Embracing Grace – Part 4 – The Throne of Grace
I went on a retreat with our Deacons this week. We had a good time of fellowship, food and friendship. We prayed together and we studied the bible together and we talked about God’s grace. I think some of today’s sermon will reflect those discussions and prayer times that we shared together.
We have been talking about embracing grace.
We have learned that grace is God’s graciousness, God’s kindness, God’s love that is extended and offered and even showered on those who least deserve it.
It is that combination of our undeserved-ness and God’s kindness that makes this grace so amazing.
We discovered that our forgiveness from sin and our right relationship with God is the result of God’s kindness and not our goodness or ability or our works or performance.
In fact, we learned that grace is grace only when we don’t dilute it with anything else. If you add anything to it, like trying to win God’s approval by your actions, performance or works…you literally nullify the grace of God.
I have so far been focusing on the word “grace” and what it means, and for just a second, I would like to focus for a moment on the other half our sermon series title, the verb “embracing.”
I felt led by the Lord to title this series “Embracing Grace” because I believe the bible says that our response to God’s love is a verb, it is an action, it is something active and not passive.
We looked at Bill and Grace giving each other a hug a few weeks ago, and I hope that picture of embrace is still in your minds.
Last week, we looked at the difference between “taking” and “receiving” grace.
I hope that you learned that God’s grace isn’t to be merely received, it is offered so that we will take it and appropriate at it as our own.
God’s graciousness is of such value that we would be remiss to merely yawn and not be excited about taking it as our own possession.
I would like to read a quotation from Jeff Harkin, “It has been my observation throughout thirty years of Christian ministry as both a counselor and a teacher that a surprisingly high percentage of true believers in Jesus Christ are hindered or crippled in many vital areas of their Christian growth, worship, and true witness because they lack understanding of how to appropriate the grace of God on a daily basis.” (Celebration of Grace, Jeff Harkin)
Appropriation means to take something and make it your own.
This is the great void in our discipleship of Christians.
We teach a person who meets Jesus how to receive the grace of God for the very first time…to place their faith in Christ and receive the forgiveness of their sins.
We teach them how to pray, how to read their bibles, how to witness…
But we leave them to their own efforts to maintain their relationship with God, and wonder why our churches are filled with guilt ridden, shame filled, joyless believers.
I am guilty of it. I think many of us are…we see a brand new Christians and we never tell them how to embrace the grace of God as their own on a daily basis.
Why is that?? Maybe it is because we aren’t really all that certain of how to do it either!
Let’s examine our key passage for this morning and discover the answer to that question:
Hebrews 4:14-16 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. 16 Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
v14: “Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession” –
Every year, on the Day of Atonement in the Jewish faith, the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies in the temple to offer atonement for the sins of the people of the nation. He would offer the blood of a lamb and the people would rejoice that their sins from the past year would have been covered.
In contrast, Jesus has gone into the heavenly temple on our behalf. He Himself being the spotless Lamb of God and great High Priest, has offered Himself as our atonement. Not only the sins of our past but our present and future have been covered and forgiven.
And because of this, we are told that we should hold to what we believe! We have a reason to never give up or turn from our hope, because Jesus has finished the work! He has paid the price. He has won for us the grace we could not win for ourselves. We have unlimited, total access to God.
V15: For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.
Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses. He was flesh and blood like you and I, subject to the same weaknesses we are, tempted just like you and I are, and yet without sin.
I want to help you understand what this means. I rather imagine that there are few people in this room who understand the full weight of temptation. How do I know that?
Because when temptation comes to most of us, at least in our area of greatest weakness, we never let it come to its full weight…because when we give into it, the weight of the temptation is gone and sin takes its place along with its guilt and shame.
Jesus never gave in to temptation. Jesus faced temptation much more severely than we ever have or ever will. The Sinless One knows temptation in a way we don’t, because only the one who never gives into temptation knows the full strength of temptation. It is true that Jesus never faced temptation in an inner sense the way we do, because there was never a sinful nature pulling Him to sin from the inside. But He knew the strength and fury of external temptation in a way, and to a degree, that we can never know. He knows what we go through; He has faced worse.
C.S. Lewis stated, "A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of the wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means." Mere Christianity,
So Jesus grappled with the very things you and I have and was victorious! That becomes a source of joy and hope for us because He “sympathizes” with us.
Sympathize:
Many of the religions of the world worship a distant, indifferent god. Moslems worship a god that they will never see, that they will never have fellowship with. Buddhists worship a cosmos, an indifferent force that is about ying and yang.
For the Greeks, the primary attribute of their gods was apatheia, (apathy) the essential inability to feel anything at all.
Jesus isn’t like that at all. The God that Christians worship is a personal God, a God who knows and has felt what we go through. That is the miracle of the incarnation…God caring so much that He took on our nature.
The Greek word used in this passage for sympathize means "to suffer along with."
God feels your pain and your sorrow, your hopes and dreams, He suffers along with you in your failures and your crushed expectations. He knows what you are going through when you are tempted and weak.
Jesus didn’t have to be a sinner to understand what it is like to live as a sinner in a fallen world.
