Audio and graphics for my message at Central Church of Christ in Stockton, CA for March 1, 2020.
Text was Hebrews 3.12-13; 4.14 – 5.7.
We also heard Exodus 26.31-34.
(The connection between those two passages: The curtain that led to the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle was woven to represent the heavens, with cherubim guarding the holy space. So on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would “pass through the heavens,” into God’s presence, to make atonement for the people. According to Hebrews 4.14, Jesus is our Great High Priest who has “passed through the heavens” once-and-for-all. He has made atonement for the sins of his people, and now continues to represent us before the Father.)
The audio-visual link is embedded below. Sermon notes below that.
Today’s text: We’ll end up in Heb 4.14 – 5.7
But we’re going to start out with a couple of vv we heard last week, Heb 3.12-13
These vv began some counseling Hebrews had for the Christians they were writing to, and that counseling session continues into our reading today
That’s going to be our big idea today: wise counsel
We’re going to talk about who needs counseling
Why we need it
How often we need it
And where to find it
Hebrews was written to a struggling church
And life was so hard for these Christians
they were so tired and restless and discouraged,
that they were about to give up and go back out into the world
In fact, some already had.
And there were others who were sitting there that Sunday morning, thinking, You know—I don’t think I’m going to come back next week
So they were struggling, some of them were anxious and some were suffering, but Hebrews didn’t water it down or tone it down.
Here’s what Hebrews told them.
Take care, brothers [and sisters!], lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.
[On the spot application—Friends, media, culture counsels us to just follow your heart; but according to this passage, that’s not safe; your heart can lead you away from God. Instead of just following your heart, Hebrews says …]
But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Focus on exhort
This is the closest word we have in our Bibles to what we would call counseling now
Your translation might say encourage or help or warn each other
Gk = parakaléō.
And here’s the mental picture that word parakaléō is supposed to draw for you.
It’s someone who comes beside you,
maybe they even put their arm around you,
and they draw you into their confidence.
They listen to you, they speak words that comfort you, they give you pep talks; but they also confront you and challenge you and warn you when you’re going astray
These vv come at the end of a paragraph that begins in v7—
and notice what it says there about the dangers of just following your heart wherever it leads.
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
OT story Hebrews had in mind
Israel in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan,
God had acted powerfully and rescued them from slavery
and was bringing these ex-slaves home to rest.
Journey that should have taken less than 2 weeks ended up taking 40 years!
Why?
Because unbelief entered their hearts in the wilderness,
and they forgot everything God had done for them.
They started asking themselves, Exod. 17.7:
Is God really among us?
Then they panicked: Where will we get water? What will we eat?
But when God fed them, they complained about the food.
Then they started accusing God:
The Lord just brought us out into this wilderness
to kill us!
So God said, You know, if you think that’s the kind of God I am, okay. You just spoke a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And the overwhelming majority of that generation died from old age,
still in the wilderness.
Without ever finding the rest God had prepared for them.
Hebrews used that story during their counseling session with those struggling Christians, and said: Don’t be like them and give up!
Instead, exhort—or counsel—one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Heb. 3.12-13 tell us all about wise, godly counseling.
According to these vv,
Who needs counseling?
Everyone.
Why do we need it?
To keep our hearts from being hardened by sin and unbelief, so we don’t fall away from God.
How often do we need it?
Every day—or at least routinely, regularly
And where do we get it?
From each other.
Wow. That was easy. I guess we can close our Bibles and go to lunch now!
No, just kidding.
I haven’t said anything about Jesus yet.
I haven’t even really said anything about us.
Surely we need more than a list of rules about counseling.
After all, the Israelites had a good enough list of rules. They had ten of them that pretty much covered all the bases of life.
And they still got stuck in the wilderness.
Here’s what Hebrews wanted those Christians back then to understand,
and God wants us to understand this now:
Spiritually, emotionally, psychologically-speaking,
our life in this world
is like traveling through a wilderness.
That was true for the Israelites way back when.
It was true for the Christians Hebrews counseled.
And it’s definitely true for us today.
