A Better Priesthood - May 17, 2026

It is my privilege to invite you to today's sermon podcast.

I have made the Apostle Paul's prayer request my own.

When he states in Ephesians 6.19, Pray also for me, that whenever I open my

mouth, the words may be given to me, so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel.

May today's sermon come alive to you and aid you in your understanding of God's plan for your life.

How am I going to preach after that? I feel like we need to have some fireworks or something.

Boy, we're about more than just the patriotic of the United States.

I love that song. It's one of my favorites. And thank you for introducing us

to some of those verses today. That's powerful.

I want to tell you a story really quickly. It's an old story about an old Baptist

deacon living in Oklahoma, which if you don't know, there's a lot of Indian

country in Oklahoma. As a matter of fact, the whole state is because of Native Americans.

And so this old country boy decided

he was going to go take a trip of a lifetime, and he went to Italy.

And he goes to Italy, and as he's touring through Rome and seeing the great

Colosseum, seeing these cathedrals,

seeing all the sights that there are, he comes upon this outside of a cathedral,

and he notices there's a whole lot of people lined up.

And so he asked the tour guide, hey, what's this all about?

And the tour guide, so thrilled, so excited that this old guy from the United

States would ask this question. He said, oh, my friend, you just cannot imagine what we have here.

We have a priest available in just about every single language you could think

of that are ready to hear your confession for sin.

And the Baptist guy thought a little bit, and he was a little confused.

That's definitely not Baptist tradition.

And so he says, well, what about French? You got someone that speaks French? Oh, yeah.

Monsieur so-and-so, they speak French. Well, how about Chinese?

Well, yeah, we've got a Chinese-speaking priest.

Well, how about Spanish? Oh, yeah, Spanish is near Italian. We definitely have

someone that could speak Spanish.

And he goes down the list, and then the Baptist guy thinks about back home.

He says, well, do you have a priest that speaks Choctaw?

The Italian tour guide looks and says, huh? Well, how about Cherokee?

Huh? And he goes down the list of all of his neighbors that live around his

community that speak those different languages. And he finally confesses,

these are Native American languages. Do you have anyone that speaks them?

No, I don't. Well, then how is anyone going to confess their sins to God through your priest?

And then the Baptist deacon says, oh, wait, wait, I know. He can just go straight

to the Father Like the Bible says to confess his sins And the guy was taken

aback And says oh no Now this morning I want to be made clear.

I'm not trying to bash anyone that goes to a priest.

I'm not trying to tear down anyone else,

but I do want to go to the Scripture because this morning, I do want to show

you what the Scripture says this morning,

that Jesus has a better priesthood than anyone in the Hebrew system of belief

that there was way back when,

and anyone that has any beliefs now.

And so while I attempt not to be offensive, the truth sometimes can be offensive,

because that's just what truth is.

It's what it is. And so this morning, I want to remind you that human priesthoods are temporary.

They're not meant to last forever. And as my story illustrates,

there's some shortcomings in those.

You say, well, why do we need a priest, or why would we need a priest anyway,

Mike? Well, the reason that a priest was needed, especially as we look to the

Old Testament, is there's a broken relationship between human beings and God.

And a priest would go between sinful, broken man or woman,

boy or girl, and would stand in the gap before a holy God to make intercession,

to find a way to see that these other people's sins are forgiven.

And we're all in the same boat. We all need a mediator. And I preached some

weeks ago about Jesus is the better mediator.

And so we have this broken relationship. And so we need someone to go between.

It's kind of like if Melanie and I got in a big old fight and,

you know, she's just wrong and everything else, and she just won't listen to reason.

And of course, she thinks the same thing about me. And it's probably true that

we would need a mediator. We need a counselor to go to.

Someone objective that could listen to us and say Mike you're full of baloney

man Why don't you listen to your wife And that would help to set things right between us.

And with God, we needed someone to come to help set things right between us.

But the priesthood was not meant to be something that was forever in the sense

that it was given to us. But there is a purpose, and we'll get to that today.

So this morning, just a reminder, as we're going through Hebrews,

remember the context or who the letter was written to was people that were Jewish

Christians, brand new to the faith in Christ.

