Christ is risen. I invite you to take your Bible and open to the fourth chapter of Hebrews Hebrews chapter four. If you are using a Bible in the pew in front of you it is on page one thousand and three. As you're turning, I ask you now to bow your head with me for one more moment of prayer. Let's pray together. On this day of resurrection of new life in Christ, Heavenly Father, we thank you that this son whom you have sent has come and completed his work in full and is leading many to glory. We would ask now, in these moments now, that you would open our eyes to see more fully the wonders of Christ, to love more deeply the Christ whom you have declared your beloved Son, in whom you are well pleased. We ask in Jesus' name, Amen. Sometimes it just simply does not seem worth it. Faith doesn't seem to work. God can feel remote. The Bible can actually peculiarly and conspicuously seem disconnected from our own sense of reality. And as far as we can see, if we're really honest with our own hearts and our own lives, this gospel good news is really not, at least for right now. After all, what does the resurrection of Jesus Christ have to do with me balancing my checkbook? Weeding my garden? What does it have to do with my parents' declining health? The war in Afghanistan? What does it have to do with the Dow Jones Industrials? What, after all, does it have to do with my son's squabble with his Little League assistant coach? What does it have to do with my dealings with my drunken neighbor? Many of us live with a measurable disconnect between the faith that we claim in the resurrected Christ and the way in which we believe that has relevance for now. Many of us live what I like to call an IRA faith. that we invest now, but we see no benefits, no accrual until sometime yet future. We believe somehow that God is adequate for the end of the story, but somehow He does not have sufficient means to deal with me now. As we combine the apparent incongruities and inconsistencies, the injustices of our world with our perception that the gospel has a bright hope for tomorrow, the pressures and pains of our own existence sometimes lead us to long for a gospel escape from what we perceive to be an irrelevant gospel now. In it all, we tote this curious conviction that Jesus will help us tomorrow, but we're on our own for today. Many of us live that deferred faith. There are probably others in our midst this morning that actually forthrightly deny Christ. They see no reason to confess Him as Lord. They are, to date, unpersuaded what they know of the Christian faith. Perhaps that's you. Perhaps you have not yet seen the full Christ as the Scriptures present Him. Perhaps your own pains and your own sorrows have clouded your eyes to keep you from seeing Jesus for who He really is. Perhaps it is the professing Christians around you whose Jesus is really irrelevant to them. The message that we have before us today from this text of Scripture summarily is going to direct us to this point, that a gospel, a Jesus, a resurrected Son of God that is irrelevant for today is irrelevant, period. We want to give consideration to what the text of Hebrews says in terms of the relevance of the resurrected Jesus Christ for today. We want to put aside the tyranny of a trivialized Jesus, or perhaps for those of us who have deferred our faith, we want to put aside this tyrannical notion of a tomorrow Jesus. The central question then before us is this. What is the relevance of the resurrected Jesus Christ for now? Many religions, of course, have sought to postulate ideas and philosophies seeking to minimize problems. Some will even forthrightly deny suffering. created this mystical or philosophical notion to make sense of the world as best as we simply can. However, before us this morning is something radically different, cosmically different, transcendently different, as we see laid before us the resurrected Son of God who has been exalted and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. The Jesus of the end is the living Jesus of now. I want to turn your attention with that introduction now to our text before us in Hebrews 4. Starting in verse 14. Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens. Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. As we look at verse 14 of this text, we come to our first point this morning that is as follows. We are called to rest in His victory. To rest in His victory. Verse 14 says that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens. Let me make sure we understand the function of a high priest. You see, the function of a prophet is actually to deliver the Word of God to man. He is God's spokesman, spokesperson for the message, the revelation of God. You see, the priest, on the other hand, is actually moving man toward God. It is his role to take care of interceding and pleading for mercy before God. And as we saw in the last couple of weeks, especially last week, The function of the Old Testament prophet was to continually to offer these sacrifices, these blood sacrifices. Once a year, the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies to make atonements. Make intercession for the people of God. But look over at chapter 7 for just a minute with me. Turn a page to chapter 7, verses 23 to 25. There's a problem with the old covenant priest. Look. Verse 23, the former priests were many in number because they were prevented by death from continuing in office. But he, that is Jesus, holds his priesthood permanently because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. One of the grand themes in the book of Hebrews is that Jesus Christ is the all-sufficient High Priest we saw in chapter 2 and verse 17. That He is the one that has been made like us in every respect, and He has suffered, He has made propitiation, He has been the one who has satisfied the wrath of God. And He bore that judgment of God, the unfurling of God's anger for sin on His own Son. But there's something more. You see, Jesus, as we see here in verse 14 of chapter 4, is the high priest who has passed through the heavens. What does that mean that he's passed through the heavens? That is a shorthand, if you will, for the full success of the Son of God. That He is not only the High Priest who has died, He is not only the High Priest who has been the sacrifice Himself, but He has been raised from the dead. And as we saw at the very introduction of this book, Hebrews 1, 1-4, He is the Son of