Hebrews: Goodbye Guilt Trip

So last week we talked about God's heart for orphans.

The week before that, we talked about politics.

We're jumping back into the book of Hebrews today.

We've been going through the book of Hebrews this fall.

After today, we're going to jump into next week, talking about gratitude in the light of thanksgiving to come.

And then we'll be in Advent through the end of the year, and then we'll come back to Hebrews in the new year.

So that's that's the plan.

If you're keeping track, you're not keeping track, but I thought I would let you know.

Here's our text for this morning, Hebrews 9, 11 through 14.

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent, not made with hands that is not of this creation, he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.

For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctify for the purification of flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

So there's a lot of Old Testament imagery through there, and we're going to get into that, but we're going to hold on to that all the way until January.

This morning we're going to focus on this idea of a pure conscience that is made and given to us by Jesus once and for all.

So point number one is this the cross of Jesus gives us a pure conscience, redeeming us from the guilt trip.

Maybe you heard about this trip made by a group of Americans.

It was back on March 5th of this year, not a great time to take a trip, and they got on a cruise ship in Fort Lauderdale, 235 of them on March 5th.

And they're gonna sail from Fort Lauderdale across the Atlantic to Europe.

That sounds like a nightmare to me, even if a pandemic doesn't break out.

That's not my gym.

I have too many control issues for that.

Passengers start getting sick, and then sure enough, they all get quarantined to their cabins.

If you've been on a cruise ship, you know there's about eight good rooms on the whole ship, and everybody else is in a closet.

So everybody is quarantined in their little closet room for the rest of this trip.

No country will let them in.

No country wants to take them.

No country wants to take this ship full of sick people.

Nobody knows what's going on.

Finally, France lets them port.

They're taken off the ship, they're put on buses, locked on the buses for five hours before they're let back off, put back on planes to come back to the United States.

It was a trip that wouldn't end.

They get on the plane, everybody's coughing, people are getting sick, people are collapsing.

Finally, they get back to the U.S., to Atlanta.

Thank you, France, for that gift, a great gift that they gave to us, this plane full of sick people.

And they get to Atlanta, they land, they sit on the tarmac for three hours, nobody knows what to do with these people before they receive some help.

One person said it was a trip from hell.

And maybe you know what a trip from hell feels like as you went on it.

Maybe it wasn't that bad, but maybe it felt like that, where it just won't end, right?

Like you're never safe, you're never relieved, you're never at home.

Or maybe you know this other trip, the guilt trip, which can feel exactly the same way.

It's the same feeling that this will never end, I'll never be relieved, I'll never be safe, I'll never be at home.

And it's not whether you're guilty or not, because we all have guilt because we all do things, say things, think things we should not.

So we all have guilt.

The guilt trip is about keeping you in your guilt.

Feeling condemned.

And you can never do enough or be good enough.

There's not enough self-pity to get yourself out of it.

There's not enough self-pity that you won't pile on yourself or self-belittling that you won't do to yourself while you're on the guilt trip, and you're just stuck.

Now, the feeling of guilt is legitimate.

We have legitimate guilt, and godly sorrow can lead us to really good places confession, repentance, growth, health, restoration.

But the guilt trip is different because it's a sorrow that doesn't drive us to those places of confession, repentance.

It's a sorrow that drives us toward condemnation.

And it's so wonderful that the Bible has something to say to us.

Because we all know that.

Some of us live on a guilt trip, like it was a cruise ship you got on a long time ago and you hadn't gotten off of it.

Others of us visit the guilt trip.

But we all know the feelings.

In verse 14, we read that in Jesus God purifies our conscience.

So two words there to define.

The first is conscience.

So this is the part of your soul, your inner being, that knows the difference between right and wrong, the part of your inner self that distinguishes right and wrong.

And therefore it's the part of the inner self that feels the weight and the burden when you do wrong.

Okay, so that's what conscious is in this in this verse.

And then it says purify.

Another way to say that is purge.

So it means to cleanse or consecrate with more than enough power.

So our conscience is purified, not by us and our work, but by the work of Jesus.

So if you've ever been on a guilt trip and you know the feelings of self pity, self-belitting, beating yourself down, the way in which the conscience is purified is not by you doing enough or being enough.

It's about resting and knowing the work of Jesus for you.

You can rest and grow in a pure conscience by gift alone, even while not being perfect.

In 1955, Billy Graham was invited to speak at the University of Cambridge.

So he was 36 years old, not well educated, but he was well known.

So he gets this invite to go over to Britain to preach.

University of Cambridge is full of the brightest minds of the entire world, and the press gets a hold of the fact that Billy Graham, this Southern preacher, is coming over to preach the brightest minds in the world, and the press and the academics just start to work him over, labeling him a fundamentalist because he believes the blood of Jesus is the path for forgiveness of sins.

And he's intimidated.

He said he was intimidated.

But the first night he gets there, and one-fourth of the school shoves themselves into a building.

2,000 students and teachers and faculty are there to hear him.

The first two nights, nothing happens, nothing resonates.

He preaches his sermons and he's trying to meet them intellectually on their level.

He's trying to quote the right people and say all the right things.

And then Wednesday night, he just sort of has nothing left of his own intellect to offer, and he sets aside his lecture, and he says, Let me tell you what I know about the cross of Jesus Christ.

Here's what Anglican minister Dick Lucas says about that night.

He was sitting there on the floor.

