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HOLY HELP FOR THE HOPELESSTHROUGH A WORSHIPPING COMMUNITYHebrews 10:19-25INTRODUCTION There is a word in the NT that we citizens of the U.S. regularly ignore. Ignore is perhaps too strong of word. It is more like we are blind to the word. We have a natural bias against this word and in our thinking and speaking we regularly replace it with another word. It is a small word and it occurs in slightly different forms, all with the same meaning. It is repeated in the NIV translation of our passage this morning 13 times. It is a word that appears in the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray some 8 times. Would anyone care to hazard a guess as to which word I refer? It is the 1 st person plural pronoun: we, us and our. It has long been noted by sociologists that “we” has fallen on hard times in the vocabulary of American society. “Me” is the word of choice in our day. The 1980’s were known as the “Me Generation” and I see little reason to think that this generation is any different. We see it in marriages built on contract, not covenant. As long as I am getting what I want out of the marriage than I am happy to refer to “us.” However, when you don’t meet my needs, it’s only about me. When I was preparing to move to Janesville in 1997 to plant this church, as I read material written about church planting, I regularly read that the only way to be successful at planting a church is to understand what my target audience wanted and then make sure that I organized the church to make sure we were delivering the goods. I was told that people are always tuned in to WIFM: “What’s In it For Me.” We are consummate consumers. Always on the look out for the best deal, we flit from product to product and from one association to another in the hopes of finding something better. Most of us, if we were personally asked, “why did Jesus Christ live and die and rise again?” would reply, "so that my sins can be forgiven and I can go to heaven." While it is true that Jesus came to save individuals yet the overwhelming testimony of the entire Bible is that God, through Christ, saves his people, the church. Deuteronomy 7:10 “For you are a people holy to the Lord, for the Lord chose you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.” Titus 2:14-15, “He gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people of his very own, eager to do what is good.” Jesus died for his church and therefore he died for me if I belong to his church. This is the logic of the whole NT and it can be clearly seen in our passage this morning. This passage is the hinge upon which this letter to the Hebrews turns. The entire argument of the letter is summed up in these verses. After spending most of six chapters describing the greatness of Christ and his work he now turns to describe the impact that this great Christ and his great work has upon us. Here the author answers the basic question: what difference does it make to us that Jesus is our priest and sacrifice? This passage is structured around three basic commands. You can see them in vv. 22-24: “Let us draw near to God”, “Let us hold fast to the hope we profess” and “Let us pay attention to one another.” The main point of this passage is to show that Jesus came into this world to save his people. These verses then describe what is characteristic of his people. What kind of a group or community is the church to be? This passage tells us what every local church is supposed to look like. MAIN POINT Jesus lived and died and lives again so that we will be a community that…I. Continually draws near to God in worship (vv. 19-22) The command to draw near to God is embedded in a description of all that Jesus has done for his people. The first part of v. 22 gives us what we are to do, “draw near to God” and how we are to do it, “with a sincere heart and in full assurance of faith.” Verses 19-21 and the last half of v. 22 tell us why we ought to love drawing near to God. Let me begin by making sure we all understand what it means to “draw near to God with a sincere heart, in full assurance of faith.” First of all, if you will remember, this isn’t the first time we have seen this command. In chapter 4, verse 16 says, “Therefore, let us draw near to the throne of grace with confidence that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” In that passage we are commanded to draw near to God in corporate prayer in order to find the resources we need to persevere in faith when we are in trouble. Then in Hebrews 11:6 we are told, “Without faith it is impossible to please God for everyone who draws near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” Drawing near to God is synonymous with earnestly seeking him in order to be rewarded by him. What does that mean? When a young man is earnestly seeking a young woman, what is the reward he seeks, if he is an honorable young man? The reward is her presence, her love, her attention. If a person is earnestly seeking employment what is the reward being sought? Obviously, a job is the reward. All who earnestly seek God aim to be rewarded with God’s presence. Finally, in 10:1 we were most recently told, “For this reason it (the law) can never… make perfect those who draw near to worship.” When we remember that most of the previous chapters were based upon the “drawing near” of the priests to God in the tabernacle we can see that drawing near to God in this context means that we have as our chief ambition to live with God, to know God, to be delighted with God alone, to joyfully and spontaneously join with all of God’s