Hebrews 4:16
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
If you were to look at my YouTube account, you will see that in the history of that account, I have clicked the like icon exactly one time. It was three summers ago, and Lindsay and I had decided we were going to upgrade our basement, so we stripped out the old carpet, and we started to lay luxury vinyl planks. We set a plumb line. We started clicking the planks together. was going well for about the first three rows, and then when we got to the fourth row, things started to go wrong. As I banged the fourth plank in, it would open up a gap in the first row, and this was immensely frustrating. And so I restarted a few times. I picked a few different starting points, but each time the same thing happened. Four rows in, it was a disaster. And so as I moved through the stages of frustration and bewilderment and despair and all the other things, Lindsay did what the rational, modern DIY person does, and that's Google the problem, right?
And she came across the video, Fail-Proof Guide for Any Size Vinyl Plank Installation, DIY Friendly, on the channel, appropriately titled, so that's how you do that. Now, if any of you are going to lay luxury vinyl planks, the secret is that the first row has to be anchored to the floor. So whether it's concrete or wood, you have to drill screws through into the floor so it can't move, and you're good from there. Now, my problem on that day was not that I did not have any help.
I had willing helpers. I had my family. I had a couple of dear brothers from home group who were there alongside of us. I had plenty of help, but the reason that I failed is because I needed a particular kind of help. I needed somebody with knowledge and expertise of having completed that job so that that person could help guide me through the end of the project. And so tonight we're going to think about spiritual help. What is the kind of help that we need and where do we get it? And that comes to us from the book of Hebrews chapter 4.
The assigned verse is verse 16. We're going to look at 14 through 16 just to get some context. So I'm going to read that. If you want to look at the Pew Bible, it starts on page 1003. He says, Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Now, tonight I hope to convince you that Jesus is the high priest that we need, so ask for his help. And we're going to think about that in four things. What is a high priest? Why do we need one? Why is Jesus the one that we need? And how does he help us? So first, what is a high priest? Simply put, the high priest's job is mediation. He's somebody who goes between two parties. He goes between the people and God. He represents God to the people, and he represents the people before God.
When God gave Moses the instructions about the tabernacle, the place where God dwelled, represented his dwelling, he gave elaborate instructions about the way that that place was to be decorated, with royal purple, with gold, with all of that. And the people couldn't go in. They didn't see that. Only the priests had access to that space. But the priest himself also wore those colors. He was adorned with purple and gold. And so what the people could see of God was what the priest wore when he appeared before him, before the people.
Part of the priest's garments were stones that had the names of the tribes on his shoulders that he would bear before God, the names of the tribes on his heart, on his breastplate that he would bear before God. And so he went before God's presence on behalf of the people representing the nation. And so that's what the high priest's job was, to represent God to the people and to represent the people before God. Why do we need a high priest? Well, the simple answer is because of sin. Ever since the garden where Adam and Eve rebelled against God, humankind continues to fall short of God's holy standard.
We are born rejecting God, seeking our own way. We seek independence from him. We resist his authority. We question his character. And because of that, we are prohibited from his presence and we deserve his judgment. And that's what the sacrificial system of the Old Testament was all about. It was about a way for an unholy people to dwell with a holy God. So the high priest, his job was to offer sacrifices. The people would provide an animal and kill it. The priest would take that animal, parts of the animal, offer it before God, and that would count as that sin being dealt with, God forgiving the person's sin.
And the priest would offer assurance and forgiveness on behalf of God to the person who made the sacrifice to show that it worked. Guilt had been removed. Sin had been dealt with. That was the way the system worked. So why is Jesus the high priest that we need? And that brings us into verse 15. We're going to think about how Jesus is both sympathetic and sinless. So Jesus is sympathetic as a high priest. and this is a statement about his full humanity, the fact that he is fully human. He understands our experience. Even though he is exalted, he's the one and only Son of God. The first three chapters really unpack that, the glory and the beauty of Jesus as the Son of God, greater than angels, and yet he's also a human. He took on flesh to relate to us as a high priest, and it's essential for him in order to represent us, in order to represent us before God. He had to be one of us. And specifically the author says that he's like us in weakness. So he says negatively
he's not unable to sympathize, which means positively he is able to sympathize. He does understand us. Now when we say that, when I say that, when you hear at first that Jesus understands us, he gets us, that's the Jesus that I think we're tempted to think about, that he gets us, Jesus. Are you down and out? Are you betrayed? Are you misunderstood, homeless, rejected, sad. Well, Jesus was too. And he'll sit next to you and put his arm around you and say, man, isn't life hard? Now, I'm not saying that Jesus is not kind and compassionate and wouldn't want to relate to you, but I don't think that's what the author is getting at at all in Hebrews 4. He explains further that Jesus is like us in weakness because he was tempted in every way as we are. James says that temptation, it happens when each one is lured and enticed by his own desires. And then desire conceived gives birth to sin. So we need to stop right there and realize
that temptation and sin are not the same thing. Temptation is something that happens before sin. Temptation leads to sin, but temptation is not sin. And so temptation is any kind of desire that's contrary to God's way. So that's the kind of weakness that Jesus experienced. It's theological in nature. It's the vulnerability of the human condition and the pressure to doubt God. And so what Jesus suffered was this whole life tension of continued obedience to God, continued pressure to give in, to find another way, to do something else, but to resist that temptation and to continue to persevere in believing in God.
