Welcome to the River City Church podcast and a message by our
lead pastor, Jason Powers. Our prayer is that this message
would inspire and encourage you, build your faith and point you
to the life changing love of Jesus.
May you enjoy the goodness of God as you follow Him today.
We begin with. We're continuing our journey
towards Easter. We've been looking.
We started in the garden, but we begin, like we do each week,
with our confession and our confession.
We say together as His churches that we are badly broken.
Yes, you are. Grace and peace to you.
Our story and our journey. The Easter began in the Garden
of Eden where we saw a world in chaos, a world in disorder,
which says it was formless and it was void.
And the first thing that we see God doing in that is bringing
structure. He forms and He.
Fills and what we find is that God in that space.
Is creating a home. He's creating a place where he
and we can dwell together. That's always been God's desire
to be with us. When we say that God is love,
that's what it means that our God desires to be with us.
And in order for the for the home to be what it is, he
created the garden as a partnership.
God and his sovereignty in his infinite, unlimited power and
authority, His ability to do whatever he wanted to do.
And he gave to us a measure of that authority.
So we have God's authority. He created something from
nothing. He brought order out of the
chaos and he gave us the authority.
Then he created a garden and he said be fruitful and multiply.
Now take the order that you've seen in this garden and expand
it to fill the earth. And so that system, what God
created was good. Over and over we see in Genesis
1, and God's telling that story is it was good.
There was order and it was good, and it was good and it was good.
That system of partnership, God's omnipotence, God's all
powerfulness, and our limited authority, our limited ability
to move in that a partnership is good.
It's how the world is supposed to work.
But into that garden, a serpent whispered.
Did God really say he said. And what he called into question
in our hearts, in mankind's heart, was the.
Character of God. What he caused us to question
was, is God's holiness really for your benefit?
Can you really trust a God that would put limits on what you can
do? And we see an E when we see she
reads for the fruit and the fruit gets the bad name right.
And fruit is delicious and it's healthy for your body.
But that specific fruit, the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. See up until that point, we had
seen everything is good. But what Adam and Eve said, we
want the ability to decide for ourselves.
We want to know for sure. And so in our distrust of God's
holiness, we grasp that sovereignty.
We didn't want to just experience the goodness of God.
We wanted to define what was good.
And that's been haunting US ever since.
And we've looked at all kinds of examples from our life work and
our sexuality and sex itself and money and our identity and all
of these things we desire to redefine as good for our own
self. We want to say what good is.
And what happened is when we distrusted God's holiness, when
we distrusted God's character, we backed out of the garden.
God sent us. He said, listen in.
His mercy says you can't eat from the tree of life because
then you'll live forever in this separated state.
So the separation that had already been born in Adam and
Eve's heart took physical shape as Adam and Eve walked out of
the garden and a gate was closed behind them.
And since then, mankind has lived, exiled from the presence
of God in the wilderness. But our God and his love and in
His Holiness wasn't content for us to be alone and separated.
So what God did is pursue us out into the wilderness.
And we see this over and over and over again throughout the
biblical story. This is that what we've called
throughout the series, God's fatherly impulse.
Our God absolutely cannot stand to be away from us.
Go out into the wilderness. He chased us.
He came and followed us out there.
And he said, I want you to build a space where I can dwell with
you. And he called it the Tabernacle.
And he gave meticulous instructions for how to build
this space. How do we bring God's holiness
and our fallenness together into the same space and the
Tabernacle in the wilderness? Once Israel became the Hebrew
people, came, established in the nation, it became a temple right
in the center, in the very heart of their nation.
And right in the center of that temple, God dwelt with his
people just like He'd always wanted to do.
But what we saw last week is that same distrust that crept
into the garden, that same distrust that made us look at
God as his limited authority and say, God, I'm not sure that I
can believe you and I can trust you.
It crept into the temple as well.
What began in this holiness, this holy space and the presence
of God as a cloud that filled the space so tangibly that the
priests were literally knocked off their feet over time over
familiarity with the sacrifices, over familiarity with the space,
the people of Israel and the priest.
They face the same problems they did in the garden.
The atonement that came, the atonement, the holiness that God
had provided, became familiar to them.
And when it became familiar, they began to leverage for their
own resources. They'd say, why would we need to
obey God? Why would we need to walk in
holiness? Why would we need to submit our
job and our finances and and our desires?
Why would we need to submit those things to God when we can
just do whatever we want and then just go to the temple and
offer the sacrifice and everything will be fine?
That's what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace.
It's grace that costs us nothing.
