Holiness and Hospitality

Scripture Introduction:

It’s always a little difficult to preach a sermon on a passage such as . There is a difference between a shotgun and a rifle. A rifle is going to be pointed and impactful. It’s scope of impact will be smaller but where it does hit it’ll be effective. A shotgun blast has a wider range of impact and will hit more of a target but each hit will be less impactful. I think preaching really ought to be more like a rifle than a shotgun. A bunch of scattered thoughts that will minimally hit everybody, I don’t think is as impactful as one main point which hits the target.

But sometimes we need the shotgun blast. And that’s really what is like, or at least that’s what it looks like on the surface—a bunch of loosely connected directives. Yet, I think it would do us well to ask the question— “why these”? Of all the stuff the author of Hebrews could pack into that shotgun shell why did he pick these things?

This morning we’re going to look at the first 6 verses and we’re going to do that because I believe they are connected. And then I think I see a thread in verses 7-19 that we’ll look at next week to close out Hebrews. What I see here is a thread