King, Champion, Brother, and Priest, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Are you overwhelmed with despair? Look at the resurrected Jesus. How can you be in despair when the champion, the king, the brother, the priest is seated on the throne and controls all the universe?

How could you possibly be in despair? Look at him. Look at him and just rest in what he is and what he's done. Welcome to another day of good news here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

I'm your host Molly Bidevich. Let's start with some reflection today. What controls you, drives your decisions, keeps you up at night? Is it a fear of disappointment, a fear of missing out, fear of death or pain or loneliness?

Chances are that fear is a factor in the things bringing you pain or distraction right now. But the good news today is that it does not have the final word. Today Pastor J.D. describes how you can be freed from whatever it is that's holding you back. Pastor J.D. titled this message from Hebrews chapter two, King, Champion, Brother and Priest. You see this is the difference, the fundamental difference, hear this, between religion and the gospel. Religion tries to tell you what is wrong with you and then how you should go fix that. What the gospel does is it doesn't tell you what's wrong with you and how to fix it, it tells you what's wrong with you and then tells you to look at what Jesus has done for you.

Then you change in response to that. Religion tries to change you by command, the gospel changes you by sight. And so what the writer of Hebrews does is not list a hundred things you ought to be doing better, he lists what Jesus has done for them. And when you look at him, when you see him for who he is, then your life will change. So whatever spiritual dysfunction you bring into this place, and I know in a room like this, even looking at some of you right now, they are many and they are huge, I know that.

Whatever it is, whatever your spiritual dysfunction, there is one cure and that is look at Jesus. That's what he shows you here in Hebrews chapter two. We're going to begin in verse five because we left off in verse four last week, so let's begin there, verse five.

For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere. By the way, I love that. Is the writer having a senior moment? It's been testified somewhere. I can't remember the reference.

No, no, he's not having a senior moment. The reason we know that is because he quotes Psalm eight perfectly word for word. So he hasn't forgotten where this is written. There's something that's lost in translation in that phrase.

What it really means is it's been testified everywhere. The whole Bible is about this, what he is about to say there, and then he goes on to quote Psalm eight. What is man that you are mindful of him or the son of man that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels. You've crowned him with glory and honor and you put everything in subjection under his feet.

Now that's a pretty amazing statement, is it not? Listen, God made the world for you. God made the world for you.

It was all supposed to be under your control. You were the highest of all of God's created order. You were higher than the angels. The one that created the angels became lower than the angels, namely Jesus who is crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone. I'm going to give you four pictures of Jesus. Here's your first one.

Number one, he is a king who got involved. Sometimes when I see people suffering, if I feel like they brought the suffering on themselves, you have a tendency to be like, well, they'll just get what they deserve. I never feel like that about my kids. When my kids are suffering and it's because of something that they've done wrongly, I mean, my heart breaks for them.

And if I could get involved and if I could help them, I would. He was a king who saw our suffering, that he got involved. Number two, he is a champion who saves, a champion who saves. Some of your Bibles say captain. It means somebody who represents somebody else, right? What was he fighting?

What was he fighting? The one thing that most terrified us, at least in our sober moments, is down in verse 14. It says that he delivered us from the fear of death that had held us in slavery. Death is the one thing that terrifies all of us, at least when you think about it. You got to think about it because it is only in the light of death that your life starts to make sense. You have to start thinking about eternity because your life, the Bible says, is like a wisp of smoke that appears for just a moment, then it disappears. Sometimes you're terrified of death because you fear the judgment of God, and so you start obsessing about appeasing God. You start wondering if you've done enough to get to heaven. People, as they get older, a lot of times get desperately religious because they're trying to get prepared for the next phase. What he is saying is our champion took on that greatest fear, death, and he put it away forever.

He did it all by himself. Verse 14, you see this? Since, therefore, the children share in the flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil. Some of you are past the age where you should have gotten married and you wanted to get married. You're like, God, why did this happen? It's not like there was something wrong with you. It was not like you were a lesser person and nobody wanted to be around you. This is just not what God's plan was for you.

