Holiness Through Gratitude

Hebrews 8, starting in verse 7. Not care for them, says the

Lord, for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After those days, says the

Lord, I will put my laws into their minds, and upon their hearts I will write them. And I will be their

God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen, and everyone his brother, saying,

Know the Lord, for all will know me, from the least to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.

When he said a new covenant, he has made the first obsolete, but whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear.

Let's pray. Lord God, lofty promises that your people have seen the realization of.

Lord help us this morning to understand. Help us to understand the riches of your mercy, and the greatness of your promises.

Lord, that you are long -suffering with your people, willing that none would be judged and condemned, but instead that we would be your son's inheritance, and that we would be your people, and you would be our

God, Lord, and that you would live among us. We can scarce imagine it, and yet it is reality.

You have promised it, and it is so. So Lord, help your people to see, and to walk in it, and to have faith.

It's in your name I pray, amen. Thousands of years ago, a man named

Abraham, you might have heard of him, had won an improbable battle against four mighty kings, with only his 318 trained men.

He brought his nephew out of captivity, and then amazingly gave a tithe and offering to a mysterious man who was greater than himself.

This man is a man of mystery. His name is Melchizedek. This man,

Abraham, he was the father of God's chosen people, and his greatness is known across the whole world even today.

Three world religions are tied up in honoring and commemorating Father Abraham.

But he gave a sacrifice, which is always made from the weaker to the stronger, to a man of mystery with the title

King of Salem. And Genesis 14 tells us that Melchizedek was a priest of God Most High.

This priest and King of Salem brought a meal of bread and wine to bless the lesser

Abraham. And then he offered the word of God in a prophecy saying, blessed be

Abram of God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High who has delivered your enemies into your hands.

Then Abraham gave Melchizedek a tenth of everything that he owned, as unto

God himself. And that tenth was a lot. Abraham owned a lot.

This mysterious figure from the beginning of days is the meat of spiritual things that God, the author of Hebrews, desires the church to understand.

See, we are in the elementary things, much like we've seen in 1 Corinthians. As we take a break, we see that there is a frustration in the apostles that the people would move on from the milk, from the basic things, into the meat.

But until you get the milk, until you have the basics, there's no way to understand the deeper mysteries and to truly be a spiritual man.

Hopefully it is in humility that I will endeavor this morning to help us eat some meat and not bake turkey.

Good meat. See, this Melchizedek, he doesn't disappear.

He comes back two times in Scripture after Genesis 14. David wrote of the coming

Messiah in the most quoted Scripture in the New Testament, Psalm 110. And in verse 4 of Psalm 110, he says, the

Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, speaking of the Son of God. He says, you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.

This man, Melchizedek, was a man who had no Levitical lineage. He did not descend from the fathers of priests, but he foreshadowed

Christ with communion, with blessing, and the promise of peace that was coming.

And this thing that he foreshadowed was a greater thing even than him who our father Abraham gave a tenth of all he owned.

This promise was of the coming great high priest of the line of David, who would crush the chains of oppression of sin and death that were foreshadowed by the oppression of Egypt against God's people so many years before.

See, this sermon today is titled, Holiness Through Gratitude, and the reason might not yet be apparent, but the

Scripture tells us in Psalm 32, 1, how blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

In order to be holy, we must be sinless. In order to be sinless, we must be made something besides fallen humans, and that would take a miracle.

Could you hear the urgency in the Scripture last week as Paul said, are you just merely humans?

It's an impossible situation, isn't it? But Jesus said in John 3 that all things are possible with God.

This morning I want us to look and hopefully in my humble way that I can show and maybe excavate and show a facet of the beauty of what

God has done. It is enormous. The reality of what has happened changed the world.

The enormity of what had happened has changed everything, and nothing will ever be the same again. Let's eat the good succulent meat this morning, and let's look and gaze and consider the great high priest who has left zero room for us to look back.