And they were tempted to go back to the old religious system,

to go back to killing animals to cover their sins until the next year,

to go back to all the rituals and rites and everything that they did in order

to try to be made right with God,

when what they didn't realize is they were already made right with God because

of their relationship with the risen Savior, Jesus.

And so there was this big temptation, and there was a lot of pressure on them

to go back to the old ways.

Yeah, keep Jesus, but go back and do the old things that you used to do in order

to be made right with God.

And what the author here says is that, no, Jesus is better.

He's the better revelation. He's got a better covenant.

He is the better sacrifice. And here he has a better priesthood.

And so today we're going to see how Jesus' priesthood is better than any human

priesthood that there ever was or ever could be.

And it has implications for us today, because it changes how we approach God.

See, we don't have to worry if there's a priest that speaks our language,

because we have one that hears every language, that hears even the intents and

the desires of our heart. And that's powerful.

Today, we're going to see how we can trust this priest and how we can respond with our lives.

And so, I want to guide you to Hebrews chapter 7, and I want to read the first

Hebrews 7 · chapter mention

10 verses, although the sermon will cover more than that. That's just what I want to read today.

So if you're willing and able, would you stand for the reading of God's Word today?

Hear now the word of the Lord. This Melchizedek was king of Salem and a priest

and priest of God, the Most High.

He met Abraham returning from the defeat of the kings and blessed him.

And Abraham gave him a tenth of everything.

First, the name Melchizedek means king of righteousness.

Then also, king of Salem means king of peace.

Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end

of life, resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever.

Just think how great he was. Even the patriarch Abraham gave him a tenth of the plunder.

Now the law requires descendants of Levi, who become priests,

to collect a tenth from people, that is, from their fellow Israelites,

even though they also are descended from Abraham.

This man, however, did not trace his descent from Levi, yet he collected a tenth

from Abraham and blessed him, and who had the promises.

And without a doubt, the lesser is blessed by the greater.

In the one case, the tenth is collected by people who die, but in the other

case, by him who is declared to be living.

One might even say that Levi, who collects the tenth, paid the tenth through

Abraham, because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. Lord, even these meaty passages

today, which may be difficult to comprehend, difficult to digest,

Lord, may we have something to chew on today to see that Jesus has the better

priesthood, that Jesus is the better mediator, as we've said before.

But Lord, we just ask you would take this word and apply it to our hearts today in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you all for honoring God's word. You can be seated.

Why do we need a better priesthood? I want to give you three reasons.

Why do we need a better system, if you will?

I was tempted today to bring my old Atari 2600 and set it on stage before you.

My in-laws brought it back with them. It's not even mine. I think it was Melanie's family's.

That thing was covered in so much dust, I didn't want valley fever to spread

around or anything horrid like that to outbreak here.

But then I was going to set beside it, my son Noah has these goggles you put

on, and all the video game he can see, we can't see what he's playing,

but it's like he was really there, and it's virtual reality.

And the difference from what the old system was to what the new system is, is incredible.

And how that all works is amazing.

And that's kind of what we're dealing with. We have an old system.

You see, if we think about what's the priesthood stuff all about,

well, the priesthood stuff is, especially for the Jews, it's how they stayed

right with God. They had to go to the priest.

They had to make sure the priest would offer sacrifices, push their sin forward

so that they would be okay another year with God.

So that's like the old Atari 2600 with dust on it.

When Jesus came, I mean, it's not a good illustration, but it's the virtual

reality. I mean, it is reality.

You don't need the priest anymore because Jesus brought the better priesthood into existence.

You see, the first reason why we need a better priesthood this morning is this.

The old priesthood couldn't bring us home.

The Atari 2600 cannot play the Facebook virtual reality metagames.

Facebook started with Pong. I mean, Atari started with Pong,

that little box that went up and down across your screen, and you tried to hit

it with a little controller.

Now, the metaglasses or whatever, you're doing the actions yourself.

You don't even have a joystick, really. So it's just amazing.

Remember, to the Hebrew, especially to these that this letter was given to.

Religion was access to God. In order to have access to God, you had to bring the sacrifices.

You had to participate in the rites, in the rituals, in the festivals,

in the holidays. You had to do that stuff.

It was written in the law that you had to do that stuff in order to be right with God.

God gave the law to reveal sin and the priesthood he gave in order to provide

sacrifices to bridge the gap between people and himself.

