Pentecost Sunday

Good to see all of you this morning as we celebrate

Pentecost together. We're going to be looking at

Hebrews chapter 10. And yeah, if you'll stand with

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

me for the reading of God's Word, we'll hear.

We'll hear verses one through 25, starting in verse one.

For since the law has been a shadow of the good things to

come, instead of the true form of these realities, it can

never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered

every year, make perfect those who draw near.

Otherwise would they not have ceased to be offered, since the

worshippers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have

any consciousness of sin. But in these sacrifices there is

a reminder of sin every year. For it is impossible for the

blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Consequently when Christ came into the world, he said,

sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you

have prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sin

offerings you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is

written of me in the scroll of the book, when he said above,

You have neither desired nor taken pleasure.

And sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin

offerings. These are offered according to

the law. Then he added, Behold, I have

come to do your will. He abolish is the first, in

order to establish the second. And by that we have been

sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once

for all. And every priest stands daily at

his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can

never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for

all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right

hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemy should be

made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has

perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us.

For after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with

them after those days, declares the Lord, I will put my laws on

their hearts and write them on their minds.

Then he adds, I will remember their sins and their lawless

deeds no more. Where there is forgiveness of

these, there is no longer any offering for sin.

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the

holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way

that He opened for us, through the curtain, that is, through

His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the House of

God, let us draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of

faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience,

and our bodies washed with pure water.

Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without

wavering, for He who promised is faithful.

And let us consider how to stir one another up to love and good

works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of

some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you

see the day drawing near. This is the word of the Lord.

Go ahead and have a seat. We'll pray, and that's God to

bless us. Lord, we do thank you for your

word. We thank you for how you

instruct us. And long passages like this with

cryptic language from the Old Testament is weird to our 21st

century years. And I pray that your Holy Spirit

would enlighten us, illumine the truth of this text to us.

And Lord, most of all, I pray that you would make clear for us

the confidence that we can have through Christ, through the Holy

Spirit to commune with you and enjoy you and be transformed

further into Christ image. In Jesus name we pray.

Amen. Yeah.

So I, I have spent my whole life trying to figure out what does

it mean to or how do you actually engage the Holy Spirit?

If we're going to be celebrating the Holy Spirit, we should

actually know something of what it means to actually engage him.

And as as I've thought about that, Hebrews 10 has been a

chapter that is central to helping me learn how to do that.

I'm still learning and I'm sure you all are as well.

But I often ask myself the question of like, what do I need

to do? Like I love fishing on my kayak.

Is that do I go out into nature alone, isolate myself and get

alone with God? Is that is that how I engage the

Holy Spirit? Do I go into my closet at home

alone and go into fasting and prayer?

Do I do that? Like what, what do I do?

Like what am I? How am I supposed?

Do I need a worship worship leader as gifted as Joseph is to

hit the right notes and chords to make that tingly feeling up

my spine to know I'm with the Holy Spirit Like what, what,

what is it like? How does it work?

And I think when we look at chapter 10 here of Hebrews, we

get some clarity on that. And so my hope, my hope is to

show you that this gathering, being with each other is the

perfect place to engage and experience and get help from the

Holy Spirit. So we got a lot of work to do to

show that through this text. So hopefully we can get there

together. So here in chapter 10, verses 1

to 14, I say Paul, who knows who the writer of the Hebrew to the

letter of the Hebrews is, but I'm going to say Paul.

So as the writer is writing in these verses, he is helping

Jewish Christians figure out how they how to navigate their

relationship with God. They have navigated their

relationship with God through Moses and the law.

All of a sudden Jesus comes, things have changed, and he's

writing here trying to help them to see what the difference is

now that Jesus has come. And he's trying to help them

figure out, well, what do we do with Moses?

What do we do with the sacrifices?

What do we do with the Old Testament law?

And he's explaining to them in this section that Jesus is

superior to all of that and has replaced the sacrifices, the

priests, as he is the sacrifice, He is the high priest.

He has come to establish what all of those things were

pointing to, that those laws and those sacrifices, as we read

they cannot and do, did not fully pay for sin or their

guilt. And the law and the sacrifices

had no power and no inherent life in them to sustain them,

anything that they might give them.

Which is why the Holy Spirit would come and go in the Old

Testament. He'd show up and then leave.