Because if you look back, you would be like the fool, we want to be wise like Peter who said when he was asked, are you going to leave me too,

Peter said, where would we go? You have the words of life. So let's be reminded of what has happened.

I'm going to have to do this very quickly. Structure of Hebrews, all of Hebrews in hopefully a minute here.

Hebrews starts by telling you, I know Corey's laughing at me, audacious, right? Hebrews starts by saying that there is a greater thing who has come, and that is

Jesus Christ. He is greater than the angels, he is greater than Moses, he is greater than Joshua, he is the rest that was promised to all of the patriarchs of old.

Jesus is the Sabbath, and he created the Sabbath. Jesus is the king, but even more importantly, as the author keeps building up, he builds up to a climax, and if you're studying at home and if you read

Hebrews, the high point of Hebrews is Hebrews 7. He wants to get there, and Hebrews 7 is a very strange piece of text indeed, because it is the story of Melchizedek, and the author of Hebrews goes much further than anything we would have gotten in Genesis or in Psalms.

Much further. Because the Spirit led that author of Hebrews, who I believe to be

Paul, led him to see the significance of Melchizedek, and how it is the pinnacle of the

Christian life. Understand that what he wanted the people of Hebrews to know is that there was nothing to go back to, because Melchizedek changed the whole priestly order, and Jesus is his descendant, a mysterious descendant, because Jesus is

God, and Melchizedek was a man without lineage. So 7 gives us the climax of a great high priest who is greater than any of the

Levitical priests, because he existed before the Levitical line ever existed, which

Melchizedek did. Levi was not born yet, and he was this great high priest.

And then we get from chapters 8 until the end, the fallout, the application. So what do we do now that we have this great high priest who has made atonement once and for all for everybody who believes?

If you spit on that, as chapter 10 warns us, if you spit on that, then the blood of Christ has no power over you, because he would have to be crucified again, and you are out.

There is a warning. Don't go back. Don't go back. Don't go back. So what do we have to ask?

What are you going back to? Well, the people wanted to go back to the religious rites and the religious rituals, the focus on works, the focus on lineage, the focus on all of the physical things that the people of Corinth are valuing so highly, the outward manifestations of religion, but not the inner wisdom that God creates in his people when he fulfills the new covenant and gives you a new heart that can understand him.

Let's read our main text this morning. It is the fallout from Melchizedek, Hebrews 8, verses 1 through 7.

Now, the main point in what is being said is this. We have such a high priest who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens, a minister in the holy places and in the true tabernacle, which the

Lord pitched, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices.

So it is necessary that this high priest also have something to offer. Now, if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are those who offer the gifts according to the law, who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.

Just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the tabernacle. For see, he says, that you make all things according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain.

But now he has obtained a more excellent ministry by as much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises.

For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second.

So as much as Scripture does, if you want to read Scripture rightly, I want to tell you this. The key to the Christian life is looking back and looking forward.

Look back at what God has done before, look back at the people that have been faithful and run the race, and then look forward to what

God has in store to you. But we don't look back longingly to the shadows.

We look at the substance and view the shadows through the substance. This is a difficult text, in case you didn't notice as we're reading through.

It's grandiose, it's huge, it's metaphysical. But it goes to a really simple problem that we have as human beings, and that is this.

Man's natural bent is to focus on the good -bad balance.

We feel debt keenly. No more keenly than yesterday morning when

I forgot to show up to an appointment. And I'm going to tell you, let me tell you the bent of my dirty old human heart being merely human.

My idea is that I want to pay something to make it right.

And it's hard for us to understand grace because we are creatures who long for the rigid rules of the law.

We just don't want to be held accountable to it. See, when we make a mistake, we want to get even. We don't want to walk around with somebody having something over us.

We want to do anything we can to make it even so that we're okay. And this is the natural bent of man.

This is being merely human. I've got to get better before God will even want to talk to me.

I've got to clean up a little bit before I can get in the church. How am I ever even going to talk to my wife about the stupid things she's doing when

I'm being so stupid? You see the deal? We always have this fulcrum going on. There's a lever and a balance.

