Hebrews: Eternal Inheritance
Pastor Fletcher preaches from Hebrews 9:15-28, read for us in Mandarin. Discussion points: Heaven is far better than what we can imagine based on what we can experience in this world, living a “good” life is not enough to earn our way into heaven, Jesus took the punishment that we deserve while we get the eternal inheritance that he deserves.
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Scripture reader: Today's scripture reading is from Hebrews chapter 9, verse 15 to 28. So I'll be reading in Mandarin and you can follow along on the screen with English. At the end, I'll be saying this is the word of the Lord, and you can join me saying thanks be to God.
Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive.
Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world.
But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
This is the word of the Lord.
Preacher: All right, good morning, everybody. Once in my life, I received an inheritance from someone that I did not know. this is not some Disney story of a rich uncle. This is a real life story. I got a call when I was about 16 years old from a lawyer, and, the lawyer informed me that there was a man who left, a sum of money for me in his will. The man was a man named Bob Hayes. I actually had to call my mother to find out what his name was, because I never actually met him. I did not know him. Maybe I met him when I was a child.
Basically, the story of Bob Hayes is that he was a man who owned a bar on Beale Street, which is like the big party street in Memphis where I'm from, and. My mom and dad obviously formed a relationship with Bob when I was a child, and they actually asked Bob to be my godfather. Now why they would ask a bar owner from Bill Street to be my godfather, I have no idea. But they gave him the honor of being my godfather, and as a result, Bob wrote in his will to leave me $5000 upon his untimely demise, or his timely demise, I suppose.
And so, I don't know about you guys. When I was a 16 year old kid growing up in rural Mississippi without much money, $5000 was a lot of money. As far as inheritances go, that's not very much, but for me, it was a ton of money. And I was a very responsible kid. So instead of spending it all on candy like my kids might do, I went and I went and put it in the bank and saved it until I turned 22 years old, in which I bought a 2005 Honda Civic. Woo! Woo! Chick magnet, that thing. That was actually the car I was driving when I met Megan and we dated and that and with that Honda Civic, and not so much in the Honda Civic as I was about to say, but we dated with that Honda Civic and, you know, I don't think that they're, I'm sorry if any, any Civic drivers in the room, I'm not looking at anybody in particular, but I'm not sure any girls have really been drawn to a Honda Civic before, but I'll tell you who was drawn to it, was her father. Megan's dad saw that Honda Civic and he said, this is a man of fiscal responsibility. In which he will need to marry my daughter. And he, I think he made his decision the second he saw me driving that Honda Civic, that this is a man that can marry his daughter.
Receiving an inheritance from someone you don't know, it's the stuff of dreams. I mean, who in here would be disappointed or wouldn't be disappointed if, they had some, you know, rich uncle that they had never met leave them some type of inheritance that they receive tomorrow. What would you do if you got a phone call tomorrow morning, but instead of $5000 it was $5 million. Well, that would change life for anyone in this room, would it not? I mean, with $5 million you could like pay off all of your debts, you could tithe, you could. Retire early, you could save some money, you could do all of that, but then what? Then what? Don't you know that rich people have all the same struggles that you do? That anxiety and depression are not cured with money. That you can't buy a loving family. That you can't pay off a clear conscience.
Today's passage tells us that you have something better than a physical inheritance, and I really believe this. I, I've been wrestling with this, cause I'm like, I need to believe this, and I need to believe it for myself, so I can teach it to you all, and I do believe it, but it is one of those things that's hard to grasp, and it's something I have to fight to believe, but I really do believe that in Christ, we have a spiritual inheritance far greater than any type of physical inheritance. That in Christ, we have treasures beyond our comprehension. Far better than what we have in this life, that an inheritance from Jesus can and will change your life.
