Christ’s Perfect Work (Part C)

He said this to his audience, I thought you'd be ready for meat at this time in Hebrews 5, but you still need milk. People get insulted. That's their conscience. Sounding the alarm. Doesn't mean they're going to respond the right way. I mean, what happens if the fire at the firehouse, the alarm goes off and they just turn over and go to sleep?

The house burns down. Christians, we are susceptible to such poor behavior, and may we not give in to it. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Hebrews.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Now here's Pastor Rick with his continuing message called Christ's Perfect Work in Hebrews Chapter 10. Now up to that point, you could say that about King David. You could say that about any of the kings that were righteous. But then he takes this turn, Isaiah does, to narrow it down.

Just which child is he talking about? Which we know more about than Isaiah knew at the time. And his name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. All of those things belong to him. He says of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end.

You cannot say that about anyone else. Upon the throne of David and over his kingdom to order and establish it with judgment and justice. From that time forward, even forever, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this. And so verse 7 where it says, behold I have come in the volume of the book it is written of me. Well there it is.

There's just two places there. Of course, hundreds of prophecies concerning Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. Not to mention all the sacrificial offerings pointing to him. Verse 8, previously saying sacrifice and offerings, burnt offerings and offerings for sin you did not desire and had no pleasure in them.

Which are offered according to the law. Now maybe I've lost you. Maybe you say, I don't know where you're at. Offerings, sin, blood, sacrifice, priests, Christ coming.

I don't know where you are. I'm speaking to believers. Well then you have a lot of homework. You have to catch up. You can't, you do not automatically know the scripture when you become born again. When you accept Christ as your Lord and Savior, do you memorize the Bible instantly? Do you know what everything means?

Of course not. None of us can exhaust it, but we have work to do. You've got to plow the book. You've got to go into it and learn what is being said so God can work through you. You know, we have a saying, it's not all about you. Much of it is about you, but not all of it. That part that is about you is supposed to be a channel.

You're not just supposed to be a trough that holds things, but you're also supposed to be an instrument through which things can pass through one to another. The word of God, the teachings of God, we were singing that they will know us by our love. Christian love, that's a whole sermon right there. How difficult is it for Christians to love how easy it is for them to criticize in the name of love? In the name of love, I love you brother, but that's an ugly tie you got on.

If that was the worst criticism I had to handle, I'll take it. But unfortunately, Christians can be more vicious than that. Oh, you go to that church? Well, what's wrong with that church? Unless you've got a biblical doctrinal or moral issue, you better keep your mouth shut. You better be careful who you are messing with when you mess with God's people and his pastors. And so the work begins when you come to Christ. Christ did the dying work, but you've got a lot to do.

And you should be following me on these things. He said this to his audience. I thought you'd be ready for meat at this time in Hebrews 5, but you still need milk. People get insulted. That's their conscience sounding the alarm. It doesn't mean they're going to respond the right way. I mean, what happens if at the firehouse, the alarm goes off and they just turn over and go to sleep?

The house burns down. Christians, we are susceptible to such poor behavior. And may we not give in to it. Verse 8, previously saying, I read verse 8, verse 9. Then he said, behold, I have come to do your will, O God. He takes away the first that he may establish the second. Well, the New Testament, the New Covenant in Jesus' blood, superior, overruling the first covenant.

And to distinguish the one from the other, he makes it clear here that one is the new and one is the old. Verse 10, by that we will have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all. His single death, removed all of our guilt, saved us from the wrath of God, those who come to him. God is not going to do something else to redeem the loss.

He's done it all. Charles Spurgeon writes this. And if you don't know who Charles Spurgeon is and you are a Christian, you are missing out. As part of your homework assignment, if you are a Christian student, still in need of milk, and you want to get strong enough to take the meat of the Word, you need to start reading the Scripture. You need to be under the teaching of men who will teach the Word of God. And with that will come familiarization with what God has done with other saints over the centuries, to this present day.

But Charles Spurgeon, that great pastor of all, said, no new victim is expected or required. There is nothing left to be presented by so-called priests on earth or to be made up by the panaceas and payments of their dupes, by powerful language. In other words, he is saying, Christ has done it all. We don't need a priest to get into heaven. So you can go directly to Christ. So you can go directly to Christ, and if you think you need a priest to get to heaven, you are a dupe.

