Christ and Community


Sermon by Cory Brock on October 25, 2020 Hebrews

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We are working our way through the book of Hebrews on Sunday nights and we’ve been in chapters 7 to 10 focused – it’s one big section, and it’s a big section that’s been all about covenants and the temple and tabernacle and the priesthood and sacrifices and the blood of bulls and goats. And that whole section about the old covenant, when you look at the old covenant sacrificial system carefully, it’s so confrontational because what it says to every one of us is, “Because of my sin, I deserve to die.” That’s what the old covenant sacrificial system really says. And Hebrews 7 to 10 comes in in the New Testament and says, “By the sacrifice of Jesus, I do not get what I deserve. I look at the old covenant and I say, ‘Because of my sin, I deserve to die.’ I look at Jesus in the new covenant and realize I don’t get what I deserve.”

Donald Macloed, one of the great Scottish theologians in Edinburgh who’s still there, he tells a story of preaching in rural, a subsection of a country in rural Africa, and he says that he shared the story of Jesus Christ for the first time and a young man came up to him right afterwards and in broken English said, “I understand. He die. Me no die.” And that’s what the tabernacle actually teaches – that I should die but He died. And that’s what Hebrews 7, 8 and 9 has really said to us in sum total so far.

You come to Hebrews 10 tonight, and I outlined Hebrews 10 this week and I realized that it would take five sermons, I think, to preach through Hebrews 10. It’s a long chapter. And so Hebrews 10. Verse 1 to 18 really summarizes everything that I just said about the old covenant fulfilled in Jesus Christ’s blood. And so I want to focus down in on verses 19 to 25 tonight because verse 19 to 25 tells us how to respond. In one way it says that Jesus’ blood creates unique community. And so let’s pray and read together and think about that. Let’s pray.

Father, we come tonight and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit to understand this wonderful book that You’ve offered us, Hebrews, and we ask for help as we focus down on our community. So come and meet with us, Lord. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

So let’s read together from Hebrews 10, verses 19 to 25. This is God’s Word:

“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

This is God’s holy Word.

This little section of Hebrews 10 teaches us two things; two things that we’ve got to see tonight, I think. The first is the foundation. This passage tells us about the foundation of the Christian community. And then secondly, it tells us something about what the Christian community looks like. So really simple tonight.

The Foundation of the Christian Community

First, the foundation of the Christian community. Now if you look down at verse 25, you see the very famous, the often quoted command, “Do not neglect to meet together.” And right there, what we see is that we are being talked to about Christian community. “Do not neglect to come together.” And if you look just before that, verses 22 to 25, you’ve got all these “let us” verbs. “Let us hold fast the confession.” “Let us stir up one another.” “Let us encourage one another.” This is about the community, this section of Hebrews 10. And in verse 19 to 21, it tells us about the foundation of that community. And look right there in verse 19. It says the foundation. “We have confidence, brothers and sisters, to enter into the holy places by the blood of Jesus.” And if you look at verse 21 it says we have “full assurance” to go into the holy place, which is the presence of God, knowing that “our hearts have been sprinkled clean” with the blood of Jesus, that we’ve been forgiven fully. We have confidence. We have confidence and we have full assurance to enter into the holy place, into the presence of God.

And you see what this is saying? That the reason Christian community exists is because we’ve been given something that gives us full confidence, full assurance so step into the tabernacle and walk right through the curtain into the presence of God. And that’s the reason, that’s the reason that Christian community exists. You see, the author is connecting Christian community to the fact of what Jesus has done to make a way for us to enter into the holy place, to enter into the tabernacle full of confidence without fear of death like we saw in the Old Testament the last few weeks.

Now why? And if you jump back to verse 19, you’ve got that word at the very beginning of verse 19, “Therefore.” That says that this argument, what he’s telling us here about Christian community, is completely connected to Hebrews 7, 8 and 9 and 10; everything that we’ve been talking about from Melchizedek forward has been bringing us to a point to make the point about Christian community. Verse 1 – if you have a Bible you can see this in Hebrews 10 verse 1 – it says that the entire old covenant, the tabernacle, the temple, everything in the Old Testament, it calls “the shadow.” And it says that the blood of Jesus Christ is the reality, is the substance.