So let's just walk through this a little bit. First, first, I wanna talk about what is the inheritance. Second, we're going to be talking about how do you get the inheritance, and third, how do we respond? So first, what is the inheritance? Verse 15, we've been making our way through the book of Hebrews, and today we're in Hebrews chapter 9. And we're doing 15 through 28, and with this chapter, what we found, honestly, I'm really excited about moving to the next part of Hebrews, because we're in this long section where he's been kind of repeating the same refrain over and over again. And so I'm finding it's like a jewel, like a. Like a jeweler can show you a diamond and turn it in many different ways, and you see these different facets.
So every week we're going to be talking about what Jesus did for us in the gospel, because that's what's the most important thing. But as you look at a a diamond from slightly, and he's just turning it very minutely, so we're seeing really a lot of the same things, but it's just with a little bit of a different angle. We see this passage in Hebrews in Hebrews 9:15, it says this, Therefore Jesus, he, therefore he, Jesus is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.
So the passage continues. The next verse it talks about how Jesus writes us into his last will and testament. Verse 16, for where will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established, for will takes effect only at death, since it is not enforced as long as the one who made it is alive. And so this is teaching us that we have an eternal inheritance in Christ. Now what is that eternal inheritance? But it is life with God forever.
Now, when you are teaching someone the gospel, many times we might present the gospel in the most simplistic way. We might present it like this to kids, OK? And we have a lot of kids in the room. It's family worship Sunday. We might say something like, do you want to go to hell? No. That's a bad place. how about heaven? That sound better? Good. OK, well, you need to believe in Jesus, and that is how you get to go to heaven. But that's an overly simplistic understanding of it. It is true, but even this idea of what is heaven is hard to grasp, because as earthly people, all we have is earthly things to compare heaven to. And so we like to think about heaven as just being the best possible life that you can imagine. And even in the wildest imaginations of America's greatest authors, they still can't quite capture the beauty of what the Bible describes as heaven.
Ernest Hemingway, that famous author, this is how he understood heaven. He wrote a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald one time. They were buddies back in the day, and here's how he imagined heaven. He said this, to me, heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two Barrera seats in the front row. And a stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in, and two lovely houses in the town. One where I would have my wife and my children and be monogamous and love them truly and well, and the other where I could have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors. This is the the best that he can imagine, but he's only working with the resources of an earthly perspective.
And in fact, when you think about how Ernest Hemingway described heaven, I think if CS Lewis was to evaluate this quotation, he would say that sounds a lot more like my description of hell than it does heaven. In his book, The Great Divorce, CS Lewis has this fictionalized understanding of hell, and it's meant to be fictionalized. It's not meant to be the way that he actually understands hell. But the way that CS Lewis describes hell is this place where people are given to their utter selfishness, where you are able to do whatever you want, whenever you want without any regard for anyone else. And that's what CS Lewis says is hell. And that's why he says that the doors to hell are locked from the inside. Cause they don't want anything to do with God, they just want to live for self.
It is the opposite of what it means to be a Christian, that you live for others, that you live to serve. And so in CS Lewis's depiction of hell, you see people moving farther and farther away from one another, so they can be more isolated and more selfish. And there's even rumors of some people who are very bad, who've been there for a very long time. In fact, I think the book mentions like Napoleon Bonaparte living millions of miles away, that no one ever sees them because they've moved so far away. Our ideas of heaven, oftentimes reflect more of what CS Lewis describes as hell than they do heaven.
So what is heaven? I love what 1 Corinthians has to say about heaven, verse chapter 2, verse 9, it says, but as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined what God has prepared for those who love him. You see, Hemingway's is the best that he could do. It's the best understanding of his human appetites taken to extreme. But instead, what heaven is, it's the culmination of where those appetites are pointing. Hemingway is saying, I would like to be loved in the best ways I can imagine. A selfish love and a self-giving love, both a marriage and a and mistresses. But what God says is that there's a love underneath all of these loves that these things are pointing toward. That our loves for other human beings, our enjoyment of things, our enjoyment of entertainment, all of this is pointing forward to ultimate realities that we get to experience in the kingdom to come.
