful priest cannot get God's ear. Isaiah 59 says, "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor His ear too dull to hear, but your iniquities have separated you from your God, your sins have hidden His face from you so that He will not hear." But that will never be the case of Jesus, He is perfect, pure, and holy, and God always hears His prayer and so it says He was heard because of His reverent submission.

7) Perfect in His Piety: Obedient, Reverent Submission

And so we see Jesus is perfect in His piety. He was heard because of His reverent submission. KJV says, "He was heard and that He feared." ESV, "He was heard because of His reverence." NAS gives us, "He was hard because of His piety." So I'm going to break all the rules and put them all together. He feared in reverence, in piety. I'm just going to intensify this. He is a godly man who's praying for you, and because of His fear, of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom, because of His godliness, He was heard by Almighty God. And He comes in perfect submission to His Father.

He says, "Father, if it's possible, let this cup be taken from me. You can save me from death." But it was not God's will to save Him from death. It was not God's will, because He wanted to save us from eternal death. He wanted to save each one of the sinners that are in here, if you will just call on His name and I'm pleading with you, if God has brought you here under the hearing of the Gospel then hear me now. This is the day of salvation. This is your savior, there is no other. Jesus was not saved from death, so He could save you from death. All you have to do is trust in Him. Call on His name, for the forgiveness of your sins.

And it says here that Jesus learned obedience from what He suffered. This is the mystery of the incarnation. How can you be omniscient and learn something? It's troubling to me. But Jesus, it says learnt. And I think here, He learned by experience, He learned by living as a human being, by suffering in the body, and especially He learned by going through the cross and having been made perfect, He is therefore our high priest. Well, what does this mean that He was made perfect? Well, it does not imply imperfection, you know what it implies? It implies a completion of God's sovereign plan. God laid out a plan and Jesus perfected the plan. He lived it out and did it. And so he says in John 17 in the high priestly prayer, "Father, I have brought you glory on Earth by perfecting the plan You gave Me to do." So, He finishes the plan and then right before He's dying, He's on the cross, the last words in John's Gospel, last words He says as He's dying on the cross, He says, "It is finished." The Greek word is related to the word for perfect. It is perfect is what we could say. "It is perfected. I have finished the work that God gave Me to do and it's finished." And so, He was qualified or made perfect by what He suffered and therefore you see He is perfect in His sacrifice.

8) Perfect in His Sacrifice: The Source of Eternal Salvation

Once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey Him. Jesus by dying on the cross, by shedding His blood becomes a fountain, a source of eternal salvation for us. Just meditate on those words; eternal salvation. Jesus is your eternal savior, He's bringing you into an eternity of salvation, He is your source. And so we have that river of the water of life flowing clear as crystal coming down from the throne of God in the center of the city. He is the living source of your salvation, the source of your eternal salvation is the blood of Jesus.

This then is the perfection of the priestly ministry of Jesus, the high priests who are descendants of Aaron were sinful men who had to offer imperfect sacrifices for their imperfect lives. And after endlessly offering those symbolic sacrifices, which could never take away sins, they died and they were replaced by their sons to carry on that ministry. But Jesus is the perfect high priest. He is the Son of God, and the Son of Man who is sinless, pure and undefiled. He was called by God to be a high priest and a king in the order of Melchizedek. Jesus humbly took that role from God. He displayed perfect prayers in Gethsemane and perfect submission to the will of God, and that perfectly qualified Him to be our High Priest and once made perfect through suffering, He is qualified to save you, sinner, though you may be.

So, what application? Just go back a little bit to the end of Chapter 4, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. Amen. That's our application. Hold on to this great high priest as He holds on to you. Strengthen your faith grip on Him, immerse your mind in the things that I'm talking about here today, immerse your minds in scripture, if your grip on Jesus is weakening, strengthen it. Now you're not saved by your grip on Jesus, you know that, but it's still good to have a good grip on Jesus, amen. I press on to take hold of that for which Jesus has taken hold of me. So Jesus takes hold of me, and in taking hold of me, He's teaching me to grip on Him. And so, let us hold fast to our confession.

Secondly, let us draw near to the throne of God. As we said last week, come near. Jesus is already praying for you. He's been praying this whole time. He's praying that you'll hang in there with me another one or two minutes, we're almost done. But He's praying for you, that your faith will be strengthened and it will not fail and that you'll get the full ministry of the Word of God. He's interceding for you. When you come in to the throne of grace, it's a busy place. Jesus is already there at the right hand of God, praying for you. Join him in prayer.

And thirdly, He is the source of salvation for everyone, that's not what it says. He's not the source of salvation for every single solitary human being on the face of the Earth. No He's a source of salvation for those who obey Him. Let me put it to you this way, if Jesus is saving you, He's causing you to obey Him, and if you're not obeying Jesus He's not saving you. And so, obey Him by the power of the Spirit. And again, you're not saved by your obedience, you're saved, that you may obey. And your obedience is not the ground of your salvation, it's merely the proof of it, but you must obey Him, you must follow His laws, by the power of the Spirit. This is our fifth baptismal vow. We say it every single time. Do you promise to walk in the pattern of newness of life by the laws of God, and the laws of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit? Yes, I do, that's our baptismal promise. Close with me in prayer.

Father, thank you for sending us such a great high priest and Jesus, thank You for never forsaking us, never leaving us, thank you for interceding. Thank you, You bear our names on your heart and You carry them into the presence of God and You bear our names on Your shoulders and You carry the weight of us all the way into heaven. Thank you, Jesus, our great high priest. Pray for us, O Lord, continue to pray as I know You will, and teach us to pray as You are praying, that we would pray for each other horizontally, that we would join into the intercessory ministry of Jesus, praying for this brother or that sister that their faith won't fail and that they will obey Jesus and follow Him. By the power of the Spirit, we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

So, I can scarcely imagine at this moment, this incredible moment of redemptive history, recorded for us in the biblical book of Esther, Queen Esther standing outside the throne room of her husband King Xerxes, the most powerful man on earth. What it must have been like to be there, to see her? Perhaps her heart rate elevated, short of breath as she's just about to walk into the throne room of this, the most powerful man on earth, her husband, yes. But still the most powerful man on earth, the emperor of Persia, 127 provinces stretching from east to west, sitting on an exalted throne reflective of his great power surrounded by dozens of counselors doing the business of the empire, surrounded by many soldiers who would at any moment been willing to lay down their lives for the Emperor or to take life if he commanded it as well. And the circumstances that had driven Esther to take her very life into her hands are recorded in the pages of that book.

You remember how the king had been duped, had been tricked into issuing an edict amounting to the genocide, the annihilation of the Jewish people. And how Esther had been approached, persuaded to go into the throne room of the king and beg for the lives of her people. But there was a problem and she said in Esther 4:11, "All the kings officials and the people of the royal provinces know that for any man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned by the king, the king has but one law: That he be put to death. The only exception to this, is for the king to extend the gold scepter to him and spare his life. But thirty days have passed since I was called to go to the king." Esther though with incredible boldness, incredible courage was willing to risk her life, and go in and speak to her husband on behalf of her people, to go uninvited into the throne room of the King of Persia. And she said, "If I perish, I perish." A great moment of courage. And so with that boldness, she walked uninvited into the throne room of King Xerxes, the king saw her. And says in Esther 5:2-3 "When he saw a Queen Esther, standing in the court, he was pleased with her. And he held out to her the gold scepter that was in his hand. So Esther approached and touched the tip of the scepter. Then the king asked, 'What is it Queen Esther? What is your request? Even up to half of my kingdom, it will be given to you.'"

Friends, this amazing story from the Old Testament is a picture of a bold access into a throne room of power, the golden scepter extended to her as a picture of a welcome of grace into that throne room and an invitation that she should make her request known to the king. Amazingly, I find this a picture of what's extended to us in Hebrews 4:16, a picture of the grace that flows like a vast river into our lives from the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Hebrews 4:16 says, "Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with confidence. So that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." Now, my goal in this sermon is to give you a sense of the immense privilege that Jesus is won for us, pictured by Queen Esther's approach to her husband King Xerxes as he sat on the throne.

Access, however to the throne room of Almighty God, not merely that of a temporary earthly potent-y who would some day die. Access granted continually to that throne room, not just on one particular occasion. Whenever is our time of need. An access that actually comes with a command that we should do so that we should approach. A command to draw near to the throne of God. An access that is paid for and granted to us not merely by the extension of a golden scepter, but by the precious blood of Jesus Christ shed for us on the cross. I want to unfold therefore Hebrews 4:14-16, because I just want you to pray more. I want you to saturate your lives in prayer, I want you to pray and pray and pray. I want you to pray without ceasing because I'm going to make a case this morning, that there is no such time as a time that's not a time of need. Every moment is a time of need. And so we have this invitation to come right into the throne room of grace.

Now before I do that, I want to speak briefly a word about faith. A word about faith, faith is the eyesight of the soul, that enables us to see invisible spiritual realities. The Word of God is the food of faith. It opens your eyes to this vast spiritual world that we would not see if God didn't grant us the gift of faith. The basic building blocks of this passage can only be perceived by faith, Almighty God, the Holy One seated on His throne, Jesus the Son of God, our great High Priest, ourselves as sinners in need of grace, as children of God, who are welcome in His presence, our enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil, our situation, that naturally we were separated from God because of our sins, with an infinite gap between us and the Holy One, Jesus the Son of God has worked for us, a great salvation on the cross. By faith, now we are children of God, the completely forgiven of our sins, but we are in immense danger. Jesus, our great high priest, has gone through the heavens and is at the right hand of God and is interceding for us. We must hold fast to our confession of faith, we must hold fast and this we cannot do without an ongoing supply of grace.

Every moment as I said a moment ago, is a time of need. We must see our great need, and our great privilege. In order to hold fast, we must draw near to the throne of grace. Now, this is the basic spiritual lay of the land. This is what is true invisibly and spiritually and we cannot perceive it except by faith. So, my desire is to strengthen your faith. I'm not going to urge you to go on a pilgrimage. There's no physical place on Earth, more holy than another. The throne room of grace is an invisible spiritual reality.

And so I'm going to urge you to be strong in faith and believe and step into that throne room of a grace. Now, I want to talk about greatness and I'm going to just lay out this passage with three senses of the greatness of the issues here. I want to talk about Jesus, our great High Priest, I want to talk about the greatness of our need, and I want to talk about the greatness of the privilege that Jesus is one for us. So the word great, is going to appear a lot in this sermon, because these are great issues. These are immense issues.

So I want to begin by talking about the greatness of our High Priest, Jesus. Now, what do we mean by High Priest? Well a priest is an intermediary between God and man. The first time that a priest is mentioned in the Bible is in Genesis 14:18, "Then Melchizedek, King of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High." That's the first time the word priest appears in the Bible. Now we're going to get to know Melchizedek very well when we get to Hebrew 7. We're going to talk much about him.

Now, the Book of Hebrews summarizes the calling of a priest plainly in the very next verse, that we're going to study God willing, next week, Hebrews 5:1, "Every priest is selected from among men, and is appointed to represent them in matters related to God, and to offer gifts and sacrifices." Now in the Old Covenant Aaron, the brother of Moses, was chosen as the first high priest. And then his sons, his descendants after him, took that office in the Old Covenant. High Priest, represented the people before God and God before the people. Now in Latin the word for priest as "pontifex", which means bridge builder. And I think that gives a good sense of that mediator role of a priest as a go-between, in some way between God and man. For example, Ezekiel the prophet was also a priest and God said to him, in Ezekiel 22:30, "I looked for a man among them who would stand in the gap on behalf of the land, to stand before Me in the gap on behalf of the land so that I would not have to destroy it, but I found none."

So, a priest is one who is qualified by God to stand in the gap. Now, the gap gives a sense of a breach like a tear in cloth or a breach in the wall. That's what the Hebrew word means, there in Ezekiel 22:30, there is a breach or a gap. Well, between what and what? Well, I think it's pretty clear, between God and man, between a Holy God and sinful human beings, and that gap, that breach is wider than the Grand Canyon, is wider than the gap between us and and the edge of the Milky Way or the edge of the universe. It's an infinite gap because of the infinite holiness of God, and a priest, then stands in the gap between a Holy God and sinful man, and seeks to build a bridge.

How is Jesus a High Priest?

Now how then is Jesus a High Priest? Friends, we're not going to plumb the depths of that this morning. We have actually six chapters to study that theme. Hebrews 5-10, just meditates on and on about the greatness of Jesus's ministry as High Priest. So I don't need to go into any great detail, but very soon we're going to be looking at these profound concepts from Psalm 110 in Verse 4, "The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind. You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek." Simply put, then Jesus is a High Priest because He represents us sinners to God by offering His blood, as a perfect sacrifice, and praying for us based on that blood and He represents God to us sinners by displaying the perfect image of God.

And by teaching us the very words of God, Jesus is the Great High Priest. Now, what is the greatness of Jesus as our High Priest? Well, we've already seen in many respects, the greatness of Jesus Christ, right from the very beginning of the book, Jesus is greater than all the prophets in the past, God spoke through all the prophets. But in these last days, He's spoken to us by His son Jesus is God's final Word to the human race, Jesus is greater than all the prophets. In that same chapter, and then on into chapter 2, we saw that Jesus is greater than all the angels. They are merely servants, they are merely winds and flames of fire. But Jesus is the Son of God. And then again in Hebrews 3, Jesus is greater than Moses. Moses was faithful as a servant in all God's house, but Jesus is faithful as a Son over God's house. And so Jesus is greater than Moses. And we saw that Jesus in Hebrews 4 is greater than Joshua in that, the promised land He brings us to, is a greater promised land. The rest of God, that perfect final Sabbath rest, is heaven, it's eternal not a temporary lodging in an earthly Promised Land, but rather the eternal lodging in heaven, and so Jesus is greater than Joshua. And now from Hebrews 5 through 7, we're going to be comparing Jesus to Aron and we're going to find that Jesus is a greater high priest than Aaron. The greatness of Jesus as our High Priest.

Well, why is He great? Why is Jesus greater?

1) Great in His Person

Well, first and foremost Jesus is greater because of his person-hood. Just who He is even before He became our High Priest. In Hebrews 4:14, it says, "We have a great High Priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God." Jesus is a great high priest because He is great in and of Himself. Now, there are some times men who fill great offices, but they're not great men. Significant offices, great offices of leadership worthy of great honor because God ordains that office, but they're not great men. And we see this again and again in the Bible, kings are to be held in honor, because they're kings with their wicked people. But Jesus is great in and of Himself. He is the Son of God, or God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. And it says in Hebrews 1:3, "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word. After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven." Jesus is our great high priest, because he's the Son of God, because of the greatness that He has in and of Himself.

And since Jesus is the Son of God, He has a special in with His Father, the judge of all the earth. The Father loves the Son. He delights in the Son. Think about the Mount of Transfiguration, and Jesus is up there with Peter and James, and John, and His face and His clothes, and His whole being is transformed before them and He becomes radiant, bright shining with light. His heavenly glory, for a brief moment, partially restored to Him. And then a bright cloud envelops them all there on that mountain. And a voice from the cloud says, "This is My Son whom I love, with Him I am well pleased." Aren't you glad Jesus is your Great High Priest? Aren't you glad that that's the love that the Father has for our Intercessor? He is great, because He is the Son of God.

2) Great in His Journey

Also in the text, He is great because of the journey He traveled, because of the journey He travelled. Look at verse 14, again, "Therefore since we have a great High Priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus, the son of God." It's an incredible thing. In the old covenant, the ironic priest took the blood of the animal from the sacrifices that were done in the holy place and carried them and brought them into the most holy place, or the Holy of Holies. But I tell you that Jesus went on an infinitely greater journey to bring His blood before Almighty God. It says he passed through, or moved through, or went through the heavens themselves. He went right through the heavens to the other side. Well this bends even breaks my mind. This is where your circuit breakers start to trip. Jesus has gone through the heavens. Friends, the heavens are a created realm. In the beginning, God created them. But our God is infinitely above any created realm, and so the Scripture repeatedly presents God as above the heavens. So it says in Psalm 8, and verse 1, "Oh Lord, our Lord, How majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens." Or again, in Psalm 57:5, "Be exalted, Oh God above the heavens, let Your glory be over all the Earth." So Jesus goes through all created realms visible and invisible to a place that only He as God could go. The place where the Creator where Almighty God is and there He presents His blood. So, Jesus is great because of this infinite journey, he has traveled. And so Hebrews picks up on this, again, in Chapter 7:26, "Such a High Priest meets our needs, one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens." There our great High priest, exists with His Heavenly Father. And He has offered his own blood for us right before the throne of Almighty God.

3) Great in His Sympathy Toward Us as Sinners

Thirdly, Jesus is great in his sympathy toward us as sinners. He is a great High Priest because He's great in sympathy. Look at verse 15, "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with us in our weaknesses, but we have One who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin."  This is one of the most incredible themes in this passage may be in the whole Bible. Jesus the perfectly holy one is perfectly sympathetic to us as sinners. He sympathize with us, even us sinners. The Greek word is literally sympatheia, from which we get the English word. It means to feel with, to link my feelings, my passions with someone else, very related to the word compassion. They're completely related. And so the idea of sympathy or compassion is a union of one person's heart with another. We're supposed to do that when we rejoice with those who rejoice in one with those who mourn. We have genuine compassion for each other.

Jesus has a genuine compassion to Himself, in Himself, with us sinners. And specifically with people who feel that they are sinners that they need His ministry as a great High Priest. And what's interesting, how Jesus here uses a double negative, as if to strengthen the assurance in our minds. We ought to be strongly motivated to come to Jesus as our Great High Priest, because listen, we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize. The word unable shows a limitation on Jesus, a limitation, that would be on Jesus's character.

It would be a limitation on him as a high priest. But He doesn't suffer from this limitation. Like, when some people thinking they're being humble, say that God is too busy, spinning the planets, to look after my little needs. They don't realize, by this false humility they're really limiting God. We serve a God who is unable to both spin the planets and look after your little needs, so therefore, we'll let him spin the planets and you look after your own little needs. No friends. We serve a God who can do both, he can spin the planets and He can look after your little needs. And so, it's a dishonor to God to say that kind of thing.

So it would be a dishonor to Jesus to say, he's unable to sympathize with you. That he doesn't know what it feels like to go through what you're going through. It's a dishonor. And so the author uses this double negative to jar yourself out of thinking that you have a high priest who doesn't know what it feels like what you're going through right now. Jesus is actually infinitely great in his sympathies toward us as sinners, he is moved deeply with compassion toward us, as we struggle with the effects of our own sins, and those of others to us. Deeply sympathetic.

Jesus watches us struggle with temptations linked to our flesh and as He does that, He knows exactly what it's like to be tempted. He is mild and gentle, and faithful as a loving priest who will welcome us warmly into the throne room of grace. He's not standing like a guard at the door saying, you're not getting in here. But he is warmly welcoming you into this throne room of grace. He is moved with compassion for us. As Xerxes was moved with love for his wife, Esther, as she stood there in her beautiful queenly robes. And he loved her, and he extended his golden scepter to her, just right from his heart, flowed right through him and he loved her. But his love for Esther is just nothing compared to the love that Jesus has for his bride, the church. He loves his church and he's moved with love for her and extends a warm welcome to her, to come any time.

4) Great in His Temptations

And why is He so moved with compassion because Jesus is fourthly, great in his temptations. He is great, he was great, in his temptations in his time on earth, Hebrews 4:14, "for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin." Jesus 's compassion for us and our temptations and trials is certainly linked to his incarnation. He took on flesh and blood so that he could sympathize, so that he could experience those same things that we do. He shared our flesh and blood. He lived a life in the flesh, he felt its pulls, its desires, its weaknesses, its afflictions. He knows by experience what it is to be hungry. He fasted for 40 days and 40 nights and was tempted in the desert.

He knows by experience what it is to be poor, he said, "The Son of Man has no place to lay his head." Women were supporting him out of their means, He and his disciples are walking through the grain fields on the Sabbath, plucking them and eating them like all the other poor people. Jesus knows what it's like to be poor, he knows by experience what it's like to be weary to the bone. Fell asleep in the back of a boat on a cushion in the middle of this storm and had to be awakened. He was exhausted. He knows by experience what it's like to be rejected by people who ought to love Him, but instead hate him. Who twist up their faces in anger, he had to look at that for three years. And He saw the hatred in them, and He knew that they wanted to kill him. He knows by experience what it's like to be hated and rejected and despised, and He knows what it's like to feel physical pain, and death. He's been through all these experiences. He knows what that's like. He's been tempted in every way. Just as we are.

Now here friends I tell you, we come to infinite mystery, and this is a mystery to me, and it ought to be a mystery to you too. Meditate on this with me. Our temptations are not merely linked to our bodily nature, our physical drives, but also linked to our sin nature which we inherited from Adam. We were born sinners in Adam with a tendency to rebel against God and then we rebelled against God and in so doing, we built up habits of sin. That form a strong pull on us, and make it very difficult for us to live upright, lives.

We develop addictive habits of sin, of lusts and jealousies and pride and overeating and other things, addictive habits, just by transgression. And so James describes our temptations in this way, in James 1:14-15. "Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed, to then after desire is conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it is full grown, gives birth to death." Friends, these words cannot be ascribed to Jesus. He had nothing inside Him dragging him away from the Father. He had no habits of sin that he had to battle all of his life. How then can we say that Jesus's temptations were real temptations. How were they not like the pull of a magnet on a block of wood and that there was nothing inside Jesus, responding to the temptation.

My answer to you is, I have no idea. It's good for a theologian and a pastor, to know his limitations. I have no idea, I just know the text says that He was tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin. I know that. I know He had no habits of sin to battle against but I think it was a real battle, he was fighting in Gethsemane, when he was deciding what to do. Isn't the evidence there that that was a battle for him, to obey his father? It was real temptation. And so the bottom line is, Jesus is a great high priest for us because he is so compassionate on us in our weakness and our temptations and because he's experienced it all himself, no not every single temptation there's some temptations that He never has to go through. He never has to tell a second lie to cover the first lie.

But I think what the author means here is he understands all the categories of struggles, we have in our lives, because he went through them too. But in all of Jesus ' temptation, I hope you notice there's a key difference as well. He was tempted in every way, just as we are, but there's a big difference. He never sinned, He never gave in, not once.

5) Great in His Holiness

And therefore He is great in his holiness. We have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin, Jesus never sinned. It's just, it boggles my mind to consider 30 plus years of life in this earth. Tempted every day and never once sinned in any way. And this makes him a perfect high priest for us. It qualifies him to be our high priest because he was perfectly holy in every way. And therefore He was acceptable to God.

And if you go back in your mind to Hebrew 7:26, again, such a high priest meets our need, one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners exalted above the heavens. Jesus, I contend, I've said this in this pulpit before, and I say it again now, is the most tempted man in history. More tempted than any of you have ever been. You know why, because he ran all of his temptations into the ground. Jesus and his temptation without a foot raised, Jesus won. Temptation drops in exhaustion, Jesus is still strong. He wrestled all of his temptations to the ground and stood in triumph over every one of them, he felt every temptation to the maximum level, and defeated everyone. We sinners, cave in at some point. And you know it's true.

Take for example a man with a temper. He's got a problem with anger, gets up resolves in the Lord that he's not going to get angry once that day. Says it out loud and Satan says, "Okay, now we know what we're working on today." Okay? And so he goes to breakfast, and his wife may say something that he doesn't like, but he's not going to get angry today, so yeah, but there's a little heat that's rising. Some memories. You know what I'm saying? Some things, but nothing comes out. Kids may do something etcetera. This is not autobiographical. I hope you know that. You understand that.

I'm not speaking auto-biographical, but these experiences happen. He goes to work, his boss criticizes him at a conference in front of other people, and he's embarrassed by that and tempted to do a lash back but he doesn't, for good reason. And on his way home, there's some incidents with another driver who's in a bit more of a rush than him, and who honks at him and makes a gesture and is, but I'm not going to get angry today. Yeah, but he's close, isn't he? I mean, he's like ripe fruit, ready to drop. And so he comes home and I don't know what it is, but there is that straw that breaks the camel's back, you know what I'm talking about? And so the camel's back breaks, and he lashes out. He congratulates himself, that he made it that far in the day. Friends, look, he cut out at 62% of the temptation, he didn't feel the whole thing, there were still more Satan could have done. There was more things that could have come, he just cut out he kicked out. Pushed the red eject button, the canopy went and he went out of the flaming jet.

He's out, he's done Jesus never did it. He felt every single temptation right to the end, 100%. 30 plus years he took on those temptations one at a time, like Samson with the jawbone of a donkey until all of those Philistines were laying dead at his feet. That's Jesus our perfect High Priest and therefore He is qualified to be our high priest. See then dear friends, the greatness of our high priest, great in his person as the son of God. Great in his journey through the heavens to the right-hand of God. Great in his sympathy toward us as sinners, great in his experience of temptation and great in his personal holiness. We have a great high priest. But we are also great in our need.

Look at the greatness of our need, and look at verse 16, it says, "Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." Verse 16 speaks very clearly of us as needy people. It uses the word help so that we can find help. We can find grace, to help. The Word which we could say assistance to gain assistance implies we can't make it on our own. The Greek word was a nautical term it's used during the shipwreck of Paul's ship in Acts 27, of the cables that are passed under the hull of the ship to keep it from falling apart. And so the idea is that the hull is going to fall apart if it doesn't receive the help of these cables and so it is with us, we need help, Amen. We need help. We're going to fall apart if we don't have help, we can't make it on our own.

What cursed independence, we have. And how we express that in prayerlessness. We don't need to pray because we're fine on our own. Really, we need help. We are greatly in need of help, And it says to receive help in time of need, the image, there is of timely help, help that comes just when you need it. Like Calvary, over the hill. And the horses come just at that moment. And the text also speaks of our weakness in verse 15, "We do not have a high priest who was unable to sympathize with our weaknesses." These weaknesses are moral infirmities. We are feeble as we battle temptation. We're not strong, we're not Samson's, we're like little children we're weak and sick as we try to battle. The whole context, I think, of Hebrews 4:14-16 is one of the temptation. These Jewish professors of faith in Christ, were being tempted to turn their back on Jesus because of these external temptations and they were, they were dropping like flies. And so the author is saying, don't drop run to Jesus when you're being tempted.

Don't fight on your own, it's too strong for you. You need help, you're weak. And why is that? Well, we've got an infinite journey ahead of us. We'd speak often of the two infinite journeys. One of those two infinite journeys is that internal journey of personal holiness. We were predestined to be conformed to Jesus, to be just like Jesus in Hebrews... Sorry, in Matthew 5:48. It says, "Be perfect therefore as your Heavenly Father is perfect." We're called then to be perfect like God. Hebrews 12:1 says that we are to throw off everything that hinders in the sin that so easily entangles and run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Christian life then is portrayed not only as a long distance race, but also as a battle like a warfare that we have to fight and these two images come together in 2nd Timothy 4:7, when Paul says, "I fought the good fight, I finished the race."

It's a fighting race. And we have these enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil that are just assaulting us all the time and get the image of World War One and no man's land. You can imagine just barbed wire on the left and barbed wire on the right. The Germans and the allies and there's just... It's like... It's looks like a moon scape nothing living and just artillery fire and all kinds of grenades and machine gun-ness, and you have to run 10 miles along no man's land to make it to the other side. Think, well, that's an overstatement. No, it isn't. Spiritually, that's what you're trying to do here. Every day, lusts and Satan, with his demons, assault us and try to pull us from Jesus every day. If you didn't have great assistance, you would have fallen long time ago. Now, I say to you some of that assistance comes whether you pray for it or not, but this text is telling you to pray for it.

To get the help you need as you run this perilous, race. It says, we need mercy, and grace for our time of need. Mercy and grace are almost, in some cases, interchangeable terms hard to distinguish between the two. Some theologians say that mercy is God's goodness to us in times of suffering, when we're hurting. Somebody blind by the road and says, "Have mercy on me son, of David." He's suffering, he's in pain, he's struggling. And then grace is just going right for your sins, the thing that makes you defile before God, it covers your past sins. It helps you not sin in the future, mercy and grace. And that's what you need in this time of need. Our needs are great.

Thirdly, look at the greatness of our privilege. We have a great high priest and we are greatly needy. Look at the greatness of our privilege. Full access to the throne of grace. We needy sinners, needy sinners. Who are we? We are great sinners friends, one Puritan said our sins are as many as they are great and there are as great as they are many.

Our sins are great, like the mountains, not like little ant hills, they're great because God is infinitely Holy. And our sins are many, they're not occasional. King David said, there are as many as the hairs on my head. And so how can it be that sinners like us would actually be welcomed into the throne of grace, how could it be? But look what it says in verse 16, "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace." Now, when you think of a throne, don't you think of a place of sovereign power, where a king is seated. He's seated on his throne. And ordinarily for us as sinners, it would be a place of sheer terror. Think of a throne of righteousness where God Almighty, God displays His righteousness, the throne of righteousness.

Or think of a throne of justice where God dispenses his justice against those who have violated his transgressions in his laws. Or think of a throne of omnipotence. Where God can do anything He chooses to do and nothing can thwart him and nothing can stop his mighty hand. But for us as sinners these are terrifying concepts. Absolutely terrifying the throne of God. But see the value of what Jesus has done for us. He has transformed it, and made it a throne of Grace. And I'm not going to say it's not a throne of justice, it's not a throne of righteousness, it's not a throne of omnipotence. No, it's a throne of grace. I'm not going to say that, that wouldn't be true. But now God's justice is helping you get saved, God's righteousness is on your side. It is just and righteous for God to forgive you your sins in Jesus. His powers unleashed to get you to Heaven. It's a throne of grace. And all of God's attributes are working together to bring you to your final end in the new Heaven and in the new earth.

Friends, the Old Covenant was all about restrictions. We weren't welcome, we were left on the outside. If you weren't a Levite you couldn't come into the holy place. If you weren't a high priest, son of Aaron you couldn't come into the most holy place, or else you would die. But the new covenant is all about access. Amen. It's about a doorway. Jesus is the door of the sheep. It says, in Ephesians 2:18, "For through Him, we [both Jew and Gentile] have access to the Father by one spirit." In Hebrews 10, it says, "Therefore brothers, since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, open for us through the curtain, that is His body, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our heart sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience, and having our bodies washed with pure water."

Do you not see the great privilege we have here? We have a great privilege, we are invited right into the throne room of Almighty God. God is opening wide the door to his presence and not only that, He is commanding you, a believer in Jesus, He's commanding you to come in. Now, I said in a sermon, years ago, I don't really know the difference between God's commands and His invitations, and His invitations and His commands. Well, command is something. Well, kind of negative and invitation is like to a party. So that's something positive. Friends, are any of God's commands burden, some are negative? No, they're all wonderful. And you are commanded to come to the throne of grace. Or if you like better, you're invited to come to the throne of grace, but you need to come.

Application number one. Therefore, let us hold fast to our confession of faith. And I want to just start by saying, "Have you made a confession of faith?" I mean you're here today, it's Sunday morning, you're in church, maybe because you're invited or you think you should be in church or something like that, but have you made a profession of faith in Christ? Have you testified that Jesus is your savior? Have you cried out to Jesus to save you from your sins? Have you asked that his blood shed on the cross would be a cleansing river for you? Have you made a profession of faith? The goal of Hebrews is not only that you would make some initial profession of faith in Christ, but you would hold fast to your profession of faith. That you would hold it just as firmly now as the day that you with tears trusted in Jesus and asked Him to be your savior.

Hold on to it fast and in order for you to hold fast to your confession, you need to come regularly to the throne of grace. You need to come again and again, you need rivers of grace, you know that throne, that throne of justice and righteousness, and holiness, and power? Do you know that throne in Revelation 22:1, is the source of the river of life flowing clear as crystal from the lamb, from the throne of God, of the lamb? That throne has become for you a river of grace. Stand in that river and let it cleanse you. Come near to the throne of grace. Let us draw near to get help in time of need.

Now I already said at the beginning and now here I say at the end, there are all times of need. There's never a moment which you can say Jesus I got this one, I got it. You can go help somebody who's more needy. I'm doing just fine. Friends you're really in need, then. That's when you're neediest, when you don't think you need Jesus. We need him at every moment, we need him every hour.

You need them in the morning when you first get up. That's a time of need, when you first get up in the morning, you get down on your knees and you anticipate your day, you think about what's coming. Maybe you're going to school, you've got a test or you going to have... You're meeting with some other students for a project, maybe you're working at a company, maybe you're raising your kids, you're a mom that's raising her kids, maybe... You know, who knows the situation, but you know what your day holds, you don't know for sure, but you have an idea. Bring those things before God in prayer, say, "God I need your help today. Satan's planning some things. I don't know where he's coming from, I know this, he wants me to sin. So I ask You for grace and mercy to help me in this time of need."

Times of temptation are a time of need. I think that's the home base of these three verses. When you're tempted, go. Now for the longest time in my Christian life, I would use these after I've sinned. We'll get to that in a moment, but like a mop and a bucket, you know, to come clean it up. And it is that, friends. But better not to sin, Amen. And so, times of temptation are times of need, when you're being tempted go to the throne of grace, say Jesus I'm being tempted right now, I'm being tempted. This same old lust has hold of my mind, in my imagination and I don't want to sin but I know that I will unless you help me. Will you please help me? This temptation to slander or gossip has come over me, I want to lay this person low but I ought not to do it, it's a bad habit. Help me. The individual earlier, in my sermon, he's struggling with anger. He's going and he is saying, "I just want to... " He needs to bring it and just douse it in the ocean of grace, so he's not heated anymore. Times of temptation are times of need.