You're like, God, why? Some dream was shattered. What I can say to you is all those things were just dim shadows. That's all they were, preparing you for something much greater, something that in the light of what you experience in eternity makes this look like a light and momentary thing.

I do not want to ever gloss over your pain because I know that it is real, but I will tell you with the apostle Paul, it is light and it is momentary. It was a story of this girl who they were her and her boyfriend were about to get engaged. They were already looking at rings together. Right before they were going to get engaged, he was in an automobile accident. At first, they thought he was going to be brain dead, but eventually he came back from that. He, through a long time, learned to communicate, but he's just not nearly the person that he was. He'll never be able to hold a job.

He'll never be able to have a coherent conversation. She said, I faced this issue of what do I do? We were going to get engaged, but we weren't engaged. We're not married, but I knew what his intentions were. She talks about going through this struggle and how she knew that God was leading her to get engaged and to get married to this guy.

She didn't say that's what everybody ought to do in every situation. She just said, this is what God was leading me to do, but the reasoning of it, what was so powerful to me. She said, because this marriage on earth will never be what I dreamed it could be. This marriage here now will never be what I've hoped it would be.

It will never be what I've hoped for since I was a little girl. But see, this marriage was a light and momentary thing that God allows us to experience to prepare us for eternal glory. If God is going to let me know him more through this, then I can put up with a marriage that is not everything that I had hoped it would be because I realized that it's not the point.

Ultimately, that's the point. God has taken the sting out of a disappointing marriage. That's what gives you the ability, you see, to go on in things like that because death's power has been defeated.

That means the partial things you miss out on down here, you will experience in fullness there. Our enemy's greatest weapon, you see, the weapon within all the other weapons was death and our champion defeated it. So now Paul says, death, where's your sting? Grave, where's your victory? Disease, where is your finality? Disappointment, failure, rejection, where is your devastation?

Loneliness, where is your bitterness? Christ has removed death from death, and he is the only religious leader to ever have done that. When people look at me and they're like, oh, all religions teach the same thing.

I don't even know what to say to that anymore, honestly. I'm like, you couldn't possibly have read anything about Jesus Christ and make a statement as backwards as that one. He is the only one to have gone into the one thing that terrifies us all, death, and conquered it.

Our religious leaders give you better ways to live, better ways to run your family, better ways to be better people. Jesus' primary work was to take on the thing that scared us most, the thing that nobody could overcome, the giant who stood on the field that none of us could conquer. He walked out there and all by himself, he took it down and conquered death through death so that in his death, I can now find life, so that even when I go through death, which I will, I go through it without a sting. I go through deprivation without devastation. I go through disappointment without failure.

I go through physical death without the bitterness of thinking that it's all over. See? Our champion who saves. Verse 13, keep reading. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers. Number three, he's a brother who's not ashamed of us. He's a brother who's not ashamed of us. This is so beautiful.

Verse 13. I was trying to think of how to ask this question sensitively. Do you ever have somebody in your family that you were ashamed of?

You know, oh, come on. We've all got one, the weird uncle, right? The person in your family, you're like, oh, please, no, please don't, oh, there they are, right? If there were ever a family member to be ashamed of, you were the family member Jesus should have been ashamed of. But he wasn't. He proudly identified with you. He claimed you. He said, that's my brother. That's my brother. That one, the crazy one, the dysfunctional one, the one who can't get anything straight, the one who can't get anything straight, the one showing up drunk, the one who's out of his mind. That's my brother.

That's my sister. I was reading this to our campus pastors this week. One of them said, man, this genealogy is filled with people that we classify in our church in the hoe pod, the homeless orphaned prisoner. I'm with mother of high school dropout. And Jesus' genealogy is filled with it.

That's because he was saying, I'm not ashamed. I include them in my genealogy. They're my brothers and sisters.

