"Strengthened By Grace" - Hebrews 13:7-19

All right, we've got a Bible Hebrews 13. We've got this week and next week, and then we did it.

I'm going to give everyone a participation trophy for making it through Hebrews with us.

That way you can go and put it on your, I'm sure, full trophy case.

I'll be asking this. When you think of a strong person, who do you think of?

Give to me. I had a baby. That was planted.

I also think, it was funny when I was growing up, you know, I would.

I would see my dad do certain things and I would think he just picked up that

cinder block with one hand, you know, and this guy must be a superhero.

And then you get older and you realize, well, that's not that strong.

All right. And then you associate strong with different things. Maybe yours was Rambo.

I've said this before, but like Chuck Norris and me, we were best friends for

like five years on TV. I thought Chuck Norris was the best thing.

Just this past week, I watched a 140 40-pound small Hispanic man carry two 40-pound

bags of concrete up onto three levels of scaffolding.

And I thought that might be the strongest person I've ever seen. I don't know.

And then if you grew up in a Christian

home when I did, you may have seen something called the Power Team.

Okay. Okay. You did see it. That's good. That's good. That's good.

You know, they would come to church and they would like bend rebar over their

heads and rip phone books in half.

And I remember thinking as a kid, that was cool. And as a teenager, I'm like, this is lame.

And of course you think it's lame because you're a teenager and everything you

don't do is lame. What you're really thinking is, I wish I could rip a phone book in half.

And you would be lying if you said you didn't go home and try. That's fine.

But it's interesting, which real quick, this is a side note,

I ended up working for someone that was on the power team?

I know, full circle, full circle. And I was like, well, I got to make sure to

make any power team jokes around this guy, which was harder than you think.

But when we talk about strength, it's interesting because I think most of the

time what I see with Christianity is people aren't trying to make Christians

stronger. They're trying to make Christianity easier.

And there's really two ways that you can go when you think about Christianity.

You can either say, listen, I'm going to embolden people, empower people,

make them strong in their faith, push them towards Christ, or I can just make Christianity easier.

I can water it down. I can say, man, if you'll just come to church on Sundays

and listen to these songs and pray these prayers, maybe hit the altar once a

year, everything will be fine. And the issue is, as we walk through Hebrews,

you've seen it. Christianity is not easy.

That should be just a baseline that we start with, right?

Let's have the altar call now, right? Let's just, you know, let me get up here

and say, guys, Christianity is really hard. It's not easy. It's going to take

a lot of strength. It's going to cost you a lot.

And then let's play just as I am and see how many people want to come.

That really is kind of how Jesus did his altar calls.

But I do find it interesting that when we talk about strength,

which we're going to this morning, that oftentimes we don't really feel like

we need it to do a lot of the things that we're asked to do as Christians.

Now, you may need a little extra time, you may need a little extra effort,

it may cost you a little money.

But other than that, when we think about the strength that we need to be a Christian,

we don't consider it a whole lot.

And so this morning, whenever he tells us to be strengthened,

he has in mind, the writer of Hebrews has in mind that this is going to be difficult.

This is going to be hard. Not only your Christian life, but just knowing God

in general is hard because you can't know all of him.

You'll never understand him completely. I was talking to multiple people this

week and one of the common themes was they would maybe ask me a question and

my response would be, I don't know.

And for 2000 years of church history, people have been trying to answer certain

questions. And the ultimate answer is, you know, I'm just not 100% sure.

There is always a level of mystery in being a Christian and being a follower

of Jesus Christ because he hasn't revealed every mystery.

And for a lot of us, that's maybe the hardest part.

Because in our lives, when we make decisions and when we go out to do something,

we've already been considering what we should do and how we should do it and why we should do it.

There's multiple of us here in this room where if I invited you to a new restaurant,

I said, hey guys, meet us at this new restaurant on Thursday.

We'd love to take you out. The first thing you would do when you got in the

car is look up the menu at the restaurant and start figuring out what am I going to order, right?

And what do I need to do? And maybe I can look up pictures of the food.

Maybe I can read Yelp reviews of what's going on. And maybe I can find some

one of my friends that's been before and he can tell me where to sit.

That's how we like to make decisions.

But that's not how Christianity works. Now, I'm not at all saying you can't

answer a lot of questions. I think you can.

It's an intellectual thing in that you can read your Bible and know things,

but trying to make everything make sense will be a pursuit that you will find has no end.

