Unshakable Confidence | April 5th, 2026 | Pastor Will Hawk

We chase confidence in all the wrong places, then wonder why fear keeps winning when life gets hard. We open Hebrews 10 to see how the finished work of Jesus and the resurrection create a clean conscience, steady hope, and a community that helps us hold on. 

• why Easter confidence is built for dark days 
• welcoming the seasoned churchgoer, the seeker and the skeptic 
• what Hebrews means by confidence through the blood of Jesus 
• defining sin as missing the mark 
• the three default moves: ignoring sin, outperforming others and trying to pay for it 
• why endless religious effort is exhausting and cannot erase guilt 
• the jet ski story as a picture of self-reliance and suffering 
• “it is finished” as the foundation for assurance 
• drawing near with honesty plus full assurance 
• holding fast because Jesus is faithful even when we are not 
• stirring one another up through encouragement, love, good works and meeting together 

Grab one of the cards that’s in front of you. It’ll give you a chance to jot down a prayer. It’ll give you a chance to meet with the pastor, receive prayer. There will be a number of us praying on the back porch if you want to join us. 

If you want to learn more about the MidTree story or connect with us, go to our website HERE or text us at 812-MID-TREE.

Transcript

Anna Kreisel 0:50

Good morning, church. Please turn in your Bibles into Hebrews chapter ten, which is on page one thousand and six in your pew Bibles. That's Hebrews chapter ten, page one thousand six. Okay, please follow along while I read God's word. Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He opened for us through the curtain, that is, through His flesh, and so since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful, and let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together at is as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near. This is the word of the Lord.

