I invite you to open your Bible to the book of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 9. Adrian has been leading us through this wonderful book, but I just thought it'd be good to focus on one small section as we're coming to the Lord's Supper tonight. And I thought Hebrews chapter 9 really speaks well to that. Hebrews chapter 9, we're going to be reading verse 11 through 22. Verse 11 through 22, let's give our attention to God's Word. The writer says, when Christ appeared as high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent, not made with hands, that is not of this creation, he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God? Therefore, he is the mediator of a new covenant so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance. since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. Therefore, not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, He took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you. And in the same way, He sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law, almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin." Let's ask the Lord's blessing. Heavenly Father, now as we come to this, your word and this gospel, I pray that you would give us ears to hear and hearts to rejoice in what you've accomplished for us in our Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that you would speak to our conscience tonight and that we would have just the joy of a clean conscience under the gospel. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen. Oh, brother and sister, I'd like to ask you, do you ever feel like a failure as a Christian? You look at other people, and they seem to be doing well, and they're happy, joyful, full of gratitude and peace. Join the Lord, and they read their Bible every day, and they have a wonderful prayer life, and they're talking to people about Jesus. And you look at your life, and you're just kind of hanging on. And you're dealing with the reality of sin and lack of joy and the experience of guilt and shame in your life. It's very, very common. And I've chosen this text tonight because it speaks to that common issue, speaks to the issue of people who are struggling. If you remember, as Pastor Adrian's been leading us through this book, the goal of this book is to encourage discouraged Christians. They've come to Christ, they believe the gospel, and life got really hard. And they've been ostracized, they've been persecuted. And they're still wrestling with so many of their own struggles and problems and sins. The writer to the Hebrews accuses them of being dull of hearing. In other words, the gospel doesn't seem to be sinking in. They've heard the good news, but they're still discouraged, which just reminds us that it's possible to hear the gospel and even believe the gospel, believe that Jesus is great and the cross is sufficient, and yet still struggle with doubt and fear and anxiety. And the question I want to ask tonight is, why is that? What is the barrier, what's the obstacle that keeps us from deeply enjoying the gospel we profess to believe? How is it possible that we can hear it and we can say yes to it and yet we don't experience the joy of it? Well, there's a variety of answers possibly, but one certainly is that a barrier is a shamed, guilty conscience. It's clear that the issue of conscience is on the writer's mind here in chapters 9 and 10. He speaks of it specifically four different times, 9 verse 9, 9 verse 14, 10 verse 2, and 10 verse 22. He's focusing on this. It's an issue he wants to address. And so tonight we're going to look at the trouble of a guilty conscience and how the gospel addresses it. Boys and girls, I just want to ask you, do you know what a conscience is? What is a conscience? Well, I could use a simple illustration. Boys and girls, if you fall down and maybe you're riding your bike and you fall and you skin your knee up, it hurts, doesn't it? Do you know why it hurts? It hurts because you have nerves in your leg and nerves in your knee, and those nerves are sending messages up to the brain that something's wrong, something's happened. That's what nerves do. Well, boys and girls, the conscience is like the nervous system of the soul. The conscience is the nervous system of the soul, and so when you do something wrong, something sinful, your conscience says something's wrong. Maybe you feel bad about what you've done. You feel guilty about what you've done. That's your conscience talking. Christopher Ashe has written a wonderful book entitled Discovering the Joy of a Clear Conscience. And he describes the human conscience as moral self-awareness. It's the voice that God has placed within each person that speaks to us concerning matters of right or wrong. It warns us when we're about to sin. It reminds us that when we've sinned, we should do something to make it right. It's just this moral conscience, this voice within us that God has placed, that every person has. Ash in his book mentions three things that the conscience does. One, he says, the conscience remembers. If I ask you tonight to share with your most shameful secret, you would be able to do so in detail, even if it happened decades and decades ago. You see, a guilty conscience never forgets, even if you don't want to forget. I mean, if you do want to forget, a guilty conscience won't let you. It remembers. Secondly, a guilty conscience makes us want to hide. Guilty conscience makes us feel shame, not just embarrassment, but deep shame, a sense that something is deeply fundamentally wrong with us. That's why when Adam and Eve sinned, they went and they hid. No one told them to go hide. Their conscience was just talking to them. And when God said, who told you that you were naked? Well, their conscience told them that they were naked. And so they were afraid of God and hid because they were afraid of judgment. That's what the conscience does. It makes us want to hide. Third, a guilty conscience makes us