They're my brothers and sisters. In fact, one of my favorite resurrection scenes jumped to the end of Jesus' life, John chapter 20. Jesus appears to Mary in the garden, right? First one to see Jesus, Mary. Jesus has a little conversation with her. Then he says this, and you might have always overlooked this, go and tell my what?

Go tell my brothers that I've resurrected. That wasn't the most common metaphor he used for them. He didn't say go tell my disciples, go tell my friends, go tell my followers, go tell my peeps, my apostles. He didn't say any of that.

Of all the things to say right there, that's not the one I would have chosen, right? I mean, because what have they just done to him like just three days before? Oh, we don't know who that guy is. They left him. They were cowards. They departed him in his hour of need. I mean, if that had been me, I'd have been like, you go tell those backwards, cowardly, idiotic dolts that I raised from the dead like I told them 100 times I was going to.

Seriously. That would have been the gospel according to JD. That's not what he said. He said, go tell my brothers. Because what he was trying to say is essentially this, he is not ashamed. He wasn't ashamed to own them. He's not ashamed to own you. Maybe that's what you needed to hear today.

He is not ashamed to own you. There's more teaching in just a moment, but before we return, let me tell you about our latest resource created exclusively for our Summit Life listeners. Just like God was always there for the giants of the faith we find in the Bible, helping them thrive despite hardships and persecution, our new study book will help you do the same to help you flesh out, apply, and pray through what you're learning. Christ is Better follows very closely with our on-air teaching, so you don't want to miss this resource.

Reserve your copy today by calling 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgreer.com. Now, let's rejoin our teaching with Pastor JD in verse 16. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Let me just stop real quick right here, because this is such an unbelievable statement. He doesn't help angels, he helped the offspring of Abraham.

You got something the angels are jealous of. I got one more image here, I'll get to it in a minute, but you realize that Jesus did not become any of these things for them, none of them. He didn't have to become them for you. He was not a king who got involved for them. He was not a king who got involved for them. He was not a king who got involved for them. He was not a brother who was not ashamed of them. He was not, whichever one I just skipped, a champion who saved them.

He could have. He could have taken on angel flesh and died. About a third of the angels rebelled, right?

They became demons. He could have taken on flesh and he could have saved angels, but he didn't. And so now 1 Peter says that angels, you ever think about this?

Angels long to look into the things that you and I experience in the gospel. Just do you realize what he has given you? He's a king who got involved. He's a champion who saved. He's a brother who's not ashamed. Here's number four.

Number four. He's a priest who can help. He's a priest who can help. You know, a priest is somebody that you go to for help when you've messed up. I mean, he shows you why Jesus is the best priest and why we don't think you need any other priest if you got him. If you got varsity, you don't need JV anymore.

Here's why he's varsity. Number one, he engages us without judgment. He engages us without judgment. You see, there's always a question when you go to God and that is, is he judging me for my sin?

Right? I mean, don't you have that question? I skipped the verse, didn't I? Let me read the verse first so I can show you that what I'm getting is not from my head, but it is from the Bible. Verse 17, therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he's able to help those who are being tempted. All right, so here's why Jesus is the high priest.

He does so without judgment. It's because of that word, propitiation. Now, propitiation is probably not a word that you use a whole lot, right?

Propitiation means that anger was taken away because a penalty was paid. And he says he became a high priest because he propitiated our sins. He took them into himself so that now when I go to God, there is no more threat of judgment anymore. I've told you this before, but I used to be kind of worried when I would go to God because I would wonder when God would run out of patience for me. Yeah, I wonder when God would be like, you know what, man, I have forgiven you like a thousand times for that one.

That's it, no more. You're going to pay a little bit. It's going to sting. Or I would go to Jesus and be like, Jesus, I'm so sorry, I need you to go to the Father for me and I need you to get help. And Jesus would be like, uh-uh, seriously?

