The Pioneer of our Faith
Notes
Transcript
Pioneers
Pioneers
This is the 4th sermon of the series I started a few weeks ago thru Hebrews. When I introduced it, I told you that this sermon was written in the 60s.
1960s? No. I was born in 1960, it’s a little older than me.
1860s? No. It’s a little older than that, too.
The 60s. About 1,947 years ago. NT history. Hard for us to process things that happened so long ago.
The US is less than 250 years old.
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
The pilgrims came over in the 1600s, landed on Plymouth Rock.
We declared our independence from Great Britain in 1776.
Everything started on the east coast and pioneers led the rest of us west and it wasn’t that long ago that the migration occured.
Pioneers lead, forge the trail, establish the new settlement, and others join them creating the towns and cities we know today.
My 8-great grandfather was Daniel Boone. He was a famous pioneer who w/ his wife Rebecca and their 10 kids settled in Kentucky. They led the migration of ppl who wanted to move off the coast and build farms and ranches in the lush grasslands some miles inland.
And, as the politicians were signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he was establishing what became Booneville on the KY River.
It took another 100 years for other pioneers to lead the migration into the American SW. And maybe we don’t realize just how recent it all happened and how closely related we are to the ppl who settled out here.
In 1901, T.C. Schnebly moved his family from the midwest to Oak Creek. A year later he opened a needed post office. He wanted to call it the Schnebly Station but that wouldn’t fit on the postmark. So, they named it for his wife, the Sedona Station.
A few years later, a nephew and his young family followed his uncle Carl and Aunt Donna out to the dry SW b/c his son suffered from asthma. Uncle Carl was T.C. Aunt Donna was Sedona. And the nephew’s daughter is Linda Van Deren.
Linda was a long-term member of MPCC, former head of our Missions Committee. Just a couple of years ago her family moved her into an assisted living apartment, first up in Flagstaff, now down in Cottonwood to be near family.
We know 2 of her daughters, Terryl was our post mistress for years here and Sonja is a waitress at the Pinewood restaurant.
Fun fact, Josephine’s restaurant in Flagstaff is a favorite special occasion place for me and Sara. It’s a little pricey, but the food is very good. It’s a remodeled house on Humphreys Street.
When Linda Van Deren would go to Josephine’s, she would always request a table in one particular room b/c she grew up in that house and the room was her bedroom and her mother would never let her eat in her room.
In the late 1800s, James and Hattie Munds settled in Oak Creek, too. To escape the summer heat they would drive their livestock up to this beautiful grassland that is our paradise now.
Imagine no RV park, self-storage, church, restaurants, gas station, country club or I-17. Just a vast meadow of thick grass surrounded by ponderosa pines.
James was tragically killed when his gun accidentally went off. Hattie’s brother, John Loy moved out here to help her with her ranching operation.
John Loy worked to improve the Munds Trail where they would drive their livestock from Oak Creek to their homestead up here and back. Munds Trail became Schnebly Hill Rd, that we enjoy driving our side-by-sides up and down today.
John Loy also brought the idea for a potato farm up here during the growing season. His potato barn is still standing just north of the RV Park.
In 1969, Hattie Munds Loy deeded about 1.3 acres to a family here in the area that in 1984 a group of people that included Gail Van Deurzen’s mother, Eva, purchased to build a new church building.
Pioneers faced the dangers, led the migration, built a homestead and founded new communities that became our paradise today.
Why the history lesson? B/C in Hebrews 2:10 Jesus is referred to as the Pioneer of our Salvation.
Jesus is our Leader who makes a way for us to join Him in Paradise.
He is the Establisher of His homestead in the Kingdom where there are many rooms for us to live in forever.
He is our Rescuer and Liberator who frees us from what would otherwise prevent us from joining Him there.
He is our Qualifier and Sanctifier who makes it possible for us to migrate there when it’s our time.
He is the Founder of the organization of ppl who will be settlers in his kingdom
He is our Protector and Provider until we get there.
Jesus is the Pioneer of our faith who established a homestead in Paradise and a way for us to get there when it’s our time to go.
Just like the Schneblys, Munds, and Loys homesteaded in our Paradise here where we’ve been able to migrate and settle today.
No one else has come close to doing anything similar to what He has done for us, Christ Above All.
Homestead in Paradise
Homestead in Paradise
It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified:
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
a son of man that you care for him?
You made them a little lower than the angels;
you crowned them with glory and honor
and put everything under their feet.”,
In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
There is a place where Jesus reigns as the authority over all creation.