And so are times of sin. We all sin, we all stumble in many ways. When you have violated your conscience, when you have done what is shameful, when you have experimented again with those things of which you are ashamed. And you think through insanity, it's going to have a different outcome this time than it did the last. And you have been duped, you have been tricked and you have sinned. You need to come to the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help you in your time of need. What is the time of need? Well, that you'll add a second sin on to the first one and a third on to the second and develop a new habit of wickedness that will be even harder to break later. Nip it in the bag. You sinned, go admit it, confess it, and He is faithful and just and He will forgive you, your wickedness, and He'll cleanse you from all unrighteousness. Bring it to the throne of grace in times of sin. Times of trial are times of need, God is marshaling trials at you. He's bringing them to you to train you and prepare you and build up your faith. You may be going through an economic trial, you may be unemployed, you may be struggling financially, having trouble making ends meet. It's a trial, the Lord has brought it on you.

Bring it to him, he's the one that brought it to you bring it back to him and say, "Lord I need grace to not curse your name or to question your love for me in the trial, I want to stand up and rejoice in this trial." It could be physical, it could be a health problem, a very serious diagnosis of cancer or diabetes or heart disease, for yourself or a loved one. It's a trial. Bring it to the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help in your time of need, to stand under the trial and to not give in to the temptation to question God or murmur, or to lose your faith.

Times of prosperity are times of need. You may not think they are and that's your danger. When you're doing well, you get the promotion, you get accepted to grad school, you get a raise, something good happens it's a time of need. You know what you ought to do, you got to recognize every blessing that ever comes to me comes from... Well, it comes from the throne of grace. I might as well bring it back to the throne of grace and say, thank you Jesus. What do you want me to do now with this blessing? I've got some extra money. How do you want me to invest it in your kingdom? I've got a little bit easing of my circumstances here, I'm healthier now. How do you want... I'm healed. How do you want me to use my strength now for you?"

You're bringing it back to the throne of grace, lest you forget that God gave you the blessing, lest you forget to be compassionate to other people who aren't blessed like you, lest you forget to use every blessing for His kingdom and for His glory, lest you forget to thank him simply thank him for the good things he's given you. Times of weariness are times of need. Weary, tired, fatigued, burdened, just bring it to Jesus, say, "Renew my strength, dear Lord." And finally ordinary, boring everyday life-ness, are times of need. I don't know how to call it, just regular life. That makes up 85% of your life, and if it's only these other times then what, you got it on your own these other times? No, when you're sitting behind the wheel and you're about to put it in drive, pray.

It's a time of need and he may tell you, you don't need to put it in drive you should put it in reverse. You'll hit that car if you put in drive, that happened to me. I prayed and I put it in drive and the Lord, showed me, you need to be in reverse, right now. What it is, is we think we got it. We don't need any help. When you're making that same meal you've made a hundred times ask Jesus for help. When you're about to sit down and eat that meal, thank him and bring it to him, and say, "Thank you Lord for this food. Help me to eat it to your glory." There is no time, that is not a time of need. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for your mercy, we thank you for your grace, we thank you for the river of life flowing clear as crystal from the throne of grace. And we're drinking from it now, oh Lord, I pray, teach me, teach all of us to pray more than we do. Teach us to pray throughout the day, pray in quiet times, pray while driving, pray right before meeting with somebody, pray in the middle of conversations quietly in our minds, pray when we're tempted, pray when we've sinned. God teach us to pray consistently, not just for ourselves, but for others as we go through this difficult journey, this battle, some quarrelsome way as we're trying to make it to heaven Lord, just help us we pray. Thank you for Jesus, thank you for His death on the cross. In his name we pray, Amen.

I am so excited to preach this message. I said that last week didn't I? I just am. I just feel blessed to the core of my being, for the privilege of unfolding the Word of God before you week after week. And I celebrate today that the topic is the Word of God itself, for I love the Bible, and I love everything that it says.

Throughout history, no technology was so carefully developed and guarded, protected as that of swordmaking. The sword itself, the most powerful weapon in the world before the advent of gunpowder. And thus, it became a symbol both of military conquest and of the governmental power that followed it. To live by the sword, or to die by the sword, meant to live or die by that military conquest. David said, "The sword devours one, as well as another," referring to the power of the sword to take life. Swords are mentioned over 400 times in the Bible.

The merest mention of the word sword conjures up in our hearts, our memories, the thoughts of heroic courageous figures or terrifying figures from history, the Roman gladiators, the Roman legions who carried that short stabbing sword. English Knights. King Arthur who pulled Excalibur out of the rock, as you remember. Or the terrifying power of the Viking warriors. Or the stealth of Japanese ninjas, the sword.

When I was a missionary in Japan, I was fascinated by the katana. The legendary Samurai sword that was forged with astonishing precision by ancient technologies. If you looked at the edge of one of these exquisite swords, you could see them on display in museums. They had an interesting kind of ripple quality to them. You know, smooth as silk, smooth as glass, but still, you can see these ripples within the crystal structure of the actual steel. And that's because they use two different kinds of steel and they sandwich them one after the other, and pounded them down under the heat of the forge. They use high carbon steel which is exceptionally hard and could be honed to a razor-sharp edge, but was very brittle and it just won't do in the middle of a battle to have your sword snap in half. And so, they would put in then a layer of low carbon steel, which was softer, more malleable, which absorbed the blow and could give the sword a kind of a toughness and through secret technologies were able to make these remarkable swords, a katana.It took centuries for the Japanese blacksmiths to develop this art and they guarded the secrets of it very closely and then stories, a kind of mythology, grew up around the katana, around this special Samurai sword, specifically of two individuals, one named Masamune and the other Muramasa, two men who actually lived at different times from each other, but no matter for the myth or the legend. The legendary contest that occurred between them had the elder Samurai blacksmith, Masamune, as the mentor and trainer to the younger Muramasa. Masamune's swords are regarded as the most beautifully crafted, most skillfully katana ever made. Surviving swords are priceless national treasures. By contrast, Muramasa's swords were regarded as violent, brutish and evil. The swords of Masamune considered to be deeply spiritual, pure, and benevolent. In the legend, Muramasa was Masamune's student. The student became arrogant and at some point challenged his master to see who can make the finer sword.

To test the swords, each sword was held into the current of a mountain stream. And the student Muramasa's sword was so perfectly sharp, honed to a razor sharp edge, it was said to have cut a leaf in half that floated down the stream and just met the edge of its blade. But the Master Masamune's sword did not cut a thing. When the leaves would get near to its edge, it would miraculously avoid the sword and float around it, showing that the sword somehow possessed a benevolent power that it would harm nothing that was innocent or undeserving a punishment.

The Cutting of the God’s Word

Friends, that's just a legend, it never happened. But I say to you in the passage that we read of today, you just heard read, we hear of a more perfect sword, sharper, more penetrating and more pure, more spiritual than any of these legends can describe. As a matter of fact, this sword is actually said to be alive even better than the Samurai legend, the sword only ever cuts in order to heal, it only ever cuts in order to bring life, it cuts in order to engraft faith, it cuts in order to surgically remove the tumors of sin. The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to the dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow, it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything's uncovered and laid bare, before the eyes of Him to whom we must give an account. Every time you pick up a Bible, you're holding in your hands a miracle, a living miracle spiritually alive. Only the power of Almighty God can explain the existence and the potency of this book. Over the centuries, God forged this sword in the furnace of human history, on the anvil of human experience and hearts. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we have this Scripture.

Now why does the author celebrate the Word of God here in Hebrews 4? What is the context of this celebration of the living and active Word of God? Why here? Well, remember the overall context of the Book of Hebrews, the author to the Hebrews is deeply concerned about a congregation of Jewish people who had made an outward profession of faith in Christ, but who under the pressure of persecution were waffling in their commitment to Christ. Their commitment to Christ outwardly seemed to be decaying. Some of them weren't attending church anymore, they were afraid to do so. And so they were in a decaying orbit with Christ, and so he writes this letter of warning, this letter of exhortation to stimulate and strengthen them in their faith so that they will not fall away.

And for the last two chapters in Hebrews, Hebrews 3 and 4, he has been marvelously meditating on just five verses in the Old Testament, Psalm 95. He's just ruminating very deeply on phase after phrase of Psalm 95. And he's taking the spiritual lessons of that Psalm from the Old Covenant, and moving them over to New Testament, New Covenant believers like you and me, and applying those lessons to our spiritual situation to our condition. He's taking Psalm 95 and bringing it over. "Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts" as that generation did when they refused to enter the promised land. And so it says, "I declared on oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest." So, the author has meditated powerfully on some key words like the concept of today as long as it is called today, today is the day we have to believe Christ. Today's the day we have to take in the Word of God to live for Jesus. We have today. It's all we'll ever have.

So, he's meditated on this idea of today or he's talked about God's rest. "I swore an oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest." What is God's rest? We found last week very clearly that it's the Sabbath rest, of eternity in God's presence, in heaven. And the danger then, of a hardening of a heart. "Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts." And so he's warned them about the danger of a hardening heart and the only remedy there can be to the deceitfulness of sin that comes and hardens our heart is this, the living and active Word of God. It's the only remedy.

And so he's wielding this sharp double-edged sword. He's been wielding it now for these two chapters, he's been wielding it really from the very beginning, The Book of Hebrews is saturated in Old Testament quotations, saturated in the Word of God, but I think he's really specifically saying, "Look at all that Psalm 95 can do in your life." And it's just five verses of the Old Testament. Oh, the beauty of the Scripture, the power of it, how it can be unleashed in your life. So he's talking about it, that's the context. And so what does he say? What does he say about the searching qualities of the Word of God?

Well, look again at verse 12, "The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It penetrates even to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow."

First he says that it's living. The Scripture is living. The Word of God as a living thing. It's alive in some mysterious way, it is a mystery, this life of the Scripture, it's a mysterious thing, but it is alive. These are living words. JI Packer, the Puritan scholar, speaking of Richard Baxter's 'Reformed Pastor' said this, "Its words have hands and feet. They climb all over you, they work their way into your heart and conscience and will not be dislodged." Well, dear friends, if that is true of Richard Baxter's uninspired book, 'Reformed Pastor,' how much infinitely more is that true of the Word of God?

It has hands and feet and it climbs into your heart. These words are living things, they run into your brain through your eyes as you read and your ears as you hear. They find their way quickly through your spiritual bloodstream, into the vital organs of your spiritual experience, and they settle in there, they are alive, they begin to multiply their effects on you, they send off related thoughts and implications, they challenge an ever widening circle of issues in your heart and mind. They're multiplying, replicating, they're moving and churning, they're running roughshod over every objection you may have. They take your whole way of viewing everything in the world captive and transform it and make it like God's.

The Bible is living and it's also life-giving, Basic principle and biology is life comes from life. If any biologist anywhere in the world is studying looking through a microscope at a living cell, plant or animal, that biologist knows one thing, that living cell came from something living. If something is alive, something living gave it birth. So also dear friends, if you are alive spiritually, it is the living Word of God that gave you life. That's where you got it from. Life comes from life, so the Word of God is living. We were spiritually dead, and now we are alive forever more.

It says in Ephesians 2:1 1, "But as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live." You were the living dead. You were biologically alive, but you were spiritually dead. But in Ephesians 2:5, it says God "made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions, it is by grace you have been saved…" and God used as an instrument of that spiritual life-giving, that spiritual resurrection of you, the Word of God, the Word of the Gospel. Jesus said in John 5:24, "I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word, and believes him who sent me, has eternal life and will not be condemned, he's crossed over from death to life." So the Word has power to give life to the dead.

You remember that story in 2 Kings 13, where some dead person was being buried and it was a time of turbulence, military turbulence, as frequently happened in Israel's history, some raiders rode into that town and so the people in the middle of the funeral hurriedly took that dead body and threw it into Elisha's tomb where his bones were and suddenly that dead person sprang to life. That really happened. But it's also a kind of a living parable. If Elisha's bones can give life to a dead corpse, how much more can the living and enduring Word of God give life to a spiritual soul. Just spring to life when you hear the Gospel. We live on a living planet, don't we? This green, glowing, pulsating, alive, Emerald-like thing, just in the middle of blackness of space. Where does all that green come from, all those plants? Well, they come from seeds. Where do the seeds come from? They come from plants, and on and on. Read about it in Genesis 1.

But the most remotest piece of land on earth is an island in the South Atlantic called Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. It's 1509 miles from the nearest landmass, which is also another tiny little island in the South Atlantic, St. Helena, where Napoleon was exiled because it was so distant itself from every other landmass. It is just like half the continent of North America away from any land, and yet it's just covered with lush green vegetation. How in the world did that happen? So, biologists study this, and they wonder how the seeds got there to begin with. Well, I have no idea. Maybe they were carried there on wind currents. Maybe they were lodged in logs that floated from South America or from Africa, I don't really know. Maybe they were in the intestines of birds that ate some plant and then died, flew there and died and then the plant sprang to life. People have different theories, but it doesn't matter how distant or how far life can get there, how much more than to the distant shores does the gospel go with life in Jesus' name?

And it doesn't matter how old it is either. I was reading recently about an archaeologist that found some old wheat seeds in the burial shrouds of a mummy from Egypt, he decided to plant them and he got wheat out of them. They were 3000 years old. But apparently no water had ever touched them and so they were vital, they were ready to go. In the 16th century, there was a copy of the Scriptures in some old Augustinian cloister, Martin Luther blows the dust off the pages, reads and comes to life spiritually, and the Reformation just jumps up out of that.

It doesn't matter how old the Bible is, it is still vital, still alive. Bible also has power to revive you spiritually, to renew you, to give you new life in your walk with Jesus. As it says in Psalm 23, "He restores my soul." Or in Isaiah 40, "Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength, they will soar on wings as eagles, they'll run and not be weary, they'll walk and not be faint." All of that gets ministered to you through the Bible. That's how it comes, the Scripture comes and gives you life.

Have you ever heard it said of a great teacher, a preacher, "That individual makes the Bible come alive"? I hate that expression. The Bible is already alive. We are the ones with the problem. No, a skillful teacher is using the Bible to make you come alive. The Bible's forever young, it's forever ancient. It will never lose its youthful vitality or its ancient wisdom and experience. It's never gonna get old and feeble, or decrepit. It cannot become out of date and uncool or is the word "vintage." The Bible is never gonna be vintage, dear friends. The Bible is alive and active today. It's younger than you are, and it's older than you are. It doesn't matter how old you are, how young you are. It's vital, it's strong.

And also beautifully, the Bible cannot be killed, though many have tried to do it. You just can't kill it. The Roman Empire sought to do it, they couldn't do it. The barbarian Dark Ages that spread over Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire couldn't do it. Vikings and all their depredations on the monasteries, they didn't care about the Word of God at all, so they sacked the monasteries, because there is no one there that could fight them, or would fight them. And they burned all these worthless scrolls, and took the gold and silver they found, and off they went. About 150 years later, they're converted to Christianity. That's what happens with the Vikings.

You can't destroy the Word of God. You can burn some copies of it. You can burn some scrolls. Many have done that. The Medieval Roman Catholic church burned Luther's German translation of the Bible, they burned the Bible, because it was in the vernacular, but still it lives. The enlightenment's mockery under Voltaire couldn't stop it. The enlightenment philosophy under Immanuel Kant couldn't destroy it. It's still here. And the murderous and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century Nazism and Communism, they tried to destroy it. Nazism is dead and gone, communism is going to join it soon, but the Bible still stands and it will stand forever.

Persecution can't kill the Bible, neither can worldliness. Our worldliness will not kill the Bible. It may kill us but it's not gonna kill the Bible. Doctrinal error can't kill the Bible, lazy neglect of its teachings cannot kill the Bible, nor slanderous misrepresentations of its teachings, that cannot kill it, nor unbelief by whole regions and generations of people, that cannot kill it either, it still lives. Charles Spurgeon put it this way, "The gospel is such a living gospel that were it cut into a thousand shreds, every particle of it would spring to life and grow. If it were buried beneath a thousand avalanches of error, it would shake off the rubble and rise from its grave. If it were cast into the midst of a fire, it would simply walk through the flame, as it has done many a time as if it were in its native element." So, the Bible is living.

Secondly, the Bible is active. And now, you're wondering how long this sermon is going to be. Now you're wondering, Okay, we're only on the second descriptor. Well, don't worry, Eric already said you're going to get out before the Super Bowl, right? When is that? 6 O'clock, 7 O'clock. Worry not, dear friends.

The Bible is active, the Word of God is living and active. What does it mean active? Another translation, would be powerful or perhaps energetic. I take it to mean effective. The Bible is effective, it's able to produce the effect it desires. When drug manufacturers want to test the effectiveness of a drug, they have to remove any questions about what's called a psychosomatic effect. In other words, people who take pills and medication think they're going to get better and that helps them to get better. So in order to test that they come up with things called placebos; they have the same shape and size and color of the other pill and they do tests. The placebo however is studied because it has absolutely no chemical effect on the body at all, at least in the areas that they're trying to study. So, it just removes that at all, and then they can compare.

Let me tell you something, the Bible is no placebo. It is effective, it's an effective agent, it steps in and does what God sends it to do, every time. And the clear testimony of this, Isaiah 55:10-11, "As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth, it will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it." God sends forth His word and it comes back to Him having done the job.

By the way, in that passage, Isaiah 55, I discovered this morning. I hadn't thought it through. The Word of God is compared to rain there, precipitation. In other places, it's compared to the seed, so the Word of God is everything, it's the rain that comes down, it's the seed that it receives. God's all over the whole process. The Word of God produces an unmistakable effect and God said, "Let there be light and there was light." Genesis 1:3, or in Genesis 1:9, "And God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear, and it was so." The Word of God produces the effects specifically on human hearts spiritually, for the elect, those chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. The word brings them to life, and sustains them in life until they are glorified in the presence of God.

For the non-elect, they are hardened and offended by the Word. They are confirmed in sin and in patterns. They are given over to their sin, as it says in Romans chapter 1, by the same Word. And so it says in 2 Corinthians 2:15-16, "For we are to God, the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and to those who are perishing, to the one the smell of death and to the other we are the fragrance of life."

Now, preachers need to trust wholly in the Bible to transform the church. Put your trust here. Anyone who wants to see a church transform, they must put their trust in the Word and not in some technique or gimmick coming from a Christian book store that you can buy for $39.99 and you get out of a box. Reformation of a church doesn't come out of a box, it comes out of the Scripture. Spurgeon says this to his fellow pastors, "You may study your sermon, my brother, and you may be a great rhetorician, you may be able to deliver it with wonderful fluency and force, but the only power that is effectual for the highest design of preaching is the power which does not lie in your word nor in my word, but in the Word of God." Have you never noticed when persons are converted that they almost always attribute it to some text that was quoted in the sermon? It is God's word and not our comment on God's Word, which saves souls.

So, what effect does the Word of God produce? Well, it releases those that are held captive to sin, it unlocks the doors of hearts and the prison cell of unbelief, and lets the captive go free into a free life of Jesus. It unlocks the doors of depression and discouragement and sets the captive free into lives of joyful selfless service to the Savior. It convicts sinful twisted hearts of deep patterns of selfishness, it reveals hidden lusts and the cliff edges of materialism and other things in the heart to keep that soul walking in Jesus, that's what the Scripture can do. And all servants of Christ, pastors or not, it doesn't matter, should put their full trust in the Word of God because the Word of God alone is effective.

Thirdly, the Word of God is sharp, sharp. It says sharper than any double-edged sword, the sharpness of the Word of God. Its ability to divide and render asunder things that ordinarily would be together, that's what's discussed here. What is a double-edged sword? Literally, the Greek is two-mouthed sword, one that cuts both ways, two sharp edges, two honed edges. No dull side. Friends, there are no dull passages in the Bible. There are only dull minds as we come to those passages.

Spurgeon was relating a story of a man who was just reading a Sunday school lesson, just reading the Sunday School lesson. And he came to that genealogy in Genesis 5, which goes from Adam to Noah. And it's just this kind of rhythmic so-and-so lived so many years after the birth of so and so, and they had other sons and daughters, and then he died, and then he died, and then he died and then he died, and then he died, and the man was converted because he was considering his own death. He was cut to the heart by that passage because it has piercing, it has cutting abilities. The Word is sharp. It is sharp and it cuts both ways. A preacher unleashing the powerful convicting word of the Bible ought to see, does see, if he's a godly man, that it's cutting both ways. It's not just the people that are being cut, but it's the preacher as well. He stands under the convicting, converting, the transforming power of the Word, because he is having those same things happening in his life.

And I was meditating on this cutting because there's a Greek word that relates to the cutting. It made me think of another passage of Scripture, 2 Timothy 2:15, which says, Paul's talking to Timothy, a young pastor. He says "Study to show yourselves approved unto God, a workman who doesn't need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of Truth." Orthotomeo is a Greek word, rightly cutting it, cutting it right. So I thought, Now this is strange. In Hebrews, it talks about how the word is sharp, but then in 2 Timothy, it's that he's to cut the word straight.

So I was meditating on this and I came up with my onion illustration. About two or three months ago, I was making spaghetti with fresh onions, big white onions from the produce section. And I got a sharp knife and I sliced right through the center of that onion, and opened it up, and I was weeping within 30 seconds. I was just weeping as the pungent chemicals just oozed and flowed up into my face. And so I think that's how these two relate. A skillful pastor cuts open the Scripture so it can cut you open, just unfolds the Word of God so that you are cut open before it and brought to tears over sin, brought to conviction and brought to joy over what Jesus has done at the cross. And so the Word of God does have power to hurt you and it also has power to heal you from that hurt. He wounds, and then he binds up the wounds, and he does it by the Word.

Take someone with a malignant tumor growing up inside their body, strangely, the body is supporting and nourishing that malignant tumor with blood vessels, feeding that tumor with blood vessels. The surgeon comes in with a scalpel and cut those blood vessels and there is bleeding. But the intention is healing because that tumor will kill you. And so the Word of God is sharp to heal you from sin.

And it's also penetrating. The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow. So it's not just a slashing kind of thing, but a piercing kind of thing. There's a sense of piercing. Well, what's being pierced? Our hardened hearts. That's what's being pierced.

It says in Hebrews 3:12-13, "See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness." Sin is deceitful. And the effect is a hardening of the heart. The Word of God has a remedy, it pierces the hardness that sin has produced. As in the days of Peter's sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2:37. When the people heard his sermon, it says, "They were cut to the heart," they were pierced in their hearts, "and they said to Peter and the other apostles, 'Brothers, what shall we do?'" "Repent and believe in Jesus" is the answer. But because they were pierced. The Word of God can pierce like a rapier point.

One of my favorite stories from church history concerns George Whitefield, he was a powerful preacher of the Word of God, very dramatic but very biblical, very God-centered. He was an expository preacher but very passionate and dramatic in his presentation. He's just going verse by verse and going through this and unleashing the power of the Word of God. And the Great Awakening, just by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Great Awakening was just pouring down as this man and others preached this Word. However, everywhere Whitefield went, he stimulated tremendous opposition, people hated him, and opposed him. Some would blow trumpets in his ear while he's up on the stand preaching, others would throw dead cats at him or worse. He had enemies, and as he was doing it in one particular ministry in Bristol, England, he had stimulated some specific opposition.

Now, George Whitefield had a defect with his body. His eyes were constantly crossed. He had crossed-eye like that, and so those that sought to mock him called him Dr. Squintum. And so he had these squinty kind of crossed eyes, and there was this one particular group of young men who made it their business to mock Whitefield everywhere he went. They organized themselves in something called the Hell-Fire Club and there was a particular man named Thorpe, who was kind of the ring leader of the Hell-Fire Club, and they just kind of mocked him wherever he went in Bristol, England. And apparently, Thorpe was very good at doing impressions, he was good at it, and he had all of Whitefield's mannerisms and gestures down pat. So he went with his buddies, the Hell-Fire Club, to a certain pub like a bar and he got a copy of one of Whitefield's printed sermons, and he has the copy in his hand, gets up on the table and starts to mock Whitefield by preaching one of Whitefield's sermons. Ten minutes into it, he is converted by the power of what he's mocking.

He just sinks down on his knees in tears and begs Jesus to forgive him, forgive. This piercing power of the Word of God, and then he became himself a preacher of the Word, and led many to faith in Christ.

It's the piercing power of the Word of God. You can't escape it, if you're one of God's elect; and the Word of God has power to discriminate in your mind between this and that, to set it apart, to divide soul and spirit, joints and marrow. I don't know what that means exactly. Some theologians say that there's a difference between the soul and the spirit. They say that the soul is that part of you that relates to God and they even, some of them, talk about it being implanted at the new birth, relationship with God. And then they say the spirit's the natural kind of immaterial part of you that enervates you, that gives you life, etcetera. Look, I don't know, I think that the word soul and spirit are frequently used interchangeable in Scripture, but I know this, if there can be a distinction made between soul and spirit, it's the Word of God that can do it, and it can divide between joints and marrow too. And so it discriminates.

Charles Spurgeon put it this way, "The Word not only lets you see what your thoughts are, but it criticizes your thoughts. The Word of God says of this thought it is vain and of that thought it is acceptable. of this thought it is selfish and of that thought it is Christ-like. It is a judge of the thoughts of men and the Word of God is such a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart that when men twist about and wind and wander yet it tracks them down."

And so, the written Word of God is vibrant, and its job is to bring us now, now, today, while there's time, spiritually in our minds to bring us to Judgment Day. That's its job. It brings Judgment Day to you or you to Judgment Day because it says it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. The function of Scripture is to save your soul. 2 Timothy 3:15, "How from infancy, you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." That's what they can do. And so, before salvation can happen, a sinner has to be made to see himself as guilty in the eyes of the holy God. That sinner has to be brought to the judgment bar of God and stand guilty, and the Word of God has power to do that. It's a mirror that shows you your corruptions, and it has power to illuminate your thought-life and reveal it to be godly or corrupt at any moment, it has the power to lay open the twists and turns of your tricky heart.

It says in Jeremiah 17:9 and 10, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" That's not a rhetorical question, it's a real question. Who can understand the human heart? Next verse, "I the Lord search the heart and the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve." God knows your heart. He knows everything about it, even in its sinfulness.

Hunters catch foxes by studying their habit patterns and how they are clever and tricky, and how they double back on their ways and all that, what their layers are, and so human beings can hunt foxes successfully. But we can't hunt our own hearts successfully, can we? But God through the Word can hunt our hearts successfully and the Word of God works together with the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit uses the Word, and the Word and the Holy Spirit go together. And so the Spirit brings conviction of sin and it brings us to the judgment seat of God. And why is that?

Look at verse 13, "Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account," of God. This is God's universe. He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and His holy eyes search out everything there is on this planet. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. We in our sin yearn to hide, we yearn to hide.

Adam and Eve made those fig leaf coverings for themselves and then when they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, they ran and hid behind trees. They're looking for a covering and they think that God cannot see what they do in the dark. But even the darkness is as light to God, there's nothing in all creation hidden. Our secret lusts, our secret deeds, our secret desires, our secret histories, the things we've done in the past, the Word of God uncovers them in His holy presence so that we can bring them to the cross of Jesus for forgiveness. So that we can bring those things to Jesus and say, "Lord I am a sinner, oh Be merciful to me. Oh, Jesus, you shed your blood for sinners. I am a sinner. Save me, save me." Even the best men in the Bible forget that God sees everything. We always think we sin in the dark, don't we?

So Moses right before he kills the Egyptian, what's he do? He kind of looks here and there. Well, what's he looking for? For eyewitnesses. Seeing that there were none, he proceeded and killed the man, but he forgot the most important eyewitness of all, Almighty God. Or Jonah, he runs down and gets on the ship. Why? To get away from God. You can't do that. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. There's nowhere you can go from His Spirit, nowhere you can flee from His presence. And we yearn for a covering. And why?

Because some day in verse 13, we are going to give God an account. We are going to stand before Him and we will give Him an account.

Later in this book of Hebrews, "Man is destined to die once and after that to face judgment." And we are not ready, in our naked sin, we are not ready to stand before Him. We need a covering, amen? We need a covering. And there is a covering; the covering is the blood of Jesus, and so it says in Romans Chapter 4, "Blessed is the man whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered." We need a covering and the covering is provided. His name is Jesus, His blood was shed that we might be covered, that we might be forgiven, that we might stand clothed in the righteousness of Jesus.

And so, what application can we take from this? Prize and reverence the Word of God, revere it. I don't mean set the book in front of you, and bow down to it like some heathenish idol. Not saying that. I'm saying open it up and read it, listen to its message and realize that God's speaking to you by it. And let the Word of God convert you. You may be here in an unconverted state, you should tremble about that, it should cause you to be worried and concerned about your soul. I plead with you to flee to Christ. Jesus shed His blood for sinners like you and me, God raised Him from the dead on the third day, trust in Him. The Word of God has power to convert you. And if you're already a Christian, but you're feeling saggy in your Christian life, you're feeling drained, you're weak, especially in your prayer life, let the word of Christ revive you spiritually. Go to the Word to derive new strength from it and let the Word of God strengthen you for His service. You're given a ministry but you're getting weary in it, you're not seeing the fruits of the results, you're tired of it. Go back to the Word through the Spirit, and let the Word of God revive you and renew your strength so you can go out and serve Him. And let the Word of God be your main strategy for fruitfulness.

If the Lord tarries and if the Lord calls me away from this pulpit, either by death or by some other calling, which I don't intend at all, it's not in my mind... I'd like to stay here till death. But if you're here and the time comes to get another pastor, get one that'll preach the Word, that's what you're searching for. And if you're looking, you're searching for a church, if you should leave from this place as our covenant says, or you're not a member yet, find a church that preaches the Word above all else, that's what you need. And finally let the Word of God search your innermost heart. I would suggest you physically lay down on your bed from time to time and say Psalm 139:23 and 24, "Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me, and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way and lead me in the way everlasting." And then having been renewed and revived and strengthened, then take the Word of God out to a world that needs it. You're surrounded by people without hope and without God in the world, minister the Word of God to somebody this week, say the words of Scripture to a lost person this week, get into a great conversation like Jesus did with that woman at the Samaritan well. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank You for the power of the living and active Word of God. We thank you for everything it does in our souls. I pray that you would take the words that I've spoken and that You would blow away the chaff, the influences and effects that I have given that are unhelpful for human hearts. Blow them away, but let the eternal seed of the Word of God take root in hearts and grow to bear fruit for eternity. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

So what would you think of a traveler who had to drive from California to New York to be with his extended family in a wonderful and joyful family reunion, but somewhere in Colorado, came across a rest stop with the most spectacular vista that he'd ever seen in his life, and this traveler, liked the rest stop so much, he decided to move in there? And they had a very nice washroom vending machines with all of his favorite snacks, and soft drinks and, a lot of friendly people that came and spent 10 minutes or so, and then went on their way. He slept in his car, he greeted those new friends and just kind of settled in there. What would you think if this former traveler's family called him on the cellphone the day he was to have arrived and asked "Where are you?" and he told them, "I found the most beautiful place to live, and I've decided to settle here." "What? We're all waiting for you, where are you?" And this former traveler answered "I'm living now at a spectacular rest stop in Colorado, in the Glenwood Canyon, actually, in Interstate 70." "A rest stop?" They answer. "Are you crazy? We were expecting you sometime this afternoon." "I know, I know," he answers, "but you really should see the view here. It's so restful."

Do you think there would be anything that that strange seller could do to persuade his family that he hadn't lost his mind? Settling down at a rest stop, even one as beautiful as Glenwood Canyon Interstate 70 in Colorado. Or consider a different case. What about a man who, during World War II escaped from a Nazi prisoner of war camp in Central Germany with three fellow POWs, and they're making their way across Germany, they travel all night, they're exhausted beyond all reckoning, they're traveling through the mountains of Bavaria, they're seeking across eventually into Switzerland, they're hiding, frantic during the day, hiding in caves, under bushes, terrified as they hear the sounds of German soldiers down the valley, searching for them. After three days of this kind of travel, this arduous journey, they find a small abandoned ski chalet, and they break in, they're thrilled to find some canned vegetables there and they break them open and eat them cold, first food they've had in three days. Then they take turns, through that night, keeping watch, while each of the others get a few hours of fitful sleep.

But when the time comes to push on, one of them says, "I don't think I'm going anywhere, I'm going to stay right here. I like it here, I'm going to stay." And his buddies are dumbfounded, and they say, "Stay? Are you kidding? The German patrols could be here in minutes. You're not going to last a day here, they'll catch you for sure." "No, no, no, I'll be okay. Besides, I like it here, and I'm tired of the journey."

