We are back in Hebrews chapter 10 this morning.
So grab your Bible and open to Hebrews 10, or you can look at the screens as we make our way through.
It's quite a passage.
It's a lot to cover, to be honest, but I'm excited about it.
I'm ready to share it with you and be in it with you this morning.
I think it has so much for us.
We're going to jump in at verse 19.
Therefore, brothers, we say brothers and sisters, of course, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opens for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.
And since we have a great priest over the house of God.
Now that's a lot coming off of chapters and sermons for us about the new covenant, the covenant of grace, the sufficiency of Jesus as our final sacrifice and final priest.
So that's a lot to say, but all that content is there for you, leading up to these verses.
Verse 22.
So point number one to make sense of this is this In Christ we learn to walk shame free with bold joy.
Now, as soon as I say that, you're gonna like, I don't always feel like that.
And of course you don't, neither do I.
That's why this is what we learn to walk in as a person of faith.
The key word here is confidence in verse 19.
Now that word means boldness, courage, joy.
So this is about our secure standing with God, which gives us that.
It gives us that kind of courageous, bold joy to walk around in this world, to certainly have with God on a day in and day out basis, but then also to walk in that identity on just like a Tuesday morning or a Friday night.
Tuesday night, actually, I I went and I watched my daughter cheer at a seventh grade boys' basketball game in the old gym at the old Marietta High School.
I don't know if you've ever been in that gym.
And that gym is like every gym I grew up in as like a 12-year-old seventh-grade boy.
And I I walked in, and it's just like every time I walk in that gym, it's just like all the memories flood back.
I I love old gyms.
Like I love the smell, I love the sounds.
I mean, I just sit there and I just relive everything.
And what I would do is on Friday nights, I would watch my highlight reel that I'd put together of Larry Bird, because that was my guy.
Here's what Larry Bird looked like.
Now I kind of grew up to kind of have his amazing body and skin tone, right?
Like I ended up with that amazing physique there.
Um, but I didn't learn to shoot like him, but but I thought I did.
I watched all those clips on Friday night, and I would get to the gym on Saturday morning.
I walked around, strutted around that gym like I owned it.
Confident, courage, bold joy.
And half the time it worked.
Like I walked, played the game, hit a few threes, and after the game, I'm still walking around.
Bold, confident joy.
And you knew what happened there.
You know what happened the other half of the time.
I missed the shots.
And all the confidence is gone.
There's no joy, there's no boldness, there's no courage, right?
Not until the next game, and I watch my next highlight of Larry Bird, right?
Like you know that.
This is how the world works, right?
It works for a while.
It works while you maintain it.
So you can have confidence while you maintain it.
Or while you're looking forward to it, you project onto it until it lets you down.
It lets me down.
It's just how it works.
But the context of this passage, the promise it gives to us, the context here would have been to the Roman Empire.
Only if people were walking around with this amount of confidence in the Roman Empire, would have been a citizen of the Roman Empire.
A free citizen.
They wouldn't have been able to walk around with their head up without shame or without fear.
And Roman society's slaves did not have this sort of confidence to live like this.
Only free members in a household.
And what this passage is saying to us, to anybody who is in Jesus, is you're a free member in the household, in the house of God.
What a promise this is to us, and at the same time, we know we don't always feel like this, right?
So this is one of those already but not yet.
Like we already have this, and yet we're also learning what it is that we have in Jesus in its fullness.
That's what we're growing in.
Verse 22 says this let us draw near with a true, true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.
In the old covenant, only a high priest could go into the very presence of God.
Everybody else stood outside, scared for him.
Like this guy's going into the holiness of God and the justice of God, and he's carrying a sacrifice to make a sacrifice on behalf of himself and for the people.
And they are scared to death for him.
Is he gonna come back out?
Is this sacrifice gonna be enough?
And this verse 22 is stepping into that scene, into that posture of fear, to say, Jesus is the final sacrifice, and he's more than enough.
He is the grace of God to us.
And so our posture can change.
When we're in Jesus, we don't have to live afraid of how God feels about us day in and day out.
Our posture with God and in this world can transform our growth in grace, and what the Holy Spirit wants to be doing in us day in and day out is to be transforming us from postures of fear to postures of confidence.
And that's not arrogance, but it's but it's a courage, it's a joy, it's a boldness.
Verse 23.
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.
So that's how we can do this, for he who has promised is faithful, and 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, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
So point number two is this.
As the beloved, we are called into practices of grace.
Verse 23 builds off of 22 and then reiterates at the end of 23, we're doing all this because he's faithful.
So there's some lovely applications here for us.