And this way, keeping God's rules, worshipping God rightly

with proper sacrifice, while good, while holy, while

righteous, it didn't perfect them.

It didn't. It didn't fully help them to

become who God demanded and wanted them to be.

However, as we look at this text, verse 14 kind of sticks

out. It sticks out.

It's it's like it's in bold in the text even though it's not.

We read in verse 14 that Jesus is 1 sacrifice on the cross

where he spilled his blood to take away our guilt has noticed

there the past tense perfected us.

Jesus, in his death and in his resurrection from the dead, so

purifies us through his blood that we now enjoy the status of

those who are perfected. Now, I don't know about you

guys, but as we're going through that liturgy and as you hear me

say those words just now, I tend to bristle a little bit that

word perfect, that Jesus has perfected us.

It sounds pretentious to me. It just does.

It sounds pretentious. It sounds arrogant.

It sounds it sounds like something that's that you would

consider to be haughty. It feels awkward to bandy about

that kind of language, especially when referring to our

own selves. We might even resist it.

We would resist it even if we if it if at least it didn't just

seem to be too good to be true. It's certainly uncomfortable.

We call people perfectionists, not as a compliment.

And those who act as if they're perfect, well, probably not

friends with them. They're not typically the kind

of people we enjoy hanging out with.

We typically call people perfectionists, ironically, and

ingest. Yet that's how God is talking

about us here. It's awkward, It's it's

interesting, it's different, and it's being used of you.

It's being used of you who put your trust in your faith in

Jesus. To you it says you are perfected

in Christ. Your guilt is gone, your sin is

fully forgiven and cleansed, and God has received you as His

righteous child and the whole Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit

look at you and they see a perfected individual.

You are perfected in Christ. Let that just wash over you for

a moment. That doesn't.

That's not normal. That's opposite of everything

that we see and feel. It's such strong language and

it's used to define who you are before God.

But it doesn't just stop there in verse 14.

Let me read the whole of it again to you.

He says by a single offering he has perfected for all time those

who are being sanctified, those who are being sanctified.

The word sanctified there means holy.

Just another way of saying perfected.

But it describes someone who's becoming holy, someone who's

becoming a more holy person, a person who is more formed into

the image of Christ, a person who is more perfect.

So that sounds like a contradiction, does it not?

At least it should if you're thinking about it.

Christ has perfected us and we're being sanctified.

There's this dual reality that we're experiencing.

You heard it even in our liturgy this morning, These the now and

the not yet the now. We live in sin in the world, but

we're also perfected and like we're well.

It's why life is so confusing and so weird, especially as a

Christian. And so how do we, how do we put

together in our heads this the fact that we really are

perfected, but when we look at our lives, we don't necessarily

see it and we're going through this difficult process.

Well, I'm a father of five children, four of whom are now,

believe it or not, adults. Yes, one of our daughters just

turned 18. I've only got 1 left in the

house. That's a minor.

So she's an adult, but is she? She's an adult, but she doesn't

pay her own bills. She still lives in the house.

She may be mature for an 18 year old, and I would say she is, but

she's entirely dependent upon us.

She's entirely ignorant of anything about the world.

She's an adult, but she's still a child.

Her legal status is that of an adult, but in reality she's

learning what it means to become an adult.

Both my child and we, her parents, live between her status

of adult while she is still a child and if we handle ourselves

wisely as parents, and hopefully we do.

And we've had to learn to do this now more than once, rather

than clutch on to her as a child and demand that that's really

what we want her to be and remain.

Instead, we'll maybe hold her hand and help her to move into

her identity as an adult and walk with her in that process to

live into and become what she is legally, what her identity

actually is and what that's what's, that's what the right of

the Hebrews is getting at here. That legally, literally, legally

before God, you are perfected. You are an adult in Christ.

That is your identity. It is your status.

It is real. It is not just a figment of an

imagination. It's not just spiritual mumbo

jumbo. It is who you are, and it's only

with a matter of time with Jesus at your side, walking with you,

that you will become fully formed into His image and your

status will become your lived reality.

That is what Jesus is doing in you, and that's what He's doing

for you. He comes to your side, He holds

your hand, He knows your struggle with sin, but He looks

at you and He knows you are also already perfected in Him and you

simply need his help to move your heart and your body into

that reality. As painful and challenging as

that may be. That's great news, right?