And so the last thing that we saw last week was this picture
of the temple where God's presence dwelt so fully that it
knocked people off their feet. And we saw it ascending out of
the temple. And for 600 years after that
spirit ascended, a rebuilding of the temple.
For 600 years, the sacrifices went on, the ritual went on, it
was destroyed and rebuilt again. For 600 years, the everything
continued, accept the Spirit, and nobody noticed.
So the question that's left hanging with us is the same
question that Israel was supposed to answer.
How is it? How do we who are desirous to
inhabit holy space? The reason that you're here this
morning is because we believe somehow in some way or someone
who invited you here believes that somehow in some way, it's
possible to have an experience with that kind of holiness.
The question that all of us since since we walked out of
that garden, the question for all of us is how do you live
near to a holy God without losing the awe?
How is it possible to have a present temple where the
presence of the living God dwells and to become so familiar
and comfortable? With it that you don't even know
when it leaves. I remember the first time that I
had a sense of the presence of God not listen.
I grew up in churches. My grandfather was a pastor like
I I was around all of the things like I did all of the things,
but I remember that there was a moment where I knew God is not
just a good idea, but God is real and God is not just real
out there, but God is real in here.
It knocked me off my I was laying down, but it knocked me
over. It changed my entire life is
marked as before. And after that moment, and it
wasn't loud and flashy. There were no trumpets.
There were other people in the house that didn't even know that
it was happening. It wasn't loud and boisterous.
It wasn't extravagant. And it was wasn't.
And it wasn't like all of a sudden all this information
flooded into my head and I knew all of the things.
It was quiet. It was deep.
It was real. There were a million things in
that moment that I didn't know about God, about Jesus, about
what? But what I did know is nothing
will ever be the same. And so my guess.
Is that many of you in here are sitting and like, well, of
course, like you're a pastor, Like you're like, you have to do
that. That's how it goes.
That was a long time ago, that moment, and I've had moments
since then again where the Spirit of God with the presence
of God seems real and tangible. But I do want to tell you often
it doesn't feel like that. Sometimes, even now, doesn't
feel like anything. Maybe you've had that
experience. You come here to church because
at one point in your life, church was alive.
Church was a place where you could go and you could know that
you were going to have an encounter of some kind.
You were going to meet something that was bigger than you.
You wanted a sense of that transcendent.
But now it's kind of just a place that you go.
Now church is kind of just a crowded room with pretty
uncomfortable chairs, but you remember.
So you keep coming back, and maybe it's just duty and
obligation and just a ritual that brings you back.
You do it because you've always done it or because Mom did or
because Grandpa did it. Maybe you used to open the
scripture and the scripture would just jump off the page at
you. It's like you could have
sometimes said about my wife, Like my wife could just drop her
Bible in the hallway and she gets a word from the Lord,
right? Like like she hears what's
what's going on. And maybe the scripture used to
be like that, but now it's just letters on a page and you read
it, thank God you want it to be real, like you wanted to speak
to you again, like it used to do that.
And we just come back again and back again and back again and
rope it. And you keep the ritual.
You keep the same. Maybe you wake up in the morning
and you do your quiet time and you read it, or you have your
devotional thing. And that's the question in your
mind is, did Jesus die so I could get up 30 minutes earlier
every morning and read a book that hasn't moved me in years.
Maybe we just do it because we feel like we're supposed to do
it. Maybe communion is one of those
things. You read the words we hear that,
you know, when Jesus instituted it said do this in remembrance
of me. And you say what?
What am I remembering? It's mostly just stale bread and
kind of weird cracker and juice and cellophane for some reason.
Am I the only one? Maybe you used to worship and
you would come to worship and before a word was.
Said as soon as the music to your heart would start pounding
and beating and you just knew the Lord was present in your
worship and you would sing because you couldn't help but
singing. And or I grew up Baptist and so
right, any time that my hands came out of my pockets, I was
worried that I was getting charismatic right?
Like I was going to be a Pentecostal if I, I kind of, I
did that. But I've had moments in worship
where it's just like my eyes are closed and my hands are up and
I'm, and I'm just like, they're all laughing at you and you just
go. I don't even care because I just
because I know I can sense the presence of the Lord and
sometimes there's emotion and there's tears and it moves me
and sometimes I'm just. Mouthing the words and thinking
about lunch. How do we get so familiar with
holiness that it just becomes routine?
Well, the thing I want to say is like in a room like this,
there's people in all different places and maybe you're here and
you're like, and I want to say especially like if you've just
recently started following Jesus or if you've just recently had
kind of a conversion moment of coming back to the Jesus moment,
I think that the Father by his Spirit and his.
Grace often gives us big feelings and big experiences as
confirmation to remind us this is real, like this is a truth.
