Good to see all of you this morning as we celebrate
Pentecost together. We're going to be looking at
Hebrews chapter 10. And yeah, if you'll stand with
me for the reading of God's Word, we'll hear.
We'll hear verses one through 25, starting in verse one.
For since the law has been a shadow of the good things to
come, instead of the true form of these realities, it can
never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered
every year, make perfect those who draw near.
Otherwise would they not have ceased to be offered, since the
worshippers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have
any consciousness of sin. But in these sacrifices there is
a reminder of sin every year. For it is impossible for the
blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
Consequently when Christ came into the world, he said,
sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you
have prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sin
offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is
written of me in the scroll of the book, when he said above,
You have neither desired nor taken pleasure.
And sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin
offerings. These are offered according to
the law. Then he added, Behold, I have
come to do your will. He abolish is the first, in
order to establish the second. And by that we have been
sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once
for all. And every priest stands daily at
his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can
never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for
all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right
hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemy should be
made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has
perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us.
For 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.
Then he adds, 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.
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the
holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way
that He opened for us, through the curtain, that is, through
His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the House of
God, let us draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of
faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience,
and our bodies washed with pure water.
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without
wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
And let us consider how to stir one another up to love and good
works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of
some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you
see the day drawing near. This is the word of the Lord.
Go ahead and have a seat. We'll pray, and that's God to
bless us. Lord, we do thank you for your
word. We thank you for how you
instruct us. And long passages like this with
cryptic language from the Old Testament is weird to our 21st
century years. And I pray that your Holy Spirit
would enlighten us, illumine the truth of this text to us.
And Lord, most of all, I pray that you would make clear for us
the confidence that we can have through Christ, through the Holy
Spirit to commune with you and enjoy you and be transformed
further into Christ image. In Jesus name we pray.
Amen. Yeah.
So I, I have spent my whole life trying to figure out what does
it mean to or how do you actually engage the Holy Spirit?
If we're going to be celebrating the Holy Spirit, we should
actually know something of what it means to actually engage him.
And as as I've thought about that, Hebrews 10 has been a
chapter that is central to helping me learn how to do that.
I'm still learning and I'm sure you all are as well.
But I often ask myself the question of like, what do I need
to do? Like I love fishing on my kayak.
Is that do I go out into nature alone, isolate myself and get
alone with God? Is that is that how I engage the
Holy Spirit? Do I go into my closet at home
alone and go into fasting and prayer?
Do I do that? Like what, what do I do?
Like what am I? How am I supposed?
Do I need a worship worship leader as gifted as Joseph is to
hit the right notes and chords to make that tingly feeling up
my spine to know I'm with the Holy Spirit Like what, what,
what is it like? How does it work?
And I think when we look at chapter 10 here of Hebrews, we
get some clarity on that. And so my hope, my hope is to
show you that this gathering, being with each other is the
perfect place to engage and experience and get help from the
Holy Spirit. So we got a lot of work to do to
show that through this text. So hopefully we can get there
together. So here in chapter 10, verses 1
to 14, I say Paul, who knows who the writer of the Hebrew to the
letter of the Hebrews is, but I'm going to say Paul.
So as the writer is writing in these verses, he is helping
Jewish Christians figure out how they how to navigate their
relationship with God. They have navigated their
relationship with God through Moses and the law.
All of a sudden Jesus comes, things have changed, and he's
writing here trying to help them to see what the difference is
now that Jesus has come. And he's trying to help them
figure out, well, what do we do with Moses?
What do we do with the sacrifices?
What do we do with the Old Testament law?
And he's explaining to them in this section that Jesus is
superior to all of that and has replaced the sacrifices, the
priests, as he is the sacrifice, He is the high priest.
He has come to establish what all of those things were
pointing to, that those laws and those sacrifices, as we read
they cannot and do, did not fully pay for sin or their
guilt. And the law and the sacrifices
had no power and no inherent life in them to sustain them,
anything that they might give them.
Which is why the Holy Spirit would come and go in the Old
Testament. He'd show up and then leave.
And this way, keeping God's rules, worshipping God rightly
with proper sacrifice, while good, while holy, while
righteous, it didn't perfect them.
It didn't. It didn't fully help them to
become who God demanded and wanted them to be.