We Have Not Arrived Yet

Friends, God in his wisdom, has set each one of us on a journey home to an incredibly joyful family reunion. The journey is a long and challenging one. Final resting place in the family reunion with brothers and sisters from every tribe and language and people and nation, is going to be incredibly, infinitely joyful. Along the way, God in his wisdom gives us certain providential rest stops. He restores our soul, he makes us lie down in green pastures, leads us beside quiet waters, he restores our soul, so that we can follow him in passive righteousness for his name's sake, through the valley of the shadow of death, but renews us. Like rest stops on an interstate, he does not intend for any of the travelers to settle down there in their hearts and minds, but rather that they should think of themselves, as aliens and strangers who are simply passing through. And again, dear friends, God in his love has rescued us from Satan's dark kingdom and is in the process of transferring us or bring us over into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

In one sense, he's already done that. If you've come to faith in Christ, you're justified, you have already crossed over from death to life, but we still pray Your kingdom come. In a very real sense, we still have miles to travel across occupied territory, enemy territory, we're in danger here, miles and miles to go, and our journey is far from over. And like that ski chalet, he gives us way stations of rest along the way, so that we can continue to make our journey across this occupied territory until at last, we come to a safe haven, safe resting place. We are therefore to consider ourselves just passing through aliens and strangers in this dangerous world. But sadly, I think, too many Christians, too many of us settle down here in some sense, in our minds. We think of the earthly blessings that we enjoy here, and that refresh us, are meant to last forever. They include the blessings of beloved family members, of Christian friends, godly pastors and disciplers and prayer partners and others that help us along the way, the blessings of good health, the blessings of possessions, of homes, of vehicles, of clothing, of hobbies, of food and drink, of a certain style of living that we're accustomed to. None of these things is meant to last forever. They're just way stations of rest along the way.

But how sad it is when it happens that one of those or some of those blessings, get taken from a Christian and they lament as though somehow God doesn't love them anymore. I fear that many Christians yearn for a rest here and now that God is not willing to give us. Hebrews 4:9 speaks of a rest that is yet to come, friends. "There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God." God lavishes restful blessings on us to renew us for our journey, and we are tempted to settle in and live there and stop journeying. Remember in this church, we talk again and again about those two infinite journeys, the internal journey of sanctification, of growing in grace and the knowledge of Christ, becoming more and more like Jesus, it's an arduous difficult journey. God gives you way stations along the way, but we're still to be journey, or that external journey of evangelism and missions of world-wide kingdom building, it's an arduous journey. God gives us way stations of rest along the way, but we have to travel those miles as a church. Now, as I told you last week, I didn't fully understand this passage like I needed to, I was preaching more the earthly way stations, than I was the final heavenly rest. And I think the earthly way stations are needed. The Sabbath itself was such, a cyclical kind of resting time to rest and to be renewed.

The Saints Everlasting Rest

But I hadn't really understood how much of this passage is really pointing ahead, until that is, I read this book by Richard Baxter. Now, don't get me wrong, friends, I didn't read the whole thing, I just wanted to show it to you, look at that. And you can't see from here, but that's really fine print, small print. With single space, maybe even half space. I don't even think it's single space. 672 pages of meditation on one verse. Hebrews 4:9, "There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God." Now, this Pastor, Richard Baxter, may be the greatest pastor in terms of the whole pastoral ministry of the Puritan movement, a great and godly man, was dying in 1650, dying of an illness, and thought he was going to die, he actually didn't die of that illness, but thought he was and so he had recoursed to Heavenly meditations and he started to write them down and it became this book. And the central message that I got out of it, (I haven't read the whole thing, but I hope to at some point), but this Saint's everlasting rest, the central message is, "We have not yet entered God's rest." That's the message.

The burden of this passage in the book is "We're not there yet, we haven't entered the rest yet." Look at Verses 9-11, that Hong just read for us, but look again: "There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God," verse 10, "For anyone who enters God's rest, also rests from his own work, just as God did from his." Let us therefore, I'm going to change it a little bit, "let us therefore labor (preacher’s interpretation) to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience."

The sabbath rest still remains for the people of God. KJV in Verse 11, gives us "Let us labor therefore." That's the clencher for me. The exhortation here is we need to work. What that means is we haven't entered the rest, we're still laboring, we haven't yet laid down our labors, as God has finished his. There is a race to be run and we must run it. We're going to get later in Hebrews 12:1, "Let us therefore run, throw off everything hinders in the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance, the race marked out for us."

I guess one of my desires in this sermon is to mark out the course of what that race looks like for you, very clearly today. What is that race, that arduous race you have to run, what's it look like? So I have three goals, number one, to make clear the labors of the Christian life that will burden us from now until death, that will be no part of our heavenly experience. But they are definitely part of our earthly experience.

Secondly, to warn and exhort FBC members, and visitors and guests, to run that laborious race for the rest of your lives. I want you to drop with happy exhaustion at the finish line. I don't want you to spare anything in your running of this race.

And then thirdly, I want to strengthen you, throughout the message, with sweet meditations of our heavenly rest. What I'm going to do is take you through each of the labors and tell you how it's part of our earthly life but not part of our heavenly. And then I'm going to put in a brief kind of word for the way that Baxter did some heavenly meditation.

So, how then must we labor? What are the labors that will characterize our earthly life, but will be no part of our heavenly life?

1) Continue to Believe in Jesus Christ

Well, first, we must labor to continue to believe in Jesus Christ. This is the work of God, said Jesus, that you believe in the one he has sent. This is very much the point of the whole book of Hebrews. Look back at the beginning of this chapter. Hebrews 4:1-2: "Therefore, since the promise of entering this rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it, for we also have had the Gospel preach to us", just as they did. But the message they heard did them no good because those who heard did not combine it with faith."

And then again, in Hebrews 10:3939, it says "We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed but of those who believe, and are saved.” So the labor in front of us is to keep believing the Gospel, to keep believing in Jesus Christ. What is the gospel? That God, the Holy One, sent his son, he was incarnate. Son of God, Son of man who lived a sinless life. He did miraculous signs and wonders to prove his deity. But above all, he came to lay down his life on the cross for sinners like you and me, and if you will just put your trust in Jesus, all of your sins will be forgiven, that is the Gospel, that message will do you good if you combine it with faith. And I'm pleading with you, I've already prayed for you if you're lost here today, but I'm pleading with you, believe in Jesus. The one who was died, who died, who was crucified, but who's raised also in the third day. We must labor, now, I know that faith is a gift of God, that God implants in the soul, but yet Jesus did say "This is the work of God that you believe in the one he has sent." And so there is a co-operative work of faith going on.

We work out our salvation with fear and trembling, because God is working in us and faith is the center-piece of that. But not only do we work on our own souls, we've got brothers and sisters around us, who are in danger too, and so we need to labor that they continue to believe as well, we need to know and be known, we need to pray for them and care for them. And so look again at Verse 1 of this same passage, "Therefore since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear," I think is a better translation, "That none of you be found to have fallen short of it." You see that? We should be caring and in some sense, fearing that no one around us drops off here. And again, in verse 11, "Let us therefore labor to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience." I don't want anyone here to fall away, so I have a labor to do in your lives. I'm seeking to do it right now, frankly, but then throughout the week, through prayers, through exhortations, through word of counsel, anything I can do to labor on each other's faith that we keep believing in Jesus. Now, I believe that if you truly genuinely believe in Jesus now, you will till the day you die. But you still need to labor.

However, in Heaven, all such labor will end. You will not need faith then, dear friends. You will see him with your own eyes, you will see him with your own eyes, and your heart will rejoice, and delight, and the day of faith and of hope will end. And you won't need to labor anymore in faith and in hope, but you will have the reward of your faith and the object of your hope at last, the consummation will be upon you.

2) Labor in Self-Denial and Taking Up Our Cross

Secondly, you need to Labor in self-denial, in taking up your cross, daily. Again, Luke 9:23, Jesus says to us all, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me." Now, here we come face-to-face with the flesh, with that indwelling sin nature, and how we must say no to the flesh, and say no to the fleshly drives and desires. The bent of your flesh is selfishness. To pander to yourself and comfort yourself, and make yourself at ease when you should be pressing on, and you have to deny yourself and take up your cross. It's a labor. And to fight self every day is exhausting, isn't it? But in Heaven, dear friends, our nature will be transformed. We will love everything that Jesus loves and hate what he hates, we will be conformed to him in every way, and there will be no denying of self anymore, but we will give full reign to self because self is going to give full rein to Jesus.

And we will be in that consummated era, and we will embrace the savior at last, our daily battle with the flesh will be done forever. How sweet will that be?

3) Labor to be Holy and Against Sin

Thirdly, we have to labor to be holy, and to fight sin. In Hebrews 12:14, it says, "Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord." If you take out the middle words, they're important. And if I change it a little bit, change it to Labor, make every effort. I'm going to use word labor right now. Labor to be holy, without holiness, you're not going to see Jesus. So there is a holiness that comes through labor and if that isn't in your life, you're not going to Heaven. And so you must labor to be holy. Sanctification, then, is a bitter step, better fight every step of the way. It's a wrestling match with a serpent, and John Owen said it this way, he said, "When sin leaves us alone, then we may leave sin alone." Well, he's meaning in this world, it's not going to leave us alone, but you know, actually, it's not absolutely true. Someday, sin will leave us alone, amen, and we won't have to do anything with sin anymore, there'll be no more sin in Heaven. But that time has not yet come, temptation assaults you every day by day and by night. It seizes you with a brazen face and kisses you and promises you pleasures and feeds you death in the end. Every day, you have to fight temptation. You have to slay the temptations. You must labor to do it.

And if you have sinned, if you've yielded to temptation, you have to labor on your heart even more. You have to labor in confession. In 1 John 1:9, it says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." You must lay your soul open before Jesus. Confess your sins honestly to him. So also, you must mourn for your sin, and that takes a certain laboring on the heart. It is a bitter and a painful work, but it is necessary. And none of us mourns for our own sin as deeply as we ought to. We think of it as a light, a minimal thing, we don't really deal with it much. "Oh Jesus I'm sorry of what I did, I did it again. Please forgive me, amen.". But James, chapter 4, says "Grieve, mourn and wail, change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom." That's labor. Labor is written all over that. Labor on your hearts to grieve, because the Holy Spirit was grieved when you sin. It's hard work.

Oh, but how delightful it will be to lay aside all morning for sin. Doesn't it say, in Revelation, they'll be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain. We will not be morning over our sin in heaven, not at all. And you won't be striving and laboring to be holy, you will be holy as he is holy. You will be light as he is light, you'll be pure as he is pure, and temptation that's slithering coiling serpent will be dead at your feet forever. No need to labor on your heart to love God more, you will love him. You'll love him, with a perfect love. And you won't need to Labor on your heart to love brothers and sisters and Christ, you love them as well, in all bitterness and ranker and unforgiveness will be gone and you'll be in sweet fellowship with the body of Christ. You won't need to confess sin anymore, you've already been thoroughly searched on Judgment Day, and the time for that is over, you won't need to give Jesus any more accounts for what you did in the body, whether good or bad, the time for that will be done and he'll wipe every tear from your eyes, there'll be no more morning because the time for rejoicing will have come.

4) Labor Against Bitter Spiritual Enemies

Fourthly, we need to labor against bitter enemies we are not making this journey to heaven unopposed, we have bitter enemies. It says in 1 Timothy 6:12, "Fight the good fight of faith, take hold of the eternal life to what you were called." The Christian life, therefore is a life of warfare, spiritual warfare, first and foremost, against Satan and his dark kingdom. Satan, he's a powerful angel with an intellect and an experience in spiritual matters. That Towers is far over you as a title wave does over a sea side Village. He's been at this for centuries, you've been at it for years, and he has arranged this wicked demonic kingdom around you with, I believe in some mysterious way, demons assigned to study. You would know your weaknesses, and feed you temptations that will be effective.

And so it says in Ephesians 6, "Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." that is labor, so put on that full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes you may be able to stand your ground and after you've done everything to stand, that is exhausting labor isn't it? To fight the devil, to put on the spiritual armor, to get up again and go fight when he's studying you and coming at you, with those flaming arrows with those accusations, with those alluring temptations.

We're tempted to give up grow weary and give up, and then we'll see who he really is. He is a ravening lion, a devouring lion seeking to devour your soul. That's when you see him when you give up, he'll come after you. He has no mercy. So you must fight him. The good news is, the Bible tells us, Resist the devil and he'll flee from you, God's sovereign power will make him do so, but you still have to fight. And then there's the world his brilliant dark wicked system that he's created around us with all of its kind of built in temptations and allurements, and it's pandering to our idolatrous nature the way it allures us, with power and pride and possessions, the way it just sings a siren song to us to entice us to ruin on the rocks of materialism and idolatry. How like in the parable The Seed and the Soils, it sends up a thorns, which choked the seed, making it un-fruitful. Worries of this life from the deceitful-ness of wealth and just the desires for other things. That's the world that's what it's all about, and friends, it's exhausting labor to fight the worldliness the encroaching worldliness that comes into your heart. It's already there. Do your friends, brothers and sisters, it's already there, and you need to weave the garden of your heart, you need to get out there with a whole... Or in there, I think really... And weed your heart from the worldliness. It's already crept in.

It's hard work. And part of that world system are human beings, people who hate us, who hate what we stand for, who the more faithful you are in challenging Satan's world system the more aggressive and louder, they're going to be in yelling at you, cursing you, insulting you. It's part of what we face here. And we have to labor to not hate them, but to pray for them and love them and turn the other cheek and pray for those who despite fully use us and bless those who curse us and yearn that God would convert them. These are bitter enemies of our soul, and we faced them, every day, but someday we're going to step into God's Sabbath rest, we're going to step into God's Sabbath rest, how sweet it will be in Heaven when all of our enemies will be gone when Satan and his demons will be thrown into the lake of fire, that's what it was made for us, for the devil and his angels, along with all of his rebellious human fellow servants.

Everyone who causes sin and all those who do evil, will be weeded out of his kingdom and thrown into the fiery furnace. And you will breathe a sweet clear air of peace and everywhere you look will be angels and redeemed people who are your friends and none of your enemies. There are no enemies left, you will be a peace at last free from all opposition.

5) Labor on Heart Attitudes We Need NOW... but WON’T NEED in Heaven

Fifth, we need to labor on heart attitudes that we need now, but we will not need in heaven. There's certain heart attitudes that are necessary for this journey that we have, for example, longing and waiting patiently, longing and waiting patiently is a hard attitude for here but not for there. Hebrews 11 praises those who were yearning and longing for a city yet, to come, they died without receiving the things promised, they saw them and welcomed them from a distance, they confessed that they were aliens and strangers in this world that is an admirable state of heart now, and we need to labor to develop that long and yearning for an invisible kingdom wanting it yearning for it and waiting patiently. It's kind of, it's a development of almost a certain kind of home sickness, like in that song Beulah Land where there's this home sickness that comes on us, and we're just not there yet and how we wish we were. I long to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far says the Apostle Paul.

Romans 8:23, testifies to this. "Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” Do you know what that groaning is like? If you've done any of it this week? Groaning, inwardly. It's a hard attitude that you need now but you don't need it in heaven. And how about this? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness? You're yearning to be pure, if you want your brothers and sisters to be done with their sins too "Are you hungry and thirsty for righteousness? So, you groaning inwardly, for that world of righteousness, that's promised to us hungering and thirsting is a reasonable heart attitude now, but you won't need it in heaven. There's no hunger in heaven.

There's no thirsting in heaven, we will be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be richly, deeply, fully fed, and satisfied. And what about watchfulness that's a heart attitude. Do you need watchfulness? Do you need to watch over your own heart do you have to guard your heart for out of it flow the well-springs of life, do you have to, if any man thinks he stands, take heed lest default, you have to do some of that. Taking heed now. Do you have to develop a watchful attitude over your own wandering, changeful drifting heart, you have to be vigilant over your own heart and that of your brothers and sisters. Friends we can never be perfectly at ease in this world at any front. Can you ever reach a certain place in a certain toilsome fight against a specific sin? Say, "At last I know that sin at least is dead. I will never lust in that way again or I will never gossip that God has dealt with me." I heard a good sermon on it, I had a prayer partner who prayed for a whole week for me, I saw some victories in that area tempted to gossip, I didn't do it. I'm done at last, and forever with gossip. Was that true?

Friend you better take heed, you better be watchful, you better take heed if you think you stand lest you fall. You've got to be watchful. But you know what, you're not going to need watchfulness in heaven. You know, the odd thing about the new Jerusalem it's got these high powerful walls that no one could get in, but there's no enemies anymore, they're all deal with, they're all gone. We don't need any watchmen on the walls and you don't need any watchmen on the walls of your heart, in heaven, you will be free at last, no more watchfulness. And no more mourning, over other people sins either. We talked about morning of our own sins, we mourn over this world that we live in. Rivers of tears flow from my eyes and Psalm 119 verse 136. Because your law is defiled, every day. In the book of Ezekiel, these shining ones, these angelic messengers were given a task to go through the City of Jerusalem and mark each Saint there who mourned and lamented over the sins of the city.

Those are the ones who weren't slaughtered so therefore the Christians are the ones who live in this world, and like righteous lot are tormented in our righteous souls by the lawless deeds we see in here. There is a mourning over the sinfulness of this world, but we won't need that in heaven. Neither will you have to mourn over the lost in Romans 9:2. Paul says, "I speak the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit, I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish, for I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers…" Those of the nation of Israel that haven't come to Christ yet, he's mourning over the lost, grieving over them. Any of you do that? Mourning over lost family members, relatives, neighbors. There's a grief.

You're like "Well, I don't know that I grieve that much over." Well you ought to. And so therefore, you should Labor on your heart to be like Paul or like Jesus who wept over Jerusalem, and weep over the lost, then you'll witness to them, and we're supposed to mourn with each other, right. You may be going, you may be having the best week you've had but you'll bump into a brother, or a sister, here who isn't. And out of compassion, you're going to mourn with them and show some love for them, but you won't need any of that in heaven. You'll be done with all mourning and you won't need perseverance in heaven or, an old word for perseverance is long suffering, right? We're supposed to run with perseverance, the race marked out. You don't need any there's no enduring of heaven. I know you may think I can't be there floating around, singing Amazing Grace a million times in a row, I think on the 900th thousand time. I'm ready, I'm done, I'm set. We need a new him Lord. But friends, that's a satanic lie, there's no boredom in heaven and there's nothing to suffer in heaven. There's no long suffering need in heaven, there's no short suffering need in heaven, there's no suffering in heaven.

You won't need any perseverance or endurance in heaven. You won't need any humility to accept correction, but you need it now, you need it now? If you're in a good church some brother or sisters at some point perhaps even very soon, perhaps even your spouse will come to you saying, "You know something. This is an area you need to work on." And so it says in the Psalms, "Let a righteous man strike me... it is oil my head, I will not refuse it." I want to be corrected, I want people to help me with my battle against sin, so I need to be ready with humility, right? Somebody comes, I need to be humble, I won't need that kind of humility in heaven. There are different kinds of humility in heaven but not that one. I won't need the humility that's ready to accept correction, and I won't need any fear and trembling. Now I work out my salvation of fear and trembling, but then we'll be done.

These are many heart attitudes that you have to labor on in yourself now, but you won't need any of them in heaven.

6) Labor in Spiritual Disciplines and Graces

Sixth labor in spiritual disciplines, and graces. God has ordained various means by which he's going to get Grace into your soul, they're called means of graces. Two of the greatest are coming up in Hebrews four. The Word of God, which is living and active, that's the scripture. You have to labor in scripture to get its messages. And then after that we're encouraged to come to the throne of grace. That's prayer, right? You have to labor in prayer, these are means of graces they're not easy, and so you have to read the Bible every day and feed on it every day. A number of brothers and sisters here have resolved before God to read through the Bible in a year. How's it going? Since the last Sunday in January. Renew, refresh, reset, whatever you need to do. Pick up the Bible and read it. But it's labor isn't it? Some of you have resolved to memorize the book of Philippians.

It's hard work to memorize scripture but it's well worth it. Pastors and teachers of the Word of God labor after exegesis, we have to struggle with Greek or Hebrew with rules of exegesis with interpretations. We have to stand up in front of churches and say, "I got it wrong. We'll do this again next week." You have to do that from time to time, because the word of God is not always easy to understand. We have to labor in it.

And do any of you ever labor in prayer? You know, there's a certain wrestling in prayer isn't there, Paul says in Colossians 4:12 that he is always wrestling in prayer for them that they may be mature and established in Christ. There's a wrestling in prayer waiting on unanswered prayer George Muller, praying every day for 50 years for a loved one to come to faith in Christ. The parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge. You remember that one? What's the lesson? God isn't going to give it to you right away. So you need to labor in unanswered prayer, but those labors will be done when we reach heaven. We have very soon the Lord's Supper. It's a means of grace labor in it, we labor it to understand its symbolism, we labor to have our hearts ready and right before we receive it, all of these labors will end when we come to heaven.

7) Labor Under Discipline for Sin

Seventh you have to labor under discipline for sin, When you sin and when God thinks it's necessary, he will chastise you, he will chastise you. In Hebrews, 12 it says, "The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline, God is treating you as sons." You may feel even very soon the rod of fatherly chastisement across your back. He may be bringing some illness or some financial reversal, or some other kind of chastisement into your life, and at that point, you need to labor under it. As some have said, to kiss the rod and don't get angry at God and don't murmur against him.

And don't make light of it, either, but learn the lessons of fatherly chastisement and labor on your own heart to trust God even more and to resolve to fight sin even more deeply and more powerfully. But you have to labor under discipline for sin.

8) Labor in Ministry to Other Christians

Eighth, you have to labor in good works in ministry to other Christians, God has a whole lifetime of good works for you to do. I don't know about you, but I think in order to do works, you have to labor don't you think? [chuckle] There is just some works that we have to do. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. And that involve spiritual gift ministry. Brothers and sisters in Christ. Use your spiritual gifts, your gift is teaching, you need to labor it to be a good teacher. For your gift is encouragement you need to labor in it and be focused in it. If your gift is prayer, you need the labor in that prayer, if you're gift is administration, there's labors to be done. If you're in the ministry of counseling. We've got some brothers and sisters do a great job of counseling. You have to labor to be a better counselor going to conferences, name conference reading books and then as you're sitting down with someone whose marriage is falling apart or struggling, you have to labor with them, give them a good scriptures pray with them. There's a labor involved in serving our brothers and sisters.

9) Labor in Mission to the World

Ninth, there's a labor in the mission in the world, you know that many elect people, many elect people haven't come to faith in Jesus yet. And many of those elect people that haven't come to faith in Jesus yet are in very hard to reach places, like the Muslim world. And there is a labor that has to be done for those lost people. "The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost," and we are his ambassadors, as though God Himself were making his appeal through us, the missionaries in those places, they know that their labors aren't done, They haven't ended their heavenly rest, they've had to bury a member of their church this week where they have to lament and prayer over some other person is incarcerated they know what it's going to take to reach that Muslim village for Christ. It's hard work, others are learning a language for the first time, and they're laboring to bring the lost to faith in Christ. This isn't time to settle in at a rest stop no matter how beautiful the vista or the scenery, it's not the time for the ski chalet and eating cold vegetables. We're not in Heaven yet. And there's still some work to be done. There are lost people here in this triangle region there's lost people, to the ends of the earth.

Wouldn't it be sweet for you to know, have God were to send an angel and say I have 12 people for you to lead to Christ, over the next year? One a month, I want you to do that. Wouldn't you rejoice in that? So Lord, will I be successful? I'm telling you, you will be your only job is to go share the Gospel with him but we have labors to do. In Heaven, we don't need to do those labors. For the church the redeemed, will be set and all of the elect will have come to faith in Christ, and they'll be there with your rejoicing.

10) Labor in Painful Trials

And finally, dear friends, we have to labor in painful trials. "Consider it pure joy my brothers whenever you face trials of many kinds. Why? "Because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance, must finish its work. you need to get work done. And so, I do too. And the work in sanctification happens during trials. That's a hard time. And so you have to labor in trials.

And that's how you know you're not in Heaven yet, there, there's no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, but here there certainly is, there is death here and there is mourning here and there's crying and there is pain here. And so the parents have a terminally ill child have to labor on their own hearts, to keep trusting in God and loving God and not murmuring against God or questioning God, even when their hearts are breaking, and they want to know why God's not answering prayer for healing, they have to labor in their hearts to keep trusting in Jesus through that time and not question what he's doing, even if he doesn't in the end, give the Healing. Friends of an incarcerated house church pastor and East Asian nations have to labor under that trial as their prayers go unanswered, and then as their friend is not released but actually executed. They have to labor in the middle of that trial, and count it pure joy and see God's hand in it.

Single person waiting for God to answer their prayers for a spouse, a godly husband, a godly wife. Still waiting. Still waiting, they have to labor in that trial to keep trusting Jesus to not give up to believe in him. So also a childless couple every month praying that same prayer and still the prayer hasn't been answered. Oh but in Heaven, you're going to step across that threshold, you're going to cross that river and you're going to step into your Sabbath rest, and you're going to lay aside all trials. Their time will be over all of the grief, and sadness, will fall off you like an old garment, and you will be free of all of these things and you will have finished your race.

These are the delights of heaven, we will rest from our labors as God did from his. Look at verse 10, anyone who enters God's rest, also rests from his own work just as God did from his.

In the meantime though, we have all these labors to do and others besides I'm just giving you a sampling, but there are labors that we have to do. But can I tell you a word of encouragement? The same God who called you to do these labors will sustain you and strengthen you through the spirit, in your inner being, to run this race with endurance. He will give you what you need to finish this race.

And one of the ways he does that is through sweet heavenly meditations. We've been doing some of that here, but I want to close my message now by giving you a little sampling of this book, okay. Richard Baxter at the end of 672 pages, gives an amazing chapter in which he gives a sampling of his style or type of heavenly meditation, for those. And this is little quote, for those who are unskilled in it, Amen I'll sign up, I'll go with that class, all right?

And I read it and I was just swept away by it. Now this is a man who used to spend hours and hours in heavily meditations and when he would come out of that room, friends that knew him said It was like Moses coming off the mountain, his face was shining it was like, he was in another world. Well, when I began reading these meditations when I began reading, I realized I'm not good at this, I've never done this. And then just my engineering side kicked in and I started timing one of these pages, I literally did, I got my stop watch out and I timed it, I read it in a natural kind of flow and it took me four minutes and 11 seconds, and then I counted the pages and there were 30 of them. That's two and one half-hours of heavenly meditation.

I said to Christi yesterday, "Wouldn't it be something if I just spent a Sunday afternoon, just reading this out loud?" She said, "Oh you ought to do it." I haven't done it yet, I've done little portions of it. I've copied it for 50 of you, and it'll be in the north tower. Ryan will tell you more at the end, but get it and read it. In the King James kind of style of English, but you can understand it and I want to close with a section of it that literally brought me to tears, and with that we'll go into the Lord Supper.

And in it, by the way, he talks to his own soul as though he were Jesus then he turns around and talked back to Jesus not talking back but answering back in prayer. Sometimes he preaches to himself, sometimes he receives breaching but he's the one doing all of it, he's doing scripture than he's stepping aside and meditating. It's just an amazing journey. And I would recommend that all 50 get taken take them all, I mean how can I face Tom tomorrow when he did all the work, and there's still like 16 of them left. So don't let there be 16 left, 50 of you grab them. And it's public domain, so it's on the internet too.

Listen to a portion of it as you prepare for the Lord’s Supper:

"Though your eyes have never seen your Lord, yet you have heard his voice, received his benefits, and lived in his heart. He taught you to know yourself and him; he opened to you that first window, through which you saw into heaven. Have you forgotten since your heart was careless, and he awakened it; hard, and he softened it; stubborn, and he made it yield; at peace, and he troubled it; whole, and he broke it; and broken, till he healed it again? Have you forgotten the times when he found you in tears; when he heard your secret sighs and groans, and left all to come and comfort you; when he took you, as it were, in his arms, and asked you, ‘Poor soul, what troubles you? Do you weep, when I have wept so much? Cheer up! Your wounds are saving, and not deadly; I’m the one who wounded you, I who mean you no harm; though I drained off some of your blood, I will not drain off your life.’ I remember his voice. How gently did he take me up in his arms! How carefully did he dress my wounds! I think I hear him still saying to me, ‘Poor sinner, though you have dealt unkindly with me, and cast me off, yet I will never do that to you. Though you have trivialized me and all my mercies, yet they and myself are all yours. What would you have that I can give you? And what do you lack, that I cannot give you? If anything I possess will give you pleasure, you shall have it. Would you have forgiveness? I freely forgive you all your debts. Would you have grace and peace? You shall have both. Would you have myself? Behold I am yours, your Friend, your Lord, your Brother, Husband and Head. Wouldst you have the Father? I will bring you to him, and you shall have him, in and by me.’ These were his sweet words to me!

After all, when I was doubtful of his love, I still remember his overcoming arguments: ‘Have I done so much, sinner, to prove my love, and yet do you doubt? Have I offered you myself and love so long, and yet do you question my willingness to be yours? At what dearer rate should I tell you that I love you? Wilt you not believe my bitter passion on the cross proceeded from love? Have I made myself in the Gospel a lion to yours enemies and a lamb to you, and do you now overlook my lamb-like nature? Had I been willing to let you perish, why would I have done and suffered so much for you? Why would I need to follow you with such patience and urgency? Why do you tell me of your wants; have I not enough for me and you? or of your unworthiness; for if you were yourself worthy, what would you do with my worthiness? Did I ever invite or save the worthy and righteous? or is there any such person upon earth? Have you nothing? are you lost and miserable, helpless and forlorn? Do you believe I am an all-sufficient Savior, and would you have me? Here, I am yours: take me; if you are willing, I am; and neither sin nor Satan shall break the bond.’

These, O these, were the blessed words which his Spirit from his Gospel spoke unto me, till he made me cast myself at his feet, and cry out, ‘My Savior, and my Lord, you have broken, you have revived my heart!"

Hebrews 4:9. "There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God." Hebrews 4 speaks of a timeless Sabbath rest for the people of God, and it commands us to labor to enter that rest, in verse 11. How then do we do this, how do we enter the rest that Hebrews 4 is talking about? For many of you, when you hear of the Sabbath, or a Sabbath rest, you have images of the Jews, perhaps from Fiddler on the Roof, as the sun would go down on Friday, and how the women would prepare the Passover or the Sabbath meal with the candles and with prayers and Jewish singing.

Or perhaps, some of you think of the Puritan strictness on the Sabbath, how they were strict Sabbatarians, it was said. A strictness that many felt went beyond the delights of corporate worship into sheer legalism, though, I think that could be and should be debated. And the Puritans in the 17th century fought against the Book of Sports, a declaration issued by King James I in 1617 in which he listed out sports that were permissible on Sundays. By the way, football was not mentioned. The Puritans were for the most part strict Sabbatarians so it's said; restricting all their activities on Sundays to religious observances and to acts of mercy. So maybe that's what pops in your mind when you think of the Sabbath.

Or again, maybe you remember the struggle of Eric Liddell, the Scottish missionary, who was also an Olympic athlete, whose life is portrayed in the movie Chariots of Fire, and how he upbraided with some little boys that were playing soccer on Sunday and he said, "Sabbath's not the day for playing football, is it?" And those words came back to challenge him when he realized that he would have to run on Sunday in order to win the Olympic medal that he'd trained for all those years and his commitments on the Sabbath would not permit him to run on the Sunday. And you know the story, if you've seen the movie.

But I want to say to you that the Sabbath rest of Hebrews 4 is something infinitely beyond all of these meditations. It soars infinitely beyond all earthly shadows and types and pictures. All human observances of the Sabbath, that's what we're discussing in Hebrews 4. No, the Sabbath rest of Hebrews 4 is the perfection, the completion of Christ's saving work for us. The final perfection of it awaits our resurrection from the dead, into a glorious body free from all death, and mourning, and crying, and pain. Free from temptations. Free from weariness, free from all evil, living in a perfect world, at peace and at rest radiated with the open clear displays of the glory of God.

The new heavens and the new earth, that is the Sabbath rest in view in Hebrews 4. This is the Sabbath rest that Jesus bought for us through His blood shed on the cross. So the author begins, that the concept is something that still remains, if you look in verse 6. It's something that still stands over us all, it still remains that some will enter that rest, and that those who formally had the Gospel preached to them, did not go in because of their disobedience. So these are the things that still remain in front of us, those that do enter in and those that don't enter in through unbelief and disobedience, but it still remains.

Rest is the Unifying Theme of Hebrews 3-4

Now, the unifying kind of cohesive theme of Hebrews 3 and 4 is the author's extended meditation on David's exhortation in Psalms Psalm 95. The centerpiece of that exhortation is today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts. Yes, but what is God saying as He speaks? What message is God speaking that we should not be hardening our hearts from? The topic according to the author, the topic of God's address is His rest. That God is speaking to us concerning His rest. And so the author in Hebrews 4, 1-5 focuses on God's rest. Look at verse 1 again, "Therefore, since the promise of entering His rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it." Or let us fear. A gain, in verse 3, "Now, we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, 'So I declared an oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest.'" And in verses 4-5, "For somewhere, He has spoken about the seventh day in these words, 'and on the seventh day God rested from all his work.' And again, in the passage, above, he says, 'They shall never enter my rest.'" So the unifying theme then is God's invitation to His people to enter his rest.

This is the topic the author is picking up again here in Hebrews 4:6-11. Main idea then is, that there is a perfect eternal heavenly rest to which God is calling His people to through faith in Christ. Now, there are earthly experiences or foretastes of that final rest. The weekly Sabbath, and the conquest of the promised land are in view in particular here. Foretastes. But they are merely types or shadows of the final reality. They pre-figure that perfect rest. It's like a woman who is cooking a wonderful meal and the husband comes and sticks his finger in the pot and puts it on his tongue. Ought not to do that, but it's a foretaste, the meal hasn't come yet. And so, we have actually through the Holy Spirit, many foretastes, but we've not entered the rest yet. And so verse 9 says, there still remains or there remains therefore a Sabbath rest for the people of God. And then with that an imperative or command in verse 11, "Let us therefore make every effort" or let us labor to enter that rest. So it portrays the people of God as still at work, still needing to work.