people in displaying and declaring his great worth. Worship is the goal of the gospel. So God views as the outcome of the work of Christ a group of people, a church, gathered together out of their mutual affection for him. As I have said before, the church is to be organized around a shared theology, not a shared sociology. We are together as his people not because we share the same politics or the same ethnic background or the same educational philosophy or because we like the same music. We are together only because he is the object of our trust and delight. We gather together in order to express our need of him, our confidence in him, and our admiration for him. In this command we see again that the gospel is not about us but about him. Christ has done this amazing work on our behalf so that God himself will be the treasure that we seek. How many of you have seen the movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind?” The story line goes like this. Alien space craft visit every country in the world and in some mysterious way select particular individuals to receive a vision. The vision is of a particular geographical feature in their country to which they have an irresistible desire to go. The main character of the movie quits his job and obsessively makes a sculpture of this feature that fills his mind. He creates a model of “Devil’s Tower” which is out in eastern Wyoming . He happens to see a report on TV of Devil’s Tower and realizes that is what he is building and so he hastily packs his family in the station wagon and heads west. What he discovers along the way is that he is not the only one going to Devil’s Tower. He joins a company of people, who all like him, have been infected with an irresistible urge to draw near to Devil’s Tower. I won’t tell you what they find there because it would ruin the movie for you. The point is that the evidence that Christ has given himself for our sins is that we have an irresistible urge to join with God’s people in drawing near to him. This isn’t a private experience but a corporate experience. You cannot obey this command by yourself. It does not say, let each one of you individually draw near to God. It says, let us draw near to God. It is a command to join a local church in worshipping God. He commands that we do this with a true or sincere heart. In other words, he is commanding us to come to him because we love him and desire to live with him, not because we want to use him to get what we really love. An example of an insincere heart is the person who marries for money. The man who draws near to a woman with words of desire and love and longing not because he has affection for her but because he loves her money has an insincere heart. So God commands that we draw near to him because we love him, not because we love what he can give us. We come to church to worship God, not find friends. Drawing near in full assurance of faith means that we draw near to God expecting to find him, expecting him to be and to do all that he promises. We trust that all he promises to do and be for us he will do and be. It means that we come to God exclusively, abandoning all other loves and all other hopes. All of our hopes for happiness are tied to him. We don’t have any other “fish on the line.” It’s like getting married. I forsake all others and pursue my happiness in my wife alone. I depend upon her favor alone to be content. I do not trust in the affection of any other person, just my wife. So we also draw near to God in reliance upon him alone to be everything for us. Let me ask you a question. Does it seem like a big thing or a little thing that God would command you to draw near to him? Does it seem amazing to you that God would want you to live with him as one of his people? If you listen to how people talk about God’s love, nothing seems more natural to most human beings than that God would love them and be glad to have us near him. But the Bible talks as if God’s commanding us to draw near to him is the most unexpected and amazing thing in the world. Most of us would be far more surprised if President Bush were to call us this afternoon and command us to be his friend then we are surprised that God wants us near him. Yet, the reality is that God’s command that we draw near to him is far more remarkable and improbable than President Bush calling you this afternoon. There are four reasons given in vv. 19-20 for why we should draw near to God: “Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place ”. “Since we have a great priest over the house of God.” “Since our hearts have been sprinkled to cleanse us from a conscience of evil.” “Since our body has been washed with pure water.” These are the four reasons we should draw near to God as his people. Let me show what each of them mean and then give a brief description of how they should motivate us to draw near to God. The only person who could enter into the presence of God in the Most Holy Place was the high priest. He is the only one who had the boldness, the authority to enter into the Most Holy Place . Notice that because Christ shed his blood, because his body was sacrificed for us, we now have that same authority to pass through the curtain and enter into the Most Holy Place . The author isn’t just talking about the earthly tabernacle but about heaven itself. We were repeatedly told that Jesus has entered the Most Holy Place , now we are told that we can enter there with him. Because this is true we should draw near to God. Next, Jesus is the great high priest over the house of God. In Hebrews, this phrase, “house of God” always