All right, well, in this episode, we're going to continue the series we've been doing exploring the New Testament letter to the Hebrews.

And these were lectures and teachings I gave a number of years ago when I served as a pastor at Doer of Hope Church.

And in this teaching, we're going to explore Hebrews chapter 10, the second half of the chapter, which is one of the stiffest and most challenging warnings that pastor, who wrote the letter, gives to this early Christian community.

The letter to the Hebrews is known for having some of the most kind of intimidating challenges, pastoral challenges, and calls to examine yourself and your faith and your life.

And this is one of them. And so we're just going to go right towards it. Why does the author get so intense? Why does this pastor really want the people in this early church community to examine their very motives for following Jesus and examining their hearts as to whether they're actually going to be a pastor.

Whether they're actually loyal to him and showing faith towards him. So what's up with these kinds of challenges? If the gospel is the good news of God's grace, shouldn't that be good news? Why is it that there has to be this kind of intimidating really intense what some people might hear as bad news that the stakes are high and that there's real risk involved in this adventure of following Jesus.

So how do we move towards this? We're just going to go right into it in Hebrews chapter 10. And as I explored these, these are called the warning passages in Hebrews.

Personally, I was both deeply challenged, but also found myself with a renewed sense of God's grace and covenant promises to me and to our world. So I hope that's what you can discover here too. So let's dive in. Hebrews chapter 10 and we'll learn together.

Today is an important kind of transition in our moving through the book of Hebrews. The passage we're looking at today is the last half of chapter 10, it starts in verse 19 and goes towards the end.

And this section of Hebrews, I kind of think of it as like the hinge of think of Hebrews is like a big swinging door. And this passage we're in today is like the great the hinge on which the great door swings.

And so for like last six weeks, starting when we jumped into chapter five, the author introduced us to this whole area exploring the character and the ministry of Jesus, Jesus as our priest, as our high priest, Jesus as the sacrifice, the sacrificial lamb, Jesus is the one who goes into the holy space and inaugurates the new covenant and so on.

And that's just how priestly, priestly stuff going on here and he's going to bring that to a close in the text we're at today and it's sort of like we're saying, if in fact Jesus has done this for us, if he's our priest, if he's our standard, right, we explored this, if he is the one who comes to do for us, what we can't do for ourselves, we're too broken, we're too compromised as human beings to get ourselves out of the mess that we're in together and before God.

If Jesus is, in fact, the priest and the offering, he's the one who makes the offering and he is the offering himself. And in his death, he absorbs the evil and the sin and the death and just the mess that we all heap up throughout our lives and that we make in our world.

If that's really what he's done for us, how then should we respond and should we live? Let's see, other doors going to swing, what Jesus has done, who he is, how then what's an appropriate response to this reality of Jesus and the passage that we're looking at today is the hinge, moving us from understanding who Jesus is to what we ought to be doing about it.

That's the passage we're looking at today. And before we dive in, there's a number of pieces going on here and I kind of want to bring some clarity and give us some handles first that will kind of help us give us categories as we go through.

So I want to help us get a handle on this hinge text. I want to show you a picture of a guy that is seemingly unrelated to Hebrews 10 and he probably never knew that he would be brought up in a sermon about Hebrews 10, but whatever. He's been dead for a long time, so he can't do anything about it.

So his name is Edward Jenner, right there. I just got the wall of fan right there, so I don't know if that was funny or not. So Edward Jenner, he was a British doctor and surgeon.

He lived obviously late 17 early 1800s. Anyone heard of Edward Jenner before? It was one, hey, alright. You should get a lollipop or something. I don't know. I don't have one.

I guess you don't get one, but you should get one. So he was a very prominent British surgeon doctor. He kind of what he's most known for, his legacy to medical history and so on, is that he innovated the vaccine for the smallpox virus.

So smallpox, you may, you know, it was declared eradicated in 1979, so probably most of us has not had it or don't really know anybody who's had it.

It was a deadly form of something more similar that's more still widespread now like the chickenpox or something like that.

So you get the blisters and the skin rations on, but it was accompanied by deadly fever. And so children, elderly, it was often a death sentence if you get smallpox.

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