Hebrews: Jesus is Our Rest

So this fall we are journeying through Hebrews chapter four, not just chapter four, all of Hebrews today.

We're in chapter four.

Let me read Hebrews four, six through ten.

Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience.

Again he appoints a certain day, today, saying through David, so long afterward, in the words already quoted, Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.

So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

Let's pray and we'll try to make sense of this passage.

God, thank you for your goodness to us, that you give us rest from the toil that we know as we're trying to earn our value and worth in this world, and the toil we know that even within faith, we so easily make it about what we do.

And it wears us out, and we are so thankful we get to come this morning and hear that there is a Sabbath rest for us, and it is you.

Help us to know this in a greater way this morning.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

So point number one coming out of these verses is that we enter God's rest by belief.

By grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, and nothing else.

We enter God's rest by belief and nothing else.

Last week, uh, after dinner, our little family, and sorry, Christine, didn't ask you for permission for this story, but we went into the backyard to play Capture the Flag.

Now, if you remember the rules of Capture the Flag, you've split the field into two.

You have two sides, you put a flag at the end of both, right?

Maybe a flag or a ball or something like that.

I think we had two different balls.

And so at the end of both, and we had our little girls on one side, one team, Christian and I were on the other side.

And you try to move into the other team's territory, work your way through the territory without them tagging.

If you get tagged, you go to their jail, get their flag, bring it back to your territory.

If you get back to your territory, you have won that round.

And then maybe you reshuffle teams or you just keep playing new rounds.

And so we line up flags on each side, territory, we establish the line, we're on the line.

Now I'm the kind of dad that likes to dominate my kids, so I'm ready.

I'm warmed up.

I did a few stretching, you know, warm-up drills and stuff like that.

And I'm ready.

I'm giving the stink eye.

I have a I'm confident in my partner.

We've been married 16 years, she's athletic, she's smart and savvy.

We're ready, we're ready.

So we say game on.

As soon as we say game on, Christy runs across the line, and that dear woman tags one of our children across on their territory and says, I got you.

To which that child, very confused, tags her and says, You're in jail.

And of course, we all laugh, you know, with mom, you know, not at her, you know, with her.

And we then reviewed the rules, and it turns out Christy was playing tag, not capture the flag, which was the game we were playing.

Now, we reviewed the rules, and then we kind of, oh, let's start over, and then everybody was on the same page.

We're all on the same page, right?

But let's say, let's just say Christy had kept playing Tag while we were playing Capture the Flag.

Well, she would have just ended up in jail over and over and over again, right?

Just like if you or I were playing one particular game when actually we were playing another game.

Right?

Like you can be really, really good at one game, but if the game's actually something else, it just won't matter.

And Jesus changed the game when he fulfilled the law.

You can keep playing the game of trying to fulfill the law, be enough to be accepted by God, do enough to be accepted by God.

But the game changed from a religious merit structure to the gospel.

By grace through faith in Jesus.

And this is why he is our Sabbath rest, because we can rest from our works as he did his.

Because when it comes to these things like forgiveness of our sin, like our actual sin, our mistakes, not theoretical, but our actual mistakes and our fears and just everything that we should be and we're not, and our worth and our value and our righteousness.

This is all coming from God to us as a gift, and we receive it.

That's why we're at rest.

Verse 11.

Alright, so that's all good news.

Verse 11 transitions over.

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Now, without the grace of God, that could be quite scary.

With the grace of God, you know that you are fully welcome and delighted in by God and Jesus.

Point number two is this in the gospel of Christ, earning is over, but effort is not.

And we need to distinguish those two.

We need to say all that.

Earning is over, but effort is not.

So God gives us rest from the endless toil of trying to be enough in the world or be enough with him or be enough in the church, and yet we're called in the grace of God, already in that secure relationship, to enter the very rest already given to us.

This week I heard this list is from this book, Twelve Steps for the Recovering Pharisee Like Me.

That's the title of the book.

And we could kind of title this list 12 steps to rest.

I mean, it's sort of like our confession.

You'll hear the sarcasm, but the truth as I read through these 12.

We admit that our single most unmitigated pleasure is to judge other people.

We have come to believe that our means of obtaining greatness is to make everyone lower than ourselves in our mind.

See, these are our confessions.

We realize that we detest mercy being given to those who, unlike us, haven't worked for it and don't deserve it.

We have decided that we don't want to get what we deserve after all, and we don't want anyone else to either.

We will cease all attempts to apply teaching rebuke to anyone but ourselves.

We are ready to have God remove all these defects of attitude and character.

We embrace the belief that we are and will always be experts at sinning.

We are looking closely at the lives of famous men and women in the Bible who turned out to be ordinary sinners like us.

We are seeking through prayer and meditation to make a conscious effort to consider others better than ourselves.

We embrace the state of astonishment as a permanent and glorious reality.

We choose to rid ourselves of any attitude that is not bathed in gratitude.

And having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we will try to carry this message to others who think that Christians are better than everyone else.

That's a right confession, a right diagnosis in those first handful of steps of what we sadly tend to do and where we need to move.

This passage is right when it says that the scriptures cut us open, right?

I mean, it cuts us, it cuts our souls wide open because the truth of the scriptures of what we should be cut us open for us to go, well, I'm not that.

And what do I do now?

And we have to have a confession and give an account, and the account is I'm a sinner in need of grace.

Thank you, God.