And so it is. The people in Hebrews were balancing Jesus with the temple worship.

Are we really going to leave this behind? This is what our fathers did. This is what we have to do.

And the author says, no, because Jesus can't be that kind of earthly priest. Because that earthly temple was a shadow.

Moses was following instructions. Jesus was going home. There's a difference.

See, man's natural bent to focus on the good -bad balance, and you'll hear it all the time. What are you going to tell

God? Well, I think my good works outweighed my bad. Well, the Bible says something very different, doesn't it? It says that your good works are completely worthless.

Are you going to barter with God, the creator of the universe, over your pitiful good works when you don't accept the promises that he's given, when you don't accept his sovereignty?

What good work can you offer when you rebel against the creator? There is none. But see, it is also a trap when we work this into our own personal relationships.

Remember, we have to bear with one another. We have to forgive. We have to believe the best.

See, man's natural bent is very merely human. It's never been the reality with God, because God is so transcendent that good is completely and utterly defined by one thing, and that is what brings

God glory. And God is so transcendent above man's works that even bad works of man glorify

God, because he has sovereignly appointed them. See, there's going to be two ultimate glories, and that is going to be the glory of God's mercy in saving the lost through his blood, or the glory in God's righteousness at pouring out his wrath against the wicked.

And that's where it ultimately will be summed out, which side are you going to be on? We see that in this text, right?

This text, Hebrews 8, 1 through 7, it has almost nothing to do with humans, does it?

Look at the language. The tabernacle was not built by humans, it was built by God. This high priest who was coming, he's not of earth.

He couldn't have been an earthly priest because he wasn't a descendant of Levi, so he's a greater high priest that supersedes the shadows.

Why are you worrying about Levi when you've got Jesus? Anybody worrying about Levi today?

The answer is yes. There's lots of people who are depending on their religious activity and their works of penance to try to make things right with God, and it is a fool's errand.

We also see from this passage that there was a human tabernacle that was made to mimic the throne of God in heaven.

It was an earthly shadow of a heavenly reality, and it was a perfect cube. And Moses was told how to do every single part of the tabernacle.

Moses was not creatively building an altar to God. God gave him step -by -step instructions, and if you've ever read that part of Scripture, it's kind of a challenge, is it not?

A lot of acacia wood, a lot of gold inlay, a lot of cedars from Lebanon, okay?

And things the size of pomegranates, all right? It's a long, arduous task, but the reality of that is that we can learn from the

Scripture. God does not honor us cavalierly coming up and demanding things from Him.

He will be worshiped as He prescribes, and anything else is the pride of man. You see, this temple that was a shadow on earth, it was unapproachable on earth except by a certain ordained lineage on a certain day after certain rituals and at great risk.

There was cherubim woven through the curtain of the Holy of Holies, just like at the Garden of Eden where there would be an angel with a flaming sword that if you tried to get back into Eden, the sanctuary of God, you would be cut into pieces.

But it also similarly meant blood is required to enter in before God because sin requires blood.

The wages of sin is death. By sin, blood will be spilled. There is no atonement with God.

There is no peace with God without blood because His righteousness demands it. It was folly to enter into the

Holy of Holies without a blood sacrifice. The flaming angel sword -bearing cherubim in the curtain would tell you that.

And so the priest entered with a tremendous amount of fear on that holy day.

See, to enter this place, this place, this shadow with sin was to die.

It was not something that you were whistling as you walked into the curtain, as you were making atonement as the high priest for the sins of all of your people.

A heavy thing. But see, we know this too, that this shadow, it's spoken of in Revelation.

And this temple, this tabernacle in Revelation is at such a scale. It's like from the size of New York to Arizona, at each side of this cube that is described in Revelation, where what it would be is this is to show the insignificance of the shadow.

Listen, too often, Revelation is grossly misinterpreted, horribly misinterpreted.

