Hebrews - Part 10 Christ the Sympathizing High Priest (Hebrews 4:14-16)

Well, last time we got through Hebrews 12 and 13, and so it makes sense we will try to finish the chapter, but one of the things that I have to remember, and so I'm reminding you, but this is not like something I always remember. I forget it too, is that the chapter breaks are not inspired. And so often we read a chapter of scripture and then we stop and we think, okay, that thought is ended.

And then we go about our day and then the next day we read the next chapter because that's how most Bible reading plans go. and so we will want to look at how if there wasn't a chapter break here would we really stop at verse 16? Or would we just kind of think that there's still a thought going on here and there most certainly is still a thought happening and so we will start to look at that as well. So the context of Hebrews of course the new covenant versus the old covenant, particularly Jesus better than everything that the Jews had ever known.

So we have that context. And then what we just saw in the most recent verses there, 12 and 13, was that the word of God is living and active. of Jesus Christ, I said, is the word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

And we have a transition word in verse 14. Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 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. 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.

So, the transition word in verse 14 is since or since then. So, it's almost the same word as therefore, right? It means because of what I just told you, here is something for you to consider. And so, he says, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, he names them Jesus the son of God let us hold fast our confession so what was happening in the beginning of chapter 4 he describes the people who had fallen away he describes the people who had again had outward exhibitions of religious life they had outward manifestations of keeping the law at least physically speaking.

You'll remember that one of the things we talked about last week was that if you lived in a theocratic society, there were laws you kept not because your heart believed in the creator of the laws, and you loved him and adored him and you knew they were good, so you obeyed him. There were laws you kept because the penalties were so severe you didn't want to disobey. I mean, if we had a blasphemy penalty in Ohio tomorrow, there would be people that would just shut their mouth if the penalty was enforced.

It's just that simple. And so we have to hold fast to our confession because our confession here is not the London Baptist confession, which is what I told my kids. Like I said, hey, see, it's in the Bible, you know. I'm kidding. But the confession is your confession of faith. And so what he's reminding the Hebrews is that we don't want to be like the people who for a time believed God, did something that God said, maybe tried God out a little bit, and then when things started not going the way they wanted, all of a sudden God wasn't useful.

He's saying we need to hold fast to our confession. so keep in mind that basically every New Testament epistle is written to the church but even in particular was written to a group of believers who were going to suffer or were going through suffering and there are very few religions in the world I can't even think of any off the top of my head where you're actually promised if you follow the religion you will suffer that's actually the opposite of what appeals to most people's flesh. There are some people who will become martyrs for their religion because apparently that satisfies their sense of self-righteousness. But in the case of Christianity, you're being told, hey, you're going to follow the real God, and as the result, things might get really, really bad for you.

And so he's telling them, you have to hold fast to your confession. You hold on to your faith even if everything you see doesn necessarily match up with what you think would make sense for a follower of God And so he tells them that they have a great high priest So we are looking at the Levitical priesthood and these people would have been totally familiar with the phrase high priest. So for us in the United States, we don't have priests, and even though I was raised Catholic, concept of a priest.

I didn't know what a high priest was. He is referring to the fact that Jesus is the great high priest. That he isn't like all the high priests that are selected from among men. And so the high priest was the guy who, and we're going to see this later, especially chapter 7, the high priest was the guy who went into the temple and he took the sacrifice. once a year, and he did all the special things that only one guy a year got to do.

He was the main mediator between men and God, between sinners and God. And the author of Hebrews is calling Jesus a high priest. Now this is, of course, after we've already seen that Jesus is from the tribe of Judah. He's not from the Levitical priesthood. He's from the priesthood of Melchizedek. And so the Hebrews author is hammering home the point that there is a great high priest, not one high priest of the Levitical priesthood who suddenly was a better high priest.

