began to exposit chapter 12 last Sunday morning, as you well recall. And we began to talk about this chapter in reference to the previous chapter, chapter 11, which was this hall of faith which showed us many of these that gave a testimony of what it meant to be faithful. What it meant to stand by faith, to walk by faith, to live by faith, even to suffer by faith. And that's very important, as we said, to the context of this letter. Now, of course, those testimonies are given to us even at the beginning of chapter 12, because it says, we're surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. And of course, this is the reminder that it's going to this picture of an athletic event, of a run, an Olympic run. And we enter into the stadium and we look around us and we see all these saints who came before us. and they present to us a testimony of what it means to live faithfully. They are those who have finished their course and now have retired to the stands having been judged faithful in their race. And now we are called to run our race with endurance as they did before us. Now we spoke last week about the lifestyle of an athlete. It's a lifestyle that involves suffering and hardship. If you're gonna be an elite athlete, you have to suffer. It's just the reality of it. If you're going to be an Olympic weightlifter, you're going to have days of soreness, right? After going for personal records on certain lifts, if you're a runner and you've been running all day the day before, training in a new methodology, you're going to be sore. Anybody that's ever done athletics knows that when you train hard, you're sore, right? You suffer in some way. And that's just what it means. If you say, you know, I've really never had a hard workout, I've really never in my life been sore. I've really not suffered in any way. You're probably not a great athlete, right? You probably have not pushed yourself to your limitations. Or maybe at the level of athletics you're at, you're unchallenged, right? You're just so naturally gifted, you haven't had to push yourself. But if you want to go to the top, if you want to be in the Olympics, if you want to run in that race, you're going to have to strive, and you're going to have to suffer, and you're going to have to endure. And that's the imagery our Lord builds upon in this text as the author of Hebrews encourages us to think about these things and to run our race with endurance, the race that is set before us. Now you'll remember that Christ himself is given to us as the example. We can look back in chapter 11 and see many, many examples, and I think it's important that we have those human examples because it might be easy to say, well of course Jesus did that, right? He's the son of God incarnate. Of course he could struggle and suffer. I think we would undercut what the Bible tells us of him as an example by saying it that way, but maybe you could reason through and say that. So we're given these examples in chapter 11 of human beings. Yes, Jesus was a human being as well. We don't want to deny the incarnation. We're saying fully God and fully man. But some of us, we realize we're just men, right? Fallen men. Christ was not in that same position. And we say, you know, Abraham was like us. Abraham was a sinner saved by God's grace, a human being, had all the weaknesses that we have. Christ was subject to some of those weaknesses as well, obviously. Tempted and tried in every way, yet without sin, the book of Hebrews tells us. As we consider this, we recognize that they're also given to us examples because, hey, if Abraham could do it, if Moses could do it. Surely somebody in there you can draw some inspiration from and say, hey, we need to stand by faith. And they didn't stand in their own wisdom or strength. They stood in God's grace. With God's help, they stood and we too can stand. But the author asks us to also look to Jesus, right? Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. So we want to make sure we also realize that the primary person we're looking to is Jesus. Looking unto Him as the example, for He endured His course. He endured His course of suffering and shame. And why? Well, it's not all that detached from the example we're being given in the text. Why does the athlete train and suffer? It's for the joy of winning. It's for the joy of succeeding. It's for the glory attendant to those things. And it tells us in the first two verses of the chapter which we looked at last week that Christ endured the suffering and shame of the cross for the joy that was set before Him. Of finishing His course which was set out before time began. that he would come into this world and be a redeemer of his people. And so Christ endured all of that with joy because he knew the reconciliation that would come through it, that his people would be redeemed. And so, my friends, as we think about that, this is an apt analogy that's being given to us of an athletic endeavor and all those hours of struggling, all those hours of sacrifice. When that person stands on the podium and hears their anthem played, and they receive that medal, I bet in that moment every bit of it was worth it, right? All that struggling, all that hardship was worth it because they achieved the goal. And we want to always remember the mission of Christ was never in doubt. but