Let Us Draw Near | Hebrews 10:19-25
Brian Hedges | September 29, 2024
For the message this morning, let me invite you to turn in scripture to Hebrews chapter 10. We’re going to be reading verses 19-25.
While you’re turning there , let me remind you of words that I’ve quoted often from this pulpit. I think it’s one of the most important sentences that I’ve ever read outside of sacred scripture. They are the words of Scottish minister Robert Murray M’Cheyne. In the nineteenth century he said in one of his letters, “For every look at self take ten looks at Christ.”
I think those words, that counsel, captures a deep truth about our relationship with God—that the Christian life is not a life of introspection where we are constantly looking at ourselves and our works and our sins and our own efforts, but it is to be a life that is focused on Jesus Christ. In fact, this is how we enter into a relationship with God—through faith in Christ. It’s how we continue in our relationship with God and every time we come into the presence of God we do it only in and through Jesus Christ. M’Cheyne understood this; he understood the power of a conscience that was cleansed—washed in the blood of Christ—and he practiced this regularly in his life.
I think that practice and that mentality connects closely to what we’re going to talk about this morning from Hebrews chapter 10. It’s all about drawing near to God through the finished work of Christ and I think in many ways we could say that these verses we are going to study together are the heart of Hebrews. If I could think of just a few verses in Hebrews that kind of summarize the whole letter, it’s right here. These verses are something of a summary of the argument that has gone before, but also the hinge in the letter that leads us on into the exhortation that will flow through the rest of the letter.
And maybe you’ve noticed that Hebrews really is kind of built with this alternating emphasis between exposition and exhortation. We’ve been in a very lengthy exposition section of this letter for the last number of weeks as we’ve been looking at chapters 8-10 together with its emphasis on the supremacy of the priestly ministry of Jesus Christ that’s seen through the new covenant that he has inaugurated, and is seen through his final sacrifice on the cross which he has offered in the heavenly sanctuary in the very presence of God. All of this in stark contrast to the old covenant ministry of Levitical priesthood.
But now the author is summarizing what has gone before and is leading us into the final chapters of this letter and it’s all going to be exhortation from here on out. The rest of the letter is just a sustained series of exhortations about how we are to live as believers in Jesus Christ. And so, we’re going to slow down a little bit over the next few weeks as we look at these verses in chapter 10:19-25.
Let me begin by reading the passage and then I want to explain the structure of the passage that will kind of help chart the course for the next three weeks and then we will dig into verses 19-22 this morning.
So Hebrews 10, beginning in verse 19, “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places [or the sanctuary] by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”
This is God’s word.
So as I’ve said, this is the heart of Hebrews, and this passage can be understood as presenting us with two great privileges—two privileges of the new covenant—followed by three exhortations. You can kind of see the structure of the passage here.
The privileges are signaled by these two phrases “Since we have”. “Since we have confidence to enter the holy places”, and, “Since we have a great priest over the house of God.” Those are two gospel privileges that come to us in the new covenant that are really summarizing the teaching of this letter up to this point, and the author is saying, “In light of this—therefore because of this—let’s do three things.”
And you have three exhortations that follow. These exhortations are signaled with those words “Let us”. “Let us draw near” (verse 22); “Let us hold fast” (verse 23); and “Let us consider one another” (verses 24 and 25). “Let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith”—it’s all about faith. And then “Let us hold fast our confession of our hope”—that’s all about hope. And then, “Let us consider how to serve one another to love”—so it’s all about love. So faith, hope, and love, that triad of Christian virtues.
They’re right here, this exhortation to draw near in faith and hold fast the confession of our hope and stir one another up in love. In many ways we could say that this is the most basic teaching on the Christian life. The Christian life is the life of faith and hope and love, and the basis upon which we live that life is this confidence we have to enter into the very presence of God through the priestly ministry of Jesus Christ.
And so what I really want us to do for the next three weeks is just focus in on those three exhortations. Today, “Let us draw near.” Next Sunday, “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope,” which ties quite closely to the rest of chapter 10. And then on October 13th, “Let us consider how to serve one another to love and to good works.”