anxious and afraid in life in general. It's been said that this is the most anxious generation that maybe we've ever seen in Western society. Anxiety is everywhere. And maybe one of the reasons why there's so much anxiety is It's because the gospel isn't as robustly believed as it once was, because people now are sensing they're alone in the world and there's nowhere to go with their sin. John Flavel says this, it is guilt upon the conscience that makes cowards of our spirits. This is an old Puritan. He says, a guilty conscience is more terrified by imagined fears than a pure conscience is by real ones. A guilty conscience is more terrified by imagined fears than a pure conscience is by real ones. So how do we get rid of a guilty conscience? How do you get a clean conscience? That's what the writer is talking about. And the wonderful truth is that there's one way, and there's only one way to do that. You have to receive it as a gift. It's a gift that comes through Jesus Christ. It's a gift that comes by believing the gospel. And in order to help people understand the wonder of that, the writer of Hebrews does, first of all, shows us the futility of Old Testament sacrifices. All of chapter 9 really is devoted to that. It's one of the primary themes of the book of Hebrews, the futility of Old Testament sacrifices. The writer wants us to understand that the Mosaic sacrificial system was never able to actually resolve a troubled conscience. What it could do was point out the problem, and it did that very well, and it did that in very specific ways. The writer mentions two of them. In the first part of chapter 9, the first 10 verses, the writer's talking about the tabernacle. The old tabernacle in the Old Testament. And the same would be true of the temple. And he just makes the point that the tabernacle and the temple were not inviting places. There was not a welcome, come on in sign on the tabernacle. There were, in fact, many things that said, stay out. Don't come close. There were barriers. You have the barrier of the outer courts. You have the barrier where you're not allowed to go into the holy place. You have the barrier, most important barrier, you're definitely not allowed into the most holy place. If you would just trot in there, you would immediately be consumed with fire. Only the priest is allowed into the most holy place, and only once a year, and only if he's carrying sacrificial blood. One of the primary messages of the tabernacle is that, yes, God has drawn near, but don't go close. There are barriers, and the reason is because your sins have separated you from God. There's a fundamental problem here that needs to be resolved, but the tabernacle couldn't resolve it. And the other noticeable outstanding aspect of the Old Testament system is the blood. Oceans of blood verse 19 for when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people He took the blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet wool and hyssop and he sprinkled the book and all the people saying this is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you and then he sprinkled with blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship and indeed under the law almost everything is purified with blood and Now, I know many of you have been reading through the Bible in a year, and so you've just made it through Leviticus and Numbers. And maybe you were surprised, as I was again, at the amount of blood. Why so much blood? All the sacrifices. And the answer is, of course, because there was so much sin. And sin requires death. That's the lesson. The soul that sins shall surely die. One of the benefits in that sense, or the blessings of the Old Testament Mosaic system, is that with its rivers of blood, it did not offer a cheap solution for sin. The reason that's a benefit, you see, is that our conscience, if it's working correctly, It generally tells the truth about our guilt, and it needs the truth about how to resolve it. If you are under true conviction of sin, and you recognize that you've sinned against a holy God, and you sense that hell is actually what you deserve, and someone comes and says, if you just put 10 bucks on the offering plate, it'll be fine, your conscience will revolt against that. That's not possible. That's offensive in light of what I've done and who God is. Your conscience needs the truth. It needs a real solution. Some cheap solution is not going to work. And there was nothing cheap about the Old Testament solution. In that sense, the lamb or the bull, the goat would be taken and you would slit its throat And the blood would gush out. I remember growing up on the farm, there would be times where we would have to put down a cow because she was just too sick, or if we were going to butcher a cow, and that's exactly what would happen. You'd take that knife and you'd cut the artery, the jugular, and the blood just gushes out. Buckets. Average cow, 10 gallons of blood. There's nothing cheap about it. And that sort of sacrifice would be going on and over, and you'd see the animal frightened, kicking maybe, struggling, and then you slit the throat, and the blood gushes out, and the animal slowly succumbs to death. It's very graphic, very dramatic. And there's just mountains of it. In Numbers 29, we read about the Feast of Booths, where 70 bulls were to be sacrificed. That's 700 gallons of blood. I'm trying to be graphic, but that's exactly what it would be. And that's just the bulls. That doesn't count the goats and the lambs. But you see, the problem is that while the animal sacrifices could point to, and definitely did, the incredible seriousness of sin, it couldn't remove it. It couldn't resolve it. A goat, you see, can't stand in your place. You can slaughter the poor animal. ceremonially and symbolically, even place your hands on its head, sort of symbolically placing your sins on the goat, but you know that when you slit the goat's throat and that animal dies, it's not sufficient. That