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Deal with it Lord! Deal wth our Ignorance! A sermon for the 5th week of Lent
Deal with it Lord!
Deal with our Ignorance!
Hebrews 5:1-10
† In Jesus Name †
May you realize the gentleness of the grace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, as you see revealed that Jesus is the source of your salvation!
- Instinct When Dealing with Ignorance
The illustration for today is simple.
You are going to teach someone who has never seen a old fashioned charcoal barbecue, how to cook a nice steak, and maybe a few beast loaf burgers on the grill.
Simple? Easy? Sure!
Except they are completely ignorant about the process.
So you tell them to make a nice pile of Kingsford charcoal in the grill, and they get the bag and do so.
Step two, you get some handy barbecue lighter fluid and tell them to squirt some on the briquets, and then using the torch, which you have demonstrated, light the fire.
A moment later you see them dousing the charcoal, and they keep dousing it, you go inside to grab a drink, come out and in their left hand they are still dousing the charcoal and in the right hand they have the torch, and they’ve lowered it into the grill, where there now ¼ of an inch of lighter fluid in the bottom.
What do you do next?
Wait!!! Before you answer than, I’ve got one question, which is more dangerous, an ignorant person with something flammable and even explosive, or an ignorant and wayward person tempted to sin?
- Will This Work with the Sinner?
I am going to assume you are all brave and honorable and would somehow try to save the person you were supposed to be teaching before he or she burns down the entire neighborhood.
But can you use the same technique with the person about to give into temptation? Can you reach the person ignorant of God’s grace yet caught up in sin the same way?
Imagine, you are the ignorant, wayward sinner about to gossip, and racing across the church comes Bob, and he is about to tackle you! Or maybe you were about to covet something, and Tom starts screaming at you to stop! I will not event get into what Manny might do if you don’t find a sabbath rest with God!
I do not think that any of them are going to stop you from sinning, in fact, they may create another response or two that is sinful!
So back to what is more deadly than lighting 3 cups of lighter fluid at close distance.
The acts of the ignorant and wayward person caught up in sin.
- Jesus Does it
Our passage in Hebrews tells us how Jesus, the great high priest will deal with him.
2 And he is able to deal gently with ignorant and wayward people because he himself is subject to the same weaknesses.
I love that, he is able to deal gently with ignorant and wayward people… like you and me.
Jesus doesn’t tackle us or scream at those caught up in sin. He deals with us, and he does it gently, with grace and compassion.
- How He does it
So how does Jesus deal with those who get caught up in sin, who don’t understand He is here to rescue us?
He does two things according to this passage. He identifies with us and our trials, and He offers the sacrifice that
Let’s deal with the identity idea first.
Remember it said that “he Himself is subject to the same weaknesses.”
Living among us wasn’t easy, even as God. Besides dealing with Satan, He had to deal with sinners like Peter and hotheads like James and John, and Matthew and Simon the Zealot on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
I imagine Jesus might have been tempted to let some of them light the barbecue grill once or twice…
Remember, he faced temptation, just as we have, without sinning. He lived our kinds of lives and didn’t give in to sin.
Knowing He went through what we do, it makes it easier to realize His compassion and sympathy for us.
While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could rescue him from death. And God heard his prayers because of his deep reverence for God. 8 Even though Jesus was God’s Son, he learned obedience from the things he suffered.
That doesn’t sound like the easy life.
Jesus felt the pain and the anxiety of dealing with sin around Him, and He knew when death was coming, and how it would come… and for what reason.
Which leads to the second way in which Jesus helps us. He is not just offering the sacrifice for our sins.
The writer of Hebrews said this about Jesus’ role,
In this way, God qualified him as a perfect High Priest, and he became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey him.
Going back to our illustration, as our playing with sin is likened to lighting half a bottle of lighter fluid on fire. Jesus deals with us by moving us away, and taking all the heat Himself. He protects us from the consequences of our actions and does becomes our salvation.
Every sin you’ve committed. Every single one. He takes your place and my place, taking all of God’s wrath as the ultimate sacrifice.
A sacrifice we realize as we take His Body and His blood at communion, and realize the penalty of sin was dealt with, as His body and blood were broken and spilled for us.