That's amazing. It's wonderful, wonderful news.

It's what we celebrate. It's, it's the hope of the

gospel. It's what it's what we look to

Jesus to do for us and in us. But there's more because he goes

on. There's another 10 verses that

we're going to consider this morning.

And the reason why we go on is because what we learn in verses

15 to 25 is that how Jesus comes alongside of us and brings us

into maturity, brings us into adulthood, bring helps us to

manifest the perfected status that we have in him is actually

through the ministry and through the work of the Holy Spirit.

That's what that's how he does it.

So here in verse 15 down through 25, we see that there is this

transition that takes place in verse 15 where the focus now

turns to the Holy Spirit and it says there that the Holy Spirit

is with us to in verse 15 bear witness with us.

Look there, verse 15. And the Holy Spirit also bears

witness to us. Now we'll get to what that means

in just a second. But to bear witness to us, the

Holy Spirit has to be near us. He's got to be consciously

present somewhere in our lives in order for us to have anything

to hear from him to to have anything born witness to us, to

affect us. And we know that in Acts chapter

Acts 2 · chapter mention

2, Jesus from his throne in heaven, having risen from the

dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father, he did what

he promised to do. He sent the Holy Spirit not just

to be near, but to become, but to enter into us, to come upon

us, to take up residence in us, to make in us his own home.

Which is wild because when you read the Old Testament, and

especially for these Jewish readers who originally got this

letter, for them, the Holy Spirit only went into the most

cleansed, the most perfect place on earth.

And the basically almost all of the laws and rituals and priests

and everything in the Old Testament was there to make a

space that is good enough for the Holy Spirit to go into.

And what we learn is that Jesus accomplishes all of that,

perfecting us so that now we are perfected to become the perfect

place for the Holy Spirit to come and dwell.

You don't merely as a Christian have a perfected legal status

before God. You are so perfected in Christ

that God is happy to live within you.

He's happy to live within you, and not just to live within you

begrudgingly, the way some of my teenagers have with me, but He

lives in you to bear witness to you, to bear witness to you.

What that means is that the Holy Spirit looks upon what Jesus has

done and he agrees. This is a good place for me to

be. You are God's chosen place to

live. That's how effective Jesus has

been for you, so perfected that he would dare enter into us and

make us his home, to make us living temples in which he

dwells. And he doesn't just live there,

but he speaks and bears witness. And what we learn in verses 15

and following is what He's actually bearing witness to us

in with what he's saying to us. He's reminding us of God's

promises. He reminds us that we're loved

by God. He reminds us, He reminds us

that we are his children. He he assures us.

That's what the language here says.

He wants to assure us of our status before God.

He wants to remind us of who we are in Christ, to encourage us,

to help us, and to help us live into the identity that Christ

has won for us. The Holy Spirit has chosen you

to be His dwelling place to make you a confident, assured child

of God. That's that's what he's done for

you and that's what he currently is doing for you.

So that's that's like the theological explanation and

content for our experience in our lives as Christians.

But what happens in verses 19 down through 25 is the right of

the Hebrews now says, OK, this is what this means for you.

He says this is. These last 10 verses I'm going

to go in and I'm going to show you how what happened on

Pentecost because of the blood of Christ actually works in your

life. He takes the perfecting work of

Christ in the indwelling assurance and witness of the

Holy Spirit, and He makes practice of it in verses 19 to

23. We see there that the Holy

Spirit bears witness to us so that we would have confidence to

enter into His presence so that we would have confidence to

enter into His presence. All throughout the Old

Testament, you would see the temple or the Tabernacle cleanse

so the Holy Spirit could show up.

And then there was this sense of, Oh my gosh, I'm sinful, I'm

impure, I'm defiled. If I go in there and I spend

time with God, I'm going to defile the place and incur God's

judgment upon myself. And that happened.

That happened. You read the Old Testament,

Leviticus chapter, chapter 10, literally immediately in Chapter

9 where the Holy Spirit comes. Chapter 10, the next verse is

two dudes walk into the Tabernacle where the Holy Spirit

is and they get burned alive by God.