refers to the church (cf. 3:1-6). Just like the Jewish high priest was over Israel as their representative head, so Jesus is over us, the church as our representative head. He always lives to intercede for us. Therefore, we should draw near. Third, notice that our hearts have been sprinkled clean from a conscience of evil. This language picks up on the fact that the priests had blood sprinkled upon them thus cleansing them so they could enter the tabernacle. It also is picking up on the ways the prophets use this language to describe God’s work in giving to his people new hearts as the fruit of the new covenant. He takes away hearts of stone and gives hearts of flesh. He changes our hearts from being hearts that delight in evil to those who now delight in God. Because the sprinkling of Christ’s blood both purifies us and transforms us, we should draw near to God. Finally, we are those whose bodies have been washed with pure water. Again, this reflects the fact that the priests were washed with water before they entered the tabernacle and the washing of water is again used in the prophets to describe the work of the Holy Spirit in giving us new hearts. Most commentators recognize in this last clause that water baptism as the physical symbol of the spiritual washing of the Holy Spirit is being referred to as well. So the author is saying something like this, “You have all been converted by the Holy Spirit, that is had your hearts washed clean by him and you have given witness to that fact by being baptized with water, therefore, draw near to God. So verses 19-20 are saying, since Jesus shed his blood on the cross to gain access to God for you and since he now lives in the presence of God as your faithful high priest, since your evil conscience has been wiped clean by his blood and since his Holy Spirit has washed you clean in the new birth and you have given evidence to this great work by being baptized, draw near to God. Christ came, first and foremost, so that we can draw near to God as his people. Imagine that I built a tree house for my children. This was not just any tree house. It looked like the house that the Swiss Family Robinson built in the movie by that name. There are pulleys and ropes and staircases and different floors. You can safely climb to the top of the tree and look out over the entire neighborhood. I built this house because I want them to enjoy it. What would it mean if my children ignored the tree house? What if they were not impressed with it and never went into it? What would it say about how they feel about me? Do you see what this means? Christ came to bring you to God and so if you’re not going to God then you are treating Christ and his work with contempt. Christ has done everything so that we can draw near to God. Christ didn’t die so we can pursue a life of worldly pleasure, ignoring God now but then safely go to heaven when we die. So honor Christ by drawing near together with all of God’s people. We do this together on Sunday mornings as a whole congregation. We do it in our homes as we draw near in family worship. We draw near during the week as we gather in small groups and one on one to pray and to rejoice together in his work. Jesus lived and died and lives again so that we will be a community that…
II. Continually live like we’re going to heaven (v. 23) We are to unswervingly hold fast to the hope we profess. The first question we need to address is, what is the hope we profess? As I’ve told you in the past, in the Bible, hope never means “wish”, as in “I hope it doesn’t rain today.” Rather biblical hope is a confident expectation that a promised future good is going to one day be mine. It is both an objective reality and a subjective experience. The objective reality is that one day Jesus is coming back and when he does all who have died as Christians, trusting in him alone for their salvation, will be raised from the dead. Their currently disembodied spirits will be reunited with their resurrected, immortal bodies. Every Christian who is alive at that time, in the twinkling of an eye will be changed. Our mortal bodies will be immediately transformed to be like his glorious, immortal body. Then our Lord Christ will subdue all his enemies under his feet and he will make a new heavens and a new earth where we will dwell with him forever. It will be this world and this universe cleansed of the curse and all the wicked who are under that curse. No more sickness or accidents or death. No more sin. No more anger or fighting or sadness or lust. No more meaningless work. It will be a world of love where we will perfectly love God and one another forever. This is our hope. But our hope is not only an objective reality but also a subjective experience. Our hope is also that joyful confidence that we have in our hearts because we are expecting this reality. We are secure, joyful, stable people because we know where the story of our lives is going. We know what the end will be. Notice also that this hope is a hope that we profess. In other words, there are obvious, outward evidences and expressions of this hope. It is something we talk about and it is something that affects how we live. We’ve all experienced this in our lives here. We’ve gone to work and our normally crabby co-worker is smiling and friendly and cheerful. When we ask her, “What’s gotten into you? Why are you so happy?” She says, “I’m going on vacation tomorrow.” Or maybe she says, “My grandchildren are coming for a visit.” In other words, she professes her hope by both her lifestyle and her words. It’s the same with us. We are people who regularly