A Hope of Perfection

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Good morning. It's heartfelt. You guys are feeling it today. If you would open up to Hebrews 9. We're gonna be in Hebrews 9 today, or turn your phone to Hebrews 9. However that works with you. That's cool. As you're turning there, if you have been alive and not under a rock the last 15 years, you have noticed and overabundance of home improvement shows. There have been a few. There's a whole channel of them, actually. Fixer Upper, Good Bones, Property Brothers. I know we could probably have a good debate as to which one's the better one. Nope, you don't get to vote now. So we could. That means we're not having the debate now. These are a guilty pleasure for me that I have no intention of dropping. I can watch a home improvement show any day of the week. I could be exhausted, come in, home improvement shows on. I'm like, man, how are they going to get these cabinets

stained in time? I mean, I'm there every time. And you know you watch too many of them. Here's some warning signs. You've watched too many of them when you become an interior decorator in your own mind. You've just watched too many. You start debating with the decorator, right? She's saying, oh, yeah, we definitely need these countertops to be chords. And you're like, granite! We got granite countertops, not chords, right? You start second-guessing their decisions, like, oh, that would look way better as mid-century modern. They went with our deco. I don't know what they're thinking. And you're sucked in, right? You're too far in. Because when you do that, and when I do that, when I start really getting into these shows, and I've watched too many, I start thinking in terms of space and function. I start thinking in terms of how a kitchen flows into a family room.

Now, that doesn't mean no good. I'm a pastor. My degree is in Bible. You don't want me decorating anything. But regardless, it's just something that I get sucked in with and I start seeing this relationship between space and functions. And as we turn to Hebrews 9, this relationship between space and function kind of comes to the fore. You start seeing this difference or this relationship between the physical space and its use. And as we open up to Hebrews 9, we're going to start in verse 1, we're going to kind of plow through a lot of Hebrews 9 today. It's almost as if we are interrupting a conversation in Hebrews 9-1, but there are some key words that I want to kind of pick out. So here's Hebrews 9 verse 1, it says, now even the first covenant had regulations for worship in an earthly place of holiness. Even the first covenant had regulations for worship in an earthly place of holiness.

So we got some key words there. These key words are going to help us. So let's pay attention. The first covenant that we're talking about here is the Old Testament. Bible is divided, not in half, more like three quarters of one quarter. But the first three quarters of your Bible are the Old Testament. Another word for Testament is covenant or promise. So you have the first promise and the second promise or Old Testament and New Testament. So we are firmly talking about the Old Testament here. So in the first covenant, and then earthly places of holiness. Um, if you're looking in the first promise, the Old Testament, you're very much going to find that, uh, it is centered around a tent that was set apart. Okay. Uh, a tabernacle, a tent, it later became permanent. It was a temple, but it started out as this tent and really everything was kind of centered around this tent that was made holy and there were also regulations

worship. And in the verses that follow that we will not get into, because man, it's a lot. In the verses that follow, I will summarize just telling you in that tent that everything was centered around, there was an outer section and an inner section. Not intersection, but inner. So outer and inner, they were different from one another. And that inner section, that inside part, was called the Holy of Holies. Everybody say Holy of Holies. There you go. Holy of Holies. And it just meant that it was the most holy place, right? The Holy of Holies, the inner part of that tent was the most holy place. And we're going to get into that a lot more next week, whenever Daniel Oster is preaching through the next couple of verses, but, and because it gets a lot more into that.

Daniel just made this face like, what? I'm preaching next week? You got me. You got me. That's jerk. Okay. All right. Just you wait. Just you wait. In the intersection, in the inner part, that's where goats and bulls and calves were slaughtered. Okay. So in this inner part, you have animals blood and verses 1 through 11, what they do, They give us this really crazy juxtaposition of space,

which is bloody, everything's bloody and full of ashes. So space and function. Because the function of it was holiness. So you have this really odd coming together of things that are set apart and holy and beautiful and laden with gold and only the best wood all of this really pretty sweet smelling things, all of these things are there. And then you have this, you just cover with blood. It looks like a murder scene.