Why Easter Calls For Honesty

Welcoming Seasoned Seekers And Skeptics

What Real Confidence Looks Like

The Old Ways We Cope

Ignore Outperform Or Pay For Sin

The Jet Ski Story Of Control

Jesus Opens The Living Way

Draw Near Hold Fast Spur On

Will Hawk 2:10

Amen. Thank you. Well, guys, I'm pumped to hang out with you. I love Easter. It is one of my favorite days of the year. There are a million reasons why. Um, it is a unique day, it is a fun day, and I I will tell you, there is a little bit of pressure to be uh the pastor on Easter. I I don't know how many of you guys have ever been in the ministry. There is a whiteboard in my office filled with tons of jobs, lots of little names next to it, tons of documents. Today is the day that you're supposed to be most polished, everything's supposed to flow most nicely. And I just want to tell you what I told the team. I'm not terribly worried about that. I promise you, I'm not gonna keep you here forever. I I got a timer, don't sweat it. They keep one running for me. Um, but what I do want you to know is this my goal is not to be polished, my goal is to be honest. Here's what I want us to wrestle with. How can someone be 90 years old with an IV hooked up and laugh about the moment to come? How can that happen? How can somebody get a PET scan with cancer from head to toe and look at it and smile and say, Jesus has already chalked this up to a W. I was a little disappointed initially when I saw the weather forecast for today. I like it to rain on Good Friday when we think about Jesus' death on the cross. When we show up late on Friday, we take communion. That's when I want it to be stormy and rainy. I want it to be like bright and cheerful on Easter. And for those of you who got up early and came to uh sunrise service, you can tell because they're a little bit muddy, or you had to wake up your kids a little bit early. You know, like Easter comes with it a little bit of expectation, but I think today's perfect, and I'll tell you why. Christians don't sing when the sun is shining, they sing when the sun sets. Christians don't celebrate only when the flowers are blooming, they are able to celebrate all the time, and that is what I want us to put our eyes on this morning. As we get ready to dive into the text, if you want to get the notes from today's sermon, sometimes you guys are trying to take pictures and I'm talking so fast and swiping so quick. So if you want it, here's your 15-second opportunity to grab your phone. You're allowed to pull your phone out so long as you're not texting or on social media. We will allow that here. Um, fire away and grab that. And while you do, let me just say one of the other things that's unique is the group of people that make up an Easter Sunday. All right. There are three people that are always in the room on a Sunday, but you can see it and you can feel it a little bit more on Easter. You've got your seasoned folks, they already have a place where they usually sit. Their big struggle today might be the fact that they aren't in their normal seat. You've got folks who are just like, hey, this is what I do. I do it every Sunday, and here I am, let's do this again. But Easter is a little bit different. You dress a little differently, you show up, you have different expectations of your day. And so if you're a seasoned churchgoer, here's my hope for you. Man, I want you to leave today with so much confidence that it changes your Tuesday and your Thursday. That's what I want. I I want the reality of the risen Lord to affect you long after eggs have been opened and hid, and unfortunately it rains, and so they're all hid in the den, and the Easter egg hunt lasts 30 seconds. Like long after that happens, I want you to have a ton of confidence. Seeker, maybe you are at church for the first time in a long time. Welcome back. We are pumped to have you. And I don't know exactly what you're looking for, but I will point you to the one who I guarantee you can give you everything that you need. And finally, we have the skeptic. You're my favorite, by the way. You're my favorite because I'm one of you. And I love the fact that you may be at church for the first time, and you're like, all right, let's see how long it takes for this thing to get weird. I am completely okay with that. And one of the reasons I'm okay with that is Jesus' followers were skeptics. In fact, here's what we read. When they, being the women, came back from the tomb, they told all these things. Angels showed up, earthquake, stone rolled away, clothes folded, Jesus not there. The angels got a little salty with us, and they were like, Why are you seeking the living among the dead? They they share this whole story with the disciples. It's down from 12 to 11, but look at what happens. But they did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense. The guys who hung out with Jesus the most watched him multiply food, watched him bring people back from the dead, cure blindness and leprosy, and tiptoe on water across a lake, they're like, I don't know, man. No, dog, that's that's quite a tale, the resurrection. Not to mention the fact that Jesus already told them it was gonna happen. So if you come in here as a skeptic, welcome. Welcome to a group of people, all of which were at one point skeptical. But God's word offers us something that we all desperately want. We want to be 90, having lived a good life with no fear when our eyes close in this world for the last time. We want to be able to get any diagnosis from a doctor. We want to be able to receive any news and be unshaken. We want to be a people who operate off of joy. That is not a Christian thing, that is a human thing. So, how can all of these people find this? Well, I think the writer of Hebrews in God's Word helps us. Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence, notice this foregone conclusion. The Bible doesn't say if you have confidence. The Bible doesn't say once you have confidence. It looks and it says, Christian, that's what brother means. Christian, since you have confidence. Now, let me just play devil's advocate for a minute here and ask, how is your confidence? Now, we talk about it in a number of different ways. We talk about self-confidence. We walk by the mirror. Are we happy? Are we sad? The older we get, you're never as happy as you used to be. That's not the kind of confidence that we're talking about here. But we can talk about the confidence we have in ourselves. We can talk about how we govern our thoughts. Scale of one to ten, how are you doing? How confident are you in governing your thoughts, your feelings, your motivations? How confident are you in life, the decisions you make, the relationships you have, the million miniature complexities that make life complicated and hard? How is your confidence one to ten when you think about facing death one day? And just so you know, there are people in the room who are navigating with that right now. Navigating it in themselves, in parents, in family, and friends. How is your confidence? God's word offers everybody in the room something we deeply want, but you do not find it where the world is going to tell you to find it. In fact, you don't find it anywhere, you find it with someone. And where is this? Well, this confidence is supposed to create something, something new and something living. Now, when we think of the Easter, those two words make sense. All right. When we think of the Easter, we think of baby chicks, right? We think of flowers coming up. Y'all are wearing like pastels and and all like this is what we think of. Some of y'all ran to tractor supply in the past week. And you're like, I'm gonna be a good parent. We're gonna have chicks. And now you're like, living things are hard. And uh, by the