Hebrews 10:9-14, 17-18 (NASB) 9 then He said, “behold I have come to do your will.” He takes away the first in order to establish the second. 10 By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. 11 Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins; 12 but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down at the right hand of God, 13 waiting from that time onward until his enemies be made a footstool for his feet. 14 For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. 17 “and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” 18 Now where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin.
When we think of guilt today we usually think of “guilty feelings.” In the Scripture, forgiveness is not so much release from feelings as it is from a fact. Guilt comes from the damage we have done to ourselves, to others, to our world. Guilt is God’s verdict on the darkness and distortions of our thinking and behaving. Guilt is real, but so is God’s forgiveness and that forgiveness is made real and effective in our life by the death of Jesus Christ. That is what the writer of Hebrews claims has happened for us.
“Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.” Put in modern terms the writer of Hebrews is saying that in many and various ways we seek our self-worth – by our achievements, by the standards we set for ourselves, by our own inner efforts of self-assurance. But all of our efforts, no matter how hard we try and even to a degree succeed, only serve to remind us of our failure by the very fact that it requires continued effort.
Christ offered one sacrifice for our sins, an offering that is effective forever, and then sat down at the right hand of God. The death of Jesus was the permanent cure for the fact of our guilt. The forgiveness we need, desire, and often seek becomes “effective forever,” because of the death of Jesus. The effectiveness of the Cross does not depend on our having a complete understanding of how it works. The effectiveness of the Cross depends on the fact that it does “Make perfect forever those who are purified from sin.”
Faith is our response to this fact. Faith is believing that God’s forgiveness removes the reality of our guilt. Faith is not wishful thinking. Faith is believing the truth, and that act of believing is like a hinge on a door that opens the way for life, love, and forgiveness to become a reality for us, meeting us at the point of our need. The echo of past sins ceases to interfere with the present acoustics of hearing God’s new words of command, and peace. Forgiveness continues to erase our sin so that God can speak and write anew His will for our life.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope, April 27, 1986
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell
No comments:
Post a Comment