It's weird. It's a strange juxtaposition. In fact, Hebrews 912 kind of kind of helps us understand where we're going with this with this idea of space and function. It says, hey, Jesus entered once we're all into the holy places, not by means of blood of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. What we need to see just from that verse, there's a lot there. What we need to see, what we need to focus on is that in Hebrews, we are redefined holiness and blood everywhere. We are redefining it. Both the space and the function of what was happening in the first covenant is now intensified. Both are intensified. We're not talking about blood of bulls and goats and calves. We're not talking about that. We're talking about Jesus's blood now. And we're not talking about just like a most holy spell, like a

physical space. We're talking about something different and it has to do with eternal redemption. This, what I've just walked us through, helps us remember exactly where we left off last spring talking about the book of Hebrews. This year, our church is going through the entire book of Hebrews. And instead of trying to eat that elephant all at once, we were taking small bites and we're breaking it up into four series. We are on the third series of those four.

The first, the first one that we cover was Hebrews chapters one through four. And that was what we said, Jesus is higher. So we talked about Jesus being higher. Jesus is the full and final word of God. The full and final word of God. So verses chapter one, verses one and two, it talks about how in the Old Testament, God spoke through prophets, but now he has speak to us through his son. So Jesus is higher. Okay. And that was what our kind of the sermon artwork looked like. That was Hebrews 1 through 4. The next one was Hebrews 5 through 8 where we talked about it was a higher promise. It was a higher promise that Jesus delivers a promise to us that is higher than shame or anxiety or neglect or even sin. Right? That in chapter 6, verses 17 through 19 says that God made us heirs of the promise that He guaranteed it and that in this we have what it calls a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,

that the promise that we have in Jesus, and we're going to be looking at that a little bit in this in this series too. But the promise that we have in Jesus is something that we can anchor on, something that we that doesn't just kind of float around and sometimes a sure and sometimes it's not. It's always there. And that's really important. today, we are going to be moving through, starting a series on Hebrews 9 through 11, chapters 9 through 11, and we're going to call it a higher hope. A higher hope. We use the word hope kind of in society as kind of crossing fingers, right? Like, hope it turns out okay, you know. But hope in the Bible is really different, and we should understand that. Hope in the Bible is a little more sober. It's a little more gritty. It's a little harder. There's an edge to it. And so I'll give you kind of an example. So or not an example, but maybe a metaphor to help.

The world defines hope as like a full court basketball shot. Raise your hand if you've ever made a full basketball court shot. Yeah, me neither. Oh, nice. One. One out of the room with a full court basketball shot. That is really hard to do. It's your chances are, I don't know, one in a million. Maybe you can get better at it. But that's really how the world defines hope. It happens every once in a while. The Bible defines hope not as a full court shot, but as climbing through a very small window into a sure future. Climbing through a very small tight window into a very sure future. With a full court shot, you need luck, right? Not saying you were lucky. Maybe you've been practicing your whole life. I don't know. But with a full court shot, you need a lot of luck. You need a lot of things to go right. But with a small window, whenever you're climbing through it,

you don't need luck, you need endurance. Those are different. This kind of hope requires endurance, not luck. Okay? We really need to wrap our minds around that. When we're talking about a higher hope, We don't need to understand hope as a maybe. We need to understand when you see hope for what it is. When we do see hope for what it is, okay, the reason that we need to do that is because it is actually the hope itself. It's the hope itself that can actually move us,

that can change us. It is the hope itself. When we engage in real, gritty, sober, biblical hope, when we actually kind of join hands with that, when we do that, that itself transforms us into the people that Jesus is calling us to become. Hope isn't something that we sort of do sometimes. Hoping is a way of living. Hoping, actually hoping, transforms us into the people that Jesus is calling us to become. And so today, we're going to find out a little bit more about how hope transforms us and how we can cooperate that. We're going to talk about how hope is kind of in the present tense. Our hope simply stated is at the end of verse 12, what we read already, that Jesus has secured an eternal redemption for us, like it says in verse 12, that he secured an eternal redemption. I want to look a little bit more into that. And to do that, I want to look at the verses that follow.