way, if nobody else in the room is that that's me right now. Hey, what's up? The kids love them until like day four, and then you're constantly changing the water and the food, and this living thing starts to smell not so great after a period of time. Like, that's what Easter is. It's living, but how on earth can this be new? How can the Bible tell us that we can find confidence in this new way that never dies and is constantly young and alive? We've been talking about this for 2000 years. How can this possibly be new? Well, you need to compare it to every age-old way. We have tried to find confidence. Any of you guys um have a dog that when you would let it out in the backyard, it always ran the same trail. And before you opened the door, you knew exactly what that dog was gonna do because it was the only dead grass. And no matter what dad did, he couldn't fix it because this dog was destined to destroy that one pet. Do you all know what I'm talking about? This is who you are as a human. As a human, we open the back door when we realize we have a sin problem. We want confidence, but the problem is we give ourselves a lot of reason not to have it. Numerous mistakes and failures. So, where must a Christian find confidence in a different way? Well, first you have to go to where we typically go to deal with our sin. These are the three, the three little trails that the dog runs as soon as you open the back door. And by the way, you're the one running into the backyard. How humanity deals with sin. Now, let me just define sin very quickly. It actually comes from an archery term. Uh we think of sin as like darkness and brokenness, and that's fine. It is, especially when you compare it to God. The word actually means off mark. That's what sin means. So some of us sin by missing the bullseye slightly, some of us miss by completely missing the entire thing and hitting some kid playing in the woods in the back. So, like, sin does have different consequences, but every sin is slightly or greatly missing the mark. And no matter how old you are, when you do this, you will find yourself in one of these three categories. All right, so what do we do when we sin? Well, our first thing, the first thing we try to do is we try to ignore it. We gave this our best shot in the garden. Adam and Eve sin, and what do they do? They run away and they hide. All right, we're not gonna look at God. Maybe God won't look at us. We'll let a week pass, we'll let two weeks pass. If I don't bring it up and they don't bring it up, we'll sweep it under the rug and we try to ignore it. We pretend it's not a problem, but this is tough for the conscience. It's tough for the conscience because sin and its consequences don't disappear just because we ignore it. If you try to ignore it, here is what you will find. You will find that if we say we have no sin, we're only deceiving ourselves. You're not deceiving your wife, okay? You're not deceiving your husband. If we say, ah, really, I don't have a major problem, you're not fooling your kids. And kids, you are not fooling your parents. You're not fooling your coworkers, you're not fooling the person that pulled up next to you when you decided to go through that yellow light because it was barely a yellow light and it didn't really quite count yet. There is no way that we can fool other people, even if we try to deceive ourselves. If we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us. We can't ignore it for long. So what do we do? We'll go try to outperform it. We'll try to break even. This is where the concept of karma comes. I've got good, I've got bad. I want to be basically even with one tilt higher on the good. I'm gonna try to dig my way through morality out of the bad things that I have done. Jesus tells us a story about this, and in this story are the greatest prayer ever prayed and the worst prayer ever prayed, in my humble opinion. He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves. That's the problem. That they were righteous. By the way, when you do that, you will treat others with contempt. Two men went up into the temple to pray. One a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus. There's no way for me to read this without doing it sarcastically, so just lean in. The worst prayer I think ever prayed. God, I thank you. I am not like other men. I'm not like extortioners, unjust adulterers. This guy's probably praying with his eyes open, so we know there's a problem. He's looking around the room. I'm not like that guy, I'm not like this guy, I'm not even like this tax collector over here. In fact, I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get. Welcome to the worst prayer ever prayed. Look at how great I am compared to the tax collector who is standing far off. He wouldn't even lift up his eyes to heaven. He beat his breast, saying, Short, sweet, true, life-changing, God, would you show mercy to me? All I can bring is the sin that I have made. Would you show me mercy? And in this teeny little prayer, quick time out on me being a preacher and the pastor and the guy doing that, this prayer is not only one of the greatest prayers in all of Scripture, it's not only one of the shortest prayers in all of Scripture, it's the most important prayer for you to pray. God be merciful to me, a sinner. I've tried to ignore it, I've tried to outperform it. I tell you, those who pray like this, they go down to their house justified, just as if I'd never sinned, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. Now, I called this karma. I called this trying to outperform. And you may say, Will, this seems an awful lot like religion. The guy's fasting, he's doing this, he's got this list of laws. But here's what I want you to notice different than religion. This guy is not comparing himself to his previous self. He's not comparing himself to a law, he's not comparing himself to a standard, he's comparing himself to the people around him. All he's worried about is finding a horse in the race of life that runs slightly slower than him so he can feel good about himself. This is what it means to outperform. When we look around and we say, Well, I'm doing better than that, and I'm doing greater than this, and I'm parenting better here, and I'm spending wiser here, and I'm eating healthier than them. So I'm good, right? I've made more good decisions than bad decisions. This is outperforming. And finally, if that doesn't work, we try to pay for it. Hebrews tells us what that looked like for years, and every priest would stand daily at his service, offering repeatedly these same sacrifices, which can never take away sin. Might I define exhaustion for you? Go do something every day. Do it repeatedly throughout the day. Do the same thing over and over and cause it to never work. Welcome to the exhaustion of religion. Try harder, be more impressive, be a little bit better than you were just the day before. Have you done that yet? How do you look compared to yourself five years ago? This is what religion calls for. It's what it asks. It puts you on a hamster wheel that never stops running, even if you do. This is what humanity dealt with until a full cross and an empty tomb. And by the way, all of us do all three of these. You can't even help it. Even believers get sucked back in to trying to do this. Uh, we were on spring break, our family was over the past week. We had an absolute blast. We went down to the beach. It was legit cold to be in the water. I don't know how many of you guys got a chance to get away. It was cold. And my son, who is 17 and has a little business, had saved up enough money to buy a jet ski, which I am living so vicariously through. Always wanted one. The fact that my son got one way before I ever did, I'm like, praise the Lord, this