But understand this, when God describes this cube -like temple, He is showing what the obsolescence of the

Old Covenant is. Revelation is above all, it's a letter that says the old is gone and the new is here.

And this new temple is so huge that if you were to pine for these curtains in the old temple, you would be what we would call in the common vernacular, an idiot.

That would be idiotic. Because this thing that's the size of half the United States is where God dwells.

Now who knows how big the thing really is, but I don't think it's going to come down and land on the United States and reach into outer space.

I don't think so. But I do think the heavenly temple is one that is so significant that it should make us utterly forget the old one except for looking what it pointed to.

The whole setup was a shadow. And the shadow of the Old Testament always ran alongside a greater promise and a greater reality.

That's what Hebrews is all about. Hebrews is the second most Old Testament book of the New Testament behind Revelation.

It is so soaked with Old Testament. And the reason why is because it was a confusing time.

Because the shadows become the reality for people and people want to go back to something they understand. Now, can you honestly say that when you hear that read out of Ezekiel or when you hear the

New Covenant in Jeremiah, you go, oh yeah, that's pretty easy, I understand most of that. No, you don't. Because this is the meat and it's very difficult to understand the promises of God and it's even more difficult to understand that when you look at what came before that was so important that's given way.

And now we know that it's obsolete. It has no power anymore. The old shadow, the old system, the

Levitical priests, all of that incense, all of the washing, it has no power anymore because it's all been fulfilled.

It's not done away with, it's fulfilled in Christ. Christ did all of it forever. And we live in the glory of that.

The whole setup was a shadow. And to grab onto it is to try to grab onto a shadow.

You're pleasing no one except yourself. See, today and always,

God saved through the regeneration of His Holy Spirit. The understanding that was faulty of Hebrews, the understanding of the old people of God was that they thought that they were being saved by their lineage.

Read it with the Pharisees. They believed over and over again that they were right with God because they were physical sons of Abraham.

Today we misinterpret the passage. Galatians lays it out very clearly for us. Do you know who the promise to Abraham is given to?

It's not to Israel. It's to his seed. And then Paul tells us in Galatians, who is the seed of Abraham?

Jesus. And he specifically says, not seed plural, seed singular.

This seed is Jesus. And so today, the blessings of Abraham are given to Christ through His people.

We are descendants of Christ, given His blessings. It's not that complicated. But we've made a hash of it.

Understand that the shadow was so obsolete at the time of Hebrews that Jesus wouldn't have even been allowed to enter this

Holy of Holies. Do you understand that? The Son of God would not have been allowed to make atonement in the tabernacle on the

Holy of Holies. That's how it's obsolete. The new thing came and moved it out of the way.

But instead, He didn't try to go to the Holy of Holies and sit down and make atonement that way, because what

Christ did is He made His own sacrifice, which was His body, and then He didn't go into the temple to offer the sacrifice.

He went to sit at the right hand of His Father in the heavenly temple. And that's where He is today.

Every single piece of the Old Covenant was pointing to its fulfillment.

Every piece of it. And it's amazing when you look at Scripture. It's amazing when you look at the

Old Covenant through the lens of what has been brought to light in Jesus Christ, how you can see in so many ways it pointed at Christ.

I know on the road to Emmaus, when Jesus took the apostles aside and He taught them all the Scripture and how it was fulfilled in Him, they were amazed.

And friends, they passed it down. It's not a mystery. They were taught by the

Lord and they passed down the faith, once and for all, delivered through who? Through the apostles, who were taught by Jesus.

And what's the real kicker out of Hebrews 8, 1 through 7? It's that Jesus has a better ministry.

We are not cleaned, even apparently, by religious ritual, but instead by the promise of God enacted by the

Son of God. So as we look to the past, what should we see? All of your attempts to appear righteous are self -defeating.

God only values what is done in service to Him as Christians.

Now, there's a whole thing, like do bad people do good things that stabilize the earth? Yeah, of course.

That's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about what God's people are grateful for. How can we be holy?