But eventually, over time, I believe that as we do that,
sometimes the feelings will diminish.
Or maybe they'll change and maybe we are left wondering
what's you know, what's that about?
The first thing I want to say is when you have an experience like
that, it is a gift from the Lord and you shouldn't take it
lightly. We should be grateful for that
every time. If you find yourself moved to
worship, thank you Lord, that you are reminding me how real
you are, not just out there somewhere, but in this face.
Thank You that when I sing to you, you respond to me.
And thank you for that. It is a gift that we should
cherish and treasure and thank God.
For. But those Amen is right.
Yes, that's valuable. That's right.
And that's good. But if I gave you a map to my
house and I wrote it out and draw lines on it and I gave it
to you and you said, Oh my God, thank you, I'm going to cherish
this forever and you put it in your pocket and went back to
your house, that's not the point.
Having the map is not the point. The map is a way to get to
another place. That is the.
Point and so maybe listen and I believe that the Lord moves our
hearts. I believe he wants us to
experience him. I believe that he wants us to
know him, but like the map is not the same thing as the place
that it points to. Our feelings aren't the point.
Jesus didn't die so that your heart would be moved in a
crowded room. That's a great benefit.
It's the same way with the temple and with the Tabernacle
that we've been studying. God gave Moses instructions,
obsessive and for 16 chapters in the book.
Of exodus, he told Moses to tell the people what kind of.
Wood to use. What kind of overlay, what the
stitching, what the inseam would be, how tall it would be, how
long it would be, what the poles were like.
God gave specific instructions, instructions to build the
Tabernacle and the temple, but the point of it always was to
point to something else, to point beyond it, to remind them
where they had come from and where God was calling them back
to. But instead, along the way, the
temple became the point. The temple became the thing that
the people of Israel put their hope in.
And we often, and by we I mean me and maybe you also, we trade
the presence of God for the pathway.
We have traded away what is real and what is deep for the
journey. But just like the temple, these
practices, these experiences can call us back.
That's the idea behind the Temple the whole time.
That's what Casey read in the book of Hebrews.
Now the book of Hebrews is a New Testament letter to.
The Hebrews and the Hebrew people when he's writing to this
letter to the Hebrews, they would have understood the
temple. These are people that were
steeped in the temple. They knew the law.
They knew what it was all about, but they had been familiar.
These were the people who had forgotten, who hadn't realized
that the Spirit had left. And So what the writer is doing
is reminding them from where they come.
Hebrews Chapter 9, verse one. Now the first covenant also had
regulations. The first covenant is the law.
That's what Moses got when he went up on Sinai and God gave
him the tablets, right? That said, you'll have no other
God before me. Honor your father and mother,
don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't covet your
neighbor's wife or his donkey, right?
And so that was the law, but it was also how to treat the
foreigner, how to treat your neighbor, how to conduct
business, all of these things about how to become the people
of God. That's the first.
Covenant. So it says the first covenant
had regulations for ministry and an earthly sanctuary.
It was about the sacrifices, how to make atonement.
Verse 2 for a Tabernacle was set up and in the first room which
is called the holy place, where the lamp stand, the table and
the presentation loads. Inside the temple were rooms and
the rooms had stuff. In them these things he goes on.
Behind the second curtain was a tent called the Most Holy Place,
sometimes heard it called the Holy of Holies.
It had a gold altar of incense and the Ark of the Covenant
covered with gold on all sides and which was a gold jar
containing the manna. So this is what's inside that
ark, Aaron's staff that budded, and the tablets of the Covenant.
What's interesting in this ark is there was the tablets of
stone that Moses had received that had been carved by God that
had the law on them. The cherubim of glory were above
the ark overshadowing the mercy seat.
It is not possible to speak about these things in detail
right now. The reason it's not possible to
speak in detail about these things for the author is because
they were already spoken about in Exodus for 16 chapter.
And he's not going to like they didn't have cut and paste.
He's not going to transcribe all of that here, right?
But the idea. Here is what he's saying is this
passage. These 5 verses are basically
Exodus chapter 25 through 40. This is 16 chapter distilled
down into his description of the temple and what was inside of
that and the story of the temple begins in the outer courts and I
had. ChatGPT draw a picture.
This is not an actual photograph taken.
These are outside. You'll notice that this is the
courts and it's open right there, but you can see down down
the hallway. This is there would have been
people gathering. There would have been
conversation going on here this. Is this The temple was a center
and a hub of the community. Everybody wanted to go to the
temple. When they would come back for
the feast, they would go to the temple and they would gather
there. And what you see is up on this
raised stand would have been two things.