However, as we look at this text, verse 14 kind of sticks
out. It sticks out.
It's it's like it's in bold in the text even though it's not.
We read in verse 14 that Jesus is 1 sacrifice on the cross
where he spilled his blood to take away our guilt has noticed
there the past tense perfected us.
Jesus, in his death and in his resurrection from the dead, so
purifies us through his blood that we now enjoy the status of
those who are perfected. Now, I don't know about you
guys, but as we're going through that liturgy and as you hear me
say those words just now, I tend to bristle a little bit that
word perfect, that Jesus has perfected us.
It sounds pretentious to me. It just does.
It sounds pretentious. It sounds arrogant.
It sounds it sounds like something that's that you would
consider to be haughty. It feels awkward to bandy about
that kind of language, especially when referring to our
own selves. We might even resist it.
We would resist it even if we if it if at least it didn't just
seem to be too good to be true. It's certainly uncomfortable.
We call people perfectionists, not as a compliment.
And those who act as if they're perfect, well, probably not
friends with them. They're not typically the kind
of people we enjoy hanging out with.
We typically call people perfectionists, ironically, and
ingest. Yet that's how God is talking
about us here. It's awkward, It's it's
interesting, it's different, and it's being used of you.
It's being used of you who put your trust in your faith in
Jesus. To you it says you are perfected
in Christ. Your guilt is gone, your sin is
fully forgiven and cleansed, and God has received you as His
righteous child and the whole Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit
look at you and they see a perfected individual.
You are perfected in Christ. Let that just wash over you for
a moment. That doesn't.
That's not normal. That's opposite of everything
that we see and feel. It's such strong language and
it's used to define who you are before God.
But it doesn't just stop there in verse 14.
Let me read the whole of it again to you.
He says by a single offering he has perfected for all time those
who are being sanctified, those who are being sanctified.
The word sanctified there means holy.
Just another way of saying perfected.
But it describes someone who's becoming holy, someone who's
becoming a more holy person, a person who is more formed into
the image of Christ, a person who is more perfect.
So that sounds like a contradiction, does it not?
At least it should if you're thinking about it.
Christ has perfected us and we're being sanctified.
There's this dual reality that we're experiencing.
You heard it even in our liturgy this morning, These the now and
the not yet the now. We live in sin in the world, but
we're also perfected and like we're well.
It's why life is so confusing and so weird, especially as a
Christian. And so how do we, how do we put
together in our heads this the fact that we really are
perfected, but when we look at our lives, we don't necessarily
see it and we're going through this difficult process.
Well, I'm a father of five children, four of whom are now,
believe it or not, adults. Yes, one of our daughters just
turned 18. I've only got 1 left in the
house. That's a minor.
So she's an adult, but is she? She's an adult, but she doesn't
pay her own bills. She still lives in the house.
She may be mature for an 18 year old, and I would say she is, but
she's entirely dependent upon us.
She's entirely ignorant of anything about the world.
She's an adult, but she's still a child.
Her legal status is that of an adult, but in reality she's
learning what it means to become an adult.
Both my child and we, her parents, live between her status
of adult while she is still a child and if we handle ourselves
wisely as parents, and hopefully we do.
And we've had to learn to do this now more than once, rather
than clutch on to her as a child and demand that that's really
what we want her to be and remain.
Instead, we'll maybe hold her hand and help her to move into
her identity as an adult and walk with her in that process to
live into and become what she is legally, what her identity
actually is and what that's what's, that's what the right of
the Hebrews is getting at here. That legally, literally, legally
before God, you are perfected. You are an adult in Christ.
That is your identity. It is your status.
It is real. It is not just a figment of an
imagination. It's not just spiritual mumbo
jumbo. It is who you are, and it's only
with a matter of time with Jesus at your side, walking with you,
that you will become fully formed into His image and your
status will become your lived reality.
That is what Jesus is doing in you, and that's what He's doing
for you. He comes to your side, He holds
your hand, He knows your struggle with sin, but He looks
at you and He knows you are also already perfected in Him and you
simply need his help to move your heart and your body into
that reality. As painful and challenging as
that may be. That's great news, right?
That's amazing. It's wonderful, wonderful news.