So today our focus is on “Drawing near to God.” What I want us to do is to look at three things. I want to see:
- What It Means To Draw Near
- Why We Can Draw Near
- How We Actually Draw Near to God
- What It Means to Draw Near
We’re really focusing on those two words from verse 22, “Let us draw near.” Now, those words, draw near, are really central to the book of Hebrews. It’s one of the core concepts in this letter, and you see the phrase pop up a number of times. We’ve already seen this a couple times in the letter. So for example, in chapter 4:16, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” That passage in some ways parallels this passage here in chapter 10. Or we read in chapter 7:25, “Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him since he always lives to make intercession for them.”
So drawing near to God has to do, not merely with a physical proximity or with attending some kind of religious event like coming to church, it really has to do with the movement of the heart towards God. We could say that drawing near involves entering into a deep and personal relationship with God that is marked by sincere devotion and worship. And we could say that drawing near to God is something that we do both personally in our prayer lives, and is something that we do publicly and corporately together in our worship. And really it’s at the heart of our relationship with God—this Godward movement of the heart as we draw near to the Lord.
I think one of the best explanations of this I’ve seen is from Adolf Saphir who was a Hungarian Jewish man, whose family was converted through the ministry of Robert Murray M’Cheyne in the 19th century. Adolf Saphir ended up becoming a pastor and minister and he wrote an exposition of Hebrews and a wonderful little book called, The Hidden Life: Thoughts on Communion with God, where he talks about this phrase, “Drawing near to God”, or in his words, “Drawing nigh to God”. And he said it’s the most comprehensive expression to describe the soul’s attitude to God. He said, “Prayer is the culminating point of this attitude. Drawing near to God describes the character of the Christian’s life.”
I wonder if that’s descriptive of your life. Is your Christian life described in this way—as drawing near to God? Saphir went on to say, “In the meditation of our hearts and the desires of our souls and the activities and enjoyments of our daily path, we approach God, for we wish to live before him, conscious of his presence, in constant dependence and in constant enjoyment of his grace.” The approach of the soul to God with the aim of living before God in constant dependence and in constant enjoyment of God. That’s what we’re called to. That’s what it means to draw near to God.
Now maybe there’s something in your heart that corresponds to that—that resonates with that. You say, “Yes, I want to live like that. I want to live in the conscious dependence on and enjoyment of God. I want my heart to be a Godward heart. I want this to be characteristic of my Christian life.” But it may be when you think about this that there’s something like a hesitation in your heart. There’s something in your heart that holds you back from this intimate and personal approach to God. It may be that you don’t even quite know what I’m talking about—that you don’t really know what it is to really be in the presence of God.
Or it may be that you are conscious of a huge barrier between you and God—and there is a problem because of sin. Sin poses a barrier, creates a barrier between our hearts and God in his holiness, because God, in his utterly self-consistent holiness demands a corresponding purity in those who are created in his image and who would have fellowship with him. And we know this because of many passages in scripture, and really, all the revelation of the Old Testament.
You might think, for example, the question of the Psalmist who asks, “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?” And, “Who shall stand in his holy place?”, Psalm 24. And the answer is it’s him who has a clean heart or clean hands and a pure heart and honest lips. Only this person can stand in the presence of God. God says, “Be holy, for I am holy,” says the Lord your God. And because God is holy and he requires holiness of us, and because in reality we are not holy, we’re not clean, we are not pure, we don’t have clean hands, we don’t have pure hearts, and we have not upheld integrity and honesty in every word that we have spoken—because of this we know that there’s something in us that disqualifies us, that keeps us from being in God’s presence.
So there is this barrier between us and God and this has certainly been the discovery of the saints in the Old Testament when you study the stories of the patriarchs and the prophets. When they actually had a real encounter with God, they were really in the direct and immediate presence of God, how did they respond every time?