Verses 13 and 14 shed a lot of light on what that eternal redemption is. Hebrews 9:13 says, and we're back in the first covenant here, for if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, if they sanctify for the purification of flesh, okay, so we're going to let it hang on an if here for just a second. It's saying if in the first covenant, if all of those things, if the blood of animals and the ashes of a heifer were good, if those things were good, what does 14 say? How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God? How much more would the blood of Christ purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God? It's saying Jesus' blood is way better than goats and calves and the ashes of a heifer.

It's greater. How? Why? Why is it greater? It's greater because it's present tense. The eternal redemption that we're talking about in verse 12 is not heaven when we die or not just heaven when we die. That eternal redemption starts now. That Jesus's blood purifies our consciences from dead works now in the present tense. And so do you have a conscience that is stained by lustful thoughts right now? Apply the blood of Jesus, it's there. Do you have a past that brings you shame? Apply the blood of Jesus right there. Do you feel disqualified to pray or to pray out loud? Apply the blood of Jesus right there. It's so simple. It is so simple and it is so refreshing that in Jesus Christ we have eternal active, present tense redemption and that eternal active present tense redemption crushes anything in its way.

Anything at all. That eternal redemption is a Mack truck and your problems are already roadkill. It runs over everything. It crushes anything in its way. And the idea of this supremacy, of this ability to crush anything in its way, it comes up again in verse 15. It says, in Hebrews 9, 15, it says, It says, therefore, He, Jesus, is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promise eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. Look, there's a lot there, and we're really only focusing on a few things. We're going to cover a lot more next week. I'm just piling it onto Oster to just have so much to do next week. Just slogging through all this stuff. I just kind of skimmed over. No, just kidding. It talks about how Jesus here is the mediator of a

new covenant in Hebrews 722, what we covered a couple months ago. It says that Jesus is the guarantor of a better covenant. So it's not just a new covenant, it's a better covenant. What is it better than? What is this covenant better than? Why do we need a new covenant? What is this new covenant entail? Why is it better? Why do we need to replace the old covenant? Didn't the first covenant work well enough? What is it better than? It's better than whatever covenant you are currently operating under. This covenant is better than whatever covenant you are currently operating under. This is a really big point in the book of Hebrews and I want to really just lay it nice and clean for you. I really want you to see it in the Old Testament, in the First Covenant. So we've been talking a lot about Old Testament today. In the Old Testament, in the First Covenant, they had a whole sacrificial system. And I mean, the thing was complicated.

Okay, you want to know how complicated? Read the book of Leviticus. That complicated. Okay. And you got to like, you know, you got to kill this animal at this point, then kill another animal at this point, you got to take this blood and put it on your thumb, and this blood and put it on your thing in your earlobe here, and you have to wear this ephod, and you have to do this thing in this order. You got to kill this and burn this at the same time. I mean, it is a thing. It's a whole system. It's a full-time job. Okay. It's a lot. And it was centered around blood, which is the point of Hebrews 9. The positives of this sacrificial system is that I've illustrated their need for a Savior. Right? Nobody left that sacrificial system going, yeah, I mean, I'm good enough. Like, nobody. Because the point of it was to show you that you're a sinner, to show you that

you need redemption. It's the whole point. The negative of that was that it tied everybody to a system that was limited. That sacrificial system was limited. In particular, I'm going to bring up three things, three ways it was limited. The blood, the first covenant, it did not purify their consciences from dead works. It didn't do anything to purify their consciences.

