I'm going to jump into Hebrews
12. So let's start in Hebrews 11 and read verse 32 through the end. Because
verse 32 goes into chapter 12, verse 1. Here we go. And what
more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell
of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets
who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises,
stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped
the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became
mighty in war, put foreign enemies to flight. Women received back
their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing
to accept release so that they might rise again to a better
life. Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains
and imprisonment. They were stoned. They were sawn
in two. They were killed with the sword.
They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted,
mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering about
in deserts and mountains and in dens and in caves of the earth.
And all these, though commended through their faith, did not
receive what was promised, since God had provided something better
for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. Therefore,
since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let
us also lay aside every weight and every sin which cling so
closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set
before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and the perfecter
of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured
the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand
of the throne of God. Now, Paul has brought the gospel
to the place now where we are going to begin to receive some
instruction, some things that we should be doing, some things
that we should be thinking, some things that we should understand
are consequences of the gospel. And as we think about it, we
see there in chapter 12, verse 1, this great cloud of witnesses. And you might think, well, what
is this cloud of witnesses? What does this picture, what
does this imagery have to do? And what are we supposed to understand
concerning it? Well, in the end of chapter 10,
and keep in mind, I'm using these numbers because it helps us to
know where the text is. Paul did not segregate this letter
this way. He did not take and say, okay,
this is what I'm gonna say, and then this is what I'm gonna say,
and then this is what I'm gonna say, and I'm gonna part it out and put the numbers
under it. No, these are just reference numbers, like spots
on a map, so that when we read 1,500 pages, we're not trying
to dig through all the pages. It's a good place of reference
So as Paul is talking about the single and effectual offering
of Jesus Christ, that God has established salvation, I want
you to think about this for a moment. We often use the idea of being
saved. And I've had this question numerous
times through the years on Theology on Call, but recently, I don't
know, maybe it was around Thanksgiving, somebody asked the question about
salvation in the sense of how do you know when you are saved? when you are saved? And my answer
to that question actually pushed back a little bit on the use
of the term in general. Why do we use the word saved
in the context of being born again? Why do we use the word
saved in the context of the knowledge of the truth? Or the word saved
in the sense of that we have a set of doctrines that we believe?
Well, because it is part of our vernacular. It's part of what
the world has come to term how you are found in Christ, that
you've been saved. But really, if we think about
the scriptural idea of salvation, salvation is of the Lord, period,
alone, by grace, period, alone. There is nothing that man must
do or can do for salvation. There is nothing man can accomplish
in the context of salvation. There is no condition that must
be met in the way that man can work or respond in any way to
salvation. Yet we see the language of Scripture.
What does it say? Seek the Lord while he may be
found. Believe in the gospel. Those who are believing have
eternal life. Those who are not believing and
so on and so forth. And we see the language of Scripture
and the language of the culture in which we live. And sometimes
they walk together and sometimes they do not. But ultimately salvation,
as it is explained and as we have learned it in this letter
to the Hebrews, is something God has accomplished. If the
picture of salvation is the sentiments of the precepts of
Moses, if the picture of salvation is seen in the shadow, if you
will, of the sacrificial system, Then the fullness of what we've
learned thus far in this letter, of course we've known it before,
is that God deals with sin and God promotes, provides, produces,
whatever P we want to put there, God establishes, that's a better
word, salvation by substitution. That's what it's all about. Substitution. God's justice is
intact. God's righteousness is intact.
God's love is intact. God's wrath is intact. All of the things that God is,
all the essence of God, the Father and the Son and the Spirit, each
person of the Godhead who are God, everything that God is is
intact. God is not on trial because of
how Humanity establishes their own conditions based on how they
understand justice. God's justice is righteous because
He has substituted His people. And in their place, He has destroyed
His Son. There is no place in Scripture,
philosophically or in inference, in any context whatsoever that
would ever teach us in any way that there is a numeric measuring
of God's justice or a numeric measuring of God's righteousness
or a numeric measuring of God's grace. God is not bound to the
idea of expressly showing how full his coffers are and he's
just right there and he's got to get here and then he's satisfied.