That at some point, you just have to say, I trust Christ.

I believe his word. I'll say what it says. I believe what it says.

And everything that I don't understand, I will put in his hands.

It'll be his. It'll be his. It'll be his.

So as we get started this morning and being strengthened, we're going to be starting Hebrews 13, 7.

And I wanted you to remember where we finished last week, because it's one of

those things here where we're in the middle of a thought.

He's making a big point here in all these verses, and so it's hard to break them all up.

But if you remember where we finished, he's quoted the Old Testament here,

and he says, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

That's what the Lord says to us. I will never leave you nor forsake you.

So we can confidently say, the Lord is my helper.

I will not fear. What can man do to me?

And we said, well, man can do a lot of things to you. They can fire you.

They can persecute you. They can make fun of you. They can talk bad about you

behind your back. They can kill you. They can imprison you, right?

Man can do a lot of things to you.

The point is, as Christians, we don't have to fear what the world can do to

us because ultimately we're in the Lord's hands.

But ultimately we will be with him for eternity.

So he gets to verse seven. He says, remember your leaders, those who spoke to

you the word of God, consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

So he says, remember your leaders. I think he has leaders in mind in general,

but I think he also has Hebrews 11 in mind, right? Remember your leaders.

Remember those people that have gone before you, right? He doesn't just give

us Hebrews 11 and then forget about it. That's not how people write letters.

He writes Hebrews 11 and now he references, I think, back to it.

He says, consider the outcome of their way of life. In other words,

these people's life is over.

Their life is not still being lived.

Nothing's going to change. Consider how their life ended up.

And he says something really, really important here.

Don't imitate their life, right? He doesn't say imitate their life.

He says, imitate what? Their faith.

Let me tell you why I think this is so important.

When he tells us to imitate the faith and not the life itself,

what he's saying is, you need to know the God that they believed in,

but you don't need to be a copycat.

And so much of Christianity, so much of religion is just copycats.

People who don't really know God, they don't really have faith.

They don't really know who he is. They don't want to know who he is,

but they've been told, this is what you're supposed to look like.

This is how you're supposed to dress. This is how you're supposed to talk.

These are the books you're supposed to read.

These are the topics that really matter. These are the things that are supposed

to matter. This is how your life should look. Now go do that.

But don't worry about faith. Don't wrestle with faith. Don't wrestle with the

Lord. Just do what I'm telling you to do. Do what they did.

Copycats don't inherit the kingdom of God. Looking like someone who was faithful,

acting like someone who was faithful, doesn't garner you any goodwill in the Father's eyes.

Because it's never what someone did or how they dressed or how they talked that

ever gained anyone any merit in God's eyes.

And there is such a danger, especially where we live, in being just a faithful

copycat, but not a faithful disciple of Jesus.

Because we have ample examples of people we can find and we can just wait until

we find the one that we like the best and go, you know, I'm just going to do what that guy's doing.

I like that pastor. I like that person. I like how they lived.

You know, I just want to be like my grandpa. Paul, I'm just going to be like

my grandma. I'm going to model my life after them.

The whole time God's going, you're not them. You're not them.

That's why we always say it's bad to look at the life of David,

the life of Samuel, the life of Solomon and go, I'm just going to live my life like them.

Well, you're not David or Solomon or Samuel.

You're not a prophet, a priest, or an Old Testament king.

You are who you are. God has made you who you are. He has placed you where you are.

You're in this room this morning because God wants you in this room.

And what he has asked us to imitate of those people is their faith, their trust in the Lord.

And he follows that up in verse 8 by saying, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

In other words, you can look at the lives of faithful people,

but none of them are like Jesus.

He spent the whole book of Hebrews trying to get us to understand this.

That you can look at angels, but they're less than Jesus. They actually serve Jesus.

You can look at prophets if you want. That's fine. They were simply the mouthpieces of the Lord.

You can look at the temple. You can look at sacrifices. You can look at all

of the things you want to look at, and that's fine.

But realize all of those things will pass away.

Every single one of those things will no longer be here. If you want to use

a contemporary example, you can sing all the Christian songs you want to sing.

Whether you like hymns from the 1500s, 1600s, whether you like Gregorian chants

from before that, I don't care what you're into, okay?

Or you only listen to Chris Tomlin or you only listen to this band, right?

You have found the best worship music in the world or maybe you've just found

the pastor that you love the most and you can listen to him on YouTube all day.

Ditto, I've got those too. You can do all of those things, but none of those things are like Jesus.