I'd embarrass myself going back up there for you. I'm not doing that. You are on your own now, son. But see, propitiation means that when Jesus stands before the Father, he holds up the finished work. Listen, he doesn't ask for mercy for me. He asks for justice. He says, God the Father, you can no longer punish JD ever, ever, ever for his sin.

Why? Because you punished me. And it would be unjust and unfair for you to punish JD for something you've already punished me for.

So I need you to give him the love that I earned for him. See, he holds up before God justice. That's why he is a faithful and merciful high priest.

He is faithful because he has already paid all the penalty for us so that now all that is left for me is love and acceptance. I don't know what God is doing in your life. I don't know why you're in some of the pain you're in, but I can tell you this, if you walk with Jesus, it has nothing to do with condemnation. Even the wounds that he gives you now are just the wounds of love.

It is not the wounds of judgment because Jesus took judgment out of the way. He is a high priest who helps us without condemnation. He is a high priest who engages us with understanding.

Engages us with understanding. People read verse 17 that I just read. Look there in your Bible and they get confused by it. In verse 17 says, oh, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect. Because he suffered when tempted, he is now able to help those who are being tempted. They get confused. They are like, what do you mean? Jesus learned something?

He was down here on earth and he was like, oh, that's what that feels like. I never knew that. Thanks. Now I understand.

No, of course not. God is perfect. He has always understood everything. I don't really know how to explain this unto you. I'm just going to admit it. I just know what it is like experientially. For some reason, knowing that whatever I go through and whatever I face, Jesus has dealt with it firsthand.

I can't explain to you, but that just does something for me. To know that I am talking to a God who understands it because he has felt it for himself. He knows firsthand what the lure of temptation is like. He knows what it's like to be tired and hungry. He knows what it's like to weep, not knowing the will of God in a situation.

Jesus of the tomb of Lazarus, not understanding. He knows what that's like to weep and say, God, why are you doing the things that you're doing? He knows what it's like to experience betrayal and rejection by a dysfunctional family. He knows what it's like to be stabbed in the back by friends, by close friends, by ministry friends.

He knew all that firsthand. He knew what it was like to be single long after the rest of his friends got married. The Gospels record him going to all kinds of weddings.

Well, after he was in his 30s, when most Jewish men have been married about 13 years by that point. He's always going to his wedding. He's like, always a wine maker, never the groom. He knows what that's like. He knows what that's like. He knows what it's like to be single.

Some of you guys and girls that are single and you're past the age where you thought you should have been married, it might help you to realize that every single time you pray, you pray to a 33-year-old single adult every time. He understands. He knew disappointment in ministry. Matthew 23, 37 says that Jesus stood outside of Jerusalem and said, how many times I tried to gather you and you just wouldn't listen.

But if you understand what I'm saying, that's a kind of failure in ministry, is it not? He knew what that was like, church, to fail. He told the story of the prodigal son.

He was the father the son had departed from. He knew what it was like to be a rejected marriage partner. He understands. He understands. And sometimes just knowing that he knows firsthand helps me. See, when you go through pain, you want to talk to somebody who's felt what you feel. He felt it all.

He felt it all. And we know that because he experienced it, he can be moved by it. So you go to a faithful high priest who doesn't look at your pain from a distance, who's walked through all of it, and you can talk to him as somebody who has gone through it firsthand.

There's a third reason I'll give it to you real quick. He engages us with assured victory. So we know that because he's a priest who sat down. The fact that he sat down at the right hand of God means, listen, that your sin is as far as the east is from the west. Your guilt is removed. The fact that he sat down also means that your victory is secure.

It is secure as Jesus sitting there. There are some of you in here that are so overwhelmed by a struggle that you're having. There is an addiction you cannot seem to get under control. There is a temper you cannot seem to be able to bring into what it ought to be.