You're disagreeing with what the Scripture said. Next section, when we get into Hebrews, he's going to say, we can boldly come into the throne room of God. Boldly we come. We don't have to have a representative, a human representative. We have Christ himself representing us, standing for us, inviting us in. And so when he says by that, we will have been sanctified. Two parts to sanctification.

One is justification, our position with God. We are set aside. We are saved.

The second part is we are developed in Christ. We are learning. We are growing. We are making mistakes. We are recovering from mistakes. We are being used by God. We are stepping out in faith and we are failing and we are stepping out again in faith.

Because we believe him and because that is what it takes. That is sanctification. The world does not have it. They are not sanctified. They are doomed. The wrath of God abides on them. We are here not to be opponents to them, but to reach them wherever we can.

And you cannot do it if your sword is dull. Because it is going to take knowledge of Scripture to reach their conscience. You cannot convict them or you cannot convert them if you can't convict them. And conviction comes by truth and so Jesus says, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God. But the word of God is going to hurt sinners.

It's supposed to do that. It will slaughter man's self-willed opinion of himself and bring him in touch with a loving God. Who has his arms stretched out to receive any sinner that will come. Verse 11, and every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.

That's his whole point. They were never finished. John's Gospel chapter 19. So Jesus, when Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, it is finished.

There's that same word for complete. And bowing his head, he gave up his spirit. No one can do that. You cannot bow your head and drop dead.

There has to be, you need help. But you cannot dismiss your spirit as Christ did. The Old Testament sacrifices. Again, not able to open the gates of heaven, but Jesus Christ, Revelation 1, 18, speaking to John, the apostle, he says, I am he who lives and will not be saved.

And was dead. Behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of death.

I've got the keys. John 10, verse 9. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.

You will be free and you will be provided for. It is the work of Christ. It's amazing that there are churches that don't speak about sin and Christ and he being the only Savior.

And they don't use their Bibles. It's sort of like going to a coffee shop with no coffee. You go to a coffee shop. I'd like to have a coffee and we don't sell coffee. Well, why are you a coffee shop?

What businesses are yours? To probably say, but there are churches out there. You go looking for God's word in God's house and it's not there.

And they're quite indignant if you say anything about it. They want to make room for you to believe anything you want, just like Satan wants you to do. Because he is the author and finisher of blasphemy.

He is the author and finisher of leaven and corruption and apostasy and heresy. And then Christians are afraid to stand up and say, yeah, that's true. You know how we become weak in our testimony as we become so familiar with the other side is that we don't want to offend them with the truth. I'm not saying we should be abrasive or offensive. Yet, if the truth does that, then that's the truth.

That is not me. So we don't go and say, Jesus loves you, you idiot. You see that's abrasive.

And offensive. You might want to say that, but that's not how we do it. No matter what they're throwing at us, we can save very lovingly. We can tell them, I would love to call you an idiot, but Christ has saved me from that.

Can't do that either. But we can tell them, look, I know you don't like it. This is what we believe. We believe it for a reason. We can back ours up.

You can at best guess at what you're saying. But Christ has revealed his word to us. Verse 12, but this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, forever sat down at the right hand of God. He is not a catch and release writer, this Hebrew, this writer of the letter of Hebrews. He is relentless. He won't let them go. They can say, we heard this in chapter six.

We heard this in, it wasn't chapters then, but they could say, we heard this in the early part of the letter. He is coming back to it. He is hammering them because he does not believe in catch and release as a fisher of men.

It's okay if you want to catch a big mouth bass and then throw them back in the water. But when we give them the truth, we're not trying to let them go back to a lie. We want to hold their foot to the fire as best we can until they understand the difference between a lie from the enemy and the truth from God. So when Stephen was preaching, this is what the scripture says about Stephen. And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spoke. So what did they do to Stephen? They killed him. They killed him because they could not prove him wrong in their own heads. And out of that came the apostle Paul, who could not escape the conviction.