None of those things are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Every single one of those things was invented yesterday, maybe around today, and they will be gone.

Jesus Christ is where our eyes go. Jesus Christ is where our faith is.

And it's amazing how fickle we are when we don't get our way and we don't sing

what we want to sing or hear what we want to hear or we go through a drought of those things.

It's incredible how irritable I get about stupid things in my life.

Just stupid things, just things that don't really matter.

Things that will change tomorrow, things that will change next week,

things that will change when I die that won't matter.

Instead of fixing my eyes on Jesus who is the same forever and ever.

So that's the first thing.

Imitate faith. Don't imitate actions, right? And I'm not saying you can't have role models.

I'm not saying you can't find people to look at their lives and say,

those are some wise choices. Those are some good things.

But ultimately what we want to do is be faithful like some of those that have

gone before us, not to be copycats of them.

He goes on in verse nine, do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings,

for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods,

which have not benefited those devoted to them.

Verse 10, we have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right

to eat for the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy

places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp.

So he says, do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings.

And whatever this diverse and strange teaching is seems to be attached to food.

I have no idea what the teaching was. It's one of those things you can read

15 commentaries and get 15 different answers and they all sound really smart.

The truth is he doesn't tell us exactly whatever this teaching is.

We do know is that people are saying, for some reason, what you're eating,

I would imagine it's Jewish dietary laws, are bringing you a certain level of

grace and mercy from God.

That you're not eating this and you are eating this, that God's looking down

and going, well, because you did that, I love you more.

People are being strengthened by the actions that they're taking.

And yet here he says, be strengthened by what? By grace.

Be strengthened by grace.

So when you think of being led away by diverse and strange teachings,

the first litmus test for that is, are the teachings that you're listening to

grace-based or work-based?

That's the first question you ask. Are the teachings that you're listening to

grace-based or works-based?

Are the teachings that you're drawn to saying, if you'll do this, God will do that.

If you'll give him this amount of money, he'll give you back this much.

If you'll make sure and follow these moral codes of laws, then he'll make sure

and bless your life in these ways.

Every single cult that exists, exists because of this distinction.

Every single one begins with denying that grace is free, that grace is what strengthens us.

It's also important to note there's a reason verse 8 exists.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and then be strengthened

by grace because grace is not a thing.

Grace is not a force in the universe. Grace is not imparted to you by the church.

Grace is not imparted to you by grandparents. It's not imparted to you by Sunday

school teachers, and it's not imparted to you by any pastor.

When the Bible says, be strengthened by grace, what it means is be strengthened

by Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Grace in the Bible is the person and work of Jesus Christ.

We cannot separate them. We cannot move them to different places.

Grace is not received by what you eat or drink. It's not received by what you do.

It's not received by who you are. It's not received by where you live or who

your parents are or what somebody says about you or how many Bible verses you

memorize. Grace is grace.

It is the person of Jesus Christ.

If you want to be strengthened to live the Christian life that's hard to live,

then you have to be strengthened by grace.

Because if you try and strengthen yourself by doing something,

you'll be exhausted by trying to do something and there won't be any more strength

to find because you're looking to your own works to do it.

The flip side of this is you can know people who've been in church for 50 or

60 years and you meet them and you wonder, why are those people so bitter?

Why are those people so angry? Why are those people so, why do they think that

they're smarter than everybody? Why do they think that they're better than everybody?

This is why. Because the strength that they have found is in and of themselves.

So many people think Christianity is about being right, about understanding

everything, about getting every little theological issue right.

Again, don't mishear me. I'm not saying that's not important.

We have a statement of faith for a reason.

We stand behind it for a reason, but we also understand that the best of men

are men at best, and we are but men and women.

That no one is saved by simply what they believe.

They're saved by a person. They're saved by Jesus Christ,

Now certainly you have to believe That Jesus is who he says he is That he did

what he said he did And he will do what he says he's going to do To be saved

But the reason that you'll believe that Is because Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ rescued you and he redeemed you and he atoned for your sins,

that the punishment that brought us peace was upon him.

You deserved the punishment that he received, but you received the peace that

he deserved because of a person and that person is Jesus.

So he says, be strengthened by that grace.

When Christianity is hard and it should be, don't look to yourself.

Don't run first to YouTube. Don't run first to a podcast. Don't run first to

your favorite theologian's book.

Don't run first to the Christian radio station. Don't run first to Spotify.