Take Jacob in Genesis 28. Remember, he has this dream of a ladder—this ladder that reaches from earth to heaven and the angels of God are ascending and descending on the ladder? And when Jacob wakes up he is afraid. He’s afraid and he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.” And he says, “How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven,” and he names the place Bethel. But there’s this dread that comes upon him when he meets with God.
Or you take the children of Israel at the base of Mount Sinai when God reveals himself in smoke and in thunder and in lightening, and the ten commandments are given. Do you remember what the people say to Moses? They say, “You speak to us. We will listen, but don’t let God speak to us.” They don’t want to hear the voice of this God. They are terrified of this God.
Or take Isaiah the prophet, maybe the most righteous man of Israel in his day, and he has this vision when he sees the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up and surrounded by these winged seraphim who are crying out incessantly in this antiphonal song, night and day, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory.” And when Isaiah has this vision, he says, “Woe is me, for I am undone. For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.”
That’s why Calvin, reflecting on these stories, wrote of the dread and the wonder with which the scripture commonly represents the saints as stricken and overcome whenever they felt the presence of God.
And this is the tension that we must understand if we are going to understand the beauty and the glory and the power of this passage of scripture. And I know that as New Testament Christians—and many of you who know your Bible know the resolution to this tension. We’re going to get there in a minute but I don’t want to rush there. I don’t want you to get there too quickly, because, for some of us, we’re not taking seriously enough what it means to be in a relationship with a holy God. For some of us, we don’t take sin seriously, and we don’t really know what it is to wrestle through this personal need for forgiveness and restoration and holiness if we are to enter into the presence of God. For some of us, maybe we do take it seriously, and the reality is that we feel so overcome with that guilt and that burden, that it keeps us from ever even trying to enter into the presence of God.
Let me just ask you this morning—how do you respond when you confront the reality of your sin in the light of God’s holiness? And are you even aware of the weight of sin and how it separates you from a holy and righteous God?
Don’t pass over those questions too quickly. Let it rest with some weight on your heart. It certainly landed with weight on the hearts of the saints in scripture and when they came to actually see some manifestation of this God, they were overwhelmed. They were overcome. They were filled with dread and with fear because they knew that they were not clean. They knew that they were not worthy. They knew they needed redemption.
That really sets up the tension of this text. We need to feel that tension. To draw near to God is to come into the very presence of the Holy One. It is the Godward movement of the soul towards God, so that we live in his presence and before his face. So that’s what it means.
- Why We Can Draw Near
So then, I want us to see why we can draw near. It’s an awesome thing to be in a relationship with the creator of the universe. But this passage is telling us that we actually can do this. We can draw near to God. It gives us two reasons and it really connects to these two privileges of the Gospel, or these two privileges of the new covenant—these two “since we have” statements in verses 19 and 20.
So notice the first privilege. The first privilege is confidence to enter the holy places. “Therefore brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places [or the sanctuary]...” So I think it has in mind here the heavenly sanctuary which is the very presence of God, and he is saying we have confidence to enter the presence of God. How do we enter? By the blood of Jesus—”By the new and living way that he opens for us through the curtain—that is, through his flesh.”
Now that’s an amazing statement. We need to just kind of dissect that for a minute so we understand what he’s saying. “We have confidence”---that means boldness and access and it means both an objective right to come into the presence of God and the subjective confidence that we feel in our hearts, so that rather than coming into the presence of God with guilt and with shame and with fear, we come with boldness and confidence that we will be accepted. And we have confidence to enter into these holy places by the blood of Jesus. That's pointing us back to the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ when he shed his blood on the cross for our sins—this final, once for all sacrifice that’s been expounded for us in chapters 9 and 10.
And the author says we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus by the new and living way that he opened for us. Now what is that? What is this new and living way? I think he calls it a new way because it is the way to God through a new covenant as opposed to the old covenant. So it seems that he’s recalling this contrast here and he’s telling us that through what Christ has done in shedding his blood for our sins, we not only get the pardon of our sins, but we also get transformation of the heart. We get newness of heart, newness of life. Scripture says that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, right? “The old things have passed away, behold the new has come.”