talk about the resurrection, the return of Jesus and the new heavens and the new earth. We talk about the glory of being with Jesus forever. And we also live differently because we expect to live with him forever. When people ask us why we’re so cheerful we can tell them, because I’m bound for heaven. When people want to know why we stick in a difficult marriage we can tell them it is because we are going to live with Jesus forever. When we’re questioned about why we don’t get mad when the annoying guy at work gives us a hard time we can tell people the goal of our life isn’t to live an annoyance free life but to go to heaven. The command in v. 23 to hold unswervingly to the hope we profess means that we are to continually remind ourselves of the glorious future that awaits us and then not deviate from the path that will take us there. This is the Olympic athlete who often thinks of how it will feel to win the race and stand on the podium while she runs sprints over and over again in preparation. This is the mother who thinks of the joy she will feel when her baby is born while she is going through labor. This is the thought of how happy my daughter would be when I gave her the dollhouse I was building when I wanted to quit because nothing seemed to be working. This is the marathon runner who thinks of the relief and the joy he will feel when he crosses the finish line instead of thinking about the pain he is in at the moment. We know that while we draw near to God now, yet we aren’t going to experience the fullness of the joy of living with God until heaven. All of our experience of God’s grace now is only partial and incomplete. So hope fixes our attention on the future when our joy will be complete and the journey will be over. We think much of the glory of God and of the joy of living with him forever and this feeds our hope so that we keep pressing on in spite of the pain in the present. But notice the reason we hold fast to this hope is not because of us and our stamina but because God has made promises that he is going to keep. Eugene Peterson remarks in his book, “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”, “God sticks to his relationship. He establishes a personal relationship with us and stays with it. The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment that God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination; it is the result of God’s faithfulness…. Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms.” Are you hoping in what God promises to give? Are you relying upon his faithfulness or your determination? I find so often when I talk with people who are feeling depressed and hopeless that the reason is because they are not hoping in what God promises. God doesn’t promise secure finances, good marriages, and healthy bodies. He promises eternal pleasures in his presence forever. He promises to be our refuge and strength in the trouble not a genie in the bottle that keeps all trouble away. Jesus lived and died and lives again so that we will be a community that…
III. Continually pays attention to one another (vv. 24-25) First, notice the structure of vv. 24-25. There is only one primary command here followed by two subordinate clauses that give more details about what obedience to the command entails. The command at the beginning of verse 24 literally says, “Let us carefully consider one another for the purpose of provoking one another to love and good works.” This is the same word that is used back in 3:1, “Fix your thoughts on Jesus…” Just as we are to fix our attention on Jesus so we are commanded to fix our attention on one another. We are to do this for the purpose of provoking one another to love and good deeds. Then in v. 25 we are given two clauses that give us more details on how this is supposed to work are, “by not abandoning our meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but by encouraging each other and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Let me draw your attention to the big idea here. If you are a person who has been cleansed by the blood of Christ, who has Christ as his or her great high priest, who has had your evil conscience cleansed, then you are also a person who is a committed member of a local church. These two verses simply expose as a great deception the idea that is so prevalent in our culture that you can be a Christian and go to heaven without belonging to a local church. These verses also indicate that it isn’t just showing up on Sundays either. Rather we are all looking out for one another. We pay careful attention to each other’s situation for a purpose. We pay attention to each other in order to provoke each other to love and to good works. I use the word provoke because it is the meaning of the word. It is a very strange word to be used in this context. It almost always is used in a negative way in the Bible. It describes either God’s being provoked to anger or humans fighting with one another. Most translations use a milder word, like stimulate or stir up. Frankly I think it is a play on words. How often have you been provoked to anger by what another Christian has done or not done? The author knows this and so he uses this word in an ironic fashion. We are to be so in tune with each others lives and aware of what is going on so that we can speak and act in such a way that others will be unable to stop themselves from loving God and others and doing good because of their love. This is what encouragement is. Encouragement is not trying to bolster someone’s self esteem but it is words and actions aimed at stimulating others to hold