Transcript
We are in Hebrews chapter 13, Hebrews chapter 13, and this is our last week in Hebrews. So some of you will recall those of you that have been with us through this journey, that this is some intense pastoral counseling. These Christians, primarily Jewish Christians, they're facing a crisis in their own lives and they're considering going back to the old Covenant Judaism. And they were looking at backsliding basically away from what Jesus had purchased for them. They were in a difficult spot because of being socially ostracized. Some of these people were being kicked out of their families. Others were just kind of being pushed to the perimeter of society because of their identification with Christ. And it seems apparent having gone through this letter that the temptation for them was to not stop being religious, but to stop being a follower of Jesus. They were going to just return to the Levitical laws, the priesthood.
And so it's a difficult place and this pastor who wrote this has been calling these believers to recognize Jesus as so much better than anything in their Jewish tradition. So it's like, Hey, you need to go back to Jesus as you're sorting through. It's interesting, many of the conversations I had before church, you're going through changes with your career or in life. You've maybe new to the city, you're kind of navigating life. And there is this sense, there can be a sense of deep turmoil, kind of like you have that ever have a vinegarette dressing where if you let it sit on your shelf, everything you get your layers that are going on in there, you've got your balsamic vinegar and then your oil and your seasoning kind of goes, but then sometimes your life feels like it's all shook up and there's no layers.
And what this pastor is saying here is like, listen, as you're kind of going through the turbulence of life and all of the unsettled feeling that comes from suffering, Jesus is the primary thing that you need to grab onto. You need to grab a hold of the priesthood of Jesus, that Jesus is your pie priest today, this very moment, Jesus, not in the future when you're going to be with him, but today in this very same time as you occupy this time, Jesus is interceding on your behalf. His full-time job is to help you be close to God. And so he's called these believers to just please hold on to Jesus. But he also talked about having a soft heart and responding in faith to the promises of God that listen. And here's the temptation. If you've grown up in Judaism, you don't have to grow up into Judaism to understand the temptation, to check out of a daily vibrant relationship with the Lord.
And to kind of go back to the routine of like, well, I'm going to go to church on Sundays and I'll read some nice verses here and there and I'll kind of play Christian, but not engage it as a living and active thing that impacts my daily life. That's a safe form of religion and that is what religion is. It's like it doesn't engage me personally and cost me a whole lot, but I can still be associated with it. And that is where these Christians are at. And so this pastor, he's written so much that we, I will not try to summarize here, but we are going to be in these last five verses six verses 20 through 25. Let me put them up in front of you and then I'll pull some stuff out that I think is beneficial for us. Now, may the God of peace who brought up from the dead, our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the everlasting covenant, equip you with everything good to do His will working in us, what is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever.
Amen. Brothers and sisters, I urge you receive this message of ex for I've written it to you briefly. Be aware that our brother Timothy has been released. If he comes soon enough, he will be with me when I see you greet all your leaders and all the saints, those who are from Italy send you greetings, grace be with you all. Let's pray for a moment and ask the Lord to speak to us through this text. God, we again surrender our minds and our hearts to you. We want to have a listening ear and a heart that has that posture of faith where we're ready to trust you. And as Tracy was sharing, there's that can be that wrestling in our own life. Sometimes it's a resisting you and other times it's just a confusion and a swirl. And God, I pray you would just see in us and you would help us to have that disposition where we're ready to obey whatever you say to us this morning.
We want to be a people that are following you, not trying to lead you in our own lives. And I ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. So to be candid, I'm going to just really focus in on verses 20 and 21, this greeting. I'll mention it here at the end. It's a short greeting, some notes probably by the hand of the writer where he takes the scroll from the e Emmanuel and he signs it with these notes at the end. But what I really want to do is focus in on this prayer. It's oftentimes maybe even called a benediction in your Bible. Benediction is a Latin word, meaning it's a blessing. It's fascinating. There's two real parts here. You have the prayer and then you have this final greeting. And it is fascinating how the New Testament contains these written prayers. So we have in verses 20 and 21 this, do you see the direction, who this is different from the rest of the text in that this is not instructions given to you.
This is the pastor is writing about something that relates to his audience, but he's asking God to do a work on behalf of them. Do you see that? Now may the God of peace and then he comes down to what he's actually asking for here, equip you, equip you. He's praying for their equipping. May the God of peace who brought you, who brought up from the dead, our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the everlasting covenant. Now, the New Testament writers would write out their prayers. As you look at the epistles, you can see Paul praying very specific things for these different churches. You look at the church in Ephesus and in Ephesus chapter one, he prays that their eyes of their understanding would be enlightened, that they would know what is the hope of their calling. He literally uses, he talks about the heart being as if your heart is like a shutter on a camera that opens up.