And again, this is all outside people walking in the courts.
They could have seen it. They would heard it, they would
have known what was going on. There were two pieces of
furniture here. There was 1 was the altar of
sacrifice and one was the bronze basin and it was filled with the
altar. So the idea is we walk through
the through this the temple today and as we see it, what
we're going to see is these spaces, what they meant and what
they represented and what they looked like right what they were
for this outside gathering this outer court with the altar and
with the basin. This is a picture of what
closeness to God costs. This is that are people that are
outside and as they want to move into the presence of God that
resided in the holy of Holies, they had to stop here first.
They had to pass by this and this is a picture of what what
it looks like before you get the presence, you have to have the
altar and the basin. And the big idea in this outside
temple here is that no one gets to come home without sacrifice.
No one gets to barge into the presence of.
Holiness, it is costly. And you know, we have at
Christmas time, right? Like we have this tendency
inside of us to want to sanitize things, to make them palatable,
right? Like we sing.
What do we sing in Christmas, right?
Silent night, Holy night. Listen, I've been around at
least three births. There's nothing silent about
them. I don't know who wrote that
song, but he had clearly never actually been in a birthing
room, right? We want to make it palatable so
then we can experience. We look at the altar and they
go, oh, yes, this is where the sacrifice of atonement would
make. I want you to think that since
the covenant was handed down to Moses, for thousands of years,
animals had been had given their lives on this altar.
It would have been caked with centuries and millennia of
blood. The stench of death would have
been almost unbearable. And it is hard for you to
overestimate the visual sight of the gore that was happening on
this altar it. Was.
Vile. And it was a picture of the
death that was required, the death in us to enter into the
holy space. It has to be blood.
But it doesn't leave us in the gore.
And I know this is so hard, right?
Like, like, why would God do this?
Well, listen, part of the reason that we do this is because when
we read in Genesis 1 and 2 about the presence of God with
mankind, and it's all good, right?
And then we read about Genesis 3 where sin enters the human story
and mankind goes right out of that.
Right? After that, we read about Cain,
who kills Abel. See, the vile and the gore
doesn't begin in the heart of God.
It begins in the heart of mankind.
The picture on the altar is a picture of what we have to lay
down. It's a picture of what it costs
us. Something in us, the wilderness
in US, has to be put to death. We can't bring that into the
presence of holiness. Exile and holiness don't enter
together. So we have this sacrifice where
this part, the parts of us that keep us from God, are put down
and put to death. And from that, from the blood
and the mess and the gore, we move to the cleansing place
where we are washed away. We leave the gore behind us.
This is a picture of cleansing. This is the Brown Basin.
Filled with water. Water where the priest would
have offered the sacrifice and then cleansed blood and water,
sacrifice and purity. This is a picture of confession
where we come before God and we say we are badly broken, and
this is a picture of the brokenness.
We confess that when we stand at the threshold of holy space, we
bring wilderness with us. We bring the fear and the
anxiety and the anger and the distrust and all that distrust
of holiness. We bring it with us.
See, this part isn't about God. This part is about us.
And confession is telling the truth.
When we get together each week and we say we're badly broken, I
want to know. I understand that some of you
don't feel badly broken in that moment.
You don't feel? Sometimes, like you need to have
forgiveness. But if we look around and we
look closely and we look with honesty and integrity, there's a
wake of brokenness all around us.
So when we come to the table and we come to the altar, when we
bring our sacrifice and we set it down on the altar before the
priest. What we're saying is, Lord, we
want the broken. Parts put to death, we.
Want the broken parts taken away?
We want as much of wilderness as can be scraped off the bottom of
our shoes. We want it removed.
It's a picture of our heart longing for a reality beyond
brokenness when we come and when we acknowledge that standing
before the altar before God and saying, Lord, my identity is
shaped by who approves of me. And Lord, I'm willing to
compromise all kinds of things to make people like me, to make
people believe in me. Lord, I am more concerned about
having other people approve of me then you are.
That is a sacrifice. That is confession, the
acknowledgement that I will compromise my integrity for a
paycheck. I will compromise my integrity
for someone to tell me that they love me and.
When we come to the. Sacrifice.
When we come to the altar, the we want to approach holiness.
What we're saying is, Lord, I want you to kill that in me, and
I want you to put it to death, and I want you to wash all of
it. And I have to say this now as a
pastor, it would be pastoral malpractice if I didn't say
that. But when we walk away from these
identity markers, are you listening?
This is important. When we walk away from those
things that have defined our identity, things like sex,
things like money, things like work, things like fear.
When we walk away from those things, it feels like death.
