Hebrews 5:1-10

The book of Hebrews is at the end of the Bible.

It is an epistle.

Each week we've been saying how the book of Hebrews, it's written to first century, it's urban people probably living in a city, and they're experiencing much in the way of troubles and difficulties, and they were really in the process themselves of considering just giving up.

They had made a sincere effort.

They started well.

As Christians, they they shot out of the cannon with a bang, right?

Imagine like uh somebody running a race and they took off out of the gates well, but they're halfway through the race and they're weighing.

Is this worth it?

Is it worth it?

We'll see when we get to chapter 10, there's some that are struggling, they're like they're facing loss and disappointment and uh social pressure to no longer follow Jesus as the Messiah.

Probably they had a Jewish background.

And the pastor who wrote this, he's been meditating and preaching through the Psalms.

Specifically Psalm 110, Psalm 95, and he composes this letter to encourage these Christians to not give up.

I want to show you five of the encouragements here.

Five of the encouragements that we see throughout this book.

The first one was pay attention.

Right?

Just these are this is simple.

We're gonna go through this entire book, but these are the five things we're gonna come across.

And if, look, if you're not a follower of Jesus yet, I just want you to know that just because you, at the point you do decide that, okay, I'm ready.

I'm ready to surrender my life to Christ, I'm ready to follow him and give him my whole, that doesn't mean that all of a sudden life is like peaches and cream.

There's still issues that come up.

There's still this temptation of, like, man, did I make the wrong decision?

Especially when you face difficulty, you wonder, is this the right thing that I'm doing?

And so here's the warnings that are given.

Pay attention.

Pay attention.

Watch out.

Mature.

You know, in other words, keep growing, draw near, and run the race.

Those are going to be the five warnings that we're gonna see as we go through the book.

We've already hit the pay attention, we've been uh looking at the watch out section, the whole thing that is being watched out for is watch out for a hard heart that keeps you from being able to enter into the rest that God has for you.

I know we've talked about this.

I felt like last week I just didn't summarize it well enough, and I had some more time to.

I sent you in the email this morning just a little note about rest from Warren Wearsby, but this was my summary after kind of thinking about it some more this week is that rest is the experience that comes from hearing God's word and obeying out of a soft, believing heart.

I don't know what you experience emotionally when you do this, but it seems like just using kind of all of the different pointers and the pieces of Hebrews 3 and 4, you end up with this type of conclusion.

That it is what you experience when you are ceasing.

Maybe I should include in there something about ceasing from your own works, but yet the works that you're doing is this responsive obedience from a soft heart toward what God is saying.

And so it begs the question: what is God saying to you?

The first thing right away, what Paul says, and this isn't Paul that's writing this letter, but the first thing that Paul says, 1 Corinthians 15, is look, Jesus died on the cross for your sin and my sin.

He was buried, and on the third day he was raised.

That act, that central act, turned history, turned history.

That was what the Old Testament led up to.

The Old Testament primed the world for a Messiah, an anointed leader, a king who would come and who would overrule, overturn the reign of sin and darkness, the reign of Satan's destructive power over the earth, and to reverse the course of human history so that humanity could be reconciled back to God.

That message is what we call the gospel message.

Many of us have heard that initially, and our hearts were tender, and we said, I want to trust that message.

I want to trust in Jesus Christ as the one who will save me from my sins personally.

Not just the sins in the world generically, but I know I'm guilty, and I want to, I recognize that I can't get God to forgive my sins on my own.

Somebody had to pay for my guilt, and I recognize that Jesus did that on the cross.

And if you have believed in that message, then you've begun to enter the rest that God has for you.

And this morning, if you feel weary, you feel like your life is not marked by rest, I would encourage you to consider are you believing with a tender heart and obeying the things that God's speaking to you?

Very simply, the warning here is watch out over your life.

And if you do not feel like you're in a place of rest, then you need to go back to what is my relationship, my heart's relationship with the things that God is saying to me.

Okay, we covered that one.

We covered that one a lot.