You see, it's far better than what we can imagine, because only what we have is a dull reflection of what we shall receive. Is this tracking? Every good day, every beautiful mountain, the deepest of human intimacies all point forward to the joys of our eternal inheritance in the new creation. And you might say, well, that's fine and good, but what about today? How, how am I supposed to enjoy? What does that matter to me today? All of this comes with this. Though you have an eternal inheritance today, you're given a trust fund. We're trust fund kids.
You know, if it's a smart thing to do. If you are someone that has any type of wealth that you might be passing on to your children, whether it be a small amount or a large amount, if you own a house or anything like that, you probably want to have a will. And in your will, you wanna dictate who it goes to, who all the stuff goes to. But if you have young kids, I see a lot of you being like, we gotta make a will. Don't worry, I'm not coming after you, OK? If you, if you have young kids, it might be a good idea to set up a trust, because what a trust does is it protects your resources until your children are old enough to manage such trust. Such money. Because if you just dropped, you know, all of your life savings into the hands of a nine year old, they're gonna buy some interesting things. They're gonna buy a lot of 3D printers, and maybe, you know, they might buy their way into a Mark Rober video or something like that. But if you set up a trust, so they can afford just a little bit, just live by it, mate, you have it entrusted to someone. It's much wiser.
So for us, we have an eternal inheritance that we await for, that we wait for it eagerly, but for today, we have a trust fund. And what's included in that trust fund is pretty dang good. Because in today, we get a taste of the intimacy that we will enjoy forever. That's part of the trust fund that we get to enjoy these earthly pleasures with an understanding of where they're coming from, of what they're pointing toward, that we get to understand and and experience life with God. And not only that, but our trust fund comes with a debt forgiveness plan. That we walk through life without the overwhelming bear of sin on us, that our sins have been forgiven. We walk with this understanding that the eternal inheritance awaits.
And so how do you get this? How do you get this? Our passage says that those who are called may receive this inheritance. Verse 15, I'm gonna read it one more time. Therefore, he is the mediator of a new covenant. So that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. So what does it mean to be called by God? It means that you have heard and believed the good news of Jesus, which let me just put that very simply. What is the good news of Jesus? It is news. It is not advice. A lot of people treat religion like advice, like live this way and God will like you, and this is the best place, the best way to live. It is not that, it is news about what God has done, that God sent His Son into the world to die the death that we deserve to die, after living the life that we could never live.
And as a result, my sins are placed on him, and his righteousness is placed on me, and I'm loved like a child. This is what it means to be called by God. Now we believe that God initiates this relationship that he calls us, that as we hear the words of the gospel, that he takes our hearts of stone and he transforms them into hearts of flesh. That it's not because we're somehow favored in that we've done something to earn his favor, but he calls us just because he calls us.
Now let me compare two common views about Christianity. They come with big words, OK? I'm gonna break these down to you, kids in the room, how to explain things, and you know, if you benefit from it because I'm explaining it to kids, that's OK too. Two different ideas: one is moral therapeutic deism. And the other is penal substitutionary atonement. Hebrews hammers this dichotomy over and over and over again.
So let me talk about moral therapeutic deism. That is the most common religion of our day. It is moral, meaning that you are to be a good person. It is therapeutic, meaning that if you are a good person, then God will love you more and he will bless you, and it is deism. Deism is this understanding that God created the world and then he stepped away from it. And so if you believe in moral therapeutic deism, you might believe that God loves you if you were a good person. And if I went and asked you why are you going, why would you go to heaven? If you died today, would you go to heaven or hell? And, and you said heaven, I said why? You might say, well, I'm a good person. I pray, I I do nice things. And why do you go to church? Well, I think that it lifts me up. Makes me feel better about myself. This is all moral therapeutic deism. This is not Christianity. This isn't the message of the Bible anywhere in the Bible. This is what people understand Christianity to be, almost everyone, and it's not what it is.