This is a new way. It’s different than what you had in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, access to God was very limited. Only the high priest could go in and he could only go in once a year on the Day of Atonement, and he could only go in with these blood sacrifices with the blood and the incense and he had to go through this curtain. Nobody else could go in. If anybody else goes in they die. And the author to the Hebrews is telling us that something has changed. This is the new way and it is a living way.
Why does he call it a living way? The commentator, New Testament scholar Thomas Schreiner, thinks this refers to Christ’s resurrection and refers back to Hebrews 7 which tells us that Jesus always lives to make intercession for us. Jesus is the resurrected Priest-King and he lives always to intercede for us. Hebrews 7:16 speaks of Jesus as our High Priest by the power of an indestructible life, and the idea here is that Jesus not only died for our sins, but he conquered death, he rose from the dead, and now he stands before God in heaven as the resurrected, risen Priest-King who gives us this access to God.
And I think we could also say that, once again, you have a contrast between the old covenant and new covenant. We don’t have time to go there this morning, but if you read a somewhat parallel passage from the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 3, one of the things you will notice here is that Paul describes the ministry of the old covenant as the ministry of death and of condemnation. Whereas the ministry of the new covenant is the ministry that leads to life and justification and righteousness and transformation.
I rather think, that when the author says that we have confidence to enter by the new and living way, part of what he means is that we come through the resurrected Christ who has inaugurated this new covenant, and when we come into the very presence of God, it does not lead to death, it actually leads to life. We get life! Very different than what Old Testament believers experienced.
Notice it says, “By the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain—that is through his flesh.” And my guess is that as the author was penning these words, he remembered an event that had taken place right after Jesus died. An event recorded for us in Matthew 27:50-51. It says, “And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.”
I mean, this is an amazing thing. This is one of the miraculous, supernatural events that happened when and after Jesus died on the cross. The curtain, the veil that separated the Most Holy Place from the rest of the temple, was torn in two. It was a powerful and a visual representation of this great truth, that the way into the very presence of God was now open.
Listen to how Spurgeon explains this in a wonderful sermon called “The Rent Veil”. I’ve slightly updated his language but you’ll get the gist here. He said, “For believers, the veil is not merely rolled up, but torn from top to bottom by the divine hand, ensuring that it can never be hung up again. Between those in Christ and God, there will never be another separation. The one separator is destroyed forever. The devil himself can never divide us from God now. The tear is not slight, but complete, making an entrance for the greatest sinners. What abounding mercy that the veil is torn from top to bottom so even the chief of sinners may pass through. This act was not by man, but by God alone—done rightly, finally, and irreversibly. God has laid sin on Christ, put it away and opened the gate of heaven. Behold, he sets before you an open door.”
And here you see the resolution to the tension. If you feel the guilt of your sins in your conscience and if that ever poses in your conscience this sense of “I can’t come into the presence of a holy god,” here’s how you can. You can because those sins have been put on Christ and because through the final sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, the veil has been torn.
I didn’t read this part, but Spurgeon says essentially in the sermon, “It wasn’t just a little tear so that the little sinners could get through.” He said, “The whole thing is torn from top to bottom so that the greatest sinners could go through.”
And for some of you—and really all of you if you know your hearts—that’s really good news. It means that whatever that sin is—that great big sin that haunts your conscience or that terrible secret sin that’s often repeated and you’re struggling, you're fighting it but you don’t feel like you’ve gotten the final victory over it yet but it’s that thing that torments you and is the barrier between you and God—this is telling us that Christ in his death on the cross has dealt with that sin, that you can be forgiven, that you can have freedom and that the way is open. You can come into the presence of God. Confidence to enter the holy places. That’s the first privilege.
The second one I can be shorter on. Hebrews 10:21, “And since we have a great priest over the house of God.” And, of course, in just a phrase he is summarizing for us the whole argument of this letter so far, that Jesus Christ is this great High Priest who has passed into the heavens, who sympathizes with us in our weaknesses, who has already made purification for our sins, who has sat down at the right hand of God. He is the priest who gives us access so that we can come into the presence of God; we can come to this throne of grace to find mercy and help in our time of need. It’s through the priesthood of Jesus Christ that we have access.