it was for that joy that he endured all those things. As we continue on today, we want to see that verse 3 builds upon that, and we want to use verse 3 to prepare for the Lord's table today, and think about what He further says about suffering in the Christian lifestyle. are the Christian life. And so we want to begin to read this text again. I want to read all three verses that begin this chapter together. and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls." As we think about this today, I want us to look at two points. First of all, the Christian focus. And second of all, the author's concern. Beginning with the Christian focus, I want to start out by saying I won't be long before us this morning, but I do want us to think about the significance of this verse and what the author is saying today. We want to see the continuity from the message, as I've already been mentioning, that it builds upon, upon the call of running with endurance the race that is set before us. And we each have our own race. Right? We have a different course in life from one another. We all have our different challenges, our different missions. God gifts us in different ways. But whatever our course is, the call is to run it faithfully and to run it with endurance. In fact, we might argue that running it faithfully and with endurance are really saying the same thing. Right? How do we run faithfully? Run with endurance. Run for the long term. It's not to run faithfully to say, well, I'm going to get off to a good start and then fall away, right? That obviously is not what's being called for. In fact, that's Paul's message to the Galatians. It was like, you got off to a good start. Who tripped you up? What happened? You were running so well, and now you're tripped up. What happened? Again, the call is to run with endurance, to set out for the long course, because sanctification is a lifelong process. Praise the Lord that our justification, we are justified in a moment as we are transformed. But this sanctification is a lifelong call as God transforms us. And sometimes we seem to be making great gains, and sometimes maybe not such great gains, but the Holy Spirit is ever at work in us. And I think it's a good reminder what Spurgeon said, that the older we get and the more sanctified we become, the more I guess the further we realize we are from Christ, right, and sense of being holy. And so that sanctification process continues as we are made increasingly like Christ and conformed to His image. And so again, as we think about this, it is this call to run with endurance. We saw last week that we are to look unto Jesus. The thing that will help us most in this race is to look to Jesus. If you look to human beings, you'll get let down from time to time, right? Even the people that you love and trust the most, we're human beings, we'll let you down. So our eyes have to be upon Jesus. We have to keep our eyes upon Him. Now, today he's going to say something very similar. It is a little bit different, I think, because we see from the very beginning of our verse today, he says, to consider Him. Consider Jesus. And this is kind of a difficult word in the Greek. I think almost all translations use the word consider because it's probably the best English word we can use. But the word that undergirds it, the Greek word means to think out carefully or to reason thoroughly. And of course, in our attempt to have a word-for-word translation, we don't want to put three or four words in there, reasons as close as we get. But it's not just a quick reasoning. It's not just a quick consideration. It's a lengthy, considered time of thinking about something. We're to keep our minds upon Jesus, to think about Jesus, to consider Him thoroughly. My friends, I think we could say for a moment that this is a big part of the Christian life. We can get into like sloganism here, you know, a method of evangelizing people. Have you considered Jesus? That isn't really what the text means here. Yes, they need to consider Jesus, and we should present him before unbelievers. But he's speaking here to believers and saying, have you considered about Christ all these truths? Everything that you know about him, have you considered who he is and what he suffered and what he has accomplished? Have you considered those things? Well, the author of Hebrews has given us much to consider throughout this letter, hasn't he? He's told us that Jesus is the creator of all things, all things made by Him, through Him, and for Him. He's told us that He is more glorious than the angels. He has told us that He is the messianic king and priest. That He is the high priest that all the scriptures was pointing toward. He is the ultimate sacrifice. He is the ultimate mediator that every other mediator in the scriptures point forward to Him as more glorious than them, as greater than them. He is the fullness of all the promises. In fact, as Paul says elsewhere, all the promises of God are amen in Christ. He is the fullness. He is everything that's been pointed to. He is the second person of the Trinity. God incarnate. born under the law, obeying, keeping the law, going to Calvary's cross, giving his life as an atonement for his people, being buried, and then of course rising again, ascending to the right hand of the Father. And Hebrews has made a