We cannot be holy by loving the exact opposite things of holiness. When we think that our own deeds are going to make us holy, we are mistaken.

Only through having a heart that has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and that has become, from one degree to another, a more spiritual heart, can we hope to have deeds that match what we are inside.

And it is a war. It's a battle every single day. Brothers and sisters, do you feel it? Do you feel the draw of worldliness every day?

Do you feel the draw of being forgetful every day? Do you feel the draw of thinking, ah,

I'll just look at the phone this morning, maybe I don't want to pray? Have you felt it? Does it hit a little close to home?

Do you think you're accomplishing good work on your own merits and by your own power? Do I even think that there can be a sermon prepped by my own power and by my own intellect?

It's easy to fall into the trap, and it's easy to go back and grasp onto the shadows because we see the shadows.

And here's the contradiction and the problem, is when we are merely humans and we have fleshly desires, we don't see the spiritual.

Even if we know it's there, we don't see it, and we see shadows. And so we grasp for what we see, and we grab the thing that is less real than the thing we're blinded to.

Understand that one day we will all sit before the judgment seat, and our works, good and bad, are going to be laid out.

And our sins are going to be laid out, but they will be covered by the blood of Christ, and they will be cast away from us.

But what we often don't think about is we're going to see what's left of our work here, and you are going to have a deep desire in your heart on that day.

And your deep desire is going to be to worship Jesus Christ, your King, who you will see in His full glory with everything that your life amounted to.

Is there a competitive nature of Christianity? I think so. I think we're all going to love each other in glory, but I think also we are going to see how much trash we held onto here that's going to be burned away, and we're going to wish that we had spent our life procuring gems and things that would last.

I have to ask the question, what are we doing? What do we do? Are we like the people confused in the first century who were looking at the temple worship and being ostracized by their culture, thinking, maybe this

Jesus, I know He's good, but maybe He's not enough. I think I need to go back. This is getting too hard.

What is it that pressures us to not have heart? What is it pressures us to lose our courage and to walk away?

And I can tell you, the answer is very obvious, and you're not going to like it. It's your sin. It's your sin.

It's dirty and horrible, and let me read one of what I think is the greatest triuses on sin in the

New Testament. It is very sinful, this sin thing. You know, it's almost impossible to give hyperbole to how horrible, deadly, tricky, deceptive that sin is.

It even holds the best of us in bondage. Romans 7, 14,

Sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh.

For the willing is present in me, but the working out of the good is not. For the good that I want,

I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. For if I'm doing the very thing

I do not want, I am no longer the one working it out, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that in me evil is present, in me who wants to do good.

For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in my members, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin which is in my members."

Friends, it's not a very hopeful text. That was written by the Apostle Paul. You ever even done a thought experiment of comparing yourself to the great men of faith?

So the Apostle Paul says of himself that he doesn't do what he knows is right.

And that in his flesh, he doesn't want to concur with the law, but instead he wants to do the things that are against the law.

Paul would also say that the law awakens the desire for sin in him.

The spiritual law. This is the law that was written by God on the tablets that was given directly to man.

It is perfect and pure in its righteousness. There is no fault in the law except that the law cannot make us right with God because the rebellious fools that we are, we look at the law and when we read it, what it makes us want to do in our rebellion is to instantly break it.

We think of sins that we never thought of before when we read the law. That's what it does to us.

When we're confronted with one sin in our fleshly man, what we do is we want to move on from that sin and grab 10 more without digging the root out.

This is the folly of trying to go back to the shadows. There is an inevitable battle raging in you,

Christian, today. Sin versus obedience. Flesh versus spirit.

See, our fallen state, we're so fallen, and I want to repeat it. We're so fallen that we see the good law of God as a tool to make us more rebellious.

Have you felt proud lately? Have you felt like you're pretty good? Like you hadn't sinned in a few years? Just start reading the law.

Have you coveted? That's the one that nailed the Apostle Paul to the wall.

Every single act of sin is rebellion against God. Do not be fooled.