It excused, it somehow like made them right with the Lord, but their blood didn't have any power per se. And thus they were not free. They were not really free to serve the living God, not in that kind of freedom and it's because they were in a system that continually repeated. They were caught in a loop every year. Same sacrifices, same things. Hebrews 10, 11 points this out in particular. It says, and every priest stands daily at his service offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, sacrifices, which can never take away sins. This is the problem with the first covenant, with the blood covenant. It didn't purify their consciousness. They weren't free and it put them on a loop, same sacrifices every year. Hebrews is telling us, Hebrews is telling us, in the Old Testament, people were using a sacrificial system to do what only a savior could do. Hear that, hear that.

In the Old Testament, the people were using a sacrificial sacrificial system to do for them what only a savior could do. But if you think that we've somehow graduated from a sacrificial system, you are wrong. We got one. It's just a modern version of it, right? And we're not sacrificing goats and bulls and calves. We're not sprinkling the ashes of a heifer on anybody. Thank the Lord.

That'd be stinky. Our sacrificial system does not revolve around blood. Our sacrificial system revolves around self punishment. We punish ourselves enough to consider ourselves whole. We punish ourselves enough to consider ourselves whole. There's an old word for this, penance. It's an old word and essentially it means making ourselves low out of guilt. And I want to illustrate this to you in a couple of different ways. Society actually operates on self-punishment, and I'll prove it, okay? I'll prove it. Let's just say a celebrity and or politician does something super dumb, okay? They said what they shouldn't have said, they did what they shouldn't have done, they do something super dumb. They need to publicly apologize, potentially go through some kind of therapy, but it also is going to take time.

In other words, they can't just say, sorry, publicly, detox for two days, and then everything's okay again. Where the public's like, oh, they're fine. No, man. When a politician or celebrity does that, they're not welcomed back into the circle very quickly. It's a slow, painful process. They have to reboot their whole career. Now, I'm sure there's exceptions to that, but by and large, punishment, self-punishment. They wanna see you suffer, and they wanna see you suffer at your own hand. They want you to impose exile upon yourself to earn the right to come back and be a politician or a celebrity. Self-punishment, though, it's just another broken system, right? In particular, self punishment works the same way as the blood covenant does, in that it doesn't purify your conscience from your past. It doesn't set you free to serve the living God and joy. And it's a repeating system because self punishment is never enough.

Never enough. Never have any of you or I, never have we done something wrong and then engaged in self punishment and then had the conscious thought, okay, I'm good now. Like I'm absolved. I absolved myself. I can forget about that. No, we don't. We don't forget about that. When we are left to forgive ourselves, that is agonizing. We learn this pattern of self punishment from when we sin against people. When I sin against my wife, for example, which happens minute by minute. Okay, all the time. For the same room, I'm sitting against her probably. When we do that, when I send against my wife, my wife needs time, because she's a person. She's a human being, and she can't just process all of that real quick, like oh, okay, you know, Drew just said something extremely rude to me, but he said he's sorry, everything's fine. No, every husband knows right now that I'm like, that's never, ever, ever, ever gonna happen.

When you say something terrible to your wife, if you just turn around and go, hey, I'm sorry, and you expect everything to be fine, you were raised better than that. You know better than that. People need time, that's where we learn that. People need time. Even men need time. People need time. But with Jesus, it is totally different. totally different because waiting after you sin, waiting to go back to Him doesn't help you. Waiting alienates you. Self-punishment does not absolve you. Self-punishment deceives you. Self-punishment, let me just say it one more time. It doesn't absolve you. It only deceives you. You are deceiving yourself into thinking that if I just do enough self-punishment, If I go through enough ritual, if I say, oh Jesus, I wanna pray but I just can't because I feel so guilty. Oh, I just wanna read my Bible but I can't because I feel so guilty.

Oh no, I just, oh, oh, I gotta be out of your presence. That doesn't help you. That doesn't help you at all. Because it'll never be enough. You'll never crouch away enough, ever. You'll never wait long enough, ever. It'll never happen. And even, even if you go through that process and you think you've waited long enough and then you go into God's presence again, you are still deceived because you think you've earned it. You're still deceived. The reality? When you sin? The faster you come to Jesus, the better. Every time, every time. day of the week, no matter what you've done from white lies to capital murder, anything you've ever done, the best thing your soul can do is to run to Jesus. Because what is our encouragement when we sin according to scripture? It's to drag that sin into the light, to run to Jesus, to throw off the the cover, to confess your sin, to say, here I am, here it is, I screw it up again.