And you know how an old fashioned camera with film would work, the shutter opens up, it lets a little bit of light in, and that light hits the A film material and you get a photograph or you get a negative that has to then be turned into a photograph. So Paul's prayer for the Ephesians church is this super surgical prayer, like specific for them that they would have this spiritual experience where their heart just captures this new vision, the hope of their calling and the power of God. It's this beautiful prayer that's Ephesians one. You go a couple of chapters later, you get to Ephesians three, and there's this prayer that you would know the love of God for Paul praying for the Ephesians, he's praying a lot about. Here's what I want you to know. I want this to be, I want you to have this given to you by God in your understanding ending.
So you get to Colossians or Philippians, I would encourage you at some point go and look at the specificity of these prayer requests that the Holy Spirit is leading Paul to pray. I mentioned this a few weeks ago. In your own life, I would encourage you to even consider writing out your prayers so that you can be specific. There's a couple of reasons why the writers would do this, why Paul would do this, and the pastor who wrote Hebrews would write this. Can you imagine? Why are these prayers written out? Why would you take a prayer and write it out and say, here's what I'm praying for you. What does that do?
Communicate it to other people.
You can communicate it. Maybe it's a modeling, right? It's a modeling of like, oh, that's a good prayer to pray. I appreciate that. I could pray that for others. That's good. What else? You
Can amplify it saying the same prayer,
Amplify it. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, you could pray the same thing. That's right. What else? Yeah,
You can remember when God answers your prayers when you go back,
Ah, yes, you could remember. So you can see, oh, that prayer request was answered. I love those. I put down two more. One is that if you know what somebody's praying for you about, then you can have a sense of anticipation. It's kind of like what you're saying, Beverly, where as it's unfolding, you recognize it. Oh, that's what I prayed for. And if it's not specific, then it's hard to recognize. So the more specific you are, the more recognizable it is as it occurs in your life. The second reason that I think that the New Testament has these written prayers is so that you can cooperate with God. Now it's God who's going to do this work, but somehow in the mystery of God's government, our cooperation is necessary. And so if you're telling somebody, Hey, this is what I'm praying for you about, it would encourage them to be open to the work of God in their life.
So we have this benediction, this prayer. Now, I was talking with my wife about this week, and so we were on vacation, we were sitting on the beach and I was kind of wrestling with this text. So my relationship with the Bible is kind of, I love the Bible, but I kind of wrestle with the Bible where I'm kind of frustrated with it. And this text, I was, it's so wordy. In fact, I used the term I used with her. As I says, if you cut out the fat, you can get to the request. But as I was thinking about it some more after the fact, I realized that the reason why there's fat, or it's so wordy, is because it's a prayer. And it's like climbing a theological mountain. When you climb a mountain and it's steep, you really can't jog up it. You are looking for one place to put your hand after another, after another.
And the reason that this is written in such a roundabout way is because as each phrase is encountered, it stirs up a sense of prayer in our hearts. So he doesn't, I mean, could just, if this was a command, let's say you wanted to command a kid to perform this act, right? You would just say, be equipped to do his will, right? We could shorten it down to that much or we could say, he could have just said, God, I pray that you would equip these people so they could do your will, but instead he adds all this fluff. But again, if you go back to these prayers, I don't think he's just trying to be poetic. I think that each one of these phrases are a foothold and a hand grip for faith. So as you're going through this, you're reading that who is the God that he's praying to?
It's the God of peace who throughout this whole book, this pastor has been appealing to this audience, to recognize that it's through Jesus that peace has been made on our behalf. He is the God who's trying to bring people who are in a turbulent setting to recognize that your God is a God of peace, and that God is the one who brought up from the dead, our Lord Jesus, the resurrection power of God. So again, you take a hold of that and it's like, oh yeah, he's the God of resurrection and who is Jesus? Well, thank you for asking here. We'll call him the shepherd of the sheep, the shepherd of the sheep. In 13, if you go back, he's been talking quite a bit the earthly leaders that were appointed in these churches and the need for recognizing and honoring leaders and their God appointed role. But here he comes along, he says, Jesus is the chief shepherd. Well, that's Peter here. He's the shepherd, the great shepherd of the sheep. And it's through the blood of the covenant. So I mean, here we have that God is a God of peace, the resurrection, Jesus as the shepherd, we have the covenant, and then we get to the request that God would equip you.