It's what we celebrate. It's, it's the hope of the
gospel. It's what it's what we look to
Jesus to do for us and in us. But there's more because he goes
on. There's another 10 verses that
we're going to consider this morning.
And the reason why we go on is because what we learn in verses
15 to 25 is that how Jesus comes alongside of us and brings us
into maturity, brings us into adulthood, bring helps us to
manifest the perfected status that we have in him is actually
through the ministry and through the work of the Holy Spirit.
That's what that's how he does it.
So here in verse 15 down through 25, we see that there is this
transition that takes place in verse 15 where the focus now
turns to the Holy Spirit and it says there that the Holy Spirit
is with us to in verse 15 bear witness with us.
Look there, verse 15. And the Holy Spirit also bears
witness to us. Now we'll get to what that means
in just a second. But to bear witness to us, the
Holy Spirit has to be near us. He's got to be consciously
present somewhere in our lives in order for us to have anything
to hear from him to to have anything born witness to us, to
affect us. And we know that in Acts chapter
2, Jesus from his throne in heaven, having risen from the
dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father, he did what
he promised to do. He sent the Holy Spirit not just
to be near, but to become, but to enter into us, to come upon
us, to take up residence in us, to make in us his own home.
Which is wild because when you read the Old Testament, and
especially for these Jewish readers who originally got this
letter, for them, the Holy Spirit only went into the most
cleansed, the most perfect place on earth.
And the basically almost all of the laws and rituals and priests
and everything in the Old Testament was there to make a
space that is good enough for the Holy Spirit to go into.
And what we learn is that Jesus accomplishes all of that,
perfecting us so that now we are perfected to become the perfect
place for the Holy Spirit to come and dwell.
You don't merely as a Christian have a perfected legal status
before God. You are so perfected in Christ
that God is happy to live within you.
He's happy to live within you, and not just to live within you
begrudgingly, the way some of my teenagers have with me, but He
lives in you to bear witness to you, to bear witness to you.
What that means is that the Holy Spirit looks upon what Jesus has
done and he agrees. This is a good place for me to
be. You are God's chosen place to
live. That's how effective Jesus has
been for you, so perfected that he would dare enter into us and
make us his home, to make us living temples in which he
dwells. And he doesn't just live there,
but he speaks and bears witness. And what we learn in verses 15
and following is what He's actually bearing witness to us
in with what he's saying to us. He's reminding us of God's
promises. He reminds us that we're loved
by God. He reminds us, He reminds us
that we are his children. He he assures us.
That's what the language here says.
He wants to assure us of our status before God.
He wants to remind us of who we are in Christ, to encourage us,
to help us, and to help us live into the identity that Christ
has won for us. The Holy Spirit has chosen you
to be His dwelling place to make you a confident, assured child
of God. That's that's what he's done for
you and that's what he currently is doing for you.
So that's that's like the theological explanation and
content for our experience in our lives as Christians.
But what happens in verses 19 down through 25 is the right of
the Hebrews now says, OK, this is what this means for you.
He says this is. These last 10 verses I'm going
to go in and I'm going to show you how what happened on
Pentecost because of the blood of Christ actually works in your
life. He takes the perfecting work of
Christ in the indwelling assurance and witness of the
Holy Spirit, and He makes practice of it in verses 19 to
23. We see there that the Holy
Spirit bears witness to us so that we would have confidence to
enter into His presence so that we would have confidence to
enter into His presence. All throughout the Old
Testament, you would see the temple or the Tabernacle cleanse
so the Holy Spirit could show up.
And then there was this sense of, Oh my gosh, I'm sinful, I'm
impure, I'm defiled. If I go in there and I spend
time with God, I'm going to defile the place and incur God's
judgment upon myself. And that happened.
That happened. You read the Old Testament,
Leviticus chapter, chapter 10, literally immediately in Chapter
9 where the Holy Spirit comes. Chapter 10, the next verse is
two dudes walk into the Tabernacle where the Holy Spirit
is and they get burned alive by God.
That's not going to invite a lot of confidence for anybody to go
into God's presence. That's at least going to make
you think twice. So the purpose, one of the main
purposes of the Holy Spirit is to come into your life and to
bear witness to your soul, to say, hey, what Jesus did was
real and you can happily confidently walk into God's
presence. Look, look at what it says there
in those verses, verse 19. Therefore, brother, since we
have confidence to enter into the holy places by the blood of
Jesus, by a new and living way that He is open for us through
the curtain, that is, through His flesh, since we have a great
priest over the House of God, let us draw near with a true
heart in full assurance of faith.
