A Better Mediator - April 12, 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.

I have to make an admission to you again. And, hey, the Bible says bear one

another's burdens, and you seem to have to bear a lot of mine.

So I had to call customer service the other day.

Now you need forgiveness? No, it didn't go that far.

Although the frustration was building up in front of me. You know,

you get on the line, and what do you hear?

Press 1 for this one. Press 2, and then you go down through all these numbers.

And then they give you like eight

options to press and you forget what the first one or second one was.

And those are the ones you needed, but you're waiting because you want to hear

of a better offer that's coming.

You know, like maybe a direct line to who you really need to talk to.

And the frustration builds up. Yeah, you're talking to an AI robot or something on the other end.

You just want a real person to talk to you, but they trick you now.

Have you noticed that? They're getting so good. You think you're talking to

a human being on the other side. But they're not.

And it gets frustrating. And so you press this number. Finally,

you get a human being and you begin to explain your situation.

And then you hear these words. Oh, I'm sorry. That's not my department. Let me transfer you.

And so you're on hold again. And here's the really sad part about it.

Is the on hold music isn't old people music anymore.

I heard Sweet Child of Mine by Guns N' Roses in Muzak form. Okay.

That's old people music now. Oh, my goodness.

Now, I might have been jamming out to the Muzak version of it,

but still waiting. It doesn't make the waiting any more palatable.

But I finally got through, and then it was a person I couldn't really understand that well.

I don't know if it was a connection or what it was, but then I got put on hold

again because I did the thing where you say, May I have a supervisor, please? Yes.

And then you're waiting again. this time it wasn't Guns N' Roses on the Muzak, hold music.

It was more like music used to be in the unhold version, the old hold version.

But nevertheless, I finally just did not get resolution.

And so the last thing I did was say, is there something online I can do?

Oh yeah, just go to this website and type in this code and it'll take it all for you.

I kid you not, in less than a minute, my issue was solved by going online and

typing in what they told me to do. But five to ten minutes online in order to

get that one thing that I needed to resolve what I needed to do.

It was very, very frustrating.

I know many times I just hang up. I'm sick of dealing with it.

I'll deal with it tomorrow.

But tomorrow never comes, and then you get a notice in the mail or this or that or the other thing.

But aren't you glad when it comes to sin, when it comes to our sin problem,

that we have someone we can go to and get immediate results?

We don't have to press one or two or three. We have Jesus who,

when Emma read the scripture this morning from Timothy, that he is our mediator.

He's the customer service agent we go to, and he just doesn't put us on hold

or transfer you to a pastor or transfer you to a Sunday school class or transfer

you to a passage in the Bible. Jesus takes you straight to God himself.

He cuts through everything else as the mediator, the one who stands between.

And he says, come on, let's get this problem taken care of.

Not just a sin problem, but any of our needs. Jesus is there mediating for us, being the go-between.

And, you know, Hebrews tells us this, that he is the better mediator.

And the words we used here is he is the better priest.

So this morning, we're going to look at verses 1 through 10 of Hebrews chapter 5.

Hebrews 5 · chapter mention

And I'll invite you, if you're willing to or able, would you stand as we read

these first 10 verses here?

The word of the Lord says, every high priest is selected from among the people

and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God,

to other gifts and sacrifices for sins.

He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and going astray,

since he himself is subject to weakness.

This is why he has to offer sacrifices for his own sins, as well as for the sins of the people.

And no one takes this honor on himself, but he receives it when he is called

by God, just as Aaron was.

In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high

priest, but God said to him, you are my son.

Today I have become your father. And he says in another place,

you are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

During the days of Jesus' life on earth. He offered up prayers and petitions

with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death,

and he was heard because of his reverent submission.

Son, though he was, he learned obedience from what he had suffered,

and once being made perfect,

he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated

by God to be a high priest in the order of Melchizedek.

Father, thank you so much for the opportunity to pray today,

to worship you, Lord, to share in fellowship, to study your word.

And Lord, now to hear your word proclaimed. And Father, we open our hearts to

you today as one group, as one body, but Lord, individually as well.

Will you speak to us, Father?

Thank you for giving us the high priest, Jesus, Lord, our mediator,

the one who goes on our behalf before you, God.

And Lord, we're just so grateful to you for the time we have today.

