Discipleship; Hebrews 12:1-2 | Sam Rapp

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

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Transcript

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Well, I have spent almost uh every summer of my life going to a little beach town on the shore of Connecticut called Old Saybrook. For the first decade of my life, we would we would drive there. Uh, and here's a what the drive looks like on Apple Maps. Uh maybe you are in here and you have a commute to work. Uh some of you work from home, some of you drive to Atlanta. What's so crazy to me is that that drive became normal to me. Uh like it was something that my my body would be used to, and like we'd pack our stuff up, we'd pile into my mom's Volvo, we would know we had 15 hours ahead of us before stops. Um, and we used to do it in one day, which was so crazy. We'd leave at like 5 a.m. and get there 11, 12 uh a.m. Uh it was crazy. And I as I've been reflecting on this drive, I'm not sure if there's anything in the world now to get me in a car for 15 hours. I was like reflecting on it a lot this past week. I was like, okay, Super Bowl tickets, maybe a tea time at Augusta, maybe like I there's a it's a short list. And the reality is this little beach town, everything closes at 8 p.m. Uh, there's nothing special about it. There's a couple of stoplights. It's become my favorite place in the whole world. And so it got me reflecting on tonight, and so kind of what I want to open with is this that the quality of the prize empowers the perseverance of the journey. We live in a day where anything that matters or anything that's worth anything should come immediately, right? Like if Grace and I order DoorDash and the delivery time gets delayed, or the driver misses our house, which for some reason happens all the time, even though we have a tiny little house, it's you'd think they'd find it. Or La Priya is taking too long, right? Uh I get annoyed. Right? If I'm wanting to go visit Grace at Tuesday's coffee shop, and there's a line out the door, I'm not gonna wait. And so I just walk by and give her a little wave because uh it's not worth it to me. Uh and so with with chat and with you are worth it to me. That's awesome. Uh and now, like, you know, with with chat and Claude uh increasing, like, we have crazy access to coding and research and work and life help that we've never had before with a really quick prompt and like the world is in front of us. Our culture will rewards speed, right? It rewards fast results. Even when I take our dog Wally on a walk, I get annoyed if he's not moving at my pace. When he's distracted or wants to smell something. So the question I want to pose for tonight as we dig in is what does it look like to be a lifelong follower of Jesus? Really simple. What does it look like to be a lifelong follower of Jesus? Many, if not all of us, have uh in this room know someone who has drifted from the faith and no longer identifies as a Christian. Peterson, in the book, he comments on it in this first chapter. He says, We assume that if anything can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by 30-second commercials. Our sense of reality has been flattened by 30-page abridgments. It's not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel. It is terrifically difficult to sustain that interest. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate. So, how do we persevere for the long haul? Right? How do we uh what do we do when our childhood faith no longer works like it used to? How do we follow Jesus when reading the Bible or prayer or fasting or listening to worship music makes us cringe in ways that it didn't used to? Right? So, our our teaching tonight is gonna have three movements as we wrestle with this question. They all start with I, uh, because I'm a pastor. So it's identity, integration, and inheritance. So the first movement is identity. So what we're wrestling with is in this is, hey, like, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? If we are a follower of Jesus, how does the Bible describe us? Who who are we? What is our identity? Right? If we were to think and kind of pope the oppose the culture, maybe things would come up like, are we just simply rule followers? Are we, is a Christian simply someone who avoids certain morally bad things and pursues morally good things? If not that, if if not those things, are Christians summarized as morally conservative people in the Bible Belt? Or are they described as morally liberal people who pursue social justice? I think all of these things are valid. Well, the Bible generally gives two designations for people of faith disciple and pilgrim. So, first, disciple. When you think of the word disciple, what comes to mind for you? When I was thinking through it this week, the first things that came to my mind were like a follower of Jesus, someone who maybe is like active in their faith, who's taking it seriously. And it's easy now, 2,000 years into Christian church history, to become really familiar with a word that we don't really use in other spheres, right? Like we don't use the word disciple very often outside of Christianity. So here's an example of Jesus using the word disciple. This is Matthew 10, 24. He says, a disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. So the question we need to ask as we read this text is when Jesus uses this word, what does he mean? For a first century Jewish person hearing the word, what would they have understood the word disciple to be? One of the big shifts after the Enlightenment was that education changed a lot. Today, students sit in rows, kind of like we are tonight. They listen to a teacher tell them things, and then the students go study, and then they come back, take the test, hoping that they studied well, right? And honestly, I think if we're honest, church can feel similar, can't it? Right? We come on Sunday, we show up to Tuesday night like this, we listen to information. We want to make sure we learn everything we can so