Christianity is rooted in penal substitutionary atonement, which is the idea that Hebrews keeps on hammering. It is penal, meaning that Jesus receives our penalty. Our penalty for sin, the consequences of our sin are placed on him is substitutionary, like a substitute teacher, because he gets what I deserve, I get what he deserves, and his atonement, meaning that my sins are paid for by Jesus. So you can think of it like the big switcheroo. Jesus gets what I deserve, I get what he deserves. Now let me ask you this. If I told you you have an eternal inheritance based upon how good of a life you live. Well, there's not much to look forward to, is there? Some of us might have a little pile of inheritances saved up. But what if I told you that you have an eternal inheritance based upon how good of a life Jesus lived. What type of inheritance is waiting Jesus? Well, he deserves it all. He never had a selfish thought. He was tempted by it, but never went there. He gave himself completely to others. He deserves to sit at the right hand of God.
And that is what you get. It's not based upon what you've earned, it's based upon what Jesus has accomplished. You're invited onto the throne with Christ. It's better than our wildest imagination. What does Hebrew, what does Corinthians say? What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, no heart of man imagine. This is what God has prepared for those who love Him. It's far beyond what we can imagine. A few places that support this in Hebrews, verse 24, for Christ has entered not into the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true thing. But into heaven itself. Now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.
You see, the joys of life today are copies of the real thing. Jesus walked into the real thing, and he appears on our behalf. We get what he deserves. He took what we deserve. Verse 28. So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many - penal substitutionary atonement - will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. And so church today, you have a simple choice. You can continue to live for the poverty of the world, or you can choose to invest in the eternal inheritance that is in heaven. When you live for the poverty of this world, when you just say I'm gonna get the best that I can out of this world, that's like throwing money into a bonfire. It might be warm for the moment, but bonfires don't last very long.
But when you live for the eternal inheritance, it's like putting money into the bank account, not the bonfire. You can see that it is used and it not only that, but it, God takes that and he credits you with the life of Christ. That is made on your behalf, that deposit. And so we get this option to either live for today or eagerly await the inheritance that is to come. We eagerly await it.
There's a huge mental health crisis in our world. Anxiety and depression have never been higher. Undoubtedly, there are people in this room who are struggling. Undoubtedly. And friends, those are serious issues that require complicated answers, but I will tell you this, that if you live for today. You will slide more easily into anxiety, depression. You need more to live for than this hamster wheel of life.
And so whether it is the first time or the thousandth time, I encourage you. Return to Christ. See that he offers more and better. How do you do that? How do you get this eternal inheritance? It is really simple. You just place your faith and trust in Christ. You say you are enough for me, you confess your sins, saying I'm not enough. You say you are enough. And you praise him, and you say, my life belongs to you. Why would I continue to invest in the things of this world when I could invest in the things to come? You see, friends, that you, we need to have that conversation with God though, not just once. That's not a one time conversation. That's like a a daily, weekly conversation where you say, I am still committed to you. I am still living for you. You are still enough for me.
When Peter preached this message of Jesus, the people looked up at him. This is in Jerusalem, kind of the first time that the gospel was preached to a large crowd after Jesus ascended to heaven, and the people heard the message of Jesus, and they were cut to the heart, and they said, what must we do to be saved? And if that's what you're asking, hear the words of Peter. He says, repent and be baptized. Every one of you. In Romans, it puts it like this, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. And so this is how we get the eternal inheritance.
Now finally, number three, how do you respond? Let's say you have this eternal inheritance waiting on you, OK? That's like just sitting on a big old bank account though. Like, what do I? I can't do anything with it. What do I do? How do I respond? Let me, let me give you a couple of first, wrong responses, OK? One, there's a temptation to prove that you're worthy. That if God has given you all that, there's a temptation to prove I'm worthy of all of that. Can you imagine a child who feels like he always has to earn his father's love? Some of you are like, I don't have to imagine that's just the world that I live in. But it's a sad reality. Because the father's love should not be conditional. It must be unconditional. That is the love that we all long for.