He did a lot of damage before he finally succumbed to Christ. Because it is a very real fight. It is invisible, but it is very real. And we get so sidetracked. We need time to be entertained and to have harmless fun. There's nothing wrong with that.

The day can be very long. You've got to fill those voids with something. So long as they remain clean and honest and do not become a distraction. But at the same time, we have to say to our Lord, what are you doing with me? What is my role in the kingdom? And I can tell you that if you are being used by God, you will not be satisfied in this life with being used by God. In other words, you'll always be asking, is there something more I can do? I don't feel like you're getting enough from me. I know that there's more in me to be used. And then God will say, yes, there is, and I'm going to do it. Then he puts you on the side and doesn't do anything with you because that's part of the training.

It is called weight training. Wait there and be trained so you can know how to hear my voice versus your ambitions. Well, as a pastor, I'd like to let's all just go out and just go into Walmart. Let's blitz the place and let's jam the gospel down their throats.

That would just be wrong. And so God says, no, I want you to wait. I want you to do it my way and I want you to learn how to distinguish my voice. How to distinguish my voice from your voice. My voice from the devil's voice.

I want you to learn discernment. He sat down at the right hand of God, it tells us in verse 12. In the Jewish temple, there was nowhere for the priest to sit. As he's writing this letter, the priests were still ministering in the temple.

Nowhere to sit. They could not rest from their work. It was never finished. But Christ as a priest, according to Melchizedek, not according to Levi. When he finished his work, he sat down at the throne right in the throne of God. Verse 12, he sat down at the right hand of God. You cannot say this about anyone else except Jesus Christ.

His work is finished. Now the Jehovah Witnesses and others would say, aha, he sat down at the right hand of God because he's not God. Else he would have sat down as God. They failed to factor in the Godhead, which is clearly taught in scripture.

And because they failed to factor in the Godhead, they failed to factor in that God is central. Where else is Christ to sit as a second person of the Trinity? On the lap of the Father?

No, he sits to the side of the Father. The Holy Spirit is there just as much, but he does not draw attention to himself. That's why we do not hear about, and the Holy Spirit sits on his throne. He's not pointing to himself. The role of the Holy Spirit as designed by the Holy Spirit is to point to Jesus Christ because there's no way into heaven without Christ.

He could point you to anything else. You'd never get to heaven, and thus his work would not be holy. So the Son is equal, equal with the Holy Spirit. The Father, the Son, they're equal together. Three individual persons, and they can't get past that. They can't get past that, so they stumble at that verse and many others.

Why? Because they don't want it to be so. Because they've been told it's not so, and they want it that way.

So they work to ignore. And so when they come out with their own translations, they change Greek words that don't mean what the Greek means. So when the Bible says, uses the word concerning Jesus Christ that he is worshipped, because that would mean he's equal with God. If he receives that worship, they change the word from worship to obeisance. He just shows him respect, but he's not worshipped.

Oh yeah, he is. That's the Greek word. It's never twisted the way you do. And so the truth, it will set you free, and lies will put you in jail. Well, I'm almost out of time. We've got a few verses to go. I can do it. I just kick into my New York speech mode.

8,000 words a minute. Verse 13, from that time, waiting till his enemies are made his footstool. I just want to read this verse concerning that. 1 Corinthians 15, 24, then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom of God, the Father, when he puts an end to all rule and authority and power. When he says, enough human rule, and he takes over.

That day is going to come. His enemies will be his footstool when he separates the sheep from the goat. Verse 14, for by one offering he has perfected.

There is that word finished again or completed. Forever those who are being sanctified. Justified is again, your sins are removed. Sanctification is you're being developed into the image of Christ in this life. In heaven, there will never be a worry about remaining in heaven. You will never have another worry again once you make it off this battlefield.

He perfected forever. Recurrent cleansing. When you sin, Christ has already made provision for that. In other words, you're a Christian now and you stumble and you sin.

You don't have to go back to square one or you're not eliminated. There's a thing called recurrent cleansing. Now, that's not a biblical word, but it is a biblical fact. That's why we have where sin abounded, grace did much more. That's why we have there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. That's why we have the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sins. This should make us robust, otherwise you're timid, oh, I sinned, I can't preach Christ, you know, I'm all messed up now, I've got to do some sort of penance or some goofy thing. Christ says, no, I paid for you, I've made you complete. You're sanctified, get up, go at it again.