that maybe our life will improve in these particular ways as time goes on. And what's super interesting is that the word Jesus used for disciple here had a lot of connotations that we would think, right? Like learner or pupil. But a huge difference between the way we think about discipleship and how someone in the first century thinks about it is that learning and being a pupil was not like information classroom-based. It was more relationship and lifestyle-based. So a disciple in the first century wouldn't be seeking out information just for information's sake. They would be seeking out a lifestyle. They'd be looking for a better way to live. One of my favorite stories in the last 20 years is about uh this actor named Daniel Day Lewis. I think we have a picture of him. There's our boy, Daniel Day. Uh he's one of the great actors of our lifetime. Uh about 25 years ago, 30 years ago, he left the glamour of Hollywood to go move to Florence, Italy to become a master shoemaker, uh, as one would. And he would uh he went to this guy named Stefano Bemer. I don't know if that's how you pronounce his name. There's our boy, Stefano. Um he at the time was like the Michael Jordan of shoemaking in Italy. So the way that Daniel Day Lewis learned the art of shoemaking, by the way, his shoes today sell for like five grand, like crazy uh next level. But the way Daniel Day learned how to be a master shoemaker was not by sitting in a classroom and taking notes, it was by sitting under his master every single day, not just seeing the way that he did it, but thinking about the way that he thinks about it, looking at all the different nooks and crannies of leathers, colors, mixing, matching, hammering, all of it. It was an apprenticeship in the purest sense of the word, where Daniel Day Lewis literally changed his life and organized his life so that he would become like Stefano Bemer in shoemaking. And this is a little bit like what Jesus was calling the disciples into. It wasn't like, hey, come sit in rows and learn from me. Not just new information, though, Jesus did teach things. But it was, come live under me as your rabbi and become like me. The rabbi disciple relationship in the first century was super common and very like well understood. But there's two major details that made Jesus a different rabbi than the ones of the day. So one is he seeks out his disciples. So in the first century, typically it was like the super religious elite who would be they'd be set apart to go search for a rabbi to apprentice under. And Jesus completely flipped that expectation on his head. He went to fishermen, to a tax collector, and he invited them. And not only that, the other six or eight disciples, they had jobs so unimpressive that the Bible didn't even mention them, right? None of these guys were equipped or trained to be living with a rabbi. And so what we can glean from that is that a disciple of Jesus Christ is not this religious elite. It's someone who has been invited by the King of Kings to sit under him and become like him. And then the second thing that makes Jesus different is that the center of his teaching is himself. Most rabbis in the first century would have taught the Old Testament law to their disciples. So if you think about the Gospels in the New Testament, the Pharisees are a great example of this. They had found that their God had become the law. And so they uh were, their goal was to create a bunch of disciples that were made in the image of that, who followed these Pharisees into legalism. That's what it kind of ended up looking like. And Jesus shows up then. He says things like this in John 14. He says, In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? Then if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going. Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know the way where you are going. How can we know the way? And Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. So we see here a lot of things, but we see one big one is that the way is not a set of religious norms. It's not a diet, it's not mysterious spiritualism. It is through the person of Jesus Christ. In the first century, a common saying amongst religious people would be, May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi. And the image here is that you're walking so closely behind your rabbi on those dusty roads that his dust kind of gets on you. So that's the invitation of Jesus for you. Not a set of rules, but a person to follow closely behind. So that's kind of disciple. And now the second one is pilgrim. This idea flows really well off of the idea of disciple, doesn't it? A pilgrim is someone who is who is going somewhere. We'll cover this one a good bit quicker, but I want to read again the passage that Grace read for us earlier. The writer of Hebrews says, Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. So the ideas that we get from disciple and pilgrim is essentially this: that we're invited to walk closely with Jesus, our rabbi and our Lord, and to become like him as we journey to our heavenly home. One of the central things of a pilgrim is that they're not quite home yet. And yes, we live in homes in Marietta and surrounding, but we have a heavenly home that we are journeying towards. And I love what John Mark Homer says by this. He says, for those of us who desire to follow Jesus, here is the reality we must turn and face. If we are not being intentionally formed by Jesus himself, then it's highly likely we are being unintentionally formed by someone or something else. So, how do we intentionally form our lives so that we are formed by Jesus? So that brings us to our second movement: integration. How do we integrate our identity as a disciple, a pilgrim, a follower of Jesus into our present reality? So, with that, the Psalms of Ascent and our book for this fall sets us up really well. So these 15 Psalms, Psalm 1 again, 120 to 134, they were sung by the people of God, the Israelites, as they would journey up the mountain to Jerusalem. So three times a year, the people