It's not a little pet thing that you just kind of like to do. It's not a thing that's in the shadows and that's secret and that nobody knows about.

It is a cosmic act of rebellion against your Creator. You have looked at the good that God has given you, and you decided you wanted something different of your own making.

Every single time. See, sin doesn't just sit there either.

Sin will deceive. It will entice. It will go dormant for a time. It will slow play.

It will grow gradually, and eventually, when given full fruit and it blooms out, it will kill.

See, sin loves to get us to chase dopamine, adrenaline, whatever your poison is. And then what it will do to hide is it will entice us to compare ourselves against others who we deem to be worse than us.

That's how the sin lives. Hey, I may have this little thing going, but have you seen him over there?

Think of the implicit thing in the background. God's going to look at the good versus the bad. No, he's not.

Sin loves to hide. It loves to make excuses. It loves to advance and then retreat, and it loves to slow boil us to death.

Sin is incremental. That's something Diala and I were talking about last Sunday. You don't go from pure as the wind -driven snow to having adultery in a month with no steps in between.

And many of you guys are taking the steps today. And I myself, if it's pride, if it's deceit, if it's laziness, if it's sexual immorality, if it's greed, if it's covetousness, if it's dishonoring our father and mother, if it's having other gods before God, if it's making idols, if it's taking his name in vain, whatever it is, you are currently, if you have not repented, taking steps toward the ultimate prize, which is death and sin.

It's waging a war on you. Are you awake? The war never stops.

You never get peace on this earth. And that makes the peace that we will surely have in Christ one day so much sweeter.

You're going to look at the Lord and you're going to realize something. There's no war. Can you imagine?

Have you had a taste of it here ever? Just a taste. They're often fleeting, and we spend a lot of time trying to grab that taste back.

And I will tell you, every single taste I've had in my life has been when I was surrounded by God's people.

Every single time. The taste of heaven, the foretaste of it, is with God's people.

Do you know what sin will also do? We see many examples in Scripture. When it's in full bloom, it will tell us that God will now destroy us and that we need to cover up our shame with our works before he sees us, making us even more sinful.

We're too dirty to repent. That's the sin of our father and mother,

Adam and Eve, is it not? They took their own hands and they made garments to cover their sin, their shame.

And they hid from God. The only way to be healed from sin is not to hide from God, it's to run to him.

And much of what we have to do here is we have to learn how to run to him. Let me give you the bottom line on sin.

Sin will do anything to avoid repentance. Anything.

Any lie that you can believe, any shame that you can carry, any embarrassment, guilt, any love of the lust of the flesh.

If you just like doing it too much, it just feels too good and you haven't got caught, it's not going to stay there, brother.

It's going to get worse. And it's going to destroy you. But what it'll do is it'll do anything to avoid repentance.

And people who are fools, people who are in the flesh, people who are not spiritual men or people who are dead spiritually will do anything to avoid repentance.

They will use worldly sorrow all day long. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm so sorry you were hurt by it, while all the while having no intention of turning away from it.

Our enemy knows that the priest of the line of Melchizedek has made atonement. He knows that Jesus has absorbed the just wrath for our sin.

He knows that Christ has sent our sin to the bottom of the sea in a sack, never to be found again. And he knows that Christ has brought us into the holy places to sit at a wedding feast as guests, as sons at his table.

Our enemy knows that, and he will do anything, anything to get you to be distracted, to not understand those realities.

Repentance destroys sin. It destroys it. That's why sin is so afraid of repentance.

But repentance is not fueled by shame and guilt. Get me on this. Hear me on this. Shame and guilt can be good things, but they do not fuel repentance.

Shame and guilt fuel conviction that can lead to repentance. But if you stay in the shame and guilt, the best you're going to do is worldly sorrow.

And even the damned do that. Worldly sorrow is not worth pennies in a sack.

It's not worth anything. Get rid of it. Quit making things go away with your lying worldly sorrow.

You do not rightly see your sin when you have worldly sorrow. You need to see your sin in light of what Christ has done.