is awesome. I didn't pay for it. I'm in this moment realizing we might need to have insurance on it. But all that to say, we're at the beach and like just zipping around. He's giving rides to his brothers, he's given rides to his sister, and it's my turn to go for a ride. He pulls up like a boss right up next to the beach, and I'm getting ready, I'm zipping up, I'm ready to get on and go ride with my 17-year-old, and the thing won't start. Now, as a man with a machine in front of other men, all right, let's get this thing fixed up. You know, take the I got tools, we got we got a leatherman, let's make this thing work. And we just go to tinkering, man. We're going, everybody's looking, everybody's watching. We can't get the thing to start. Quite humiliating, honestly, to be put you're pushing a jet ski. It's no longer impressive, it's no longer fun. And a guy with his family in a little John boat with a five-horsepower motor pulls up and he offers to tug us over to the marina where the trailer is so that we can put it on there. We would have been stranded forever. You can't ignore the dead jet ski parked in front of everybody else, going, uh, you just can't ignore it. So, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna outperform it. You know what I'm gonna do? I'll pay for that. I'm gonna make this work. And I did the dumbest thing. Now, listen, as a man, you recognize that you are called to raise your hand for the hard job, right? My life, my wife has not killed a bug in 20 years, okay? That's my job. She doesn't take the trash out. My job, okay? Dead jet ski, my job, okay? Well, we've got to get it across the bay. It's gonna be about a 15-minute ride to get there. And I say, all right, Ellis, you hop in the boat, I'll just get on to jet ski because that's what I've always done whenever something had to be towed. Somebody's gotta steer, somebody's gotta get it off park, operate the brake. But the dumb guy didn't think about the fact that a jet ski doesn't have a brake. It also doesn't have a rudder, it doesn't do anything when it's not running. And I realized this 60 seconds into a 15-minute drive across a freezing cold bay where every three seconds, waves splash and completely soak my body. And three minutes in, like a maniac, I am laughing at myself. Because I want to ignore it and I can't. And when I can't ignore the problem, I'm gonna be responsible for it. I'll be the one who hops on the back. And when responsibility doesn't work, I'm gonna pay for it, I will take control. But I couldn't control a thing. This is life apart from Christ. You are raising your hand to get in a boat you are never designed to ride in. You can't control anything, you can't affect anything. All you're doing is raising your hand for suffering when Christ would welcome you into the boat in the front, and he will ride in the back, taking every wave of brokenness across the bow of humanity onto his own self so that you can arrive to the shore of eternity safe and dry with a smile on your face. Christian, this is what every day should look like for you. You're not in that boat anymore. If you are in this room and you are not a believer, if you're trying to ignore it or outperform it or pay for it, Christ is inviting you into the boat that he built with his own body and started with an empty tomb and guarantees it will make it all the way home. Where does a Christian get this kind of confidence from? By the blood of Jesus. That is where he paid for it, he purchased it. And when he did that, it opened a new and a living way. And he just invites you to live every day to newness every single day. And do you know what this is not? This is not ignoring it. It can't be ignoring it. Look at the difference in Christ and us, every priest daily. But when Christ offered for all time a single sacrifice, they were offering it repeatedly. His was oh, sorry, I was supposed to say all time first. It goes like this. And then here's the biggie. They're standing there every day, and Jesus goes and he sits down because it is finished. Do you see the difference? This is not ignoring it because Jesus refuses to ignore it. This is not denial, it's also not a balance sheet where you're trying to outperform it because Jesus actually does. He lives the life you never could have lived, and then he offers it to you. And this is not endless religious effort because Christ willingly pays for it, so that you do not have. To one sacrifice for all time and sat down. Why? Because where there is forgiveness of these sins, every little miss for one millimeter or for a mile, there is no longer any offering for sin. What are you trying to pay for? There's no longer an offering. What are you trying to perform for? There's no longer an offering. Why would you ignore it? He has already seen everything and loves you anyway. And he said, It is finished. This is where confidence comes from. The it is finished work of Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be a Christian, a Christian, if you want to know what it means to operate off of a living confidence every day, it means you stop trusting in yourself and you begin trusting in him. And I do mean for the salvation of your soul, but I also mean that complex relationship that you don't know what to do with. I mean everything. You stop trusting in yourself, you stop trusting him. If you don't know how to do that, pray. If you don't know how to do that, meet with me. If you don't know how to do that, open a Bible. It is right there for us to be able to trust in him. It's not by looking inward, it's by looking upward. It's not by building confidence through achievement, it's by receiving confidence through his. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again, to a hope that is alive every single day. Through what? The resurrection. That if a 90-year-old can laugh and a man filled with cancer can laugh, you can laugh too, because death has become a joke. And if your greatest enemy has become a joke, then your smaller enemies ought to as well. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. So what do we do with this? I want to close with this little three-verse piece. Every one of these things flows from what happens if we have confidence in the finished work of Christ. Let us draw near, let us hold fast and let us consider how to stir up one another. What does it mean for us to draw near? Well, notice this we're drawing near with a true heart and with full assurance. Most of the time, you don't see these things living together. They can't. How can I be completely honest about what is real of me and have full assurance? Those two things don't sit side by side. If you knew what I thought, if you knew what I said, if you knew what my life looked like when my kid was acting some kind of way, then I would not have full assurance of faith. If you knew the way that I did this business thing or that business thing, but notice, draw near with a heart that is completely honest and is also completely assured. Why? Because our hearts have been sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies have been washed with the pure water of Christ. Because Christ offers full payment for our sins, we can be honest and assured at the same time. That's why a young lady was able to sit in front of a large group of people this morning as the sun came up and said, My greatest fear is to speak in front of people. So God asked me to speak in front of you today. It's why you can share the greatest brokenness and darkness and still have full confidence. Confidence in God's love for you. Because it was never about your perfection. But not only do we draw near, we hold fast. We cling. We hold fast the confession of our hope. And we do this without wavering. How? Because you're faithful?