And now we need to move forward into this section on Jesus the high priest.

You see, there's two things that are going on.

There's the pastor here is saying that Jesus is our high priest, and he's calling the readers of this letter to enter into this rest.

So we've got two simultaneous big ideas that are that are coming kind of into the fore.

Jesus as our high priest, he is fully vested in bringing us closer to God.

That is his full-time job, right?

As if think of like, what is Jesus' job?

Or think of like when you hire a plumber, that plumber, his full-time job is to be a plumber.

What does a plumber do?

Fix his pipes, right?

Yes, he fixes the pipes, the gas pipes, right?

You put in a new gas stove, you get all the plumber.

If you have a clogged toilet, you call the plumber and he'll come fix the pipes.

But he has a vested interest in the water and the gas flowing properly through your house.

That is his full-time job, right?

That you take advantage of by paying him to come and service your home.

What about a landscape artist?

What is their job?

Yeah, to maintain your landscaping.

Yeah.

Yeah, to they're fully vested in taming back the wildness of your yard so that it is beautiful to look at and you are able to enjoy it, right?

That's the idea behind the idea of having a job.

Jesus' job was to be a high priest.

And the core concept there is that he is fully vested in bringing you and I close to God.

Do you feel this morning close to God?

Because you have a high priest who is completely committed his life to helping you be close to God.

Being close to somebody means that you're able to communicate with them.

There's a sense of their presence.

The people you're closest to, you're physically close to them.

You can feel that they're near to you.

Jesus' full-time job is as a high priest to bring you near to God.

Now he has to do a lot of things.

Like just like a plumber, in order to keep your plot your house functional, sometimes he's got to get that thing out that like you wind it up to clear out the pipes, right?

Other times it's like, oh, I got to get a wrench and I got to fix this leaky thing over here, or we got to pull this part apart, right?

There's different parts of the job.

Same with Jesus as the high priest.

He had to do a bunch of stuff, right?

The sacrificial piece, the intercession.

But all of that, we could wrap it up with this idea that I want to bring you this morning close to God.

And so the writer, this pastor here, is using gonna again, he's gonna use galactic terms, right?

Big ideas that are to encourage you and I in the midst of the temptation to quit, he's gonna say, you have a high priest who is going to bring you near.

And there's gonna be some specific application.

So let's um let's look at this text together, these three verses.

It says, Therefore, since 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 weakness, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.

Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Would you pray with me for a second and let's ask the Holy Spirit to help us really appropriate this text into our life?

God, we give you this time and we ask for you, Holy Spirit, to open up our eyes that we could see the things out of your word, not just what it's saying, but how this is going to apply to us.

We want to be discipled and shaped by this text, and our stories are very diverse and different.

And we just ask that you would speak to us, you'd magnify the person of Jesus and this idea of him being our high priest.

Help us to understand that, to get our minds around it this morning.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So the pastor here is using this image of the Levitical High Priest as an image for his readers to grab a hold of in their minds.

You'll recall back in chapter two, he already introduced this idea by saying, therefore, he had to be like his brothers and sisters in every way, so that he could become a merciful and a faithful high priest in matters pertaining to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people.

For since he himself has suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

So this idea of Jesus as our high priest has already been brought to bear upon this audience.

We've already been kind of warmed up to this idea.

But between chapter two and the end of chapter four, where we're at now, the thing that we've been talking about is Moses, how Jesus is better than Moses, and this warning about watch out, don't miss out on not entering into the rest that our high priest has purchased for us.

Now we transition, we go back to this more specific idea of Jesus as our high priest and how it pertains to prayer.

I want to draw your attention to three ways that Jesus is acting as our high priest in this text.

What activity is ascribed to Jesus as our high priest in this text?

The first is this idea that Jesus has passed through the heavens.

Jesus has passed through the heavens.

Have you passed through the heavens?

That's a weird question, right?

But the obvious answer is no.

You have not passed through the heavens, right?

This is not just talking about like the meta, a metaphor of like having a psychedelic trip on mushrooms.