Speak to us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you for honoring God's Word. Please be seated.

Three points I want to make this morning regarding this passage,

that Jesus is a better mediator.

In other words, Jesus is a better high priest for us.

And that's the first fact is that humanity, people, we need a mediator. We need a high priest.

We need someone to go before us on behalf of us to God the Father.

See, that's what a priest did in the Old Testament. a priest,

a mediator, he would stand between God and the people.

He would be the one that was appointed to do everything that the people on earth

to be their representative before a holy and a mighty God.

He would bring their petitions. He would bring their prayers directly to him.

You see, why was that necessary? Well, we go back to Genesis and we see why

that was necessary, because there is a broken relationship between human beings and God.

And it all happened back in the Garden of Eden. That started everything.

And this broken connection, this broken relationship was not easily restored.

I mean, you ever know someone that if they mess something up,

they really mess something up.

That's kind of what Adam and Eve did for the rest of us, right?

They messed it up big time. I was working on my daughter's car yesterday,

trying to replace an O2 sensor.

And I replaced it, man, I was feeling good.

I saved me some money, right? Replacing and that O2 sensor is so easy to get

to right at the front of the engine.

And so I said, okay, let's go get a soda, Noah. Let's go take it for a test drive.

Everything was fine. Went to M&W, went to the, I didn't go to the gas station,

I guess that time, but turned around and went home and it started chugging and

it started throwing up all these errors.

And I said, oh man, my fix didn't fix it. It kind of messed it up worse.

So rather than pursue that, I took the old one on, I put the old one back on

and then it was fine again. So I'm not messing with that thing.

And so I need your prayers that we get to Indiana in that thing.

It's just an emissions issue, right? Right.

Lord, help us. Sometimes when we mean to do something good, we don't.

We mess up, and we mess up big time.

Sometimes it might be an easy fix to correct it, but other times, no.

And it's in all those cases that we need this relationship with Jesus restored,

and that's what the priest would do in the Old Testament.

He would stand in the place of humanity as their representative to God,

the mediator, the one that would cry out to God on our behalf,

that would bring the sacrifices to.

We have represented a holy God and a sinful man, and the priest was the one

called to stand in the middle there, almost like a heat shield.

Did you guys see the Artemis II come back?

That capsule? Man, just spectacular.

Having a first-person view to being in the capsule as it entered the atmosphere.

I don't know if you saw that time lapse.

Just incredible, but that's kind of what the mediator was, was that heat shield.

5,000 degrees on the outside as the capsules coming back into the atmosphere,

just incinerating heat, but yet the heat shield, the mediator between the astronauts

and the atmospheric plasma that was building up on the outside protected them.

And in a sense, that's what the priest was. He was that insulator.

He was the one that would take our needs and go to the Father,

would hear messages from the Father, and even pass those on at times.

We see this important role.

We need a mediator. And what the priest did was to represent us,

like I said, especially when it came to sin, to deal with our sin.

The priest would bring their sacrifices, their grain offerings,

their burnt offerings. The priest would have to make those.

But it's something about the priest in the Old Testament.

You see, what the priest would have to do was, first, he would have to make

atonement for his own sins before he could go to God on behalf of everybody else.

He would have to make his own sacrifice because the priest wasn't perfect.

The priest was a human just like you and me, and he was standing before a holy

God, and he had to take care of his own stuff before he could come to God on

behalf of the whole nations, the whole world's stuff.

When we think about that, it's very humbling. Even the priest needed a mediator.

You see, that was the old system.

The old system revealed our need that we need to be right with God,

that we need someone to go to God on our behalf.

But that's as far as it would go. It would deal with the sins that...

That we unintentionally committed, the sins where we were just weak,

where we really couldn't resist that.

But what the priest's sacrifice could not take care of was those sins that we

did that were intentional, that were presumptuous. Oh, if I do this, God will forgive me.

The sins of rebellion where we're just flat out saying, no, I'm not going to do that.

God, no, I'm not going to do what you call me to do. I'm not going to obey.

I'm not going to give up these idols.

I'm not going to do what you've called me to do.

The law was powerless to deal with that kind of sin, the sin that came from

the human heart in that way.

What the law did, it showed us that animal sacrifices could never truly resolve the problem of sin.