The Holy Spirit lives within you to bear witness to what Jesus
has done for you so that you can confidently walk into the
presence of God and not fear judgment.
To remind you that Jesus's death was real and His blood really
did accomplish everything the Bible says it did and is sinful
as you are, no matter what your week was like last week or what
it will be like next week. That you can confidently walk
into His presence because He has perfected you.
And the Holy Spirit is there to remind you of that and to call
you into it. Despite the fact that we live
like children. We may be adults, but yet we are
like children. Maybe like an 18 year old
spiritually. The day I turned 18 I did two
really foolish things. This is real, this is not a
joke. The day I turned 18, I took my
new ID and I went into the Amoco gas station in Maquoketa, IA and
bought myself a pack of Marlboro 25 cigarettes.
And then I went to the Bumblebee Tattoo shop in Davenport, IA and
got myself a $35 tribal art tattoo on my left shoulder.
Yes, I peeked early. Yes, I had a new legal status.
I'm an adult and I exercise my new identity like a child.
And no doubt have done many more childish things like that with
my new perfected identity in Christ.
But let's not miss what happens here.
The reason I bring that up isn't just to tell on myself.
The reason I bring that up is because I may have been doing
really stupid childish things, but I really actually believed I
was an adult and I walked into that Amoco gas station not
fearing like I have a fake ID. Like I put my slap my ID on that
counter and I was like I want a pack of cigarettes and they gave
it to me. When you are confident in your
identity, it creates a boldness in you to use your identity
properly or legally. And this is what the Holy
Spirit's in us to do, to embolden you to build your faith
up so that when you walk into the presence of God, you don't
have to walk in sheepishly like, oh, I got a fake idea.
I hope I can get away with it. It means when you go to prayer
before God, even when you're full of guilt from sin, you
could go in confidently that He's there to love you and
forgive you and to transform you.
It means when you when you have a horrible week and you walk
into church on Sunday morning and you feel like trash, that
you can walk boldly into God's presence.
And no, you're not going to face judgment because Christ has
perfected you. And the Holy Spirit is there to
buoy your soul and to create confidence in you so that you
know that you're going to get what you need from God, the
encouragement and the help that you need.
This is this is what Pentecost gets us, but it gets us more
than that. And verses 24 and 25, this is a
command. We see a command, and it's a
command to go to church. Don't neglect gathering
together. But isn't it interesting that
it's right here that He gives us command?
This isn't coming out of thin air, folks.
This command in verses 24 and 25 is not just falling out of the
sky. Unrelated to everything else
that has just been going on in the book of Hebrews.
This is coming at the precise point that it needs to come.
And the reason is because you've just been invited somewhere with
your new status. You've been invited into the
holy place. And so we get to the question.
We open with what, where and how do I get to meet with the Holy
Spirit? Well, it's among one another
because if we take seriously what God says here in Hebrews
chapter 10, it's not just you personally who've received the
Holy Spirit, every person who loves Jesus around you, They are
temples of God's presence as well.
And when you get around them, you get around God.
How does the whole where do you find the Holy Spirit?
You hang out with one another, you worship with one another,
you pray with one of these, serve one another.
And guess what happens when that when you do that, you get the
things that the Bible call the fruit of the Spirit and all the
evidences of the presence of the Spirit.
You get help and encouragement, which is exactly what we find
the calling to hear in verse 25. Not neglecting to meet together,
as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the
more as you see the day drawing near.
That as we're waiting for the fullness of all that Christ has
accomplished to manifest itself, we can be encouraged by the Holy
Spirit in each other. That the Holy Spirit encourages
you through one another. Now that can be good news or bad
news, depending upon your experience with the Church.
No doubt, like you and me, on paper, when we look at it, the
church is a mess. Historically, the church has
failed profoundly. I don't need to list the endless
evidence of that. And no doubt some of you here
have been personally hurt, disappointed, ignored, or feel
invisible in the church. And for you, when you come among
the gathering of God's people, you don't experience being
encouraged. Some of you at least, maybe even
just for a season. But you don't feel encouraged.