He has established a homestead where ppl will be able to settle and live forever once we leave this place.
You have heard me define grace as receiving something good you don’t deserve. Let me expand that definition a little.
Grace is when someone greater reaches down to someone lesser to give them something good they don’t deserve nor have any way to repay.
Jesus, the Greater, came down to us, the lessers, to offer us the opportunity to join Him after He returns to establish His homestead in Paradise.
We don’t deserve it. Cannot pay for it. In effect, we will be squatters on His land and He is happy to welcome us there to do it.
Quoting Psalm 8, who are we that you care so much about us to do this for us?
The implied answer to the question is He did this b/c He loves us, not b/c we are worth it.
The ultimate act of love is giving your life for another.
So, here is the supreme authority in the universe, the One who will sit on the throne and rule everything, who willingly left heaven and all its benefits to come down to earth to suffer as a person and die so that we could live.
By God’s grace He died to save us.
Death. Unless we are here for the rapture, we are all going to leave this life. We call this death.
But, the biblical definition of death is separation from God. In that sense, we will never die even as we leave this life.
Jesus suffered death so we don’t have to. This was the most painful part of his torture and crucifixion. He suffered physically.
But that paled in comparison to the emotional and spiritual pain he suffered when His Father turned His back on Him.
When in the Garden of Gethsemane, He pled w/ God to find another way if possible. He wasn’t balking at the physical pain he was about to endure.
God cannot even look at something sinful.
While on the cross Jesus took all of your sin, my sin, everyone’s sin on Himself. He had none. But in that moment, when a son would otherwise cry out to His father for comfort, all Jesus could say was, “Why have you forsaken me.”
His father turned his back when His son needed him most.
Jesus suffered that separation so that we never will never have to face a time when God turns his back on us. He will always be our Abba, Daddy, ready to scoop us up in his arms when we hurt as if we are sinless only b/c Jesus took that away and gave us His righteousness.
He now reigns over everything, even things we have no knowledge of yet. There is so much going on that we don’t know about right now. We will find out later when we get there.
Once his purpose on earth was complete, he returned to Paradise to establish His homestead so we would have a place to go once we pass from this life to the next.
He will lead us there. He is our Leader and Establisher of His homestead in Paradise where we will settle for the rest of eternity.
As the Pioneer of our Faith He is so much more. The preacher gets into that next.
Jesus homesteaded in the kingdom. We still have to get there. Like the wagon trains of old that traveled great distances to settle in the new territories, we have to find our way to the kingdom, too.
Our Pioneer makes the way for us.
Our Path to get There
Our Path to get There
In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. He says,
“I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;
in the assembly I will sing your praises.”
And again,
“I will put my trust in him.”
And again he says,
“Here am I, and the children God has given me.”
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
Jesus is the Pioneer of our salvation, the pioneer of our faith, our Captain.
Like the Enterprise on Star Trek, he went where no man has ever gone before. He settled back in the kingdom and is providing a way for us to follow him there.
He was already perfect.
What the preacher meant here is He perfectly fulfilled His one and only purpose in coming to earth, accomplished all the items on his checklist that give us the opportunity to avoid what He had to go thru.
We will have to leave this life to get there, but we will never be separated from God for even a second as we migrate to His homestead.
It was fitting for him to do this b/c he’s the only one who could. No angel, no other person is qualified themselves to do what He did so we can follow.
When we come to believe in all that Jesus is, this Pioneer and perfecter of our faith, we become more than human believers, we become family with Jesus.
In that sense, he is our brother. We are his brothers and sisters. As a result, we share in his holiness. That’s why we will never be separated from God.
He is the Founder of the organization of children of God and the head as the Firstborn among us siblings.
We are made holy by Jesus, we don’t do it to ourselves, it’s done to us at the moment we believe in and receive Jesus as the Pioneer of our faith.
IOW, when he says we are made holy, we are sanctified and Jesus is the Sanctifier. We are changed, made different from the inside out. We look different to God and are different before God.
B/C we are sanctified, we now qualified to settle on Jesus’ Homestead in Paradise.
We will have to suffer the end of our lives here before we can settle there. But whatever suffering we go thru to get there, getting there will make suffering here worthwhile.
And Jesus trusts His Father to make all this happen the way He laid it all out and Jesus followed thru.
If Jesus trusts the process, we can trust the process.
A big part of that process was for Jesus to come to earth and appear as a person Himself. He could have come in any form. He could have been a giraffe. He could have come as an alien.
But, we couldn’t relate to any of that. We can relate to Jesus because He is one of us. He felt what we feel. He went thru what we go thru.