That's not how God is not a two-year-old in preschool coloring pictures
between the lines. And when God established salvation
in any way he deemed necessary through substitution, he is satisfied
in his wrath. So the satisfaction of God's
justice is found in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the righteousness
of God. Jesus Christ is God who created
the world, who sustains the universe by the word of his power, who
upholds all things. The molecules that make the stand
that holds this Bible. and everything around us are
held together by the power of Christ. Beloved, Christ is not
like the Fantasia Disney sequences where we see this creative idea. If you know what I'm talking
about, where Mickey Mouse has got the little wizard hat and he's creating
things. God is not motioning his hands across the vast nothingness
and creating water out of these things and moving planets and
creating stars. He's not orchestrating like a
conductor the creation. God is not a wizard. God is not
a wizard in salvation. God is not working in a humanistic
way. God decrees and therefore it
is. God's Word, even out of His anthropomorphic
mouth is not necessary to bring about that which he desires for
all that God desires is His decree and all things will come to pass
according to the counsel of His own will. And we are not to play judge
and jury with God's righteous justice. By a single offering, He has
perfected for all time those who are being set apart for Him. And the Holy Spirit preaches to us
where He says in this covenant that I will make with them out
of Jeremiah 31, And with them in those days declares the Lord,
I will put my laws on their hearts and I will write them on their
minds and I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds
no more. So there is forgiveness. Someone who is saved is someone
who has been forgiven, is someone who Christ has paid the debt
to the Father in their place. Now, why is it that this is the way God has done
it? Because this is the way God has done it. You see how simple
that is? It's the way God has done it.
That's why God has done it that way, because that's the way he's
done it. And that answer bothers us. That answer bothers our wise
Self-counsel. That answer bothers the philosopher
that lives in the back of my head. I shouldn't have said that
out loud. That answer bothers my wisdom,
my understanding, my reason, my logic, my rationale. And that
is as far as God will ever permit us to see it. That is as far
as God will ever explain it to us. He proclaims and reveals
His salvation for His people alone. And so that when one is
saved, he or she are saved because Christ paid for their sins, so
they are saved from the wrath that is to come, which is the
righteousness of God. Yet, there is the flesh at work. And
here with these Hebrew people, as we already know, there were
others coming into the fold of the church. As we know by Scripture,
there will be wheat and there will be tares and only Christ
Himself will separate them. There will be sheep and there
will be goats and only the Great Shepherd will take them away. There will be truth and there
will be lie. There will be the living and
there will be the dead who will see the second death. And the list
goes on and on and on in that way. But because God has saved
His people from their sins, the very essence of what Christ says
He came to do, I came to seek. I came to look for. the lost,
and save them. Now I want you to think about
that for a second. Now we know after the whole counsel
of the word of God that Jesus, and even in his humanity, was
not standing around there going, I wonder who my people are. Hey,
are you my people? Are you my people? Can I check
your ID? I mean, this isn't the point of teaching us that. This
isn't why we learn these things about Christ and His scripture. Jesus wasn't ignorant of what
He was doing in His adult ministry. He wasn't blind to the heart
of men. He knew who were His and who
were not His. He knew who the Spirit would
regenerate and show the truth, who would grant the gift of repentance,
which is saving faith. And he knew the trials that would
come. He knew that these saints here
in this first century era would be working tirelessly to cleanse
themselves when others would come in and say, Are you sure
you have salvation? Are you sure you have been saved? Whether it be the circumcision
party, whether it be the proto-gnostics, whether it be someone else with
this idea of extra knowledge or conditional idealism or rationale
or logic or whatever it might be. Philosophies of the world,
like Paul wrote to the Colossians about. politics, nationalism,
certain ways of seeing a specific worldview, the knowledge of truth,
the knowledge of error, the ability to exegete, the ability to exposit,
the ability to love, and all the conditions therein. The word
teaches us that Christ understands our pain. He understands the
frailty of our human life, our human body, our human, oh, do
I use the word, psyche? Our conscience would be a better
term. He knew and he understands what
we go through, and yet the scripture says that He has compassion on
us, He sympathizes with us in our weakness, for He too was
tempted, yet none of us have been tempted to the point of
shedding our blood, and if we had, it would have been ill effect. It would have had ill effect,
but Christ's blood had full effect. So he says to hold fast to the
confession, hold fast to the truth that you know is yours.
What is this truth? What is this saving faith? That's
what we've been learning for several months. Saving faith,
as we like to call it, which is a misnomer in a real sense. But yet it is appropriate in
a theological sense. For it is a necessary condition
of those who are truly Christ's at one point in time. And that
God has determined all the elect will believe. And what will they
believe? They will believe the promise
of God to save them in the death of Christ. It is a finished work. But yet we misappropriate, and
it's very easy to do, we've all done it, and many of us may be
doing it now, to think that salvation is at the moment of believing,
but believing is to believe in the moment of salvation. One
of the greatest idols of the American Christian ideal is the
idol of salvation. is the idol of salvation experiences. And yet we're constantly looking
for something. in our flesh, something to touch,
something to record, some certificate, some completion, some level of
understanding that we can put our hands on, that we can put
our minds on, oh, that we could put our hearts on and we could
say, oh, that I know, that I know, that I know that I have eternal
life because look at this moment, look at this idea, look at this
understanding, oh, look at me is what that is, it's a selfish,
And we all do it. It's a self-righteousness. The scripture says that the righteous
one shall live by faith. And if you endure. You will receive what is promised.
