Jesus Is Better - 15

Jesus Is Better - 15

Introduction

You were built to endure. According to National Geographic, you can survive for just 2 to 3 minutes without air, but with training it's possible to hold your breath for 11 minutes. You can survive for 10 minutes at 300° F. You can endure 30 minutes of exposure to 40° F water. You can survive for up to 7 days without water. You can survive for about 45 days without food. God has designed your body for endurance. He has done the same for your soul.

TS - For the last few months we have listened in as the Preacher of Hebrews has pleaded with his audience to stay the course. Their faith in Christ had brought much pain and heartache for them, something their previous Jewish faith had not done. Now they are facing persecution…loss of jobs, loss of relationships, loss of homes, they are isolated, they are mistreated. 

As they are tempted to revert back to Judaism and their easy way of life, he pleads with them that Jesus is Better. He is better than the OT patriarchs. He is better than the OT sacrificial system. He is better than anything they have experienced before. And if he is better, then he is worth it. 

He has been urging them to maintain their faith in and faithfulness to Christ. In chapter 11 we were given an overview of what that faithfulness looks like. Person after person, life after life, showed their faithfulness to God, no matter the results. Some were rewarded with earthly success and wealth because of their faith…kings like David and Solomon, while others were rewarded with homelessness and death…prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah. No matter what road their faith led them down, they were faithful to the Lord.

Now, after seeing all those great examples of faith, we are shown the ultimate example. Jesus is better.

- Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. 4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

Faithfulness is pictured for us as a great race. That’s a good analogy, which we will see more as we walk through this. His call to them, and God’s call to us—finish the race. How are we going to do that? Two steps to take to remain faithful:

1. LOOK TO THE FINISH LINE

“Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…” Since so many faithful men and women have gone before us, we can keep going. They’ve proven to us that it is possible to not give up. They faced as much or more than any of us ever will, yet were faithful to the end. They are witnesses, not in the sense that they are creepily watching us from the heavenly stadium. Those who have gone before are witnessing to us of the life of faith and the glory of endurance. That’s the call here…endurance. It’s mentioned 3x in these 4 verses. What is repeated is important.

“Lay aside every weight…” If we are going to remain faithful to the Lord for a lifetime, we are going to have to keep running. Anything that might hold us back, hinder us in any way from our faithfulness to Jesus, has to go. These are all athletic ideas here…lay aside every weight. A modern way to understand that is the little weight baseball players use in the on-deck circle. You slide that little metal weight over the handle and down onto the barrel and take a few swings. The added weight makes the bat seem lighter when you take it off. No one keeps the weight on for their at bat. That would be stupid. You take the weight off and swing away. What is it that can keep you hindered from faithfulness? 

—a relationship that is too tempting 

—a friendship that leads to idiocy 

—a business practice that reveals corruption

—apathy 

—addiction

“…and sin which clings so closely…” Obviously if we are going to be faithful, then sin is going to be in our way, an ever-present obstacle. Because of sin this race of faith is not an easy jog with clear lanes. At best there are some hurdles. Most of the time its an adventure race that is a collision course with the sin in our lives. We’ll come back to that in a minute. That word “sin” is singular. He’s referencing their specific sin of unbelief. That has been their biggest struggle. They are tempted towards unbelief in Jesus, toward not trusting in him. That is the opposite of faith. 

“let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” We clear our lane of anything that hinders and we run. The word means “progress.” We progress ever forward, one step at a time. The reason endurance is needed is because the race is hard. Those of you who run, you know this. It’s hard to keep going. Ironically enough, the Greek language communicates this well…the word for race is “agonize.” So how do we keep going? v. 2.

“looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” Jesus is the finish line. He is the goal. To be with him, to be like him, that is what we are after. We so deeply cherish him we want to be with him. We so deeply admire him we want to be like him. Notice the two titles he is given here:

—founder of our faith—he got this whole thing going. He is the one who is responsible for saving us, forgiving us. It was his action at the cross, and his resurrection that has secured our eternal life. He’s the initiator, the author, the pioneer (some translations even put it as trailblazer) of our faith.

—perfecter of our faith—he is the one who takes the mess that we are and does incredible transforming work. He perfects us. The idea behind the word ‘perfect’ is mature, complete. As we progress in our agony/race, he is maturing us, making us more like him. We will pick back up on this later too.

“who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Look to Jesus, the finish line. Why? Because he set the pace. He crossed the finish line first. He did not give up. He endured the cross, despising (not fearing) its shame, and sat down with God, work completed. He already won the race, you just have to finish. “For the joy that was set before him” links us back to the first verse that ends with “run the race set before us.” Same word. We keep running the race because there is joy at the finish line.

v. 3 “Consider him who endured…” Again, look to the finish line. Consider Jesus. Pay attention to him (this is what he called them to in chapter 2 when he said “pay much closer attention”). This word for “consider” is a great one. It is a math term that means to “add it up.” The ancients did math differently than we do. We add numbers down and draw a line for the sum. They added them up and drew a line at the top. He’s telling them, “Hey, we’ve looked at all this stuff over the last several chapters…add it up. We’ve looked at all these OT heroes…add it up. Draw the line and you’ll see that Jesus is the answer the problem. It all adds up to him.