You run first to the person of Jesus Christ who will meet you with grace,

who will shower you with the same grace that he used to save you.

And then all those other things are simply avenues to get to him.

He goes on to give us an example from the temple. He says, we have an altar

from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat.

In other words, if you're still taking sacrifices to the temple,

if you're still putting things at the altar and expecting God to forgive you

of your sins because of some animal's blood, you have no right to come to the Christian altar.

You have no right to come to Christ. You could say it this way.

If you're at all trusting in anything that you have done to know who God is,

if you're at all, depending on your own self and your own works and your own

righteousness, then the Christian altar is of no use to you.

Says in verse 12, Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify

the people through his own blood.

So he gives you these two options. Number one, you can bring your own sacrifice to your own altar.

You can sacrifice whatever you want. Again, maybe it's money, maybe it's time.

I meet people all the time that when they talk about church,

it's obvious that they're talking about a sacrifice.

But you can come up with your own sacrifice and you can bring it to your own altar.

You can put that before the Lord and say, listen, Lord, here's what I brought

you. Here's what I've got.

Here's what I've done for you. Here's what I've accomplished on your behalf.

I'm gonna put this at the altar and I'm gonna see how you can receive it.

That's your first option.

Your second option is you can place your faith in the offering that Jesus laid

before the Father on your behalf.

His perfect life lived, his blood poured out, his body broken.

That is the decision that you have to make. That's the decision he's laying before these Hebrews.

Do you want to bring your own offering or do you want to trust in Christ's offering on your behalf?

He even says, verse 13, therefore, let us go to him outside the camp and bear

the reproach he endured.

In other words, he's telling these Jewish believers, if you want to follow Christ,

you're going to have to go where Christ was.

And that's outside of the camp, outside of Jerusalem, outside of the temple.

You've got to let go of all these laws. You've got to let go of all this religion.

You've got to let go of all this, you doing something to make God love.

You have to get out and you have to bear the reproach that comes with that.

You may think, well, we live in East Texas. No one really brings us reproach

for doing what Christ says.

Tell them it's all of Christ and see what they say.

Tell them nothing they do can earn them a place at God's table and see what they say.

Because that is not how most people think.

Most people think that Jesus goes 99% of the way or 90% of the way and that they fill in the gaps.

People think that God has done

most of the work, but that there is still a work that they need to do.

And this passage exists to make sure people understand, no, God has done everything on your behalf.

He has sent his son, his perfect son, to live a perfect life,

to be a perfect and pure sacrifice, to die a perfect death, for a perfect resurrection,

to sit next to his perfect Father in heaven at the right hand of God,

to go back and get his people whom he will make perfect on the last day.

And his people will look at him and they will not say, I am so glad that I did X, Y, or Z.

No one will look at Jesus on the last day as he's rescuing them and go,

man, I'm so glad that I did anything.

There's nothing to put in the blank.

We will look at Jesus and we will say, I am so glad that you saved me.

I am so glad that you rescued me. I'm so glad that you redeemed me.

I'm so glad that you did what I could have never done.

I'm so glad that you chose to become my brother.

I'm so glad, God, that you chose to become my father, that you adopted me into your family.

It's when we realize that about who Jesus is, that we're okay with going outside

the camp, that we're okay with people looking at us and going,

man, that guy's kind of weird.

He really does only care about making God happy. He really does only care about

what Jesus wants him to care about.

And especially for these Hebrews, the second that they say, none of this stuff

matters, Moses, Aaron, the law, none of this stuff matters anymore.

Jesus has completed those things, they are going to get lambasted by all these other Hebrews.

And what the writer of Hebrews is saying is the second you realize that Jesus

has done everything on your behalf, you will welcome the outside of the camp.

Really all he's doing here is in a roundabout way saying exactly what Jesus

has already said, which is if you want to follow me, take up your cross and follow me.

Take up your cross, walk outside the camp, up to Golgotha, and sacrifice your life on that hill.

He says it this way. Jesus makes it abundantly clear.

The reason we go outside the camp is because we realize it's no longer I who

live, but Christ who lives in me.

In verse 14, for we have a lasting city, or sorry, for we have no lasting city,

but we seek the city that is to come.

Through him, then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God that

is the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.

Do not neglect to do good and to share with what you have for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

So we're looking for a city that is to come. Then he says, through him,

then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God.

Listen, that is the fruit of lips that acknowledge him.

The fruit of lips that acknowledge him is a life that is sacrificed to him.