So the process is like this. A person sins. They do something outside the will of God.

Explicitly or implicitly, they break a known rule of God.

And they've got to do something with that because we know the scripture says

that sin separates us from God. It puts a big gap between us.

A holy God can't stand to be in the presence of sin. It doesn't work like that.

However, God gave this system where the priest would come and he would offer

a sacrifice, again, to roll those sins forward.

I mean, when you came to church this morning, did it stink in here?

Now, I mean, not besides yourself, you know, if you forgot to put your right guard on.

Did you hear the sound this morning of screaming animals like they were dying?

Maybe your children or your grandchildren.

I don't think so, though, because we've got good kids. Was there anything off when you came in?

I mean, think about the Hebrews when they had to go worship God,

when they had to go to the temple.

Man, it may have smelled like the butcher shop down at Albertsons.

It may have had that, you know, someone's fixing an animal kind of thing.

You might have smelled the burnt sacrifices when you went to worship.

The screams and the cries of animals as they were sacrificed.

I mean, it was a whole different ballgame when they would go to worship.

And I don't mean to put you in a funk with those crazy descriptions,

which are not PETA-friendly, probably.

But it was an ugly system, the sacrificial system.

But it was that sacrificial system,

those things that they did in order to ceremonially be right with God.

Until the next time that they had to be done. You see, the old priesthood was

there to teach us about sin, but it had limitations.

Even with sacrifices, people still felt the distance from God.

They still felt this gap that even though their sins were atoned for,

there was still that possibility that they would fall again and then had to

worry about that. They never felt in the presence of God.

It made them never fully at home with the creator of the universe.

I mean, when you think about limitations, we don't have far to go in the Old Testament.

We think about Hosea, who says God wants mercy.

He doesn't care about your sacrifices. He wants you to be merciful. God wants justice.

We think about Micah 6, 8, that God wants justice and humility.

And even David in Psalms 51, after he really messed up big time for the nation

and for himself, for his own family, he said,

Psalm 51, 16, and 17. He says, what God really wants is not my sacrifices,

but he wants a broken and contrite heart.

And those things really didn't fit this old system very well.

But yet, that's what was established to really show humanity the need,

the reality of sin and the need of a Savior, and that the system was not going to be good enough.

The law and the Levitical priesthood were God-given.

But I got to tell you, they were only temporary, and they were inadequate to

fully restore a person to relationship with God.

It would only be a Band-Aid on the wound, a little steristrip on your juggler

to maybe hold you over till next year.

It wasn't what it was meant to be. And maybe you've experienced this.

It's what I call a holy dissatisfaction.

Maybe you know that feeling. When you do something religious,

maybe you come to church, and maybe you go on a mission trip,

or maybe you give, or maybe you serve in the children's department or with our

youth, or you volunteer to teach a Sunday school class or a Bible study,

and you do that, but then you still feel this distance between you and God.

And you're thinking, well, God, I thought that's what you wanted me to do,

but you still feel there's a distance, maybe a holy dissatisfaction in your heart.

I think the Bible says that ache is there on purpose. It's to send you looking

for what is true and for really what God has planned for you,

to really search out a different kind of priest,

the eternal priest, the one that's taking care of things forever.

As a matter of fact, in Psalms 110, verse 4, we are promised a different kind of priest.

Psalms 110:4

The psalmist promises us that. This is a messianic prophecy because the Messiah

is prophesied to be a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

And Hebrews 6.20 that we talked about last week says, Jesus is such that kind of priest.

He is the eternal one, the one you go to once and for all, and he takes care of your sins.

Isn't that awesome? You don't got to go slaughter any more animals to make your sins right with God.

Because Jesus willingly gave himself up to die a crook's death,

a sinner's death for you and for me. That's a powerful statement there.

You see, some of us, though, we've got to be careful because we still live like

the old system is still in place.

We try to fix our guilt with rituals.

Oh, man, I was working on the car and I hit my hand and I said about 20 cuss

words in that one hour that I was out there working on my car.

I guess I better go to Sunday morning service and Wednesday night just to be safe.

I mean, we feel this guilt that we didn't control our tongue and we seek ways to assuage that guilt.