“so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.” These are two more athletic terms, ones used by Aristotle to refer to athletes who collapsed in exhaustion after crossing the finish line. It’s ok to collapse in exhaustion and stop running…AFTER you cross the finish line! 

“In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” As we run we are struggling to keep pace, struggling to stay faithful. And no matter how hard the race gets, it doesn’t come close to the cost that the founder of our faith had to pay. It cost him his very life. In our struggle, we haven’t shed blood like he did. There is a great turn of phrase here in the original language (I know I don’t usually get this much into the original language, but this stuff is just fun). Remember, the Greek word for race is “agonize.” Well the Greek word for struggle is “antagonize.” We are to have an antagonistic posture regarding sin…we fight it, we are opposed to it. So as we run the agonize, we ant-agonize sin.

TS - So to be faithful to Jesus, we keep our eyes on Jesus, the finish line of our faith. There’s a second step to take to finish this race.

2. ACCEPT THE TRAINING YOU NEED

Now, before we read the next section of verses, we need to clarify something. The text is going to use the word ‘discipline’ several times. There is a difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what happens to you to repay you for something you’ve done wrong. When you were a kid and did something wrong, your parents punished you…maybe they spanked you, grounded you, etc. That was the penalty for your action. 

That is NOT what this text is talking about. God does not punish us for our sins. While there are sometimes natural consequences for your sin, which God does not always rescue you from, he does not hand down a penalty for our sin. Why? Because he already punished someone else! Jesus paid the penalty for your sin. You sinned and Jesus took the punishment so you didn’t have to. His death on the cross was the divine payment required for your sin. That’s already been taken care of. 

Discipline is something different. When you hear that word when we read through this, don’t think punishment…think training. Think maturing. God disciplines us, meaning he corrects, he matures, he trains us. And that is exactly what v. 2 said Jesus is…the perfecter, the maturer, the trainer of our faith. What we are going to read now is how God does that.

- 5 And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,

    nor be weary when reproved by him.

6 For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,

    and chastises every son whom he receives.”

7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 11 For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

12 Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

These Christians are in the middle of incredibly difficult circumstances. How should they view what is happening to them? Does God not love them? Is he punishing them? Have they angered him? What lens do you view the hard circumstances you go through?

Hebrews gives us this revolutionary idea…view it as discipline. Not punishment, but training. God is allowing you to go through these things for the purpose of maturing you. Just as our earthly fathers, he says, have disciplined/trained us, God does the same. Now, we may not have liked it when it happened, but it helped form us. Those course corrections enabled us to grow in wisdom. We have been able to learn which paths aren’t good for us and which ones are. God sovereignly orchestrates the circumstances of our lives for that very purpose. This is a HUGE NT theme:

- Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

- 2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Psychologist Jonathon Haidt had a hypothetical exercise: Imagine that you have a child, and for five minutes you're given a script of what will be that child's life. You get an eraser. You can edit it. You can take out whatever you want. You read that your child will have a learning disability in grade school. Reading, which comes easily for some kids, will be laborious for yours.

In high school, your kid will make a great circle of friends; then one of them will die of cancer. After high school this child will actually get into the college they wanted to attend. While there, there will be a car crash, and your child will lose a leg and go through a difficult depression. A few years later, your child will get a great job—then lose that job in an economic downturn.

Your child will get married, but then go through the grief of separation. 

You get this script for your child's life and have five minutes to edit it. What would you erase? Wouldn't you want to take out all the stuff that would cause them pain? That’s tough, right? We naturally want to keep ourselves, and those we love, from any hardship. But is that best? John Ortberg comments on that psychologist’s hypothetical exercise:

“If you could wave a wand, if you could erase every failure, setback, suffering, and pain—are you sure it would be a good idea? Would it cause your child to grow up to be a better, stronger, more generous person? Is it possible that in some way people actually need adversity, setbacks, maybe even something like trauma to reach the fullest level of development and growth?”

According to God, that is absolutely the case. Allow him to use the challenges of your life to mold you and shape you into the person he has called you to be. Let him train you. Because you’ll never know what level of training you need to complete the next leg of your race. If you don’t let him train you this time, perhaps you’ll collapse in exhaustion before the finish line. 

T.D. Lea - “God allows all Christians to experience hardship so that they might develop holiness. Even though God’s chastisement seems hard for the time, it will eventually produce righteousness in those who follow Him.”

- Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.

God has called us to run with endurance. To finish the race. To keep the faith. Cross the finish line. We can do that because those who have gone before us have done exactly that. We can do that because Jesus did exactly that. He won the race, we just have to finish it. We do that by looking to the finish line, and by accepting the training we need.

Conclusion

For the next few minutes we are going to celebrate this together. First, we are going to sing about how good our Father is, that he loves us enough to discipline us, thus enabling us to finish the race. Then we are going to take communion and remind ourselves that the race is not ours to win. Jesus already did that. By his death and resurrection, he has already secured the victory.