life, it doesn't really pay for your sin, your human sin, your willful rebellion against God. You can slaughter animals all day, but it's symbolic. It points to something. It doesn't objectively resolve the reality of sin. With what shall I come before the Lord? Ten thousand rivers of oil, and you could say rivers of blood. No, it's not going to work. And the text says that, verse 9, which we didn't read. According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper. Can't do it. Can't perfect the conscience. And what's true of the Mosaic Law holds for every human effort. So Piper says, we know that our conscience is defiled by pride and self-pity, by bitterness and lust and envy and jealousy and covetousness and apathy. We can cut ourselves or throw our children in the sacred river or give a million dollars to the United Way or serve in a soup kitchen at Thanksgiving or a hundred other forms of penance and the result will always be the same, The sin remains and death terrifies. Doesn't fix the problem. But what if something could? What if there was a life that was so staggering in its significance? That the sacrifice of that life would actually satisfy the demands of God's law and silence the accusing voice of our own conscience. And, of course, the gospel message is that that's exactly what we have in Jesus Christ. The power, secondly, then, of the cross. That Jesus has actually, in truth, accomplished what the law could not ever do. It has resolved the objective reality of our guilt, and it is able to cleanse our conscience then from shame. Let's just think about this idea of objective guilt first. In verse 12, we're told that the death of Christ has secured an eternal redemption. It's past tense, completed action. Secured. In other words, there's nothing more that needs to be done for eternal redemption to be accomplished. Jesus hasn't begun a payment program on eternal redemption for us. It's done. And he's not asking you to make payments on it. It's all paid with his life. Nothing left to pay. Imagine if you go to a restaurant and you get up and you go to the front to pay the bill and the lady says, well, the person who was before you has paid it in full. Well, it's paid, and you're thinking, well, what could I do? Well, there's nothing you can do except say, thank you. It'd be foolish of you to sit there and demand that you should pay. It's been paid. And that's the truth about the gospel. Jesus paid it, paid it all. What did that payment objectively accomplish? Well, look at verse 15. He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance. Let me just give you an illustration. If you are renting an apartment, nowadays you're probably paying $1,500 to $2,500, maybe more if it's a house. But let's say you have a contract for $1,500 a month plus utilities. That's the contract you signed, that's the covenant you're under. Every month that bill is due, and there will be penalties if you don't pay. Well, imagine you got a new owner, new landlord, and he comes with a new contract. And the new contract says you just need to pay $100 a month, no utilities, no fees, just $100 a month will be fine. Well, that would be amazing. In fact, it would almost feel like you were stealing, but you're not stealing. The owner has made a contract with you, a contract with which he is fully satisfied and pleased. You don't need to hide from him when you see him in the hallway. You don't need to try to pay Him back. What you need to do is just accept and delight in your new contract. Well, that's a small picture of what we have in Jesus. We have a new contract with God because we have a new mediator, right? Our old landlord Moses has been replaced with our new landlord, Jesus Christ. And in Jesus, we have a new contract that's been initiated by God and with which God is fully satisfied and thoroughly pleased. It pleased the father to have his son be the mediator of this contract and be the one who satisfies the demands of the law. God is happy with this arrangement. And in this contract, then, we are promised an eternal inheritance. Promised, it says. An eternal inheritance. And because we have this new contract, we're absolutely assured we shall receive it. You don't ever have to wonder if God loves you. Not under this new covenant. You don't have to wonder if you'll make it to heaven. Not under this new covenant. No matter what you've done in the past or the sins that you still battle with in the present, if you're battling, then you have every reason for joyful assurance in Jesus. You live under a new covenant, a new contract. And in that covenant, the Bible says that a death has occurred that redeems you from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. A death has occurred that pays the price. That's the idea of redemption. The debt has really and truly been paid. There's nothing more for us to do. And the author paints a picture for us in this in verses 11 and following. He wants us to see Jesus as the great high priest now, just like the old high priest used to go into the most holy place and he would take the blood of the sacrificed animal But he wants to see Jesus now entering the most holy place in the court of heaven itself, not with the blood of a bull, not with the blood of a goat. He enters with his own blood to atone for the sins of men. And there in the court of divine justice, Jesus there sprinkles that blood, which covers our shame, washes away our guilt forever. And when Jesus does that, friend, the guilt is actually truly gone. It's done. We're no longer guilty before God. Not just because God has declared it to be so, but because Jesus has made it to be so. I think a lot of Christians struggle to really accept that's true. Because if you accept that as objectively true, you're gonna feel a weight go off your shoulder. You'll be amazed, you'll be astonished, it won't quite seem possible. And you'll feel just a lightness. Your sin is gone, your guilt is gone. You don't have to be afraid