Connecting Brain Injuries, Hebrews, and Jesus' Priesthood | Losing My Religion (Part 7) | Stephen Feith

All right. Well, for those of you watching online, my name is Steven lead pastor and we are in the middle of football season right now.

And I'm wondering if any of you guys are football fans, go ahead and raise your hand. We'll take a poll just in general, you like football? Okay, it's almost almost it's a lot of the room.

If you're watching or listening online, let us know in the chat room if you like football. And you can also answer my next question, which is, what is your favorite team? Let's take another poll. How many of you would say your favorite team?

Are is the Packers let's go ahead and look at that. Yes, packers, we've got a small minority, how many of you would consider yourself bears are Vikings fans? I wish I could flip the camera around to show you that this church literally is a place where senators feel comfortable. It literally, they outnumber us. We know who we need to start praying for this week. So if you saw like, go ahead and write it on your prayer card. Now, I bring up football not for the sake of football, I'm actually surprised how many of you said or indicated, you're a football fan. Because usually at Madison church, I'm the only one who gets my sports references. So I've really tried to just stop.

But today's reference actually has to do with our message. And I think it's something that a lot of you guys will understand and see the relevancy behind it.

In football, there's a very, very common head injury that occurs is called a concussion.

Many of you are familiar with concussions. And it's just what happens when you're playing a fast, violent sport when lots of bodies are moving big, strong guys. And they hit head to head.

Now concussions and these other types of head injuries lead to something that is called CTE.

And they find this a lot of cases after a football player has died, they find that their brain has physically changed, like there are physical changes to the brain, this leads and the concussions can themselves lead to death, or other kinds of symptoms after retirement. Some of these things are like memory loss, depression, anxiety, headaches, stress, sleep disturbances. I can remember when I was in high school, which wasn't that long ago, but it was it was 2004 2005 I was playing football. And I know it's probably tough to tell, but I played linebacker for a while.

And then you know, obviously I wasn't like physically gifted to play a position where your primary job was to tackle the other running back who was usually twice my size. And so they thought it'd be really cool to move me to running back. But then like, then I had to go against guys who were much bigger than me trying to tackle me which I didn't like that either. But I was in a drill.

We're doing a warm up drill before practice. And I was having a hard time with my helmet. I remember that year my helmet was fairly new, but the cheek pad kept falling out. And so I was walking back we're spread out all over the hill was walking back, I was taking my helmet off to fix my cheek powder ticket feel came on done.

And man, next thing I know I was just kind of like laying on the ground. And I was I was looking up I knew I had been hit. I knew I had been hit and I was laying on the ground my ears kind of like pop there was a ring.

I didn't like to miss any I was I was small. So if I got hurt, I felt like they were eager to replace me with a backup who was bigger than me. But the only thing I really had that set me apart from my backup was was heart and passion like I would run faster than him and always pursue. So like you need to get up you need to get up. And I just remember like not being able to move just laying there just like oh my gosh. And I remember the coach told me to get up. And I remember I couldn't even come up with words, I was just laying there.

As I look next to me, like see the guy, he was also laying there. The guy hit me he was also laying there like me, they call an ambulance, they caught us off, I go in for a bunch of different types of scans to check my head. And this is in 2004. And they said you had a pretty severe concussion and you sprain some vertebrae in your neck. And so you can't practice the rest of the week. But you should be good to go on game time on Friday. And so I thought that was great because I didn't have to practice all week, but I still got to play in the game.

And I did I went out and I played now lo and behold, they would not do that anymore. Like the science has shown that that was not the right call medically or like personally for me to go through and play especially when I was 16 years old playing and and it was a regular season game but it's high school football.

So like let's simmer down with the expectations here on that I needed to play. The NFL first started looking at concussions back in 1994. And you can kind of tell that they had a little bit of an agenda when they started this committee to investigate concussions because they called it the mild traumatic brain injury committee. Mild Brain Injury remember those symptoms guys, memory loss, headaches, sleep disturbances, early death. And the first committee the NFL ever had was called the mild traumatic brain injury committee. Now, to make matters worse, if you're following along the leader, the chair of this committee was a room technologist, a rheumatologist.