And last week, Greg helped us to think about Jesus' wilderness temptation and how it sort of reflects all of the core temptation that humans face going all the way back to the garden. How Satan attacked us in three ways. Will we trust God's provision? Will we obey God's prescriptions? Will we honor God's providence? And Jesus understands us because he faced that squarely in the wilderness, but really for the whole course of his life until he died on the cross. Jesus understands the pressure of having to obey and persevere in trusting God.
So he sympathizes with us, but Jesus is sinless. So he did all of that yet without sin. So Jesus understands even more fully than we do the weight of temptation because he never gave in. The desire of the world never once overcame Jesus. He died trusting, honoring, and obeying God the Father. And that's why he is uniquely qualified as a whole different kind of high priest from what we see in the Old Testament.
And the help that he has to offer us is a completely different kind of help. So how does Jesus help us? Fourth, Jesus' help comes to us not as a matter of degree, but a matter of accomplishment. What I mean by that is if you're learning math, you need someone who knows more math than you do. So there's the old joke that the second grader is going to quit school. What's she going to do? She's going to teach first grade. She already knows enough. She's farther ahead. She can do that. Or if you're an athlete, you need someone who's more developed in the skill that you are, who's farther along, who can teach you and bring you up to speed.
It's not that Jesus is just better at resisting sin than we are, And that if we follow his program, we'll get better at it too. It's a matter of accomplishment. Jesus stood where we fell. Jesus overcame where we were overcome. Jesus succeeded where we failed. I'm sure a lot of you remember back in 2018 in the summertime when the boys' soccer team in Thailand was trapped in the cave system.
And over several days, it was in the news. There were heroic efforts of thousands of people, and then finally a few expert divers found the boys, got to where they were, and then just miraculously were able to get them out of the cave to safety two and a half miles from where they were underground to the mouth of the cave. It was an amazing thing. There's a movie about it. Those boys trapped in the cave did not just need scuba equipment and a map and a crash course on cave diving.
They needed experts. They needed somebody to come in and latch them to themselves and say, I'm going to hook you up to this tank, and I'm going to pull your rear out of this cave and get you to a safe place. And that's what they did. They needed somebody who had the skill and the equipment and who knew the way. And in chapter 12, the author of Hebrews describes Jesus as the pioneer of our faith. So it's not just he's ahead of us. It's that he blazed the trail to God where there was no trail.
And then he invites us to follow, to open, he opened the way for us to follow in his steps. So the help that Jesus offers to us is sympathy translated to action. He understands us, sure, but even more, and he understands even more than any of us do, right? In chapter 12, he'll also say, in your struggle of sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your own blood. But Jesus has. And so as the great high priest, he offers himself as the perfect sacrifice for sin once and for all.
He's not like a personal trainer. He's not like a math tutor. He's as if you sat down to take your advanced calculus class in another language, and you put your name on the paper, and the math whiz puts his or her name on the paper, and then you switch tests. And that person completes the test on your behalf, and you fail the test on their behalf. In academics, that's cheating. But in theology, it's called dual imputation. God takes Jesus' righteousness and credits it to our account, and he takes our sin and puts it on Jesus, and he counts Jesus' death as sufficient payment for our sin.
And on the basis of that work, Jesus restores sinners to fellowship with God. When we believe in him, everything that caused us to not be able to relate to God, all barriers of access to God have been removed. So what do we do with that? Well, the main thing that the author of Hebrews wants us to do are things that he repeats in this section. It's hold fast and draw near. So as we think about holding fast to the confession, to the truth about Jesus, what does that mean? Well, first of all, if you're here tonight and you're not a Christian, it means you need to confess Jesus.
It means you need to go to him and acknowledge that you're a sinner and ask him to forgive you on the basis of his work on your behalf because he died the death you should have died and rose again to conquer sin on your behalf. And all you have to do is receive salvation as a gift. Ask him, come to him in repentance and faith and ask for his forgiveness. And if you're a Christian tonight, what you need to do is keep confessing Jesus. You need to remind yourself and the people around you of Jesus' sufficiency. You need to fill your mind and your schedule with things that help you think rightly about Jesus.