The author proves that neither the Sabbath rest under Moses nor the promised land rest under Joshua fulfilled the rest that God is inviting us to enter. The focus of our time today then is the Sabbath rest of God, not the imperfect Sabbath rest of the Law of Moses. Nor the imperfect rest of the Jews entering the Promised Land under Joshua, but rather that perfect final rest which is the goal of our faith in Jesus.

So what does it mean then to enter that rest? Now, there are two different ways of understanding this passage. I didn't realize that until yesterday. So there's going to be another sermon on this passage next week, because I couldn't bear to throw out this morning sermon entirely. And there's good things in it, but I believe I was convicted by the Spirit that I had somewhat missed the point. Somewhat.

What is the point? Well, there are two different ways of looking at entering the rest. First of all, we enter the rest through faith in Jesus. So that it can be said of us in Romans 5:1, "Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." So that we are already at rest with God, and God at rest with us through Jesus.

Those are true biblical themes but that's not what the author has in mind here. That's not the rest he's talking about here. He's talking about something that, not a single person on the face of the Earth has entered yet. None of us has entered the rest he has in mind here. It still remains for you to enter the rest, you haven't entered it yet. It's in the future, and therefore, in verse 11, you need to make every effort to enter that rest. So it really talks about the nature of your life from this point until you finally die and do enter the rest that the author has in mind. And so that clarity actually didn't come to me until yesterday, and so I'm going to preach more clearly on that next week. But what I want to say is, in the meantime, through our faith in Christ, we can have and ought to have as many foretastes of that rest as we can have in this world, and it's beneficial. And so that's the kind of two-part outline of this Sunday's and next Sunday's.

So how then can we enter into God's rest by faith today, in a foretaste sort of sense? Well, coming to realize that we will never enter that rest while we live here on earth. And that therefore much in line of the whole flow of the book of Hebrews, is we are being commanded in Hebrews 4 to run a race with endurance here because we haven't finished yet. And we'll get to that later, and that image in Chapter 12. But that's what the author's been saying all along. You're not there yet, dear people, you've not finished yet dear friends. You've still got some laboring to do.

Now, what I've come to understand is that there's a kind of work and a kind of labor that Jesus frees us from immediately, as soon as you come to faith in Jesus. And we'll talk about that this week. But then there are some other kinds of laborings that you must bear with until you at last walk through that door in heaven. And you must do it, and that's the press of the passage okay? So I hope that's as clear to you now, as it's I hope been clear to me and we'll talk more about it next week.  

We have first these imperfect pictures of God's final Sabbath rest, and that is creation, Sinai and the promised land. The original kind of mention of the Sabbath rest, or the resting of God happens as you know, at the beginning of creation, in Genesis 1. God creates the universe, the Heavens and the Earth, He creates the universe, and the world He makes in six days.

In Genesis 2:1-3, it says, "Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array and by the seventh day, God had finished the work that He had been doing, so on the seventh day, He rested from all His work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done."

The Significance of God’s Rest

So what is the significance of this statement that God rested on the seventh day? Well, you get the sense of God deeply and richly satisfied by what His hands had made. He's declared that it's all very good, and He's satisfied with the labors of His hands, and He finishes those labors, that category of works that He intended to do. So it's a cessation from labors. He's ceasing from His work, the work of creation. Nothing could be added. And so God blessed that seventh day and set it apart as holy. Friends, that seventh day rest is a picture of our future rest in heaven.

It's a picture of it when all our labors will be finished. Perfect and complete, nothing more to add to them. And so God in His finishing of physical creation at that point, blesses the seventh day and sets it apart as holy. The perfection of God's rest is that He was satisfied with what he was intending to do at that particular time. But there is also an imperfection of the rest, because God knew perfectly well that all of redemptive history lay in front of Him at that point.

Jesus said, "My Father is always at His work, to this very day and I too am working." What's the nature of that work? The nature of the work that God was doing was saving sinners from His wrath and bringing them into His perfect rest. That's what redemptive history is about. And so when God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, still in front of Him in redemptive history was the fall of Adam into sin and with him the entire human race.

And the wickedness of the human race at the time of Noah, when and when every single thoughts and inclination of the hearts of men was only evil all the time, and Noah alone and his family found grace in the eyes of God, and God wiped out the world with the flood; that was still in the future. And the call of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the Promised Land and to receive it only as a promise, something that was still ahead of him, and he died without receiving that promise, but that was still in the future, when God rested on the seventh day.

And so also, the development of the 12 tribes of Israel, and their bondage in Egypt and all of their labors, still in the future. And then the deliverance under Moses, the passage through the Red Sea was in the future at that point. And the coming to Sinai and the entrance into the promised land, and then the wretched cycle of sin of the Israelites which they had already done before they even entered the Promised Land, and so they have to wait 40 years to enter. And then in the Book of Judges, they just began immediately going after the gods of the peoples and the cycle of wickedness and sin, until, finally, they're evicted from the Promised Land. Been warned again and again by the prophets, but they still wouldn't heed God and they were evicted from the Promised Land, all of that was still in the future. And so also the restoration under the time of Ezra, Nehemiah, and the coming of Jesus, born of a virgin, born in the fullness of time.

And his sinless life, and his rejection by His own people, the Jews, how they rejected Him. He came to His own and His own did not receive Him. And His bloody death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead, and His ascension into Heaven, and the coming of the Holy Spirit in the day of Pentecost, and the explosive movement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth going on now for 20 centuries, all of that was in the future when God rested. And He knew that, He knew all of that story.

And so God's work was imperfect, because there was still more work to be done. And so therefore the seventh day rest was merely a picture of a future rest that was going to come. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, but He knew that the whole story was yet to come. The perfect rest could not come until Christ brought it about both in His death on the cross and through His constant intercessory ministry as our high priest at the right hand of God, and by His sending of His Holy Spirit to convict the elect, and bring them into the kingdom. Through that work alone, the preservation work, redemption accomplished and applied, right to the end; only then would it all be perfect.

The Sabbath Rest Commanded at Sinai

We see also the imperfect type or picture of the Sabbath rest, commanded at Sinai. Now, the concept of the Sabbath as a weekly observance precedes the 10 commandments. It existed in the mind of God, but it was not in the habits of the people. They had been slaves in Egypt, seven days a week, they were slaves. They were making bricks, by that time they were making bricks without straw. Laboring, the sweat, blood, and tears, that that life of bondage called from them. And they're just working seven days a week, day after day, after day, after day, after day, after day until you died in bondage. That's what their lives were like for four generations, they'd been there. And there was no distinction one day from another.

But when God called them out and by the power of His miracles, and through the Red Sea crossing, and they come into the desert, God provided manna for them, the bread from heaven to eat. And He began teaching them about the Sabbath. The cyclical observance, a once a week observance through the patterns of the giving of the manna. And so the manna was coming down like rain like bread from heaven, and they were to collect it in baskets off the ground. And they were told very clearly to only collect enough for one day. Don't take any more for tomorrow, I will provide for you tomorrow.

So that's somewhat in Jesus' mind, when He says, "Give us this day, our daily bread." But some Israelites really just didn't listen to instructions. Perhaps you teachers have had pupils like that, they just didn't listen. Some parents, perhaps from time to time your children have not listened to instructions. Perhaps that's even characterized you from time to time. But some of these Jews went out and they took some extra amount. Not merely for a midnight snack, mind you, but this was for tomorrow so they'd have enough for tomorrow. But what did they find? The stuff that they left over was wriggling with maggots the next day, it was foul and unusable.

God rebuked them for their disobedience. But he made an exception in preparation for the Sabbath. And He said in preparation for the Sabbath you are to collect twice as much manna, collect two days' worth. And the people found the next day that it wasn't covered with maggots, God did a once-a-week miracle for them to preserve that extra manna and they would eat enough, and they would not go out and collect. Although some of them didn't, wouldn't you know, they would go out on the seventh day, and they did try to look, and there was none on the ground. But God was already teaching them a certain rhythm, a seven-day cycle in which there would be six days of laboring and serving, and then on the seventh day they would rest, they would cease.

And this was in preparation for this to be codified, to be established in the law of Moses, in the fourth commandment, "Remember the Sabbath day," At Sinai, God commanded them, "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord, your God. On it, you shall not do any work, neither you nor your son or daughter, nor your man-servant or maid-servant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but He rested on the seventh day." And therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. And so in this commandment, God was being gracious to the Israelites and setting up a weekly reminder, I believe, of that future final, eternal rest that we will enjoy with Christ in Heaven. He was teaching them about that.

Now, in one sense, the Sabbath regulation was backward-looking, for in six days, the Lord your God made the heavens and the earth. But in a very mysterious, and at that point, very shadowy way, it was forward-looking too, to a time when all of their labors would be done, finished. And God really intended that they keep this because the Sabbath law came with a penalty, and if you did not obey it, you would be put to death. He very much meant, He intended that this be a part of their lives. And so when a Sabbath breaker was found who was out collecting firewood, the word came for this Sabbath breaker to be put to death, and so he was.

Now, the Sabbath regulation was seen to be a time of self-denial, interestingly. Leviticus 16:29. "You must deny ourselves and not do any work." Interesting. Deny yourselves and not do any work. Well the self-denial means from just give up your earthly ambitions for a day, don't try to achieve more in this world than in this life, in this day. Deny yourself, focus on God. That's really what it's about. Again, in Leviticus 16:31, It is a sabbath of rest. You must deny yourselves. It was also called sacred to the Lord, and a day of holy assembly. Leviticus 23:3, "There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly." You are not to do any work, wherever you live. It is a sabbath to the Lord." And so, a time for the people of God to gather and to meet together and to focus on God and to worship Him.

Sadly, the Jews regularly disobeyed the Sabbath regulations, they sinned, as we already mentioned the man gathering the firewood. Or in Jeremiah's day, they're carrying loads through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath. The time of Nehemiah doing the same thing. And He went out as the governor and said, "If you continue to camp outside the gates, I'm going to lay hands on you." And that's not for ordination. He was going to arrest them if they continue to do this, but they just were constantly wandering into worldly business and ambitions and materialism, and prosperity rather than taking that day to rest and focus on God. Now, all of this Sinai regulation, the fourth commandment, was man-centered in it's purpose. Jesus came to instruct us about the Sabbath and teach us. He designated first and foremost, Himself to be king over the sabbath. Which would be sheer arrogance, if you weren't God. But he said "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath." In other words, the way I define the sabbath is the true and right definition, of it. And he said to them, "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."

The God-Ordained Sabbath a Delight

It's for your benefit for our benefit. It was not made to be a burden, a crushing burden, but rather a delight. And so it says in Isaiah 58: 13-14, "If you call the Sabbath a delight, and the Lord's holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please, or speaking idle words then you will find your joy in the Lord." It's to wean us from earthly things and to have us focus on God. And nothing but God, that day. Now the Sabbath regulation was right for legalism. Legalism with the Sabbath tends to focus on you what you must not do. What you are forbidden from doing. But they call the Sabbath. A delight approach, focuses and what you may do, you may focus on God, you may release the world for a day, and you may meet with the brothers and sisters and pray together, and worship, and have a foretaste of God that day. That's what you may do.

Well the legalistic Sabbath was a crushing burden by the time Jesus came to free us from it, His poor disciples and I mean that literally, they were poor, going through the grain fields on a Sabbath they hadn't had anything to eat, in the Law of Moses provided for poor people to just pick heads of grain that were standing and eat them immediately. They couldn't bring baskets in the field, but they could eat their fill, Just in the fields. It was their form of welfare, really. And so His disciples are standing there doing it and the Sabbath police, the Pharisees said," Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath." Wasn't that they were stealing they knew that, that was fine, but it was they were harvesting. They were harvesting on the Sabbath. Jesus had to deal with this all the time. I actually think... If you read through it, do some statistical analyses, you'll find that you did an overwhelming number of His healing on the Sabbath. He did it on purpose. Is there someone I can heal today on the Sabbath? So He finds a man paralyzed by that that pool in John 5, and He heals Him on the Sabbath, and the Sabbath police find him and he's carrying his mat.

It's un-lawful for you to carry your mat. Not asking how were you healed and what does it signify? But it's unlawful for you to be carrying your mat. But Jesus was Lord of the Sabbath, and more than that, He's more than just Lord of the Sabbath, friends, He is the Sabbath rest. He is our Sabbath rest, both now and forever, He is the Sabbath rest.

A Shadowy Picture of Rest Under Joshua

And the third shadowy picture is the rest under Joshua. The coming into the promised land. It was spoken of as a kind of rest before they even enter the Promised Land, under Joshua, it says in Deuteronomy 12:10, "But you'll across the Jordan and settle in the land the Lord your God is giving you, as an inheritance and He will give you rest, from all your enemies around you. So that you will live in safety.” So there's that word rest. And after they entered the Promised Land and had begun in a large part, had conquered it and settled it in Joshua 21:44, it says "The Lord gave them rest on every side as he had sworn to their fore fathers."

He mentions in Deuteronomy 8 the rich blessings of that land of rest. "The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land. A land with streams and pools of water. With springs flowing in the valleys and hills, a land with wheat and barley. Vines, and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey, a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing, a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills and when you have eaten, and are satisfied then praise the Lord your God for the good land, He has given you." He especially focuses on when you eat from vineyards you didn't plant. And when you gather in harvest that you did not labor for. When you sit at tables you didn't build, and when you eat meals that were laid out by somebody else, but now you get to sit there and eat them, then praise the Lord for the good land He's giving you.

That is such a picture of our heavenly enjoyments, we're going to get out there and we're going to sit at banquet table with Jesus. And He paid at all, what did we do? And we're going to sit and eat His food and we're going to celebrate. And so the conquest of the promised land is a mere shadowy foretaste of our crossing the river of death, and entering into our final resting place with God. But it was merely temporary friends. The author says, Joshua did not give them the rest that David wrote about, because David wrote about this rest long after they had entered the Promised Land, and if Joshua had given them rest then David wouldn't have spoken later about another day, another time. Joshua's rest was not permanent. For the possession of the promised land was conditional, it was a conditional covenant, they had to obey the laws of Moses, to hold on to the Promised Land, and they could not do it. The Old Covenant did not transform their hearts, the Old Covenant did not take out the heart of stone and give the heart of flesh. The Old Covenant merely said, "Do this and you will live." And so it was not the final rest but merely a picture.

And so, dear friends, there remains still a Sabbath rest for the people of God. It remained in David's day. It remained in Ezra's and Nehemiah's day, it remained in Jesus' day, it remained in the days of the apostles, it remained in the days of the reformers, and it remains still today, and it will remain as long as Jesus tarries, there still remains for us a Sabbath rest. "Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts." And along with that comes the warning. "I swore on oath in my anger. They shall never enter my rest." And so the implied command or invitation however you like to understand it, please all my people enter my rest. God is still inviting you through the Gospel now, to enter His rest, again verse one, "Therefore since the promise of entering is rest still stands. Let us be careful that His fear that none of you be found to a fallen short of it."

And so in every generation, God stands with His arms extended and He invites His people. He invites them and says, "There remains for you today a Sabbath rest for the people of God. There remains the Sabbath rest." And this Sabbath rest, is heaven. He is not talking about a meticulous careful Sabbath regulation. He's not talking about that. And so if you are hoping that I would answer the age-old Christian question, "Are we still to keep the Sabbath?" I will not. I have preached about that in Colossians. Get it up on the website and listen to it. I've been through all that, but that's not what this text is about anyway. That's just a shadow in a type. The Sabbath rest that He's talking about here is heaven through Jesus Christ.

Christ’s Perfect Work at the Cross

And so when Jesus stands there in Matthew 11, and says, "Come unto Me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest, take My yoke upon you and learn from Me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy. And my burden is light." He is talking about the Sabbath rest of Hebrews four. And Jesus is the door way for the sheep, He is the way to enter. And it is through Jesus that we come into our Sabbath rest, as though we're in this long corridor. And there's that door, and we have to finish walking through this corridor and we will step through the door. But Jesus is the corner, He's the door and he's the rest. And He says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life, and no one..." What? "Comes to the father, except through me, you know the way to the place where I'm going." That sounds like a journey to me friends. It sounds like there's a race to be run dear friends, and Jesus is the race and He is the finish line and He's the reward on the other side.

So I want to plead with you. It says in verse six that some are going in and some aren't. Some are going in and some through unbelief and disobedience are not going to enter that rest. And I pray this morning that there would be someone here who has not yet come to faith in Christ, so I could plead with you to do so. That you could know justifying faith right now that you can know that God is at peace with you through the blood of Jesus right now. You can know that, that all your sins will be forgiven it could be that soon you might die you don't know how much longer you're going to live. What are you waiting for? Jesus shed His blood for you. He is pleading with you to come to enter through Him, to find rest for your souls. Complete forgiveness for all of your sins and I'm pleading with you, and His place through the spirit that you would do so. I'm begging with you, don't put it off.

Jesus finished His works, Amen. Jesus works are finished. He said in John 17:4, "I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work You gave me to do." And the ultimate perfection of that work was on the cross when He shed His blood for sinners like you and me, and when he finished, he said. "It is finished." It is finished. Or you could translate it, "It is perfect." You can't add anything to it, it's perfect, it's done, it's finished. And He completed His work. And so therefore in verse 10 of our chapter here, anyone who enters God's rest, also rests from His own work, just as God did from His. And so we're going to step into Jesus' finished work. And I tell you there's a category of works that Jesus frees you from for the rest of your life, you're done with it for the rest of your life and you can enter that immediately if you're Christian, you've already entered that rest.

But then next week I'll tell you there's a category of labors you are not free from yet. And you need to still work out your salvation with fear and trembling. That's next week. But now, you can be freed from a variety of works, you can be freed from wicked and sinful works that lead to death. Hebrews 9:14 speaks of works that lead to death. You can be freed from those works immediately, from idolatry, freed from the works of your hands, worshipping the works of your hands. The thing about the Sabbath regulation is it enabled you to look at your idols. And say, "I can't live for the things I make, for the money I make, or the stuff that I can experience here on earth, I'm living for heaven." It's a benefit. You're freed from wicked labors, you're freed from the labor of slander, you're free from the labor and the work of gossip, you're free from the work of lust and covetousness and greed, you're free from all of those works, the works of idolatry. And you're free from empty religious works that don't get you any closer to God at all, but the God repudiate because they're not done by faith in Christ. You're free from religiosity, you're free from justification by works, isn't that beautiful? By the works of the law, no flesh will be justified. You're free from that now. Your standing doesn't depend on the works of your hands.

You are accepted in Jesus by faith. As it says in Romans 4, "To the one who does not work, but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited in his righteousness." You're free then from religious works that you're trying to use to pay for your disobedience, you're free, from that friends. And you're free from frustration in the labor of your hands. As the book of Ecclesiastes says "Vanity of vanities," or, "meaningless, meaningless… everything is meaningless." "What does man gain from all of his labors and toils under the sun?" If you're a Christian, you're free from that mindset, forever, Amen. You can wash the dishes to the glory of God. You can make beds of the glory of God, you can train children in the glory of God, you can go to that job tomorrow to the glory of God, you can type a memo to the glory of God, you can answer a phone call to the glory of God. And everything you do by faith for the glory of God will be waiting for you on Judgment Day, reward able by grace. You are freed from wrestling with the ground and it producing only thorns and thistles for you in that sense.

There is a sense you're not free from that curse. We'll talk about that next week. But you are freed from the ultimate meaningless-ness of life. Your work then has always been the same. What must we do to work the works of God, it's always the same. This is the work of God, that you believe in the one He Has sent. So labor to enter God's rest by faith, even today, have done with these works that you're freed from forever. Have done with wicked works, and religious works and meaningless works and justifying works, have done with all that, and stand in the peace that is yours and God.

Now next we're going to talk about meditation on the heavenly life. And I'm going to share with you some insights from a Puritan pastor who wrote a 677 page treatise on Hebrews 4:9. And you're going to get all of it next week, no you're not, I'm sorry.

Run Your Race With Endurance

Hebrews 4:9. "There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God." Richard Baxter, thought that was worth almost 700 pages. I was interested in that. I knew of the Saints Everlasting Rest. I've heard of it but I never read it. I looked at it I said, "Oh, that's the text I'm working on this week. What a surprise? What a surprise how long it is?" And as I read it I said, "What a surprise, I've missed the point." The point is run your race with endurance, and we'll talk about that next week, close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the insights that come from the Word of God, and Lord we look forward to the saints everlasting rest not pulses of rest coming in and out of rest coming in and out of a sense of peace, and then back at it again. Oh God, we yearn for the day when we're free at last from the battle itself. And Lord I pray that as we meditate on that this week, and as we prepare to hear more from Hebrews 4 next week, Oh Lord enable us I pray, to be ready to answer that final rest through faith in Christ. I pray that we wouldn't Imitate those who through disobedience and unbelief refuse the gospel. And Father, I pray again for any lost person here. Oh, God, I pray that now in the hearing of the gospel they will have been saved, that they will be ready to die even now, so that they can have eternal life, in Jesus name, Amen.

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on James 1:22. The main subject of the sermon is how James' command to be doers of the Word and not hearers only obligates us to protest abortion.

For myself, I was enjoying the testimony. I would still be sitting there and listening to it, but I do appreciate Ryan's ministry. Thank you. But Tony, what an incredible, powerful, powerful testimony. 

I was struck by what Ryan said earlier than that as he was talking about how evangelical churches are celebrating, and then he changed to mourning and about this issue, the sanctity of human life, and I wrote out in hand this morning as I was preparing this sermon, thinking more about it. That's exactly how I begin. And I thought it was ironic that he ran into that kind of strange little difficulty as he was talking about this. The Christian life is a strange mixture of celebration and sorrow. Is it not? We are constantly rejoicing and sorrowful. The Scripture openly says it, "As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." I liken that to that statement, 'cause it gives you the sense that sorrow is temporary, rejoicing isn't. And that is true. Some day the sorrow will be gone, and He's going to wipe every tear from our eyes. Meanwhile, if you're healthy, you're going to weep. And you're going to be sorrowful. We're told to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.  

Are you supposed to do that at the same time? You come to church on Sunday, and there's a category of rejoicing people and then there are the category of the mourning people, and if you really care, you're gonna do both in this course of a healthy Sunday. Jesus said paradoxically, "Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted." If you know anything about the word blessed in the Greek language, it means happy, joyful, makarios. Blessed, happy are the mourners. It's just, it's the mystery of faith that we are... Our eyes are open and we see the world and the visible and the invisible, the universe as it really is, and the universe as it really is, begins with God seated on His throne, and that is the best news there could ever be, because God is good and He's ruling, and He sent His Son, and through Him, we can have a completely forgiven perfect relationship with Him, and that is good news. John Piper had it right, God is the Gospel, he is the good news. And yet our eyes are open to realize what sin has done in this world, what it's done in my heart, in my family, in my life, in my community. What it's done in my nation, in the world that we're living in. It's awful, it's worse than we can imagine. And so if you have faith, you're gonna be both rejoicing and mourning all the time. 

Today is Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, and so we celebrate the gift of life. We celebrate the sanctity, the sacredness of human life. It's a good thing that God created man, male and female in His image, that's a good thing. At the same time, we mourn the culture of death that we permit here in this country. We are guilty, we are responsible for 38 years of legalized abortion in America because we just let it happen, and we don't do what it takes to stop it. Abortion is a lie, and we, the pillar and foundation of the truth, the church, has not told enough truth to overturn the lie, not yet. I do believe some day, the God of peace will crush satan under our feet, and I look forward to that.  

I was talking to Matthew Hodges this week about a particular aspect of abortion, a particular aspect of it had to do with a racial aspect, the fact that this is the biggest problem facing the African American community, and he showed me a link that made it just incredibly obvious how devastating it is in the African American community. Since 1973, the second leading cause of death among African Americans is heart disease, 2.2 million, third leading cause of death is cancer, I think it's 1.8 million, and down from there, I can't remember the whole list, AIDS is on there, traffic accidents, other illnesses are listed, gang-related violence, other things like that. By far, the number one is abortion at 13 million human beings. As a matter of fact, if you take the others and the next I would guess, 'cause the list stopped after seven or eight causes of death, and you just because of just statistically 'cause by then you're down to 75,000, 70,000, and the gap between 13 million and 2.2 million is so huge that you could add the next 20 causes of death and you still wouldn't get up to abortion. It's horrible. 

Another statistic I heard this week that 41% of all the babies conceived in New York City are aborted. I mean that's just... And you know this isn't a problem just “out there.” Eighteen percent of the babies that are aborted in America today are done so in the hands of women who claim to be part of Bible-believing evangelical churches. That's what they would put on a survey. That's a quarter of a million babies, 250,000, it's not just “out there.” And so we have to learn ourselves the sanctity of human life, and then tell it to the world. It's a church problem before anything else. We need to get this straight ourselves. 

Now, I believe, as I'm preaching to you, that a huge percentage of you would claim openly to be pro-life, I would hope 100%, but I'm not so naïve as I think 100%, but I think something really high, a high percentage of you would say, "Yes, I am pro-life and do not buy the whole abortion thing, I don't buy the whole pro-choice thing. I'm pro-life. I vote pro-life. I'll check that in a box on a survey. I hate pro-abortion, logic and rhetoric and that whole way of thinking. I may have even spoken up for pro-life a couple of times. I may have been to a PSS banquet. I might have even written a check. But my question to you today is, "Are we hearers only or doers in this issue?" That's my question. And really, it goes quickly to this one issue of sacrifice, "How much have you or I sacrificed to be pro-life in America?" Some people make it the focus of their entire life and ministry, it's what they do. Tony is choosing to do that. Praise God for that. Some people see it on a par with slavery, the slavery issue of the... Of 19th century America, they see it at that level. I personally call it the most profound civil rights issue of our day, absolutely a civil rights issue. The question is, "What are we willing to sacrifice to be pro-life?"  

Randy Alcorn, President of Eternal Perspective Ministries, pro-life is a major plank in his ministry. He's got a number of things he's doing, but that is a huge part of what he does. He's written a number of books on it. He was active, I think, in Operation Rescue, I'm not sure, but he was active in actively blockading abortion clinics in Oregon. And so he was tried and convicted. And in May of 1990 an envelope came to his home and basically said... In the envelope was a writ of garnishment for all of his wages. The reason for it was that he had refused to pay the small financial settlement because he'd be writing a check to an abortion clinic and he refused to do it. So he at that moment decided to go without a paycheck the rest of his life, and he's living by faith in that regard, he made a sacrifice for pro-life. My question. The text question, James 1:22 says, "Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says." That's the text that I feel the Lord gave me for Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.  

And the question is, then, “Are we pro-life hearers only? Are we doers? What are we willing to sacrifice?" So what I wanna do for you now briefly, is to just tell you what the Word says about this. I don't think this is gonna be new to you. I think you'll know these 10 basic principles that God gives us on this, so I don't have to belabor them, I'm just gonna tell you what they are, just to remind you. Ten basic principles on the sanctity of human life. Number one, God is creator, king and judge of all the earth. Start there. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, Genesis 1:1. This is God's world that we live in. Psalm 24:1-2, “The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters." And in Genesis 18:25, Abraham says, "Will not the judge of all the earth do right?" Well, He will do right, He is the judge of all the earth.  

Secondly, all human beings are created in the image of God, and therefore human life is sacred, unique and sacred. Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God, He created him male and female, He created them.”The image of God is still in place, though marred deeply by sin, we are still in the image of God. And so therefore, James 3:9 says that if we even insult or curse, our brothers were damaging the image of God, we're slandering the image of God with the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, he says, and with it, we curse men who have been made in God's likeness. 

Sanctity of human life, though, isn't just taught in the Bible, we live it every day. I don't even mean just we Christians, we human beings, just kind of know that human life is different. For what other form of life would rescue teams plow through the rubble of Port-au-Prince, Haiti looking for survivors, that the magnitude of the effort is a testimony to the sanctity of human life. Or rejoice the world over when 33 Chilean miners are rescued from a hole in the ground, half a mile down below the surface of the... They've been down there for two months, everybody just rejoicing when they were brought up. Sanctity of human life causes surgical teams to labor over a single individual trying to do anything and everything they can do to save that person. Causes searchers to scour over miles of undulating empty waves looking for the survivors of a shipwreck or a plane crash. Causes unimaginable grief at the loss of a single toddler. I read about recently in Syracuse, New York, the victim of a shooting in gang-related violence a little toddler. Sanctity of human life is there, we can't deny it. 

Thirdly, human beings are commanded to be fruitful and multiply. Genesis 1:28, “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth, and subdue it. Rule over it.’” That command was reiterated after the flood with Noah, still there.  

Fourth, human life begins at conception. This is the whole point. This is where we disagree with our pro-choice neighbors and co-workers and family members who are themselves created in the image of God, and who might be elect and who might be... You might see those individuals come to Christ as we can persuade them, but this is where the rubber meets the road, this is where we get to it quickly, human life begins at conception. That's what we believe. And that's what the Scripture teaches. To me, the strongest passage on this remains, Luke 1:43-44, where Elizabeth filled with the spirit is greeting Mary with these incredible words: "But why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb, leaped for joy." Game, set and match, friends. John the Baptist, pre-born, leaping for joy, only persons leap for joy. That's a human being in there. 

And even more significantly, Elizabeth calls Mary “the mother of my Lord.” She was at that moment carrying Jesus just a few weeks after his conception by the Holy Spirit. Mary was already granted sweetly the title mother of my Lord. And so personhood is given by Almighty God. It's nothing I can give to you. I can't give you or grant you personhood or take it from you. Hitler couldn't take personhood from the Jews or the gypsies of the Slavic race, though he called them sub-human, he couldn't take it from them. He could murder them, but he couldn't take their personhood away, 'cause it was given by God. And personhood has nothing to do with your geographical location. I am no more of a person on a mountaintop than I am in a valley or in a cave. And that baby is no more of a person, a few inches down the birth canal than a few inches back. It's got nothing to do with your location on the Earth. Personhood is a whole issue. 

Fifthly, all children, all children are a blessing from God. God blessed them. Genesis 1:28, and said, "Be fruitful and multiply." Psalm 127, “Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him, like arrows in the hands of a warrior, sons are born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” Blessing. 

Number six, satan hates all human beings and wants to murder them. He'd like to kill us all. He doesn't have some favorite human beings and others that aren't... He'll use people, people can be sons of the devil, but he hates us all. John 8:44, “Jesus said to his enemies, ‘You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth because there is no truth in him.’” He's a murderer. Revelation 12:4 says, “the dragon,” that's satan, “stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that he might devour her child the moment it was born." In context, this is definitely Jesus, but I just picture that frequently, the dragon there in front of the woman about to give birth.  

Number seven, human beings are forbidden from taking life. Exodus 20:13, "You shall not murder."  

Number eight, God's people are commanded to rescue the perishing and care for the needy. All you have to do is look at our text. Look at verse 27 in James 1. We'll talk more about it in a moment. “But religion that our God and Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: To look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” And Proverbs 24:10-12 says this, "If you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength? Rescue those being led away to death. Hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, 'But we knew nothing about this?' Does not He who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not He who guards your life know it? Will He not repay each person according to what he has done?" Rescue people who are perishing. 

Number nine, Judgment Day is coming when we will have to give an account for every careless word we have done Matthew 12:36. Revelation 20 is the clearest depiction of Judgment Day. In verse 12, "I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the Book of Life, and the dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. 

And this one's my favorite. Number 10, grace is available through Jesus Christ to all sinners who repent and believe in Him. Oh, how I need that word today. Oh, how I need it and so do you. “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. Christ, Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst,” said the Apostle Paul. I never forget when preaching on abortion that I may be speaking to someone who's had an abortion, or a man who compelled a woman to have an abortion, or a doctor who performed an abortion, or a nurse who assisted in abortion, or a political activist who actively raised money for pro-choice causes, or any of those things. That I might be talking to people who had some point in their lives committed act of sin in this area. I've never forgotten it. The grace of God is available through Jesus Christ for you. God sent his son into the world. He died on the cross, his blood was shed for sinners like you and me. And all we have to do is fall down in tears before Him and say, "Save me, Lord, the sinner. Be merciful to me, oh God, the sinner," and He will forgive you. Completely forgive you. 

I was witnessing to somebody this week, talking to them about grace, and I said, “Grace is 100% forgiveness for all of my sins, and I've come to that conclusion because I realize that 99% forgiveness will do me no good at all. I need it all forgiven. All of it. And it is through the blood of Jesus Christ. Come to Jesus, fall at his feet and trust in Him, see in his wounds, in the blood that he shed, see in his death your atonement for your sins. You are guilty and I am guilty. That's what we are.” Or I should say, if you're a Christian, that's what you were. But now you're washed, you're clean, you're holy, you're righteous in Jesus, simply by faith. Okay. So that's the Word of God.  

But it says in our text, “Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says, is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror, and then after looking at himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 

But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it, he will be blessed in what he does.”  

Let me tell you, my greatest fear and concern for this local body, for this church, First Baptist Church, is that you will, or have already, developed a taste for good doctrine, good preaching and teaching for good books, for good podcasts, for good Scripture teaching flowing in your ears and in your mind because you love it and it's orderly and beautiful and all that, but that we will come short of living it fully for the glory of God. That's my fear that we will be hearers only and not doers also. Oh God, deliver us from that. I'm praying that God would use Tony's testimony, use the elders leadership, that he'd use our own repentance to deliver us from being hearers only of the Word and not doers, also of it. It's my concern. I believe that the 10 things I've listed this morning wouldn't be shocking to any of you, I don't think there's anything on there that would say... I don't know, I don't think I'd agree with that.  

