Sermon Outline
Text: Heb 4:14-16; Heb 5:1-10
Seniors final service – Phil 3
- Congratulations – graduating from Caltech is not easy
- I remember when I was a senior in 1996, I thought I was the next Billy Graham
- I wanted to be a pastor who changed the world for Christ
- God in His wisdom, didn’t let me pastor right away – he had me wait 15 years
- Life is hard
- One chance at life
- Phil 3 – Gain Christ
- Make it your life goal to know Christ
- Make him the #1 aim of your life, above vocation/career, above church, above ministry, above good works and helping others
Testimonies
- Incarnation
- Word of God becomes flesh
- Thank you to Jessica and Sophia for their courage
- John Shen shared last weekend some deep struggles
- Christians don’t have it altogether
- If you could eavesdrop in some of my prayers, you might be scandalized
- We are all works in progress
- Not a community of performance
- Wearing suit and tie and smiling politely – isn’t God good? But inside…
- We’re not here to impress one another
- Community of grace
- Sign of God’s activity – you just want to testify to the world, I was blind but now I see
- I was broken, but now I am whole
- I was addicted, but now I am free
2 ways of preaching
- Third way: topical exposition
- Hebrews – one of the most difficult books in Scripture to understand
- Do not want us to get lost in a mire of deep theology and miss out on the author’s main point
- Heb 12:1-3 – why should we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus?
- Why do we fix our eyes on Jesus, not a Pope, not a pastor, not a church, not a ministry philosophy, not the Great Commission, not an idea about Jesus, but the person of Jesus?
Title: Jesus, Our Great High Priest
- Today, we’re going to answer the question–why is Jesus our great high priest?
- Why is Jesus great?
- And why is he referred to as our high priest?
- The author introduces this idea–Jesus as our great high priest–at the end of chapter 4 and he spends the bulk of the letter fleshing out what that means
Heb 4:14 – great high priest who has PASSED THROUGH THE HEAVENS
- In 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now, I can pretty much guarantee that none of us in this room will be alive
- 100 years sounds like a long time, but if you think about eternity, 100 years is like a drop in the ocean
- Scientists have their theories that once your heart flat lines and your brain activity ceases and you breathe your last, that’s it
- You cease to exist, nothingness, dark blackness
- Philosophers have their theories
- Buddha has his theory – you just reincarnate–if you lived like a cockroach, then you’re going to come back as a cockroach in the next life
- The problem is, you can’t test any of their theories
- Because when they died, everything stopped
- No more speeches, no more writings
- Therefore, there’s no way of verifying if their theories are true
- Why do we believe Jesus when he says, there is going to be judgment, there is heaven and hell?
- Because Jesus died and he went to hell because of the sins of the world
- He battled Satan and 3 days later he overcame sin and Satan
Heb 2:14-15
- Before we met Christ, we were all slaves of sin and death
- When you’re young, you don’t think about death often because it seems so far off
- But when you reach my age, people have what is called a mid-life crisis
- Why? Because you feel time ticking away
- My life is half over and what have I amounted to? What have I accomplished?
- It’s embarrassing to see middle aged men suddenly getting a motorcycle and wearing tight jeans with their bellies hanging over them In an attempt to redeem the time
- Thankfully, Jesus conquered sin and death and while we live, the fear of death
- Because as believers, we know that this life is only preparation for the next
- Even if we utterly blow it in this life, if we gain Christ, our eternal future is guaranteed
Jesus died and did battle with Satan and Death itself - 3 days later He resurrected, He returned to tell us what he had accomplished on the cross when he bled and died
- And now he has passed through to the heavens
- He is seated at the right hand of God
- His word is done, He is victorious
- Jesus is the only human being to die and to return to tell us what happens when you and I, when our hearts give out and our brain activity ceases and we breathe our last
- His theory about the life to come has been validated
- Because He’s been there and he came back to tell us about it
If I told you, man, Mt Everest is awesome
- It takes a few weeks in blistering cold, but when you get to the top, the view is breathtaking
- And you ask, oh, when did you go?
- Well, actually, I never went up there
- But last week, I watched a documentary at the local IMAX theater
- If I told you this, you would dismiss my testimony because they I am not speaking from firsthand knowledge
- How can I speak on things I haven’t experienced myself?