Literally, this is a different level of high priest, a different category of high priest. One who has passed through the heavens. And so that little phrase just sounds kind of strange to me. I think it requires meditation and so I know you're all logging into Zoom to hear me teach for a few minutes and then if you're listening on my podcast you're trying to learn from me but the art of meditation is something that God has given to his people so that we can sit and we can consider what his word says and I don't like the phrase, let his spirit work on us, but it's the idea that we're not quenching the spirit by just reading through something quickly, just going and looking up what John Calvin or John Gill said, or just listening to your local church pastor, your buddy.

You should spend time, when you get to a phrase that's not immediately obvious, meditating on it. Think about what does it mean that he's passed through the heavens? and I have to admit and this is one of the banes of our existence here I hate to even say it and put it on your mind but my mind imagined the Jesus figure that everyone draws pictures of in 2020 walking through clouds that was my first thought when I read this which is horrible which is one of the reasons I hate pictures of Jesus because they're hard to get them out of your mind once somebody else has put them there. But one of the things I think we have to remember is that Hebrews chapter 5 wasn't necessarily written in such a way where you were going to understand it perfectly before you got to later chapters.

So even though we go verse by verse through the Bible and the plan is that we will teach Hebrews 5 Hebrews 6, Hebrews 7, obviously later than when I'm teaching Hebrews 4. But I think we can understand that there's later chapters that we're going to understand and that it's Jesus who we're going to see later went into a heavenly temple. And so he hasn't explicitly stated that in that way yet, and he's about to.

And so sometimes you have to keep reading. So don't just read chapter 4 and think, okay, well now I understand chapter 4, and now that I know chapter 4, I can maybe understand 5. You may need chapter 7 to understand chapter 4. And so, Jesus, the great high priest of the order of Melchizedek, who has passed through the heavens, he's the one who went into the heavenly temple.

He didn't go into the copy made with hands. he didn't go into the one that people could see, touch, taste and feel he didn't go into the one that all the other Levitical priests go in basically the dirty ones that have no ability to truly wash away sins he went into the heavenly place that is the real existence of where sin was atoned for and Jesus Christ is the anti-type of what all the priests were types of. So all the high priests, all the Levitical priests, they all prefigured and pictured what was to come. Someone of certain qualifications was going to go into the holy place and approach God with a sacrifice that was acceptable to God.

And this was prefigured constantly in the Old Testament. qualified men were entering into a holy place or a holy of holies or a most holy place, and they were bringing a blood sacrifice that would be acceptable to God for the sins of the people they represented. And when we think about these things, we think about them carnally. So we think, oh, okay, there was this earthly stuff, and then there's like the heavenly thing, and I think what we need to remember is it's actually the reverse.

There's the heavenly thing that is eternal Jesus Christ and there the place that God has where this is going to happen and then God created copies of that so that creatures could understand them, so that creatures could get a picture of these things. So it's almost like we think, okay, there was this priesthood, and it wasn't working, and so God was like, okay, I'm going to need to create a heavenly version of this. That's how our minds kind of go, and forgive me if yours doesn't, but that's how my earthly mind goes.

It's always like earthly first. And then I start thinking about heavenly things, and then it's like, okay, well maybe that heavenly thing makes a little bit of sense based on my understanding of the earthly thing. And I think what we need to remember is that there's the heavenly thing, and then God creates the earthly things so that people who have the inability to comprehend his thoughts have some ideas of how they can start to understand him.

And so he's actually really gracious and condescending in a very kind way. I know that word connotes something bad in our society. But for someone to be condescending literally, it just means that they are bringing themselves down to someone else's level to help them understand something. And it just so happens that I think usually when humans are condescending, one person is rude about it, or the person being condescended to is just so offended by the fact that someone is actually superior in that area that they don't like to believe that the person needed to condescend.

But anyway, we say God needs nothing. Well, he needed to condescend to communicate with creatures. He isn't in our category. And so the author says, since then we have a great high priest. So since we have a great high priest. So remember, he's trying to get their minds off of all their little high priests.