To make up for it to God. That's not how it works. Because God already said

in 1 John 1, 9, that if you confess your sin, he's faithful just to forgive

you those sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

Not only that, he says in James, hey, who can tame the tongue?

No man can tame it. But you know what? He also gives us a Holy Spirit to dwell

in our hearts, to help bring that self-control in, to get rid of those things,

those thoughts, those other things we might do without thinking.

We try to live in that old system of spiritual performance, just performing

for God rather than living in a right relationship with God.

Living how God wants you to live, not because you're chalking up brownie points

with him, but because this is the way he's empowering you to live and showing

you the better way to live in life.

You see, Hebrews is saying that old system was never meant to be your home to

these first century heroes, but for us today.

So if you're in that kind of thing, break out of it. The old priesthood couldn't bring us to God.

That's why we needed a better priesthood, an eternal priest,

one that would take care of things forever.

And so secondly, this morning as to why we need a better priesthood is because

Jesus gives us a better priesthood.

We get into this story of this mysterious character in the scripture called Melchizedek.

If we had the rights, I'd play the theme song to CSI right now. Who are you?

Right? Because who is this guy?

We don't know. He's only mentioned a few places in Scripture.

What we do know, what the Scripture tells us in these three verses,

is that he shows up as the king of righteousness.

He shows up as the king of peace, the king of Salem, the king of Shalom, if you will.

And he shows up as the priest of the Most High God. And if you go back to the

Old Testament and you look in Genesis, Abraham just got done kicking some booty

and taking names and taking some spoil.

He had won a major battle with some other kings.

And so here he comes, and as he's coming in to this area, Melchizedek is there.

And Melchizedek offers him a bread and wine, offers him a meal to sit down with him.

And they have this nice moment together. And then Abraham takes a tithe,

10% of all the spoils of what he just had plundered, and he gives them to Melchizedek.

And then, of course, Melchizedek blesses Abraham, and then he goes on his merry

way. and we don't hear nothing else about it until Psalms when the psalmist

says, hey, the Messiah is going to be like in the order of this guy, Melchizedek.

And so we're left wondering, and you'll probably be disappointed today because

I won't be able to answer the question, who is this guy?

But maybe I can get you started and you can talk about it more at Life Group

on Wednesday or do some study on your own and then share some more with me.

But we see that there's a picture here, a quite lengthy picture that we're given

in chapter 7 of this Melchizedek, because all that happened in Genesis 14, this Melchizedek guy.

It's interesting, because when you try to study this guy out and you're looking,

Genesis has all kinds of genealogies.

This one begat this one, this one comes from this one, this one's from this

region, that guy, he's from over there. But when it comes to Melchizedek, there's a silence.

We don't know anything of where he came from. We don't know anything of what

happened to him after this.

All we know is this picture that we get, this king of righteousness,

king of Salem, king of Jerusalem, we could say, king of peace, nothing.

The narrative, the story, the account is silent on him.

And so what does that mean for us? It means it gives us a picture of an ongoing priesthood.

We don't know the beginning. We don't know the ending because Jesus is in that

order. It's eternal. What do we know about God?

He has no beginning, and he has no ending.

Why? He's eternal. And so we get this new kind of priesthood,

a snapshot of that, that doesn't fit the Old Testament law, that doesn't fit

the old system, the old way of doing things,

but that does in fact predate the old system, the system we call old now, right?

So Hebrews uses this narrative silence as a picture of this ongoing priesthood,

that it will continue, and really a type of Christ.

Now, it doesn't mean that this was Christ. Some would speculate that.

You can study and make your own decision about that, but it's a type of Christ.

It typifies who Jesus was, or who Jesus would be, I should say,

that he would be one, a priest for human beings for all eternity.

And so, you think about Jesus. He didn't have the qualifications to be a priest

because he was not of the line of Levi.

He was from the line of Judah. Jesus was. And so how was that going to be possible?

Well, Scripture speaks to that as well.

See, you could only be a priest if you were from the family of Levi,

if you were a descendant from old Levi there. That's the only way you could be a priest.

And if you, so to speak, lost your genealogy. You lost your paperwork.

You tried to go on Ancestry.com and try to find your stuff, and it wasn't there.

You couldn't serve unless you could prove that you were from this line.

And so I know they didn't have Ancestry.com back then.

But it was important to them that they followed the genealogy.