who were able would travel to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem for these people was where God was. So if you wanted to go be in the presence of God in the purest sense, you go to Jerusalem. And what's so cool about these psalms and what's happening is twofold, is they both are literally ascending up the hill. And as they're doing that, it's like they're spiritually ascending into the presence of the Lord. So they would go to Jerusalem singing these Psalms three times a year for three distinct feasts. And these three feasts speak very specifically to us now in Christ. So the first is the spring feast. There's the peace of uh the feast of Passover. And the summary of the Feast of Passover is that salvation is accomplished. So even even non-Christians know about Easter in our day, right? Easter bunny, candy, eggs. And for the Christian, Easter bunny is our Super Bowl. Many people, if they go to church once or twice a year, they're gonna get there on Easter, right? So why is it our Super Bowl? Well, it's the day that the Lord Jesus Christ, after he had on Good Friday, received the wrath and justice of God for sin. He rose from the grave. And when he rose from the grave, it was as if he was handing the keys to death in Hades to his father. So the Feast of Passover was the Super Bowl for the Old Testament believer. It was their Easter Sunday. It was the moment of history where they would look back on and say, look at how God delivered us. Look at how God had brought us out of the hand of our oppressor. So, for context, the Israelites were in brutal slavery under Pharaoh, and they were crying out to God. And Pharaoh was not budging, and so God sent ten plagues on Pharaoh. And the tenth and final plague was a really brutal one. This is Exodus twelve. God says, For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast, and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments. I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. So the Israelites listened to this hard and disorienting command, and they got out. They would go on to cross the sea, to be delivered from the hand of their oppressors, to be set free to follow the Lord. So as they were ascending the hill to Jerusalem at this feast, they would be reflecting on that moment in their in their story. So one of the Psalms, Psalm 124, which we'll hit on in a few weeks, they reflect on this. So look at this. They're singing, If if it had not been the Lord who was on our side. Let Israel now say, if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, as they're just thinking about this moment in their story. So if I can encourage us tonight, we too have been delivered from our oppressor. If we are in Christ, we no longer are under the dominion of death and Satan. So I would encourage y'all to spend your days reflecting on that. Yeah, life is hard. Yes, we struggle, but we're not under a master anymore. We're under a new one, Jesus. Second feast was in the summertime. It was called the Feast of Pentecost. And in this one, they're reflecting on the fact that their identity had been defined. And this feast had two meanings that kind of adapted over time. So the first meaning is that in the Torah, Pentecost was primarily a harvest festival celebrated 50 days after Passover. That's where we get the penta from. And so it marked the end of the barley harvest, the beginning of the wheat harvest. So the Israelites at this feast they would bring the first fruits of their big harvest to God as an act of thanksgiving and dependence. Now the second meaning is the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, where they received the Ten Commandments, and this is the moment where God was setting them apart as his holy people. So as the people ascended to the hill again in the summertime for the feast, they would be remembering and reflecting that they had been given a new identity, right? As God's people. This is what we see in Acts 2. When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled this entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them other utterance. So I want to think for a moment with y'all about the feast of Pentecost in the Old Testament in the relation to Pentecost in Acts 2. We have a we'll pull up a slide for y'all. So we see at Mount Sinai when the law is given. Law is written on stone. And then you see it in Pentecost on the right side in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit writes God's law on our hearts. And then in the next one, Israel is formed as God's covenant people. We see in Acts 2, the church is formed as God's new covenant people. The next we see first fruits of harvest are offered to God, and then in Acts 2, first fruits of the worldwide harvest are gathered into Christ as the church is born. And then the last one, maybe my favorite, is at the law, God's presence descended on Mount Sinai, but in Pentecost, God's presence descended on us to this day. What's so interesting, um, as y'all will even reflect, I feel like in our in our twenties and thirties, we are expected to create and establish an identity, are we? And then we're then expected to live in service to that identity in some sense. Maybe it's to be successful, maybe it's a specific career, specific calling, specific friend groups. Maybe it's to be well liked, whatever it might be. Um we see Christ has invited us into an identity that's unchanging. So I'd love to encourage you all. Remember that salvation has been accomplished on your behalf, and you've been called to a new identity as a unified person in Christ. And now, third, we see our last feast, the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths. Uh, and this is talking about preservation, to be assured. And so this uh this was the final feast of the year, it was the big one. Uh, this was the big feast. It was, they would ascend the holy hill around September, October. Um, and this feast would last seven days, and then on the eighth day, they'd have a big assembly, like a kind of a church service. And this feast had