So if you just imagine, there's priests everywhere. They're wearing the garb. They're trying to do the stuff. They're still sacrificing animals. They're still making people follow Levitical laws and ceremonial laws and all the stuff that Colossians was written about, like don't taste, touch, feel, all that stuff. They're making a big deal out of the Jewish festivals, and they're not understanding how all of these things, ceremonially speaking, pointed to Jesus Christ's fulfillment one day.

And he says, we have a great high priest. So we have the better one. And I don't think this is just like he's great. This is the ultimate. This is superlative. We have a great high priest.

No high priest will come who is better, could come who is better, can come who is better. This is the ultimate high priest. If this high priest is not enough for you, you don't have a high priest. It's that simple. since we have a great high priest who went into the heavenly places he's going to describe what all that means later but a great high priest who has already done what the earthly high priest could never do hold fast to your confession hold on to your faith because your faith in him is what God measures you by because you're not the one who's going into the heavenly place with a sacrifice you haven't even resisted to the point of shedding your blood yet and your resistance to sin you couldn't, if you shed all your blood pay for your own sins if you were to enter a heavenly place to offer a sacrifice for your own sin the result would be you would fail and you'd go straight to hell where you'd never pay your sin debt so you have to hold on to your faith because your faith is in the fact that your high priest is actually qualified to go into the correct holy place bringing the correct sacrifice that is actually pleasing to God.

And this is all prefigured again in the Old Testament because if you gave the priest your sacrifice and then he went behind a veil, you had no idea what he was doing. And if he was back there fornicating with girls at the temple door like those guys were Eli's sons, right? Or if they were offering strange fire. You had no control over what that priest did.

You had to have your faith in the fact that the Old Testament priest was actually qualified to mediate between you and God. It was always by faith. There was the work. You had to do the work, but it was always that you were trusting your representative to mediate for you. and now here it's just clearly displayed I don't even want to say it's amplified because this is the real thing it's actually de-amplified in the Old Testament the real thing was scaled down so that we could see it and understand it a little bit and so you have to hold fast to this faith in Jesus, the Son of God you cannot waver in the sense that you can't stop thinking that Jesus is qualified to be a representative.

So he's warning them, don't start putting your faith in other high priests. You have Jesus. So he names them, right? The name the angel gave him before he was conceived in the womb, and he will be called Jesus. Why? Because he will save his people from their sins.

Well, Jesus, I think it means God saves. And so you have Jesus who will save his people from his sins as your high priest and then he's described as the Son of God. Well being a son of God is a foreign concept here They understood that priests were special that priests were you know maybe in a sense I don want to say they thought they were better men but they knew they had a way to get to God that they didn But Jesus being a son of God is extremely unique.

And so it reminds us back of chapter 3, where it says, 3-5, Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant, right? He served and he ministered to testify of the things that were to be spoken later. Well, there's your hint about the prefiguring. But verse 6, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son. God loves his son Jesus. And so when Jesus comes as a mediator of a priesthood, of a better covenant, and he shows up in the holy place, unstained by sin himself, with the exact kind of sacrifice that God is actually pleased with, a blood sacrifice, but it happens to be a blood sacrifice that's able to pay for the penalty of all the people that believe in him.

God is pleased with that sacrifice. and so we hold fast to our faith in Jesus as the Son of God. So you have to believe He's the Son of God. You can't believe that Jesus Christ is just one person God, like unitarianism. What's the one word? It's just one God. We believe in one God, but we believe in three persons.

There's people that believe there's not three distinct persons. Yeah, I guess that's modalism, where he just shows up in different modes, right? We have to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. We can't believe true things about God and then deny truthful things that the Trinity tells us. Like, you know, chapter 2 of the Confession of God and the Holy Trinity.

We need to believe that God is one God in three persons. And so Jesus is the Son of God. And so now he tells us in verse 15, 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. So all of a sudden he goes from, you have Jesus, the Son of God, right? Like, different category from you.

I just called you creatures in verse 13. Now I'm talking about Jesus, the Son of God, in verse 14. He's totally different from all your priests. And I've been trying to explain this to you at length so far, that He's so different than everything. And so lest you start to think that He's so different that He's not even able to understand you, that He's just like a totally other category in such a way that He doesn't know your weaknesses, that He doesn't understand your struggles, that He doesn't know what it's like to be tempted as you are, lest you start to think that, he's going to explicitly tell you, we don't have a high priest who's unable to sympathize, though.