That's not going to invite a lot of confidence for anybody to go

into God's presence. That's at least going to make

you think twice. So the purpose, one of the main

purposes of the Holy Spirit is to come into your life and to

bear witness to your soul, to say, hey, what Jesus did was

real and you can happily confidently walk into God's

presence. Look, look at what it says there

in those verses, verse 19. Therefore, brother, since we

have confidence to enter into the holy places by the blood of

Jesus, by a new and living way that He is open for us through

the curtain, that is, through His flesh, since we have a great

priest over the House of God, let us draw near with a true

heart in full assurance of faith.

The Holy Spirit lives within you to bear witness to what Jesus

has done for you so that you can confidently walk into the

presence of God and not fear judgment.

To remind you that Jesus's death was real and His blood really

did accomplish everything the Bible says it did and is sinful

as you are, no matter what your week was like last week or what

it will be like next week. That you can confidently walk

into His presence because He has perfected you.

And the Holy Spirit is there to remind you of that and to call

you into it. Despite the fact that we live

like children. We may be adults, but yet we are

like children. Maybe like an 18 year old

spiritually. The day I turned 18 I did two

really foolish things. This is real, this is not a

joke. The day I turned 18, I took my

new ID and I went into the Amoco gas station in Maquoketa, IA and

bought myself a pack of Marlboro 25 cigarettes.

And then I went to the Bumblebee Tattoo shop in Davenport, IA and

got myself a $35 tribal art tattoo on my left shoulder.

Yes, I peeked early. Yes, I had a new legal status.

I'm an adult and I exercise my new identity like a child.

And no doubt have done many more childish things like that with

my new perfected identity in Christ.

But let's not miss what happens here.

The reason I bring that up isn't just to tell on myself.

The reason I bring that up is because I may have been doing

really stupid childish things, but I really actually believed I

was an adult and I walked into that Amoco gas station not

fearing like I have a fake ID. Like I put my slap my ID on that

counter and I was like I want a pack of cigarettes and they gave

it to me. When you are confident in your

identity, it creates a boldness in you to use your identity

properly or legally. And this is what the Holy

Spirit's in us to do, to embolden you to build your faith

up so that when you walk into the presence of God, you don't

have to walk in sheepishly like, oh, I got a fake idea.

I hope I can get away with it. It means when you go to prayer

before God, even when you're full of guilt from sin, you

could go in confidently that He's there to love you and

forgive you and to transform you.

It means when you when you have a horrible week and you walk

into church on Sunday morning and you feel like trash, that

you can walk boldly into God's presence.

And no, you're not going to face judgment because Christ has

perfected you. And the Holy Spirit is there to

buoy your soul and to create confidence in you so that you

know that you're going to get what you need from God, the

encouragement and the help that you need.

This is this is what Pentecost gets us, but it gets us more

than that. And verses 24 and 25, this is a

command. We see a command, and it's a

command to go to church. Don't neglect gathering

together. But isn't it interesting that

it's right here that He gives us command?

This isn't coming out of thin air, folks.

This command in verses 24 and 25 is not just falling out of the

sky. Unrelated to everything else

that has just been going on in the book of Hebrews.

This is coming at the precise point that it needs to come.

And the reason is because you've just been invited somewhere with

your new status. You've been invited into the

holy place. And so we get to the question.

We open with what, where and how do I get to meet with the Holy

Spirit? Well, it's among one another

because if we take seriously what God says here in Hebrews

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

chapter 10, it's not just you personally who've received the

Holy Spirit, every person who loves Jesus around you, They are

temples of God's presence as well.

And when you get around them, you get around God.

How does the whole where do you find the Holy Spirit?

You hang out with one another, you worship with one another,

you pray with one of these, serve one another.

And guess what happens when that when you do that, you get the

things that the Bible call the fruit of the Spirit and all the

evidences of the presence of the Spirit.

You get help and encouragement, which is exactly what we find

the calling to hear in verse 25. Not neglecting to meet together,

as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the

more as you see the day drawing near.

That as we're waiting for the fullness of all that Christ has

accomplished to manifest itself, we can be encouraged by the Holy

Spirit in each other. That the Holy Spirit encourages

you through one another. Now that can be good news or bad

news, depending upon your experience with the Church.

No doubt, like you and me, on paper, when we look at it, the

church is a mess. Historically, the church has

failed profoundly. I don't need to list the endless

evidence of that. And no doubt some of you here

have been personally hurt, disappointed, ignored, or feel

invisible in the church. And for you, when you come among

the gathering of God's people, you don't experience being

encouraged. Some of you at least, maybe even

just for a season. But you don't feel encouraged.