unknown 26:41

Ha!

Response Prayer And Next Steps

Will Hawk 26:42

No, you're not. And neither am I. But do you know who is? Jesus is faithful. And Jesus says, When you let go of me, I'm not letting go of you. My hand was pinned to the cross, but it didn't have to be. I would have held it there anyway. It isn't how hard you are clinging to Christ that makes your faith secure. It's how hard he is clinging to you. Tim Keller puts it this way: it's not the strength of your faith, but the object of your faith that will actually save you. Imagine two young boys running up an oak tree, one on the west and one on the east. One climbs out to a very thin, precarious branch with all the confidence in the world, and the other tiptoes onto the strongest branch on the tree. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. Put your faith in Christ, not in yourself. And finally, let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works. Not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day drawing near. This stirring up means two things. One is obvious to stir up. Don't let the good things that God has done in your life settle to the bottom. Bring it to the top. Speak about it often. Look for the opportunity. But it also means to spur, it means to smack the horse that doesn't want to move because it ought to. This is saying not only should we stir up the good things, but we should ask people to kick us in the rear occasionally when we're cruise controlling Christianity. And we ought to lovingly do the same for others. It looks like love. It looks like good works. It looks like meeting together. And it means doing this all the more. Let me just say one hard word, and I'm not trying to bust on anybody. Easter is a day when a lot of people show up to church for the first time or the first time in a long time. I can't give you enough of Jesus in the 75 minutes that we meet. It is humanly impossible. Let us, let us, let us. You may come to Christ alone, but the one who comes to Christ never remains alone. You cannot do this life by yourself. You are called into a family. A family who is looking forward to a day where they will stand next to him. At a table that has been prepared for them. I'd convinced myself when I was 13 years old that if my life went south and I never got a job and I lost everything, I would beg until I made enough money to get a Sam's Club membership. And the reason was I had just gone to Sam's for the first time and I had eaten my fill of samples. And I had gone back around a second time, and they just kept handing it to me. And I was convinced. I don't know why there are poor people on the streets anymore. All we need to do is get them a Sam's Club membership. That's how my 13-year-old brain worked. And we're set, guys. We have solved the poverty crisis. Just Sam's. Do you realize how many of us as Christians think we can operate off of the little sample-sized bits of Christ that we go when He wants to offer you a table of His mercies? He prepares a table before you, not only in heaven, He prepares a table before you in the presence of your enemies today. Eat. Be full on the goodness of Christ. And you will never do that at an empty table. Let us draw near. Why? Because Easter means the way to God is open. Let us hold fast. Because Easter means hope can stand steady because the one who promised is faithful. And let us stir up one another because we are never meant to do this alone. We respond in a few ways, and I'm going to invite you to that. I'm just going to leave this up for you to look at one of these three and wrestle with it. A couple of ways you can do that, grab one of the cards that's in front of you. It'll give you a chance to jot down a prayer. It'll give you a chance to meet with the pastor, receive prayer. There will be a number of us praying on the back porch if you want to join us. But take a moment, look over that card, prepare your heart. Which of these led us hit home for you today? Let's find confidence in Christ. And the band will lead us in worship.