He moves us out of the way, and takes all the heat….
And the Holy Spirit recreates in us a holiness that reflects Jesus’s
We just confess our sins, and realize He did the hard stuff.
- Lent and Outreach
During Lent, we go back to these basics. We work through them, remembering Jesus gentleness with ignorant and wayward ones for two reasons.
The first is simple – we need to work gently with the ignorant and wayward ones in our lives. We have to not tackle them or scream at them, but bring them Jesus slowly, prayerfully and patiently. Gently, drawing them to Jesus, letting the Holy Spirit convert them.
The second is more touchy. Some of you here today are wayward, and if not ignorant of God’s mercy, it has been forgotten as we are buried under guilt and shame. If that is the case, knowing God’s nature, we stop hiding or fighting Him, and let Him bring healing into our lives.
That is where we are – either the ignorant and wayward, or called to gently minister to the ignorant and wayward…. Or of course, we are both.
Either way, Jesus is our high priest, and the one who offers the sacrifice. AMEN.
Remember Who You Are!
Devotional Thought of the Day:
Before you knew God, you were slaves of gods that are not real. 9 But now you know God, or better still, God knows you. Galatians 4:8-9 CEV
We will, we choose, we create the moral ignorance in our souls, the ignorance that Plato saw as a prerequisite to doing evil. We voluntarily turn off the light of truth. For instance, we shut out the divine truth and justice of “thou shalt not steal” before we sin by stealing. The ignorance of the thief—by which he thinks that filling his pockets with stolen money will make him happier than filling his soul with proper virtue—is indeed, as Plato saw, a prerequisite for his act of theft.
2157 The Christian begins his day, his prayers, and his activities with the Sign of the Cross: “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” The baptized person dedicates the day to the glory of God and calls on the Savior’s grace which lets him act in the Spirit as a child of the Father. The sign of the cross strengthens us in temptations and difficulties.
The law has been given to men for three reasons: (1) to maintain external discipline against unruly and disobedient men, (2) to lead men to a knowledge of their sin, (3) after they are reborn, and although the flesh still inheres in them, to give them on that account a definite rule according to which they should pattern and regulate their entire life.
Peter Kreeft’s words above are truer than we want to admit.
We too often set aside God’s truth, shutting it out, so we can serve gods that are not real. One of them is the pursuit of happiness at any cost. Most of our sins will fall into that category. One example, choosing to sleep in, because that will make our day go better, rather than getting up and praying before all else. Or if it is Sunday, getting up and going or participating online in a church service. Kreeft’s thief is another example. A third, the man or woman who would commit adultery either in deed or just in thought, because the sex might be better than it is with their partner.
Sin sets aside our God-given identity, choosing to be ignorant of who we are.
The law confronts that worshiping non-existent gods, including the god of happiness, for sure. But it is often missed in the Christian. Rather than using it to establish the pattern of our lives, and to regulate that, we try to use it to externally discipline each other. We are great at pointing out others’ failures, others’ sins, but not so great at truly addressing our own. When we do, we usually beat ourselves up, fall into depression, and do not really change anything.
I find the key to this, when I remember it, in the words of the Apostle Paul. The part where he says what is better still. God knows you!
God knows you.
He cares for you.
God loves you!
That challenge is convincing you of that.
You see, before you knew God before you were united with Jesus, you were someone different. But that all changed when God came to you and baptized you, joining you to Jesus in His death and resurrection. (See Col. 2) We need to know that we need to stop setting it aside for this sin or that one. We need to celebrate that salvation with joy, recognizing who we are because of it.
The children God loves.
That is why Lutherans and Catholics and Orthodox make the sign of the cross when we pray, or when they start the day. The reason should be to remember the cross, to remember that they were saved there, as Jesus hung there and died…and with Him, they died to rise to a new life. It needs to be done, (and I will admit it is not… often) with reverential thought, remembering our identity that was established there.
Remembering, we are defined by this very thought. God knows us.
Peter Kreeft, The God Who Loves You (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 65.
Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997)521.
Theodore G. Tappert, ed., The Book of Concord the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. (Philadelphia: Mühlenberg Press, 1959), 479–480.