There is pornography. There are bad habits. And sometimes you feel like, God, I don't feel like I'm ever going to get victory of this. I can tell you this. Your victory is as sure as Jesus seated by the right hand of God. And you can get up when you fail because until Jesus falls off that throne, your victory is secured. So I don't have to worry about whether or not I'm ever going to overcome my sinful habits.

I know that I'm overcoming my sinful habits because Christ overcame them all. Christ is seated on the throne, and Christ lives in me. Therefore, my victory is secure, and that's how he engages me. You see, Jesus, the writer of Hebrews says, is a king who got involved. He is a champion who saves.

He's a brother who's not ashamed. He's a priest who can help. That's who Jesus is to you, or at least it's who he wants to be if you'll let him.

That's what he repeats over and over and over and over again throughout this book. Look at Jesus. There's no way for you to have seen the glory of Jesus and then turn around and look back at yourself as if you were the answer to your own problems.

No way. Do you lack courage? Look at Jesus seated on the throne. His opinion's the only one that matters. If he is for you, then who cares who else is against you? So when you find your courage lagging, don't try to read books about courage. Look at Jesus and say, he is for me.

If he's for me, I don't care who else is against me. Are you overwhelmed with despair? You're overwhelmed with despair right now? Look at the resurrected Jesus. How can you be in despair when the champion, the king, the brother, the priest is seated on the throne and controls all the universe? How could you possibly be in despair? Look at him.

Look at him and just rest in what he is and what he's done. Are you lonely? Are you lonely? Your brother and your friend will never leave you, never forsake you.

And yes, while you may experience earthly loneliness down here, you've got a friend that sits closer than a brother, a friend who is a better companion to you than a husband, a wife, a father, or a mother. What you lost was bad, but what you gained was better. Are you discouraged at the lack of victory over sin right now?

Is that you? Are you just discouraged in it? When Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look and see him there who made an end to all my sin.

You can trust him. Are you struggling in your faith? Are you striving to understand? Is it difficult for you?

Got questions you don't know how to answer? Me too. I'm right there with you. I can't explain everything, but I can show you a God who conquered our greatest enemy and reveals his plans for good and is now seated at the throne of the universe. Whatever it is that you lack, you need more than a new command, a new teaching, a new willpower, or new motivation.

You need a savior in whom to trust and find refuge. You are listening to Summit Life with a message called King, Champion, Brother, and Priest from Pastor J.D. Greer. If you missed any part of today's message, you can hear it again online at jdgreer.com. J.D., we have a companion resource this month that goes along with our teaching series. How are we hoping listeners will use this Hebrew study guide? Yeah, Molly, thanks for asking that because one of our desires here at Summit Life is to help people study the Bible better on their own. And the book of Hebrews is an excellent laboratory to do that in, to not only learn the message of Hebrews, but how to study the Bible. And so what we're going to do in this study is take you on a little journey that will compare and contrast Jesus to key historical people and events from the Hebrew Bible that the author of Hebrews references. And through those comparisons, what you're going to see is that while there are many heroes of the faith, there's only one real hero, and that's Jesus. So our Bible study is called Christ is Better. I couldn't think of a more simple way to say it.

Christ is Better. And as you're hearing these messages taught on Summit Life, you're going to find they're greatly enriched as you go deeper into the message of Hebrews through this Bible study. Our goal here at Summit Life is for everybody within our listening audience to put Jesus first in their lives and to ask God what it looks like for you to live faithfully as a worshiper and a follower of Jesus.

And I think this study will help you do that. Thanks so much, JD. As our thanks for your generosity today, we'll send you this exclusive new Bible study. Your donation is a partnership because when you give, you're joining with us in reaching the world with the transforming power of the gospel. We can't do it alone. So donate today and request the Christ is Better workbook.

Go online to JDGrier.com or call us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. And on behalf of the entire Summit Life team and all your fellow listeners, let me just say thank you for making this ministry possible. Tomorrow, we're dealing with a common problem, busyness. And Pastor JD explains why slowing down is so important for our spiritual well-being. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us Thursday for Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.