It could never resolve it. Check it out. Your sin, if you brought a lamb to

sacrifice because of your sin, that would just roll it over for one more year,

and guess what you had to do?

You had to come on back next time around and do it again.

So sin was always right there in front of them. They could never take care of

it themselves, even with the mediator.

But it would push that forward, push it until it could be dealt with again.

Have you ever heard the phrase, kicking the can down the road?

Boy, at some point that road ends, doesn't it?

And how many cans are piled up down there you got to deal with?

It's not the kind you can take across the border to Oregon and get a few bucks for.

It's the kind you've really got to deal with. You've really got to take care of.

So the first thing Hebrews does, it helps us see that humanity has always needed

someone to stand in the gap for them.

But not just any mediator will do. No, there's requirements.

This mediator has to have the right heart, has to have the right calling,

and has to have the right power to be able to deal with sin.

And as we look to Scripture, it hints to us about what that person's supposed to be like.

You see, a true mediator must meet God's requirements.

It's not something where we can hold an election and say, oh yeah,

so-and-so's pretty good. I think they'll make a good mediator,

a good representative for human beings before a holy God.

No, that's not how it worked in the Old Testament system, we see from our scripture passage.

Especially for verse 2, he's able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and going astray.

Boy, that takes a special person to deal with those that are just ignorant,

that those that are going astray, they're wandering off.

And sometime, at some point, our patience becomes really thin with ignorant

people or with people that are just flat out not listening and going to do their own thing.

So the priest had to deal gently with the weak and the wayward.

There's a word that's used in here, metriopathy. And metriopathy,

it's kind of this great theological concept that a priest had to really have.

And really, when we look at Jesus here in a minute that he had,

it's kind of a balance, a balance between just having a harsh apathy, right?

Apathy like you really don't care. Here's the law. You should have done it this

way. Why didn't you do it? You're guilty.

And so you're going to get the full brunt of the law. there's that aspect of it.

But then there's the other aspect, that's just your extreme passion,

compassion for a person.

Yeah, but they're weak. They're only human. They have all these flaws.

And it's trying to find that gentle middle ground.

And that's what a priest had to have, was that balance between knowing what

the law was, knowing the violations of the law, but also having the extreme

compassion for the person, the people,

the human race that was guilty of that and having that metriopathy,

that tender but holy heart, not excusing sin, not saying it's okay,

I love them, my love will let them do whatever they want to do.

It was not anything like that.

It was, no, there's sin, there has to be an account for that.

We know you're weak, we know you struggle.

And so there's a tenderness along with the holiness of God.

The priest had to have that requirement, had to be able to deal with those that

were just off their rocker and and just could not do what God wanted them to

do. It had to be that perfect balance.

And so the priest had to be that special person.

There had to be that sympathy, but also not harsh, not indifferent,

but tender toward the people, especially the people of God.

It says that the priest must understand human weakness because the priest shares

in it. The priest himself is weak.

The priest himself has frailties. The priest himself was one who struggled with

sin, who did not have their sin taken care of once and for all,

but had to make atonement for that.

Human priests could sympathize, but they were still sinful themselves,

and they still had to offer their own sacrifices first.

That's what verse 3 told us here in the Scripture.

They had to make sure that, hey, they were good with God before they tried to

go to Him on behalf of everybody else.

Third, the priest must be called by God, not self-appointed.

You know, it just wasn't some religious person in the tribes of Israel saying,

hey, I think I could do a good job being mediator.

So he goes down to the print shop and has a whole bunch of business cards printed

off and then starts handing them out, hey, I'm your new high priest, here you go.

You know, it wasn't because of something they thought they could do or they would be good at doing.

There was a calling involved, a calling from God, and that calling came through

one line of genealogy from Israel, and that was through Levi, through Aaron.

And Aaron was, and his line, his family line was where all the priests were taken from.

And you had to be in that line in order to be a priest. You had to be in that

family in order to have this calling from God.

Now, you have to understand all priests weren't good.

There were a couple of priests, a couple of sons of a priest. They were horrible.

Hophni and Phinehas, you could read about them in the Old Testament. Well, they were crooks.

Even as we talked about a little bit last week, you know, the chief priests

and elders at the time of Jesus, the chief priests especially, they were corrupt.