And if you take this perspective of I have to prove that I'm worthy, that God will love me, I have to do the right thing, I have to accomplish enough, be successful enough for God to be happy with me, then friends. You're not I'm listening to what he has already said. Because God has given you approval. Because he loves you as he loves his very only son, Jesus Christ. That's the level of love that he has for you. And second, there's another wrong response of there's a fear that there's something that you can do to undo the inheritance. Now don't get me wrong, well, first of all, there's nothing you can, nothing you can do to make God stop loving you if you were his child. Remember, it's Christ's life, not yours. But I, you know, I mentioned this last week and I felt like I did a poor job actually tying some things together. So I want to come back to this idea of guilt and sin, because the scriptures are really clear, Hebrews is really clear that our guilt is paid for, that our sins are atoned for, that we're forgiven with God.
But where does that leave us? If you're struggling with guilt. The consequences of sin are death. And Jesus paid that death for us, but there are still consequences to sin. Like if you were to cheat on your spouse, Jesus has paid for that sin, you could have forgiveness for that sin and still bear the consequences of that sin, because things would never be the same in your marriage. There's something broken. And so just because you can be forgiven, you still have to avoid sin. Now grace abounds, but as Hebrew, as Romans says, shall we go on sinning so the grace may abound more and more? That's the right question to be answering, but what does it say? By no means! Thank you. It's his birthday. We'll, we'll give him one. Could use a little more talking back in here anyways.
How do you, how do you respond? If you understand what Jesus has done for you, and you're enjoying his eternal inheritance, what do you do? You respond with faith, love, repentance, gratitude. Matthew 13 says the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found, and when he found it, he covered it up. That confused me, for a long time. I'm like, why did you cover it up? Well, he didn't want the person who owns the field to know that there was a treasure, cause he wanted to be able to buy the field so that he could get the treasure because the treasure is worth far more than what the field is worth. Which feels deceitful, you know, as I read that, but it's, it's an analogy. It's not meant to be literal in that way. Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
What he's trying to tell us is that the eternal kingdom of God is worth everything in this life, giving up everything. And once you see it, you can't not give up everything. Most of us take the eternal inheritance for granted. We're like these spoiled trust fund kids. But God is inviting us today to be reminded of the riches of His mercy. The debt is paid. The inheritance is secure, the king is coming back. So stop running the hamster wheel, my friends, and rest in the finished work of Jesus.
In just a moment, we'll have an opportunity to respond to God's word through a sacred meal that we call communion. with this communion meal, the way that we do this here is if you are a Christian, we invite you to come and participate in this meal. If you're not a Christian, and instead we would encourage you to receive the good news of Jesus, to receive the gospel, to be made new, to get that eternal inheritance that we're talking about today. And you can pray with someone today in the back, we'd love to pray with you, or I would love to talk with you after the service.
On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus took a loaf of bread, he tore it, and he said, This is my body broken for you. And he took a cup and he said, This is my blood shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And so as we take this communion meal, we're being reminded of what Jesus did on our behalf, and we're experiencing his presence in part. Would you join me in standing, and we're gonna end with a little contemplative prayer as we prepare our hearts to receive this communion meal as the band makes their way up here. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna pray for us, and I'm gonna give us a little bit of space between some of these, these words so that you can. So that you can focus and, and pray and make them your own.
Lord, we confess that we're tired. That we've spent this week running on the hamster wheel of performance. Trying to prove our worth to our bosses, our teachers, our families, and to you. We've treated your grace like a wage to be earned rather than an inheritance to be received. Forgive us for the dead works of trying to pay a debt that Jesus has already cleared. Spirit, would you do what no amount of money can do? Clear our consciences today. Silence the accusations that tell us we aren't enough. Replace our anxiety with this quiet security of an heir. We look to heaven itself where our high priest stands on our behalf. And may we live this week not for your love, but from it. Amen.