What is the endurance? Standing in the promises of the
Lord concerning his great salvation that we should do well to pay
attention to and not ignore what we have heard lest we drift away
from it. Some of the greatest theologians
that will ever walk the planet are children. without the stupidity of history,
without the arrogance of thesauruses and dictionaries, but with the
simple, breathy, God-giving Spirit. God is my Father and Jesus Christ
is my righteousness. I belong to Him. He has purchased
me. These are things that I've heard
children say concerning their testimony of Christ. Oh, that's
not enough. It is enough. And if you require
more, you are God himself. You see? Faith. Faith. is the assurance of things hoped
for, the conviction, the certainty, based on what is written, not
on what we feel. Faith is not what we feel. Faith
is what we know that has been given to us by God the Spirit
through the written Word. It is not about what I have taught
you or what someone else may have encouraged you to know.
It is about what God's Word says in every breath. And then everyone who lived under
the promises of God's grace, of His effectual love for His
people, all these in the hall of fame of faith never received
what was promised in their life because what God ultimately was
showing them and promising them was not of this world. This world
is dead and dying and is passing away. Yet we must live in it
by command, not separate ourselves from those who are dying, not
separating ourselves for those whom God has called us to be
accountable to and intimate with and growing together with. But all these witnesses, all
these witnesses, They have one true hope and that is that they believe
in what God has promised them through Christ. Now ask yourself this question.
To what does your faith look? To whom does your faith look? And if you say Christ, only Christ,
then you understand. And when the Bible explains these
things and teaches us these truths of Christ, the doctrines, the
teachings, that's what doctrine means, the teachings of Christ,
then we are believing on. And Christ alone, but O is our
flesh and our mind always working against that rest. Always. It's like at the 10th hour, taking
caffeine pills before we go to bed or going and doing something
crazy to eradicate our sleepiness. It's like when we try to rest
spiritually, our flesh goes, oh no, no, you're getting too
comfortable in the faith. You ever heard somebody tell
you that? I was told that once in my 20s. Heard someone preaching,
said, maybe you're too comfortable in your faith. I think you should
be comfortable in your faith. I think the enemy is always stirring
in our hearts, in our minds, in our conscience, relationships,
always stirring to try to put us in a place where we're going
to do something different because we're resting too much. If we're not resting, then we're
not believing. And the odd thing about that
statement is that when I say it, it is exactly what the scripture
would teach us. Yet we hear in our flesh, then
that means I'm not saved. Beloved, get away from that phrase. Christ's death has saved you.
Faith rests in Him. All the witness of the Old Testament,
everything that was ever written concerning Christ, all of God's
sovereign work for His people as shadowed in this Old Testament
culminates to this very thing. The cloud of witnesses endure
by looking to Jesus. looking to Jesus. And because we look to Jesus,
therefore let us lay also aside every weight and every sin which
clings so closely so that we can run. Where are we running? What are we running to? That's
not a command to run. It's an illustration. It's a
picture. It's an imagery. That if my feet
are tangled up with weights, if I have weighted shoes or ankle
weights on, or shackles, or I'm running through a barbed field,
I'm not going to be able to run at all. I'm going to bog down.
I'm going to trip. I'm going to fall. I'm going
to fail. So the scripture is teaching
us now because of our ability to rest in the perfection of
Christ, which is now our perfection credited to us, let's throw away any weight and
sin which clings so closely so that we may run. What is running? Well, I don't have to explain
that. You know the picture. We're not
running to salvation. We're not running to justification. We're not running to sanctification. We're not running to missions.
We're not running to ministry. We're not running to earn any
crowns. We're running because that's
what we're doing in life. And the whole crazy thing about
it is, how do you run when you're resting? Think about that picture for
a minute. How do we endure when we're resting? Well, you know what the running
really is? I think it's the rat race of the mind as we live this
life. I think it's the Ephesians 6. You are not fighting against
flesh and blood, but against the principalities and the powers
of this present darkness. So we stand firm, therefore. How? Against the darts of the
enemy. So our running is a standing.