This is a real place that the writer here of Hebrews is talking about.

The place where God is passing through the heavens.

It's heaven's plural because this is not just the heavens where the birds fly and the clouds float across the atmosphere.

This isn't just the place where the stars and other galaxies reside.

This is beyond that to the celestial heaven.

This is where God resides, where God's throne is.

That's the heavens that Jesus has passed through.

This language is used in other places.

I'll give you a few places.

In Hebrews chapter 9, verse 24, it says, Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with hands, only a model of the true, but into heaven itself.

Hebrews 9:24

So here he's talking about how the priests in the Old Testament, the Levitical priests, do you remember them?

The ones that were like Moses, the ones that Moses appointed with Aaron.

Remember them?

They would go in to the tabernacle into the holiest of all, and they would talk to God once a year.

That was where the it was the holiest place.

Only one, the high priest once a year could go there.

And that was a picture, he says it's a model of the true one, the place in the heavens itself, and he appears before the presence of God for us.

So when in chapter four, follow this.

In chapter four, when the pastor says that Jesus passed through the heavens, he's talking about this idea here.

When did this happen?

Well, good thing we have some more Bible because in Acts chapter 1, this is right after Jesus has been raised from the dead.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

40 days after the resurrection, Jesus is there with his disciples on a mountain.

He's talking to them, and all of a sudden he just goes right up into the clouds.

And everybody's staring with their mouths wide open, and some angels appear and they say this men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into heaven?

This same Jesus has been taken from you into heaven.

He will come in the same way that you've seen him go into heaven.

So here is again a reference to Jesus going, passing through the heavens.

How about one more verse?

Romans 8.34.

Romans 8.34 says, who is the one who condemns?

Who is the one?

Who's the one to condemn you?

Who could condemn you right now?

The only person on earth that really is legally justified to appear before God, the just judge of the whole earth, and condemn us.

The only one qualified is Jesus.

Do you know that?

Like the only person that could really condemn.

Now Satan loves to condemn you and make an argument, but Satan doesn't have grounds legally to accurately, he just wants you to feel condemned.

Jesus is really the only qualified one to condemn you, but Jesus is the one who didn't do that.

Instead, he died, he was raised from the dead.

He's also at the right hand of God interceding for us.

So he's passed through the heavens.

And when he shows up there in heaven before God's throne, he doesn't say, hey, you gotta hear about how awful this guy is, or how horrible this woman is, and how much they should be condemned.

No, Jesus, he's the one, he's like, Father, I died on the cross for their sin.

And I was raised by you from the dead.

And now I'm here before you, and I'm here to intercede on their behalf rather than to condemn them.

That is your and my high priest.

He is passed through the heavens so that he today can intercede on our behalf.

That's one of his functions.

Now, when Jesus is interceding for us, does that bring us closer to God?

It does.

It does.

It brings our needs, your specific needs.

Not just the fact that you need to be forgiven of your sins, as terrible as yours and mine are.

It's here's where I'm at with this addiction.

Here's where I'm at with this job.

Here's where I'm at in this broken relationship, here's where I'm at in my insecurities and my identity.

Jesus is there bringing those things before the Father.

He's passed through the heavens to bring those very things to the Father on your behalf.

That's a really good thing to have, right?

Because have you ever passed through the heavens?

No.

Nope.

Never been there.

Now, fundamentally, you and I were created to have a relationship with God.

If we go to Genesis 1 and 2, God's creating humanity.

He's creating us in his image, not like the animals.

He's saying, No, I want to make you, you, you, you, you in my image so that I can have a personal relationship.

And I'm going to give them instructions, and they're going to come to me for life, and they're going to know what's good and bad.

And I'm going to just tell them, hey, just don't take this tree, the knowledge of good and bad, because I want to be your source of good and bad.

Now, did Adam and Eve follow that instruction?

No, they didn't.

You know that.

They didn't follow that instruction.

That was disobedience.

And from that point on, they fell from their position of being able to be in God's presence, and they felt what?

