Sermon Tone Analysis

It has to be experienced

While you are turning your Bibles over to Hebrews chapter 5 this morning, I will relate to you that there are some things that we have to experience to truly appreciate or understand.

Musical Experience

Seeing a musician live in concert is often one of those experiences.

Typically, you will have heard the music before in some recorded format, and you will have a knowledge or understanding of the music, but that experience of hearing it live.

We were hoping to have that experience last night, but unfortunately the Mercy Me concert was postponed due to some folks on their crew getting COVID.

The most extreme example of this I have experienced was when I saw Adele in concert.

I was not an Adele fan.

With the exception of her singing the opening theme to a James Bond movie, her music is 100% and completely not in the categories of music I typically listen to.

But my wife Kate is a fan.

So, several years ago I surprised her and we took this double decker bus that used to from Cincinnati to Chicago up and saw Adele at the United Center.

Like I said, I was not an Adele fan.

I’m not even a fan of that genre of music.

But, hearing someone with this extreme level of vocal talent in person, gave me an appreciation for her music that i would never have had before.

There are a lot of things like this.

Until you live on your own for the first time, you really can’t fully understand it.

Being a parent is one of those experiences and I while I understand the concept and have even witnessed it happening, I am positive that my wife has a deeper understanding of child brith than I do, especially after he came so quick that he had to be delivered without drugs.

Our Passage

If you have your Bibles open to Hebrews 5, we are going to be looking at verses 7 and 8 and read of Jesus experience, hopefully appreciating his work on the cross more and adopting His character more fully in our own lives.

Follow along with me as I read:

This morning we continue our series Our Great High Priest with a message entitled Reverence and Obedience

Let’s Pray

Prayers and Supplications

Jesus did what we do when we are hurt or uncertain.

When we are afraid.

Our Bible says He offered up prayers and supplications.

We see this phrase all over our Bible:

Acts

In Acts, before they knew of the resurrection, the disciples of Christ met together in an upper room and it says of them

When they met, after their Lord had been seized and then executed they reacted exactly in the way they should.

They engaged in prayer and supplication.

Paul

In Ephesians 6 as you are likely aware, Paul tells the Christian to put on the full armor of God.

He says we should be armored with the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the gospel of peace for shoes, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit.

But after having put on all of those pieces Paul says in v18 that we should be

In Philippians 4:6 Paul gives the Christian the admonition

and Paul again in 1 Tim 2:1 said that not only should prayer and supplications be made for all people but he brings prayer and supplication up another time.

In chapter 5 the discussion turns to the necessity of the church to take care of widows but Paul says it’s not just any widow that church should be responsible for.

Could you imagine.

If the church were required to take care of every widow, especially in a time when widows were some of the most vulnerable people in society, that once they became a widow they would immediately realize, hey, I better become a Christian real quick so I have someone to take care of me.

No, the requirement of someone who the church is required to care of is someone who has a real need, someone that is not able bodied to provide for themselves.

Someone who doesn’t have family that can step in to help and doesn’t live in excess and most importantly, someone who has demonstrated a lifetime of Christian character in serving the church.

But you know what else it says? 1 Timothy 5:5 says

Prayers and Supplications aren’t just something that is a thing that a Christian ought to be doing, it is foundational to the Christians life.

Prayers, being any address to God and Supplications which are simply our begging of God to intercede in some thing that is burdening our heart.

Prayers and Supplications are where the believer turns in times of crisis and we read in Hebrews 5:7 that this is exactly where Jesus turned as well.

Do you know what prayer of Jesus is being referenced here?

Turn your Bibles over to Luke 22:39 and we will read down to verse 44

See, with the reality of the cross in sight.

And I’m not talking about the device of Roman execution he was facing, but with the knowledge that He would have the wrath of God laid upon him for sinners and being able to grasp in a way that you and I never could, how much agony that would put him through.

He pleaded to God for another way.

Heard

We might not think that his prayer was heard.

After all, within the hour the High Priest would have him seized and within 7 hours he would be crucified.

He mocked and spit upon.

He would have his beard plucked and scourged by the Roman soldiers.

And then he would be hung on a cross to die.

What I am telling you this morning is that all of these things happened AND Jesus’ prayer was heard.

And, at the end of verse 7 we read that Jesus was heard for a reason, because he feared.

εὐλάβεια (eulabeia) in the Greek.

This isn’t fear like a fear of spiders or of some villain in a horror movie, no this is talking about Reverence, a deep respect and caution someone has based upon an understanding of the character of who or what is being reverenced.

Jesus asked for His fate to be changed, but in reverence he still said what nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.

Things don’t always turn out the way we want just because we have prayed to God about it.

And it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t hear you just because things didn’t turn out the way we wanted them to.

Prime example, right here.

Jesus prayed, the Father heard, and Jesus still died.

Lessons Learned

Verse 8 in Hebrews 5 continues

This is where Jesus learns something.

That almost feels blasphemous to say doesn’t it.

How can Jesus who is the Word of God incarnate, who by Him all things were created learn something?

I like what Warren Wiersby said of this passage:

How could the Son of God “learn obedience”?

In the same way any son must learn obedience: by the experiences of life.

We must remember that our Lord, in His earthly walk, lived by faith in the Father’s will.

As God, He needed to learn nothing.

But as the Son of God come in human flesh, He had to experience that which His people would experience, so that He might be able to minister as their High Priest.

He did not need to learn how to obey because it would be impossible for God to be disobedient.

Rather, as the God-Man in human flesh, He had to learn what was involved in obedience.

In this way, He identified with us.

It wasn’t just that Jesus understood and grasped what it was to be obedient, or to suffer.

But in His incarnate flesh Jesus experienced it and became intimate with that knowledge in the same way that you may understand that a singer might be amazing live, or that a lot of things change when you become a parent, or that childbirth is painful.

Until you experience those things, you haven’t learned of them intimately.

There is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson entitled Mary’s Room.

It goes something like this:

Mary lives her entire life in a room with no color, everything is black and white.

Although she has never experienced color she studies books on the subject and is educated on light and neuroscience, to the point of being an expert on the subject of color.

After Mary’s studies are complete, she exits the room and experiences color, real color for the first time.

She see’s red and she learns something new about it, she learns what red looks like.

You can know something, but then you can experience something and know it, learn about it in a different manner.

Christ learned what it was to be tempted and he learned what it was to be obedient not just in understanding but in experience and by that experience we can trust that we have a High Priest in Christ that can relate to our experiences.

Shoe Leather Theology

I like the term Shoe Leather Theology.

As Christians we can engage in all sorts of academic pursuits in order to better understand God and how he would have us live.

There are Old Testament Studies, and New Testament Studies, Studies on Church History, There is systematic theology, and scholars of Greek and Hebrew.

One of my favorite disciplines of christian theology is apologetics, or the ability to logically and reasonably defend the faith.

But at some point we need to throw some shoe leather on to all of that theology and on to all of that study and go walking around in it.

Love Your Enemies

You can understand that Jesus said in Matthew 5:44

Matthew 5:44 (KJV 1900)