You believe these things. You'll be blessed Jesus said, If you do them, if you live according to these truths, and James likens the law of God to a mirror that you're supposed to gaze intently into, and as you gaze into the law of God you're gonna see two things. As you gaze intently into the perfect law that gives us freedom, you're going to see two things, you're gonna see yourself as you really are, and you're gonna see Jesus as he really is. You're gonna see yourself as a sinner who has violated the commands of God. You have not honored your father and mother. You have not kept your heart from defiling anger, murderous even anger toward your neighbors. You’ve not been free from lust. You have coveted your neighbor's goods. You're a law breaker. You’re convicted by it, you see yourself there, but you also see in the law a perfect reflection of Jesus's righteousness, He lived it perfectly, he never committed a single sin, He is holy and righteous and good. And that's the righteousness he offers me by faith. That's what you get when you look intently into law. You're supposed to keep doing that and not forget though. Are we merely listening to the Word and so deceiving ourselves? Ryan quoted it, in James 2, “So What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds, can such a faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. And if one of you says, him, Go, I wish you well, keep warm and well-fed, but does nothing about his physical needs. Now, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action is dead.” 

I believe that most American Christians who would assent to the 10 things that I said earlier, do very little by the way of sacrificial action to live up to those things in this area of abortion, and here there is a great danger of self-deception. The greatest danger on self-deception is that you aren't truly justified, you're not actually genuinely a Christian. That's why James wrote chapter two, so that we could see what kind of faith saves us, it's a faith that leads to a life rich in good works. That's what he's getting at there. That danger of self-deception on the issue of how stands it with my soul and God, am I truly saved? Am I really forgiven? Or am I going to hell? The most acute verses on this is in Matthew 7 in the Sermon on the Mount, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father, who is in Heaven. 

Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ And then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you; away from me, you evildoers.’”Oh, be not self-deceived on the issue of your soul, be sure that you are genuinely born again through faith in Christ, and that that faith is alive and producing good fruits.  

But you know, there's a second kind of self-deception, it just has to do with the kind of life that we're living, and we think that we're pro-life, but we're really not... You know, in the end, we think that we're evangelistic and we're really not... We think that we're missions-minded and we're really not... We think that we care about the poor and needy and we really don't... We are self-deceived in that regard, the only way you can tell is just look at your works, look at your life, what are you doing, that's how you can tell if you really are evangelistic or missions-minded or care about the poor and needy or pro-life. And so James makes it very plain, do what it says. Do not merely listen to the Word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. “Anyone who listens to the Word but does not do what it says, is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror. And after going away, immediately, forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do it. Not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it, he will be blessed in what he does.”   

Okay, I get it, James. I think I get what you're saying. I can be obtuse, I can be like a brick, but I get it. James is telling me I need to live out what I say I believe, it needs to affect my life, and so he gives us a vision of what it should look like, and he uses this word religion, verse 27, “Religion that our God and Father accepts as pure and faultless is this, to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” So he uses this word religion. Now, when I was first a new Christian with Campus Crusade for Christ in college and all that, I learned right away that religion was a bad word, it was kinda like a bad thing. It's not a religion, it's a relationship, I remember hearing all that kinda thing. And I thought, “Wow, James didn't get the message. He actually uses the word here, he uses the word positively...” Apparently, it is a religion.  

What is religion? I guess religion then is an organized pattern of lifestyle done to please the deity. Ever heard of organized religion? You know, I prefer disorganized religion, I don't know what the alternative is. We're going to be doing some religion, even atheists do some religion. It’s just an organized pattern of life done in reference to these spiritual things, so I wanna know I want my religion organized, I don't know about you, but I want it organized by the Word, Amen? So let's have an organized religion here, and let's let James tell us what it is, and He uses three keywords: acceptable and pure and faultless.  

Let's start with the word acceptable. Religion that our God and Father accepts as pure and faultless. What is accepted? It means God is pleased with it, God is going to take it, he will receive the sacrifice from your hands throughout the Old Testament. It's very plain. You don't get to choose what to bring God. God chooses what you should bring him, if you bring him what he chooses, he will be pleased with you and accept what you offer. If, on the other hand, you make it up yourself, he will not accept it, or you. We learn that right away with Cain. Remember Cain offered an unacceptable sacrifice. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering, he did not look with favor. So there's religion that's acceptable. Well, he's gonna tell us what is acceptable, and here he says, it's pure. Religion that our God Father accepts as pure, pure means unalloyed it's not mixed with human elements, it's not mixed with idolatrous, wicked elements. It's pure, it's heavenly, it's coming down from God to Earth. That's the pure religion that we want. It's God-centered religion. And faultless means religion that He will not find fault with you for bringing like he found fault with Cain. And so he defines it in two senses. Protective service to widows and orphans, and purity from the world. These are the two things he gives us. Widows and orphans are vulnerable, they are needy with ongoing needs for provision and protection in this world, and so you want a religion that I accept, it's pure and faultless, then take care of people who are broken and needy in the world who of stripped of protection, take care of them. I'll accept that.  

And secondly, purity. Keep yourself from being polluted by the world. The world is Satan's masterpiece. And by that I mean that world system: lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, boastful pride of life. That world corrupt system, it's his genius masterpiece that leads the inhabitants of the Earth into idolatry and away from the true religion. God accepts it as pure and faultless when you stand firm against that and you will not be defiled by the world. Now, I think that abortion, this text is perfect for the issue of abortion, even though widows and orphans aren't directly issue of abortion at the same time, they are the most needy, and the women who are there, they're behaving a lot like widows at that point. Many of them are saying, “I have no one to take care of me.” That's specifically why Tony started House of Hope, because he wanted to be able to give tangible material help to a woman who said, “I have no one to care for me during this time.” So women care for women in crisis pregnancies and concern for the babies they are carrying fits, I think, this verse perfectly. 

And concerning the pollution of the world, do you realize how wrapped up in the world the whole pro-choice mentality is? And how wrapped up in the world Christians who don't agree with it, but who do nothing about it, are? In other words, we care too much what people think about us, we care too much what our suite mates think and what our professors think and our bosses and co-workers and relatives think, and so we don't say what we really believe, and that's worldly. It's worldly to care more about man than God, and so I don't wanna get polluted by the world.   

So what applications can we take from this? What do we do? Well, what I did do is I actually went through the 10 points and gave multiple bullets under each of them. The Lord led me, turns out wisely, now to write out four different ones right before I walked in here. First and foremost, just hear what Tony was saying about the compartments of his life and how he wanted an integrated Christian life. He didn't want mediocrity in his Christian life.   

Okay, what do I want for First Baptist Church? I want Acts, chapter two at the end of the chapter for this church. “They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking bread and prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and the Lord was adding to their number daily, those were being saved.” Ryan and I, as we left Tony that day, we both said when we see the waters of this baptismal tank moved every week with people who are being converted, people who are being saved, that you all are leading to Christ and that I'm leading to Christ, and all that, I'll just “thank you, Jesus,” ‘cause I know only God can do this, and you know what? It's occurred to me that will never happen if we keep doing kind of institutional door-to-door type things, we have to step into the misery and brokenness of the world that surrounds us and meet the Christians at their... non-Christians, sorry, at their point of greatest need and share the gospel with them, and we'll see people converted, and it isn't going to happen without sacrifice. It's going to be messy, it's going to be difficult. I see it almost like a very worldly expression, but I feel like there's a glass ceiling over FBC and we can see another way of living, we can see a better kind of church life there, but we can't get there. 

Why, 'cause it takes a certain amount of force to break through, and that force is called sacrifice, and we won't break through, we will never break through unless we sacrifice. So I'm not standing here saying you need to do that kind of sacrifice in pro-life ministry. I don't think so. I think the body of Christ has a lot, there's so many issues, so much brokenness, so many things we could be doing. But I tell you this, we can't do any of it without that level of sacrifice. That's all I'm saying. So don't take from Tony Hernandez, “I need to go into pro-life ministry,” if you're not called to do that. Take from Tony Hernandez, “I need that level of commitment and sacrifice to do what God's calling me to do.” 

Number two. This is terrible and convicting. I sat in the House for Hope with Ryan and with Tony and listening and there was just one question... practical question. Always practice, I'm practical. Practical... I'm gonna be... I'm practical, practical. Okay, so we meet these ladies, they are unwed moms. We help them bring their babies to term. Then what? “Tony, what's the...” I asked him, “What's the exit strategy?” And the Lord convicted me as the words are coming out of my mouth. This is what I felt the Lord was saying to me, “Andy, that is the wrong question, and I'm so glad you asked it, because it exposes your heart. You know what it shows me about you? That you wanna write a quick check, do a quick little pro-life ministry, do something quick. Check the box and move on. You don't wanna get messy, you don't wanna be inconvenienced, you don't want it affecting your life at all. You wanna know how short a time can I look after a lady and be happy about how that went... Went great. Send them off, everything is great, and their entire extended family came to Christ and they write about us generations to come.” I want the happy ending and I don't wanna pay the price, and you know... it came right out of the text. Widows are still widows a year from now, orphans will be called orphans until they can provide for their own needs. Clearly, that was a long-term ministry, it wasn't something you did for a few days or a few hours... “Yeah, I do an orphan ministry.” “Really, what do you do?” “A couple of hours every year I put into that. It's really been a big part of my life.” Well, I can tell...   

Now, George Müller cared for 10,000 orphans, 10,000. And my third application is coming right from this book, George Müller: Delighted in God. Five years after he began his orphan ministry, he wrote about why he did it, and this was so convicting for me. I read this at 10:33 this morning, and I said, This is making... And I don't usually bring books up and read them from, but I want you to hear this is George Müller speaking about why he got involved with orphans. “The chief end,” says Müller, “for which the institution was established, is that the Church of Christ at large might be benefited by seeing manifestly, the hand of God stretched out on our behalf in the hour of need, in answer to prayer. Simply put, we needed to be needy, and so we did orphans. Our desire therefore is not that we might be without trials of faith, but that the Lord graciously would be pleased to support us in the trial that we might not dishonor Him by distrust. This way of living brings the Lord remarkably near, he is as it were morning by morning, inspecting our storehouses, that accordingly he may send help. Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord's presence I have never had.” Listen, “Then when after breakfast, there were no means for lunch, and then the Lord provided the lunch for more than 100 persons, or when after lunch, there were no means for dinner, and yet the Lord provided the dinner and all this without one single human being having been informed of our need. Just in answer to prayer.” 

I could read on, but basically what he says at that point is we needed to be needy, we needed to learn how to trust God every single day for things that we knew we couldn't provide, so we need, friends, ministries that will make us needy, that will break us that will make us cry, that will make us hurt, that will turn our lives upside down, we need that kind of ministry. If not, we will come short of the good works God had for us to do. So finally, application, get involved, with Tony, if you feel led. He's gonna be here at the front of the church after the services over, just during that mingling around time, come and tell him you’ll pray for him. Come and tell them that you'd like to go with him to the abortion clinic. I'm making a commitment before you now, I will go to the abortion clinic with Tony. If you wanna come with me, email Tom Knight and say, I wanna go with you, Andy, to the clinic. Okay, first of all, it's probably gonna be early in the morning, my experience in Brookline, Massachusetts, hardest ministry I ever did. 

I promise you there, I promise you'll get scared, I promise that you'll have a sense that you're face-to-face with Satan himself. You might get yelled at. You will see depths of depravity that you have never seen, and you will get a chance to share the gospel in one of the hardest situations. As a matter of fact, another ministry, Reb Bradley, he goes around with his son, he does all kinds of ministries, they wanted to go to that place in South Dakota where the bikers go every year, that biker place where all the Hells Angels go and they're gonna go share the Gospel. These people are amazing. And he asked his 16-year-old son, Reb Bradley did, he said, “Son, are you nervous to go with these motorcycle people?” He said, “Dad, if we can do the abortion clinic, we can do anything.” Abortion clinics is the hardest ministry I've ever done in my life, but come with me. Come with me and watch. Come and God might call some of you in, I think Tony’s greatest desire is that we'd start a similar ministry right here. There are all kinds of kind of vacant homes right near us that we could see God do those kind of things. Maybe God's putting a vision in your heart. In any case, whether you're called to pro-life or whatever you're called to, it's only gonna be by sacrifice that you'll be fully fruitful to the Lord. 

Close with me in prayer. Father, thank you for this day, thank you for the Word of God, thank you for everything that you do, that you have done in our lives. Thank You for grace. Thank you, oh Lord, that you have covered all of our past failings. You've covered our silence when we should have spoken. You've covered our cowardice. Oh Lord, you've covered women who've gotten abortions. You've assured them that they are forgiven, that their conscience is cleansed, that you love them, and that you couldn't love them anymore than you do. You’ve assured in the same way any who have actively sinned in this area. But Lord, for the rest of us who have perhaps only passively sinned, but still sinned in this area, you've forgiven us, to thank you for that grace. And now God, give us new effusions of grace, make First Baptist Church a way station of grace and mercy in a dying world, help us to be the place where shouts of joy and tears of lamentation go very appropriately flowing from the spirit, from the Word of God through our eyes and our mouths... Oh, Lord, make us alive. Help us to be that kind of a church in Jesus name, Amen. 

Dear friends, we live in a distracted, fractured, turbulent world, a world I think that's desperate for rest. Ecclesiastes chapter 2:22-23 says, "what does a man gain for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun. All his days, his work, his pain and grief even at night. His mind does not rest. This too, is meaningless." Over 172 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders, insomnia, in some sense or another. Since 9/11, the sale of sleeping pills has increased by 25%. People are disturbed. People are restless, like the churning waves of the sea, unable to sleep because of their labors and their anxieties. Struggling with fears about the future.

What will happen tomorrow? What if my husband dies? What if the stock market crashes. What if I lose my job? Even worse are the restless anxieties that go really to the center of our souls, people's guilty consciences tormenting them with their sins because they don't know Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Satan accusing. Judgment Day looming people then try to play tricks with their minds, and with theology try to convince themselves that there's no heaven, there's no hell, there's no accounting, there's no day of reckoning, no standing before a holy God, but in their minds, there's a nagging suspicion, an overriding sense that God may be angry with them because of their sins and so, they lie awake at night plotting and scheming, and reasoning, and planning and worrying and waiting for sleep to come and it doesn't. Not so the righteous says the scripture King David spoke for the entire family of God, when he described how easy it was for him to rest, to fall asleep at night.

Psalm, 3:5-6, "I lie down and sleep. I wake again because the Lord sustains me, I will not fear the tens of thousands, drawn up against me on every side." And then in the very next psalm he says the same thing again. Psalm 4:8, "I will lie down and sleep in peace for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety." And why is that, because by faith he knew that God was at peace with him. How much more dramatic then would the confidence be of the Apostle Paul, as he faced his own death, his imminent death, in the last epistle, he ever wrote 2 Timothy 4:7-8 in which he says, "I have fought the good fight. I finished the race, I've kept the faith. Now there is laid up in store for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord himself will award to me on that day. And not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing." What incredible peace of conscience, and confidence he had as he faced his own death. So I ask you today dear friend have you entered into God's rest by faith in Jesus Christ?

Persevering in the Profession of Faith

Are you experiencing the fullness of that rest right now by faith? That's what this sermon is all about. Now we've known the context here, it bears repeating the author of this book, is writing to first century Jews who had made an outward profession of faith in Christ and had testified to that by water baptism, but were being harassed, and attacked every day, perhaps, by neighbors and relatives and government authorities and religious leaders to give up their faith in Jesus Christ. And to go back to old covenant worship, back to where it was safe.

And so the author writes a strong word, an epistle of warning to them that they need to continue in their profession of faith in Christ right to the end to finish the journey of faith that they begin. He doesn't want them to drift away or turn away or fall away from Jesus. The last sermon we saw in Hebrews 3:15-19, he reminds them of the history of the Jews their forebears, their ancestors who came out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses, during the exodus, but through unbelief came short of the promised land, and the lesson was very clearly told at the very end of that chapter, in Hebrews 3:19. So we see, so we are able to conclude that generation of Jews was not able to enter the Promised Land because of their unbelief.

Now, as we look at Hebrews 4:1-5 the author is renewing this persuasion. He's going to meditate for a while on what it means to enter into God's rest. The clear idea is, that to enter God's rest is to come to faith in Jesus Christ, to see striving. And to come to rest and at peace with God through faith in Christ, that's what it means to enter God's rest and the ultimate consummation of that rest is to enter heaven when you die to enter into the very presence of God and to know His rest through face-to-face fellowship. This will only happen through faith in the Gospel, but this is going to be a very difficult journey. We're still alive in this world, it's still today the era of hearing God's word, hearing with faith. And so we are on a fight.

We're in a journey, and we have got to continue to believe in Jesus. It's not enough, merely to hear the Gospel, we've got to continue to combine that hearing with faith. So that's what he's saying it's not enough to just hear the message of a future Promised Land, it's not enough to hear the message of entering into God's rest. You've got to combine that message, with faith or it will do you no good at all. And so he's going to give them a warning. There is a healthy fear in this passage, the word fear is in the passage though not in every translation but it's there. We need to fear, less we come short of the rest of God unless any of us come short of the rest of God. So there's both a personal fear and then there's a corporate fear as well that we're concerned about other people, whether they are entering into the rest. That's what this passage is about.

And so we begin with this statement in verse 1, "Since the promise of entering His rest still stands…" the promise that God has made us of a rest it still stands over us even today. Now, what do we mean by God's rest? Well, first and foremost, we need to begin with God Himself, God within himself is a being at rest. He's at perfectly at rest and at peace within himself. This is what I believe, when I think about the unity of God, God is one.

Not just Father, Son and Spirit, but within himself, he is one with His purposes, His attributes aren't warring with each other, His love isn't fighting against His wrath, which isn't fighting against his peacefulness, or any of these attributes of God these are not at war, but everything's at peace within the heart of God. How much do we sinners need to hear that? We're not at peace within ourselves. But God is at peace in himself, he's not troubled, or tossed about by doubts or fears or concerns or second thoughts.

God is a peaceful being and nothing can trouble his rest.

Secondly, what is God's rest? Well, God's perfected labors and the text mentions this, you look at verses 3-4, and yet it says his work has been finished since the creation of the world, "For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words, 'and on the seventh day God rested from all his work.'" So the idea is one of a set of labors of works being perfected, completed, accomplished. God's initial work of creation, was perfect as God could make it but the author makes it plain that that could not be the final resting place of history. Redemptive history had to follow, leading to a final perfected rest with God, and with the redeemed.

From the very beginning of the world. Then after the sixth day of creation God declared the universe perfect in Genesis 1:31, it says, "God saw all that He had made, and it was very good and there was evening and there was morning the sixth day." Then, in Genesis 2, God declares His final act of physical creation, the Sabbath rest, the seventh day look in Genesis 2:1-3, it says, "Thus the heavens and earth were completed in all their vast array by the seventh day God finished, from all the work he had been doing and so on the seventh day, he rested from all his work, and God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that he had done." so God's physical work was all complete, it was perfect, didn't need any improvement.

But the author goes on from there. In Hebrews 4 he says "And yet His work has been finished since the creation of the world." Why does he say "And yet"? Well it shows a contrast, between the rest that he's offering us in the gospel and God's Seventh-day rest at the end of creation. That Seventh day rest is just a picture of the final rest we're going to have in Christ. God still had work to do as Jesus himself says in John 5, "My Father is always at His work. To this very day and I too am working," and yet in some mysterious and beautiful way when God deemed his works completed when he deemed them perfect he rested. And so in the same way God's rest is a finishing of a set of works that God considers complete and perfect. Answer to number three then is God's final dwelling place, his resting place, with the redeemed.

God's rest, then is the place where he will dwell with redeemed people from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation and in that place, his people will no longer be tormented, or troubled by anything, at all. That's God's rest. Psalm 132:13-16, it says, "For the Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for His dwelling. This is my resting place forever and ever here, I will sit enthroned. For I have desired it I will bless her with abundant provisions. Her poor will I satisfy with food. I will clothe her priests with salvation and her saints will ever sing for joy." That's a picture of God's future final heavenly resting place with His people. What he calls the Heavenly Zion there in Psalm 132.

Think of it then as a place of security and full provision. As God said very famously, through David in Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, He restores my soul." That's a picture of that perfect heavenly rest that God intends quiet waters, by the way, are waters that are no longer churning they're not churning and turbulent but they're at rest, and at peace. Like the Crystal sea in Revelation 21, everything at peace. And so God makes us lie down at peace with himself, and with one another and with creation, that's a picture of that heavenly rest. It's a place where there are no enemies any longer who can threaten us. Heaven is that true place. A final place of rest.

Well, that's what God's rest is. What then does it mean to enter God's rest? Well, the context of Hebrews 3 and 4 is the promised land as we've mentioned, to the Jews entering God's rest, meant physically crossing the Jordan and going into the Promised Land.

It was a physical thing, it meant taking up residence in this land and it would be their home and they would live there. It was the land that God had promised to Abraham made it very plain as he looked through the breadth and length of the land in Genesis 13, after Lot went down to Sodom. I will give this land, to you and to your descendants. It was the Promised Land. Abraham, as you remember wanted to know how he would receive it, and God promised him in Genesis 15, with a very serious covenant with the animal sacrifice with the fire pot that moved between the pieces that God would most certainly give him that land, Promised Land. But he said there's going to be a delay of 400 years where his own descendants will be enslaved and mistreated, but afterward God would come and take them out of that bitter bondage and slavery and lead them into that beautiful Promised Land and so for the Jews, it meant to come out of bondage go through the desert and then cross the Jordan and go into the Promised Land.

Deuteronomy 26:6-9, it says, "The Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer putting us to hard labor." So there's a picture of labor of work for no reward at all for no salary. They were slaves, they got no benefit out of their labors. "Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression, so the Lord brought us out of Egypt, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders and he brought us to this place, and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey."

So simply put, at that point in redemptive history, to enter God's rest meant for the Jews by faith to cross the Jordan river and by conquest, to take their inheritance, to take the Promised Land and settle, and dwell there in peace. Again and again then the Lord spoke of this Promised Land as the place as their place of rest and His. As though God Himself was going to be wandering with his own nation until at last, they came into their place of rest.

So, you see this kind of language in Numbers 10:33-36, it says "So they set out from the mountain of the Lord and traveled for three days, the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord went before them during those three days to find them a place of rest. The cloud of the Lord was over them by day when they set out from the camp. And whenever the Ark set out, Moses said, 'Rise Up a Lord, may your enemies be scattered, by your foes, flee before you.' But whenever it came to rest, He said, 'Return O Lord to the countless thousands of Israel.'" That's a very significant statement. So is there a people in pilgrimage as they're on journey going to the Promised Land, the Lord is going to go out before them searching out for them a place of rest, but at the end of the day, when they haven't quite come into it yet, the Lord will symbolically, come back surrounded by the tribes with the Ark of the Covenant symbolizing His presence "Return O Lord, to the countless thousands of Israel." So, it pictures a God on pilgrimage who wasn't yet come into his rest, he's living in a tent, a movable tabernacle pillar of cloud, pillar of fire moved out and when they conquered the Promised Land, the symbolic rest was nearer but still not achieved. Solomon built the temple thinking it would be permanent.

And we know it wasn't, it was more permanent than that tent that moved from place to place, but it wasn't permanent. And at the prayer of dedication Second Chronicles 6:41, He prayed, "Now arise O Lord, God and come to your resting place you and the ark of your might." And so, you know the Shekinah Glory of God came and gave a symbolic dwelling there, but again, it was just temporary. Dear friend, the Promised Land, the physical land and the tabernacle and the temple these were all just shadows and types, of God's true promised rest. The author will make it plain in the next passage. Next time we preach on this book of Hebrews that Joshua did not really give the Israelites rest.

It wasn't it, it was just a symbol, it was a picture of God's final rest. The Promised Land was a shadow of the reality, the reality is that eternal heavenly rest that He intended for us in the new heavens of the new earth, the true rest that God gives us in Heaven, and it must be eternity in Heaven resting in God's very presence with a resurrected soul in a resurrected body surrounded by other resurrected souls and resurrected bodies in a resurrected world with no troubles left. That is the promised rest and the only way to enter that promised rest is salvation in Jesus Christ. He is the doorway, he is the entry point into the rest of God, he is the door of the sheep, he is the new and living way into the very presence of God.

He is, the way by which we enter into the rest faith in Jesus Christ, Jesus and can't you just see him standing there as the door with his arms open wide and saying so beautifully in Matthew 11: "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Salvation in Christ

So coming to salvation in Christ is like entering God's rest, like entering the Promised Land you will find rest for your souls. And so, since the promise of entering his rest still stands well what is that promise? Well, it is the gospel of Jesus Christ, that's what the promise is and it still stands because it's still being preached all over the world today, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is being preached in every time zone on Earth. 24 time zones, 24 proclamations of the gospel, all around the church of Jesus Christ and messengers are going out to proclaim rest in Jesus' name, promise of entering God's rest still stands today.

And what is that message? It's very simple. God the Creator of the ends of the earth is Holy. He is a king, He's a law-giver, He has the right to rule over His creation. He created man in His image, but man through rebellion fell into sin, turned away from God the Creator and God the King, and went his own way. We, the descendants of Adam, are born into that wretched rebellion. We stand guilty in Adam and guilty because of our own transgressions of God's law and as a result God is against us because of our transgressions of His law. But God sent His own Son, Jesus Christ, born of a woman, born under the law, He lived a sinless and perfect life under the law.

 He died a redeeming death, an atoning death on the cross, the sins and the guilt of the people of God put on Jesus and the wrath of God poured out on Him and Jesus died, the death penalty that we deserve for violating God's loss. But God didn't leave Him dead. On the third day, He raised Him from the dead. He send him to heaven, He sits at the right hand of God. And some day, he is going to come from there to judge the living and the dead that is the promise of God's rest that by faith in Jesus Christ, all of our sins can be forgiven, that our conscience can be cleansed, that we can set our hearts at rest in God's presence and know for certain that when we die, we're going to be with Him in heaven.

And God will not accuse us on judgment day, but He will welcome us as His sons and daughters. And through repentance and faith, we can enter through Jesus into the rest of God. That's how the promise of entering God's rest still stands.

Well, what should we do about it? Well, positively, we should believe it. We should embrace Jesus, we should trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins. Negatively, not like these, the Jews here that refused to enter, we should not be unbelievers who do not trust in the promise of God, who find fault with it, and who will not enter the promised land.

And so there is a fear in this passage and this fear is that we who have heard the Gospel, will in some way fall short of entering God's rest. So look at verse 1 again, "Therefore, since the promise of entering His rest till stands, let us be careful." The NIV says "That none of you be found to have fallen short of it." So therefore looking back at Israel's failure, back to Hebrews 3:19, we see that they were not able to enter because of their unbelief, "Therefore, since the Promise still stands over us, let us be careful," the NIV says. So do not be unbelievers in this promise. But I think that "let us be careful" is not a great translation.

The ESV gives us this, "Therefore, while the promise of entering His rest till stands, let us fear, lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it." So this is a fear, we are to be afraid of something, be very afraid of something in this passage. The fear is that after we have heard the Gospel, after we've heard it clearly proclaimed that we will end up coming short of the heavenly rest that God intends that we will not end up in heaven, but rather be condemned to hell, but it's fear that any of us be found to have fallen short of it. The whole point of this passage, I think indeed of the whole book is to press upon the hearers of this promise, to press upon those who have heard the Gospel, the need for ongoing faith in the message for the rest of your life to keep believing in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to keep believing that God is offering you rest in Jesus.

That we should fear lest we not finish what we started. Now, any of us who have genuinely begun this race will most certainly finish it. I believe in the sovereignty of God over salvation. If God has given you faith, He is going to sustain it every day until you don't need it anymore, when you trade it in for face-to-face fellowship. He's going to sustain it every day. But I tell you, who uses this godly fear to help you sustain that faith. And we need these warnings and so we are commanded, Let us fear that we not fall short of entering God's rest. Let us fear that we not finish what we started.

Now, one of my favorite sports memories, 1980, The Men's Olympic Hockey team defeated the Russians.

You have to have lived in those days to know what an incredible upset that was. The Russians were a monster hockey team, they destroyed everybody that they played, they destroyed all-star teams from the NHL, they took on all comers, they won the gold medal every four years without fail. We had a bunch of college kids, the odds were, they were picked fifth in the Olympics, it was in America, so maybe had home ice advantage, but... And you know the story, perhaps, you've seen the movie Miracle and The Men's Olympic Hockey team shocked the world by beating the Russians 4 to 3, unleash the wildest on ice celebration in history, gloves flying, sticks flying, American flags waving, all of that sort of stuff.

But the problem was there was still one more game to play, there was one more game that had to be played and under the rules of that time, at that point, the American hockey team had not won a single medal. Different rules now, but back then it was still possible that if they lost that final game, they would have finished in fourth place, no medal at all. How foolish with that wild celebration have looked at that point. And as it turned out, this team seemed to love to fall behind. And after the second period they're losing to Finland 2 to 1. Herb Brooks, the coach, master motivator got their attention, the place was so quiet, that locker room between the second and third period was so quite, you could hear a pin drop. He said, "If you lose this game, you will take it with you to your graves." He walked out of the locker room, and they're just stunned. He turns around, comes back in 30 seconds later, he said "To your graves" and he walks out.

Well, thankfully they didn't have to do that, they didn't have to take the bitter memory of a loss to Finland of all things to their graves, they went and scored the requisite goals and won the gold medal. They did it to gain a crown that will not last. But we do it to get a crown that will last forever. There's still game to play here friends. There are still challenges to meet, there are still wars to fight, there are still people to lead to faith in Christ, we still have the world, the flesh and the devil against us. We're not finished yet. And let us fear that we don't finish. That's what the author is telling us here.

And fear for yourself first, look after yourself, how is your faith, how is your sense of heavenly things through the Gospel? Is it more vivid now than it was a year ago, or less so? Are you more worldly or more faith-filled now than you were a year ago? Are you more enamored with the things of the world now or with the things of Christ than you were a year ago, or when you first believed compared to that? Are you growing in your faith? If not, you're in danger. So fear for yourself first. Now, don't misunderstand. I feel like I'll need to say this the rest of the time I preach in Hebrews. You can't lose your salvation. I think I already said that once today, didn't I?

What God began, he's going to finish. I just want to ask you, how do you know that God began something in you. How do you know you're included? I tell you, keep believing, keep perpending, keep trusting, keep walking. That's how you know. So fear for yourself. But this text actually goes beyond you. Let us fear lest any of you be found to a fallen short of it. Again, we're supposed to care about each other, we're supposed to be praying for each other. Have you gotten one of these? If you have gotten one of the phone books, are you praying, some of you going to be on praying to phone calling? That's great, that's great. I was going to do that... A little discipline... No keep making the calls, but maybe you'll get three or four calls in one day, but at least know this, you are being saturated in prayer if indeed the church is praying for you.

Ask yourself, have I gotten a phone book? And have I begun praying for the people of the church. If you don't want to use the phone book, then do it from memory, that's fine if you want to do that. I think the phone book's helpful to remember who our fellow members are. But we're just obeying Hebrews 3 and Hebrews 4 that says that we should be watching out for one another in brotherly love. And that doesn't just mean in economic hard times, it means in spiritual hard times which is every day, let's pray for each other, let any of us be found to a fallen short of this, that's the fear that the author is talking about here.

And why is that because the Gospel promise is worthless unless it is combined with faith. Now, that's a shocking thing to say. He looks back to that generation that failed to enter the promised land, and he says in verse 2, we also have had the Gospel preach to us just as they did but the message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith. Notice that the author calls what the first... What those Jews back in in 1500 BC heard, he calls it the Gospel. In other words, the message of the physical Promised Land was Gospel for them and their souls depended on whether they believed it or not, just like Abraham believed God and was credited him as righteousness. What they heard concerning the physical Promise Land that was the gospel they got. Friends, we have a better Gospel now. We have the clear Gospel of Jesus Christ. The fulfillment of the ages has come on us and we have heard this Gospel but I tell you, this gospel which is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, this Gospel is of no value to those who do not combine it with faith, it's worthless, it does nothing for you. I would contend it actually harms you because it hardens your heart, if you don't combine it with faith, you're actually worse off than if you'd never heard it.

And the word combine is interesting, it's almost like the chemistry of salvation, the KJV puts it this way, but the word preach did not profit them not being mixed with faith in them that heard it. So there's a mixture here like two compounds that get mixed together to form a chemical reaction. There's this blending, this uniting together. The word must be preached, the true Gospel must be preached, false gospel does nothing for the kingdom but the true Gospel of Christ crucified must be preached and the hearer must respond with faith, there must be faith in the hearer or else it's of no value.

So everyone who believes enters God's rest, verse 3, "Now we who have believed enter the rest." There's no mystery here about those that enter. God's not holding out on us, so we don't know who's going to make it or not, those who believe the Gospel and continue to do so, year after year, decade after decade of walking with Jesus by faith, they are the ones that enter God's rest.