I was in my mid 20s when I walked away from the baseball
field at college for the last time In the next 10 years of my
life can't be described as anything other than chasing
death like it was my job. I didn't know who I was.
I didn't know what to find me. And before I could walk in
freedom, before I can walk in freedom, I have to be willing to
put those things down. And the reality is, it is death.
You are dying to the things that have marked you and have
identified, but what you're doing is you're setting down the
things in in blue of Him. You're choosing what He gives
you instead of what you can give yourself.
That's what repentance is. When you say I'll no longer let
myself be defined by that, whatever it means by my job,
whatever that means by my income, whatever that means,
I'll no longer be defined by those things.
We're putting that to death. Maybe today is the first time
that you've ever had that sense where you just go, Oh my gosh, I
don't need to just feel vaguely bad about this part of that or
that part, but I need to have it removed like surgically, like I
need it gone from my life. If you do, let me just say that
is the only place where this journey can start.
We don't get the bulldoze into the holy of Holies.
It only begins begins at the altar and it only begins with
sacrifice, and it only is followed up with the cleansing.
If that's you today. The good news is it's available.
You can have it. And the other good news is it
doesn't stop there from the outer courts and with the crowd
and the conversation, all those things going on, you would pass
through a curtain and you would pass into what is the holy
place. This is another space.
The Holy Place reminds us that we were created to dwell with
God. So we can put the picture back
up and we see where the courtyard was loud and busy and
there were crowds inside the holy place.
It was quieter, it was more intimate.
The vibe is more living. Room.
And the idea is, it's a room already prepared for you.
You have to bring your, you have to bring your sacrifice to the
altar. But once you leave your
sacrifice and you walk into the holy place, the table's already
set. And there was this table with
the bread, and there was this candle, the table of the bread,
of the presents. And there was this candle.
Think soft light, not fluorescent overheads, even if
they'd had fluorescent. Overheads.
It would have still been candlelight.
That's not in the text. I just made that up.
But the lamp that was already burning, the bread that was
already baked, it's a picture of Eden.
God placed mankind in a garden already in bloom.
It is not our responsibility or Our Calling to provide for
ourselves by any means necessary.
The bread already baked here in the wilderness.
God setting a table for his people.
He's always done His best work around tables.
He's always done his best work over a meal, and one of the
coolest pieces, I think, was this altar of incense and
incense in the scriptures. Representative prayers.
It's the prayers of God's people.
Now behind this curtain was the holy of Holies, but before the,
but before the curtain, in front of that, before the holy of
Holies, was this incense. When we sing this, so we sing
the song worthy of it all, there's this.
Free the refrain, The bridge says day and night, night and
day. Let incense arise.
We read, we'll sing about incense before.
Incense is prayer, and so it's. And what's crazy, and this is
what's beautiful about this is, and again, this is a picture of
the movement, what's crazy about this is our prayers don't begin
in the holy presence of God. Our prayers begin when we're
surrounded by provision, when we are well cared for, when we
acknowledge and recognize God's presence.
That's when our prayers go up. This is what the presence of
holiness actually looks like. Not in our fears and not in our
anxieties. The space that holiness creates.
It's not loud, it's not dramatic, it's not scary.
It's warm, it's a meal, it is soft light, it is a sweet aroma
so that all of our senses are engaged friends.
This is what intimacy with holiness is like when the Father
calls you to set down your the idolatry of your work, or the
idolatry of your sexuality, or the idolatry of your income, or
the idolatry of your house, or the idolatry of your reputation.
This is what he's inviting you into.
He's inviting. Inviting you away from the noise
and the struggle and the blood and the gore of a world hell
bent on destruction for itself. Inviting to a place where the
table's already set. The holy place was as far as
most people in Israel got to the actual presence of God.
They could come in here into this place.
And that's telling because this is as far as the temple system
could take them. Most ordinary people, The temple
system couldn't actually get most people into the presence of
God. Now don't get me wrong, this is
good. This is so good, the presence of
God, that reminder that it is so good.
But it's not all the way home. And Jesus didn't call us to lean
on the gate of Eden trying to jump and get a view.
He wants us inside. He wants to bring us back.
And that presence, Eden, the place.
Where he was, that's the most holy place, what we call the
Holy of Holies. Behind the altar of incense,
where the prayer was, there was another curtain, there was
another veil. And that veil was what separated
the people of Israel from the unmitigated presence of God's
holiness. And that temple kept every
single person out except one man, one time a year, hands
drenched in blood. Story of the Temple is the story
of the most holy place is both presence and distance.