What you need to know is that they do not work with heads very often. So they decided we're gonna have a committee to study head injuries and concussions, and we're gonna put somebody who works with joints, as I understand it, in charge of our concussions. Obviously, that wasn't great, because in 2009, the NFL commissioner then and President Roger Goodell had to go before Congress. That's how big of an issue this became a goal before Congress to defend policies, because there were tons of allegations that the NFL was hiding some science that they knew about, that they weren't doing enough to protect player safety. And since then, the NFL has put in place several new rules. Once it got public, once they got in trouble, the NFL stepped up because they had to, to put in new rules to reduce this type of hits and the plays that caused concussions.

And as of this year, in the last decade, they've seen a 35% drop in concussions. So you could make the argument that some of the things, some of the rules that are in place are working.

Some of those new things that the NFL is doing to reduce concussions is new protocols when somebody appears to have a head injury. So in my case, when I got hit and fell down, they don't tell you to get up anymore, and get back in line.

Their first thing is to see if you do have a concussion, they don't take players words for it anymore. Because we want to play we're scared that the next guy up in line is going to take our job. So now they don't even ask you they they kind of tell you no, no, you got to come off our play, we got to do a little bit of an evaluation. So that's when they do in game identification in game evaluation. And then after the game, we'll do a post game evaluation. And until you pass their protocol, you cannot play again. For some players, this takes weeks, it can take months, it could be days. But there are protocols in place, you also can't hit players with your head anymore. You can't do head to head hits, you can't hit people high up in the head with your shoulder anymore. Again, to reduce head injuries, players can be kicked out fined and suspended for breaking these rules and repeatedly breaking these rules. Now the thing is they the rules didn't change because concussions were new.

It's not like in 1984, the committee stumbled upon concussions. And that's not like in 2009 when Goodell goes before Congress to testify that like guys, we didn't know about any of this, and this is all new news to us. This really was you knew about concussions, the values then needed to change is what society what Congress, what the NFL players were saying is that the the values need to change. So the NFL said, Okay, we're gonna talk about player safety, player safety is going to be a really big deal. So they moved the target. Whereas maybe before it was about violence and big hits, because that would get the big kind of TV stuff. Now it's much more about Player Health, how much of it is, I'll leave that to your opinion, because I think that you can make a pretty good argument that it's not that great still. But they changed the rules.

And they changed the rules, because the rules that they had no longer served their purpose, the rules, they had no longer were hitting the target that they had, player safety became a priority. So the rules in the NFL had to change, including suspensions, fines, different protocols, equipment, and all of that. Now, this isn't just about the NFL, I'm not trying to give you a bunch of weird facts. This has to do with faith to what do you and I do if you're a believer in the room, you're watching or listening online and you're Christian, what do you do with the Book of Leviticus, third book in the Bible? All of those rules, a lot of blood, a lot of stuff about genealogy sacrifices, sacrifices for sin sacrifices for offering do's and don'ts. Things like you know, don't wear more than one type of fabric, don't eat certain types of meat. You know, if you're kind of if you're sick, well, if you're a woman and you're on your period, you got to leave town until you're you're done or better. You know, what do we do with that? Because certainly you and I are probably not practicing that today. And last week, we talked about how Scripture doesn't cancel out scripture. So if that's the case, how did we get to the place where it's like many of us don't follow Levitical law.

That's where the author of Hebrews is going to take us today and explain it. So I do think it's going to be very relevant. If you want to go to Hebrews right now. It's toward the end of your Bibles. We are in the middle of a very, very long series called losing my religion and It's called losing my religion because throughout this portion, throughout this letter, the author of Hebrews is writing to Jewish Christians, people who grew up Jewish were Jewish, not just religiously, but as ethnically Jewish, and they converted to Christianity.

This was a new type of religion for them. Now what began to happen with them as they started to go back into the old ways, they started to go back into the old Jewish religious traditions, and the author of Hebrews is pleading with them riding with them to not do that. This isn't to say that what we do or what we think, doesn't matter, it absolutely does. But it's to say that what we think and what we do matters differently because of Jesus than it did before.