They're just laid out for us, like a buffet.
Like we don't have to work to get them.
They're just super, super clear for our lives.
And here they are.
Number one is this because he is faithful, hold fast the confession of our hope.
That's verse 23.
See, we're a confessional people.
Not only do we live confessionally in terms of we're going to confess our sin and our mistakes and our failures to God, and as it's a healthy thing, the grace of God, we get to do that freely in his kindness.
He draws us into that process, but we're also confessional people in that we get to confess that which is true.
Theologian David Wells, he said it this way: confession is the watchboard by which the church is known.
Without this knowledge, it is bereft of what defines the church as the people of God, bereft of what of the means of belief, worship, sustenance, proclamation, and service.
Confession must be at the center of every theology that wants to be seen as the knowledge of God.
A knowledge given in and for the people of God.
Now, what in the world, what in the world does that mean for you, right?
Well, that means how do you know how God feels about you?
Like on just like a Wednesday afternoon when you're not feeling good about yourself, or on a on a Saturday morning when you're not feeling good about something you said or did.
Like, how do you know?
I I wake up every morning, this is my normal daily process.
I wake up every morning knowing the gospel.
The morning's not the problem for me.
I wake up, I'm in the grace of God, I'm fully accepted, you know, Jesus is fully sufficient, and I can conquer the world in the morning, by the way.
I mean, these two things are true for me in the morning.
Fully accepted, fully loved, everything's good.
I'm at peace with the Lord and with the world, and I can conquer the world, I can do great things.
All this is true until about 1.30 in the afternoon.
And at 1.30, everything falls apart.
I fall apart, I start hearing things from my heart, telling me stories, shame can come up, I can feel condemnation, I question everything from like 1.30 to bedtime, right?
Then from 1.30 to bedtime, I better be a confessional person.
Because I'm gonna have a lot of moodiness, a lot of emotional volatility.
And that's why I have to be a confessional person.
And we need to be confessional people.
Our subjectivity and moodiness is rooted in objective confession of the gospel.
This is why we preach the gospel to ourselves over and over and over again.
Number two, because he is faithful, let us encourage each other toward love and goodness.
Because encouragement is powerful.
Tomorrow we're gonna celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.
This week.
I just got curious.
You keep seeing clips of him preaching, right?
Like he's just over and over clips of him preaching, or little, you know, you see a quote of a sermon and a speech.
I'm like, how many times did he do this?
And so during those crucial years of protesting for civil rights for African Americans, he preached around 450 times a year.
I won't let you calculate how many times I preach a year, because I mean that comparison of how many times I'm preaching a year, probably like 45, 450 times a year.
He preached around 2,500 messages.
And he did all of that at that pace to a people being beat up and beaten down wrongfully to tell them and encourage them to do the right thing in the right way.
And he just kept doing it over and over and over again.
Why?
Because encouragement's powerful.
He just needed to keep saying it to these people that we gotta do the right thing in the right way.
And he just kept encouraging them.
Number three.
Because he is faithful, continue to meet together as a church family.
That's verse 25.
Well, that's a tricky one, isn't it?
Over the course of the last year.
Maybe you're still online.
We read that, you're like, uh-oh, there, you know, what does that mean?
For I mean, only 50% of our church has returned in person.
Now we're not gonna shame everybody who has not returned, and we're also not gonna scare them back into church.
None of that will be helpful.
We're gonna patiently walk with everybody to return to church in time.
But we're not gonna dismiss verse 25.
The goodness verse 25 has for us.
It's not a scare tactic, it's a promise of grace, it's a practice of grace for us to meet together.
It's a vital part of my faith journey and your faith journey for us to be in a community, a gospel community that helps your soul grow and gives you rest, declares and dispenses forgiveness over you on a weekly basis.
Paul Tripp writes about the goodness of Christian community.
Here's what he writes Christian community doesn't allow me to parade my righteousness.
If I'm in a healthy community where honesty and grace are prioritarized, I won't be able to show off how good I am.
I'll have my sinful and selfish heart exposed.
And I'll have to admit to who I really am.
Brothers and sisters, don't argue for your independence.
There's no safer place than to be a helpless child in the arms of the God of the universe.
I would encourage you to immerse yourself in an intentionally intrusive, Christ-centered, grace-driven, and redemptive community.
You see, I need to hear, and you need to hear, we need to hear over and over again.
We're not independent people.
That's not a safe place to live.
We actually need to come face to face over and over again with our selfishness and our sin.
That's a healthy process, especially in a gospel community that is loving you in that, right?
So, like in the same moment, you are humbled and you're loved.