God who has come down. He has taken on human flesh and now He has been exalted. This is in stark contrast to the old covenant priests who died. and could never continue on in their office. This is in contrast, even indeed, to the old kings of the Old Testament who were not able to establish an eternal kingdom. This is in contradistinction from the old covenant prophets who were the mouthpieces of God, whereas Jesus Christ is the Word of God in flesh. And why does He identify with us? Why does He become the High Priest? He does so, as we saw in chapter 2, to deliver us from sin, to deliver us from evil, to deliver us from Satan. But look at verse 18 of chapter 2. Look with me. For because He Himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those being tempted. Not only does Jesus serve the work of a priest in bearing our sin, but He is the One that lives forever to intercede for us, to help us now. We are called then, point number one this morning, to rest in the victory of the Son, the One who has passed through the heavens and is seated at the right hand of the Father. I wish I had time this morning to walk us through all the way through chapters 1-5 to see the way in which God the Father speaks of God the Son. But repeatedly here in chapters 1-5, we see that it is God that has appointed the Son. It is God that has confirmed the Son's success. And that's why it's important for us to realize at the end of verse 14 what He means when He says, hold fast our confession. The language of the original text here uses a word for confession that actually means to say the same thing. That's what confession is. Did you know that? That you are actually agreeing. The question is, with whom are you agreeing? When we are called here to hold fast to our confession, our confession of the victorious Son of God, you know what we're doing? In our confession, we are saying, Yes, Father, we agree with You about what You have declared the success of Your own Son. That's what it means to hold fast to our confession. To agree with Almighty God Himself about what He has said about His own Son. We are to hold fast to our confession. Why? Because Jesus is the victor. declared by the Father. Jesus is the High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek, as we see in chapter 5 and verse 10. That is, His priesthood is an everlasting priesthood, and He lives ever to intercede for us. Rest in His victory, the author of Hebrews tells us. Look at verse 15 of chapter 4. For we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Evidently, the first century church suffered with some of the detachment syndrome that we do in the 21st century. That is, yes, we know that Jesus is the Messiah. Yes, we know that He's the resurrected Son of God. But what is the so what of today? How does that bear upon our circumstances and our situations today? And the author of Hebrews here in verse 15, having just told us in verse 14 to rest in His victory, he calls us here to receive Jesus' sympathy. to receive His sympathy. He is the one who is the identifying, sympathizing High Priest who was born scorned, who was born ridiculed, who has been mocked, who has been scourged, who has been tempted in every way like we. In every respect, the author of Hebrews says. This Jesus is the One who is in full solidarity with us. He identifies with you in your particular suffering. We have One who fully sympathizes with our weakness. There is actually right here in the text a built-in temptation. There is a temptation to read this text and say, well, I know it says that Jesus can relate to me, but can He really? Can He really relate to me in my weakness and in my battling with temptation? Can He really sympathize? He is, after all, God, isn't He? Can He really relate to me? One of the temptations here is to Think about Jesus inappropriately. To have a deficient confession. It was in the 19th and 20th centuries, right here in this country, that in response to liberal theology which sought to deny the deity of Christ, the fundamentalists, Evangelical people said, no, we must hold to what the Scripture says, that Jesus is fully divine. And so what the evangelical movement has done is unwittingly, by our appropriate exaltation of Jesus as divine, we have unwittingly marginalized His humanity. And we need to recognize that Jesus is not only fully God, but He is fully man. There is no way you can read Hebrews 2, verses 10-18 and read chapter 4 and verse 15 without recognizing that the claim here is that Jesus fully identifies with us in our suffering. Why? Because He became like us in every respect. But there's another temptation. You might say, well, can He really relate to me for this reason? After all, it says, He sympathizes with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. How can Jesus really relate to me if He has never fallen prey to temptation? Let me ask you a question. When is it that temptation is at its greatest intensity? After you've given in to it? or when you have continued to say no to it. You see, the very reality that He did not fall prey to temptation is the basis by which the author of Hebrews can say that He identifies with us. It is because Jesus continually said no that He fully identifies with us as our sympathizing Savior. Let me press this a little bit further. The entire argument here in chapters 1-5 about Jesus' being a help in time of need to us is grounded in the fact that He sympathizes with us. And for those of us that defer our faith and claim Jesus as our ultimate Savior and deny Him as our all-sufficient sympathizer have a deficient faith. The author of Hebrews will go so far as to drive us to this conclusion. We do not have a real Savior if we do not have a real sympathizer. But the fact of the matter is we have the One who is comprehensively both. He fully identifies with us in our testing and our temptation because he succeeded. My family and I lived some years in Eastern Europe in the country of Bulgaria. Two weeks after we moved to Sofia, Bulgaria, the capital city of that former communist country, I had to buy a vehicle, a vehicle that would hold all eight of our family, and I found in the city of Sofia, with almost two million people, I found three vehicles that would work. Not three types, I found three vehicles. And one of the things that you discover about buying vehicles in that part of the world is that all of the used cars are actually rejects from Western Europe. And when you