Jesus, the author is worried that these new Jewish Christians are falling back into their old ways. Now, let me point out the obvious that for many of you watching listening here tonight, you probably most likely did not grow up with Jewish religious traditions, certainly, some of you might have. But I would say that a lot of you didn't. But you probably many of you did grow up in a household with its own Christian religious traditions, things that aren't necessarily in the Bible, like praying before you eat, before every meal, perhaps in your family's tradition to go to church on Christmas or Easter, perhaps, in your kind of family tradition, you weren't allowed to listen to certain types of music, you weren't allowed to see certain types of movies. And these things aren't explicitly in the New Testament. They're not explicitly in the Bible. And so it would be absolutely fair to put them in the category of Christian religious traditions.

And so that's why this letter to the Hebrews is so relevant to you and me, because all of us grew up in or around Christian religious traditions, and we're talking about losing our religion, because when we lose our religion, we can have a better relationship with God.

Now, to recap really quickly, during the first two weeks of the series, talking about Jesus was a new, better high priest.

And then the two weeks after that the author takes a detour.

And it's kind of rebuking them in a lot of ways for being spiritually mature. This was setting up where we're going today, because the author wanted to make sure that they knew that the content that was coming was going to be deeper, it was going to be more difficult to understand, but it was quite essential. And so if the in the last couple of weeks, as we've been talking about Melchisedec, the priesthood, all the new laws, all the new covenants, if you have felt overwhelmed and a little lost at times, that's okay. The author of Hebrews knew that was going to happen. And yet, we press on to today, when which two themes are going to emerge? One, we're gonna talk about the shift of regulations around the Old Covenant, the old laws, we talked about a new, better priest, today we're going to talk about a new, better covenant. Why don't we follow all of the rules and Leviticus anymore? That's what we're going to talk about. And then there are some relational implications to this. So let's go to Hebrews chapter seven. And we'll read from verse 11, to verse 19.

So if the priesthood of Levi on which the law was based, could have achieved the perfection, God intended, why did God need to establish a different priesthood, with a priest in the order of Melchisedec, instead of the order of Levi and Aaron, and if the priesthood is changed, the law must also be changed to permit it. For the priest, we are talking about belongs to a different tribe, whose members have never served at the altar as priest. What I mean is, our Lord came from the tribe of Judah. And Moses never mentioned priests coming from that tribe.

This change has been made very clear, since a different priest who is like Melchisedec has appeared, Jesus became a priest, not by meeting the physical requirement of belonging to the tribe of Levi, but by the power of a life that cannot be destroyed. And the psalmist pointed this out when he prophesied, you are a priest forever and the order of Melchisedec Yes, the old requirement about the priesthood was set aside because it was weak and useless. For the Law never made anything perfect. But now we have confidence in a better hope, through which we draw near to God. It shouldn't be fairly straightforward what the author's doing we've talked about Melchisedec. We've talked about how Jesus is greater than Melchisedec. We talked about why now choose a deck was greater than Abraham. So then we logically conclude Jesus is the greatest debtor But then the author goes into a little bit of a rhetorical question. That's how this passage starts. says, Why did God need to establish a different priesthood? So rhetorical question, why did God need to do that? The author says, because the Levitical system wasn't accomplishing God's purpose. There needed to be, because if there was no need for that, if the Levitical laws, the sanctions, whatever you want to call those, if those could fulfill God's purpose, the author of Hebrews is arguing, we didn't need a new priest, the old system, if it was working, if it was effective, if it was doing what God wanted it to do for humanity for him, there'd be no need for Jesus, there'd be no problem to be solved. We'd be looking for smoke for fire that perhaps wasn't there. But the author saying, Jesus is a better priest, better than Levi. And because of that there needs to be a new law. Why does there need to be a new law, because it was the old law that made the family of Levi Well, Abraham's great, great grandchildren, it was the law that made them priests. Without the law, there was no priest. With the priests, we needed the law that just went together. But now that we have a new priests in Jesus, the author of Hebrews is saying, we need a new covenant, new priest, New Covenant, old priest, Old Covenant. And he's not just saying that it's new. At the end of this statement, he says, We have confidence in a better hope. The old one never made anything perfect. Now we have a better hope. This new relationship, this new pathway with God through Jesus gives us a better newer hope and drawing near to God. The conclusion of the section that we're reading right now is pretty apparent.

The old ways could never would never accomplish what God wanted to accomplish, and what was God trying to accomplish? It comes back to this idea of why did God send Jesus because He loves you, because God loves humanity. And the Levitical law was not helping people love God and love each other better was not working and restoring the relationships that were damaged.