Do you know what fuels repentance? And here's where we make the turn and you see the title. Repentance is fueled by love and gratitude.

It's not so much turning away from sin as it is running back to the

Father and to your King. It's fueled by affection. The strongest motivator of human behavior is love and affection.

I've believed it my whole life because I've seen it with earthly parents who love me so much. And when

I sinned against them, the disappointment, sure, it caused guilt and shame. But what was the worst thing was the break in fellowship.

And I wanted to get back to them as soon as I possibly could. And I saw it in my boy yesterday when he disobeyed his mother and I had to discipline him.

And he was shaking. And when it was over, he ran to me to hug me because the pain was not the worst thing. The disfellowship was the worst thing because he knows that I love him and he knows that he had broken the family fellowship.

See, your sin is so much less valuable than the love of God for you.

Believe it. Too often we think that it's wallowing around in guilt and that this conviction is going to turn us around.

It's not. It's not. We see it in our life. We saw it with my boy.

We see it with our spouses, right? What turns our spouses towards us and out of sin is the relationship that's more valuable.

I've seen it time and time again. I'm not going to do that and risk my spouse. That's because you love her.

You will make sacrifices for her or for him. And it turns you away from the bad activity because the relationship is more valuable.

When we truly see what God has done, it makes us desire to turn to him in love and thanksgiving.

And I think that thanksgiving is the truest marker of Christian maturity that there is.

To be thankful for what God has given you is the fuel for faith. It's the fuel for courage.

Isn't the warrior, isn't the great warrior the one who's singing and laughing with his friends and has no fear of the enemy, knowing that his cause is greater than the enemy?

Worldly sorrow is wallowing around and feeling hurt. I feel so hurt.

How many times have you heard it? I'm so hurt. Godly repentance is not being hurt.

Godly repentance is a renewal of a relationship and your sin is no more.

Or has God lied? We know what he said about your sin, that it's forgiven, it's gone, atoned for.

So how do we do this? If we look for means of pleasing God in our own efforts, all it does is, like he was warning the

Hebrews about, and like Paul is describing, what it does is it leads to religious slavery.

We have a huge amount of this today, and it can even be in this building, but we'll see it everywhere.

Remember, the whole message is you can't go back to the religious activity. It's all about a relationship with the great high priest and trusting in his work.

The whole message is that the external trappings of lineage and religious rite has been done away with and is now explicitly and completely spiritual.

Salvation was always explicitly and completely spiritual, but the shadows were so understandable to the people that they grabbed onto them.

Today it's not. Baptism's a little bit more confusing than circumcision, is it not? Is it not?

Do we baptize babies or not? Kind of confusing. Circumcision's not because God told them in the law on what day to do it.

Baptism is a little bit more unclear. Why? Because we are not a physical, fleshly people of God.

We are a spiritual people of God who have been bought by the Holy Spirit, and the markers today are spiritual because the shadows gave way, and the church of Jesus Christ is the people of God.

Are you in the body? See, for us, what we have to understand, and I hear it so many times in counseling,

I gotta do better. Listen, friends, doing better is the hopeless path to apostasy.

You will deny the faith if your mantra is, I gotta do better. You can't do better.

You don't want to do better. Let's be real. You don't want to do better because outside of repentance, the only thing that your sin scars you about is the negative consequences.

There has to be something different to get what Jesus promised us, which is the life abundant, and to live up to what has been challenged in the past.

Understand this. I came across this a few years ago, and I think it's true. I want you to think of these two truths.

Number one, Scripture is far better than you have been told for your whole life. It's far better.

It is simple to where my five -year -old can understand. And as Corey prayed this morning, it is so complex that the biggest big brains on the earth can't figure it out.

Those two things are both true. Scripture is better than you have been told. The new covenant is a thing worth diving into.

Let me give you another one. Being a Christian, it's fun. You know what it's like to have a clean conscience?