And so that's why it's important that we gather. I'm talking to people who are here, but it's important that we continue to gather as a church to confess the truth about Jesus and remind each other of that. You need to repent of any efforts to justify yourself, to build your identity on your performance rather than Jesus' work. So look for places in your life where you are tempted to compare yourself to other people. If you see yourself as better than somebody else, then repent of your prideful self-righteousness. And if you see yourself as worse than other people, then repent of your prideful self-deprecation.
The main thing that we want to think about though tonight, this is the verse I was assigned, is to draw near to the throne of grace with boldness. What does that mean for us? Well, several things. It means, first of all, that we pray. Several months ago, Greg used the illustration on Sunday morning of the Moab, the mother of all bombs. And the fact that we as Christians have access to the throne of heaven to ask God to do on our behalf what nobody else can do. And I've caught myself several times since then thinking about what is it that makes me hesitant to pray in this moment?
Why am I reluctant to pray? Or why is it my first instinct not to pray? and I don't have a good reason. Is there a situation that we face that would be worse by just taking a moment to offer a few words of prayer before we act? Now, there may be more than we need to do than just pray, right? We may need to pray that God would save someone and then share the gospel with that person or pray that the Lord would change someone's heart and then have a difficult conversation with their brother or sister or pray for God's favor and then ask a request of somebody. So we may need to do more than that. But when we pray, we ask God for wisdom, for courage, for strength to do the things he's called us to do. Sometimes we thank God for his obvious provision. But what prayer does is always grounds the situation in God's sovereignty. And as we pray, asking God to change our circumstances, God also changes us and helps us to understand him more in light of what we're facing. More broadly, drawing near to God means understanding that all
of life now is lived in his presence. Before Jesus completed his work, everything about God's relationship with his people was about separation. It was about curtains, it was about priests, it was about all the ways that God was removed from his people and that only certain people had access to him in certain ways at certain times. But Jesus' work has removed all barriers and has brought us to God. And so the author invites us again and again throughout the book to draw near to God and anticipates the time we'll be united with him fully in his eternal kingdom. So as a Christian, God is never distant. He's never removed from what you're experiencing.
Third, we should draw near boldly. The language that he uses here is incredible. The throne of the universe, the place where God rules, the place where God decrees, the place that he sends out angels to do his bidding, the most powerful place in all of the universe is a throne, but it's a throne of grace. When we are united to Jesus, all of God's purposes amount to grace for us. God's undeserved kindness, his unimaginable good for our future.
I am not proud to admit this, but sometimes my children are hesitant to come to me. Sometimes they knock on the door when I'm working or when I'm in bed at night, and I hear a tentative knock or I see an expression on their face that communicates that they are not sure they are welcome. And it's because in times past, I've responded annoyed, tired, distracted, angry, overwhelmed.
Friends, God is never like that. He's never too busy. He's never tired. He's never overwhelmed. He's never grouchy. God loves to help sinners. Jesus willingly took on flesh to help us. He became a man to die for men, to defeat Satan in death, to set us free from the fear of death. So we never need to be hesitant or reluctant in going to God. We don't have a right to be in God's presence on our own.
But Jesus purchased access for us. He gave us the right to be God's children. And so we can approach him boldly, like we belong, because Jesus has given us permission to be there. So go boldly. And then last, trust that mercy and grace are the things that define your relationship with God. So Jesus' work gives us concrete assurance of past forgiveness. Our sin has been definitively dealt with in the cross.
In the new covenant, God promises that he will remember our sins no more. And so as we sing, no guilt in life, no fear in death. And what Jesus does is also give us perspective when we're tempted. More than a strategy to fight sin, what the gospel does is assures us that God will finish what he started. That if he didn't spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not graciously with us, give him all, sorry, graciously give us all things. The resurrected, ascended, interceding Jesus stands as the supreme evidence for all time that God is good, that God is trustworthy, and that he will work all things together for our good. So friends, keep looking to Jesus. As we sang earlier, Arise, my soul, arise.
Shake off your guilty fears. The bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears. Before the throne, my surety stands. Before the throne, my surety stands. My name is written on his hands. My God is reconciled. His pardoning voice I hear. He owns me for his child. I can no longer fear. With confidence, I now draw nigh. With confidence, I now draw nigh. And Father, Abba, Father, cry. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for the blood-bought privilege to call you our Father because of Jesus' work on our behalf.
God, I pray that tonight you would remove from us any instinct, any barrier that would cause us to run away from you instead of run to you. We thank you that you are glorified in helping sinners. And we pray that Jesus' help that's come to us based on his accomplished, finished work would be of great comfort to us as we go about another week. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.