Going on the verse 20. This new system was established with a solemn oath, heirs, descendants became priest without such an oath. But there was an oath regarding Jesus for God said to Him, the Lord has taken an oath and will not break his vow, you are priests forever. Because of his this oath, Jesus is the One Who guarantees this better covenant with God. Now, last week, I talked about how it was, it was great that the author of Hebrews writing to Jewish Christians was using scripture that they valued, they didn't have the New Testament was using the scripture that they value to make a case for Jesus to make a case that Jesus was greater than Melchisedec. He goes back to kind of this same line of thinking, but this time, it's more theology and philosophy.

The author points out this new covenant that you have with with Jesus, you can rest assured in because there's been an oath given. And a couple of weeks ago, we talked about different reasons why we can trust God's promises. But then the author points out to all the Jewish Christians, you know, Aaron never took an oath. You know, the old priests, they never took an oath. So you are putting all of your faith in a religious system, a priesthood, a covenant and old law that had no oath, that had no word, you are putting all of this stuff all of your faith in something that just didn't have substance. This new covenant though, well, that has substance that's different.

God gives you His Word, that this is different, we can be rest assured. We continue reading verse 23, there were many priests under the old system for death prevented them from remaining in office. But because Jesus lives forever, his priesthood lasts forever.

Therefore, he is able once and forever to save those who come to God through Him. He lives forever to intercede with God on their behalf. So the author continues to kind of talk theologically with them. He says, you know, under the old law, under the old preset, these were just normal guys, normal guys who got sick, normal guys who died and that they needed to be replaced. There were job openings, because the would eventually run out of time on this earth. And now he's saying we have a new priest and this new priests, Jesus doesn't get sick, doesn't go on vacation doesn't slack on the job with Jesus is a much better priests in terms of even fulfilling the function of the priesthood. So it's not just a new priest. It's not just an New Covenant, but it's that you have an oath. Now we can trust in this New Covenant. And also, Jesus performs the job better, he's just better at it. If you're are following along in your own Bibles, you want to circle this, write it down the last sentence, he lives forever to intercede with God on their behalf. What some of you need to know right now is that God is next. I'm sorry that Jesus is next to God interceding on your behalf.

Oftentimes, in our society, oftentimes in the West, we tend to think of God as a big, angry, violent, short temper, looking for a reason to judge someone or condemn them. And that's really the opposite picture that's painted in the biblical texts in the New Testament. In this presentation, the author of Hebrews is saying that Jesus loves you so much, that he's he is so for you, that he sits next to the Father, and prays on your behalf. It puts in a good word for you, that he's constantly telling God about you about humanity. And that's awesome.

Whereas a priest of all would come to God and throw up a bunch of prayers and and in that way, you're thinking like, okay, he's in the temple, the priest is in the Old Testament, throwing up prayers to God, does he hear them? I don't know. And now we know that we have a priest who performed the job so well, including to the point of sitting next to this father, on the throne in heaven, interceding and praying, on your behalf. Keep reading verse 26.

He is the kind of high priest we need because he is holy and blindness, talking about Jesus, on stained by sin. He has been set apart from centers and has been given the highest place of honor and heaven. Unlike those other high priests, he did not need to offer sacrifices every day. They did this for their own sins first, and then for the sins of other people. But Jesus did this once and for all, when He offered Himself as a sacrifice for the people's sins.

The law appointed the high priests who were limited by human weaknesses. But after the law was given, God appointed his son with an oath, and his son has been made the perfect priest forever.