So, Jesus being sinless doesn't mean Jesus doesn't understand our weakness. So, we've been over this before when we did Hebrews 2. Jesus being sinless just means he's morally perfect. I mean, it's a wonderful, I say just. What I mean is that it doesn't mean that when you're sitting there and all the forces of evil and hell and Satan and the world itself are pulling you and tempting you circumstantially to do evil in the sight of God, it doesn't mean that Jesus doesn't know that feeling.

Because he was a real man. and he was a real man born under the curse subject to the miseries of this life that we're subject to weak as we are and born in a low estate way, way worse circumstances than any of us have ever faced some of us if we go to the worst prison America has, we'll get to heaven and people will laugh at us if we call ourselves martyrs okay? Jesus in particular, but he would never laugh at you. So anyway, it's a different, because he loves you.

But the point is this, he was a man too. And this is so important that he is God and he is man. I think we say true God and true man. Some people say 100% God, 100% man. There's a lot of different phrases people use, and I think you need to be careful how you say them. But this is not like, you know, some of us are into superhero movies.

He's not like Superman. He's not like Spider-Man, even, who was a real person who had superpowers. He is literally just a man. He had all the weaknesses you had. The guy woke up in the morning. He got hangnails.

He had pain in his body. He had organs that would function and had to sometimes not function properly. He would get sick. And he was subject to death. And the thing that was different about Jesus is he didn't have a sin nature. He didn't have any disposition about him that would move him toward disobeying God's law.

And so when Jesus sat there and hot girls walked by and were alluring and provocative and said things like, Hey, want some of this or whatever? Like he didn't have that internal thing that thought. Oh, that sounds kind of good. And we like to think that that is circumstantial, and that's not who we are, right? That's something that happens to us, and then we have to fight it, and then sometimes we give in a little, and sometimes we fight really hard, and then we're really proud of ourselves, you know, because we didn't, you know, fornicate, you know.

But it's not like that. That's literally part of your identity as fallen in Adam. Jesus didn't have that identity. What Jesus had was an identity with God. And so for Jesus, the thought of doing anything that violated God's commands was... I always use this comparison because it's the easiest one that I know will work with any person from any culture.

It would be like if I handed you a plate of steaming hot poo. and said, here, eat this. You wouldn't for a moment be tempted to eat it. And that's how Jesus was with sin. There wasn't even a part of him that could be tempted to actually do the things from an internal, ooh, that sounds kind of good, but I've got to fight it because I know it's ungodly standpoint.

Whereas for us, we just dive right into those things. Well, then Jesus comes, he regenerates your soul, He gives you the Holy Spirit. He regenerates your heart, gives you the Holy Spirit. Well, now you have a struggle, right? Because there's some part of you that really wants to obey God because you love God. And you have the Spirit of God who loves God and knows God's will and knows God's law.

And so temptation comes. And because of your weakness, it's difficult. And because you still have that part of you that has fallen in Adam, there's a part of you that actually has to fight against that. And that is not how Jesus was, though. But he is not unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, because it says here, in every respect he has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

And so it says, in every respect he was tempted as we are. Well, Jesus wasn't married in the same exact way that any of us are married. So he does have a bride, so there is some comparison there. And he's got a pretty unfaithful bride. So if anyone had an excuse to say, hey, I'm going to go find another woman, it would be Jesus. And he still doesn't.

But literally speaking, Jesus didn't have to be in every situation you're in to be able to sympathize with your weaknesses. The fact of the matter is that Jesus was categorically tempted. He was tempted by the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. And in fact, Jesus was personally tempted directly by Satan after 40 days of not eating anything.