And if you go back, if you remember back in Genesis chapter 1 and 2, remember in the Garden of Eden God said to Adam and Eve, “If you disobey, if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall die.” But in the Hebrew text it doesn’t just say, “You shall die.” It says, “You shall die, die.” It repeats the verb twice. And so in our Bibles it’s translated, “You shall surely die.” But literally it says, “If you eat, if you disobey, you shall die, die.” And commentators have come and said that’s talking about double death; that’s talking about absolute death, total death, what sin really deserves. And then in Genesis 3, God comes down into the presence of Adam and Eve and they get a curse, they get law, they get a sacrificial system; they do not “die, die.” They do not get total death. They do not get annihilated. They do not get what they deserve.

You see, when did the sacrificial system begin? It’s not Exodus, it’s not Leviticus, but you turn one chapter from Genesis 3 and you see Cain and Abel bringing a sacrifice before the face of the Lord. You see a system of atonement already in place from the very beginning. You see, they deserve, we deserve, to “die, die,” totally, and as soon as God comes down and enters into the world that’s been filled up with human sin – it’s grace! Even the curse is fundamentally gracious. It’s God not giving humanity what we deserve. On the one hand, everything was grace in the Old Testament, in the old covenant, in the sacrificial system, a system of atonement, and on the other hand Hebrews 10:1 says it was a shadow; it was a shadow pointing to the real substance.

In other words, the old covenant system of sacrifices was like going to New York City and standing on Manhattan Boulevard and behind you stands an enormous New York City skyscraper. And you look out Manhattan Boulevard and you see the shadow of that building cast down the center of the street. In the old covenant, you’re standing there and you’re in New York and you’re looking at the shadow and when you look at the shadow, what do you know? You know that there’s something real. You know that it’s pointing to something more and something greater. And what Hebrews 10:1 says is that all you’ve got to do – Hebrews 7 to 10 says, “Turn around and see the building, see the body of Christ broken, see the blood of Christ poured upon the altar, upon the holy of holies.” Everything in the old covenant was gracious and at the same time, a shadow pointing to something, pointing to the reality, pointing to the substance. And that’s the blood of Jesus Christ. “He die. Me no die.” And that’s exactly what Hebrews 7, 8, 9 and 10:1-18 has been saying to us. That justice is fulfilled in the reality of the broken body of Jesus Christ for us.

Now you see what Hebrews 19 to 25 is doing? It’s starts off, “Therefore” all of that, all of the ways that Jesus Christ fulfills the old covenant, all of the ways that He is the reality of everything that the old covenant was pointing to – that’s the “Therefore” in 19. And then, “adelphos;” “brothers and sisters,” is the next word. “Brothers and sisters” – all of that was about not just me getting saved from my individual sins toward an individual salvation, but it’s about us. All of that was about the brothers and sisters. In other words, it’s Christianity. It’s connecting it to the community. It’s saying Christianity is not just me and my sins getting saved. It is that, but it’s more than that. It’s we, together; we, together drawing near. We, together have access into the presence of God through the curtain of the holy of holies. It’s drawing us into the community. We, together go behind the curtain without fear, in full assurance.

Now I was reminded this week of C.S. Lewis’ essay, his famous essay that he delivered after World War II to university students. And he called his lecture, “The Inner Ring.” And you ask, “What’s the inner ring?” And when you read Lewis’ essay he tells you. He says that the inner ring is really just a group within a group; a circle within a larger community. Every single one of us exists in all sorts of spectrums of larger communities. We live in a big church community like this church, and we live in school communities and individual classrooms that our kids occupy. And the parents over them form a community. And we have the work community that we’re a part of, and all sorts of sub-communities within those work communities, our colleagues. And there’s moms communities and dads communities and sports teams communities and big friend communities. And there’s even pastor communities and networks of all the different pastors that know each other and meet up every year. We have all sorts of communities that we exist in. Lewis says that the inner ring is when humans form inner circles within each of those communities that include some and exclude others on the basis of performance.