to die. Because Christ has done something that secures your eternal redemption, objectively. And you can just receive it, you see? And this also, you see, the objective reality then speaks to the subjective shame, the experience of shame. In verse 13 and 14, if the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of defiled persons was to sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God? Have you ever just wondered why the Christian life seems hard for you? It's hard to read your Bible, it's hard to pray, it's hard to love your spouse, it's hard to be more patient, it's hard to be more loving. Well, part of that is because the world, the flesh, and the devil are opposing us every step of the way. It's supposed to be hard. Another aspect, though, might be because you're trying to do it as a way to make payment. You're trying to Quiet the voice of a condemning conscience. I think that's what the writer here means by dead works. The works that we're doing, but they can't make us right with God. They can't cleanse our guilty conscience. It's a person who's still living under the Mosaic law, still thinks that if they do enough things and do it well enough that God will be pleased and God will bless and then worry about when they stumble. This is common for Christians. We believe the gospel, and yet we wrestle with guilt-based shame and fear. Why is that? Well, we can maybe use the example of phantom pain. Phantom pain is when someone, for instance, loses an arm, and it's gone, right? It's been amputated. It's gone. It's not coming back. And yet the person will experience excruciating pain in their left arm, though it's no longer there. Well, how do you fix that kind of pain when it's just all in your head, in a sense? Your body is lying to you. Well, thankfully, there are medications for that, and people can be helped with that. Well, Christians can struggle with phantom guilt and phantom fear. They can feel guilty before God, though in truth, objectively, there's no guilt there. It's been removed. And they can feel phantom fear, even though every reason for fear is gone. There's no reason for fear. The number one command in the Bible is, don't be afraid. Well, praise God, there's a medicine for phantom guilt and for phantom fear. But you have to take it. And the medicine is the gospel. The only way that we'll ever Find joy, true joy and peace in the redemption of Jesus is when we humbly, by faith, accept the full extent of what Jesus has done. We have to accept the truth of our guilt and our sin and what we deserve, and we got to let our pride be devastated in that. that God would be so just to condemn us and yet accept the full truth of what Jesus actually accomplished on the cross, that the guilt has been atoned for. It's gone. You don't have a reason for a guilty conscience. And our consciences can lie to us. Sometimes consciences, they're affected by sin too. And you might feel guilty and feel shame before the Lord because the devil's found a way to get at you and to accuse you. He's the accuser of the brothers. But we have a medicine for that. The medicine is the gospel, and we can take the truth of what Jesus has accomplished, and we can apply that medicine to the accusing voice of the devil and to the shame that we feel maybe in our conscience. We can apply the gospel. Yes, it's true, I am deserving death, and it's true, I have sinned against God more grievously than I could possibly know, and yet, my Bible says that Jesus has died and has secured for me an eternal redemption. And Jesus doesn't lie. He's atoned for my guilt, all of it. He's cleansed me from the stain. There's no more guilt there. There's no reason for shame. God has happily clothed me in the righteousness of His Son. Isn't that a wonderful truth? God has happily robed you in the righteousness of Jesus. And what he calls us to do is to accept it and to keep accepting it and pray it in until you feel the joy of it. It's like taking a medicine. Don't just, you take one and the headache is still there. Well, take two. And if it's still there, you can help yourself to three. Keep taking the gospel. Don't settle for a little bit of the medicine. Take it until the truth is resonating in your soul. My sin is gone. Jesus has secured an eternal redemption for me, and He is my new mediator of a new covenant so that I can receive the promised eternal inheritance, and nothing can take it away from me. Friend, we need to take the gospel as the medicine for our soul. The cross of Jesus is the place where we can come and admit the truth. We can acknowledge the guilt, acknowledge that the shame is deserved. We deserve to be shamed for things that we've said and done and things that we've failed to do. But the cross is the place where we can come and be exposed because in Jesus' right, God has exposed the truth of our sin. It deserves death. And yet in the cross, God promises that sinners can be cleansed and robed in righteousness, that we can be objectively found righteous, objectively made righteous at the cross. And subjectively, we can quiet the voice of that conscience that condemns us. Jesus has paid it all. The church is a place where we can come clean. The Lord's table is a place where we can come confessing our sin and receiving the medicine of the gospel for our soul. May God grant it. Amen. Father in heaven, I just thank you for Jesus. I thank you that we can take this medicine over and over and over again. It will always be for the healing of our soul. Lord, some of us tonight maybe have never experienced the joy of knowing that sin has been forgiven and is gone. And some of us are just desperate to know that we are loved by God. And we believe the gospel, and yet, Lord, those realities have not become real for us. And I pray, Lord, that whatever obstacles there might be tonight of unbelief or fear or guilt or shame, Lord, that your gospel would break through and bring pardon and peace and joy in Jesus, we pray in his name, amen.