And so he was about as weak as men could get, and actually entertained Satan for a little while, and kind of let Satan do this temptation on him. to show, hey, the human state, the existence of being a human being does not require sin. And he resisted the devil, and then when he told the devil, get out, the devil was gone. Which is interesting, because it's like, if I could tell the devil, get out, and he's gone, I would do it right when he got there, right?

But Jesus actually entertained them for the sake of us being able to read about these different temptations. So every time you're tempted to sin, Jesus Christ had a categorically similar temptation that he resisted. And he had many of them for sure. But Jesus Christ was never tempted by the lust that is within him because he didn't have that. he is only tempted by the fact that outwardly there was sin everywhere and he suffered through that hating every moment of it hating its existence hating what it does to his people hating what it does to his creation and so he's not unable to sympathize with your weaknesses so lest you start thinking well i need this earthly priest who actually uh fornicates once in a while because then he'll understand how hard it is to not fornicate.

Like, wait a second, the guy who actually gives in to sin all the time somehow understands you better? It's the guy who doesn't give in that can help you. That's one of the problems in our society is we've gotten to this point where we think that to get help with a situation, we have to find somebody else who's a failure at it like us. Okay, this is what the entire program of AA is built on, right? let's get everyone together who can't stop drinking, and then we'll just talk about how we can't stop drinking instead of finding somebody who just doesn't drink or whatever, right?

And so it's kind of goofballish when you think about it after having a clear mind for a while and thinking it's not futile. We need people who are successful at things to help us be successful at them ourselves. And so Jesus is not unable to sympathize. So don't get the idea that, okay, well, Jesus is great. He can save me from my sins, and he's God, and so I can go to him, and I can pray.

But I need an earthly priest to help me out, and I need an earthly priest to go into the temple and make sacrifices for me, because he understands what it like to be me You don need that Jesus has already passed through the heavenly place He already a qualified man of a priesthood who gone into the Holy of Holies and brought the sacrifice that was pleasing to God. And so rest in that fact. Hold on to your confession.

Be faithful to your confession. And when you are tempted, when you suffer from temptation coming to you from within or without to violate God's law. And suddenly this born-again spirit of yours has this glorious battle where the spirit of God inside you and your regenerated heart is in battle with the physical flesh that you still carry that is, in a sense, subject to Adam, an original sin.

And when that battle comes, and something in the world tempts you to sin, and it is so powerful that you feel like there's no way, there's no way to overcome this. This is so natural. This is so normal. This is impossible. when you get to that point remember that Jesus Christ resisted and then instead of just feeling bad about the fact that like he's successful and you're not and self-righteously starting to judge yourself for your failure and in a sense of self-reliance you know flagellating yourself for even having the struggle that we do all these things that make us feel aesthetic and make us feel that we've, aesthetic wasn't the right word, ascetic, you know, like asceticism where we think, okay, if I just don't give in this time, I'm a better Christian now, right?

We do these things. And it's like, we know we're supposed to obey God. And we should obey God and we want to obey God. But he says here, 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. So his admonition isn't okay, you believe in Jesus and so you don't need the ceremonial law but obey the moral law.

Do it. We know we're supposed to but we still can't. He's saying go for grace. when you're weak, remember that Jesus was weak too. And instead of thinking to yourself, okay, well, it's not, oh, Jesus was weak and he resisted, so therefore, because I'm weak, I can resist. That's not what he's saying. He's saying Jesus was weak and he resisted, so when you're weak, go to Jesus.

Come to him for help. So you can go to God and you can say, God, I'm sorry I sinned again, and we forgive me and I trust that Jesus paid for my sins and I believe that he really did wash them all away and you can have this confidence. I think he's trying to tell you, go to him when you're still suffering the temptation. When the temptation comes, that's when you go and you say, hey, you understand this.

God, you're totally different from me yet you understand my struggle right now because experientially Jesus has actually been through the struggle you're going through because as a man he categorically suffered in every respect yet was without sin and so he was tempted the way you are the pride of life the lust of the eyes the lust of the flesh all these things that nag at us things that legitimate godly men still suffer from and they still struggle with and so it's not about accepting that you're a sinner and just, well, I guess I'm just going to sin, that's okay. There is a sense of, you better be ready to sin. Let me put it this way, you better be ready for the fact that you will sin.