You can almost get there. You can get close enough to feel
it if you hold your hands just right and if you sing the right
song, you can almost get there. If you meditate on the
scripture, you can. You can almost get there if you
submit, you can almost get there as you practice these things.
But it's always at a distance. It's always behind the veil.
This is the Garden and the gate, and inside the Most Holy Place
was a simple room with simple furnishings.
It was the Ark of the Covenant, and inside the Covenant were
these reminders of their journey through the wilderness.
There was. Aaron's staff.
That had butted It's a story of God's provision in his presence.
There was a manna, God's provision for them in the
wilderness that they couldn't provide.
But what's most interesting was the tablets of stone, the
tablets of the covenant. All of the rules that Israel had
been breaking were inside this box.
They're in the most holy place and all of the covenant that
they had, Israel had never been able to to withhold, never been
able to upkeep it right there in the presence of God, right there
for God to look at. But on top of this, that's kind
of cruel. You're like, man, that's I
wouldn't. Do that, but on top of the ark
of the Covenant was a, a golden lid that was called the mercy
seat, right? And there are these two
cherubim, these two angels, and they're out and their wings are
outstretched. And God's presence dwelt on the
holy seat, on the mercy seat. God's presence was there above
the ark and he could look down. But here's the good news.
Listen, check this out once a year.
The priest, the high priest would bring him with blood.
Then he would sprinkle blood on the holy seat.
Get this? So now you've got the broken
covenant underneath all of the sins and all the laws that we
haven't kept, all of our attempts to be righteousness, we
can't do it. We can't get there.
And God is above. And when he looks down on the
broken covenant, you know what he sees?
Atonement. The blood on the mercy seat,
sacrifice has been made. I look at atonement.
I look at brokenness. Through the blood.
It's a beautiful story. It's a beautiful picture.
God looks down at the brokenness and he sees forgiveness.
See that veil that kept people out of the Holy of Holies?
That wasn't. Cruelty.
That's not the God giving us the silent.
Treatment and standing. Far away, that is a God who is
inhabiting a temple that was meant to show us the reality of
wilderness and the reality of the invitation.
The story of the temple is almost home, almost there, but
it couldn't get you there, not yet, not like this, not with the
priesthood and the blood and the goats and the gore and the basin
and all that. It could get you through the
sacrifice. It could get you into the Most
Holy put into the Holy place, but it couldn't get you all the
way there. See, that's what it says in
verse 8. The Holy Spirit was making it
clear that the way into the mold holy place had not yet didn't
been disclosed while the first Tabernacle was still standing.
What that means is that it still had every year a guy had to go
in. Every year he had to make
atonement, Every year sin. Keeps piling up every year.
Sacrifice basin. You could go back every day and
offer your sacrifice and it never works.
Have you ever felt like that? Why am I doing this again?
How did I end up here again? How does this keep happening to
me again? I read my Bible, I put the money
in the offering place. I keep doing the things.
I'm doing the work. Lord over and over and over
again. And the Holy Spirit was showing
that structure. Can't do it.
See, God didn't want access to one guy one time a year.
God didn't want one guy with a funny robe to enter in and just
tell everybody else about what he did.
The temple was. God's concession.
It's what the love of holiness is willing to concede in order
to have presence. It's a concession made to sin.
It's a concession it is costly. But his desire is that all
people would dwell with him. His desires at the Holy place
would be open to everyone. Everyone would be able to
experience him. And so each time a sacrifice was
alt was offered, each time the blood was sprinkled, the story
of the temple was this isn't the final answer.
There's something more that's needed.
There's something, someone more that's needed.
This temple is a map that keeps pushing us forward.
Listen, the temple can't get it done.
If your hope for the end of the world, our kind of end time, the
eschatology tells us that there has to be another temple
rebuilt. Why the temple didn't work the
first time? It was a picture, it was a
painting, but it never finished the story.
It never completed the job. It never actually got it done.
It was a reminder of the exile. It was a reminder of wilderness.
It was a reminder that we're still outside in exile and God
is still there and we can get kind of close.
But verse 11, the writer says this, but Christ has appeared as
a high priest of the good things that have come, and the greater
and more perfect Tabernacle not made with hands.
He's talking about eternity. He's talking about the presence
of God in heaven. He entered the most holy place
once and for all, not by the blood of goats and calves, but
by His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.
It was never about the sacrifices.
Psalm 50 tells us I own the cattle on 1000 hills you're
going to bring me. One like oh thanks I lost that
one. It was never.
About the sacrifices, It's about holiness, It's about him.