The author of this prayer is anchoring. This prayer is anchored to what is true. They're not trying to explain. He's not trying to explain the point. Instead he is trying to give them these faith footholds in your own prayers. Can I give you a little homework to do this week? Just a little homework. Just write out one prayer, one prayer, and I would encourage you to make it fluffy, not for fluffy's sake, but who are you addressing in prayer? I know it's God that you're praying to, but what do you know about God that you're praying to? Then what do you know that he's capable of? Add that to your prayer. The God of peace or the God of power or the God who created all things. What is he capable of? What is he demonstrated that he's able to do? And then the third thing, what has he said that makes you so bold as to make your request?
Can I give you an example of this? I don't want to belabor the point, but I just want to show you how the early church did this. This is Acts chapter four. After Peter and John are released from prison and they've been threatened. They go back to the church and they report back to the church. And when the church heard this, they raised their voice to God. They heard about the threats from the religious leaders in Jerusalem. They raised their voice together to God, and they said, master, you are the one who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them. Do you see that how they're addressing God? Do you see that they're not just saying God, they've given him a name master. They've said, here's what you have done. You've made heaven, earth, the sea, everything in them. Does that remind you of Psalm 46, that whole passage, Psalm 46, is de creation.
If the whole world falls apart that you happen to make, I'm going to trust in you. You've got me. God, here, it's you made all of these things. You said, oh, here they're going to quote Bible back to God. Do you think that's because God forgot what he said? No, it's because he's stirring up their own faith. You said through the Holy Spirit by the mouth of our father, David, your servant. Why do the Gentiles rage? The people's plot futile things. The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers assembled together against the Lord and against the Messiah. I mean, they're quoting a huge passage out of Psalm two. For in fact, in this city, both Herod and Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles and the people of Israel assembled together against your holy servant. So now they're getting to current times. Here's the situation against your servant Jesus whom you anointed to do whatever your hand and your will had preed to take place, and now Lord, consider their threats.
And finally, we get to the request. Grant that your servants may speak your word with all boldness. That's what they're asking for, but do you see how it's packaged? They're not just trying to be religious. These are people who are deeply tied in to a relationship with God and they understand the economy of faith. Do you understand the economy of faith? You should, because we've gone through Hebrews together and we read Hebrews 11, six which says, without faith, it's impossible to please God. When you look at Jesus and the miracles that he did, he's looking for faith, the economy of faith. Do you have faith in God? When he goes back to his hometown, it says He's not able to do many miracles there because of their lack of faith in Capernaum.
And by composing a prayer in this way, what's happening is that the hearts of those praying, this prayer are stirred up to trust God more. And so yeah, as I wrestled through the text that we're studying this morning, it was a bit frustrating because I'm kind of like, get to the point. Make your request quest, and this pastor is like, no, feed your faith on what's going to get this prayer answered. It's this God. It's the God of peace, the one who raised up our Lord from the dead, the one who is the great shepherd of the sheep by or through the blood of the covenant.
Here's, here's the outcome. While you stretched out your hand, back in acts, while you stretch out your hand for healing and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant, Jesus. Look at when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak the word of God boldly. That's an answer to prayer, isn't it? That's crazy. The place where they were had an earthquake, so it's a wordy prayer, but I do want you to see that there is a request, and we're going to kind of hang out here in this for a bit here. It's this word quip in verse 21. I want to give you just a summary of this word or before I give you the summary. If we do cut away what is fluffy? This is the request.
May God equip you to do his will. May God equip you to do his will. I love this word because it is so strategic across the New Testament. This is weby defining the word equip. He says, it's a translation of one Greek word, Tito. This is an unfamiliar word to us, but it is familiar to the people who received this letter. The doctors knew it because it meant to set a broken bone to fishermen. It meant to mend a broken net to sailors. It meant to outfit a ship for voyage to soldiers. It meant to equip an army for battle. It is a beautiful word. I've talked about it. Some of you were around a couple of years ago when we ordained Tony Johnson and with his ordination, I gave him a antique tool that is for mending fishing nets. This wooden kind of looks like a shuttle that you'd use when you're designing a beautiful tapestry, but it's used to mend nets because in Ephesians chapter four, it says that God gifts the church with evangelist, pastors, bishops, prophets for the work of the ministry to equip.