great point of that. You know, we shouldn't think, well, one day when Christ reigns. Christ is reigning now. That's the point of scripture. He is reigning now as the king of all. And so my friends, we need to recognize what the author is telling us. Consider these things. And as true as all those things are, that isn't really his point. Yes, he's reigning now and he will reign until all his enemies are put as his footstools, right? He'll have his feet upon all his enemies. And that is happening. What is true now will be made evident then. But my friends, even then the author is wanting us to consider him in a very particular light. Consider him who endured such hostility. Now we can see this flows right out of the context of the 11th chapter and the beginning of this chapter as we've looked at it. All those great figures in the 11th chapter encountered hostility, encountered difficulty. They encountered a world as Noah did or Enoch did, a world that was very much against the message they were preaching. And for some of them, they endured hardship, sometimes by what they were called to do. They had hardship, but they endured it faithfully. And Jesus is no different. Jesus encountered hostility. When you think about this for a moment, we can consider from the very beginning the truth of this. We're told even in the Gospels, at His birth, a wicked king sought to destroy Him. was willing to wipe out an entire city of children with the hope of ending the Messiah's life. And all throughout the scriptures we see the same thing, hostility against Him. John Brown said all of the history of Jesus incarnate in His ministry is a commentary on this verse. If you want to understand the hostility that Christ encountered, just read the life of Jesus. And we might even say, obviously when it comes to the persecution that he suffered at the hands of those that opposed him, the Pharisees and Sadducees, the scribes. But of course that led ultimately to those sufferings that we've spoken about. But even after that, even after he ascended upon high, we can look time and again as he ties himself to the sufferings of his people. He asks Saul, why do you persecute me? He doesn't say my church, although it is his church that Saul is persecuting. He says, why do you persecute me? Even now Christ, His name, His church encounters opposition. It encounters all these hostilities. And notice it says it's from sinners and it was against Christ. Now when you think about it, we see in the text of Scripture then the endurance of Christ who bore all these things. We know that He knew the mission that He came on. We knew that He was steadfast to complete that mission. We see things like His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. And we shouldn't think of those things as some kind of fiction. Christ understood what he would endure upon that cross. He understood bearing the weight of the sin that he would bear. Others' sin, not his own, others' sin. The weight of that, that he was going to accomplish something difficult, something great, something that he alone could accomplish. No one else could bear that. the greatest people of the Old Testament, the greatest people we would find in Hebrews chapter 11. Decide who you think that is. Maybe most people would say Abraham. Abraham couldn't bear it. Abraham was a sinner. So, my friends, as we think about this, we recognize what it's saying. Christ, in some ways, is a picture of endurance for us. He endured all these things, the shame, the suffering. He endured the hostility. He endured all of it for the joy that was set before Him of completing His calling, His mission that He was given by His Father to come into the world and to be an atonement for sin. Now, if Christ himself is the example that we are given, then we need to recognize that the shame that he bore, the suffering that he bore, becomes a model for his people as well. You know, for so many believers around the world who have a very different experience than we do, we can kind of use these texts to say, oh, the suffering I'm going through medically or at my job, those things may have carryover. But there are brothers and sisters around this world today that are suffering in real ways. I mean, suffering persecution, suffering arrest, suffering death because of their faith. Brother Anthony, who I hope will be with us in a few weeks, he was talking about in Pakistan just a couple of weeks ago, some Christians that were killed for their faith, for their testimony. We saw recently some missionaries in Haiti that were killed because they were inconvenient for the gang, didn't like them there, and killed them. My friends, there is still persecution going on in the world. We recognize that. And so again, we see here this call to endure, to persevere, to stay faithful. And we can look at our Lord and see a great example of what that looks like. He was faithful. He became obedient to death, even the death of the cross. And we sit here sometimes and think, well, this language is strange. We talked about that a lot when we were starting Hebrews a couple of years ago, that there's some strange language in there, that he was given a name that was greater than the angels, that he became obedient by what he suffered. He learned obedience. The idea here is he was made like us. He came into this world as