Because if the next time you sin, and sometimes we lower our standard for what sin really is, so that we don't feel like such sinners, but let's just imagine we don't sin as often as we do. The next time you sin and you realize you sin, if you're so shocked by that and you're so bothered by your personal weakness that it drives you into some kind of depression and it drives you to be so angry with yourself and think you're such a bad guy and you're such a failure it's all about you all of a sudden and that usually comes from a sinful form of perfectionism where we somehow think we're supposed to be perfect. And so then when we sin, rather than having godly repentance, which drives us to say, God, forgive me and help me and strengthen me and help me to be more faithful to Jesus and help me to trust Jesus and remind me, Lord, remind me in my spirit that I am weak and he is strong.

Rather than that it drives you to the Judas form of repentance which is Oh woe is me I did something wrong against an innocent man Woe is me And I guess I just kill myself The world would be better without me. And so that kind of thinking of perfectionism isn't the same as wanting to be godly. because we have to have that realistic expectation of our sinful nature that we still have. So this is where good theology helps us out.

It's hard as a teacher. I'm sitting here trying to tell you, you need to expect to sin, but at the same time, I would not encourage you to sin. And I want to discourage your sin, right? I want to encourage you to go to God when you're tempted. but then after you're tempted I also want to encourage you to remember it was going to happen and you still need to go to God and you need to have a type of repentance that actually just places your faith more in the fact that Jesus died in your place rather than your faith in the fact that you somehow were supposed to resist it does that make sense?

I want you to have that joy that can put away quickly your sin in the sense that you know you've been forgiven while simultaneously having the real repentance that hates the fact that you still do these things that violate your God. And so, he tells you to go with confidence, though. I think in one version it says with boldness. To draw near to the throne of grace.

So again, something to ponder. What's the throne of grace? I mean the majesty of what these words represent has to be meditated upon the throne this is a king we just talked about a high priest we talked about the son of God now we're talking about a king but the throne of grace has there ever been a king in the history of our world where we described his kingship as the throne of grace right I mean, kings exalt themselves.

That's like what they do, right? I mean, you never go to a building that's called like, you know, this pauper, this building is dedicated to the name of this pauper, right? The reason why you remember people's names is like they authored the history books and they built the buildings with their name on them, right? And so the throne of grace, this is a majestic description of the fact that there's a God seated on the throne, resting from His work.

He's seated. It's finished. Jesus is finished. He's seated at the right hand of the throne of God. And He's seated, and He's just ruling. And He's just in charge.

He just issues decrees. He just says what He wants to say. He turns other kings' hearts whichever way He wishes. This is the kingliness of God. This is His power. he has the power to execute whatever he desires. Which means he could smite you in a moment too.

And yet it's a throne of grace. So this king who deserves all glory, honor and praise and could have created beings that would only worship him instead decided to redeem people like us who are fallen from him. What grace? This is a gift. This is absolutely just a gift. You didn't earn it.

You didn't deserve it. You still don't deserve it. Even though Jesus has bought you with that price, and even though he has brought you to God, you still don't deserve it. You will spend eternity not deserving what God is giving you. And that's okay. That should make you grateful.

The fact that God reminds us of that repeatedly isn't evidence of him beating us over the head with it. It's because we don't remember it. because we wake up every morning and we think God owes us something. And it takes looking at the scripture a little bit to remember, wait a second, I'm a creature who hated him, and then his own son got bludgeoned in my place, and so now I get all the benefits, and maybe I should just be grateful for even the smallest one.

And so this is a throne of grace. We're to draw near to it with confidence, though. Nobody walks into the office of a king. without an amazing amount of security checking them out, without people there to protect them. And nobody walks into the king and just tells the king, here's what I want, and really expects it. The king decides what he wants. And yet, we're told, draw near with confidence.