- But if you talk to a real mountain climber and they have scaled the mountain several times, then you would be blown away by their account because they have firsthand experience
- Jesus has firsthand experience of life after death
- He is our great high priest who has passed through the heavens
- Therefore, we can trust what He says
Heb 4:15
- This is such an encouraging verse
- We can think about God in two extremes
- One extreme–God is high and mighty
- Because just by speaking a word, billions of galaxies, each galaxy with billions of stars, came into being
God is awesome in power - He is utterly holy
- If God were only one dimension–all-powerful, holy, living in unapproachable light–then we might conclude that God doesn’t really care about me
- He doesn’t know what I am going through
- He has no idea how frail we are because He’s omnipotent
- I can’t identify with this kind of God and He certainly cannot identify with me
The other extreme is to say: God is just like one of us
- We’re flawed, he’s flawed, we’re all flawed
- In some ways, we kind of like our God to be like this
- Because at least we can say, God sympathizes with me
- He gets me
- At least, we understand each other
- The Romans and Greeks often depicted their gods as better than humans but still carrying deep flaws
Heb 5:1-4
- The human priests of the OT were gentle
- Because we’re all human
- They were sacrificing animals for the sins of the people, but they were also sacrificing animals for their own sins
- Because priest and non-priest, we are all sinful
- When you meet a self-righteous person, you know right away that the person has lost a sense of his or her identity
- By using some narrow criteria–like I always come to church, or I always tithe, or I give money to charity, they have elevated themselves from others, looking down on them for not performing as well as they are
- In the process, a self-righteous person has forgotten about human frailty and weakness
- A priest who knows himself would be gentle
- When someone falls into sin and confesses, he doesn’t bring down a hammer
- And say, how could you lie, or how could you hide this sin?
- No, a priest who is humble enough to look in the mirror knows, I, too, am weak, we are all weak
- We are all capable of falling given the right set of circumstances
- And a gentleness flows from such priests who understand human weakness, which includes their own
There is comfort in the fact that another human being can sympathize with my weakness
- If you share about severe abuse growing up, sexual abuse, or depression, or suicidal thoughts because your parents divorced or you were an orphan and you are pouring out your heart
- And I said, yeah, me, too, one time I was carrying my iPad and suddenly I dropped it… and it broke
- I couldn’t play video games for a week until my parents bought me a replacement
- The person who poured out her heart would probably roll her eyes and think, this person has NO IDEA what I am talking about
There are the two extremes
- Either God is all-powerful
- Or he is like one of us and we are comforted because He can sympathize
- The problem with the first extreme of God as all-powerful only is that this Almighty God would have no idea what I am going through
- The problem with the second extreme of God as a great sympathizer is that this weak God has no power to help me to overcome my weakness
- All power and no sympathy vs. all sympathy and no power
- So we have to read on in Heb 5 to see what God’s solution to this dilemma was
Heb 5:4-6
- I’ll save the Melchizedek reference for next Sunday
- We have the dilemma of how an almighty God’s inability to sympathize with human weakness and a sympathetic God who is not powerful enough to help humans overcome their weakness
- What is God’s solution?
- He sends His Son
- Son of God, second Person in the Trinity, fully equal with God in power and stature, in being
- This all-powerful Jesus took on the frailty of human flesh and he became fully human
- Fully God yet fully human
- Full power, All-powerful and at the same time, fully human in all our weakness
- Human priests and the entire OT sacrificial system was just a shadow, a precursor, a foreshadowing
- Finally, in Christ, we have our Great High Priest, our final High Priest
- And he doesn’t sacrifice animals, He himself becomes the sacrifice
Why can Jesus be the perfect, once for all, sacrifice for human sin and weakness?
- Heb 4:15 – “For we do not have a high priest who isunable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tested in every way as we are, YET WITHOUT SIN.”
- Jesus was fully human, meaning, he understands fully human weakness
- He can sympathize with you and me absolutely, totally, in our weakness
- Yet because He is fully God, he had power to pass every test, every temptation common to man and he was utterly sinless
If you are recovering alcoholic, you can attend AA and you can have a bunch of people sympathize with you because they’re going through the same thing
- But just because you are surrounded by a group of people who are as broken as you doesn’t give you the power to overcome
- Jesus, the sinless one, who died and overcame sin and death gives you the power to have the chains of sin broken in your life
- The blood of Jesus not only covers your sins, but the power that raised Jesus from the dead, as believers, we have access to that same power, to overcome our sins
Heb 4:16