He tasted the horror of sin when on the cross, He was separated from His Father’s fellowship, and bore the brunt of the curse of sin. In that "He tasted death" He tasted the wages of sin like no other could taste it. And in the midst of all of that…he sympathizes with you…He suffers along with you as you struggle in life. Doesn’t that bring you hope?
Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Because we have a High Priest who is both all powerful, sympathetic and compassionate, we can come boldly to His throne. Our High Priest has paid the price of entry, the price of sin, He has taken all of the justice our disobedience deserved. He has thrown open wide the door to the very throne room of Heaven itself.
If you have trusted Him as your Savior, you have the right to come before His throne!
But Satan’s core strategy is to discourage you from coming to God’s throne at all, he desires to keep you cowering and afar from God and His grace. He will use shame, guilt, fear, pride, false humility, whatever lie will work…he will use it to keep you from the throne of God.
And if he can’t keep you away from the throne, then he will attempt to get you to come timidly and cowering before God.
The devil wants us to consider Jesus as unapproachable – and will offer substitutes like Mary or the Saints for us to approach instead. He knows if we find the throne of Jesus, we will find the throne of grace itself and it will be the devil’s undoing!
The throne of God is a throne of grace.
Rabbis taught that God had two thrones, one of mercy, and one of judgment. They said this because they knew that God was both merciful and just, but how could these two attributes of God be reconciled? Perhaps God had two thrones, displaying the two aspects of His character. On one throne He would show His judgment, and on the other His mercy. But here, in light of the finished work of Jesus, we see mercy and judgment reconciled into one throne of grace.
When we come to the throne of grace, we obtain mercy - is not getting what we deserve, and find grace - is getting what we don’t deserve, in our time of need.
Grace does not ignore God’s justice; instead it operates in fulfillment of God’s justice, in light of the cross.
Jesus paid the price of justice, your price on the cross with His own lifeblood. He atoned for your sin. You stand whole and complete before God on His merits!
This is the result of having such a great high priest…
So we can “draw near with confidence”
Or "Let us keep on coming to Him with boldness" (meta parrhsiav).
So that we may receive (lambano?) TAKE AS OUR OWN
and find ? grace to help?
(find or obtain – to take as one’s own.
(help) – supporting cables, therefore, support.
In time of need (?)
Eukairov is an old word also (eu, well, kairov, opportunity), only here in N.T. "For well-timed help," "for help in the nick of time,"
Bold faith is the result of embraced grace!
When you have appropriated God’s grace as your own, when you have embraced it fully and completely, you no longer hesitate to go to God with your needs or wants.
You understand what Jesus did for you…you have embraced his grace to such a degree that you go to Him for your every need with confidence.
I heard someone say “The Throne of Grace is No Place for the Bashful.”
We are to come boldly to the Throne of Grace. If you have embraced grace, if you have seen its value and taken it as your own, then you cannot remain timid. You know that God offers you an open invitation to His presence and His grace and mercy!
God went to great pains to facilitate such an access.
Don’t insult Him by insulting His ability to handle your problems as though one false move on your part will push Him over the edge.
How do you embrace God’s grace? Boldly and shamelessly!
People who have appropriated God’s grace, who have fully embraced the grace of God don’t bother beating themselves up when they fail or sin. They go straight to the throne of grace for mercy!
They are audacious enough to skip the brow beating, self-injury, performance based nonsense that we all seem to engage in, realizing it has no bearing on grace…if anything it is an obstacle to grace, and so instead they run to the throne of mercy.
Jesus spoke of the man who said, “Lord be merciful to me a sinner” and contrasted him to the Pharisee who was self-righteous. Many of us look at that passage (or our Roman Catholic view of it) and think that is the way we must continually approach God. But the story was about a man in need of justification.
If you have come to Jesus Christ and have received Him as your Savior, you have been justified once and for all by Christ. You don’t need it again. You only need His continued grace! You don’t have to grovel to get God’s mercy. It is already yours!
I think that God is more honored by such an audacious man or woman who runs to His presence after failure and sin than He is by one who beats himself up and dares not approach His throne.
It is related of Alexander the Great that on one occasion a courtier asked him for some financial aid. The great leader told him to go to his treasurer and ask for whatever he wanted. A little later, the treasurer appeared and told Alexander the man had asked for a large sum and that he hesitated to pay out so much. "Give him what he asks for," replied the great conqueror. "He has treated me like a king in his asking, and I shall be like a king in my giving.
God is approachable—even the worst sinner can approach Him.
Here is lie of Satan, “Don’t bring that to God, He will be disgusted with your terrible, awful sins.”
Here is a scenario that is played out a million times. A person who is trying to live for God fails miserably, the devil comes to them with condemnation, and assures them that they have crossed the line and God will not hear their prayer.
So they don’t approach God and become even more bound in those sins until they hit bottom. In desperation they cry to God and God hears and comforts them and they regret not coming to Him sooner because sins do have consequences in our life.
Give it to Him! Go to His throne boldly and give it to Him! He understands. He sympathizes. He knows your need. His grace is there for you to come and get. Don’t delay. Give it to Him!
Show video “I’ll Take It”