How did they feel?

As soon as they ate that fruit, they felt shame and they were like, I don't have any clothes on.

And they were pointing the fingers at each other.

And they were completely cut off from the presence of God.

They were cut off from creation that they were supposed to rule over.

They were cut off from one another.

It was just a broken world that needed a high priest who could bring them back into the presence of God.

Because they no longer could pass through the heavens.

They needed a high priest who could fix the problem.

And that's what our text says is that Jesus passed through the heavens as our high priest.

The second thing that our text says in verse 15 is that Jesus, as our high priest, he is not unable to sympathize with our weakness.

This is the thing.

The second thing that he did, the second thing that he did was that he passed through the heavens and he's able to sympathize with our weaknesses.

So we see that here.

We also see this idea of him sympathize.

Now, I man, I forgot to put it into my slides, but I just, just because I wanted to have the experience, you can do this yourself when you get home.

Just go on Amazon, look up what a sympathy card says.

And in our world, when we talk about a sympathy card, and just read through the language of a sympathy card, it's fascinating how far short our human capacity to show sympathy is.

There was one, I think the one I was going to show you, put in my slide deck here was this idea of, you know, hopefully you find comfort in the memories of the person you lost.

And I do, you know, I mean, that's that's good.

But man, when we talk about Jesus being a sympathetic high priest, this is what Isaiah says about him.

He himself bore our sickness, he carried our pains.

The idea of sympathy is I want to get in your pain with you, and I want to hurt with you.

I want to sympathize with you.

We use it when we go over and we tune like that piano that's on the stage, or we we tune a guitar, we'll use a tone, or we'll take Take like a vibrating pitchfork, and we'll we'll knock that pitchfork against something, and then we'll try to tune the guitar string.

And what you're listening for is the sympathetic vibration between the pitchfork and the string.

And when the two are resonating at the same rate, that is a sympathetic tone.

And so the idea of sympathy or being sympathetic is that my heart is resonating at your heart, but for Jesus, it's I'm gonna take on the very sickness, the pain.

I'm gonna be stricken, down, struck, and afflicted on your behalf.

But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities.

The punishment, punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds.

That is what it meant for Jesus to be sympathetic.

Not just to feel what we feel, not just to suffer, you know, and say, wow, I'm suffering and I know what it's like to suffer, but I'm literally going to take it into my body on your behalf.

I love Matthew 12, 20, this is a quote from Isaiah 42.

Jesus says this about himself.

He describes his ministry this way.

He says, He will not, the Son of Man will not break a bruised reed.

He will not put out a smoldering wick until he has led justice to victory.

In other words, have you ever gone and seen the bull rushes on the edge of a stream, those cattails, you know, that kind of grow up really fast and they've got that little, it looks like a cattail on the end of it, right?

It's a reed.

And have you ever seen they get just bruised and knocked over?

Not completely chopped off, but they're kind of broken down.

Jesus is saying, look, I'm not gonna break you off.

I know you're you kind of feel floppy that you're turned sideways, that you're hurt, but I didn't come to condemn you.

I didn't come to cut you down because you're a dysfunctional uh cattail on the side of a river.

You may feel like that, but I didn't come to break you.

Or maybe you feel like, man, the light's gone out and I'm just a smoldering wick.

It's like when the when the wax is high on the candle and the wick is so short that it's it's flickering, and you're like, oh, that candle's about to go out.

It's not gonna last much longer, right?

It's strobing.

And Jesus is saying, that's maybe how you feel.

But I didn't come.

I didn't come to destroy you in that place.

I came to heal you, to be your high priest, to clear off some of the wax, to make it possible for you for the flame to come back, for you to come alive.

That's what it means for Jesus to be our sympathetic high priest.

But the third thing, the third thing that we come across here is this idea at the end of verse 15, is that Jesus was tempted in every way, but without sin.

Now, Jesus took on flesh.

It's chapter 2, whole thing, is about him having a body like you.

Right?

You feel you feel tired for a second?