Now, there is a difference between the state of God's rest, and the experiencing of that state. You can be or God can be at rest with you through faith in Jesus. It says in Romans 5:1, "Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." God can be at peace with you through Jesus Christ, and you still churned up and turbulent and distressed about certain things going on in your life that is possible. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is possible, but there is the status of peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ that the author is focusing on here that you should enter into God being at peace with you through faith in Christ. But the experience of the peace of God, which transcends all understanding is vital too. The reason that these first century Jews were being tempted to go back to old covenant Judaism is because things weren't going well for them, and they're getting beaten on and persecuted by their surrounding generation and they were churned up and turbulent inside and distressed because they cared too much about man and what people think and care too much about their earthly lives, and their earthly comforts and pleasures and ease, and being tempted to forsake Christ and go back.

So we must have both, the objective state of peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ and an ongoing experience of entering into God's rest through faith to be healthy in this world. And do you have both friends? Is your heart at peace in God's presence? 1 John 3 says "This then is how we set our hearts at rest in his presence." Because God knows our hearts, He's greater than our hearts. Is your conscience clear? Are you violating your conscience? And if you are, are you bringing it quickly to God and having your conscience cleansed and your bodies washed with pure water, and entering into the Holy of Holies again, into the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need. That is the blessing of the Gospel, it's offered to all of you.

But this passage also has a hidden warning. Actually, it's not hidden at all, it's openly stated... Twice. "I declared on oath in my anger, 'they shall never enter my rest.'" Frankly, the rest is negative in this passage. A warning that you'll not enter it, if you don't believe.

The alternative to rest then is wrath. Revelation 14:10, it says "He too will drink of the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of His wrath." Satan is a restless being, Satan's followers are restless beings, Satan roams to and fro throughout the earth, filled with rage because he knows his time is short, his demons are going through arid places seeking rest and not finding it. And the children of the devil are living the same kind of life. It says in Isaiah 57, 20-21, "The wicked are like the tossing sea which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud, there is no peace says my God for the wicked." And therefore, the place of condemnation, the place of wrath is a restless place. It says in Revelation 14:11, "The smoke of their torment rises forever and ever, there is no rest day or night for those that are condemned there. It means at least that there's no respite. There's no break in hell. But I think it also means more than that, I think it's a place of mental and psychological restlessness as well.

Imagine what it's like to be in hell and have a memory of your life buffeted by troubling thoughts, ripped apart by regrets by bitter and painful memories. Forever, the damned are sighing with regrets, they're blaspheming the name of the God who set them there, they are buffeted by new waves of torment, they're remembering especially the times that they heard the gospel and chose not to repent and believe, thinking about those times. I swore on oath in my anger says the Lord, they will never enter my rest. Revelation 14:11: There is no rest, day or night.

Two verses later though, Revelation 14:13 says, "Then I heard a voice from Heaven say, 'Write: blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.' 'Yes,' says the Spirit, 'they will rest from their labor for their deeds will follow them.'" Do you see how clear is the contrast? There is no rest for them, but these folks are going to rest forever because of the work of Christ. And so I just want to apply this very plainly to you.

To unbelievers, I just want to plead with you, please combine the words you've heard today with faith. Maybe it's already happened. Oh, I pray, so. Maybe while you were hearing me proclaim Jesus dead on the cross, empty tomb resurrection, you believed inside your heart, you believe, at that moment you're forgiven of all your sins. Already, God's at peace with you and you're going to start enjoying the fruit of that peacefulness. If not, I just plead with you don't walk out of this room knowing that God is at war with you because of your sins.

And believers, I just urge you, enter into God's rest today by faith. Come again to the cross, ask forgiveness for whatever ways that you violated your conscience. Let the blood of Christ cleanse you once again of your sins, let your conscience be at rest and at peace in God's presence. Delight in God's present rest. And can I urge you, have compassion on those around you who aren't at rest with God yet, go to work tomorrow and find some restless soul and tell them the Gospel. And don't mind what they might do with you or do to you if they don't believe. They might treat you badly, they probably won't kill you.

But preach the Gospel. We are surrounded by people. Ephesians 2 says, "Without hope, without God in the world." It's our responsibility to tell them how they can be at rest and at peace with God and cultivate a healthy fear of apostasy both in your life and in the lives of others, be afraid of drifting away, turning away and falling away from Jesus, ask friends to pray for you that you'll stay strong and get stronger in Jesus year by year. And ask your brothers and sisters in Christ, how's it going with your soul, do it tonight at home fellowship. Ask real questions of each other, say, "How are you doing? You're walking well with the Lord, how can I pray for you?" And finally long for your future rest in heaven, long for it. Stimulate your hopes, and have a look forward to the day when you'll sit at banquet table with Jesus and just be at peace. Enemies are dead. The world, and the flesh, and the devil is gone. Your conscience is perfect and at peace with God. Do you see the look on Jesus' face and it's warm and welcoming. You look around, brothers and sisters from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, they are knowing the same peace you are, that is your future in Christ. Close with me in prayer.

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Hebrews 3:15-19. The main subject of the sermon is God's use of Church history as a warning.

Perhaps right now, perhaps in the new year, right around this time, there may be somebody inquiring into Christianity. Having made a New Year's resolution to read through the Bible this year for the first time, cover-to-cover. Maybe they're not even close to the point of trusting Christ as their Lord and Savior, but they want to read the Bible. They've always been intrigued by it, and never really got down to reading it and so they're going to settle down, and they're going to read it. Perhaps they began yesterday on January 1st with, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." And they're going to read through and as they do the familiar accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, and 3, will fill into their minds and they'll feel comfortable with that. The creation, the story of the Garden of Eden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent. Maybe they'll learn some things they hadn't noticed before, but they're there and soon after that will come, Cain and Abel and after that things will get really interesting. They'll come to a genealogy. And then the story of Noah and the Ark that had more in it than they thought was there, and pretty soon they're in other genealogies and they're in the world of the Bible.

And it will seem a strange world to them. Of tent-dwelling nomads whose wealth was measured in sheep and goats. And some of those tent-dwelling nomads squabbling over the rights to drink from wells dug long before that. An account of one man dickering with the chieftain of a tribe over the right to buy a cave where he could bury his dead wife. Page after page of ancient history, and if he perseveres this sense will actually only get stronger, as he continues to read in the Old Testament. He'll read accounts of battles between nations that don't even exist anymore. Of minor kings whose names would have long since been forgotten, if they'd not been immortalized in the Bible. Prophets will rise up and proclaim the sins of the people, sins that he didn't even know were sins. They'll proclaim oracles against nations, as I said, that don't exist anymore, and it's all going to be very troubling.

And one question will just be screaming in his ear, "How in the world does this relate to my life?" He'll put the Bible down, he'll drink his coffee, get into his Acura and drive to an office where he's going to process someone's application for a mortgage, use the internet, he'll call the people on his Blackberry, he'll text while driving though he ought not to. Maybe set up a virtual meeting by Skype or some other software or technology, he's going to use all of that technology that we're very familiar with.

He's going to check CNN money and find out how his stocks are doing and what's going on with the markets. He's going to microwave his lunch, eat it quickly and get back to his work. When he gets home, he might pick up the Bible with a sigh, and try again and continue to read some more about people that lived two to four thousand years ago, whose lifestyle seems as relevant to his is that of the Aborigines in Australia in the Outback. And at some point, this question may cross his mind, "If the Bible really is God's word, why did he fill it was so much ancient history? That doesn't seem to connect to me at all." What does this have to do with me, a 21st-century person?

What is history? When we're standing right here at the beginning of a new year, we tend to get a bit sentimental about the year that's passed, look ahead to the year that's coming, and we're asking questions about the passage of time, what is history? Well, a simple definition is just a retelling of past events. Like that Dragnet guy Joe Webb said, "Just the facts, ma'am," something like that. And so we just want the facts. The problem is there are too many of them. So, all histories tend to be selective, a picking and choosing of the relevant facts. Any parent knows what I'm talking about is, alright, what happened? And there's a selective telling from various of the children, different accounts trying to harmonize the selectivity of history. So every history has a purpose, there's a reason why the retelling is going on. A search for significance and why it happened. And it doesn't take, as I've said, much reading the Bible to realize that it's overwhelmingly a book of history.

Even the poetry, the Psalms, like Psalm 95 that we read earlier, are celebrating the acts of God in history. Now for me, as a pastor, as a Bible reader, a Bible scholar, as I try to learn and study the Bible, I always bring two questions to every text. Or two convictions, I think is a better word, two convictions that I've gotten from the Scripture. The first conviction as I come to a passage of the Bible is the conviction that I know from Scripture, God never changes. Prophet Malachi, "The Lord said, 'I never change.'" So God is the same yesterday, and today and forever. So whatever I learn about how God dealt with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or someone else in history, God has not changed one bit. His character is the same.

The second basic fact I bring to the text is that human beings don't really change either. And the same things that those people struggled with in their day, we struggle with in ours as well. From generation to generation, we're dealing with the same basic problems, our pride, our lusts, our ambitions, our materialism our family squabbles, our health, our sickness, our birth, our death... We may be wearing different clothes, we may be listening to different music, we may have different patterns of entertainment, we may have different technology, we actually do, but inside we're no different men and women than they were.

We're dealing with the same issues they were. These are the two basic convictions. And so God has lavished on the human race an immense gift in the Biblical record, in the Bible history, a perfect history book selected by God, God selected out what to tell us. You know, at the end of John's gospel, He said, "You know, I haven't told you everything about Jesus. If I did the whole world couldn't contain the books that would be written." But I picked and I chose some things to give you my gospel. That's what John's saying, selective history. And the events of history written in the scriptures are written to help us today as we walk with God. Help us today as we live our lives. Their examples in the past break into two basic categories.

Category number one, positive examples in which the people did what they were supposed to do and received in some way the blessing of God. And then negative examples in which men and women do the wrong things. And they experience in some way, curses and judgments from God, and difficulties. Positive and negative examples. The positive examples are written for us to follow, so that we may be blessed. They are encouragements. The negative examples on the other hand, are written for things for us to avoid, that we too may not be cursed or judged as those people were. They are warnings for us. When we read of Cain's refusal to worship God in the prescribed way, his jealousy of his brother Abel, his warning by God about sin crouching at his door about to devour him. Cain's ignoring of that warning and his murder of Abel based on pride, and jealousy, and then a subsequent judgment by God, it is clear that God intends for us to take heed to the warning and beware. Learn the lessons of Cain. That's why John brings him back up in 1 John 4, "Why did Cain murder his brother?"

Learning the lessons. When we read on the other hand, of Noah's faithfulness and building the ark and how he did everything down to the letter, all of the instructions and in that way, by his faith-filled obedience to God's command saved himself and his family from the flood. We are encouraged to take warnings, take heed, obey God, and follow in that way, by faith. Now, in the passage today we're returning to Hebrews 3 to look again at this Chapter and we're right in the middle of an extended meditation on a psalm, Psalm 95. Eric read the first portion of it.

And we have in Hebrews 3:7-11, the quotation of Psalm 95, "Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me, and for 40 years, saw what I did. That is why I was angry with that generation. And I said, 'Their hearts are always going astray and they have not known my ways,' so I declared an oath in my anger. 'They shall never enter my rest.'"

Now, as we've already seen, Psalm 95 and the retelling of it here in Hebrews 3, as we come to the text here, there are four different levels of context. Four different historical levels of context. First, there's us, 21st Century Americans, for the most part, coming to the Book of Hebrews, and reading it ourselves. So we're reading Psalm 95, as quoted in Hebrews 3, we with our own struggles, our own present context, that's context number one. Second context is the context of the readers of the book of Hebrews, the original audience, to which the author was writing. First century Jews who had made a profession of faith in Christ, and were struggling with temptation to turn away from that, that confession of Christ and go back to old covenant Judaism, that's their context.

Go back a thousand years before that to King David, who sat down as he was settled there in Jerusalem, I believe, and writing Psalm 95, warning people of his own generation, to learn the lessons of history, and follow God and be faithful. 1000 BC. And then another half millennia before that, around 1450 or so BC, the time of the exodus itself, when under Moses, the Jewish nation came out of Egypt, and then through unbelief refused to enter the promised land. That's the fourth level of context. All four of them are in front of us as we look at Hebrews 3:15-19.

And what lesson were the Jewish Christians to learn? What lesson are we to learn? Well, we've already seen in the Book of Hebrews, in Hebrews Chapter 1, the greatness of Jesus, the Son of God, radiance of God's glory, exact representation of His being, the greatness of Jesus. And how He's greater than angels. And how He is, in Hebrews 2, the captain of our salvation, leading us powerfully and strongly. And how, in Hebrews 3, He's greater than Moses. The greatness of Jesus. And in the midst of all this, the author to Hebrews turns to Psalm 95 to get a lesson from history. And what is that lesson? Dear friends is this, it's not enough, simply to start the journey to the promised land, you have to finish it.

Just being with God's people as they go on Exodus and beginning that journey to the promised land, is not enough, that generation didn't make it. The only way you can finish this journey is to keep believing in Jesus and keep obeying His commands, by faith. The Jews of the Exodus were cursed by God because of their unbelief leading to their disobedience. So also we are in danger, if we develop a sinful heart of unbelief, and refused to obey the Gospel, we also will not enter the ultimate, the final promised land, that's the warning we're dealing with here today. And we're looking at Hebrews 3, so have your scripture there, and I also want you to know I'm going to be going later in the message to 1 Corinthians, Chapter 10, right at the beginning, so you can work to get over there. It won't be for in a few minutes, but just have your finger in both places, we'll be looking in both. As we come to Hebrews 3:15, we're coming again a second time to Psalm 95. We are therefore warned by repetition, we're at Psalm 95 again, verse 15. As has just been said, "Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion."

Isn't it interesting to see the reading of the scripture up there, projected on the screens? And it starts with the words, "as has just been said." So we're kind of jumping right in, to this argument, In Hebrews, 3. Again, as we've mentioned, King David wrote Psalm 95 five centuries after the Exodus under Moses, a thousand years before that first generation of Christians. David was reflecting on Jewish history and he was giving the people of his own generation a timeless lesson in faith and obedience.

In the Old Testament, if you read it slightly different than it's quoted in Hebrews, I'll explain that in a minute, but therein in Psalm 95:7-11, it says, "Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as you did it Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert where your fathers tested and tried me though they had seen what I did. For 40 years, I was angry with that generation. I said, 'They are a people whose hearts go astray and they have not known my ways.' So I declared on oath in my anger. 'They shall never enter my rest.'" So in order to understand this, you have to understand the history of the Jewish rebellion during the time of the Exodus. Without that history, this whole passage will mean nothing to you.

So what is that history? Well, God, of course, sent Moses to the Jews, to fulfill his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a promise he had made very plain to Abram in Genesis 15, that Abram's descendants would be strangers in a country not their own, where they'll be enslaved and mistreated for 400 years, but God would punish the nation they served as slaves and afterward, He would bring them out and they would worship Him in the Promised Land. It was a promise He made to Abram, repeated to Isaac and Jacob.

And so the Jews were there as slaves and God was concerned and He called Moses to go back and be His mighty instrument, to lead that nation, maybe as many as two million people out of bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land. And so with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, God did precisely that. With 10 awesome plagues that displayed His power, culminating in the dreadful plague on the first born in which every first born son in Egypt, that wasn't under the blood of the sacrificial lamb was killed. And out they came. And then the incredible Red Sea crossing, when God showed His power and they crossed the Sea on dry land, but the Egyptians when they tried to do so were drowned, destroyed. An awesome display of power.

But the Jews were already consistently resisting Moses and rebelling against God, by that point. They tested God, at two places, a place called Massah and Meribah. Complaining against God and Moses. Testing God, saying, "Is the Lord among us?" They complained about having no water, they complained about having no bread, and they refused to believe in Him despite all of the display of power that I've already listed for you, they would not believe in God. And so the Hebrew word Massah means testing. So they named the place after testing where they tested God, saying, "is God really among us?" And then Meribah means quarreling or arguing, a different place with another bad name. And so here, the Jews tested God, and they quarreled against God. And then after that they received the 10 commandments from God, they heard it with their own ears the voice of God speaking the 10 Commandments. "I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, you shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make for yourselves any idol."

They heard very plainly these things. Then when Moses went up on the mountain and was there for 40 days, they immediately violated the 10 Commandments and they made for themselves a golden calf and they had a dreadful orgy glutting on food and sexual immorality and singing and praising this golden calf. "Here are you Gods, O Israel, that led you out of Egypt." And they bowed down to the golden calf, but the worst rebellion of all occurred after that when the time came at last to consummate the Exodus by crossing the Jordan River and entering into the promised land.

And how Moses sent out 12 spies and they spied through the land, they went through, they saw that it was a good and rich land that drinks in the rain and the dew from heaven. It was a lush land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And they found a cluster of grapes so large they had to carry it on a pole between two men. Succulent grapes, the fruit of the land that they were going to. Spied out the land for 40 days, saw everything they needed to see but when they came back, 10 of the 12 spies spoke through unbelief and spoke words of rebellion against Almighty God. And Numbers 13:31-33, "The men who had gone up with him said, 'We can't attack those people. They're stronger than we are. And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored, they said the land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of a great size. We saw the Nephilim there. We seem like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we look the same to them."

And the people wept aloud, and they grumbled against Moses and they made wicked statements. In Numbers 14, "All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, 'If only we had died in Egypt, or in the desert.' Why is the Lord bringing us to this land, only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn't it be better for us to go back to Egypt. And they said to each other, 'We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.'"

Friends. That's the key issue here, that's why we're even studying this today. The turning in the heart away from the promised land back to the old way of life. That's why this is relevant to you and me, that's why it was relevant to the first century Jewish professors of faith in Christ, tempted to go back in their hearts, through unbelief to their old way of life.

Joshua, Caleb and Moses pleaded with the people, not to do this thing. Pleaded with them to trust in God reminded them of all the great works of God, of all that God had done. But that wicked nation that wicked generation refused to believe in God, or in his messengers and they talked openly of stoning Moses, Joshua and Caleb.

Then the Lord spoke. And I tell you, just for myself, just what I want out of this text today what I want for you is simply this, the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom. That's the goal of this sermon. That you would fear God appropriately as members of the New Covenant, we're not done with fear, we're not done with the fear of the Lord that's why Hebrews is here for us to give us an appropriate fear of the Lord, that we may stay the course and run with endurance, the race marked out in front of us. The Lord spoke, at first he threatened to wipe out the Jewish nation and make of Moses a great nation.

Moses interceded, and stopped that by pleading that God would lose his glory in the face of the Egyptians so God made this terrifying statement in Numbers 14, The Lord replied. "I have forgiven them as you asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of the men who saw my glory and the miraculous signs I performed in Egypt and in the desert, but who disobeyed me, and tested me, 10 times. Not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers, no one who has treated me with contempt, will ever see it. But because my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to and his descendants will inherit it."

So he singled out Caleb for his faith. Notice how God refers to the pattern of rebellion that they've seen up to that point 10 times they had tested God.

Can I just pause for a word of application for you? There are no sinless people in this room. There are no sinless Christians. But my question to you is, what is the pattern of your life? Is the pattern of your life obedience-based on faith in the word of God, His promises his commands, is that the pattern of your life? And a sin an aberration for what you immediately feel shame, and you confess your sin and are cleansed and restored to fellowship? Or is the pattern of your life and increasing hardening of your hearts? What is the pattern? 10 times they tested God, He said. Then he commanded the Jews to begin their death march through the desert, a 40-year trial in the desert until the next generation, the rising generation, would come and replace their sinful forefathers.

Numbers 14:28 and following, "So I told them as surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will do the very thing I heard you say. I'm going to do for you what you said would happen in this desert your body's will fall. Every one of you 20 years old or more who was counted in the census, and who has grumbled against me, not one of you will enter the land, I swear with an uplifted hand, to make your home except Caleb, son of Jephunneh and Joshua, son of Nun. As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder. I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected, but you, your bodies will fall in the desert, your children will be shepherds here for 40 years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your body's lies in the desert, for 40 years, one year for each of the 40 days, you explored the land. You will suffer for your sins and you will know what it is like to have me against you."

Oh, tremble at those words. In Christ, if God is for us, who can be against us? But if God is against you, does it matter who's for you? You will know what it's like to have me against you. I, the Lord have spoken and I will surely do these things to this whole wicked community, which has banded together against me. They will meet their end in this desert here they will die.

Well this is a tragic history of the Jewish rebellion. They refused to trust God. They refused to enter the promised land, their bodies were scattered in the desert. They are a warning to me. And they should be a warning to you. And you would do well not to blow off this warning, but instead to take it to heart. Hebrews Three and four, then as an extended meditation. On the lessons of scripture and of history, the author to Hebrews is in effect saying, "If you turn your back on Jesus and seek to return to your old way of life, you are no better than that, generation." That wicked generation, you're no different. And he's using Psalm 95 to teach them the lessons of history.

Look what happened to that generation of rebels. Look what happened, look what their outcome was. This is the negative persuasion mode of scripture, this is the warning motive scripture, it's what it does a severe warning to attempted people not to cave in through unbelief to fear and he does it by repetition, as has just been said. Repetition's important. Sometimes we have to go back and say things again. Paul in Philippians 3:1 says, "Finally brothers, rejoice in the Lord. There's no trouble for me to write the same things to you again. And it's a safeguard for you." And so we have some repetition here, we're going back to Psalm 95, looking at it again.

Peter says the same thing in second Peter, he says, "So I'll always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you have. I think it's right to refresh your memory, as long as I live in the tent of this body." So a lot of pastoral ministry a lot of good teaching is just repetition, reminders. And so God is still speaking that's what's going on here. He's still speaking to you and you still have to listen. Today, if you hear his voice, don't harden your heart. He's still speaking so it literally says as has just been said today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. Maybe a better translation might be something like this. This is a little more literalistic. While it is being said today if you hear his voice. That's, that's strong isn't it?

During the era that it's being said today, if you hear his voice, we're in that era now. God's still speaking to us. There'll come a time when he doesn't say anymore. It's not time anymore, it's time just for judgment. But now while if it's being said today, if you here his voice don't harden your... During that era, don't harden your heart.

And God is seeking to break this deadly chain that we see laid out for us in these verses. God speaks, sin deceives, sin hardens the heart. Sinners then disbelieve the promises of God. Disbelief results in disobedience, and disobedience results in the judgment of God. That's the chain that the authors seek to get in and break apart.

So scripture comes in and feeds our faith so that we're not unbelieving and therefore disobedient. But rather trusting God, it's scripture that's given to build our faith and scripture takes this dual approach. Goodness and severity the blessings of obedience, the rich blessings of following Jesus, and the severe curses that come on those who turn their backs. So simply put, every day God sets life and death in front of you. Blessings and curses. Puts you at the fork in the road, so what are you going to do? It's what happens. So this passage is a severe warning, based in Israel history. A parallel teaching is in 1 Corinthians 10. So keep your finger in Hebrew 3 and go over to 1 Corinthians 10.

Paul does the exact same thing. It's almost the exact same teaching, it's so similar. As a matter of fact, you think maybe this is Paul's message also in Hebrews 3. Doesn't have to be. Because the same Holy Spirit was motivating both the author to Hebrews and also Paul, as he wrote in 1 Corinthians 10.

In verses 1-12. "For I do not want you to be ignorant to the fact brothers that our forefathers were all under the cloud and they all passed through the sea. They're all baptized in the Moses in the cloud and the sea, they all ate the same spiritual food, drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them their bodies were scattered through the desert." Look at Verse 6. "Now these things occurred as examples" you see that? "These things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. Do not be idolaters. As some of them were as it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry. We should not commit sexual immorality as some of them did. And in one day, 23,000 of them died. We should not test the Lord as some of them did and were killed by snakes and do not grumble, as some of them did and were killed by the destroying angel." Again, verse 11. "These things happened to them as examples, and were written down as warnings for us on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So if you think you are standing firm, take heed, lest you fall."

Do you not see the parallel here? Learn from what happened to the Jews. Paul, even just drenches the Jews exit as in Christian language, they were baptized in the sea, they ate like the Lord's Supper, they ate at the bread, and they drank from the rock and they were just its church language and look at them. It's not enough to just go to church, it's not enough to hang out with church people, it's not enough to just do church things that will not save you if that's all it is. That's the warning. So, we are warned.

Go back to Hebrews 3 if you would. Look at God's severity to Israel, since rebellion is exceedingly provocative to God. In Verse 15, "While it is said today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as when they provoked me." This word literally brought me to tears as I was doing the exegesis on this. The word literally means bitterness. Our unbelief is bitter to God, it's a bad taste in His mouth when we won't trust Him. It hurts Him. You think "How can Almighty God be hurt?" Well, He's hurt because He loves us. And He's linked Himself to us, and so it's a bad taste. I remember in 1986, I was going on a mission trip to Kenya, and they told me that I needed anti-malarial medicine, so I got two of them and one of them was chloroquine it's related to quinine. It was the most water soluble pill I've ever put my mouth, as soon as I put it on my tongue it immediately started to melt, it was also the bitterest thing I've ever had in my mouth.

I'll never forget one time while I was on the mission field, it got wedged between my molar and my cheek and melted entirely in my mouth. I got to have the full chloroquine experience in my mouth. I was tasting quinine the rest of the day. Bitter taste. That's what our sin is like in God's mouth it's bitter to Him, it provokes Him. Our unbelief is provocative to God. It's bitter to Him. God was then highly motivated to be severe to Israel. Look, God's response in Hebrews go back to Verse 10. I was angry with that generation. Verse 11, "I declared on oath and my anger 'They shall never enter my rest.'" Look at Verse 17. He was angry for 40 years, verse 18, "God swore that they would never enter His rest."

And that anger led to God's 40-year-judgment on the Jewish nation. Look at Verse 9, "Your father's tested and tried me and for 40 years, saw what I did.” What does that mean for 40 years? Saw what I... What did he do for 40 years? Well, it's not all negative. I mean, He did some positive things he provided for them, fed them with manna. He led them every step of the way by the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire. He set up the tabernacle in their midst, and received offerings and sacrifices. He gave them the first five books of Moses, during that time, I believe. That's when the scripture came rolling in. He fed them, He made sure that their clothes didn't wear out, and their feet didn't swell and their shoes didn't wear out, He looked after them, that's what He did positively. What did he do negatively? Well, He killed them. For 40 years, He killed them. Every one of them. It's not an accident, it's like, "Oh you know?" They accidentally died, there were no accidental deaths. God was in the business of killing them over 40 years.

And it's very clear, if you look at like the KJV for example, in verse 17, it's very graphic actually. But with whom was He grieved for 40 years, was it not with them that sinned whose carcasses fell in the wilderness? When you think of a carcass it's like road kill. It's very graphic, graphic word here. Same thing in Numbers 14:29. Your corpses will fall in the wilderness. And if you calculate the death rate, this is something that if you're statistical, if you're not, you'll have to bear with me here. This is where my engineering side comes out. And if you're like into actuarial charts or insurance numbers you'll be interested, if not, just pause and we'll get back to artsy things maybe later, maybe another sermon, maybe another preacher, I don't know. But this is statistic, a statistical analysis, okay? At the time of the exodus. According to Numbers one. The senses of the Israelites that took place in the second year after they left Egypt, the number of men 20 years of age and older, was 603,550.

Now, if you double that number, assuming an equal number of women that age, and assuming the women of the generation were under the same judgment as the men. If you then divide that total by the number of days that the Jews wandered in the desert, during those years, you'll find that there were nearly 90 deaths per day. 90 deaths every day as a consequence of God's wrath and judgment on that nation. Now, I looked it up and there's something called the crude death rate. Total number of deaths per year per 1000 people as of July 2009, the crude death rate, for the whole world was about 8.37 per 1000 per year. If you do the math, it turns out that the death rate for Israel during those 40 years was 6.5 times higher than that. God was killing them off almost seven times faster than usual. And that was in an age when people lived longer. He was killing them, killing them, killing them, killing them, day after day killing them, killing them. One after the other. Thousands of them dying for 40 years, they saw what I did.

It was a 40-year lesson on fearing the Lord and believing in Him. And what caused this outbreak of God's wrath on the Jews? Well, the author to Hebrews makes it plain by a series of questions.

Warned against hearing disbelieving and rebelling. It's a chain. Series of rhetorical questions, question number one, Verse 16. “Who were they, who heard and rebelled?" Here's the question, answer, "were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt?"

Question number two, verse 17. "And with whom was he angry for 40 years? Was it not with those who sinned whose bodies fell in the desert?"

Question number three, Verse 18 "and to whom to God, swear that they would never, enter his rest? Answer, if not to those who disobeyed?" What's the point? Don't be arrogant but believe.

That Generation of Jews heard the good news of the promised land, they saw the miracles of God, under Moses. They were brought through the Red Sea, by a mighty hand and a out stretched arm. They experienced those things. Those Jews were real live people who experienced the grace of God as he was giving it in their generation. But they refused to believe His promises and their hearts turned back to Egypt. So also those first century Jewish Christians, they heard the gospel of Jesus Christ how God had sent His son and Jesus died on the cross and He shed His blood and on the third day God raised Him up from the dead, and they saw the miracles done by the apostles. Apostolic miracles, they saw these signs and wonders, they heard the Gospel preached by those who actually had known Jesus.

And now because of the same fear that led their ancestor, to turn away from the Promise Land, fear of death of difficulty, of trouble. They were tempted to turn away from Jesus and go back to their old way of life because it was hard to be a Christian. "So I declared on oath of my anger, 'They shall never enter my rest.'"

And what is the root cause of all of this? It's unbelief. God lamented their failure to believe in him. Numbers 14:11. "How long will these people treat me with contempt, how long will they refuse to believe in me? In spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them?" God was lamenting their unbelief, they should have believed by now.

Again, Deuteronomy 1:31-33, "you saw how the Lord your God carried you. As a father carries his son all the way you went until you reached this place. And in spite of all this, you did not trust in the Lord your God, who went ahead of you on your journey and fire by night, and in a cloud by day to search out places for you to camp and show you the way you should go" "I would have gone ahead of you across the Jordan. I would have gone to Jericho, I would have fought that battle for you. And I would have conquered the land. I went ahead of you. I've already been there in my mind. We would have won. But you didn't trust me. Instead you turned away."

So therefore, the final lesson we are warned against failing to enter God's rest, verse 19. So we see, what's the lesson? "They were not able to enter because of their unbelief." That's the lesson. What about us? Are you going to heaven when you die? Are you going to enter God's promised rest? Will you be there at the wedding banquet of the Lamb? Will you be there? Friends, this is a greater exodus. We have a greater leader than Moses. This is a bigger deal than all of that. That's a dress rehearsal, that's like a little diorama. This is the real life action. Jesus is leading his people out of bondage in sin. Out of serving Satan to go to heaven and live with Him forever. That's the promise land. Will you enter or will at some point along the way, you turn away through unbelief and sin and stop following Jesus. Will you turn away despite what you have seen by faith, God has done. Jesus death, shedding his blood for you, His mighty resurrection, He didn't just defeat pharaoh and his army. He defeated sin and death and Satan for you, He defeated all of your enemies. He took the sting out of death by his resurrection, from the dead.

Will you keep trusting in Him? Will you keep believing in the one who Has gone ahead of us, to prepare a place for us and who will come back and take us to be with Him, so that we can live with him forever? Will you keep trusting in Jesus? Who has gone ahead of us, to the promised land, and made it ready for us.

We have better promises than those Jews had. They had the promises of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we have this, "I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes me, will never die." That's a better promise, Amen. Will you keep trusting in that promise till the day you're laying on your death bed? In the ICU or wherever it is, you're going to be. Will you keep trusting in Jesus? And will you be warned against sin's deceitfulness. Resulting in hardness of heart resulting and turning away from the living God. It's a warning to nominal Christians, it's a warning to church goers, who were baptized in water, who regularly attend worship services but who in their hearts have no true living faith in Jesus.

It's a warning to you. It's not enough merely to begin the Christian race. It's not enough to merely outwardly run the Christian race, to be along for the ride. You can deceive your pastor. It's not hard to do. It won't get you anything on judgment day. People who deceive their neighbors, deceive even family members, even deceiving themselves. But I tell you the true faith results in obedient lifestyle. Faith results in obedience, unbelief, results from our text and disobedience. Are you living a life of obedience to the commands of God by the power of the Spirit? True faith results in a growth of love for God and love for your neighbor as yourself. It results an ever expanding horizon of sanctification, your financial life, what you do with your time. Your quiet time, your devotional life. How you're dealing with your marriage, how you're dealing with your children, what's going on at work. Ever growing holiness in order around the commands of God, that's the Christian life. So rest then by faith in Christ finished work.

Please don't come up to me afterwards and say, "So you're teaching that you can lose your salvation." Okay, I'm going to say it all to you right now. Of course, you can't lose your salvation. You know who's going to take and heed these warnings, the elect, the truly faith-filled same people are going to take this to heart and keep walking with Jesus, and the others are going to disregard it. So no, you can't lose what God gave you. When God declares you not guilty of all your sins, you are not guilty. Keep running that race with endurance, that's marked out in front of you. Keep running that race until at last, you cross the spiritual Jordan and enter the Promised Land that Jesus has won for you. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for this warning. It's a scary passage, it's a scary warning. I don't want to fall away Lord, I don't want to turn away drift away, I don't want to be away. I want to be close to you, Lord Jesus. I want my brothers and sisters, every single one of them that are here today, I want them to keep running the race with endurance. Marked out before them. I want them to keep trusting in Jesus, I want them in 2011, more than ever before to feed their souls on the Word of God. It's warnings its promises it's counsel, it's commands, it's lessons that they would feed, feed, feed on the Word of God. And I pray that strengthened in that strengthened in faith, they would obey your commands by the power of the Spirit. In Jesus name. Amen.