He came as a person to save ppl and be an atoning sacrifice for us.
All of that enables us to have a relationship with Him that goes deeper than a casual acquaintance and stronger than a distant relative.
We know Him. He knows us. We know that He knows what we go thru b/c He went thru it too.
One big difference between us is he was born free as the Son of God.
We were born in captivity as slaves of the One who rules the lost world. As slaves we are bound and have to do what the One who binds us makes us do.
As children, we are free to decide for ourselves what we want to do.
Back to the story of Daniel Boone. His oldest daughter, Jemima, and 2 of her friends had been warned about wandering too far from home b/c it was dangerous. They were exposed to ppl who could do bad things to them.
They decided on their own to take the family canoe and go for a joy ride on the KY river. They were captured by a group of Cherokee and Shawnee Indians.
It took Daniel and a few other men 3 days to track them down and free them from their captors.
In captivity, they had to do what their captors made them do. As children, they got to do what they wanted to do even though it got them into trouble.
When we came to faith, we became spiritual descendants of Abraham.
A priest is the go-between between God and people. When God has something for the ppl, He gives it to the priest to deliver it.
When the ppl have something for God, they give it to the priest to deliver, as well.
When the ppl wanted to make things right w/ God and atone for their sins, the priest would sacrifice an animal to represent that atonement.
When Jesus performed the priestly function, He didn’t sacrifice another animal. He sacrificed Himself to accomplish the atonement.
What is atonement? Say an outfield makes an error allowing the other team to score 2 runs. His mistake put his team in a 2-run hole.
Then, when he comes up to bat w/ 1 runner on base, he hits a home run scoring 2 runs he has atoned for his mistake.
All even now. First, he allowed 2 to score. Then, he caused 2 to score.
Atoning for our sins makes things even w/ God.
Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross makes things even between God and us when we believe in and receive that as our atoning sacrifice.
Either I pay for my sins myself, or I ask Jesus to pay for me.
At that moment, Jesus sanctifies me.
When He sanctifies us, He frees us from captivity. We are now children of God. Satan cannot make us do anything we don’t choose to do on our own.
Satan himself wasn’t destroyed, yet. But his power over us was. We can, however, still choose to take the family canoe on a joy ride exposing ourselves to potential trouble.
That sort of temptation is always around us. Jesus was tempted just like we are. And we know he was tempted and he stood up to it w/out falling into it. He knows what we need to be able to stand up to our temptation.
We know that He knows what we need to help us avoid trouble if we will only do what He freed us to do.
That is, make mature choices.
Jesus is the Pioneer of our faith and Salvation. He homesteaded in Heaven and has made a way for us settle there, too.
No one else has done nor can do what He has done for us.
We get to follow Him to Paradise just like we followed the pioneers who settled here and enjoy this paradise while we are here.
Applications
Applications
Trust the process
Trust the process
When you believe in Jesus and receive His offer to be your Pioneer you are also agreeing to trust the process that will allow you to settle on his homestead in Paradise.
Trust the process and don’t fear whatever may take you from here to there.
Help is there
Help is there
Help is available when you are being tempted to do something dangerous that God warned you not to do.
Take the hand that is being offered and avoid the trouble.
As a child, you have the freedom to choose. Choose to ask for help and choose to take it. and avoid unnecessary trouble.
Bonds are broken
Bonds are broken
Satan can’t make you do anything.
When Jesus saved you he broke the bonds that used to bind you.
Don’t believe the lie that you have to do what your former captor made you do.
Stand strong. Stand up to it and you don’t have to fall into it.
You have the strength, be courageous and walk away.
Pioneers faced the dangers, led the migration, built a homestead and founded new communities that became our paradise today.
Why the history lesson? B/C in Hebrews 2:10 Jesus is referred to as the Pioneer of our Salvation.
Jesus is our Leader who makes a way for us to join Him in Paradise.
He is the Establisher of His homestead in the Kingdom where there are many rooms for us to live in forever.
He is our Rescuer and Liberator who frees us from what would otherwise prevent us from joining Him there.
He is our Qualifier and Sanctifier who makes it possible for us to migrate there when it’s our time.
He is the Founder of the organization of ppl who will be settlers in his kingdom
He is our Protector and Provider until we get there.
Jesus is the Pioneer of our faith who established a homestead in Paradise and a way for us to get there when it’s our time to go.
Just like the Schneblys, Munds, and Loys homesteaded in our Paradise here where we’ve been able to migrate and settle today.