And so this is what he says about it. “I believe,” he writes, “that in all human lives at certain periods, and in many peoples’ lives at every period between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local ring and simultaneously the terror of being left on the outside of it.” And he says, “We have a delicious sense of secretive intimacy that we want to be on the inside and look outward at the others.” And I see this in the development of my own kids and everybody knows this reality from childhood and especially experiences it in teenage years where we identify a group that we want to be a part of and if we get rejected by that group we feel unloved and shamed to the point where we develop envy and potentially even deep hatred for the group that we once wanted to be a part of. But if we get accepted, then we’ve been included in the inner ring and we defend the inner ring, we protect the inner ring, we adopt its identity and practices. We dress like the inner ring dresses; we speak like the inner ring speaks.

And I lived this out – before we moved back here from Scotland, I spent most of my time in higher academics in a big university and living in that world. And what I saw was that the academic culture, the university culture at its best was a place devoted to seeking the truth and to taking the truth that’s discovered and communicating truth to other people who might not have access to it. But at the same time, there’s also, in academia, in higher academia, an inner ring; a rat race towards being a part. And here’s how it’s measured. It’s measured by – How much can you publish in as short of a time as possible? How many books can you write? How many essays can you publish? How much media can you get in front of in as short of a time as possible? And what happens, when you get sucked in, when you want to be a part of the scholarly elite, accepted because your publication list is so big, what happens is your scholarship becomes less and less about the truth and more and more about getting in, about getting to the inside.

And Lewis says it’s not just academia; it’s not just childhood or our teenage years. He says he sees it, in the essay, in law, medicine, in school, in sports, in chess club, in moms groups, in dads groups. Human beings form inner rings – rings of performance that include and exclude based on personality, talent, ability, skill, and Lewis even includes, “the willingness to be a scoundrel.” The willingness to keep the secret, the willingness to gossip in the right ways at the right time, the willingness to know at the exclusion of others. Lewis says, “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, always trying to get in on the inside, you can’t really be free.” You’re in turmoil. You’re running. You’re fighting to stay in but it will never end.

Let me take it a step further than Lewis took it in his famous essay. We human beings seek inner rings, rings measured by performance, because of a misplaced desire. We want to be known. We want to be loved. And we want to live in that in an unyielding, unending, enduring community. That’s what we want. That’s what we were made for. And because of sin, we perform and we dance and we run and we race to find it. We want to be in. We want to be in with our bosses. We want to be in with whoever we think is more important. And the message of the tabernacle is that there is a hole in our heart. The message of the old covenant fulfilled in the blood of Jesus Christ, right here, is that there is a hole in our heart that is only filled by being a part of God’s people that have stepped through the curtain into God’s presence. You see, all of our social circles, everything that we’ve always wanted to be a part of, that’s the shadow. But the real, the inner ring, is because we were made to be in enduring community where we are both known and loved, that never ends in the presence of God.

You see what it’s saying? That the blood of Jesus Christ has made that community. That’s what this text is saying. You see what it says? Verse 21, “Brothers and sisters, tonight, draw near to God through the curtain of the holy of holies because Jesus’ blood has bought that for you. Step into the curtain by faith. You can have that. And if you do, if you do, if you do you’re accepted. You’re part of the family of God.” It means that every single social circle that you’ll ever walk in is only relative when you have the family of God. It means that we don’t need our identity defined from the rat race. It means that we can put away the barriers of performance that sometimes we put up in our lives. You see, every single human inner ring that we might chase after, it only breeds selfishness because it turns me back to me, over and over again. It tells me that I’ve got to get better and better and better. I have to stay on the inside; I can never be satisfied. But God’s family, oh man, God’s family doesn’t breed selfishness; it breeds selflessness, because only there can I say, “I’m accepted by the blood of Jesus Christ! I’m forgiven! My conscience has been totally cleansed from top to bottom! I am justified, so I have freedom now to actually live for other people, not for myself.”