Our running the race is a picture of life. Living out the faith. And it looks like this. First, is that we run with endurance,
which is given to us, look at this text, and I'm gonna be in
chapter 12 for six weeks probably, or eight weeks, or two years. This is one of my favorite passages
out of this letter. This endurance is maintained by the promise
of God who has given us great confidence
to know we have been saved through the blood of Christ. And we will not fail. But we are failing when there
are weights around our legs, when there are sins that keep
us from getting through life. What are these sins, pray tell?
Well, these sins are numerous. But in the context here of Hebrews,
it is the sin of adding to the conditions of assurance and faith
and hope and life that are required in order to be confident. And
then a lot of other stuff. A lot of other stuff. These present
days and the conflicts therein are easily a force to push us
off the edge of hopelessness, to push us into the chasm of
frustration, to push us into the place of wondering how we're
going to face today or tomorrow. And that's the problem. We stand
at the edge of this chasm and we look down going, Oh, I hope
I don't fall down there. I hope I don't run too fast and
get there. I think I'm just going to stand
over here and we tie our legs and we're no longer running in
our rest. Oh, what about this? And what
about that? Who cares? What about what? It's easy to say, isn't
it? Who cares? And then we go home and we think,
and we're like, I do. And my brain cares. And my life cares. And my conscience cares. And
everything else cares. And I don't think God has caught us to a
careless existence, but he's caught us to a free existence
about our cares. That our burdens are light, that
the yoke is easy, as we see in Matthew's gospel. That this light
momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory
as we look not to the things that are seen, which are temporal,
but to the things that are unseen, which are eternal. And that's
what we do. We run the race, and we stand
to the edge, and instead of looking to where we hope we don't fall,
or looking to some other place in the anchor, we look up. Now,
this is just for illustration purposes. Paul's not saying we
actually look to Jesus. We have to find him, and where's
Jesus? Oh, there he is. We buy a picture of Jesus. I
mean, you think I'm joking, but people take the Bible this literally
sometimes. They don't understand certain types of writing. But
we look up, we look up, we look away from all of these things
and we look to Christ. How do we look to Christ? We
have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And so the grace of God then
is the very effectual power which is God who is good news. You understand that's what we
do, right? Sometimes we take the gospel and make it something
that God has, rather than it's something that God is. We think that the gospel is this
thing that Christ created for us through His death on the cross.
He rose from the dead, came out, look, look at there, I got a
little bit of gospel. You want it? No, this is not how it works. And man, if they were offered
the gospel, would say, ew, no. Jesus stood at the precipice
of time in his flesh and preached the good news of God about redemption
and joy and everything else related to restoration and said, Behold,
I am the living water. Come drink from me. And they're
like, did he just run into the Capitol with a horn on his head?
I mean, you know, what is this crazy man doing? Hey, I'm the
bread of life. Did he just tell us to eat his
body? No. Man hates grace in his natural
state. He hates a conditionless salvation. He hates election. Though he might like the idea
when he studies it, he will always keep his hand on a safety net. He will always tether himself
in case he decides to slide down the chasm of hopelessness because
he wants to make sure that there's something keeping him in himself. But that's not what the scripture
says our endurance comes from. Our endurance actually comes
from the endurance of Christ himself. So that we look to Christ
and we're not worried about our walkings. We're not worried about,
we're taking away all these hindrances to keep us from continuing to
walk by faith. And we're looking to Christ because
Christ is the one who gave us our faith and Christ is the one
who is our faith. He's the founder of our faith.
In Him is the comings and goings of good news. In Him is eternal
life. In Christ is the Word of God.
In Him alone is the foundation upon which we stand. In Him is
the rock. He is the righteousness of God. He is the glory of God. He is the justice of God and
He is the justice bearer of God for the elect. And we rest in
Him because He is the beginning of life and of eternal life. And we don't look back at ourselves.
We don't watch ourselves. We don't sit around and wonder.
How close we are to being right. How close we are to being saved. How close we are to being whatever
we're trying to find. Because Christ is not just the
founder. He is the perfecter. He is the finisher. He takes
us all the way home. He creates us into this world.
brings us into himself. Our guilt is on him at the cross.
God the Father's wrath is satisfied. He gives us his righteousness. Then the Spirit causes us to
believe in this promise. And then we begin to learn and
grow and understand more about this founder and perfecter of
our faith. And in this growing we learn
to endure and we learn that the endurance that is ours is because
of the endurance of Christ and the endurance of Christ is the
satisfaction of the promise of God to kill His Son so that we
would live. Don't believe me? Look at the text. who, Jesus
Christ, we run with endurance by looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of
our faith, who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the
cross. Next week I'm going to talk about
that a lot. Jesus endured the wrath of God For the joy. What is the joy? What is the
joy of Christ? There's a lot of things to say
there, but here's the ultimate joy of Christ. You know what it is?