go shopping for these vehicles, you also know a couple of things. One is that the odometer has been rolled back. You just don't know how far back. But you also know that the best parts under the hood have all been removed and replaced with other crummy parts. You just hope your vehicle will run for a while. Day two. After having purchased this vehicle two weeks in the country, the only thing I know about Bulgarian is the alphabet. I am driving this vehicle new to us in the city, and I come to a stoplight, it turns red, I stop, so does the engine. And while I'm sitting there praying that the car will start before the light turns green, I hear a very formidable noise behind me. It sounds like this ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I was not only at a stoplight, I was on a trolley track. And the trolley came up behind me and people began yelling and saying all sorts of things that were scrambling all around my vehicle, people screaming at me, things I'm sure of a loving nature in Bulgarian. And I didn't know what to do. Tried to start my vehicle. Nothing happened. I remembered that I had just purchased a cell phone. So I picked up the cell phone off the seat of the car and I called another American missionary and I said, here's my situation. My car is broken down and I don't know what to do. There are people all around me screaming. And he said, well, where are you? And then it dawned on me. I don't know. He said, well, do you recognize anything? Well, there were lots of signs around me. I could read none of them. There were people all around me. And I couldn't understand any of them. He says to me, well, if you don't know where you are, I can't help you much. I'll pray for you. And he hung up. Many of us find that very experience in our own daily lives. We may have people all around us. We may even have signals of direction that we think maybe we should follow, but we don't really understand them. And what the message of Hebrews is to us here in this all-sufficient, sympathizing Son of God is that Jesus always speaks your language. He fully identifies with you in your suffering and your temptation. And you, as God's people, are never alone. You may be confused. Life may not make sense. But you have an all-sufficient, sympathizing Savior. Not only are we called to rest in His victory, we are called to receive His sympathy today. But look what else. Look at verse 16. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Not only are we then to rest in His victory and receive His sympathy, but thirdly, we are called to relish His adequacy. To relish His adequacy, notice the privilege that we are given as those united to this resurrected Son. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace. Do you know what that means? That means that the all-sufficient, reconciling work of the Son of God is so effective that you can crash the halls of heaven. And come before His throne and ask Jesus, the One who sympathizes with you, and He is fully adequate to meet your need. I've noticed in this church there are numbers of young children. Perhaps you have had this experience if you're parents that Your children may not necessarily like the foods on their plate touching one another. So they occupy in their chair a law of the Medes and the Persians, which is what I call the no-touchy rule. And no amount of persuasion of that young child, and some of you adults are still guilty of this, No amount of persuasion about the imminent combination of the foods on the plate and the stomach is remotely persuasive. My friends, many of us live our Christian lives in precisely the same way, that we have segments of our life that are no touchy for Jesus. That we recognize at the end of time that His Lordship will be established in full, but for now, there's territory that's ours. But what we have laid before us here is that we are called to worship, to adore the One that God Himself has declared the all-sufficient High Priest, the Son of the living God who has been raised from the dead, has passed through the heavens, and He lives today ever to intercede for His people. And His Lordship and His priestly significance are comprehensive in scope. We are to relish His adequacy. Perhaps, as we see in verse 16, as we boldly approach the throne of grace, perhaps it is because of an ongoing sin that we must confess that we come before Him and we will find mercy. Perhaps it is a nagging problem, a nagging suffering that we simply feel as though we cannot endure. And Jesus says, I identify with you and I will lead you to glory. Trust Me today. rests in his adequacy. The Niagara Falls is the second largest waterfall in the world. It's made up of three different falls. In one second, 750,000 gallons of water pour over that waterfall. For you obsessive compulsive mathematical types, that is 64,800,000,000 gallons of water per day. That's a lot of water. What I want you to think about as you envision that fault, if you've ever seen them, is just the cascading water. And what we find in the font of Jesus Christ is that type of blessing poured in abundance. And yet we, as God's church, how often we go to the Niagara blessing of Jesus Christ with a Dixie cup. When He is the One who out who pours His blessing on us, who is fully adequate. Those of you who have trusted Jesus Christ, I remind you to have the confession that God the Father has declared about His Son. For those of you to this day who are still denying Jesus Christ, I want you to realize that what you are doing this morning, as you hear from the text of Hebrews, is if you still deny Jesus, you are coming before a waterfall like Niagara and saying there is no water. What we have in the resurrected Son of God is the One in Whom is the victory. We have in Him all the sympathy as He identifies with us. And we have in Him all the adequacy. And we are called as people to place our trust, to hold fast our confession to this Son, this Jesus who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Let us pray. Thank You, mighty God, for the all-sufficient work of Your obedient Son. We thank You that You have raised Him from the dead and You have called us to look to Jesus, who is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. We thank You that He is the sympathizing Savior and that all the victory is His, all the sympathy is His, and all the adequacy is His. Turn us now to that glorified Son Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus. Amen.