And that's that's the healthy part of the Christian life and Christian community.
And we need that.
And we need to meet together to have that going on in our lives over and over and over again.
The last section of this chapter, Hebrews 10, verses 26 through the end of the chapter, is all the way down to 39.
It's a bit of a read here.
I'm just going to warn you.
And here's what's going to happen.
This is a warning passage here that we're moving into, this part of the passage.
You're going to feel it as I read, right?
Like you're going to actually feel this warning hit you.
And then as we progress through it, finally you're going to see where the author takes us.
And I'm going to read it all at one time.
Here we go.
For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
Anyone who set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses.
How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, who has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified and has outraged the Spirit of grace?
For we know him who said, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, and again the Lord will judge his people.
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
But recall the former days when after you were enlightened you endured a hard struggle with suffering, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated.
For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.
Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.
For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised, for yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay, but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.
But we are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.
So point number three is this as the beloved, we are sobered by the warning, but not afraid of it.
The key to the warning in this passage is there at the beginning.
And it's about some willful, willful sinning after coming to the knowledge of the truth about Jesus.
Now, if we take verse 26 as an absolute, we're all in trouble.
Like all of us, none of us have hope of heaven if we take verse 26 as an absolute.
Because we all willfully sin after knowing the knowledge of Jesus for us.
So it has to mean something else.
And so it seems like that perhaps some specific sin is thought of going on here, and then many think that that would be a sin called the blasphemy of the Spirit, and then some would say, well, that could be defined as Jesus claiming Jesus to be the devil, or you're not in need of Jesus.
That all kind of feels still religious to me and out of touch.
So I've just kind of kept like processing it.
And for me, I'm sort of like pondering if this is someone who knows of Jesus as God's son, died on the cross, I get the story.
Oh, I need forgiveness.
Yeah, that's the story.
But you know what?
No thanks.
I don't really need it.
I'll continue to be my own savior.
And in a way, that's unforgivable.
Because they don't even desire forgiveness.
Now, I don't have all that worked out.
I'll just go ahead and say, like, I don't have all that worked out, and my theology of grace, where I actually believe the sufficiency of Jesus is even more than enough for my unbelief.
I definitely don't have all that matched up.
I don't have it all worked out.
So some of this I have to file into the mystery of God.
But it's here for us to wrestle with.
It's here.
So it's sobering.
But the passage doesn't stop in the warning.
The writer takes us somewhere, doesn't he?
And you heard it and you felt it by the end of the end of the reading, verse 39.
But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.
I love this image of preserve.
My first thought was jellies, like you know, like a jelly, like a preserve.
And I was like, well, I don't connect a lot with jellies in terms of giving like a really good sermon illustration.
So the second thought I went to is National Park.
So that was my next thought.
Because I'm a national park nerd, I'm in the community.
I take the magazine.
There is a community, and I'm in it.
If anybody else, we can talk later because we're part of the same community.
I visited Yellowstone National Park a few years ago.
Here's a picture of me and my buddies.
We went out there and we just explored.
We were like explorers.
I mean, we were all over this place.
I mean, it's 2,500, no, 3,500 square miles.
It's larger than Rhode Island, Delaware put together.
Maybe you've been there.
It's huge.
I mean, it's hard to cover all of it, even on we.
There's hot springs, there's geysers, there's mud pots, there's mountains, there's valleys, there's canyons, there's waterfalls, there's rivers.
I mean, there's everything.
It's incredible.
It's amazing.
In 1872, our country, our government saw this land.
And they made a decision to preserve it and make it.
This is the first, the world's first national park.
Meaning they held it safe.
Right?
That's what it means to preserve, to be held safe.
Now, if you go out to Yellowstone and you drive out the western entrance, you're gonna go into West Yellowstone.
It's the junkiest little town you've ever seen in your entire life.
It's amazing to go from the preservation of the beauty of that land, and in a 10-minute drive, you're in this junky town.
But inside, inside, that land is held safe.
What an image for our souls when it comes in Hebrews 10 and coming into this verse 39 by the end of this chapter.
For us as followers of Jesus.
This is the image for us.
The world can soar all around us.
There can be a warning for people who don't follow Jesus.
Our own hearts can tell us false stories and condemnation, but we are a preserved people in Jesus.
We are held safe.
And growing in that safety that we know in Jesus is about us growing in a shame-free, bold, courageous joy.
Let's pray together.
God, thank you for the work of Jesus that is more than enough for us.
Forgive us for all the ways that we try to add to it.
Instead of live in response to it.
Help us to rest and root even more into how sufficient Jesus is for us.
Amen.