It's Father, through architecture, teaching us about
the journey from the wilderness and exile back into the presence
of God. It's about preparing people, us,
His people, to understand the reality of distance, to
understand the contamination of exile on our bones, how we get
familiar with holiness. It's to show us what it costs to
approach the Almighty and what a gift it is to dwell in that
presence. It's about Jesus, and Jesus sat
at the table with his friends that night and he said this cup
is the new covenant in my blood. He's talking about the cross.
We don't need a new altar on a table in Jerusalem.
Jesus didn't drag a bull up to the cross.
He went himself. Jesus is both the priest and the
sacrifice. Jesus is the one who offers the
sacrifice, and he is the sacrifice.
There's no atonement through ritual.
There's no atonement through ceremony.
There's just the sacrifice. This is why we insist there.
If we say Jesus was just the guy that Jesus had sin, If Jesus is
just a sin, he's got he needs the altar too.
He's got to go through the temple.
Jesus's sinlessness is the reason that he was he was able
to make the sacrifice in the 1st place.
This is why we insist on the virgin birth.
If if Joseph was Mary's dad, then Jesus just has the same
broken fallen genes that we do. We don't believe that we I
believe that He was fully God and fully man.
He's able to represent us before the Almighty and He's able to
forgive us for the sins that we committed against Him.
That's why your unforgiveness against your neighbor is unfit
for the Kingdom. The God who has no beef with you
gave his life. For you, and we've been in power
struggles for all of eternity, and we're holding grudges
against people and insisting that they don't hold them
against us. Jesus didn't just cleanse a
building one time a year. Jesus cleanses his people.
He changes our hearts as we follow him.
We say all the time that Jesus is what God has been saying.
You want to know how to read the Old Testament?
You read it in the light of Jesus.
You read Jesus the old. Jesus clarifies the Old
Testament, right? So what is Jesus been saying?
What is God saying through Jesus?
He's saying are you listening? He.
He's saying my Holiness can be trusted when he asks you to give
up your identity of yourself, when he asks you to work less so
you can be home more to raise your children.
He's saying trust me when he asks you to identify yourself by
him and not by any of these external things.
He's saying you can trust me when we're in communion with
him, when we're in fellowship with his people.
What did Jesus say? Do this as often as you drink
it, as often as you eat this. What does he say?
I should remember this. Hold on.
As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, he says you
proclaim the Lord's death. Well, now we know what he's
talking about. He's talking about the cross.
He's talking about sacrifice. He's talking about atonement.
It's not bulls and a building somewhere far away.
It's got himself and his son loving you.
There's nothing that you've said or done that's hidden from him
and there's nothing that you've said or done that you need to be
ashamed of. He sees it and he knows now he's
going to fix it for sure. He's going to say, hey, that's
not what I created you for. But we don't need to be ashamed
in a sense of hiding and running and turning away.
Of course we're broken. You have sins.
We're going to stand before the Lord someday in heaven and he's
not going to just be like, hey, you were like 90% there.
You said that cuss word on your way out.
So you've got some purgatory for that nonsense.
None of it. We're going to stand before the
Lord, and we're going to realize that we never had a pure motive
in our life. We're going to stand before the
Lord, and we're going to realize that wilderness saturated us,
and we're going to realize that He's been staring at you through
the blood of atonement since the day you were born, because He
loves you. We now have a choice whether
we're going to walk in that or not.
And the thing that we've been saying forever is that proximity
transforms us. That's what the church is is
about. It's not about, hey, we get to
do whatever we want because we're.
Forgiven. It's about there is a life that
is separated from wilderness, that he calls us into it.
If we don't have to define ourselves, if we're no longer
defining what a good expression of financial management is, then
generosity is the easiest thing in the world.
It's not mine, it's his. I'm experiencing the Kingdom by
being generous. And it's the same way with work.
I'm going to prioritize eternal things.
My family, my children, my church, I'm going to live simply
so that I can live generously. I'm going to be, I'm single and
I'm going to stay celibate even if I die that way, because he
defines what's good, not me. And so we, when we look
different, our marriages look different, our relations with
our kids, with our neighbors look different because he's
transforming us. Through sacrifice and through
cleansing. And it's always all been about
Jesus. The garden, the gate, the
wilderness, the Tabernacle, the cloud.
Temple. Every curtain, every stitch,
every table, every gold overlay. It's all about Jesus and it
always pointed. Here, now, we don't have the
full story in this series yet, the full story of atonement.
We don't have the full picture of what Jesus did.
But over the next three weeks, we're going to get there.
We're going to talk about that, but for right now, we know whose
story this is. For now, we understand that this
is about a God who calls us and His Holiness and his desire to
make us that way too. So maybe you're in here today
and you have never said I'm following Jesus.