Nor do you see, feel seen or loved For some of you here.
It's likely that as you hear that this would be the perfect
place for the Spirit to be met, you bristle, maybe even balk at
it. Like, yeah, that don't work yet.
The church, we need to remember, we need to be careful here to
allow us to interpret the church the way we're invited to
interpret ourselves. The church is not defined by her
failures. The church is not defined by her
sins or her stupidities. Just as your sin is not your
identity, the corporate gathering likewise is a group of
people who collectively have a perfected identity in Christ.
So when you look at that really annoying person who's hurt you
or ignores you, you're looking at a perfected person in Christ
that the Spirit of God lives in and is your hope to experience
the helping presence of God. And there's a real hope to
experience the perfecting presence of the Holy Spirit in
that person because God is in them to make it happen.
Just as you, if it were up to you, would mess up your own
perfection in Christ. You can look at them and know,
oh, they would do it. They're doing it too.
But just like I have hope in the God's presence in me, I can have
hope in them as well. You see, this passage invites us
to do for each other what we are encouraged to do for ourselves,
to be filled full of faith that Jesus has perfected us and is
sanctifying us into what he accomplished for us through the
empowering presence of the Holy Spirit.
The person who trusts Jesus in front of you, behind you, beside
you, those people are perfected. They are ideal dwelling places
for the Gods presence, and they're ideal places for you to
encounter and experience the work of the Holy Spirit in your
life. And when you see them, you're
invited to see them from God's view, and he sees most clearly
they are perfected houses of God that you're invited to
experience and know God's power. Do you see each other in the
church that way? Paul in First Corinthians 7
double s down on this idea when he's talking about the spiritual
gifts. And all of the spiritual gifts
are described there as to be for the purpose of building up for
encouragement. But he defines what a spiritual
gift is in verse 7, and he defines the spiritual gift as a
manifestation of the Spirit, a manifestation of the Spirit.
Which means if someone is using a spiritual gift, God's Spirit
is literally on display, manifesting himself for your
building up, for your encouragement, for your help.
That means if you want to experience the Spirit, get
around people who care to use their spiritual gifts.
This is the power to reshape your entire view of everyone
around you here. As good as personal devotion is
to God in prayer and Bible reading and communion with God
in a kayak on a beautiful lake, this passage shows us that the
perfect place to meet God, for help, for encouragement, to
experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit is to
be with each other because that's where God is.
But I also want to say this, that there are some of you who
feel inadequate to serve in the church, to do the work of
encouraging other people. They feel inadequate.
They feel like they can't, there's not really anything they
can do well enough, or that their words get all jumbled up
when they try to help someone or encourage someone, or they just
feel too broken, sinful, and inadequate to spiritually be of
any real good help to anybody. God is inviting you to see
yourself differently here. He's inviting you to see that in
Christ you really are perfected and the Holy Spirit is with you
to assure you and give you confidence in that so that you
can freely serve and love others and be the actual presence of
God for their help and for their, for encouragement in
their fight against sin and their encouragement in their
fight against depression or in conflicts.
It means you are God's direct and personal encouragement for
others. You are the ideal place for
other people to see and know and experience God's help.
So you're needed in the church. You're needed on paper.
You might feel like and look like a failure, and surely on
paper the church looks this way. But God invites us to fresh
faith this morning, to actually believe the gospel about
yourself, to believe the gospel about each other.
And he invites you to press deeply into that, that you might
experience more and more of the spirits help by digging deeper
and deeper roots here among one another.
And that's my prayer for you all this morning.
So let's pray and ask God's help for us to receive that.
Lord, we thank you and we praise you for all the good work that
you've done for us in Jesus. We thank you for the the fact
that you didn't just ascend to heaven and forget us, but sent
your Spirit to us to do all those things that we just
discussed to give us confidence to come near you and to make us
useful among others. And Lord, to make everyone
around us more than what we perceive with our own eyes.
So Lord help us, we pray to believe and receive that, that
we would be even more excited to come to church on Sunday.
The Lord more full of faith in what you have done and are doing
in and through us. So we pray and ask your Spirit
to do that work on us even now. Ask us in Jesus name, Amen.