Well, this just comes and blows everybody's mind.

And there's more that the author of Hebrews says here that continues in that way.

Jesus is from Judah, not Levi. He doesn't qualify to be a priest in the old

system, but yet he does in the system that predates the giving of the Levitical law.

Genesis 49.10 says that the Messiah will be from the tribe of Judah.

That the Messiah will come from the line that Jesus came from.

Genesis 49, 10, that he would be a priest, as we said earlier,

Psalm 110, verse 4, after the order of Melchizedek.

Psalms 110:4

So Jesus' priesthood, it says, is like Melchizedek's based on who he is,

because Jesus is holy, because Jesus is eternal, not because of his bloodline.

His priesthood, Jesus' priesthood, doesn't rise and fall on his family tree,

but it rests on the eternal life that he has and that he gives to others.

So even though every human priest dies, their ministry ends.

Hebrews says of Christ, he is made like the Son of God and remains a priest forever.

Other priests cease, Christ never does. If Jesus' priesthood is that different

and that permanent, then it

just can't sit in our theology folder and occupy some place in our files.

It demands that we do something in the way we respond to that truth.

And I just got to tell you this morning, if your access to God is depending

upon your spiritual genealogy, your church background, maybe your family name,

your religious resume, you're living under the wrong priesthood, guys.

You're not going to go to heaven just because you're a member of the Church of the Nazarene.

You're not going to go to heaven, be with Christ, have your sins forgiven,

if you don't have a relationship with him, even if grandma, great-grandma,

was a staunch Christian Christian.

Even if your dad, your great-granddad, your uncle, your cousin three times removed

was a pastor, just because of all that doesn't mean that gets you into heaven for free.

See, Jesus paid a price to get you to heaven, the price of his own life,

the giving up of his own body on a cross to die for your sins.

And so only through Jesus, a priest who offered himself as the sacrifice,

that we can eternally be with him forever.

So don't fool yourself don't trust only what your family says now this morning

we did something spectacular we had a beautiful family up here and we said we're

going to come around them and help grow Evelyn up in the Lord as much as we have opportunity right,

but just because we did this beautiful thing Evelyn still has to make a choice

in her life to follow Jesus the parents could do everything they can to remove

every obstacle out of the way to give her that opportunity.

We're going to come around and we're going to encourage the family and the nuclear

family to say, yeah, keep going. Even those tough times, the terrible twos, keep going.

The terrible teens, the terrible 20s, what rhymes with 30?

I don't know, but that we're going to come around.

But she still has a choice to make, to follow Jesus Christ.

Now, God's got her in his hands right now. Don't get me wrong, okay?

God's got her. She's under grace. Praise be and thanks be to God.

But she can't be taught just to rely on that she's a member of the church of

the Nazarene and that she's going to heaven because of a church membership. No.

Now, you have to be a believer in Christ to be part of the church.

That's what we do believe.

But we have a better priesthood, and that better priesthood demands a better response.

I'm going to kind of go through this quickly, and I would encourage you to study

this even more on your own, but for the sake of time this morning.

We see the picture in the Scripture from verse 4 to 10, really heady stuff about

Abraham and Levi and the superiority that happens there.

And basically the argument is, hey, remember, Abraham came and he gave a tithe,

10% of all that he had won in that battle.

He gave it to Melchizedek, who was a priesthood forever, who was the king of

righteousness, the king of peace.

Abraham gave that to him. And then you see the old system where you had to give

a tithe in order to be right with God.

You had to give 10% in the old system.

And the argument that's being made here is, you know what? The old system's

gone and now I can hear, yay, we don't have to tithe. Woo-hoo!

No, you didn't. Praise the Lord. Okay. The old system is gone,

the law. You don't have to tithe to be right with God.

Being right with God comes through your relationship with him.

But what the author here says is, you know, Levi, in a sense,

he was in the body of Abraham because he wasn't a gleam in Abraham's eye down the line yet.

But Levi, in a sense, gave tithe to Melchizedek because Abraham did.

It's kind of like if your great-great-grandfather made a deal to have the land

that your family owns now or occupies now, and it was like a lifetime deal, and then you come along,

you get the blessings of that because of what your great-great-grandfather did.

You get to inherit this land here because of a deal that was made before.