And listen, it’s the only way you have access. Even if you’ve been a Christian for twenty years and you’ve never studied Hebrews and you’ve never really thought that much about the priesthood of Christ and even if you don’t recognize the significance of this, this is the only way that you have access to the presence of God. You get it through the priestly ministry of Jesus Christ. This is why we can draw near.
Now before moving to point number three, I want you to think about the application of this point for a minute and what it means to draw near to God and what it means to draw near to God in this particular way, through the work of Jesus Christ. I would say there were two primary ways that we draw near to God. There is a personal way and there is a public way.
We draw near to God personally through prayer—through our own personal, private prayer life. So I just want you to reflect on that for a minute. What is the quality of your prayer life? Do you know what it is to apply this in prayer so that you know how to draw near to God in faith, trusting in the finished work of Jesus Christ?
For some of you, most likely, you just never really pray, maybe beyond meals. Maybe you pray before meals, and you mean it, but it’s not like there’s any real wrestling of your soul with God. You don’t really know what it is to get on your knees to spend some extended time in the presence of God to take time with the Lord where you’re working through your sins— you're confessing, you’re repenting, you’re setting your eyes and your heart on God, you’re thinking about his character, you’re thinking about his greatness, you’re expressing worship and adoration, you’re recounting the goodness of God in your life and you’re giving thanks to him for it. You’re not really doing that with any kind of regularity. And it may be that you’re not doing it because the guilt that you feel, or the distance that you feel is so great, that you’ve never been able to muster up the effort you think it would require to actually spend that kind of time with God. And here’s what I want you to know—the curtain is torn, the way is open, you’ve got a blood-bought privilege to come before the face of God and he will receive you if you come in this way, through faith in Jesus Christ. So don’t let guilt and fear and shame keep you from coming. In fact, the only way you’re ever going to resolve those issues is if you come before God in prayer and you wrestle through those things, claiming the work of Jesus Christ.
I’ve told this story many times and I’ll tell again this morning the story of Martin Luther, a man who had a tormented conscience but then got a grasp on the Gospel. And the story goes that Satan would come and taunt him with his sins and tell him of sins—how many they were, how often they were repeated, how vile they were—and Luther would have these conversations with Satan. “Is that all? Tell me all.” He would say, “No, that’s not all. If I were to give you the full list of your sins, it would wrap around the world twice.” And Luther said, “Bring them all, and then write at the bottom of the list, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.’”
You need to lay hold of that. You need to know that. You need to get peace in your conscience if you never have before, and then cultivate a daily, or regular, prayer life with God where you are coming to the throne of grace through the work of Jesus Christ.
But then also, we apply this in corporate worship. So when we gather for worship, this should be in our hearts. Listen, when we come here on a Sunday morning, we are not coming just to see each other, although that’s great; that’s good. We’re going to talk about the community aspect of this when we get to verses 24 and 25, “Let us consider one another.” That’s important.
But when we come here on Sunday morning, especially, and these worship services, the focus is vertical. This is us coming together before the face of God. And I’ll tell you, what was on my heart in preparing this message for today is that we not just talk about this, that I not just teach about this and that we not just understand this, but that we experience this. I want us to experience this! I don’t want you to just understand what it means to draw near to God, I want you to actually draw near to God so that when you come here Sunday by Sunday, you’re coming with this Godward orientation of the heart and you’re coming with this expectation that “I’m going to be in the presence of God with God’s people today. I want to hear from him. I want to know him. I want to be with him. I want to worship him. I want to walk away feeling like the Spirit of God was in that place and something happened in my heart when I was in the house of God.”
To whatever degree that’s not happening, it probably reflects a lack of prayer and intentionality and expectation in our hearts. And listen, I can’t make that happen. None of us can make that happen, but we can seek the Lord for that to happen. I would encourage you to pray as you come to worship, that this is what would happen. We’re coming to meet with God. We’re drawing near to God together.