Life in this world is a journey through the wilderness.
Let me paint a picture for you of what a Bible person would have meant when they talked about a wilderness.
When we think of a wilderness now, you probably imagine some place like this.
It’s wild.
It’s pristine.
You might even imagine going there to get away from the world for a while.
But for people in the biblical world, a wilderness usually meant something more like this.
A desert.
A dry, desolate, dangerous place.
It’s a barren wasteland.
Water and food
are extremely scarce.
And you’re competing with wild animals
for every scrap you get.
And the second you get weak or sick or hurt,
those animals are going to eat you.
Hebrews is saying, This is what our life in this world is like. You can’t give up because it’s hard. It’s the wilderness, it’s not supposed to be easy!
And if Hebrews is correct—if life in this world really is a journey through the wilderness—there’s a couple of things we just have to accept.
-
- We can’t find true fulfillment here.
- Sometimes it will be very hard to see God at work here.
First, we’re not going to find fulfillment in the wilderness.
The wilderness is not a place where you want to settle.
You can sort of survive there for a while, but you’re not really going to live, you know?
Life in this world is a lot like that, too.
You will never be able to feed the deepest needs of your heart, or satisfy the thirst of your soul with what this world has to offer.
Old gospel song: This World is Not My Home
If we sing that song with understanding, it’s trying to teach us that this world is a wilderness, a barren wasteland, a place we have to journey through to get home
Don’t misunderstand: When we sing, This world is not my home, that doesn’t mean the world with [name a bunch of good, beautiful things].
All those things are part of the good world God intended and created.
When we sing, This world is not my home, we mean this world
that’s cutthroat and competitive and cruel;
this world of disease and disaster,
of death and decay.
This world of abuse and violence,
shame and fear,
poverty and hunger,
of lies and corruption and pollution.
We can never have the deepest needs and desires and longings of our spirits fulfilled in this wilderness.
Because even those good and beautiful things
will be eventually be distorted or corrupted or destroyed
by the evil, ugly things that are lurking
in the wilderness.
So you’d better not look to satisfy your spiritual hunger through your marriage or your family, through your job or your hobbies or self-improvement or any of that.
Because none of them last.
Everything you know
is dying and scattering and turning to dust.
And that includes you.
But it’s so easy to invest all of our attention on those things that can’t ultimately satisfy us, because they are not ultimate.
Here’s why.
In the wilderness of life in this world,
it’s often very difficult to see God at work.
That’s the second thing you have to accept about the wilderness.
Let’s think about the Israelites again.
When they were in Egypt, they saw God at work, right?
They saw the Nile River turn to blood,
and darkness cover the land,
they saw the firstborn sons of Egypt die,
they saw God opening the Red Sea for them to cross.
And when they finally got to Canaan,
they had this land flowing with milk and honey,
where they could see God’s providence and blessings.
But it wasn’t like that in the wilderness.
In the wilderness, the most they saw of God was a cloud above them.
The miracles were scarce.
God wasn’t often working in ways they could perceive with their senses.
They couldn’t see what God was doing,
so they assumed he’d just abandoned them there.
And they hardened their hearts.
They got stubborn,
and cynical.
They began to complain,
and to treat God and his righteous servants,
like Moses and Aaron,
with contempt.
That happens to us, too.
You know where I especially see it among us?
When we go to Bible camp, we’re out there in God’s good creation.
We can see God’s hand moving,
hardened hearts start to soften,
prayers are answered every day,
relationships form and reform.
But then we come down off the mountain,
back to the valley,
and where’s God?
Where are the miracles we saw on the daily up there?
And why are my prayers bouncing off the ceiling?
Here’s what you need to understand.
Life here in the valley,
in the wilderness—
that’s the norm.
It was like that even in the Bible.
It’s not like people in the Bible got their morning wakeup call, and it was God’s voice personally speaking to them, and then they witnessed three miracles before breakfast.
Events like the Ten Plagues, the Exodus, taking the Promised Land—those were very rare events.
The norm is not being able to see what God is doing,
it’s God not answering our prayers on our timeline,
it’s God not doing what you want or expect him to do.