Why did you think Jesus got so mad when he turned over the tables in the temple?

Not once, but I think more than once, at least twice.

They were making God's house a place of worship into a place where the priest was ripping people off.

We're saying, oh, you brought that nice spotless lamb from Galilee.

Well, guess what? I see a little speck of dirt. It's not clean.

Here, buy this one from me for $50. You can have this.

And then your sins will be able to be taken care of. It was a racket.

Jesus said, I'm not putting up with this garbage. And so he cleared the place out.

You see, not all priests were holy. Not all priests really took care of their sins.

Yeah, they pushed it off till next time to deal with it later.

But the priest, the deeper question is here for all of us, who can meet these qualifications?

That's right. And that's what

Hebrews tells us, right, Les? That every human being is going to fail.

Every human being, even along the family line of Aaron, is going to mess up.

It's only Jesus Christ who could really fill this role once and for all and take care of that.

You see, Jesus fulfills what the priesthood pointed to.

It's a fulfillment of it. It's not a replacement for the old Jewish system,

but it's the completion of it, the fulfillment of that.

It's taking care of the Old Testament sacrifices are no longer needed because of Jesus Christ.

Again, it says in the scripture that Christ was appointed by the Father as high priest forever.

How long is forever? It's forever.

Longer than you could imagine. But Jesus was appointed to that.

There would never need to be any other human being again that would have to

stand in that role as imperfect as human beings are.

But Jesus was made in that order. Don't get caught up in the Melchizedek stuff.

We'll talk about that as we get to chapter 7. And so if you're really waiting,

what's the pastor think about this?

Hey, just hang on, wait a little bit more. We'll talk about that.

But the thing I will say about this is that Melchizedek, in his order of priesthood, was like a rebel.

It was like a rule breaker. He wasn't from the tribe of Aaron.

As a matter of fact, he was a Canaanite. He wasn't even an Israelite.

He predated all this other Old Testament way of sacrificing and doing this.

So there's something special there, but we'll explore that later.

But Jesus was appointed a high priest forever Our mediator Stander in the gap

forever And what it says in verse 7 Was that he entered human suffering And he prayed with tears,

Remember in the Garden of Gethsemane.

As his disciples were sleeping, and Jesus was in agony, praying and sweating as his drops of blood.

And he was saying, Lord, if there's any other way for this cup to pass from

me, then let that happen. But not my will, Jesus said, but yours be done.

And the passion, you've seen the movie, The Passion of the Christ,

the passion that he experienced there, and all the suffering,

all of his heart being broken at that very moment, the suffering that he entered into.

It wasn't just that, because think about everything else that happened that

night with the betrayal of his closest friends.

If they all took off, they ran off, and they denied that they were even with him.

Think about the suffering that he has as from the cross, he sees his mom there,

and his concern is for his earthly mom, Mary.

And he tells John, take care of her. Think about the physical suffering that Jesus went through.

Think about the suffering of a holy God, a holy man even in Jesus,

having the sin of each and every one of us placed upon his shoulders,

suffering the punishment for what we did wrong, for the mistakes that we made,

willingly and unintentionally.

Jesus suffered. And there's an interesting phrasing that happens here when you get to verse 8 and 9.

It says, he learned obedience from what he suffered.

What? Wait, we're talking about Jesus being God. Now, isn't God omniscient?

So how does this work? Is this one of those paradoxes in the Bible where it

seems like it's saying he's not omnipotent or omniscient even?

But, I mean, what's the deal here? And I'm not trying to cast doubt in here,

but this is something I wrestled with through this week.

And I kind of came up with this illustration. Maybe that will help explain it. Maybe not completely.

Because illustrations don't illustrate completely. But it says that he learned

obedience through suffering and became the source of eternal salvation.

What does it mean he learned? Did he mess up? He didn't obey God and his father,

and so then he had to learn obedience? Well, I don't think it's like that. I think it's different.

Imagine, and for some of you, it might be a lot of imagining you need to do,

but imagine that you are a doctor of, what is it, osteopathy?

Is that right? Or orthopedic? I don't know which one. One of those.

See, I'm not the one imagining right now. That's you.

And you know everything about broken bones. You know everything about...

What happens when it breaks and how it gets put back together,

when you have to have surgery, when you don't, when you need to cast something,

when you only need to put a sling on it.