- How We Actually Draw Near to God
So how, then, do we do it? I’ve already hinted at it, but let me show you the text which gives us three specific things that are necessary for us to draw near to God. It tells us how to draw near.
(1) Number one, a sincere faith. Look at verse 22. “Let us draw near with a true heart [or a sincere heart] in full assurance of faith.” There’s no way to draw near to God apart from faith. Hebrews 11:6 says, “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
So a sincere faith—faith, of course, meaning that we are trusting in what Christ has done and his finished work and sincerity means that there’s something real in our hearts that corresponds with our words, because it is possible for you to draw near with your words while your heart is far from God. In fact, Jesus said this, didn’t he? Matthew chapter 15, quoting the prophet Isaiah, says, “This people honors me with their lips but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me.” That’s the definition of hypocrisy. It’s when you’re saying something or singing something or praying something with your words and there’s nothing going on in your heart that’s corresponding to the words saying and singing. And so, there needs to be the engagement of the heart, the emotions, the affections, the feelings, the desires of the heart.
As John Piper has put it, “Without the engagement of the heart we do not really worship. Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead.” So I don’t want us to be overly focused on emotion, but also I don’t want to neglect it because if there’s no desire for God, if there’s no adoration, if there’s no love, if there’s no joy, there’s no delight, there’s no movement internally in your heart towards God, then it’s not really worship. You’re just mouthing words. Our hearts have got to be engaged. So a sincere faith—that's first.
(2) How do we draw near? We need hearts sprinkled clean. “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience.” That’s an interesting choice of words. Now, it may just be referring to what we’ve already seen, that Christ, through the shedding of his blood on the cross, inaugurated the new covenant through which our consciences are purged, purified, and perfected.
But there may be more here. The Puritan commentator, John Owen, suggested that this word “sprinkling” has an additional nuance. He points to the Old Testament, especially Exodus 24, where God’s people make the first covenant with God and the blood is shed, but then after the animal is slain, the blood is sprinkled on the people and there is an application of the shed blood to the people. And Owen suggested that there must be an ongoing application of the shed blood of Jesus Christ to our consciences if we are to draw near to God in worship.
And in fact, Robert Murray M’Cheyne, who I began the sermon with, this was actually how he practiced his devotional life. There’s a record that was left behind in his journals and diaries—nobody knew about this until after he died and then they found it—where he wrote this personal reformation and it’s seven or eight pages worth of his reflections and his resolve to seek the Lord. One of them is to always have a conscience washed in the blood of Christ. That’s the way he put it. And he talked about his practices of confession where he would work through his sins and confess his sins to the Lord, but it wasn’t a morbid introspection, instead, he said, “For every sin that I commit there is a stripe on the back of Jesus for that sin.” He was looking specifically at what Jesus did to deal with his specific sin. That’s how you do it. That’s the application of the blood of Christ to your life.
And something like that is needed in our lives. That’s why John says, “If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” There’s this ongoing cleansing that happens through the application of the work of Christ to our everyday lives.
(3) So we draw near with a sincere faith; we draw near with hearts sprinkled clean; and then we draw near with washed bodies. Bodies washed with pure water. That’s kind of an interesting expression. And some people believe this refers to baptism. Most of the commentators—the majority—say it refers to baptism. So, looking back to baptism when our bodies were washed as a sign of our union with Christ and new birth and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.
Others connect it to the prophet Ezekiel—Ezekiel 36:25-26, “For God says, I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols I will cleanse you, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I’ll put within you.”
And I rather think that the two ideas are combined together because really, what baptism is, is a sign of that inward, spiritual cleansing. And in fact, you have indications of this in scripture. Do you remember Saul of Tarsus in the book of Acts? He’s converted and he meets with Ananias, and Ananias says, “Rise and be baptized, washing away your sins.” And it’s not the idea that the water mechanically or automatically washes away sins so that anybody who gets baptized is automatically forgiven. That’s not the idea. It’s rather, that baptism is symbolic of this deep, spiritual reality by which the Holy Spirit cleanses us from sin and his regenerating sanctifying work. And so perhaps both ideas are in mind here when the author says that the way in which we draw near to God is not only with a sincere faith, and not only with a cleansed heart, but with bodies washed with pure water.