I live in astonishment of this lavish and secure love, and that we get to live in response to that.

Christy and I have an older mentor couple, their names are Rod and Linda.

We met them years ago, probably 15 or so years ago when we were in Atlanta at the church that we served at down there, and they hosted a Bible study for us, and we became friends over the years.

And we've watched the relationship closely.

You know, you watch somebody maybe is a little bit older than you, and they're in their 60s, and we're in our 40s, and so we're watching them and what they do and how they do their marriage, how they do their relationship, and then we'll talk about it.

We try to see them about once a year at this point because they live in Denver, and now we live here in Marietta, but we try to see them about once a year.

Last year we were out there seeing them, and we lived, we lived one day with them, like in their house, and they did they work, and we kind of did our own thing, and so we had one day just kind of in their normal life.

He went to work, she did her work, and then the evening they kind of came back together, we had dinner, and they sat out on their patio and we had drinks and just talked.

And at some point I asked Rod, I said, like, is this your normal rhythm?

Like, what's a normal day?

He says, Oh no, this is normal.

Like, we both do our own thing, and then we come back together and we sit out here and we talk.

I'm like, and that's one of the things that we love.

Is like they each have like their own thing, but then they come back and they talk either in the patio or they walk to a restaurant together and they talk or they take a trip together or they hike together, right?

Like they do this, and we try to do this.

And they're already in relationship, right?

They've already given relationship to each other, they're already in marriage, and yet within the security of covenant marriage, they're still striving, still striving to enter.

And this is the image we have here that we have Sabbath rest in Jesus.

We are at rest from our work, and yet within that we're called to diligently know that rest more.

But it's not to earn anything.

And isn't that give us so much peace?

It's just to know the rest even greater in deeper ways.

And I know when it comes to church and faith, there's no shortage of being weary, right?

There's no shortage of books or sermons that can tell you what to do and what else you need to do and how much you need to do to kind of like actually get the blessings of God or something like that.

That's not what this passage teaches.

It's not the gospel.

The gospel is that God's already given you fully all the righteousness and forgiveness and standing and belovedness you could ever need in Jesus.

And by belief and nothing else, you have that.

You're at rest, there's nothing to add.

And you're called, therefore, diligently, to strive to know it in a greater way.

God has no shortage of rest and peace for you.

The only thing in the way is our deep-seated self-righteousness.

And the growth in the gospel is to say, ah, I don't have to do that anymore.

I don't have to self-justify.

I don't need that self-righteousness.

I don't have to live by comparison to other people.

I get to be fully his, fully righteous, fully forgiven, fully justified by Jesus alone.

Verse 14, since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God.

Let us hold fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Let us then, so because of that, let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

So, verse 15 about who Jesus is as a high priest who can sympathize with us.

Verse 15 grounds, verse 14 and verse 16, and here's the point, point number three: God knows how we feel and is with us in all of our weaknesses.

Dane Ortland wrote this book just released a couple months ago called Gentle and Lowly, wonderful book about Jesus.

And about Hebrews chapter 4.

Hebrews 4 · chapter mention

He wrote this in our pain, Jesus is pained.

In our suffering, he feels the suffering as his own, even though it isn't.

Not that his invincible divinity is threatened, but in the sense that his heart is feelingly drawn into our distress.

His is a love that cannot be held back when he sees his people in pain.

So I think there's two gospel implications for us coming out of this this morning.

And number one is what we've been seeing in Hebrews all along, we can bring our weaknesses, wounds, and range of emotions to God.

We have a high priest who sympathizes with us.

And that is good news because it turns out we are more emotionally volatile than we let other people know.

And we're more morally volatile than we let other people know.

And we need a high priest who can be with us and know how we feel and bring it to him.

If we're not bringing this to God, what is it we're doing in the relationship?

This is what it means to grow in the grace of God.

And the Holy Spirit, who is inside of you, is waiting in those moments of confession.

Not disappointed, not to strike you, but waiting to counsel, maybe convict, but to comfort.

Number two is this gospel invocation number two, because of Christ's work, not our work, praise God, not our work, we get to live in calm confidence with God.

I know for me, for a long time, confidence came by what I was doing for God.

Unfortunately, that is over because earning is over, but my effort's not over.

So I get to, because of his work, I get to live in a calm confidence with God.

Most of my weariness, at least for me, that I have in the world or in faith, it always reverts back to the fact that I've reverted back to law.

Some sort of merit-based living that I'm trying to do enough, to be enough.

But that's actually over.

In Jesus, I have my Sabbath rest.

You have your Sabbath rest.

And we are beloved by grace.

We are maintained by his grace.

We are sustained by his grace.

And our striving is in his compassion to us.

That's why we can have calm confidence.

This passage is showing us the gospel that our true rest is in Jesus alone, not by Joshua by living in the right place, not by Moses by living by the right rules, but by grace to us, Christ's righteousness to us.

That's why the passage says, and I'll close with this, may this come alive in your heart as I read it.

I reread it, verses 7 through 10.

Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.

So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

For you, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from His.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you for your goodness to us.

That you are sufficient.

And while your work is enough, we can be at rest from our work, that the earning is over, and inside that great gift, that you have called us to know you more.

God, would we live in right confession that we are in sinners in need of your grace?

Would we receive the right diagnosis that we are not perfect?

And would we receive the rescue that your love is perfect for us in Jesus' name?

Amen.