You know all that things. You know what the symptoms are when someone breaks

their femur, when they break their leg.

You know that they get nauseated, that, boy, a lot of different symptoms. There's pain there.

Now, imagine you know all of that because you went to doctor college and you

got your practicing license and you're in a hospital and doing all that.

So you know it all right you have

all that knowledge you know it but now

pretend you're going out skiing you know you're up at Brundage and McCall and

you're going down one of the slopes man you're having a good time you're doing

kicks and flips I mean you're just having a great time you're thinking about

joining the Olympics next time it comes around and all of a sudden some kid

comes out of nowhere and knocks you down and you wipe out and you break your own leg.

Now, as a doctor that has all this knowledge about which bone is broken and

maybe what's happening and what's going on, you know all that,

but now you've experienced it.

Now you know what the pain feels like. I mean, you literally have that visceral

reaction to that broken femur.

You feel it poking your flesh.

You become nauseated because of the pain, and now you know what that is like.

You know that you're in need of help. and that you're in need of it now.

You can feel the artery pumping through that leg so vividly.

You see, on one point you had the conceptual knowledge.

You knew or you know how everything should work and how it's supposed to be

put together, but now you've been through it.

Now you have the experience of going through that.

You have the reality, that experiential reality of what it's really like to go through that.

You don't gain any new facts because you knew the facts, but what you gain is

an understanding of the reality of suffering of the patient and what they go through.

In other words, Jesus knew all these things, but yet his obedience wasn't complete

until he went through everything, his obedience to the Father.

Remember his struggle in the garden.

I keep coming over here because this is where Jesus and his homies were hanging

out in the play, right? This is where they were.

And Jesus was praying and struggling.

Remember what he said, not my will, but yours be done, God.

Jesus could have tapped out right there and said, no, I'm not going through

this for people that are not even going to care about you, care about me.

I'm not going through this.

But he was obedient to his father's will, what his father wanted,

and he went through that willingly.

He said, but not what I want, God, what you want. The suffering of a holy Savior.

Having all of our sins cast upon him, the brokenness that he felt from us,

the pain that he felt physically from taking the lashes, having his beard pulled

out, having the crown of thorns placed on his head.

You see, when we look at Jesus, we see more than an example of faithfulness.

We see the one who has done for us what no human priest could ever do,

and that is to truly stand in our place, to truly be our mediator.

Jesus did what he said he was going to do. In an extreme situation that he had

not yet encountered, he said yes to the Father's will, and it's in that that

he became complete as the one.

He went from untested to fully qualified.

Now, think about it. If you get in on an airplane, you're hoping that the pilot

has been fully qualified, that they just don't have the knowledge of what it

means to sit in a classroom or sit in a flight simulator,

but that they've had hours where they've flown the airplane and had real problems

and had to think on the fly.

That's the kind of pilot you want to fly with, right?

One that has been fully qualified. Folks, Jesus has been fully qualified by

God the Father, and He is able to stand in the gap for you.

Will you trust Him in that? Are you trusting him to stand in the gap for you,

for your sin, for your weakness, for the struggles that you have?

Are you trusting the one who's already gone through that and became victorious, had victory in that?

Remember, Jesus was tempted in every way like us. He never sinned,

but he had victory over that.

Hey, you're out working on your car, you're busting your knuckles and scraping up your hand.

You might be tempted to say some things you ought not say, It ought not be in your heart, right?

You ever think Jesus, as a carpenter, busted his knuckles, scraped himself up,

didn't have a temptation to say something, but didn't?

You see, Jesus knows what it's like to be human.

Jesus knows what it's like to suffer as we suffer, wanting to do what's right,

being tempted to do what's not right.

What does this mean for you today as we wrap this portion up here?

Well, first of all, it means we can come to God with confidence.

At the end of chapter 4, it does say in verse 4, 16 of Hebrews,

let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive

mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Because Jesus truly represents us, we don't have to approach God in fear.

We don't have to approach God from a distance.

We can come honestly, humbly, and boldly to him because Jesus is the better mediator.

It means that we can trust Jesus in our weakness.

A better mediator means you have one who really understands temptation,

who understands pain, who understands disappointment, who understands sorrow.