So, one way to apply this is for you, as believers, when you come to worship, remember you are a baptized Christian and that baptism means that if you are genuinely in Christ, it means that something has happened to you—your heart has been washed clean by the Holy Spirit, and now you need to live in the reality of that. And so when you feel this conflict with sin, or when you feel your conscience burdened because of some fresh sin committed, you remember what Christ has done for you. You remember what the Spirit has done to cleanse you and you renew your experience of that in prayer and faith as you trust in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
So let’s close in this way—we’ve seen what it means to draw near; we’ve seen why we can draw near because of these great Gospel privileges; we’ve seen how we do it, through faith with a cleansed heart and conscience and remembering both our baptism and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And I just want to end by reading these words to you. This is a hymn that was written a number of years ago that’s based on the book of Hebrews. We’ve sung this before, but it’s been a while so for many of you these will be new words. It’s a hymn that’s inviting us to come to the throne of grace. And it’s dealing with the objections that someone might have in their minds and in their hearts to actually doing it. I think the way it addresses those objections is quite helpful and encouraging. Here’s the hymn.
Come boldly to the throne of grace,
Ye wretched sinners come;
And lay your load at Jesus’ feet,
And plead what He has done.
[That’s what we’ve been talking about this morning. Here’s the objection—]
“How can I come?” Some soul may say,
“I’m lame and cannot walk;
My guilt and sin have stopped my mouth;
I sigh, but dare not talk.”
[Hear the objection here? Someone is saying, I don’t know how to come. I don’t feel like I’ve got the wherewithal to come. I’m lame. I can’t walk. My sins have closed my mouth. I don’t feel like I can come into the presence of a Holy God. Here’s the answer—]
Come boldly to the throne of grace,
Though lost, and blind, and lame;
Jehovah is the sinner’s Friend,
And ever was the same.
He makes the dead to hear His voice;
He makes the blind to see;
The sinner lost He came to save,
And set the prisoner free.
[And listen to this—]
Come boldly to the throne of grace,
For Jesus fills the throne;
And those He kills He makes alive;
He hears the sigh or groan.
Poor bankrupt souls, who feel and know
The hell of sin within,
Come boldly to the throne of grace;
The Lord will take you in.
Listen, if you’ve ever felt the hell of sin within your heart, here’s the answer, here’s the resolution to the tension—if you come boldly to the throne of grace, pleading what Jesus has done, the Lord will take you in. The veil has been torn. The way is open. We have the privilege. We come into the very presence of God. We draw near through faith in Jesus Christ, and when we do, we are welcomed and received. Let’s pray together and let’s draw near to the Lord together this morning.
Father, we thank you for these glorious truths of the Gospel. We thank you for this privilege we have of drawing near to you through faith in what Jesus Christ has done. And we pray now that you, by your Spirit, would apply this to our hearts with power in a way that my words cannot do; that your Spirit would take and apply these to our hearts so that we not only understand what it means to draw near, but we actually in our hearts move towards you.
And Lord, I pray that that’s what would take place in these coming moments as we come to the Lord’s table—that we would come, not denying our sin, but confessing our sin; not overwhelmed with the burden or the guilt of sin, but instead overwhelmed with gratitude as we think of your grace and your mercy and what Christ has done to set us free; that we would come self-consciously trusting in Christ and his finished work, depending on what he has done for us; that we would come and receive a fresh application of the blood of Christ to our troubled hearts and that by your spirit there would be a fresh renewal this morning so that as we leave this place we would leave different, cleaner, closer, more alive to you than we were before.
Again, Lord, this is the work of your Spirit. We can’t do this for ourselves, but you can do it. We ask you to do it. And we ask you to do it in Jesus’s name. Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