Nor do you see, feel seen or loved For some of you here.

It's likely that as you hear that this would be the perfect

place for the Spirit to be met, you bristle, maybe even balk at

it. Like, yeah, that don't work yet.

The church, we need to remember, we need to be careful here to

allow us to interpret the church the way we're invited to

interpret ourselves. The church is not defined by her

failures. The church is not defined by her

sins or her stupidities. Just as your sin is not your

identity, the corporate gathering likewise is a group of

people who collectively have a perfected identity in Christ.

So when you look at that really annoying person who's hurt you

or ignores you, you're looking at a perfected person in Christ

that the Spirit of God lives in and is your hope to experience

the helping presence of God. And there's a real hope to

experience the perfecting presence of the Holy Spirit in

that person because God is in them to make it happen.

Just as you, if it were up to you, would mess up your own

perfection in Christ. You can look at them and know,

oh, they would do it. They're doing it too.

But just like I have hope in the God's presence in me, I can have

hope in them as well. You see, this passage invites us

to do for each other what we are encouraged to do for ourselves,

to be filled full of faith that Jesus has perfected us and is

sanctifying us into what he accomplished for us through the

empowering presence of the Holy Spirit.

The person who trusts Jesus in front of you, behind you, beside

you, those people are perfected. They are ideal dwelling places

for the Gods presence, and they're ideal places for you to

encounter and experience the work of the Holy Spirit in your

life. And when you see them, you're

invited to see them from God's view, and he sees most clearly

they are perfected houses of God that you're invited to

experience and know God's power. Do you see each other in the

church that way? Paul in First Corinthians 7

double s down on this idea when he's talking about the spiritual

gifts. And all of the spiritual gifts

are described there as to be for the purpose of building up for

encouragement. But he defines what a spiritual

gift is in verse 7, and he defines the spiritual gift as a

manifestation of the Spirit, a manifestation of the Spirit.

Which means if someone is using a spiritual gift, God's Spirit

is literally on display, manifesting himself for your

building up, for your encouragement, for your help.

That means if you want to experience the Spirit, get

around people who care to use their spiritual gifts.

This is the power to reshape your entire view of everyone

around you here. As good as personal devotion is

to God in prayer and Bible reading and communion with God

in a kayak on a beautiful lake, this passage shows us that the

perfect place to meet God, for help, for encouragement, to

experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit is to

be with each other because that's where God is.

But I also want to say this, that there are some of you who

feel inadequate to serve in the church, to do the work of

encouraging other people. They feel inadequate.

They feel like they can't, there's not really anything they

can do well enough, or that their words get all jumbled up

when they try to help someone or encourage someone, or they just

feel too broken, sinful, and inadequate to spiritually be of

any real good help to anybody. God is inviting you to see

yourself differently here. He's inviting you to see that in

Christ you really are perfected and the Holy Spirit is with you

to assure you and give you confidence in that so that you

can freely serve and love others and be the actual presence of

God for their help and for their, for encouragement in

their fight against sin and their encouragement in their

fight against depression or in conflicts.

It means you are God's direct and personal encouragement for

others. You are the ideal place for

other people to see and know and experience God's help.

So you're needed in the church. You're needed on paper.

You might feel like and look like a failure, and surely on

paper the church looks this way. But God invites us to fresh

faith this morning, to actually believe the gospel about

yourself, to believe the gospel about each other.

And he invites you to press deeply into that, that you might

experience more and more of the spirits help by digging deeper

and deeper roots here among one another.

And that's my prayer for you all this morning.

So let's pray and ask God's help for us to receive that.

Lord, we thank you and we praise you for all the good work that

you've done for us in Jesus. We thank you for the the fact

that you didn't just ascend to heaven and forget us, but sent

your Spirit to us to do all those things that we just

discussed to give us confidence to come near you and to make us

useful among others. And Lord, to make everyone

around us more than what we perceive with our own eyes.

So Lord help us, we pray to believe and receive that, that

we would be even more excited to come to church on Sunday.

The Lord more full of faith in what you have done and are doing

in and through us. So we pray and ask your Spirit

to do that work on us even now. Ask us in Jesus name, Amen.