It's awesome. And that's what messed with me yesterday. I didn't have it. And I would pay a lot of money to have a clean conscience, but you can't get a clean conscience by paying money.

You have to repent, and you have to go try to make it right, and you have to depend on the grace and mercy of your fellow man.

And then the third thing that we have to do, and I'm going to flesh this one out, is that we have to consider Christ.

Think about Him. Really think about Him. Here's what we have to do. In order to be grateful for what

God has done, we have to recount what He has done. Has He done anything?

Let me give you a very short list because my time grows short. He has created us in His image out of nothing, out of the dust.

He has revealed Himself to us. He has restrained the evil of man after showing mercy by not killing

Adam, even though Adam had just committed a capital crime. He saved His people and our people today from Egypt by miraculous means.

He gave us His law. He defeated the giants of Canaan. He established the eternal throne of David.

He patiently waited through years of idolatry to reveal the Savior of the world who would die to save the world and rise again to rule the world forever.

He has established your family, your history, your church, your livelihood.

He goes to prepare a place for you. Can you imagine what that's going to be like?

He is patient for you to repent so that you'll be disciplined and grow in holiness through the love of His Son.

He has given you the riches of heaven as an inheritance, and He has made you yourself the inheritance of Jesus Christ.

He is our inheritance, and we are His inheritance. Have you considered that?

Have you considered that what Jesus desires and what the culmination of history will be is for Jesus to come into His own with His inheritance?

He looks forward. See, the death is in reverse, isn't it? We gain an inheritance by a loved one dying.

Jesus gained an inheritance by Himself dying, and then He lives. And Jesus' inheritance comes through life, not death.

He lives so that He will gain inheritance, and you live in order that He would receive

His inheritance. Jesus' inheritance is you. That's unbelievable.

Have you thought about it? Let me leave you with this one as we go. Jesus, in one of my favorite verses of the

New Testament, it says, He has prepared all of your works beforehand so that you can confidently walk in them.

Every good work that you will ever accomplish in your life has been mapped out by Jesus Christ, and it's by His power that you will accomplish them.

Put another way, you will surely accomplish every good work that He has set you out to do.

It will surely be done. It cannot fail. And you will surely gain crowns by the works that He has laid out before you.

Would you pray to God to have Him lay out more works for you? Would you pray to God that you would leave nothing on the field and that you would put everything in heaven, that you would have incorruptible inheritance?

Not corruptible where the rust and moth can get it. And church, if that is our attitude, if we believe and understand the promises of the

New Covenant, if we don't reach back for the shadow we pass, if we don't wallow in our self -righteous guilt, and we accept the forgiveness of our

Savior and walk in repentance with love for Him by seeing Him clearer and clearer, and by seeing those who walk before us, church, things are going to happen here.

And it's going to scare us, but it will be the best kind of scare we ever had in our life. I can't imagine wanting to be scared more than I want to be scared about what's going to happen here.

And it's you guys. God has appointed you to do it. Let's do it through His power.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, your people desire you.

Lord, the old things have become obsolete because that old temple that was a shadow was not big enough, and it was not heavenly enough for your purposes.

Lord, the high priest would go in one day a year, and he would have to do that every year, and thousands and thousands and thousands of bulls and goats were slaughtered every year.

And Lord, you one time for all time shed your blood in the fullness of time, and that blood has redeemed us.

Forwards in the present and backwards, your blood covered all the sins of your people.

Do we have anything to be grateful for? Is there anything praiseworthy for us to think on?

Lord, help us in our folly to think on these things. Help us to be wise and to regard what you have taught us.

Lord, help us to not be embarrassing babies accepting mediocrity in our walk with you, but instead,

Lord, that we would be more like our fathers of old, that we would be great not of our own doing, but of your spirit's power pouring out in our lives.

Lord, may we have short lists with you where we come back desiring repentance. Lord, help us not lose fellowship with you as your son

David wrote. Lord, take not your spirit away from us, but restore in us a clean heart, and then we will worship you, and we will worship you forever.