In other words, the point of the passage, it leads to this – if you, if you believe in the power of the blood of Jesus Christ, you have a forever family. You are part of the inner ring. You are part of the people of God. And this is for anybody; it’s for anybody. Lewis, at the very end of the essay, says, “The quest of the inner ring will break your heart, unless you break it.” And Hebrews chapter 10 says, “Christ has broken every false community. Christ has broken putting all our hopes on a false community.” The fulfillment of the desire to be known and loved in an enduring community is only found in Him, in His blood, in the open curtain where it says, “We, brothers and sisters, enter together into the presence of God.” It creates – the blood of Jesus Christ is the foundation, the bedrock of real community.

What the Christian Community Looks Like

Now secondly and finally, we’ve got to ask then, “What does this Christ-built community look like?” And that’s what verses 22 to 25 is really about. Back to verse 25 again, we quoted it at the very beginning but that very famous, “Do not neglect to meet together.” And that gets referenced a lot because it’s clearly at least to some degree a command to be at church. “Do not neglect to meet together.” We’re here tonight. We didn’t. “Do not neglect to meet together.” It’s at least to some degree a command to be at church. That’s very true. But if you look at it in the context of verse 22, 23, 24, 25 and you just look at those plural verbs, those “let us” verbs – “Let us draw near to God. Hold fast to the confession. Consider carefully how to stir each other up to good works, to works of love, encouraging one another.” And if you really think about it, you know, you can do some of that here but you can’t do all of it here. You can draw near to God together here, you can hold fast the confession here; you can think about how to stir each other up, encouraging, some, but we all have to get ushered out after the service is over. You can’t do all of this here. You can’t do every bit of this here.

Now if you read any on the metrics about church attendance and how it’s shifted over the last thirty, forty years – if you look at Lifeway, Pew Forum, Ligioner, pretty much all of the main research groups that study this say the exact same thing. Between 2010 and 2020, average church attendance for a member has shifted to about 1.5 to 1.7 times per month in the United States. So most church members of U.S. churches that you think of as committed people, attend church approximately 1.7 times per month. And almost all the data points us to that. And here this verse 25 comes in and says to that, “Do not neglect to meet together.” It’s a command. And, and, at the same time, you could be one of the rare people – and I know many of you are – that attend church 100%, that are in the door every time the door is open, and not be doing any of the commands that are written here in verse 22 to 25.

Tim Keller talks about, in one of his sermons on the Christian community, how the word here, the word “to meet together” here, is a word that literally is a verbal form of the word “congregation,” the noun, “congregation.” And he talks about how there’s such a difference between a congregation and an aggregation. An aggregation is when individuals come together for a short amount of time to hear a talk – like a TED talk, to go to a concert, to watch a movie. That’s an aggregation of individuals. We come, we gather, we sit, we watch, we leave. But a congregation, he says, a congregation is a community where the members’ lives bump up against each other like grapes in a cluster, all connected to the same vine. And you see, because of the blood of Christ, because the blood of Christ has opened the way where we can enter into the presence of God, we have a High Priest, we are not an aggregation; that’s a fact. Because of the blood of Christ, you are not an aggregation of individuals. You’re a congregation, a cluster of grapes, that are made to bump into each other, connected to one vine. We are a congregation. That’s the word that gets used here.

So what this text is telling us – we’ve got to go and be a congregation and not an aggregation. We’ve got to, in other words, become what we are in Jesus Christ – a congregation, not an aggregation. In other words, another way to say it is, this text is telling us that the people of God in the church have got to be serious about Christian friendship and relationship within the family of God. And let’s just start to move towards a close by looking at these four verbs. I’m just going to run right through them. These four verbs to see how the author, the preacher here, spells this out. How to be the community from verse 23 to 25, he just gives us four verbs.