"The word became flesh, made his dwelling among us." What incredible riches there are, and such depth of truth in that one verse. And as we're going to look today. We are going to look across the Bible, not just focusing on John, but really from Genesis to Revelation on the issue of God's quest for a dwelling place. As I've thought about Christmas and meditated on it, and it just seems that Christmas's are coming faster and faster for me, year after year - this is my 12th Christmas message to you - and it'd just fly by. But as I think about Christmas a new and afresh, I think about the story of Christmas as a story of movement, of motion from one place to another. Of course, the ultimate movement was that of Jesus Christ in coming to the earth. He left his father's throne above, so free, so infinite his grace, emptied himself of all but love and bled for Adam's helpless race. What an infinite move that was.

But at the human level also, the story of Christmas is a story of movement, of motion from one place to another in a time when ordinarily, people might be born in one locality and not move more than 100 miles from the place where they were born their whole lives. There is actually an amazing amount of movement in the Christmas story. It begins, of course, with the edict of Caesar Augustus from the city of Rome: "that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world." And this set in motion, more people than we can possibly imagine, or calculate, or research historically. The Roman Empire was best known for its top-down authority structure and its impeccable discipline. Roman Centurion in Matthew Chapter 8 said it best in Matthew 8:9. He said, "I myself am a man under authority with soldiers under me. I tell that one 'Go' and he goes, I tell that one 'Come' and he comes. I say to my servant, 'Do this', and he does it." And so, Caesar's command set in motion a vast chain of events. He had established an incredibly elaborate courier system to communicate throughout the empire, and they took advantage of the remarkable network of Roman roads. The Empire itself covered as much as 2 million square miles, and with this one command, there shall be a census of the entire Roman world, courier sped out of Rome to all points on the compass.

Once the word reaches Palestine, King Herod had no choice, but reluctantly I think, to enforce it, knowing that to disobey Caesar would mean his own downfall. And so the command from Caesar Augustus then became a command through Herod the Great, which set the whole population of Israel in motion as well. Everyone in the Holy Land had to migrate temporarily, go back to their ancestral, their tribal home and register at that location. Now, of course, this vast movement of populations of people, of couriers, and of legions and all of that, from Spain, through Gaul, through Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt, all over the Roman world, serves some key purposes for Caesar and for Rome: the ability to register local populations to know what kind of taxes to expect and be able to enforce those taxes, and to know where to position their legions based on population and the military needs. And so it served his purposes quite well, but you and I both know the real purpose was lodged in the mind of God, and it centered amazingly on one Jewish couple, Joseph and Mary, to move them from Nazareth to a place they ordinarily would never have presumed to go, to Bethlehem to have the birth of their son.

And so isn't it incredible how these macro events really are focused down on one little couple to achieve one end, and that is the fulfillment of prophecy - that Jesus might be identified for us as truly the son of God, the Messiah that was predicted in prophecy in Micah 5:2 it says, "But you Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come from me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from the old, from of ancient times." And so we have this roaming kind of migrating pattern going on at the time of the birth of Christ, and I think it's appropriate for the beginning of Jesus' life on Earth. When the time came, Jesus was born of a virgin, and she wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in the manger because there was no room for them in the inn, as you know - and I think all of this is very appropriate because later in his life, Jesus said, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head." And so Jesus lived his whole adult life without a dwelling place, without a place to lay his head, in some sense is homeless really. Jesus' birth, as you know, also caused some mysterious people, the Magi, to travel great distances to Palestine. We don't know how long they traveled, but it could have been weeks, it could have been months, perhaps even a year or more. We don't know where they were coming from, but they saw the star in the East, they traveled therefore West in a westerly direction. The most incredible celestial potent they'd ever seen, a movable star that eventually stopped over the house where Jesus was, something they'd never seen, these star gazers had never seen in their lives.

Now, you've all heard the Christmas Carol that is, in my opinion, rife with historical question marks and perhaps inaccuracies. We'll find out in Heaven, but we sing it anyway and well, we should. So go ahead and enjoy it, next time you sing, "We Three Kings of Orient Are: Bearing gifts we traverse afar, Field and fountain, Moor and mountain, Following yonder Star." Now, I don't know if there were three of them, and I don't think they probably were kings, but there's definitely a sense of traveling. They left their home country and came to a foreign land to see where the star led, and it led to a baby. It led to Jesus. It led to a savior, the only savior for the world.

And of course, soon after Jesus' birth, Joseph and Mary themselves had to run for their lives because wicked King Herod, disturbed by the visit of the Magi, disturbed by the prophecies concerning Jesus, wanted to kill Jesus. And so in order to eliminate one baby, he desired to kill them all, all the babies in Bethlehem and its vicinity, two years old and under. And so "an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, 'Get up and take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.' So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt where he stayed until the death of Herod." And so Joseph and Mary were even more homeless at that point, even more roaming far from their native land, far from Nazareth, their hometown, waiting on a message from another angel that it was time to go back.

And so Jesus lived in a turbulent time with vast political forces at work, moving vast populations from place to place, and I think all of this turmoil and tumult and movement, really to some degree exemplifies the whole human race in its sin. The fact of the matter is that none of us has any permanent place here at all, not one of us. Because of sin, we are all nomads, we are just aliens and strangers, we are just passing through in a world that appears to be rather permanent, and we can settle down and it seems permanent, but it really isn't. And to some degree in an amazing way, God himself linking himself to his chosen people to us, is himself not yet settled in a permanent resting place either. He is moving, he's moving with us until his plan is finally complete. And so all of human history, all of redemptive history, in one sense you could say it comes down to a quest for a dwelling place, a place where God and man can dwell together forever and not move again. We're living in tense temporarily, we're yearning for a final dwelling place where we can live forever. And that I think is among other things, a major theme, The purpose of the Christmas story, and that's what we're going to look at today.

Now, I'm not going to be doing a careful exposition of John 1, 14-18, though it'd be well worth doing, but I just want to trace out this theme that centers in Verse 14, where it says, "The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." I want to zero in on that issue of dwelling and I want to trace it out over biblical history and then look a little more carefully at Romans, Romans 1 and Verse 14. And so we see God biblically yearning for a dwelling place from eternity past. Before the universe even began, God had a desire to dwell with humanity, with holy humanity in fellowship that's patterned after his own fellowship within the Trinity, right from the beginning of our text today, John 1:1, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." And so there's this fellowship between persons of the Trinity, the father and the son in fellowship together. The word was with God and God eternally existing in three persons, perfect in love, perfect in fellowship and communication, in relationship and intimacy. There was no lack at all in the Trinity, but only fullness, and God yearned out of love to pour out that fullness on created beings that they might share that kind of unity and fellowship with him and with each other that he shares within himself and the Trinity. And so not out of lack did he create, but out of fullness in love he created the universe.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth," and so he created as a culmination of all that, man in his own image for a perfect intimacy with him. "God created man in his own image, in the image of God; he created him male and female, created them," and I think at least part of that image is the ability to have a relationship with God and with each other in perfect unity. And so God had a desire to settle down with us and to dwell with us in that perfect unity from before the foundation of the world.

So Romans 8:29 and 30 says, "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified." That glorification is the perfection of fellowship between God and holy humanity. So before the foundation of the world, God had a vision for this. That's what he wanted to do.

But then once history started to unfold, then you see God's quest for a permanent dwelling place in history unfolding. Of course, God set up a beautiful garden, Eden, perfect on the face of the Earth, the perfect place for mankind to begin. And God placed the man there originally alone, and he communicated with him and gave him a sense of his freedoms and his responsibilities there, "You're free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But when you eat of it, you will surely die." And so therefore, this perfect garden, this original dwelling place where sinless or holy man could dwell together in fellowship with God was merely a place of probation. They were being tested, they were on probation. It wasn't permanent. And you have a sense of the kind of relationship that man had with God over in Genesis 3, "When they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day," it says, "And they were afraid and they hid." You remember? And so if you just go back with that and say, "Well, then they must have recognized the sound of God, the communication, the fellowship they had." They knew it was him, they were having a relationship with God, but I say to you is merely probationary.

They were being tested. God knew before the foundation of the world they would fail that test and a redeemer would be needed. And so it's so very tragic as they fell into sin, they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they were evicted from the Garden of Eden, and thus the quest for a permanent dwelling place began in earnest. And it's amazing how the word dwelling or remaining or settling, I'll talk about that later in the message, but it first appears in Genesis 3:24, where it says that he drove man out. "He drove the man out and at the East of the Garden of Eden, he stationed," that's the same Hebrew word, he settled down a "cherubim in a flaming sword, which turned in every direction to guard the way to the tree of life." Isn't that tragic? That's the settling down that happened as a result of man's sin, in effect God stationing death between us and the tree of life, and to me, the tree of life is the dwelling place. That's where we get to live with God forever. And so this infinite gap, this tragic gap came between us and God because of sin. The entire human race on the outside evicted from the fellowship, that place of dwelling with God.

And so God began redemptive history. He began winning the human race back to himself in Christ. The patriarchs, it says of Enoch that he "walked with God" and "God took him," and so by faith, this man had a relationship with God. And Noah, it's also said of Noah that he "walked with God," and there's a sense of fellowship there, isn't there, but also a sense of journeying. They're not finally settled down here on Earth, they're having to move. And so they walk with God because they can't stay in this one place, and they have to move on.

God called Abraham out of Ur the Chaldees, and he moved him over to this land, the Promised Land, it became known, and because God made him a promise and it was a promise of a future dwelling place where he could settle down forever.  So God said to Abraham in Genesis 17:8, he said, "The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God." Now notice that God called Abraham an alien. That means someone with no lasting dwelling place, no place to lay his head really; to some degree, that was Abraham in the Promised Land. Abraham was called God's friend. There was nothing lacking in their relationship. Abraham walked with God by faith, but he lived in a tent, and he was sitting at the door of the tent when the angel of the Lord and two other angels showed up. Remember how it says in Hebrews that some have entertained angels without knowing it? I think that's at least talking about Abraham there. And he got up and he went into the tent and he told Sara to prepare some food and all that, but he's living in a tent, he's entertaining the Lord at the doorway through his tent.

Isaac and Jacob also lived in tents. Jacob eventually left the Promised Land under the pressure of the famine and went and lived in Egypt to come under the protection of his son Joseph who was second only to Pharaoh there in Egypt. And at the end of his life, "Jacob said to Pharaoh, he said, 'The years of my pilgrimage are 130. My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers.'"

It's an interesting expression, pilgrimage. We don't use it much, but it has a sense of a journey for religious reasons. You're going to a shrine or a temple or some place, and you're trying to get there and there you're going to offer some worship. Now, we saw Shinto and Buddhist pilgrims in Shikoku, and they went to these 88 different shrines and they were going from place to place on this pilgrimage for pagan religion and idolatrous religion, but it's a pilgrimage. So also in the Middle Ages, they used to go on pilgrimage, is going from place to place. This is the language that Jacob used for his life, and he says, "It's been short. It's only been 130 years, and it doesn't equal the years of my father. He made it to 176." And so death is just looming over this pilgrimage and it seems to be shortening it, and it's a sense of: we're not there yet, we haven't come into our dwelling place yet, we're yearning for home. And so the author to Hebrews picks up on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I think Enoch and Noah as well, and the others that he's mentioned. In Hebrews 11 up to that point he says, "All of these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised, but only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, and they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things, they're showing that they're thinking of a country of their own. If they'd been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had an opportunity to go back. Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one, and therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God for he has prepared a city for them." For the purpose of my sermon, I'll just say he has prepared a dwelling place for them, where they can live with him forever and ever. They died without coming into it; they were aliens and strangers in this world.

In the course of time, God chose the descendants of Abraham, who we know as the Jews, his chosen people, and expressed to them his desire to dwell with them. But they were slaves in Egypt for 400 years, and he called them out of bondage to be his own, his treasured possession. And it says in Exodus 29, "I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God, and they will know that I am the Lord their God who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God." He says "Dwell" twice there. He wants to live with his people, his chosen people. And so he moved them out from Egypt. In Egypt, they had no dwelling place, they couldn't own any property, there was nothing there for them. They were just slaves there doing the bidding of another, and God had a place for them where they could dwell. And so he says in Leviticus 26, "I will put my dwelling place among you and I will not abhor you." That's encouraging, isn't it? I'm so glad to not be abhorred by God. What a delight it is that God doesn't hate me. But you know the thing is, God hates evil, and what God is saying is: I will separate you from your evil and I will love you, and the evil about you I hate I will cast into the sea and you'll see it no more. He says I'm going to dwell among you and I'll not abhor you, and I will walk among you and be your God and you will be my people. That's even language. He says I want to live with you, and I want to dwell with you forever. So the Exodus was a picture of the desire that God had to give them a home, an eternal home, not in this present earthly age so ravaged by sin.

The Exodus literally means departure. I remember, I was on a mission trip in Greece, and I was in a room there and I can read Greek, and so over the door, there it was, right over the door, it said 'Exodus'. And I was like, "Wow, it's biblical. Right here in this room. There it is, there's the Exodus." Just means 'way out'. And so that was what it was, God was bringing them out of bondage. But the way gives you a sense of a journey doesn't it. A departure and a movement, there is a sense of a journeying that has to travel, and you know how it went with the Jews because of their unbelief. Because of sin, you know it lasted for 40 years out in the desert, and there was no permanent dwelling place in the desert. It was not meant to be so. That's not the land that God was giving them. And so God himself moved about from place to place for those 40 years in the form of a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, and so God is there journeying with his people, going from place to place. Sometimes they might spend only a night, sometimes they might be there for a year or more, moving from place to place. Exodus 13, it says, "By day, the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way, and by night, in a pillar of fire to give them light, so they could travel by day or night, neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people."

Now, I think, if any human being at that time felt this restless roaming and wandering, it had to be Moses. More than anyone else, I think he felt it. Look at his life. He was born eventually into privilege, once he was taken into Pharaoh's home by Pharaoh's daughter, he was raised in privilege, powerful in speech and action, wealthy, a good life ahead of him. But I think, at some point, he came to understand his heritage, and he knew that he was Jewish, and he understood what was happening to his own people and how they were being mistreated. And he identified with them, and he saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian master, being beaten, and so he came to his aid and killed that overseer, buried him and hid him in the sand. And when Pharaoh heard about him, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses ran for his life, and that began openly, a life of homeless wandering that continued to the end of his days. He eventually settles in the tent of Jethro, his father-in-law. He was a good father-in-law, but he's still a father-in-law, dear friends. You know what I'm talking about.

And he was still living in Jethro's tent at 80 years old. They lived a long time back then. Jethro is still there, and there's Moses as a son-in-law, at age 80, tending his father-in-law's sheep. How would you like that to be your life calling? I'm tending my father-in-law's sheep. How are they doing? They're doing very well, thank you. Wouldn't you like sheep of your own? Well, he's about to get sheep of his own, but they're just not sheep, they're are going to be people, two million strong. And the Lord called him in the flames of the burning bush, and he went and he led the people out, and through their unbelief, they refused to enter the Promised Land, spoke of stoning Moses and thus began 40 more years of homeless wandering for this man of God. And provoked by their wickedness, at one point, he sinned against God and did not consider God holy, but disobeyed God and struck the rock a second time, so speaking to it, and God forbid him from entering the Promised Land. And though he begged him, he said, "I want to see that good land. Won't you let me go over and see the good land?" He didn't ever say, "After all I've done for you." He knew that that would not even hold any candle or water with God at all, he didn't even say that, "But just out of your grace, out of your mercy, would you not let me go over and see that good land?" And God said, "Stop talking to me about it. I will not hear any more prayer about this. But I'll let you go up on Mount Pisgah, and you can see it from there, from afar, you can see it from a distance. But I will not let you enter it." And so this man of God, at some point, I think, in those wanderings in the 40 years, plenty of time to write, sat down and wrote Psalm 90, where it says in Verse 1, "Lord, You have been our dwelling place from generation to generation." I don't have any other dwelling place here, it's just you, God. A yearning to dwell with God. And in the midst of that time, God revealed to Moses, at a deeper level than had ever been revealed up to that point, his desire to dwell with his people.

He took him up on the mountain of God, and there he showed him a vision of a tabernacle. And this tabernacle was a symbol or representation of God's desire, his eternal desire, before the foundation of the world, his desire to dwell with his people. And he commanded him again and again and again, "Make everything according to the pattern I have shown you. Make it exactly like the pattern," and so out came the tabernacle. And it says that he did, he made it exactly like the pattern. Book of Hebrews tells us it's just a copy and a shadow of the heavenly reality. What is the heavenly reality? It's not so much that there's a tabernacle in heaven, it's that God dwells with his people in heaven. That's the reality, the tabernacle then a symbol of it. What was the Tabernacle? It was a tent. That's all it was. It was just a tent, a movable tent. God told the purpose, in Exodus 25, 8 and 9, "Have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them. Make this tabernacle and all of its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you." And again, Exodus 29, 42-46, "There at the tent meeting, I will meet you and I will speak to you, and there also, I will meet with the Israelites and the place will be consecrated by my glory, and so I will consecrate the tent of meeting and the altar and will consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve me as priests. Then," listen to this, "I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God, and they will know that I am the Lord their God who brought them out of Egypt, so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God." That was the reason for the tabernacle, so that God could in a very visible way, dwell with his people and live with them. Now, God's commands for the tabernacle, very, very earthy, very rooted in the earth. You get linen, plants that are growing up, and then you get these linen fibers that are going to be made into curtains, and you get acacia wood that's growing up out of the dust of the earth, and you've got precious metals and you've got metal for the stands and the rings, and you've got animal skins, and then the hides of the dugong. You have to look up a dugong. What is a dugong? Some say it's a sea cow. That doesn't help. What is a sea cow? Porpoise? Some kind of sea creature that would have been good for keeping water off, and they use that as a covering. Very, very earthy thing. I wonder what it would have smelled like. The tabernacle, however, was plainly intended to be movable. It could be disassembled and it could be carried, and so a certain group or sub-sect of the Levites were designed or called on by God, to carry the tabernacle. It moved from place to place.

And always, what made it special was the Shekinah glory of God. And I've told you before in other sermons, I didn't know what the word, Shekinah, meant. I just heard it all the time, Shekinah glory. I thought that the Pentecostals invented it. I couldn't find it anywhere in the Bible. But they didn't invent it, it really is just a transliteration of the word, dwelling place. So the mishkan, in the Hebrew, the prefix, the M, is a participle, it's a dwelling place. It's the mishkan or Shekinah is the dwelling place. Shekinah glory is the dwelling glory of God, and it came and said, "I will dwell with you here, the tabernacle's the place, the mishkan is the place of dwelling where God will dwell with his people." And so God's glory, the glory cloud, entered the tabernacle and abided on it as a constant reminder of God's desire to dwell with his people. Exodus 40, "Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle, and Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled upon it and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle." Do you see the tension there in the old covenant?

The law came by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus. There's this glory, and Moses can't enter. I thought the point was that, we could enter, that we could go right into the glory. We're getting there, friends, we'll get there eventually in the sermon, some time, somewhere around 1 o'clock. But at any rate, there's going to be this time of entering the glory, but Moses couldn't enter yet. And in the same passage, the glory cloud gives a sense that the journey was not yet finished, for God still had to travel with his people to reach their dwelling place. In Verse 36 and following, Exodus 40, "In all the travels of the Israelites, whenever the cloud lifted from above the tabernacle, they would set out. But if the cloud did not lift, they did not set out until the day lifted. So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel during all their travels." God's at move, on the move, and so in Daniel 7, God's throne is pictured as having wheels. In Ezekiel, there's a sense of wheels of movement. God hasn't come home yet. And so, at one point in the Pentateuch, they say, "Arise O Lord and come into your dwelling".

And so they want God to come back and settle down in his dwelling. And the tabernacle was equally accessible and inaccessible. Equally accessible in that it was right in the middle of the camp and all the tribes set up camp around, in numbers two. God described very plainly, where everyone's to set up shop and they all get to be close, but none of them gets to come in. None of them. Not even Aaron, except once a year, with blood, on the day of atonement. In Leviticus 16, God said, "You tell your brother, Aaron, he is not to come any time he chooses, into the holy place. Most Holy Place." Oh, that's a message, isn't it? You are not ready to dwell with me yet, and I'm not ready to have you dwell with me yet. The Book of Hebrews makes it plain, that the tabernacle itself showed that the way hadn't been opened yet, not yet. And so it says in Hebrews 9:8, "The Holy Spirit was showing by this, that the way into the most holy place had not yet been disclosed as long as the first tabernacle was still standing." Now, once they entered the Promised Land, God ordained that they choose one location from all of the 12 tribes, and they were not to be like the Canaanites who worship wherever they wanted under every spreading tree and on every high place. No, they weren't allowed to do that. They had to all migrate within the Promised Land three times a year and come to the one location. What is God telling them there? Even in the Promised Land, there's still aliens and strangers, to some degree, there's still a journey to be made.

And God stayed in his tent until David had a bright idea. Remember that? David saying, "Here I am, in a palace of cedar…" and there's God "in a tent," let's build him something - what's the word? Permanent. Let's make something permanent. That's what I want to do. This is a great home, God's blessed me. Nathan said, just because he was friends with David, "Whatever you want to do, do it. Sounds good." Then God spoke a better word to Nathan later on. He said, "Go back and tell David this. This is what the Lord Almighty says. Are you the one to build a house for me?" What a humbling question that is. "I have someone better in mind. My son is going to build the house, and yours." He says, "I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt, to this day. I have been moving," listen to this language. This is God speaking, "I have been moving from place to place, with a tent as my dwelling." That's an amazing thing for God to say. I have been living in a tent. "Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to the rulers of the people, that I commanded to shepherd my people of Israel, 'Why have you not built me a house of cedar?'" It's amazing how God humbles you very lowly and then raises you up.

He says, "Look, I'm going to raise a son out of your own body, and he's the one who will build a house for me." And he didn't mean Solomon. Now, Solomon dill did build, and I think, with the blessing of God, a more permanent location for them to worship. It was called the temple. But that became a stumbling stone for the Jews. They misunderstood, they really did think it was permanent. They really think God had arrived at last: Now, we have this big impressive building with these massive stones, and we have finally settled in. God will never ever let anything happen to his temple. And so they used to say in the days of Jeremiah, "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord." God had a lesson from them. When God destroyed Solomon's temple by the Babylonians, what was he saying? I have not come home yet, and neither have you. And when he scattered them to the four corners of the Earth, when they went in exile to Babylon and other places, when they were scattered, he was saying, you have not yet entered your dwelling place. You are aliens and strangers in this world, sent them into exile. And even in the days of Jesus, his Disciples still didn't get it. Remember how they were coming out of the temple grounds and looking at Herod's temple at that point. And they were saying, "Teacher, what massive stones. What impressive buildings." And Jesus said, You haven't learned the lesson, have you. "I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another. Every one will be thrown down." There is no permanent dwelling place here on earth, in this present age. It says in 2 Corinthians 4:18, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

Alright. So, does God want to have a dwelling place? Yes, he does. How do we know that? Because Jesus was born. That is how we know God wants to have a dwelling place with us. The deity of Christ established in Verse 1, this is God, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Jesus is the Word; Jesus is God, clear deity.

And then in Verse 14, "The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory. Glory of the only Begotten, from the Father, full of grace and truth." Now, the word became flesh is a shocking expression, and John, the Apostle John meant it to be so. He wrote in Greek; there's Greek thought swirling around there, Greek philosophy and Greek mentality - the senses that the physical is the low, animal aspect of humanity. We've got to get up into the ethereal, non-physical realms, you see. Because the physical is wicked and evil, and we have to become pure spirits. Some Christian theologians picked up on this and said, Jesus actually only seemed to have been human. John basically takes the human race and has a stare at the flesh of Jesus. And so he uses this word, flesh, and it's very strong, a sense of sinews and capillaries, and blood vessels and tendons, muscles and intestines and skin. The flesh of Jesus. The Apostle John is fighting against the view that Jesus wasn't truly human. He was truly human. He could have said, "The word became human," and that would have been true, but he goes beyond that and said, "The word became flesh." And Jesus' flesh was knit together by the Holy Spirit inside the womb of his mother, Mary, and he was born in the ordinary way, like any other baby, but unlike any other baby, because he had no human father. Luke 2, 7, "She gave birth in an ordinary way to her firstborn son and wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” Jesus' human body was prepared for him by God, so that he could die on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, and his body, his flesh was wrapped up in swaddling clothes, by his mother, at the beginning of his life, a symbol of his frailty. And isn't it amazing how at the end of his life, it's wrapped up again, in cloths, a symbol of his frailty now consummated in his death. As Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus wrap him up and prepare him for burial. He came into the world as a human being, frail and weak.

And it says, he made his dwelling among us. The Apostle John, clearly, I believe with all my heart, connecting back to the tabernacle language, some say pitched his tent or was the tabernacle of God among us. He was, he is the tabernacle. Jesus' body is presented then as the new dwelling place where the glory of God is clearly visible and where the people of God can meet him and dwell with him, and his disciples could behold his glory, and it would be a glory apparent only to those with the eyes of faith. We have seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten from the Father. He's the only one like him, and there's no one else like him in the universe. And it says, "Full of grace and truth." Oh, how sweet are those words, for us. Amen. Full of grace, that's Jesus. Jesus didn't merely present grace or truth or discuss them, or believe in them, or exemplify them or - and those words are too far removed from Jesus. He was grace, he was truth, he is grace, and is truth, and he's full of grace and full of - some people are conduits of grace and truth. Amen. I want to be that. In my life, I'd like to be a pipeline of grace and truth. Jesus is no pipeline; he is grace and truth. He's the reservoir of grace and truth. And what is grace? It's God's sovereign determination to do us, wicked sinners, good. Later in the same section, look at Verse 17, "The law came by Moses." What does the law do for you and me? I know what it will do for you and me. It will send us to hell. That's what the law does. The law will condemn me because we cannot keep it. We are idolaters, we are covetous people, we are adulterers, we are liars, we have worshipped other "gods," we have not honored our parents; the law condemns us, friends, but "grace and truth comes by Jesus Christ." And how sweet is that? It is the grace of God to save sinners like us.

And John testified in Verse 15, both the Apostle John in writing John the Baptist' testimony, and John the Baptist himself in giving this testimony, "He testified concerning..." Now, do you know who John the Baptist was? He was Jesus' relative, born; it seems like about six months before Jesus, began his ministry a number of years before Jesus began his public ministry, very famous, well-known, everyone in Judea going out, hearing his bold preaching, his unusual lifestyle, his odd practice of baptizing Jews, and just an amazing famous man. And he sees this man who's younger than him and who hasn't done anything yet in ministry, and he says, "He who was after me actually is before me and has surpassed me because he was before me." He takes a higher rank because he pre-existed me, or how does that work, John?  Well, before Jesus even uttered these words, John the Baptist understood them. What Jesus said to his enemies, "Your father, Abraham, rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day, he sought and was glad." Jesus' enemy said, "You're not even 50 years old and you've seen Abraham?" He lived 2000 years before Jesus. And Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am." John the Baptist understood that he was before me. He existed before me. There has never been a time he didn't exist. And John the Baptist also knew what Jesus came to do, how he was full of grace and truth. When the next day, he pointed to Jesus and said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," that's how he's full of grace and truth. That tabernacle was a place of animal sacrifice, that was the center of the meeting, and God saying, "There is only one way to get to me and that's by shedding of blood, by death." That's what the sword flashing back and forth in Eden is all about. You must die. There's a death penalty to be paid. And then that death penalty transferred to Jesus, and he is the Lamb of God who dies for the sins of the world.

And what gifts flow from Jesus?  Look at Verse 16, "From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace." I love that expression, that translation, "Grace upon grace." Now, every year, billions of dollars are spent on Christmas gifts. Perhaps you've spent billions of dollars on Christmas gifts. I hope not. But the estimate - I don't know how they even estimate these things. Every purchase made in December is a Christmas gift? I don't think so. How do they do it? I don't know. Because odd things are bought at Christmas time as gifts, so I don't know how they unravel it and say - but they're saying something like half a trillion dollars. Think about that, half a trillion dollars spent on Christmas gifts. That's an awful lot of money. Now, think back at your own heritage and history of Christmas. How would you feel if by the sovereign grace of God, you could see all of the Christmas gifts you've ever received in one place, in brand new condition right now. All in one place. That tricycle you were so excited to get when you were four, that - I had a cap gun set when I was a rooting tooting cowboy, I remember, when I was six or seven, something like that. House was filled with the smell of gunpowder or whatever, those little caps. You remember that? We used to smash them with a rock and all kinds of things. We did all kinds of fun things. But the stuff you can't wait to have. You know how the ad campaigns, they stimulate in the children, the gut to have things, and you know how almost every year, it seems there's the single gift that everyone has to have, and they're always on the verge of running out of it. And people stand up in line, and it's 20% more money because there's supply and demand. And you have all these gifts that you've had across your life, and you outgrow them or they break or they float out of your life. And one gift follows another, which follows another. Well, this Verse talks about a better sequence of gifts.

Grace, literally, it's grace instead of grace, or grace after grace. And so what God has in mind is a whole treatment of grace for you and me. Like at a spa, we need a whole series of grace treatments, and it's going to be grace upon grace upon grace, until we're at last, in the dwelling place with God in heaven. Converting grace. If you're lost, you need a savior, you need the grace of God to convert you. I plead with you, friend, be converted. Look to Christ. See Jesus now on the cross. I know we're focusing on Christmas, but focus for a moment on Good Friday, Jesus' death on the cross and on Easter. Picture him there, his blood shed, picture him buried in the tomb. Picture him raised from the dead on the third day and say, "That is my savior. I need you, Jesus." Trust in him. And if you do, you have received grace, converting grace.  But that won't be the end of the grace you need, then you need sanctifying grace to come in, you need a whole life change. God wants to transform you and make you ready to dwell with him forever, and so he's changing your life, and you need converting grace and sanctifying grace. And you need instructing grace, that God would teach you many things from his word and you'd be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And persevering grace, and sustaining grace. When you're going through trials, bitter trials, facing your own flesh and its weakness. You're struggling with loneliness and other temptations, you need sustaining grace for years and years, because only those who finish really began. And God knows that better than you do, and so he who began a good work in you will sustain it and keep it going until the end. And from his fullness, we have all received grace after grace, after grace, after grace. And then finally, dying grace, that you would maintain your testimony through to the end, and then glorifying grace.

And at last you'll be home, at last you'll be home with Jesus. That is the final goal. Verse 18 says, "No one has ever seen God at any time, but the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him" - isn't it interesting how Jesus said he had no place to lay his head? You know why? Because here's where he wants to lay his head, on the father's bosom. That's his home. And isn't it beautiful how at the end of John's gospel, John puts his head on Jesus' chest. He says, "Lord," who is it, "who's going to betray you?" Remember that picture, the word bosom then appears twice in the Greek, both at beginning and end of the Gospel. And so there's this picture of Jesus laying his head on the Father, and John, the Apostle John, laying his head on Jesus. That's your home, friends.

When we're up there in heaven, that's your home. That's where we're going. And so the consummation of the dwelling place is in heaven. We're not home yet. Do you know that? Do you know that you're dwelling, the scripture says, in a tent of a body? It's a tent, and it's getting more voluminous by the day, you're thinking, especially in December. It's a tent. Peter called it a tent, he said, "I will soon lay aside the tent of this body, the Lord Jesus has made this plain to me," He calls it a tent. 2nd Corinthians Chapter 5, the apostle Paul says, "Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God. An eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. And meanwhile, we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked." So we're waiting for our heavenly dwelling place.

And so, Revelation 21 tells us what it will be. "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, now, this is literal, 'Now is the tabernacle of God with men…'" That's literally the translation. Finally, the tabernacle shows up in eternity. "'Now is the dwelling place of God with men, and he will live with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. And he will wipe every tear from your eyes, and there'll be no more death or mourning or crying or pain...'" Why? Because "…the old order of things has passed away." and God has made everything new. That is a full history of the dwelling place.

So Christmas morning is coming soon, you sit down to open up your gifts, what does this have to do with that? Everything you open up is temporary, everything. And you know it well, don't you? Maybe the little kids don't know it yet, but they'll learn. It's all temporary. While you do it, say, "This is not my home. I'm an alien here, a stranger just passing through." Invest in your mind, in your eternal resting place in heaven.

Meditate much on it. Tell yourself, "I'm an alien and a stranger here." Tell yourself that Jesus is your dwelling place. He has pitched his tent or made his tabernacle in the center of your life. Live with him, dwell with him. Don't focus on earthly things, don't be troubled by the busyness of the season. Ask God to give you grace and energy, and do it with grace and dignity. Go through it with energy, but just know we are just passing through here and it will not be very long before we dwell with God in Heaven. Close with me in prayer.

 Father, thank you for the richness of this theme in the Bible, so much we could say. Father, I pray that we would understand the fullness of John 1:14, "that the word became flesh" and made his tabernacle or tabernacled with, pitched his tent with us. And that we would not be so rooted in earthly things that we forget our heavenly calling to live with you forever. I pray that we'd be pure and holy and not defiled by this earthly system. We thank you for these things in Jesus name. Amen.