I know.

It's a little warm in here, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's why I try to give you coffee.

But that's your body, you know?

I feel tired sometimes too when it's like that.

Here's the thing that body that feels tired, Jesus had that too.

He faced that temptation.

He's been there.

Feeling God.

In fact, it says, it says like he would he felt tired and weary.

You know, before he feeds the woman at the well and has that interaction, you know what it you know why he ended up at the well?

Because he was hungry.

It says right there in the text, he ended up right there because he was hungry.

Jesus has been.

In fact, when you go to um Luke chapter 4, it says, for 40 days Jesus was in the wilderness tempted by the devil.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

He ate nothing for those days when they are over.

Now, I don't know if you feel super like energetic and ready to resist temptation when you're hungry, but I know that for me, and I haven't eaten, I'm not like super like, yeah, I love resisting temptation.

Instead, it's just like, yeah, give me some food, you know.

But Jesus, why did he do the 40 days in the wilderness?

Remember?

Because Israel was in the wilderness for 40 years, and Jesus is like, let's put on repeat, let's put on replay, the story of Israel.

But I'm going to show you what it's like to go through the wilderness, but to come out victorious.

To face an insufficient place, to face a fasting, a position of fasting without food.

Y'all had food over there.

Remember, they had manna from heaven and quail.

God did that.

But Jesus had no food, and yet he made it through that temptation without sin.

It says in 1 Peter 2.22, he did not commit sin.

No deceit was found in his mouth.

Jesus did all of this so that he could be your and my good high priest.

He wants to be able to sympathize with us, but not just be saying, you know, I'm sorry, like you say to like a little kid when they fall down and you pat them on their head, oh, I'm sorry.

You know, it's not like that.

He's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna get in that with you.

I'm gonna experience that, I'm gonna be there with you, but not sin.

So he could be the perfect, righteous, faithful high priest.

And so Jesus takes this position.

These are the things that Jesus does as our high priest.

But that's not it for this text.

There are some activities that we are called to in verse 16.

In verse 16.

Let me put those up here in front of you.

It says, therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in a time of need.

You see, we've talked about Jesus as the high priest.

He's already gone to the heavens, he's already done this whole work on the cross.

Man, it's like, you see, all the text in 14 and 15, it's like this whole meal that's been laid out for us.

So of course we want to pray.

If Jesus has done all of this work as our high priest and he's trying to get us close to the Father and He's interceding, he's already talking to God, he's already having the conversation, he's already praying for us.

Then he's like, yo, let's go and let's go into God's presence.

Let's approach the throne of grace with boldness so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

The first thing in verse 14, the first thing in verse 14 that he says, before we get to this, is hold fast to our confession.

You've heard this before, and I'm going to show it to you again.

This is one of the big things for the writer of Hebrews.

What's your confession?

What's your confession?

We have these old church history statements, the confessions of the faith.

Calvin, John Calvin, who's a famous reformer, he said he wrote a book, Confessions.

What's your conf what is your confessions?

Your confession is this is what I hold to be true.

That Jesus is the Son of God, born of a virgin, died on the cross for my sins.

He was buried and he was raised on the third day, and he ascended to the heavens, where he sits at the right hand of the Father, and he will come back again to rule on the earth and to make things perfect, and he'll destroy permanently the reign of Satan.

Those are our confessions that we hold to.

Then he says, approach the throne of grace with boldness.

Interesting there, right?

What does it mean to have boldness?

What does that mean?

What's the opposite of boldness?

Let's ask that question.

What's the opposite of boldness?

Meekness, okay.

What else?

Timid, yeah.

Timid.

Shy.

You know, feeble.

And he says, no.

You get to go into God's presence with a boldness.

Not because of your macho.

No, your boldness is not based on macho.

Not based on your identity, not based on how good you pray.

It's really not based on anything in you.

It's based on what Jesus has done as your high priest.

But he tells Jesus it's like, go in and be bold before your Father.

What does a bold prayer look like?

What does it mean to pray bold?