a human being and suffered the temptations and trials that we do. Why? So that he could be a faithful high priest. A high priest represents his people. If he does not know what we suffer, if he has no understanding of it, he cannot faithfully represent us. In fact, Hebrews gives the principle that a high priest must come from the people he represents. When you put all that together, you see the necessity of the incarnation. We've said many times during the Christmas season, it is not an optional doctrine. Where you hear many people today challenge it and say, oh, do we really need to believe that? Well, it's not Christianity if you don't, because Christ cannot be who He said He is outside of it. There must be an incarnation for Him to be fully God and fully man, to be our perfect representative, to be our perfect high priest, to be our perfect mediator, to be our perfect sacrifice. All those things are needed. But He also needed, you see, to be tempted and tried. He needed to suffer and all these things in that ministry. So my friends, we can see the hostility of the world against Him on the cross, But there is great hostility to Christ even in the world today. We recognize that. And that brings us to our second point this morning because what's the point of considering Christ's endurance through all this hostility? Well, the answer is found in the pastoral concern this author has for these people. You see it immediately because he says, One of the things that we need to be honest about as human beings is we can get worn down. We can become discouraged. We can become weary. It's part of what it is to be a human being. But opposition, even really negativity, things like that can wear you down, but certainly persecution can. I've never experienced persecution in the sense that our brothers and sisters around the world have. But one of the reasons we marvel at our faithful brothers and sisters around the world is they stand against such difficult situations. They remain faithful when it isn't just showing up like we are to church on Sunday morning. You know, for some Western Christians, the greatest challenge is, am I going to get out of bed, get dressed, and go to church? Those are not the challenges our brothers around the world face. They face the challenges of going to church knowing it might cost me my life. Now, these Christians that we're reading about in Hebrews, they had begun to suffer for identifying with Christ. Not in the sense of physical persecution like we might think of as happening in places like North Korea or maybe Iran. But persecution, being identified with Christ, it cost them opportunities. Their reputation sank. They were no longer looked upon as leading people in their city. Sometimes they lost their work. because they were no longer welcome in the guilds. There's much written about that in the early church. You had to take an oath to a god, the god of the guild, every year, pledge allegiance to that pagan god if you wanted to work in that guild. And the early Christians said, we cannot do that. We cannot do that. And they said, well, then you can't work. Then you have to choose. Do you want to work or do you want to stand faithful to Christ? My friends, we don't realize oftentimes the suffering that our brothers and sisters have gone through, not just now, but throughout the ages. These Christians have begun to suffer in some of those ways. How do they provide for their families? You know, we often read in the early church about how generous they were. That was a lot of the reason. If you were blessed with means, you helped your brothers and sisters out who had lost their job, not because they were lazy, but because they were faithful. They were faithful to Christ. And so my friends, as you consider this, I want you to realize they had begun to feel some of those effects. The loss of esteem, the loss of respect, the loss of finances, the loss of opportunities. But our author tells them in the next verse, we're not going to consider this one today, But they had not yet started suffering hostility to the point of shedding blood. There had not been that physical persecution that we often think about. Nobody was beating them up. Nobody was killing them. They were just suffering in those other ways. We might think marginal ways, but if it's happening to you, you don't consider it marginal, right? If it's your income that's being hurt, if it's you wondering, how do I feed my children? What does the future hold for me and my family if I refuse to do what they're asking me to do? These are serious concerns. And so again, as these Hebrew Christians are dealing with this, some of them had grown discouraged and disheartened. It's at the heart of this letter. Why are they thinking about no longer identifying with Christ? Because of these sufferings, because of their concern about what the future will hold if they are a Christian. And so they began to say, listen, I think it might be better for us to disassociate with the church and go back to the synagogue. Now, I won't go through all that again. That's what this whole letter is really about. Can you do that? I think by now, hopefully, if nothing else, we've got that across that the author of Hebrews is saying, no, you can't go back. In fact, to do that would be something like apostasy. It would be to