And the first one in 23 is, “Let us hold fast.” Another way to translate that is very literally, “Let us continue to believe.” And I’ll give you the Greek word because in it you’ll hear it. It’s the verb, “katecho.” That’s where we get what we just celebrated a moment ago – the idea of catechism. In other words, it’s saying something like, “Let us walk together next to each other like living catechisms.” And one of the things I think that means is it’s calling us here, that the Christian community, the family of God here in this church, in this local church, needs to be marked by conversations when we get up and leave this place, when we’re out seeing each other, conversations that have a lot more to do with the things of God and a lot less to do with the mere superficialities. We’re walking catechisms, bumping into each other in order to talk together about, remind each other about the things of God.

The second one, verse 24, it says, “Let us consider.” And that’s a really unusual word because it means more than to reflect or think. That verb, “consider,” it’s a peculiar word that means “to think intensely over a long period of time.” And think about what? To deeply think, it says, about ways to love and do good works with each other. There’s a deacon in our church who does this a lot. He came to me just last week and he said, “Can you help me figure out a way to get a lawn service, a mowing service going for the elderly widows in our congregation?” And he said, “And maybe we could pick a street in a neighborhood nearby, right around us, and just go and start taking care of the lawn on one of those streets and we could show the love of Christ. We could make relationships with people we don’t know. We could talk to them about the Gospel. They ask us why we’re doing it and we say, ‘We just want to come and love on you.’” He was doing 24, verse 24 – “Let us consider.” It’s a word that means deep reflection over time about ways and practices defined to show the love of Christ to people. It’s saying, “Let’s think about this together. Let’s do this together.” That’s what that words means. He was doing it.

Verse 24 again, it says, “Let us think deeply of how to stir one another up.” Now this is the most surprising of the four because if you look up this word in a Greek dictionary it’s going to say “to stir one another up” means to literally “to irritate” or “to exacerbate.” This verb here means, the most literal definition is, “Let us irritate one another towards love and good works.” In other words, deep, intimate community, real Christian friendship is friendship that comes along and tells the truth; it’s iron sharpening iron. It’s coming and saying, helping shake up people that might be falling, that might be getting cold to the Gospel and saying, “Let me shake you. Let me talk to you. Let me bring you along. Let me help you. Let me help you find ways to serve.” It means to irritate. It means to bring people along to the point of being exacerbated in Christian friendship. It means truth-telling; iron sharpening iron.

And then lastly, verse 25, “encouraging one another.” And this is another verb that we hear quite often. A Greek word that we hear in English, “parakaleo.” And “parakaleo” has the sense of coming alongside people in the church community who are struggling and really need a friend, and really need somebody to sit with them, to counsel them. It means when people enter into a relationship where they say, “Let meet together and talk with one another and counsel one another through the wisdom of God by the Word of God, working through life’s problems together.” It’s personal, deep, Christian friendship. It’s translated “encouragement.” It’s encouragement plus so much more. That’s what the word “parakaleo” means. It really asks, “How can I help other people grow? How can I help these believers in here grow? How can I seek it?”

Now here’s the summary. Are we, am I deeply, intensely thinking about encouraging, stirring up, holding fast, being a catechism for another person, drawing near together based on the blood of Christ, being intentional about our time directed towards other people? Is this part of my week? Is this part of my weekly schedule? That’s what this is calling us to. It’s thinking carefully together towards good works that display the love of God to people. It begins in here, “Do not neglect to meet together,” but it doesn’t stop here; it can’t stop here. You can’t do all this in here. The body has to be alive outside of this place living.

And we’ll close with this. When you look back at this section and all these verbs, one of the things that jumps out is the “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love,” to agape, to the love of Christ, “and good works.” And what that’s saying really is that a community, a community that is not living like an aggregation but is living like a congregation, it bears fruit. There’s evidence. And the evidence that that community is truly a Christ-centered, growing community, is that people are stirring one another up towards love, good works, both inside the church and outside the church. Because you see, because God has destroyed the inner ring of all human performances, we’ve got to be about everybody. It says less about me and more about others; less about me, less about even people like me. I’ve got to get outside of my own enclave. I’ve got to go after people in love that are not normal for me. That’s really the extent that this is calling me to.