It's this word to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. God puts spiritual leaders into the, so that the people that are in that church are equipped, they're outfitted to do the work, but it doesn't just mean outfitted. I love this word, this idea of the doctor using, of setting a broken bone. Some of you in your spiritual journey, that's what you need right now. You're just in this place where you're all broke up and you just need to be put back together and the great physician needs to just touch you, and you need spiritual healing to occur in your life. Others of you, you're like, you're ready to go and it's this season of fishing others of you're ready for a journey, and then some of you, it's like, yeah, we need to be ready for battle. It has these different ideas or it's conveys this idea of just being ready for the moment.
Weirs being the same. Just a couple paragraphs later, he talks about how God equips us, how God equips us by tracing the word QSO in the New Testament, we can discover the tools that God uses to mature and equip his children. He uses the word of God. Two Timothy two. Second Timothy three 16 and 17, prayer one, thesal, one Thessalonians three 10 in the fellowship of the local church. That's the one I was talking about from Ephesians chapter four. He also uses individual believers. Galatians six, one. Finally, he uses suffering to perfect his children, and this relates to what we learned from Hebrews 12 about chastening, so I'll include those texts this week. I'm going to put up a blog post that includes those texts so that if you just want to kind of go look up the words you can, but God wants to equip you.
Many of you at some point have gotten to a place in your spiritual journey where you've really wrestled with this idea of what is God's will. What is God's will for my life? This can happen at different seasons. It happens for new believers because a person understands and hears that Jesus came into the world to forgive their sins, to set them free from the bondage of death and destruction and to restore them in their relationship with God, and it's like, yeah, I want that. I want to follow Jesus. I want to surrender my life to him, and all of a sudden, God turned your life upside down. You have this new vision for life, and you're looking at the world around you as designed. That's one of the wonderful things about being a follower of Jesus is that God is at work and he's at work in the world around you and in your life, but it births a question that is kind of upsetting, which is, well, God, if you designed everything outside and around me, what have you designed for me to do?
What is your will for my life? You can ask that question right after you become a Christian, but later on down the road things can get turned upside down. Job situations can change, and you end up at that place of God, what is your will for my life? And I love the companionship here of the idea of equipping and God's will. One of the things that you should be asking yourself if you're wrestling with God's will in your life is What has God equipped me for? Because I believe that if you begin to write out the equipping of God and the story, your experiences, your gifts, go take a personality test. Look at the Enneagram. Do the, what's the other one? Briggs, the Myers-Briggs. Go and do another personality test. Do strength finders. I don't care what it is, what jobs have you had? What people have you had in your life, and look at your life through that lens of God's equipping you, that is probably going to give you a sense of direction of it's probably God's will in your life to do this or that you may not know.
You may wish that the clouds would part and God's will for your life would be written in the clouds, and it's just like, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do. But that's oftentimes not how it works, but there is a patterned way of God's work in your life. How has God equipped you? What is the trajectory of God's equipping in your life? Wrestle with that. Wrestle with that. This is a process, a journey filled with growth and learning. It may not always be easy, but we can trust that God has a plan for us like a broken bone that is being set or a torn net that is being mended or a ship being prepared for a voyage. God is actively at work in us, fixing us, preparing us, transforming us. His tools are his word, prayer fellowship, individual believers, and even suffering.
We need to embrace his equipping, recognize what God is doing in our lives. That means you're taking notes on the activity of God in your life, trusting his will, responding in faith. We're not merely passive recipients of his grace, but active participants in his grand design, and let's hold tightly to the anchor of faith in our theological mountain climbing, believing in the promises of God. Let's not be afraid to be wordy in our prayers, celebrating the greatness of our God. What he has done and what he has said. The pastor ends with this. He says, brothers and sisters, I urge you to receive this message of exhortation. For I have written to you briefly, be aware that our brother Timothy has been released. If he comes soon enough, he will be with me. When I see you greet all your leaders and all the saints, those who are from Italy send you greetings, grace, be with you all. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for that grace that remains with us, the grace that we celebrate every time we take communion together, as we take the cup. We are so thankful that when this letter ended, your work continued and that it has laid down a template, a pattern of your work in the world. Lord, would you continue to equip us, accomplish this equipping in our life just as this pastor prayed for the recipients of this letter, Lord, equip us to do your will. Thank you. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.