Here, I'm sorry. Why? Why is, why should we hurry up and do any of that? Are we hoping that God won't get too mad if we hurry up? No, no, because in Jesus, we have eternal, active, present tense, redemption. It's working even when you're sleeping. It's working all the time. It is redeeming you eternally from now. It never runs out. And here's how Hebrews puts it, and then we're gonna skip forward to Hebrews 10, verses 12 through 14. Hebrews 10, 12 through 14, it says, But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. That means it was done. When Jesus sits down, the party's over. Okay, that's where he's finished.

13, excuse me, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. 14, for by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. Let me, let's just drink in 14. Just drink it in. By a single offering. We're not on a repeat. We're not in a loop. We're not self punishing until we finally feel okay. We're not sacrificing goats and bulls and cats. We're not doing anything. one offering, single offering that you didn't do by a single offering that Jesus does on your behalf. He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. Let me tell you, who are those who are being sanctified? The Bible makes it super clear. Those who are being sanctified are those that trust in Jesus for their redemption. There are people that trust Jesus with their life, that confess their sin to Jesus, that come before Jesus and say, okay, I want to follow you. I'm not going to do

that perfectly, but I'm going to follow you best I can. I'm just going to go for it. That's people that are being sanctified. And what scripture says is that Jesus, when he died once, you were perfected forever, for all time. You imperfect, dumb, you and me, I'm imperfect and dumb too. We're all imperfect and dumb. It's really helpful to remember that. In Jesus's redemption, in his present tense, active, eternal redemption, you and I have been not just saved, we're not like, you know, snatched from hell and then left on the side of the road. Like that's not the picture that we have been saved and perfected for all time. And it doesn't mean that we are perfect now. It does mean that we can hope that one day we will be made perfect. It doesn't mean we're perfect now, but it means that we can hope to be perfect one day. Not in this life, we can hope to be perfect in heaven.

Our eternal redemption is a sure future through a very tight window. Our eternal redemption is a sure future through a very tight window. In other words, when you sin, and you will, spoiler, don't run to self punishment. When you sin, run to Jesus in repentance, because the hope of your redemption is sure. It's done. It's established. You are actively participating in your own redemption when you confess your sin.

It is an engagement of a sure hope of your perfection. You say, Jesus, I know that you are working to make me look like you. And so in order to do that, in order to cooperate with you, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come before you and I'm just going to confess everything to you, knowing, knowing that this is part of the plan. When you are not sure of that redemption, when you don't know, when you have not said yes to following Jesus, that is not something that looks appetizing at all. Because all you do, whenever you want to sin, if you are not following the Lord, when you sin, all you want to do is hide. All you want to do is cover. All you want to do is deflect blame. All you want to do is protect yourself. Because you feel that vulnerability in Christ with eternal, present tense, active redemption. You participate in that redemption when you confess your sin before Him.

Hebrews 10, 15 through 18 kind of puts a good kind of period at the end of this. It says, and the Holy Spirit bears witness to us for after saying, and we're about to quote the Old Testament here, we're about to quote Jeremiah, after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord, I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds. I'm going to wait here for just a second. Go back, sorry. we're quoting here in verse 16 is Jeremiah 31 and this Jeremiah 31, 33, somebody checked my math, sorry. In Jeremiah, sure, the Lord God in heaven is speaking through the prophet Jeremiah and he's saying, I'm going to make a covenant with my people in the future and it will look like this. And what he's saying is, I will not put my laws on tablets. It won't put it up on a high mountain. I will put it somewhere where they have to like run

to go get it. I'm gonna put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds. Why? So that they will obey. The new covenant is not some law, some list. You gotta somehow attain to, somehow be perfect enough, somehow be smiley and happy enough or know your purpose enough, or be significant enough or be having enough influence or anything like that. It's something that the Lord does to you, for you, in you, behind you, through you. Let's keep going. Then he adds, so the point that the author and Hebrews, the preacher and Hebrews is making right now is that he's saying this is at the end of it. He says, at the end of that covenant that he says, I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.

Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin. That last verse should make you leap in joy in your heart because we're not sacrificing anything anymore. We're not, we don't need to engage in the sacrificial system of self punishment. We don't need to somehow base ourselves to make sure that we are acceptable before God, that Jesus has made this sacrifice for us and that we can in confidence, not confidence because we're awesome or confidence because like we can really do it and we're smart enough and good enough and people like us. We're not, that's not us. That's not, we don't come in our own righteousness, right? The confidence that we have is because we have been bought and paid for. That sacrifice means that there is no longer any offering for sin. There's nothing else that can cover what you're doing except what Jesus has already done.

You can drop the self-punishment because it is deceptive and it is unnecessary. Jesus' eternal act of present tense, redemption, always is enough. perfecting us gives us a higher hope of what our lives can be. And as we enter into our time of invitation, David's going to come up, we're going to sing some songs. I just, I really want to just press in a few things that our salvation, excuse me, that our perfection, the perfection that we have in Jesus is given, not earned. Our holiness is granted, not achieved. Our joy is grounded not in our striving, but in God's charity.

Our joy, your joy does not ever, will never come from how much you do. Ever. Not true joy, not joy that's going to last, not joy that's going to feed your soul. True joy does not come from a checked off to do list or being authentic or whatever. It doesn't come from that true joy. It's grounded in God's charity toward you, what God did for you, not what you're doing for him. We are free to embrace this. It's our hope. And this freedom should make us willing to repent, to push away self-punishment. Let me ask you, how would your life change if you didn't run and hide whenever you sinned? How would your, like, what if, what if you were able to experience the grace of Christ without feeling like you've earned it and you just had to hold on to it? You just had to hold on to it real tight. Would it change you? Would it change how you talk to people? Would it change how you approach work?

Would it change how you read your Bible? My encouragement, my invitation to you is for you to find out today. Let me pray, and I want to enter into our time of imitation. Jesus, thank you so much for your word. Thank you for your eternal, active, present tense, redemption that works in us, that gives us a hope, a sure hope for the future. I hope that invites us to confess to you, to be honest before you and before others, knowing that you have everything that we need and that you graciously give us those things. You're not dangling them in front of us. If we somehow perform, you are graciously offering those to us if we would follow you and believe. Lord, we ask during this time of invitation that you would move in our hearts,

that we would decide, that we would know for sure that we have a hope in you. In your name we pray, amen. Why don't you stand as we sing, And I'm going to be right up here on the front row. If you would like to, if you need prayer, if you'd like to make a decision of any kind, please come up and see me. You give light, you are love You bring light to the darkness You give hope, you restore Every heart that is broken A grave of breath, we pour out our praise I praise it so bright, we pour out our praise. You only, you alone, it's your, you give light. You give light, you are love. Bring light to the darkness, you give hope. We store every heart that is broken Great are you Lord Breath in our lungs So we pour out our praise Pour out our praise It's still breath In our lungs We pour out our praise You only it's your bread and our lungs So we pour out our praise, pour out our praise

It's your bread and our lungs So we pour out our praise, you only And all the earth, and all the earth will shout your praise Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing great Our hearts will shout your praise Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing Oh, it's your bread. And also when we pour out our praise, pour out our praise, it's your bread. Our hearts will cry, these bones will sing Pray Oh, it's your breath And oh, so we pour out our praise Pour out our praise, it's your breath And our lungs So we pour out our praise You owe me, it's your breath And our lungs, so we pour out our praise, our praises to the breads. And our lungs pour out our praise to you only. Hebrews 9, 24-28. For Christ has entered not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood, not his own.

For then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all, at the end of the ages, to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once and after that judgment comes, So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time not to deal with sin, but to save those who eagerly await Him.