And let me just close with a story. The story of Mez McConnell. He’s been mentioned in the pulpit several times. David Strain has mentioned him. He is the founder, he’s a pastor of a ministry called 20schemes. And 20schemes is a church planting ministry to the poorest and most difficult twenty neighborhoods in all of Scotland. We’ve just ordained one of our own, Wesley Strebeck, to go help with a church plant within the domain of this ministry. It was founded by a man named Mez McConnell. And Mez, when he was twelve years old, was convicted of assault in England. And when he got out from the detention center for that at age 13, he saw a friend stabbed to death. And he took the friend and tried to get him to the hospital but the friend died in the car. And he said, he writes and tells about his testimony, he says that when that happened he asked, he says, “I asked myself, ‘What’s the point of life?’ and I said, ‘There is none.’” And so he said, “I decided to turn and just free myself from the misery, the poverty that I was living in.” And so he and a couple of friends of his stole 2000 pounds from a bank in England. And they fled to Spain when he was 14 years old.

And he got caught there, he got arrested, he got deported, and later on in life when he got past some of the consequences of that, at 19 years old he had the chance to kind of start a new life. And immediately, it failed and he was homeless. He had no home; he lived on the streets. And he said that when he was 20, a group of people pulled up to him in a car and they got out and he said that the car was nice and the people were all “squeaky clean,” and they helped him. And they said that he could be saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and that he could have his life changed by Jesus Christ. And he and a friend of his, he records, threw rocks at the car and forced them to get out of the neighborhood. And a year later, Mez stabbed a man and the man nearly died but he didn’t die and Mez went to prison. And he had been in prison for a little while and two Christians came to the prison, and he later found out that they had travelled 300 miles from a local church to meet with anybody at the prison who would meet with them. And they sat him down and he records that “they treated me like a human, and that really changed me; that really impressed me,” he wrote.

And when he finally hit the time later in life for parole, he had nowhere to go. And his parole officer said, “Look, if you don’t have an address to put down, we cannot release you. You have to stay in the prison.” And Mez called up one of the two men that had visited him a long time ago in the prison, that shared the Gospel with him, and he said, “Can I put your address on my parole sheet? I won’t come. I just need – I’ve got to put something down.” And the man said, “I’ll do better than that. You put my address down and you come live with me.” And Mez came and he lived with the man and Mez said as soon as he was there, he said, “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t drink. The Holy Spirit would not let me sleep. In this house I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus Christ.” And one day he said, “I woke up and I said, ‘I’m going to serve the Lord the rest of my life.’” And God has used Mez – God has used Mez to bring so many people in poverty stricken neighborhoods in Scotland to come to faith.

And you know why? You know how that happened? It’s because one Christian man, that we don’t know his name, at some local church, turned to his brother, one of the members of the family of God, and said, “Hey, let me consider how I can stir you up to come with me to do a good work, to express the love of Christ to people that are so vulnerable, that don’t know it.” You see, it was just born out of people going to church, looking across the aisle and saying, “Do you want to come with me to a prison tomorrow and tell people about the Gospel?” And that’s Christ’s blood-bought community doing the work of ministry. That’s what verse 22 to 25 is all about. The Christ blood-bought community is the only place where you can find the freedom, a community of freedom to truly be selfless and to love neighbor, because it’s all grounded in the agape of Jesus.

Let’s pray.

Father, we ask that You would stir up our hearts now that we would long to stir up each other to the love of Christ, the message of the Gospel taken out together. We give thanks that we have been brought near by the blood, that we can step into the presence of God, that we’ve got the family of God as our bedrock. Lord, we praise You tonight and we ask for hearts, by the Holy Spirit, to live in the ways that You tell us in verse 22 to 25 here. Give us this heart, Spirit of God. We ask it in Christ’s name, amen.

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