Maybe you've gone to church, maybe you've read the Bible,
maybe you've done that. But you have never said I am
standing at the altar and I'm asking God to put to death every
shred of wilderness. I mean, make no mistake, it
won't work today. It's not going to happen today.
You're going to wake up tomorrow and there's still going to be
wilderness. And for the next 100 years, as
you follow Lord, you're going to continue to stand before the
Lord and go, Lord, cleanse me, Lord, wash me.
Lord, take these things away from me.
Cleanse me of wilderness. There's ongoing and it's
ongoing, but it begins by saying.
Lord, I don't hold on to anything.
There's nothing that I'm protecting that I'm trying to
take with you. Look carefully at this today.
Our God is more holy than you can fathom.
Our God is more righteous and pure.
His purity would consume you if you stood in front of it
unmitigated. There's no negotiating with the
holiness of God. Well, God, I'm going to hold on
to my money, but I'm going to give you this.
That holiness does not leave us unchanged.
God is more holy than we can fathom, but God is more good
than we would dare to dream possible.
We could never imagine a holiness and a goodness resident
like that. God's desire is not to kill you,
or to ruin you, or even to take from you the story of our God as
it is prepared a holy place for you to enjoy him.
And the table is set and the candles are lit and the incense
is in the air. And the only way in is our
confession of absolute need. The only way in is for him to
cleanse us from the wilderness outside.
So the question is, will you? Now maybe you're in here and
you've been a follower, maybe even following Jesus for 5
minutes or five years or 50 years or, but maybe of the
journey just tastes like dust, dust of wilderness in your
mouth. Maybe the practices that you
used to lean into, that used to give you life have just become
dry and dull. What I would say again is those
aren't the thing. That's not the point.
Scripture, communion, worship, prayer, those are the outer
court and the holy place. Hear that?
They're a necessary part of the process.
They are vital. You cannot draw close without
this. You cannot draw near to a God
that you don't know who he is. You can't draw close to God
without this. You cannot draw close without
this, without being disclosed and without open.
You don't get to go to the priest with your sacrifice and
go, hey, as you're murdering this thing and behalf of my sin,
I just want you to know it's not really that bad.
It is bad. It required a death only
entrusted communion with other people and with other.
Believables will we experience that?
You can't get there without it, but they're not home.
Jesus didn't die on the cross, so you could do a 30 minute
quiet time in the morning so that you can read through the
Bible once a year. He died so that you could come
home, so that you could rest in the garden with him forever.
And if you're dry in your spiritual practices, I want to
tell you, are you listening? He hasn't left.
He's not gone. Maybe.
Maybe you've been treating the map like the destination.
And maybe the point isn't to read more, but to read less,
more deeply with Him. The Temple asked a question.
Temple asked a question that Jesus finally answered.
It's the same question that God's been asking since Genesis
3. Will you trust me enough to let
me bring you all the way home and partner with me again?
System couldn't do it. Still can't.
You can't be good enough. Your sacrifice is insufficient.
There's not enough of you to give up to earn the favor of
God. Only Jesus can do that.
The good news is he did that. So for the next three weeks,
we're going to find out what that invitation costs and what
it means that He's paid it for you.
The very best news is coming. You pray with me, Jesus, Thank
you that you confront us with the difficult reality of what it
costs to enter into your presence.
Thank you that you haven't softened that I asked Jesus that
you would bring us all the way home.
I pray especially for those who are in here today that for the
first time they followed you. For the first time they prayed
that they they said, I, I want to come all the way home and I
want to let go of all of it. I stand at the altar and I'm
ready to have that stuff put to death and I'm ready to have to
be cleansed. Jesus, you'd actually do that.
And I pray that you would confirm it to them.
And maybe for the rest of us who have been doing this for a
while, that have been walking this for a while, I pray that
you would forgive us when we make not the main thing the main
thing. We want to come home.
Thank you, Jesus, that you made the way and your presence.
And I pray that your church, that this congregation of your
church would walk in holiness. I pray that we would set aside
every idol. I pray that everything that we
have given our lives to that isn't you.
Every sin that is rooted into our heart, every dark and evil
spirit of fear and anger and and self righteousness that has
whispered destruction into our ears.
I pray that it would be cast out.
I pray that it would be cast down and we would be walk in
your freedom. Or we want to be home and we
want to be a picture of home to a world that is desperately
searching everywhere. Let it be so, Jesus, in your
name for your glory, Amen. Thank you for joining us today.
River City Church is all about experiencing and expressing
God's love in our lives and community.
And we hope that you've been able to.
Experience that today. As grateful as I am that you've
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Thanks so much for listening. May the Lord bless and keep you
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