The promises of God the Father. The promise of God the Father
that Jesus understands and knows when He prays to the Lord in
John 17. The hour has come. Glorify your
son that the son may glorify you since you have given him
authority over all flesh. Now listen to Paul in Hebrews
when Jesus says these words. All flesh to give eternal life
to all whom you have given me. And this is eternal life that
they know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have
sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work
that you gave me to do, the joy of Christ. And now, Father, glorify
me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you
before the world existed. So, Jesus' endurance was his
joy in the certainty of the promise of God the Father for the efficacy
of His work, for the sake of His people, to the praise of
His own glory. Boom. This is it. So the glory that I had, the
glory that I now show, that I manifest for you and unto you, now I receive
again as my own, because it is mine. And then I share it with
them. for they are my body. Just think
about it for a second. So we endure. I've given them
the words that you gave me and they have received them and come
to know in truth that I came from you and they believe that
you sent me. All mine are yours, yours are mine and I am glorified
in them. Holy Father, keep them in your
name, that they may be one even as
we are one. While I was with them, I kept
them in your name, which you've given me. I've guarded them. But I'm coming to you and I speak
these things in the world so that they may have my joy fulfilled
in themselves. The word I have given them. My joy is their joy because of
the word I have given them. And the word that I have given
them is not my word, but your word. So their glory and your
glory and my joy and their joy comes from your promises. And
through those promises, I endure that which you sent me to do
for their sake. unto your name and your glory
and so therefore I despise the shame and now as Christ knew
for sure would be he is seated at the right hand of the throne
of God." What greater dream could we have
than to sit at the right hand of God? That is how we endure. That is
what faith is. It looks to Christ. It looks
to the faith of Christ, to the faithfulness of Christ, to the
certainty, to the power, and to the endurance of Christ. Beloved,
I love every one of you. But there are certain things
in this life that for the sake of my own embarrassment, I'm
just not going to do. How about you? Dares don't work. Money doesn't
work. There's just some things I'm
just not going to do. Yet Christ endured the cross. the righteousness of God, naked and destroyed and seated at the right hand
of God. So that's where we look. Because we can look there with
great peace as we run our lives, let's put away anything that
gets in the way of that. Let's put away any one that gets
in the way of that. Let's put away any ideas that
get in the way of that. And let's rest. It's difficult. And that's why
God has secured it for us. That is why the scripture, by
way of command, also encourages and promises that only through
the means through which the Bible has taught us will we ever resolve
the conflict in our own minds concerning this race that we
run. The Assembly of the Saints under the Word of God. Do you
realize that there is no way that we can fail if we stick
to the scripture in its context? If we submit to the truth of
what Christ's Word teaches us, of what God the Spirit is preaching
to us this very day as we read this text. And I love the fact that right
after Hebrews, the letter of James sits. And the very first
command he gives is, count it all joy, my brothers, when you
meet trials of all kinds. For you know that the testing
of your faith produces steadfastness. What is steadfastness but endurance? It is all here, beloved. It is
all here. And in Christ, all things are
found. Let's pray. Father, as Paul prays at the
end of this letter, and as he writes, he tells his readers to bear
carry with his exhortation. So Father, that same prayer,
that same desire, that same command, that same power, that same endurance.
Lord, we pray that we would be able to just carry this exhortation. That when we get up under it,
we would stand and we would run the race. Knowing that it is
through your word that you have promised the grace to walk in
peace, the grace to grow in faith, the power to understand and gain
wisdom. Father, help to remind us that
what we study today is not our wisdom for tomorrow. For you
do not promise that it will stay with us except that the Word
be with us. And when we are in the Scripture, your wisdom is
true. When we take it upon our own selves, it is not wise. And the moment we think that
we know, we realize we don't. So we must come back to the Word,
Lord. Keep us in the Word. Put us in the Scripture as we
travel to work, to school. not the news and the stupidity
of our world and the foolishness therein. It will always be enticing. Father, help us to pray for one
another. Help us to pray for divisions. Help us to pray for the souls
that we love so dearly that you would reconcile us to each other. Lord, that we would see unity
in the gospel. And Lord, that we would be at
peace. And Father, please, as you have
determined that your will would play out for the good of your
people in this country. And Lord, that we would not complain
and we would not gripe and we would not bite and murder and
gossip, but that we would rest. And then when those around us
begin to fear and feed themselves things that are not full of Christ,
that we would speak just clearly Your Word. And Lord, in all those
things, we can trust in You to do that which You've purposed.
In Christ's name we pray. Amen.