fast to Christ and to draw near to God and to actively live out their love for God by doing good to others. It is very informative to note what this author says in 13:22 . “Brothers I encourage you to bear with my word of encouragement, for I have written you only a short letter.” If you want to know how to provoke other Christians to love and good deeds, how to encourage them, then study this book for that is what it is written for. Based on the book of Hebrews, Dr. John Piper defines encouragement this way, “The God centered, Christ exalting, Scripture saturated, emotionally in touch use of language that aims to produce God-besotted, self-forgetting, lovers of people.” There are a number of characteristics of encouragement in this passage. First, it is intentional. The command here isn’t, “Sit around expecting others to encourage you and then if they do you encourage them but if they don’t get mad and leave the church.” Christians are people who are looking for ways to love others, not looking for ways to get others to love them. If you are feeling disappointed and angry that no one is calling you, then you are not thinking straight. It’s not just my job, as the pastor, to be concerned about the spiritual welfare of others. All of us are to be intentionally initiating relationships with other Christians for the sake of their spiritual well being. Everyone is included in this command. If you are a Christian, you are commanded to carefully think about other Christians and then to get together with them on a regular basis in order to provoke them into love and good works. Second , encouragement is thoughtful and based upon personal knowledge. We are to carefully consider one another. This means we must be interested in one another. We have to take the time to listen and to learn about others. We have to spend time with one another in settings where we get to know each other. This is one of the reasons we think being involved in a small group is so important. This is one place where we get to know each other so that we can thoughtfully consider how to encourage. I know the reason people are not in small groups or don’t faithfully attend them is because they don’t get anything out of being there. Let me suggest that if you go to a small group for the purpose of “getting something out of it” you’re not going for the right reason. This verse says you go to the small group for the purpose of giving, not getting. You go, thinking about how you are going to encourage the other members of the group. It isn’t just the small group leader’s job to make sure the group goes well. Everyone must come with the attitude of giving, not getting. Can you imagine what would happen in your small group if everyone came to the group having carefully thought about how they were going to encourage others in the group? Third , the goal of encouragement is both negative and positive. In 3:12 -13 it is stated from the negative side. "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." The goal of encouragement is to keep people from having hearts that are hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. All of us are daily battling with whether we are going to believe and act on the promises of God or believe and act on the promises of sin. This is the central battle in each of our lives and so when I aim to encourage you, I’m thinking about how to help you believe there is greater happiness in trusting God’s promises than in believing the promises of sin. In 10:24 the goal is stated positively. It is to provoke people into having hearts full of love for God and people that motivates a life of good works on behalf of others. When I seek to encourage you I am aiming at getting you to believe the promises of God so that you have a heart full of love and a life full of serving others. Fourth , also notice that in both chapter 3 and here in chapter 10 that the reason this kind of life is so important is so that we will make it safely to heaven. 3:14 says, “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.” The end of 10:25 says we are to encourage each other while we see the approaching judgment of the final day. Immediately following in vv. 26-31 is another warning passage of the necessity of persevering in faith to the end if we are going to be saved. We are like people who are outside when the tornado siren blows and we can see the approaching tornado and we are urging one another to flee into the basement while watching the approaching tornado. If our neighbor is out raking his lawn we’ll do all we can to encourage him to join us in the basement. We won’t run to the basement and leave our child playing in the sandbox, will we? We tell one another things like this, “Friend, you have to let go of your grudge against your wife and pour yourself out in loving her as the evidence that you love Christ more than having a wife who does what you want.” “Brother, get rid of your internet connection so you don’t feed your lust with pornography and thus show Jesus is more pleasing to you than pornography so you can safely make it to heaven.” Each of us must view ourselves as a minister of the gospel in relation to other believers. God wants you to carefully consider the needs of other Christians and then to personally, intentionally seek to provoke them into a life of love and good works. This isn’t just my job or the job of a few. We all are responsible for the spiritual well being of other Christians. Jesus lived and died and lives again so that we will be a community that…
© Copyright 2007 John Swanson.
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