And so when we find ourselves in those moments of weakness, Jesus is not distant,

but he is right there with us.

Now, I don't know fully the theology of the old footprints poem,

but I kind of like the part where

it says, when you only saw one set of footprints, I was carrying you.

Have you felt those moments in your life where you were so weak,

you just had no strength, but yet you're still growing in Jesus.

You were still being carried along by the Spirit of God.

See, in our weaknesses, we can trust Jesus. He knows about weakness.

What I would say to you today is stop looking for another mediator.

Stop looking at a priest. Stop looking at someone else to go between.

A lot of times what we do, we keep trying to earn our way to heaven through

our own effort, through our own performance, through a religious routine.

We think we've got to do X, Y, and Z when maybe we will do X, Y, and Z,

because it's an outgrowth of what God's doing on the inside,

not trying to go from the outside in and wondering why we never fear religious

even though we're doing all these religious things why we never feel close to

God or why we don't ever sense his presence.

Well, maybe we've got it backwards. We're trying to do all these things when

we just need to be with Christ.

Let him develop those things within us, those disciplines within us.

It's not by our own effort, not by anything we do, but it's by trusting God

daily, spending time with him in prayer, in his word.

Hey, you might not really sense anything as you start out, but it's kind of

like with every discipline.

You start small and you build up, and pretty soon it's part of who you are,

part of your character, part of your walk with Christ, and you really know,

hey, I do experience a holy presence when I'm reading the Word, when I'm in prayer,

when I'm gathering with God's people.

I know there's something special

going on. So don't look for someone else to fill the place of Jesus.

No one else fits. No one else can.

Buddha can't, right? Muhammad couldn't.

You can go down the list of religious people, of religious ideologies.

None of those will stack up to Christ.

He is the better mediator. He is the only mediator. He is the only one that we can trust.

Last but not least, I want you to rest in the one who stands in your place.

Hey, after you've come to God, after you're trusting Jesus, after you're not

looking for anything else except Jesus, then just rest in the one who stands in your place.

If Jesus has brought us to God, remember, we didn't have to press one.

We didn't have to wait on hold.

Jesus takes us straight to the Father.

Then we should live at peace with God and with others.

And our lives should reflect that reconciliation that we have with God in our

relationships with other people.

I mean, think about it. If Jesus can forgive us for everything that we've done,

for the times we held a grudge against somebody else, for the times we said

a crossword to someone and never asked for forgiveness, for the time when we

were mad at someone and really didn't even tell them we were mad at them,

but we treated them like they were nothing.

Well, if Jesus can forgive us for those things, can we forgive others for those same kind of things?

Can we see relationships restored in our families, immediate and extended?

Man, in our church family, things happen.

Sometimes we don't always represent Jesus, even in the church,

and sometimes those relationships can break.

But if we bring them to Christ, cannot they be restored and built back again?

I mean, if God has forgiven us as our mediator through Jesus,

then I can forgive my brother and my sister through Jesus for what they really

did against me or for maybe what I perceive they did against me.

But we've got to come to one another in the midst of Christ and deal with those

things. That gives us peace.

And have you ever been to a church, and I hope you don't say yes as this one,

but you walk in the door, and it's like there's just a tension.

It's like the Hatfield's on one side and the McCoy's on the other side.

If there are any of your relations, I apologize, but that's just how it feels,

and you're just there happy to worship God.

You come walking in, let's sing praise to Jesus, and let's hear the Word,

and there's just a tension, a tension that's so tight It's almost like that

banjo playing the dueling music, right?

Does anyone play the banjo? I'd love to have a banjo up here for our worship.

But you want to worship, but there's no peace. The same thing happens in our lives.

It's when we want to worship God through our life, but there's no peace.

We're always just focused on the tension.

When we need to give that to our mediator and allow him to take care of that,

to forgive us so we can live in the peace of God and the peace of God personally,

but corporately as well.

That's not in my notes. I don't know why I shared that.

But the Lord will use that. Hey, as we close this morning, we're going to take

the Lord's Supper together.

And we know that because Jesus is the better mediator, we can come to God.

We can rest in God's grace and

we can live as people who have been brought near to the heavenly father.

You don't have to wait on hold for Jesus to get to you.

Right when you pray to him, right when you say, God, help me, he's there.

Jesus is there for you.

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.