He was sitting there.

Here's what he says.

I'll never forget that night.

I was sitting in the totally packed chancel, sitting on the floor with the Regis professor of divinity sitting on one leg and the chaplain of a college who was a future bishop on the other.

Both of these were very good men, but completely against the idea that you needed salvation from sin by the blood of Jesus Christ.

So dear Billy got up that night and he began at Genesis, and he went right through the whole Bible and talked about every single sacrifice you can imagine.

The blood was just flowing all over the place, everywhere for three-fourths of an hour.

And both my neighbors were terribly embarrassed by this crude proclamation of the blood of Christ.

It was everything they disliked and everything they dreaded.

But at the end of the sermon, Billy Graham dismissed the audience and invited anyone who wanted to stay behind and make a commitment to Christ to stay.

And that night, to everyone's shock, 400 young women and men stayed.

You see, the blood of Christ resonates for people who are at the end of themselves.

And it doesn't matter how wealthy you are or how intellectual you are, your IQ, your net worth, how put together you appear to be, because if you are the end of yourself and you don't have anything to offer to make yourself right with God, to be forgiven, to feel forgiven, to feel pure, to be pure, and you're just into self-pity, you can't beat yourself up enough because you've let yourself down.

You've hurt someone, you've said something, you've lived in disobedience, all these things.

There is no better news than to hear that God loves you enough while you're a sinner to sacrifice himself in order to love you.

That's the good news we have in Jesus.

Verse 12, we can reread it.

He, Jesus, entered once for all.

So final, nothing else to add to that, into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, securing eternal redemption.

So point number two is this because God shed his own blood for us, we don't have to sacrifice ourselves when we feel guilty.

So the Hebrews believe that blood was life.

Life was in the blood.

And of course they believe that, right?

Because you have an animal, the animal gets hurt, blood comes out of the animal, the animal dies.

So therefore, life must be in blood.

So we can think about that as we read Leviticus 17, verse 11.

Leviticus 17:11

For the life of a creature is in the blood.

And I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.

It is the blood that makes atonement for one's life.

So the animal's life for the person's life.

It's a gift of forgiveness.

But what we often do, and you know it because you do it and I do it, what we often do is we sacrifice ourselves to make up for our mistakes and our sin.

Try to earn our way back with God.

We feel like we're in a debt, we're in a hole, we're losing on the scoreboard.

Score a little bit more, climb our way out.

But how much self-pity is needed before you feel welcomed by God again?

Like how much it how much is it?

One day, two days, three days, three months, three years?

How much religiosity is needed after you really screw up, you really hurt someone?

How do you measure that?

How do you determine it?

How many good deeds?

How much spirituality?

How many moralistic notions do you need to get off the guilt trip?

All of that is the shedding of your own blood, sacrificing yourself over and over and over again.

Rather than trusting in God's sacrifice for you.

It's an act of love.

Point number three is this your guilt trip can transform to a gospel journey of relief, gratitude, and joy in Christ.

That's the transformation that can occur as we learn to rest and trust over and over again in the blood of Jesus for us, that we don't have to sacrifice ourselves.

That we can move from a guilt trip to relief, gratitude, and joy in Christ as a way of life.

The gospel implication here leads us to the idea of a confessional life.

Confession becomes our avenue of repentance, that godly sorrow would be taken to God sufficiently because we know our conscience has been purged as a gift.

We're purified.

And confession becomes a gift toward healing rather than a dread toward more guilt.

Because that's what I thought it was for a long time.

The idea of to live confessional or to confess to God.

That was me filling God in, and I will feel more dreadful and in fear of God until I do enough good, and then all of a sudden I'm back into the good graces of God.

That's what I thought confession was.

But if our consciences are already purged, cleansed, and consecrated, then confession is us coming before God as a path of healing and health and growth and grace.

Late pastor and author Jack Miller said this.

Eliot called hollow men.

Ask the Holy Spirit to make you willing to be searched by God.

And in turn, you will realize you are truly known by Him.

Do not expect the process of searching to be always painless and pleasant, no, hardly.

But you will begin to have the joy of a clear conscience and a deepening fellowship with Christ as you realize he is unafraid of what he exposes, willing to heal, awaiting your return to him.

As you learn to thirst after Christ and drink of him, you will find the living waters of the Holy Spirit flowing through you.

No longer will you be the shiny appearance of something good, but you will be really living, and from you waters will overflow into others' lives.

So Jack Miller was saying we don't have to live as hollow people, hollow in the soul, building up a shiny exterior, performing or pretending.

We don't have to live as a guilt-ridden people on a guilt trip.

But as a grace-rescued people with pure consciences, purged or purified by the blood of Jesus.

My brothers and sisters, rest and delight and savor, and be more astonished this morning by the sufficient blood of Jesus for you.

Sufficient for your sin, sufficient for your guilt, and sufficient for your purity.

Let's pray to God.

God, thank you for a few minutes here just to contemplate how sufficient and astonishing your blood for us is, that we no longer have to sacrifice ourselves either in a belittling of the self or in some performance before you.

God, thank you that you find us in our brokenness, that you came to the cross while we were sinners, that you traded your life for our death, that we have the substitutionary atonement of Jesus for our hearts.

That can sound crude and yet it resonates for all the guilt that we've ever felt.

To know that a God loves us so much that He would sacrifice for us and find the way to forgive us apart from our works, but as a gift of grace.

Amen.