Don't fall for the devil's lie, don't quit. Of course you're not worthy, none of you are. If you were, I would not have died for you, but I did not. You are, if you were, I would not have died for you, but I did die for you because I say you're worth it, not because you say you're worth it.

You cannot give self-worth to yourselves. That's why the scripture says, humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord and he shall lift you up in due time. Verse 15, but the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us or after he had said before, this is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts and in their minds I will write them. This, but the Holy Spirit also witnesses.

Well, he tells what he knows in that sense. And it says about the Holy Spirit that he had said. In other words, the Holy Spirit is not an it or a thing or a power or a force. He is a person. He is the third person as we know him of the Trinity.

He is every bit of God. And when the scripture says you can blaspheme against the son and it could be forgiven you, you can blaspheme against God the Father and it can be forgiven you. But if you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, you're done. Well, I think that elevates him to status of deity.

I think that puts him right up there. But what is meant by that? Did I accidentally blaspheme? No, there's no such thing as accidentally blaspheme. Accidentally, blaspheming the Holy Spirit is it is a deliberate act. What is his role class to preach Christ? And if you tell Christ to take a hike, you're not interested and you go to your grave that way, you've blaspheme the work of the Holy Spirit, the person of the Holy Spirit, and you cannot be forgiven.

And so we're very serious about what we preach in the world hates us for preaching it. Oh, there's got to be another way. Why? Who says you? You say there's got to be another way. So I got to believe out of you of the Bible. I'll take the Bible because there's a whole lot more force behind God's word and it's being true than anything you could ever say or do. What do you get 70 years, 80 years, 90 years, 120 years? How old is the scripture?

How old is God? Verse 16. This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, that I will put my laws in their hearts and write them in their minds. Essentially getting to the point, quoting the prophet Jeremiah is saying to them, if you disagree with Jeremiah, you're going to disagree with Christ. If you agree with Jeremiah, you will receive Christ. These things were foretold and they were fulfilled in Christ. Not all of everything Christ promised is already done.

Of course, there's more to be fulfilled, but it has been launched. Verse 17, then he adds their sins and their lawless deeds. I will remember no more. Thank you, Lord.

That is true right now. God cast your sins away. So that he doesn't, he wills them out of existence for those who come to Christ. Verse 18. Now where there is remission of these, there is no longer an offering for sin. So he says, where Christ has forgiven you, there's no more offerings down at the temple. When we get further on in this chapter, he is going to say, if you go back to the temple, there remains no forgiveness for you. That is a verse that so many Christians read and are terrified by. Because he says, if you continue to sin, and we think, well, I make a sin every now and then. But he's not talking about the sin of behavior. He's talking about the sin of mixing Christ with something else.

First Corinthians, I'm almost done. First Corinthians 5, 7, 4, indeed Christ, our Passover was sacrificed for us. And I close with this concerning the Jews today. They have no temple, they have no priesthood, they have no altar, they can't even pretend to go through the motions of their faith that has been given to them.

Yom Kippur is still observed, but it is without high priest, without altar, without blood. And therefore, it is really not as God commanded it to be. The Lord prophesied that this would be the case. The reason why it is the case is because God moved Judaism out of the way because the Christ had come. And they don't believe it as a people. Hosea 3, verse 4, for the children of Israel shall abide many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, without Ephod or Taraphim.

The whole system is going to collapse and it is to this day. You would think they would say, wait a minute, maybe unto us a child was born. Counselor, the Prince of Peace, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, maybe, in fact, Christ is our sacrifice.

Some of them have and some of them do, but most of them don't. You've been listening to Cross-Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, today's teaching is available free of charge at our website. Simply log on to Cross-Reference Radio dot com. That's Cross-Reference Radio dot com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross-Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can subscribe at Cross-Reference Radio dot com. Or simply search for Cross-Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app. Tune in next time as Pastor Rick continues teaching through the book of Hebrews right here on Cross-Reference Radio.