And that's essentially what the author is saying here is, you know,

Abraham didn't have to give to this guy, but he chose to out of the generosity,

out of his gratitude for Melchizedek coming along and to honor the Lord.

And Abraham received a blessing because of that.

But we don't have to, in a sense, keep that law. However...

And I know there's a lot of people, they fight tithing today.

Tithing is a spiritual discipline that we do practice, that we do commit the

minimum of 10% to give to the Lord.

Church of the Nazarene, we practice storehouse tithing, but we don't do it out of obligation.

You don't have to come and sit in my office and bring your tax returns so I

can check to make sure that you're giving 10% in order to be right with God

and to stay a member of this church.

You don't have to do that. I mean, if you want to for accountability,

I guess I can, but I don't need to know all your business.

If you want to see mine, I can share that with you.

But the point is, we're not under the law anymore to do that.

However, there's a standard that predates the law that Abraham gives us that

shows us that there's a great blessing when we give out of the generosity of our heart to others.

When we come along and we give to the Lord's work and what we do.

I didn't mean for this to turn into a tithing sermon, so I'll get off of this quickly.

But the point is there. The Scripture says, here men that die receive tithes.

There He receives them. Levitical priests, mortal men receive the tithes for the people.

Their ministry was only temporary, though. Christ is the one of whom,

the Scripture says, of whom it is witnessed that He lives.

He receives our gifts as the living priests.

Jesus receives our gifts. When you give, when you gave of your tithe this morning,

you gave online or whatever, you weren't giving it to me.

You weren't giving it to the church board. You're giving it to God.

You're saying, this goes for God's work, for what he's doing.

To keep the lights on, keep the air conditioners working, the heaters in the winter.

To make sure that we have people that we bless throughout the entire world.

You can look at the partners in the bulletin, our ministry partners.

We give out a love in our heart. You see,

if a tenth was due to dying men, imperfect priests, That should be the bare

minimum of the honor that is due to a righteous God, a royal and resurrected and reigning Savior.

Now, let me step off of that for a minute, because I really want to hit this part.

If priests existed to bring people to God, then our response to this better

priesthood should look like these three different moves.

I want to ask you this morning to pay attention to these. First is access.

We go directly to Christ, no other mediators. If you've sinned against God,

guess who you have to go to?

You go to God. You go directly to Him. You make confession. And in prayer,

you aim that toward Christ.

Jesus died for your sin, and He could take care of your sin.

Secondly, it talks about allegiance. That's another move that we make.

We don't go back to our old priesthood.

We don't go back to legalism, checking boxes to make sure we're right with God.

We don't go back to self-effort, trying to earn our way to heaven.

You can't. It's already been paid for, and it's a free gift waiting for you to open.

We can't go back to nostalgia. Oh, I remember what it used to be like,

and three hymns, a short sermon, a prayer, and we were at lunch.

We can't go back to just the way Christian culture was, maybe.

We can't go to spiritual celebrity and lift a pastor, a preacher up to where

it seems like they're right in the same line as Jesus. It doesn't work like that.

You've got to be cautious. Our

allegiance, our trust should fully be with Jesus alone and trusting him.

Now, as a pastor, I hope you can trust me.

I hope that we can have this kind of relationship so I can help to guide and to lead you.

And to who God wants you to be. But ultimately, it goes back to Christ.

He is your mediator. He is your priest.

You go through Him to access God, and you have full and open access to Him.

Last this morning on this point is generosity.

Treat the 10th not like a ceiling, but like a starting point of your worship.

And I just don't think it's about your money.

It's definitely about your time.

It's about the talents that you have. Are you giving your time back to God?

Are you giving your talents back to God?

It's not just about your treasure, not just about lucre, you know, money, filthy or not.

It's about the whole scope of your life. Are you living a life fully devoted to God?

So I would just say on this point, reiterate, let your financial and stewardship

acknowledge Christ's superior priesthood.

I want to tell you a story as we close, and it's one you might have heard before,

but there was a winter several, several, probably a century ago in Wales,

and it was one of those harsh Welsh winters.

I know nothing about that. I only know about Idaho winters.

But it was in this that a mom was set out, and it's a blizzard time, and she could not.

Really see that well, and it got really cold, and she did not make her way home,

and she had her new baby with her.