say, Moses is enough, when Moses didn't say he was enough. Moses said, look to Jesus. So my friends, this author says if you're in that situation, if you are beat down, if you are hurting, if you are in a moment now where you are discouraged and weary, the solution to that is not to you know, somehow get yourself, you know, ready to go again, you know, encourage yourself, you know, go through this eight-step program. The first thing you need to do is consider Jesus. You need to look to Jesus. You need to consider Him because if you do that, you'll realize everything that this Christian life is about. One thing that you'll realize is that sometimes standing in Christ will mean there is a cost. We're told in the Gospels to count the cost. We're told that everyone who wants to live righteous for Christ Jesus will suffer some sort of persecution. Jesus said in this world you will have tribulation, you will have trouble. These are things told to us over and again. There is a cost to following Jesus. There is a cost. So how do you endure it? Well, you remember that he's the one who said, is a servant greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you. Do you think the world's going to hate Jesus and you identify closely with him? And the world's going to say, well, we like you. We just hate him. It's not how it works, is it? If they hate your master, they're going to hate you. That's the reality. And so this is speaking in a practical manner to Christians saying, have you considered this? Jesus did not have an easy ride. He didn't come down as they expected him to, you know, obviously a king, riding around on the stallion with, you know, all the trappings of being a king, living in some palace. Herod didn't step aside and say, oh, I see now you are the true king. Let me hand the Herodian palace over to you that you may live there. That's not what happened to him. He didn't expect that's what would happen to him. He came into the world, but the world did not receive him. That's the very beginning of the gospel of John. His own did not receive him even. His own did not receive him. We shouldn't expect that the pagan nations were going to receive him well. And so again, we ought to recognize in this, this call that's given to us over and over again to look unto him because he sets the example for us. And as we think about this for a moment, he did suffer. And if he suffered, it shouldn't surprise us that we would. And if he could endure it, and he promises to help us, if we endure it, or if we are in that moment, then we should realize that we turn to him. Luther once said, when I think of what Christ suffered, I'm ashamed to call anything that I've endured suffering for his sake. And so we can see what Luther is reminding us of. that looking unto Jesus and seriously considering His example will help us to remedy our self-centered focus. And let's be honest, most of the time when we're licking our wounds and we're discouraged, I guess I should say it the second part first. When we are discouraged and weary, usually it's because we're licking our own wounds. Somebody said something that hurt our feelings, or we did some great thing we think in our own minds and people didn't give us the credit we expected for it, or maybe somebody said something that really hurt our feelings, we took it as an insult, whatever the case may be, usually it's when we're focusing on us that we become discouraged. I can tell you firsthand, that's been the case in my life. When I've gone through periods of discouragement, I'm looking to me. I'm looking in that mirror at myself going, why is it like this for you? You know, why is it like this? And you realize how comical that is when you think about verses like this. And you look to Jesus, right? He didn't have to come into this world. We think about the message of the gospel. The true gospel tells us that it is of grace because Christ didn't have to come. If in the garden, in our fall, God said, you know what, I told them what would happen, they didn't listen, all mankind is now under the curse permanently and there is no means of redemption, would God have been unjust? He would have been perfectly just to have done that. But because of his great mercy, Jesus Christ came to this world to make a way of redemption. And so, my friends, when you look at this for a moment, you realize how ridiculous it is to say the King, the one through whom all things were made and for whom all things were made, came into this world. You know, part of Him humbling Himself in this world is that He came even as a human being. He was made, you know, as the author of Hebrews applies the psalm, he says He was made under the angels. He was, as a human being, even less glorious than they are, even though he's far more eternally glorious than they are. But he came and humbled himself and made himself under the angels, became born of a woman, born under the law, all these verses that we can think of. But he did it to redeem those under the law, that he might have the adoption of sons. And so we realize here, when we look to Christ, we realize how silly our You know, wound licking is, or feeling sorry for ourselves, or being weary. So the solution given to us time and time again is to look unto Jesus, to consider Him carefully, to think of what He endured when He had to