three primary meanings for the people. One was it was when they remembered their wilderness wanderings. Right? So these people would, they would have lived in full-on houses, but they would show up to this feast and they would make like tents. It was like it was like their camping. And as they would do that, they were embodying what it was like before they got to the promised land. So they're thinking about the season of their life where they lived in full dependence on God. He had to be their full supplier. And then the second one is celebrating God's provision. Right? The people would arrive to Jerusalem with the biggest harvest of the year. They would come with their grain, their grapes, their wine, their olives, and they would feast, thanking God for the sun, for the rain, for the growing of their crops again. And it would remind them, and it reminds us, that ultimately we're not really in control of anything. Yes, we have gifts, yes, we work hard, yes, we make our money. But at the end of the day, we're reminded often that every good and perfect gift is from above. And so that's the second thing it reminds us of. The last thing is it would they would celebrate God's presence. Because the prize of the Exodus was not just that they had been freed from Pharaoh, or that they were going to the promised land, or that they had received manna in the wilderness. The gift and the prize of the Exodus was God Himself with them. And we too have a God who dwells in our midst, a God who became man, who died for the sake of those who chose other gods, and a God who by the Holy Spirit dwells in you and empowers you. So now this these three feasts lead us to our last, our third movement, which is inheritance, which I just want to wrestle with where are we going? Right? What's our prize? What's the what's this all for? There's an uh a long time phrase in the church people have said along a lot, which is you become what you behold.

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You become what you behold. So, what that phrase is getting at is that whatever our core motivation is, whatever our core hopes are, what essentially what we worship is going to slowly form us into its Image. So if our core goal and motivation in our life is success, for example, career success, we're going to organize our life in a way so that that goal is met and everything else revolves around it. Or maybe the goal is to be a good person, which is a great thing to want to be. We will likely live anxiously hoping we're doing a good enough job. Maybe when we let somebody down, it's going to crush us. Or when we fall short of the moral expectation we have on ourselves, we'll be devastated. So this fall, as we journey with the ancient people, as we look at these Psalms, as we as we ascend the hill with them, we're going to be invited to ponder our own spiritual journeys together. We're going to be invited to see what idols are directing our hearts, what other gods we place before the Lord. We're going to have space to unearth some of these things and then replace them with worship of the God who loves us. Now you might be asking, like, hey, what do the Psalms of Ascent, what do these feasts have anything to do with me and Marietta in 2026? Well, I love what Tim Keller says. It's one of my favorite quotes ever. He says, if you stopped an Israelite in the desert of Sinai and asked, what are you doing and where are you going? He would have said, I was an alien in a foreign land under the penalty of death. But I took shelter under the blood of the Lamb and was saved. Now I've been brought out of slavery, and even though I am in a wilderness, God is with me and He's taking me to the promised land. And maybe you hear that quote and you're thinking, that sounds a lot like Christianity, and you're right. So as we close, as we're singing a few more songs, um I would just invite you as we start this journey together, as we ascend the holy hill with the Israelites, I'll just invite you to take inventory tonight. Think about hey, where in my life have good things ascended into things of worship? Right? What what aspirations in our lives have ascended to a place of idol? We're gonna get distracted often by these other paths, as the Israelites would. And there's a lot of grace waiting for us at the cross. One of my favorite things my pastor ever said in college was there's more grace in Jesus than sin in you. Which is good news. I want to read Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of the Hebrews 12 passage to close for us. So he writes this Do you see what this means? All these pioneers who blaze the way, all these veterans cheering us on, it means we'd better get on with it. Strip down, start running, and never quit. No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins, keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we're in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed. That exhilarating finish in, and with God, he could put up with anything along the way. Cross, shame, whatever. And now he's there in the place of honor, right alongside God. So whenever you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls. Let's pray. Father, um, the gospel is so joyful. I'm just picturing a couple million Israelites singing together as they ascended the holy hill to Jerusalem, as they thought about their salvation story in the Exodus, as they thought about Mount Sinai, where even as they're getting the law, they go worship a golden calf. As they think about the promise of the promised land to come, Lord, just we see that we are in such a similar place. That as we too, with millions of other Christians around the world, are journeying home, trying to follow Jesus in this strange new world, Lord, I just thank you that you meet us. Um, Lord, we just we bless the rest of this time. We ask that as we sing for a little bit longer and go our different ways this week, Lord, that you would bring to mind things that you want for us from tonight. Pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.