Unstuck By Grace

Unstuck By Grace

I. INTRODUCTION:

Today is my birthday! I am 43 years old. I am a Gen-Xer. We were born at a transitional moment in history where technology began to boom just as we were born. In the home I grew up, at first we had a rotary phone. Then a pulse phone. We had a stereo system that had an 8-track player, a cassette deck where you could make your own mix tapes, AND a record player. Later we had CD players, and gadgets to connect them to the cassette players in cars so they would play through the car stereo system. We still used payphones to answer our pagers and made collect calls to call home when a quarter wasn't enough to pay for those long-distance phone calls. One thing about record players is that when a record got worn the needle might stick in a groove and you would hear the same part of a song played over and over again.

You would have to bump the stereo or lift the needle and move it so that you could go on with the recording. The Bible has a lot to say about being stuck. God gave ancient Israel a system of worship that was good in itself, but because of their human frailty could never get them unstuck. The OT law with all of its rituals actual served to show them and us that apart from God's Gracious act of self-giving in Christ we remain stuck. We are like a broken record, on repeat...

II. TEXT:

Hebrews 10:1-18 (NRSV)

Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach. 2 Otherwise, would they not have ceased being offered, since the worshipers, cleansed once for all, would no longer have any consciousness of sin? 3 But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year. 4 For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. 5 Consequently, when Christ came into the world, He said, “Sacrifices and offerings You have not desired, but a Body You have prepared for Me; 6 in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. 7 Then I said, ‘See, God, I have come to do your will, O God’ (in the scroll of the book it is written of Me).” 8 When He said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), 9 then He added, “See, I have come to do Your will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. 10 And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ once for all. 11 And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. 12 But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, “He sat down at the Right Hand of God,” 13 and since then has been waiting “until His enemies would be made a footstool for His Feet.” 14 For by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. 15 And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us, for after saying, 16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My Laws in their hearts, and I will write Them on their minds,” 17 He also adds, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” 18 Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.

No one knows who wrote the letter to the Hebrews. Some adamantly argue that Paul wrote it, or Apollos, or Luke, or Barnabas but as Origen wrote in the third century, "The Lord knows."

Whoever wrote it seems to have written it in the first century to Jewish Christians who were in danger of rejecting Christ and returning to practicing the law of Moses as a means of being made right with God.

The writer argues that this is a backwards move because trying to be right with God through the law kept the Jewish nation stuck in an endless cycle of rituals. These rituals had no power to deliver them from their sins. The yearly cycle of sacrificial offerings to God like a broken record reminded them continually of their inability to measure up to God's standard. They were spinning their proverbial wheels, but with the coming of Christ there is grace to get unstuck.