endure nothing at all if He didn't choose to. if he didn't agree to come into this world, being sent by his Father, freely coming, and giving his life as a ransom for his people. As you think about this for a moment, it's obvious the carryover to coming to the Lord's table this morning. The Lord's table is a call to consider what Christ has done. There are many things that we can say about the Lord's table, but at the heart of it is this. In fact, I'd ask you to pick up your bulletin, Turn to the inside of your insert and look at what our confession says in chapter 30. I had it in mind to put the entire chapter in here and I realized there's no way I was gonna make it fit. I didn't think we should go to three bulletins this week. So we're gonna go with paragraph one. Here's what it says, "...the supper of the Lord Jesus was instituted by Him the same night wherein He was betrayed, to be observed in His churches until the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance and showing to all the world the sacrifice of Himself in His death, confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment and growth in Him, their further engagement in, and to all duties which they owe to Him, and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with Him and with each other." Thinking about that just for a moment as we're about to come to the table, I want us to consider, first of all, when it uses language like, oh, we have to be careful, right? The Puritans thought about this a lot. And oftentimes, they talked about it so much, they didn't worry about the words they used because they understood that they were on the same page. The idea of owing means we can pay back God for what he did. That's not what they meant here. They mean it's fitting that we do these things, right? It's right that we do these things. that in one sense, when we say we owe, that's what we're really meaning, right? Not that somehow I can pay back God for what He's done for me, but that because of what He's done for me, it is fitting that I should live my life in obedience to Him, loving Him and serving Him. As you look at this and you think for a moment, there are several things said in this statement that are important, things that, frankly, I think it's good that we get back to these documents because Baptist churches have long forgotten. I grew up in the idea that all this was was a memorial just pointed to something that happened. That's not what our Baptist fathers believed. They believed you are truly spiritually nourished at this table, that the Lord blesses His people through the taking of it. And we've had sermons where we walk through exactly how to understand that and where it more or less says that in Scripture. But on top of that, He says here, this says in this confessional statement, that it's a big part of our growth in Him. As He blesses us, we remember the things that He's done and He nourishes us in this way. It's a bond and a pledge of our communion with Him. It's a reminder when we come to this table, we belong to Him. None of us kick this door down and approach His table. He's allowed us to come to His table. By His grace, He's given us a place at this table. And not only that, it's a bond or a picture, a pledge of our communion with each other. We come to this table as the Lord's people, as brothers and sisters. Now we talk about the importance of a local church in this and of being a part of this family, but at the same time we just recognize this is the Lord's table. This is not North John City Baptist Church's table. This is not my table. This is Christ's table. And so as we come here today, it's a reminder of the communion we have with one another as believers and with Him as our Lord. And then as we continue to look here, it also mentions remembrance. Certainly we come to this table remembering what the Lord has done for us. Of course, remember those events. That's what the author of Hebrews is calling us to do in this verse. Consider Him. What place should we consider Him more than this table? If you think about the earthly picture of coming to the Lord's table, We've talked about this many times on communion servants, you know, Mephibosheth, and getting invited to the king's table. And his question is, why would you invite such a lowly dog as me to your table? That ought to be our question at first, right? Why would the Lord invite me to His banquet, to His table? We recognize it's not in my merits, it's not in anything that I've done or earned, it's in what Christ did for me. Christ purchased me a seat at this table, and He calls me to come, and He calls me to take of this, and to do it with joy and with thanksgiving and an appreciation of all that God has done for us, but remembering, considering what Christ did for us, the very things that we're to consider in here, all that He endured, all the hostility He endured, pictured maybe most appropriately in the events that led to His cross. Well, we're told by Paul that we partake of this until the end of the world, right, as remembrance of his sufferings, right, of the things that he suffered until he returns. And so, my friends, as we come to this table this morning, let us put this verse that we've read today into practice. Let's keep our eyes upon Jesus. Let's focus on Him and consider His greatness and His grace.