And it’s very easy to ask that same question the Israelites did,
Is the Lord really among us?
You forget forget how God
moved heaven and earth to save you,
and you also stop hoping for the Promised Land.
Until the wilderness takes over your heart,
and you get comfortable in the wilderness,
and you settle for the wilderness.
And that’s how your heart grows hard toward God.
That’s why Heb. 3.13 tells us to counsel each other—
to comfort and challenge and warn and encourage each other—
every day, so we don’t get hardened.
But how can we do that?
I mean think about it.
We all need counseling every day.
That means we’re all prone to
harden our hearts before God,
and to let our hearts lead us away from God.
We need a Counselor before we can counsel each other!
We need a counselor in the wilderness
We need a counselor who’s been through the wilderness,
but never settled for the wilderness.
Who knows the way through the wilderness,
and who made it across
without hardening his heart.
And of course, that’s Jesus.
Isa 9.6 Wonderful Counselor — first name of Jesus, but it’s the one we talk about the least—we usually skip right to Prince of Peace
Reason Jesus is a Wonderful Counselor is because he made it through the wilderness, without hardening his heart and falling away from God
Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness
Hebrews 4.15
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
He is our Wonderful Counselor, first, because he’s able to sympathize with our weaknesses—he experienced everything we experience
One major reason not to leave Christianity behind and go back into the world is that we’re the only religion that claims our God became one of us to find out what it’s like
Jesus knows what it’s like to be rejected
Betrayed
Lonely
He knows what loss and grief feel like
He knows what hunger and thirst feel like
He knows what it’s like to feel tears on your face
He knows how it feels to be abused
tortured
humiliated
He’s knows what it means to feel weak and helpless
He even knows what it’s like to die
And because he’s fully God as well as fully human, he knows what it’s like to be you even better than you do
And second—he’s our Wonderful Counselor because he never sinned
That used to always trip me up:
If he never sinned, how does he know what it feels like to be a sinner? To personally feel responsible for hurting someone or making a mess of everything?
Here’s why that makes him a Wonderful Counselor—
sin is what puts distance between humans
why we put up walls,
to hide our guilt and shame
or to protect ourself from others
Jesus doesn’t have those barriers
Heb. 5.7
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard
This was in the Garden before he died, and on the cross as he died
We need a Counselor—we need true, wise counsel—
and you find that in the crucified, resurrected, and glorified Jesus
We need to be warned and encouraged,
comforted and confronted
The cross does both at once
confrontation and comfort intersect in the cross
Think of the beam pointing to heaven,
that’s confronting us with the absolute holiness and justice of God,
and our own injustice and sin
But the horizontal beam shows us God reaching out to embrace us, to comfort us,
as the One who has suffered with us
Loud cries and tears / he was heard
Jesus shows us that even when we can’t feel God or see God, and our prayers seem to be bouncing off the ceiling—God still hears us, and is acting
Jesus must be our Counselor before we can counsel each other
The one who confronts us with tears is the only one who can soften your heart
Jesus shows us how to confront through tears,
because those tears, those sighs—
show your love
Heb 4.16
Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
This is the best news as we travel through the wilderness of life in this world
When we don’t see God moving,
at least not the way we want him to,
or as fast as we wish
Think about the ancient Israelites—
they saw mighty miracles,
the Ten Plagues,
crossing the Red Sea—
and that didn’t make them not harden their hearts;
and their hearts let them away from God
But with Jesus, our Wonderful Counselor in the wilderness,
we have something better
a resurrected human
sitting on the throne of grace;
at God the Father’s right hand,
collecting our prayers,
praying with us,
praying for us—
the One who already made it through the wilderness, and will return to lead us home to the Promised Land
That’s why we can always approach God’s throne with confidence,
with our prayers
with every day
seeking wise counsel,
and the grace and mercy to counsel one another.
We know we’ll always be answered,
even when it feels like our prayers just bounced off the ceiling,
because Jesus is God’s ultimate answer to our prayers,
and he’s seated on the throne.
the sermonator 