Again, going back to this idea that Jesus is a better high priest. Why? Because even the high priests had to make a sacrifice on their behalf, they had to make a sacrifice. Whereas Jesus sacrificed themselves. He was the sacrifice. This wasn't a lamb. It wasn't a ram. It wasn't a pigeon. It wasn't some livestock or some harvest some corn or beans, Jesus sacrificed himself, and where's the priest in the past as it continuously make sacrifices, because they would continuously send so once a year, you'd make your sacrifice for the sins once a year, you make a sacrifice for your offering, Jesus's one sacrifice is continuous. This goes back to the idea that you don't need to get on your hands and knees and pray every night, Oh, Jesus, please forgive me of my sins. You know, I'm such a mess up, please. If something goes wrong, you know, find it in your heart, forgive me, and let me be with you in the kingdom of God in the next life. We already know that Jesus is interceding on your behalf right now. But then also the sacrifice that he made for you is once and for all, there is an oath, he will not change his mind. And so the challenge for us tonight as we consider how can I lose my religion, than we need a relationship with God? For you to lose your religion is to have a relationship with God. This is possible to you and me, because of the life death and resurrection of Jesus. God establish a long lasting relationship with us through a newer and better covenant. God initiated the relationship with us, God initiated the relationship with you, you and I didn't initiate the relationship with Him. If you think about a God, if you're counting on when Jesus lived, died and rose from the dead, God initiated that relationship with you some 2000 years before you initiated that relationship with you. Now while we did not initiate the relationship with Him, we can respond to his initiation. Will we go go into relationship with him, or put it off longer, or ignore it or reject it. God did something about the relationship for you and me, he made it happen. God wasn't sitting around saying, I wish could should would be great. But you know, it's just man, you guys just messed up, it's too bad.

God did something. And it was you and I the cause the reason that he had to do something, it was our own selfishness that contributed to the brokenness of the world. This reveals God's commitment to humanity reveals God's commitment to you, your family. Whereas you and I, we reveal, maybe I'm not being super critical or beat you off way. But you and I, maybe we reveal every day, our lack of commitment to God, through poor choices, or selfish actions, even the best of us, sometimes are selfish, and we don't want to admit it, I certainly am. And so God shows us though, through Jesus through this new covenant that he is committed to us, even when we are not always as committed to Him as we could be.

And it's God who maintains the relationship. To many people, you might be one of them, if you're watching or listening online, you might be one of them. You might think that it's your job to maintain the relationship that you have with God, but it is God who maintains the relationship with us. It's his oath, even when we waver in our commitment and our response to God, God is there with us and for us. And so the application today is straightforward. It is very simple. But it's about you committing. It's about us recommitting to our relationship with God.

I won't go into how the last year has been long I refer to COVID as are referred to my life that really in two different ways. Now I say the 30 years before COVID and 30 years since COVID. And so COVID has changed a lot of things. But this is a great time at this junction and Hebrews, for those of us in the room for those of us watching or listening online, to recommit to our faith to recommit to our relationship with God, to look at the ways that we've come up short, to look at the ways that we haven't responded to God to look at the ways that we haven't responded the right way. And to say that tonight I want to leave changed. Tonight, I want to respond tonight, I want to step up my commitment. And if it's your first time, we would want to talk to you about baptisms on the back of your green connection card, or if you're watching or listening online, fill out that baptism form that's on our website, which gives you some information. But if it's a recommitment to you and I, it's about being intentional than this week, in that relationship, to reach out to God through prayer, to connect with God through reading the Bible, to connect with God through other people, the things that we constantly talk about.

Now, I want to close with this quote from Jesus all the way back in Matthew 517, through 18, because I think this is another one of those passages that maybe is confusing when we read it in Matthew, but makes a lot of sense and light of Hebrews. And we read Jesus says, Don't suppose for a minute that I have come to demolish the scriptures, either God's Law or the Prophets. I'm not here to demolish, to get rid of to remove. But to complete them.

I'm going to put it all together put it all together in a vast panorama. God's law is more real and lasting than the stars in the sky and the ground at your feet. Long after the stars burnout, and the earth wears out God's law will be alive and working. Remember what we talked about last week, Scripture doesn't cancel out scripture.

The author of Hebrews isn't saying we'll just throw Leviticus out of the Bible, just get rid of it. We don't need it anymore. That'd be cancelling out. But what the author is showing us and full arc of salvation is that there was this system that you and I can look at today and over 400 rules we were supposed to follow. And even if you and I could have followed them perfectly. The author of Hebrews says it was still imperfect, it was still incomplete. It was still ineffective. Even if you followed Leviticus to the letter, you were going to come up short. But Jesus didn't. And Jesus didn't come to demolish it, but it came to fulfill it.

And by that he means he's doing what the law never could do, which is give you a relationship with God to experience God's presence. And so when we look at Leviticus, what do we do with that as believers? Well, I think we thank God for Jesus Because I think a lot of us if we're being humble if we're being realistic would say that could never live up to everything that is read in Leviticus and to only find out that even if you could it wasn't enough