Christ's Qualifications to be a Sympathetic Priest

On a beautiful day someone says, 'I looked out and saw it was a beautiful day.' But to consider the day is to look long enough that the day's beauty actually shapes you. We are to consider Christ that long.

In chapter 3 and verse 1 of the epistle to the Hebrews, the writer exhorts the people of God, Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider the apostle and high priest of our confession. The people of God are called upon to consider Christ in His office, and function as a high priest. And this word, consider, means to contemplate with a view to understanding.

7:09 - 7:42 Read in full sermon

Driving home: It is more for the strengthening of our faith — if I may say it reverently — than for the informing of our Lord that He passed through these experiences.

A daddy says to his child, 'No, no, the stove burns.' The child knows it intellectually. Then a friend touches it and the child sees his friend cry — now he knows in a deeper way. Experience adds a dimension of knowing that mere instruction cannot give.

Sufficiently believed as to keep his hand away from the stove. But one day the child forgets. And after the burners were turned off, but the grate over the burner was still hot, the little child reached up to get something. And there is that searing of his flesh and the little white marks across his fingers.

13:44 - 14:03 Read in full sermon

Driving home: It is more for the strengthening of our faith — if I may say it reverently — than for the informing of our Lord that He passed through these experiences.

A newly widowed woman receives two offers of hospitality on the same day. One is from a sympathetic Christian who has never lost a husband; the other from a woman who lost hers six months ago. All things being equal, she will go to the second — because experience opens a door no theology alone can.

She finds a tremendous sense of consolation in the knowledge that tears over the loss of her beloved are not displeasing to God for she remembers the tears of her Lord at the graveside of his friend Lazarus. And having found the consolations of her Lord, the people of God seek now to mediate some of that consolation. And in one day she receives two phone calls. One phone call is from a godly woman in the congregation of which she is a part, knowledgeable in the scriptures, a woman who's walked with God for 30 or 40 years.

16:52 - 17:33 Read in full sermon

Romans 8:3 is exact: not the likeness of flesh, but the likeness of 'sinful flesh.' Christ took our humanity in its fallen, post-Eden condition of weariness and weakness — though without sin itself.

as it was in the garden, he could well have provided for our eternal salvation and satisfy all the demands of the law. Whatever might be their safety in the world to come, says Owen, their comforts in this life would be in continual hazard. To be such a merciful and faithful high priest it behooved the divine Savior not only to be conformed in nature but in condition to the brethren. There is a kind and degree of compassion and fidelity in giving comfort and relief which nothing but fellowship in suffering can teach.

23:41 - 24:24 Read in full sermon

Pastor Martin recalls his first-year Greek class. The professor would draw an alpha and a gamma on the board, and the students would carefully copy them. Just so, Christ has drawn the perfect human life on the board, and we are to copy his strokes.

Think of him as we saw him in the Gospel records, with a mind that never thought to be independent of dependence upon God, or detached from the standards and framework of Light in the Word of God. When he would combat the subtle temptations of the devil. It is written! It is written!

40:45 - 41:07 Read in full sermon

The point: Sluggards: rise early and seek God in prayer as Christ did.

He calls out the sluggards who love their beds too much: look at Jesus rising 'a great while before day' to pray. The pattern is set; we are to follow.

We behold His glory as in a mirror. It is a reflected glory. And where is that glory reflected? Not in mystical flights, angels' wings. You behold what the writer to Hebrews says. You consider your confession. You meditate upon His humanity. You meditate and ruminate upon what it means that He is truly man. And He is your perfect pattern and example. What

47:46 - 48:37 Read in full sermon

The point: Continually contemplate the perfect humanity of Christ in Scripture — without it, sanctification stalls.

We never see Christ directly in this life — we behold his glory reflected in the mirror of Scripture, and as we behold we are transformed into the same image, from one degree of glory to another.