I'm so eager to preach this sermon to you. I can't wait, I can't wait. I just want to see the effect of the Word of God. Not just today, but over years to come. Just have in my heart a burning vision for what this church already is and what it will be through the ministry of the word and the spirit that we would be a genuine community of believers that love one another, cherish each other's sanctification and growth in the Lord, that thinks spiritually-minded about church. So I'm eager that God would use this message.

We have close relatives that live in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We went and visited them. Christi's sister and her husband and children, wonderful children. What a gift they are to us, and we love to go up there to Pennsylvania. And one of the things I love when we go there is to see the Amish. I just enjoy being there. I don't intrude on them, I don't stare at them, but they live such an interesting and fascinating life and just with my interest in church history, I know a lot of the history that's led to their commitments and the things that they do, and there's a lot I don't know about them, but this Thanksgiving as we were driving, and coming near to the house, I saw a number of Amish building, a large structure, maybe a barn, I couldn't tell what it was, but they were hanging on the wood working there and working together, and I don't think it was an Amish barn raising, but there were Amish people building a structure, maybe a barn.

And it got me to thinking about that. And that's just part of their heritage. When somebody's barn burns down, the whole community will come together and the men and the women, the youth and the children they'll all be together and they'll be focused on one project; working together, building something together, that only one family in their community is going to use. They're all focused on that and there's a tremendous amount of sacrifice that goes into that and it's been depicted in a number of movies and it's a powerful part of their community. And I got to thinking how much I wanted to see something like that happen in our church. Now don't misunderstand me. You're saying, "I don't really need a barn actually, I don't have any need for the church to come to my yard and build a barn."

And I think we live in a different kind of situation, but the building I have in mind is of a spiritual nature more than anything. And I asked my brother in law Bill, who I just love and we're just good friends and I said, "Does that kind of thing still go on?" He said, "Yeah, frequently." As a matter of fact, he knows an Amish family and in that case, it wasn't a barn, and it was a bakery that had burned down. A young married couple’s had burned down, and the whole community came together and built the bakery again and now it's a thriving bakery in the community and the couple is doing well. So it's still going on. It's still part of their culture.

And I just yearn to see that happen here spiritually, more than anything. We have a beautiful building here. We have a church that we meet together, our needs are met. I'm not saying that there couldn't be a fire in our community and the need for a house and all that, but I don't know that many of us would be qualified to do that kind of building, but I know this, that God is building a different kind of structure in our midst. He's building the church of Jesus Christ. We are members of the Church, we are living stones in that structure and we're not done being built.

And so, it's really the Church that's in my mind today, the church, this local church, First Baptist Church, and then, the universal church. And I just have two questions I want to put before you, as I begin. First of all, just let me ask you personally, how important is the church to you? How important is it in your life? What is the church worth to you in your priority structure, what would you pay of yourself to see the church develop to full maturity? How much of a focus is the church in your life? That's just one question, it's different versions of the same question but that's the question, how important is the church to you?

Second question, how important is the church to Jesus Christ? What was she worth to Jesus in His priority structure? He said, "I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." That's his priority structure. That's what he's doing in the world. What was he willing to pay for the church, his own blood, shed on the cross. He shed His blood for her that she would be pure in his sight. How much of a focus is the church in his life? Well, I tell you He ever lives to intercede for her, that's what he's doing; he never forgets the church, it is in his mind all the time.

Let me shift a little bit. Just speaking very sweetly positively. Do you realize what kind of riches there are for you sitting around you in this room right now? And probably you don't even know it. Brothers and sisters in Christ, a richness of fellowship, of prayer, of mutual sharing of the ministry of the Word of God, of fellow times of worship. You're rich people, and I don't think you even know it. I don't think I do either. And I just want us to plumb the riches of one another, in our fellowship together. I want you to have a sense this morning of just how much happiness awaits this church. If we can push through what I perceive to be somewhat of a ceiling, or a plateauing of our fellowship that we would push through that and see us reach a kind of a level of unity and of ministry that few churches frankly really attain.

I'd like us to drink in the benefits of a healthy ministry together, a full benefit of all, of each other spiritual gifts and to enjoy fellowship with brothers and sisters. I don't want to hear any more, "I just didn't meet anyone Or I just couldn't connect or just the... The fellowship here, it's too far to drive," and all that. That one always gets me. We haven't moved. And the people that stopped coming because it was too far, they didn't move either as far as I could tell, same distance, check it on the GPS.

What ends up happening is the attractive features that first drew them start to wane in their estimation, and some other problems start to rise, and so then they stop coming and they look for another place. And my goal is to kindle in your hearts a love for the church, for this church, if you're a member here that you would have a deep love for this church and I want to describe a fully healthy church for you. That's what I want to do and I want to look at these two passages that we've looked at, we already two weeks ago looked carefully at Hebrews 3:12-14. I want to add the other one that Ron read. Hebrews 10;24 and 25. Works out great that the ones he read are the same ones I'm going to preach on so that's fantastic, isn't that wonderful how that just works out. So just the Providence is wonderful, how that works.

But what I want to do in the first passage in Hebrews 3:12-14, is talk about the church negatively, the benefits of the church in a negative sense, by that I mean a community committed to fighting sin in each other's lives. We've got a negative battle of sin, we're all fighting it and that's why we're drawn together, for help in that battle. We are to be a community fighting that battle with sin for each other in each other's lives, positively a community, committed to full fruitfulness in each other's lives. Fruitfulness, that you, each of you would have a full harvest, a rich life of good works to show Jesus on judgment day. And all the more as you see the day approach and we're going to talk about that.

These are the two things I want to simply put; negatively you need to be involved in a church, in this church, I think if you're called as a member here, to help you fight your sin battle and so you can help other people fight theirs, negatively. And then positively you need to be committed to this church. If you're a member here, you need to be committed to this church so that you can be maximally fruitful in your life for Jesus. Without the church you're going to be a victim of your own sinfulness, you're going to be left aside because of it. Satan is going to get you. I just say that with all the seriousness I can muster. If you're alone, you're going to be a victim. And positively, if you've got a church around you that cares, you're not. The Lord's going to use that church to protect you and concerning the spiritual gifts, you're going to be maximally fruitful, if you're involved in the church and you are not going to do all of those good works that God has laid out ahead of you, if you're not.

Let's look first of all at the... First one, Hebrews 3, a community's commitment to holiness. Look again at the verses. "See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God but encourage one another daily as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly to the end the confidence we had at first." So I'm just going to review what we did two weeks ago. I did the acts of Jesus, basically, I decided then we're going to be doing two sermons on Hebrews Three. The first would be just careful acts of Jesus and then the second would be that applications that will take up most of our time today. Let me review the acts of Jesus. That there is a danger right in the word here, the danger is apostasy turns away from the living God, αποστασία is the Greek, so we get this word apostasy.

The Greatest Danger: Turning Away from the Living God

It's part of a series of warnings on that same theme. Hebrews 2:1. "We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away." Hebrews 3:12 speaks about turning away from the living God. Hebrews 6:6, which God willing, we'll get to in due time, talks about falling away, don't drift away, don't turn away, don't fall away from the living God. That implies conversely that the goal of our salvation is proximity to God, closeness to God, to be very near him, to be very close to him.

And so we looked at verses that talk about that in Hebrews. Hebrews 4:16. "Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence." Hebrew 7:19 says the New Covenant is a better hope, "a better hope is introduced by which we draw near to God." How beautiful is that? And then Hebrews 10 just immediately before the verses that Ron read, it says, "Therefore brothers since we have confidence to enter the most holy place..." How could sinners like us do that? To enter into the Holy of Holies, but we have boldness to do it. "By the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is His body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and full assurance of faith." So proximity to God is the goal of our salvation.

So in these verses, these warning verses here in Hebrews 3: 12-14, you have a sense, as I mentioned two weeks ago, the greatest danger that faces you individually, and that is the loss of your soul, the eternal loss of your soul. What good would it be for a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. What would a man give in exchange for his soul, your soul is in jeopardy through sin, apart from Jesus, you will be lost for all eternity. So I can do no better at this moment, then to plead with you, if you have not yet trusted in Jesus that you would come to Christ, come to the cross of Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, you cannot survive Judgment Day without Jesus, you'll be sent to hell, you'll be condemned righteously and justly for your own sins, your transgressions of God's law, but if you'll just simply believe.

If you come to the cross where Jesus shed His blood, you will be forgiven and I plead with you. At this time, Christmas time, what a great time to be saved. I tell you, any time is a great time to be saved. Amen. But why not today? If you're on the outside looking in, don't stay on the outside of the church any longer, but come in and believe and be part be saved.

So the root cause of this great danger is sin's effect on the heart. And we're going to spend some time thinking about this today. Verse 12. "See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God." Sinful heart of unbelief. And really, the key here in verse 13 is that the heart can be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. The deceit is the real issue. We're dealing here with sins you don't see in your own life. You've been deceived in some way by sin and you need help with that. You can't save yourself from sins about which you're deceived, you've got to have people to help you.

That's the remedy here in verse 13. "Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness." So a healthy church will be active, daily active in protecting its own members from the deceitful-ness of sin. This is what we do for each other.

And so we've got this deadly danger of indwelling sin, we talked about in Romans 7. Paul says, "I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do I do not do, and what I hate I do." And, "as it is, he says, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me" that does it. I think about all the revulsion you could ever muster. But those phrases should cause you to shudder, there should be a sense of revulsion. Sin is living in me. This wicked tumor, this parasite that would take my very life, is living inside me. Yes, it is, and we all have these deadly blind spots of how sin is cropping up in our lives, we can't see it. We need the insights of others to show us how sin is deceiving us. The warning of this passage is only those who finish ever really began.

Look at verse 14 again, "we have come to share in Christ, [past tense] if we hold firmly to the end the confidence we had at first." In other words, only those who finish ever really began. That's what I get out of this, you see it. So I had people come up to me two weeks ago and ask a wonderful question, good question.

The Impossibility of Losing Your Salvation

Now, are you saying with this whole teaching on apostasy that you can lose your salvation? Of course, you can't lose your salvation. We have been given eternal life and it's going to last for all eternity. It is absolutely true that He who begins a good work he will carry it on to completion. "All that the Father gives me will come to me, and those who come to me, I'll lose none of them, but I'll raise them up at the last day."

Of course, you can't lose it. My question is, do you have it or not? And don't you think you ought to know now while there's time to do something about it? So that's what we're talking about here. So, we have this community commitment to holiness. I'm going to talk about applications, but that's how we explained the verse last time.

Let's look at the second passage, Hebrews 10: 24-25. Now, I'm going to... God-willing, if God gives me time, if I'm still alive and we have the opportunity to do this, I will preach on Hebrews 10: 24-25 more thoroughly. So I just want to give you a thumbnail sketch of what's going on here. I'm not going to set it in context, do any of that, but full treatment later, but let's just kind of grab at it a little bit and get some things.

"Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another and all the more as you see the day approaching." So the angle on this one is a positive one, it's a positive one. It's a community verse, it's a church verse. Look at it in verse 24, "And let us", plural, "let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together."

It's a church verse. Let's encourage one another. This is definitely a church verse friends. It's a community verse, a church verse. And the goal of these two verses, is fruitfulness, maximal fruitfulness. It's toward love and good deeds that's what we're getting at here. We want the love and good deeds to happen. And so really it's each other’s full fruitfulness. I need to care about a brother or sister, that they are characterized by love and good deeds, and I'm going to do things toward them horizontally to help them do the love and good deeds that God wants them to do. So that's the goal.

The idea is Judgment Day, it says all the more as you see the day approaching, the day is Judgment Day, what's going on that day? You're going to give Christ a full account for your life, you're going to stand before Jesus, He's going to ask for all of the things he committed to you back, and he's going to ask you for what came from, and he's going to ask, he said, "I gave you five talents, what did you do with them? I gave you two talents I gave you, did you do anything. Did you trade with them? Is there some interest on the investment?" "You're a vineyard. I put a wall around you. I dug out a wine press, I saturated the soil with fertilizer. I rained on you. I gave you sunshine. I gave you everything you need, where's the harvest? I want the crop. What came?"

And you give Christ an account. So what this verse tells me is I should care about your account and you should care about mine, horizontally. Now don't just care about your own. I should care about the brother and the sisters account, that they're going to give to Jesus. All the more as you see the day approaching, I want you guys to be ready for that day. Positively ready. I want you to have a full treasure trove of good works to show to Jesus, so I preach toward that end.

The Danger of Forsaking Church

Now, the danger subverting all of this, is that some people make a habit of forsaking the assembling of themselves together. They make a habit of it friends. Let us not give up or forsake the assembling of ourselves together as some are in the habit of doing. The issue here is habitual forsaking of the assembly. The Greek word is ethos from which we get ethic. They make it an ethic, they make it an ethic of their lives to forsake the assembling of themselves. And as I've analyzed this, I see it in two senses, number one, someone who stays committed to the same local church, but is very spotty in their attendance, intermittent in their attendance. They don't come week by week by week.

Now, if you think I'm preaching a legalistic thing. You've got to be every single, and you're a wicked sinner if you ever miss church, I'm not saying that. The verse talks about a habit and I'm talking about making a habit of forsaking it's a choice you make. Again, I'm not talking about home-bound people friends, they're not forsaken. They yearned to be here.

That's not what this is talking about. This is talking about people that make a choice. Habitually make a choice to not go to go to the church that they're members of. There's a second sense, and this is more subtle, but it happens too. And these are people who forsake the congregation they were committed to, to go to another one for spurious reasons. Church nomads, church shopping, church hopping, church consumers. You know what happens with this category of people, they come, they like it for a while, there's certain features they like, and certain feature they didn't, but they were willing to put up with it, but then those features start to get, like on the sound board or their life started to get pushed up a higher level, the other things start to push down and then... Still living geographically in the same area, but not here anymore. They were members, they are no longer members.

Now, I don't say that it's sinful for somebody to stay geographically in the same area and go from one church to another, God does do that. He calls people to do that. Again just hear me, I'm not preaching legalism here. What I'm saying is there is a category of people that left and shouldn't have. That's all I'm saying. They left and shouldn't have. They should have stayed committed to their church. What are they looking for? I think sometimes it's a selfish view of, " What's in it for me? What can I get? Do I like the music? Do I like the people? Do I like the feel here?" That kind of thing.

The Need for “Spurring On”

Alright, so that's the danger. But positively, speaking, we've got here in these verses, Hebrews 10:24-25, a community that there's a rich cross-pollination, fertilization going on, and we are provoking one another, the word says. Just sticking in people's craw, until they do what they need to be doing. I mean it's really almost, it's a negative word, but it needs to be done well friends. It needs to be done with gentleness, with tenderness and all that, but I'm just telling you what the word says, provoking or stimulating or I like this one spur one another on toward love and good deeds. I've got spurs, that jingle jangle jingle, that kind of thing. It's like, "Boy I need to be spurred on right now." Well, I've got just the person for you, says the Holy Spirit. And in that person comes to spur you on to love and good deeds but hey, look, there's right ways to do these things and wrong ways. But that's what we're talking about.

Now central to this, we have to be together and we have to know each other. Now here I want to give you, I'm already just totally stealing the thunder of that sermon that I may preach. But you forget I forget when I come to it, in Hebrews 10, when's that going to be? In like the year 2012? I have no idea. You'll have forgotten this, and I can do it like it was fresh. Okay, fair enough. But actually, the NIV, and some other modern translations is slightly off here. Not harmfully off, but just slightly off. What does it say? "Let us consider... " What's the next word in the NIV? How. Let us consider how, implies we're studying a methodology. That's not what the Greek says. The direct object of the verb is one another.

So "let us consider one another to spur toward love and good deeds" is somewhat awkward translation, but you get the idea, how does it work? It means you think about brother, A or sister B, and you think about what their gifts are, and say, "Lord what good works could they do... What do I think they'd be good at, how could I go and encourage them?" And then you start to say, "Hey look, when you do hospitality, you do it as well as anybody I've ever seen, do that even more. That's so beautiful, how you do that. I'm so blessed by the way that you teach the Word of God and Bible for life do that more and more. Listen, Sister when you pray, I am just so blessed by that, You just pray with the faith that is so deep and rich, and I'm, strengthened by that." So, you consider the people in your church, you consider them to find out, "Lord, how can I spur them on toward love and good deeds?" So translation should be, let us consider one another. That's really how it should go.

I don't know that I've seen any of the translations that do that, maybe NIS does but I'm not really sure but that's what it teaches. Let's consider.

Know and Be Known

So therefore, key to both Hebrews 3, and Hebrews 10 is we must know and be known, we really do we have to know each other. You can't tell if a brother or sister developing a sinful heart of unbelief, unless you know them. Talked about that two weeks ago, how can you tell? You can't check their sinful heart of unbelief meter. I used to work in a company which I was exposed from time to time to x-rays, and I had to wear a little badge. And then they would look at it and read and see how the radiation levels were. Okay, it'd be so much easier we could do that. "Let me check your badge. How are you doing? Ohh sinful heart of unbelief starting to develop."

It just doesn't go that way. What you have to do is develop relationships and I do not say that they will happen Person A with every other person, 400 people in the church. It will not. But I'm looking for network so no one slips through the cracks. See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart, So that God would raise up brothers and sisters, appropriately for each one in a network so that we can see if a sinful heart of unbelief is developing. See same thing on the positive side. Let us consider one another means I don't know if I can go up to this person I've never heard of, and say, "Hey, you'd be really good at such and such," If I don't know them. We've got to know and be known, bottom line. So that's why it's in the sermon title, know and be known. Let's know each other and let's be known by each other.

Alright, now what I want to do is just give you some practical steps for First Baptist Church, toward a happier and healthier community life. 10 of them. And they feed on each other, they build on each other, there is a certain logical progression here, and I just think this is the key, if we can just imbibe these.

1) Desire to Grow in Salvation and Help Others to Grow Too

Alright, number one, desire to grow in salvation and help others to grow too or simply put understand salvation as is taught in the Bible. I never tire of telling you that salvation is a process, justification, sanctification, glorification. So you have to realize that not a single person in this church is done being saved. Our salvation is an ongoing work and so is yours. If you don't understand salvation properly, you will not understand the local church and your need for it properly. You will think you can do it on your own and you will forget that you have not yet fully been saved, you're still working out, you should be, as the Bible says, working out your salvation with fear and trembling.

Salvation comes in stages, justification, sanctification, glorification, all truly justified people will most certainly be sanctified. There's just an indissoluble link between the two. And so we need to understand that we're not done being saved and no one else is that's here on earth. And so, as I already quoted Philippians 2:12, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." I think when I'm getting out of Hebrews 3 and 10 is work out other people's salvation with fear and trembling too. Not just your own. But care about whether other people are making progress in their salvation. So step number one is desire to grow in salvation and help others to grow too. Or perhaps another title for this would be: Understand salvation properly. You're not done being saved.

2) Understand the Grave Danger We Are All In

Secondly, understand therefore the grave danger every last one of us is still in. We are in a war zone, spiritually, you don't need the full armor of God, except that you're in a war and you are in a war.

So we have to see with spiritual eyes, the incredible danger we're all in from the world, the flesh, and the devil. These three ancient foes of the church are relentless and deadly. Only if we properly see their danger, will be properly committed to a local church. Every last one of us is in a vicious fight for the health of our souls. It says in 1st Peter 2:11, "Dear friends, I urge you as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful lusts which wage war against your soul." We're in a firefight and an analogy I had this morning, as I was thinking, we're in a firefight and the church is the fox hole. It is a dangerous world we live in, and we ought to be aware of this warfare and be intensely interested in it and concerned about it, not just for ourselves, but for our fellow soldiers. Somebody's head is up too high out of the foxhole, if a buddy loves him he's going to push his head down. The tracer bullet goes just an inch over where his head just was a moment ago.

Jesus was intensely concerned about leaving his church, here in John 17, He says, "I will remain," He's praying to God the night before He's crucified He's praying, He says, "I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world. And I'm coming to you. Holy Father protect them by the power of Your name, the name You gave Me. So that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe, by that name you gave me. None has been lost." Do you have a sense of the danger we're in? And that none of us would be lost? We need an active protection from the world, the flesh and the devil. The church is part of God's plan to protect you. So understand the danger all of us are in.

3) Develop an Eternal Perspective

Thirdly develop an eternal perspective. Hebrews 10 talks about, "And all the more as you see the day approaching." We fail to fully invest in a local church because we think far too highly of this present age in which we live. We think too much of the world, and so we think too little of church. That's what's going on, they're head-to-head.

I really think the biggest danger, the biggest threat to healthy Church life, is the American dream. That your life does in fact, consist in the abundance of your possessions or the abundance of your achievements. It's sucking time from the people of God that should be given to the church. And the only way we're going to remedy that is to say, "How is all this going to look on judgment day? How is it all going to look, when I stand before Jesus? Is this commitment to do this or to do that, or to do the other going to look good on judgment day? Or should I be pulling back in and do what God told me to do?" He told me, "Focus on Christ personally, stay abiding in the vine, and commit myself to the local church and build in each other's lives." That's what He told me to do. And so we need to see everything in light of eternity. This brother, this sister that we're standing near, someday he or she is going to stand before Jesus. Does that matter to you?

Can you do like CS Lewis said, "Bear the weight of their glory?" Can you carry that weight for them and say, "I want you to be glorious and radiant, fully obedient to the Lord. I don't want you to be a casualty in this war and I want you to be fully fruit, I want you to be, I want you to be rich on Judgment Day. Rich in good works, I really want that for you." And you should want it for each other. So ask a simple question about your church involvement. What will the Lord say on Judgement Day concerning your level of involvement in your local church? Can developing an eternal perspective help you focus more on what Christ is doing in the world? And what is Christ doing in the world? I already told you, I will build my church. That's what he's doing in the world, so therefore to love the church is to love what Christ is doing in the world. To hate the church is to hate what Christ is doing in the world. And to be indifferent to the church is to be indifferent to what Christ is doing in the world. This is what He's doing.

4) Weed Your Life of Distractions

Fourthly, Weed your Life of distractions. Worldly distractions. The world is full of alluring alternatives to healthy church involvement. Enticing alternatives to healthy church involvement. Jesus in the parable of the seed and the soil called them weeds, they are depleting the soil of nutrients and resources that should be going into spiritual growth in His children. And they're weeds, they're idols. And so, therefore we're going to hit a plateau. We are going to hit a plateau, is a glass ceiling or something like that of healthy church life. Unless we are willing to make hard choices about the way we spend our time. And weed our life of distraction. So do an inventory. How much time do you spend in good but not Christian activities? We are a busy people, and not only that, we pride ourself on our busyness. I see it, I see it, a glint of pride. Oh we're doing this, we're doing that, we're committed. Well, we're running in 40 different directions. I just sense Satan in all that. Don't you?

Growing families, who want experiences for their kids, they want their kids involved in different things; music, sports, scouting, community involvements, other things like that. Now let me tell you something, I'm always skating right on the edge of legalism. These things may be exactly what God's calling your family to do. This is exactly how you are called as a family to interact with unbelievers. This is your missionary endeavor. Do it to the... I'm just asking you through the Spirit, and through the Word of God to do an analysis of it, to do an assessment of it. Look at your time. It could be that you're too busy with good activities you have no time to develop your church commitments and relationship. And then there's the other side. How much time do you spend on just personal recreation, hobbies, electronic entertainment? We talk about it all the time, cable TV, internet, MP3 players, Wii Or X-box or whatever? I don't even know what's hot this Christmas, there's something every Christmas, they stand in line at three in the morning to get it.

So I don't know what it is this year, but you know what I'm talking about, or... And please don't come and yell at me about this: golf. God may be calling on you to golf. Again I'm always... I'm not saying thou shalt not golf. But maybe there's too much of a good thing. Honey is sweet, just eat a little and then go on and be committed to the church. Hunting, I don't know. Shopping, I don't know what it is for you, but just do that inventory.

5) Love Your Brothers and Sisters in Christ With Sacrificial Love

Fifth, love your brothers and sisters, with a sacrificial love. Simply put we will not make any changes in this area without sacrifice. You're just not going to. You have to love the brothers and sisters from the heart and care enough about their spiritual health, negatively and positively, to be involved in their lives and it takes sacrifice to do it. A fundamental discipline, Christian discipline is hospitality. It says in 1 Peter to offer it without grumbling. Well, the reason that we're tempted to grumble is that it is a sacrifice to open your home.

And so it just takes sacrifice, to get to know the brothers and sisters, without the sacrifice your connection to the church will be limited. And I worry, when I do exit interviews with people who stay in the same geographical region but go to a different good church. I hear so often, nobody ever reached out, nobody ever connected. Can I just turn that around. And I'm not... I tend to be meek as a lamb at times like that. Maybe I should be more like a lion. I don't know people have different ministries, different personalities, but did you sacrifice yourself for somebody else here in this church? I find the people that do that, they never complain about they don't have enough friends. They don't have any... They just don't, they're just deluged with friends and connections. But it doesn't happen without sacrifice and yet part of it could be material.

We have some needy people in the church that are struggling economically and 1st John 3 says, "If you have the world's goods, and see your brother in need, and don't do anything to help it how can you say the love of God is in you?" So some of our fellowship is going to be almost a literal kind of... Well, not exactly a barn raising, but sometimes there's going to be a time that we're going to be there with resources to help each other. But I'm talking, especially spiritually that we would sacrificial love each other, spiritually enough to listen, "What's going on in your life?" And then when they start to unload some mess on you, you're like, "I don't really want to get involved to that level." Sacrifice and love.

6) Humble Yourself

Number six, humble yourself. This may be the hardest of all. Know and be known takes humility, it really does. What do I mean? Well, we have a tendency to present a spiritual facade to our brother and sisters and say, "Hey look, everything's going great." Or, and I'm going to tread on some toes here, including my own, but to have a category of, I guess one book calls it, "Acceptable sins that you can share." You know what I'm talking about? I'm really struggling with, I'm only praying an hour a day, and really God's been leading me to..."

It's like come on. Is that really where your flesh is at work right now? Yeah, well I'm not sharing that. That would make me look like a horrible sinner that struggles with the flesh. Well, you've got to be humble, you've got to be willing to open up and be genuinely humble. Now, CJ Mahaney has done us all a good work by writing a book on this topic, Humility: True greatness. And he has a chapter entitled, inviting and pursuing correction. How's that sound to you? Does that sound good? I would like you to correct me, I invite you to correct me and to help me with my sin problems. It takes humility to do it. Now you know the story he told, it's very famous about a wealthy-looking guy, a business man who's at a breakfast shop, and he's eating a bagel, and he's got an Armani suit and he's got a well groomed moustache, he's got a Rolex watch, and he keeps glancing at his Rolex watch, because he's late to a meeting, and as he gets up to leave, he's got a big blob of cream cheese on his mustache.

And CJ Mahaney is wondering "Should I say something?" Think about, would you say something? Total stranger, "You have a big blob of cream cheese on your face. I'm not sure you're wanting to bring that to whatever meeting you're going to." Listen to this, now, I want to read this direct quote because this is powerful and as you listen, I want you to hear. I'd like this kind of fellowship go on in our church. This is a clear description of what I'm asking God to do here in this church.

Listen, let me tell you says CJ Mahaney about a cream cheese moment in my life.

"One of many such experiences that have helped convince me that there is no sin more deceptive than pride. I am in an accountability group, with men who care for and watch over my soul."

Do you hear that? I'm urging that kind of thing for men and women in the church.

"In a meeting with these brothers, I was telling them of a certain pattern of sin, a specific pattern of sin I'd noticed in my life in the past week, I'd become aware of this sin and been convicted about it, and I'd confessed it to God, and I'd received His forgiveness. Now, I wanted to inform these men about it as well, and move on, because there was another particular issue that I was more concerned about and wanted to discuss with them. But as I described in detail my sin from the previous week, my friend started to ask caring and insightful questions about the root issue behind the sin."

In effect, not so fast CJ, let's hang out here for a minute.

"I assured them that the root issue was obvious: It was pride. I even transitioned into a brief teaching on pride. And then let the guys know I wanted to move on to something else, that I thought was more important and more serious. There was almost certainly a tone of mild irritation, in my voice. But the men had more questions. They had observations. And they began to challenge me to look deeper at the pattern of sin I had shown in the previous week. Again, I felt irritation. I assumed I understood that particular sin completely. Why were we spending so much time on something I had already figured out. In essence there was cream cheese all over my face and I didn't know it. My underlying sin had deceived me, I was blind, I didn't see it, I couldn't see it. But they saw it clearly. And in my pride, I thought no one understood my heart as well as I did, but Scripture doesn't support such a conclusion. Actually God's word tells me, "No, CJ, sin is subtle, sin is deceitful and sin blinds you, and you need feedback from others in order to understand your own heart."

That's the church friends. He writes, "By God's grace because the men seated around me in that room are true friends who care for me and aren't afraid of me they persevered. Though I was arrogant not only in assuming I fully understood my sin and it's root issue, but also my reluctance to explore it more deeply, these men still persevered in kindness. And only by their kindness, and perseverance and only by God's grace did I finally begin to perceive how much my sin had indeed been deceiving me. I saw that my confidence about fully knowing my soul in the situation and in assuming I needed no one else’s eyes upon it was actually the height of arrogance. They were guarding my heart, they were helping me to see the true extent of my sin. I thought I'd already wiped the cream cheese from my face, and it was gone and they were faithfully telling me, 'it's not gone we're staring at it! And we're telling you this because we love you.'"

Do you really want something like that in your life? And if the answer is no, aren't you already in spiritual danger? Now, there's more to say about all this. There are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it they're right people to do it, and ones that probably aren't going to be as effective for you. May God match you up like a heavenly matchmaker to the right ones. There's a gentleness and a reciprocity that's so beautiful, but I want this done in my life, and I want you to want it done in your lives, so that no one slips through the cracks here.

7) Know and be Known

So therefore, number seven is no one be known. Be willing to open up. I've already made this point. Hebrews 3, you've got to know and be known, for the sinful unbelieving heart and Hebrews 10 know and be known for your spiritual gifts. So be willing to invest in relationships. Pull down the facade, tell the truth.

8) Encourage by the Gospel

Number eight, encourage by the Gospel. In verse 3:13it says, "Encourage one another daily as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sins deceitfulness." Hebrews 10:25, "Let us encourage one another." So, encouragement means fill your conversations with the Gospel. Fill your conversations with Christ crucified and risen, and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and future in heaven and judgement day and the seriousness of that. Just fill, saturate these relationships with the gospel. I'm not just talking about friendships, drinking tea partners or something like that, I'm not talking about that friends. That's just, that's the matrix of it.

What I'm talking about is the actual sharing of the Word of God in these relationships. Men get together with other men one-on-one small groups share the Gospel with each other. Share scripture with each other. Women get together with in accountability relationships, prayer partners, do it. Youth share the Gospel with each other, challenge each other, by the gospel, help each other grow. Senior adults in your social times together, your outings and you're just eating a meal together, share the Gospel with each other. Encourage one another daily.

9) Pray Consistently for the Spiritual Health of Church Members

Ninth, pray consistently for the spiritual health of church members. Now here I get very practical, and I'm going to share with you a commitment that the elders have made. This is like one of the center pieces of our ministry to the church.

In 2011 we would like each of you to have a Church's membership directory, see this is a little one that fits inside your Bible, right in there. You can get bigger ones too. And what I'd like you to do, I'd like you to pray through this thing every month. I'd like you to take the day that it is, like today is December 12th, open at page 12 and pray for the people on that page. And then put it back in your Bible, and the next day pray for those on page 13. And by the way, there's a... What do we have now? 24 pages, pray that in two years we'll need 30 pages. Amen? Right now, you get six free days at the end of the month or seven, pray for anyone you want in those seven days. On the back inside, there are spiritual things to pray for. We're not just praying for medical issues or things like that. Financial, pray for spiritual growth and development things. Right on the back page, it's right in there.

Every single day, the elders are going to do it. We are... Been doing it, but we're going to do it all the more, And we're urging you as well to do this. They're at the exits. Pick one up as you go. And if you get on that page and you're like, " I don't know anyone on this page." Well invite somebody over to lunch. Say," I was praying for you today, and I don't know you. And I want to get to know you." Have lunch with them.

10) Be Committed to Public Worship and Home Fellowships

And then finally, 10th. And this is simple and obvious and straightforward, be committed to public worship and home fellowships. Don't be a church hopper.

Don't come to me six months and tell me it's just not a great fellowship here and we... Don't do that, don't. Make it great. Reach out, connect with people. And if you're saying the distance is too far, that's what home fellowships are for. Be committed to your home fellowship, and what I mean be committed means when you sign up in August, still be coming in November and December.

I don't mean to sting or whatever... I'm just saying, please if your commitment means yes, I'm going to be there then be there, again not legalistic. I know occasionally we need to miss, but what is the habit? Is your habit to keep coming to home fellowship, or is your habit to miss? And then in the context of that you can do so many things. Look use lunchtime after worship for getting to know people. Let's do some practical things. One final word, and I'll be done. This Wednesday in Acts class, we've been studying John Calvin. We're not going to do that this Wednesday, we're going to talk about these 10 points. And I'd like you to come.

I'd like you to come and share your ideas and thoughts. There's going to be some give and take and some prayer. And I think it'd be a good time for us as a church to gather together and say, "Hey how can we make FBC a more Hebrews 3, Hebrews 10 kind of church? How can we do that? And I think it's going to be a fruitful time. Let's close in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the time we've had in the word today, and thank you for just opening up this opportunity for us to listen and learn. And so Father, I pray in Jesus name, that you would take these truths and press them into our hearts, we pray in Jesus name. Amen.