Yeah, asking.

You promise this.

You promise this, God.

Your word says this.

I'm holding you to this, God.

We see this in the Psalms a lot, right?

There's a boldness about Psalms where the Psalmist is like, God, you feel so far away.

How long is it going to take?

You're kind of like, whoa, are you allowed to ask God that?

Like, I was a little impatient.

You know?

But there's this boldness, this brashness about the Psalms, where it's like he's just saying, here's how I feel, God.

I feel frustrated.

I feel abandoned.

And there's other times where he's just like, your word says this, you've promised this.

And I'm standing on those promises.

So approach the throne of grace with boldness.

The second, the third thing is receive mercy.

Receive mercy.

And the fourth is find grace to help in your time of need.

When are you in need?

That's a trick question.

All the time.

All the time we are in need, right?

I find often that as a pastor, sometimes I'll get these messages that'll kind of pop up.

Pastor, I need you to pray for me.

I'm really going through it.

And it'll be like, oh, I miss you.

Where have you been?

I haven't seen you for a while.

Oh, I'm really going through it.

And I'm like, well, you're definitely, you're feeling your need, and that's good.

It's good to feel your need.

We just need to feel our need more often than when it really is really bad.

Right?

It may not may not need to be that bad.

It can.

I mean, it can.

Like God can allow us to go through things where it gets really bad.

And you're feeling your neediness more than ever.

But I'd encourage you that your time of need is every day.

It's every day.

Let me just close with this passage from Hebrews 10.

Okay, so we've been in Hebrews 4.

In a couple months, we'll be in Hebrews 10.

And I'll preach this.

But it's the same idea, right?

So I said that the way that this book sometimes, it's like this meditation.

So meditations are, we're going to go in circles on this a little bit, like a telephone cord where we kind of go around and we, it's kind of there's an overlap here.

So we're going to come around.

So there's some material here in chapter 10 that's going to sound really familiar.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have what?

Boldness, we have it now.

We have it.

Do you have it?

Do you have boldness?

He says we have it.

Do you act it out?

Do you have boldness?

Since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus, he has inaugurated for us a new and a living way through the curtain.

Remember, he's pulling up images of the Old Testament, the tabernacle where there was a curtain.

Well, the curtain, but he's like, wait, the curtain, just so you know, that's through his body, his flesh.

And since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart.

There's the heart again coming up, right?

Put it on replay.

I told you it was coming back.

The heart with a true heart.

In full assurance of faith.

It's imagine like, you know, when our houses around here start to fall down and like they put those bracing up.

That's it.

That's we got to assure the house.

We've got to put some assurance on that house that the wall isn't going to fall down.

We have this full assurance, not of the wall, but of the faith.

Because of what Jesus has done.

The full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled with a clean conscience or from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

This is all about drawing near.

This is the basis for us drawing near.

Let us hold, I told you it's coming up again.

There it is.

Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful.

Brothers and sisters, we have this great high priest that's passed through the heavens, working full time for you and I to be near God.

And he says, Look, I want you to pray.

I want you to pray.

I want you to bring your needs where there's grace and where there's mercy.

I want you to bring that before me.

Let's do that this week.

Let's be a people of prayer.

Let's let's go before the Lord.

Father, we thank you for your word, the encouragement that we have, the inspiration, the assurance of our faith that we have because we look at you of what you've done.

Teach us to pray, God, boldly.

Teach us to come in before your throne, to draw near.

Where you are head of the house of God and where we can intercede and we can ask for that help.

Lord, help us to take full advantage of this thing that you've made possible.

Lord, we've never passed through the heavens ourselves, but with our prayers, we can be right there before your throne.

Lord, we ask that you would answer our prayers this week.

There are things where we just we have failed to ask of you.

And so we're just lacking in some things in our life because we just haven't asked.

And that kind of seems weird.

But you want us to pray.

And we ask that you teach us to pray.

As we take communion together, God, we ask that you would meet with us, remind us of how all of this goes back to that work that you did on the cross.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.