You go to God with confidence. Well, why? Because when you go to God, you're going as a son. Because you're represented by Jesus, the Son of God, who has passed through the heavens. When you go to God and you make your requests, you go with confidence because He has made it so that you can. Because you're not just some guy going into the king's palace and hoping that maybe he'll do this thing your way that makes sense.

Kind of like Moses and Pharaoh, right? He'd kind of go in and he'd ask Pharaoh, like, hey, do this, can you do that? And he had no real hope that Pharaoh would do what he was saying, unless he was forced to, right? We go to God as sons because Jesus has made us sons of God, because of his perfect priesthood, so we can go to him with confidence. So we go to God with humility. but I don think God wants us to go like wimps I don think God is honored when we come to Him and we say things you know, I'm trying to think of how to put it.

When we come to God and we make bold requests, I think that shows God that we really believe a couple things. One, that He's capable of anything. And two, that we really believe we have access to Him through His Son. And so the opposite of that is coming to God and not making big, bold requests because you don't really believe He can do everything. So you don't ask God to change your wife to make her more submissive because you don't really believe He can.

Because you think her flesh is more powerful than that. You don't ask God to relieve you of the temptation to lust or to hate or to covet things because you don't really believe He's more powerful than those things. So we go to Him with confidence because we know He's powerful and it actually is an exhibition of our belief in His power when we come with big requests.

Do you understand what I'm saying? it's coming to him with the big requests and really believing he can do them that honors him so it sounds bold like we ask for these Lord would you revive our country would you save our country Lord and forgive sinners and change them and change the course of everything and it sounds like such a big request and it's like that's nothing to him and then we go to him with that confidence because it shows we really believe we have access the idea that you like if tomorrow you were given access to the office of Joe Biden and you could go in there and you could make any requests you wanted as often as you wanted you know just a weird hypothetical and the idea that you would just sit around and hardly make any and you'd go a day or two without making one or you'd go in and you'd ask them for small things like hey could you get me like a red truck like for my kid for Christmas like Like, you'd be crazy to not ask for, like, huge things from somebody with, like, the kind of power that a guy in his position has, okay? Even though it should be more limited, that's a different conversation, right? But you'd be crazy to not go in there and make those requests.

And yet, if you didn't, what you'd be telling people is, well, I don't really believe it's going to work out for me. I don't really believe I have that access. Well, Jesus has granted you that access. And so when you avoid it, what you show is that you don't really believe Jesus bought you that access. You don't really believe God has the power to do these things.

You don't really believe he's that good. And I don't do that to beat you up. We all fail at this stuff. So go to him. Say, God, make me a better prayer. God, make me want to pray more.

Make me want to read your word more. Make me more hopeful, God, in the power that you have to do the things that I would come and ask. And conform my will to your will, so more of my prayers will be answered. And come to him with confidence. Don't go to him with these wimpy prayers. Come with confidence and boldness.

And then let him do what he's going to do in his timing. Because some of your prayers that you never see answered will get answered. and they'll be answered after you're dead and he'll be glorified by that and your prayers will be used for good but you just might not get the satisfaction of knowing they were heard and answered the way that you thought they were going to be and that's okay but you go to him with these big bold prayers and so you go to him at times of need knowing that your difficulties you face are not some unique difficulty that only you face, and even God doesn't understand it. You go knowing that Jesus became man, understands you better.

He understands you better than you do. That's the other thing. We go to God, and sometimes I think we kind of hide things because we're ashamed. It's like, He already knows. Nothing's added to God by you confessing. It actually just helps you realize, wow, God knew before I started to realize that I was this way.

That I was this way, right? And you can't hide it from Him. Just open up to Him. He loves you. He loves you as a son. And He's a king.

And you're a prince in that sense. So there's great hope for all those who will hold fast to that confession and trust that Jesus, the Son of God, passed through the heavens for them, but at the same time, he also lived in this sin-cursed world and suffered as we suffer. And he's a sympathizing high priest. Any comments, questions, arguments? Thank you for listening to Be a Berean. with your host, Michael Coughlin.

I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website, michaelcoughlin.net You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.