This is why you hear the verse all the time that people quote,

many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, didn't we do X,

Y, and Z in your name? And he will say, depart from me.

I never knew you. what that is, is him saying, if you are going to acknowledge

his name with your lips, there should be a fruit that comes from your life.

That acknowledging him with your lips doesn't mean anything if there's no fruit

in your life to show for it.

Now, some people, it seems, have more fruit than others. That's fine.

It doesn't give you an amount of fruit that you have to have.

There's not a basket limit here. It just says there should be some fruit.

There should be something in your life that you can look at and go, yeah, God's doing that.

God's changing me. He's moving me. He's helping me to get things done that I

wouldn't normally get done.

We're about to take the Lord's Supper. And as always, this is a great reminder

of exactly what this passage has put in front of us.

That as we come to this table, we don't come to this table offering to God anything

that we've done, there's a reason you come to the Lord's table empty-handed,

that there's nothing on the table that you have to exchange.

There's no Christian token. There's no Bible verse you have to recite to take the cup.

There's no amount of offering to give, right? There's nothing at this table

that, okay, you give me this and then I'll give you that.

It is the ultimate physical way for we can put our eyes on being strengthened by grace.

That when you come to God's table, you are given his son.

He has given you his son. He has given you not some, again, force called grace.

He has given you a person to go to.

And that person has poured out his blood and has had his body beaten so that

you could come to that table.

That's an incredible picture of what we've been talking about.

Is just by reminding us what he gave us early on in this passage.

For it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace.

Do you need to find some strength? I would say two things.

Number one, if you don't, you're not following Christ. You're not.

To follow Christ, you need it.

You will need strength every single day to follow him.

I know that doesn't sound loving or kind. I just think it's true.

I think to live the life that God has called you to live, you will need him

every single day. The Christian life is a life of dependence.

It is not a life of ease and comfort and patting God on the head when you need

him to do something nice for you.

The good news, or that's the bad news, that the Christian life is hard.

The good news is strength for the Christian life is offered freely.

You don't have to drop a dollar into a plate. You don't have to figure something out.

You don't have to do everything right. You simply have to come to God with your

hands open and say, God, I've got nothing to give you. I've got nothing to give you.

I've failed. I've messed up. I feel weak. I can't make this work.

I'm trying to do all these things that you asked me to do. I'm trying to live

my life the way you've asked me to live.

I'm trying to raise my kids and

love my wife and not love money and be hospitable and love the brothers.

I'm trying to do all these things, God, but I see my failures in them and I

have nothing to give you only to be met with. Yeah, I know.

You've never had anything to offer him ever. You've never had anything to offer

him that he would accept for you to enter his presence.

The way that we live is its own sacrifice. It's its own way of honoring what God has done for us.

That's all true, but it doesn't gain you access to him.

The same thing that gained you access to him the first day you believed is the

same thing that gained access to him when Moses did, and when Abraham did,

and when David did, that we imitate their faith.

The same day that he anointed David to be king, he knew that David would do

what he did with Bathsheba.

In God's eyes, those all happened at the same time. Yet he still calls him. He still uses him.

He still invites him into the family. And he does the same for you and me.

So come to the table with your empty hands and receive the free grace that is

offered at the person of Jesus Christ and be strengthened. Let's pray.

Father, as always, thank you for the chance to be in your word.

God, I'm reminded every time, but especially this morning, how unworthy I am

to stand and do this on your behalf.

And I just pray that you would use my words, take them and do with them what only you can do.

God, help people to see clearly that we are a people of grace.

That certainly we are called to live holy lives. And like we talked about last

week, we're called to love the brethren. We're called to be hospitable.

We're called to honor marriage. We're called to make sure and not love money.

All of those things are good things to strive towards.

But God, as we strive towards them, may we never think that the things that

we're doing are gaining us access to you.

Will we always be a people that reminds ourselves that it's Christ's sacrifice

brought on our behalf that gives us the right to be called sons and daughters of God.

God, would we be a people that is strong? Would we be a people that is strengthened by your grace?

Would we be a people that reminds each other week to week and day to day that

we can do what God has called us to do because he has given us an endless supply

of strength from his son, Jesus.

We thank you for that. God, these are hard things, and some of these things

don't ever really make sense.

God, I pray that you would help us to make sense of them, and when they don't,

would you just help us to trust you?

Would you give us the faith to do what you called us to do? In the name I pray, amen.