And caught in the middle of this blizzard, she couldn't see where the path ended

and where it began, where to go.

And so she just became so cold that hypothermia started to set in.

She could feel the effects of that, and she had this baby, and her concern was

for this child, this new baby that she had.

And so as she walked and was freezing cold already,

she took her baby, and she took off her outer coat, her outer garment,

and she wrapped that baby in, and then she curled up and covered herself as

much as she could with snow and laid there with the baby,

in that warm outer coat,

kind of like this, and laying on the ground to try to save the life of this baby.

And when the rescuers came, they found her.

They found her, and she was deceased. and they were puzzled that why is she

out here without a coat on?

Why was she not prepared to go out into this blizzard?

But as they started to approach and started to kind of try to see if she was

alive and help her, they noticed a little coo from a baby.

And as they unwrapped the outer coat, they saw this perfectly preserved warm

little baby right inside of there.

This mom has given up her own comfort, given up her own life to save this child

that she loved so very, very much.

As the story goes, this baby survives and grows up.

He becomes David Lloyd George, and if that doesn't mean anything to you,

he was the prime minister of England, Great Britain, in World War I.

A powerful story because not how he was saved or not what he did during World

War I, but because of how he lived. And here's a quote from him.

He knew that he was alive for a purpose because someone died in his place.

Hebrews is telling us the same thing, folks.

Because Jesus is our better priest, we have access. We have a better basis for acceptance.

He has a better claim on our lives. And we have gifts that he's gifted us with

that he wants us to use for his purpose, which means we are saved for a purpose.

And the purpose is not just to warm that pew you're sitting on.

God's got a great plan for your life. You know, we marvel even more when we

realize Jesus, He is our royal priest, our Savior,

and He covered us, not from a snowstorm, but from the judgment that we deserved.

Jesus rescues us. He took our punishment so we don't have to.

It cost Him His own life, and He did that because He loves you this morning.

He's loved you from the time that you were conceived until this very moment.

God has loved you. He's got a plan and a purpose for your life.

I want to encourage you, draw near to Him.

I want you to trust Jesus above every lesser priesthood, every lesser way you

try to stay right with God.

Trust Jesus only and live your life devoted under His intercession for you.

Jesus wants you to worship him generously. Again, not with just your money,

your time, your talent, and your treasure because of what he has done for you.

Would you close your eyes, and I just want you to have a personal reflection time.

Because what's your response this morning? We're going to sing a closing song

and then have a closing prayer.

But I would just ask you to do this again. Three things.

If you haven't yet, would you trust Jesus as your high priest for the first time?

Would you trust him that he has forgiven your sin and that those sins are truly

forgiven? Even though you might remember him, guess what?

Jesus doesn't. He's blotted them out.

Would you trust him that what he did on the cross was good enough for you,

good enough for your sins?

Would you maybe this morning lay down a lesser priesthood and renew trust in Christ?

Quit trying to be good enough. None of us are good enough. Jesus was good enough.

And Jesus will show you the way, but you've got to do what I said first. You've got to trust Him.

Maybe this morning you just want to renew your trust in Jesus.

Or maybe this morning you just want to choose one specific way to obey Christ

in generosity and surrender.

Or maybe God's been telling you to do something with all your extra time instead

of playing on your phone or watching Netflix.

Maybe God's got someone in your neighborhood, maybe a person's right next door

that he wants you to invest time in a relationship in because they need Jesus.

Whatever that might be today, would you just trust God with that?

Father, I pray that you'd be with our congregation today as we sing our final

song and as we conclude our worship time together.

Father, help us to trust Jesus because Melchizedek or Levi or any of the other

priests that ever were, they don't compare to you, God.

They don't compare to Jesus and his priestly work that he has done.

His eternal priesthood reigns forever. And God, we can trust him.

Lord, this morning, there are those that need to confess sin.

Lord, may they confess it to you.

If they need accountability, Lord, may they confess it to their brother or sister.

And Lord, may they follow in all things your Holy Spirit.

Oh, God, we love you this morning. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.

I want to thank you for joining today's sermon podcast. You can find a copy

of today's sermon, as well as other sermons, and the sermon outline from today

on our church's website,

www.mvcnaz.org.

It is my prayer also that you will seek out a church home that recognizes the authority of the Bible.