Transcript
Tim Keller (0:03)
Welcome to Gospel and Life. The Book of Hebrews was written to a group of Christians who were weary of troubles, struggling with fear and discouragement. Sound familiar? Today, Tim Keller is preaching from the Book of Hebrews, showing us how fixing our eyes on Jesus is the only way to truly deal with the challenges we face in our lives.
Scripture Reader (0:28)
Tonight's scripture reading is from Hebrews 3, 13, 10, 24, and 25, and then 13, 17, 25. But encourage one another daily as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another and all the more as you see the day approaching. Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you. Pray for us. We are sure that we have a clear conscience and desire to live honorably in every way. I particularly urge you to pray so that I may be restored to you soon. May the God of peace who through the blood of the eternal covenant, brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Brothers, I urge you to bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written you only a short letter. I want you to know that our brother Timothy has been released. If he arrives soon, I will come with him to see you. Greet all your leaders and all God's people. Those from Italy send you their greetings. Grace be with you all. This is God's word.
Tim Keller (2:08)
Every week we've said that Hebrews is written to people who are beaten down and persecuted, filled with lives, filled with difficulties and problems. And every week we've said that the Book of Hebrews. The writer of the Book of Hebrews gives us another way to deal with the brutal realities of life without falling apart. And tonight we come to the final passage, the end of the Book of Hebrews. And we see one more thing that the writer says you have to have in your life if you're going to make it and deal with the brutal realities of life. What you've got to have is you've got to have shepherds in your life. You've got to have shepherding in your life. Now let's notice that the text tells us our insulting need for shepherds, the surprising identity of shepherds and the secret power of the shepherds we need. There's an insulting need for shepherds, there's a surprising identity of the shepherds we need, and then there's the secret power of those shepherds. Let's take a look at those three things. The need, the identity and the power. Number one, at the very end practically of the book of Hebrews, Jesus Christ is called the great shepherd of the sheep. Now he hasn't been called a shepherd any other place in the book, he's been called a whole lot of other things, but this is the first time he's called shepherd. And it's not an afterthought because this is a chapter, chapter 13 about living in a community in which there is a structure to it. Notice verse 17 says, Obey your leaders and submit to their authority for their keeping watch over your souls. That's a shepherding action. And so suddenly in this last passage, we are confronted with the fact that we are sheep. Jesus is the great shepherd of the sheep. We are his flock. We are sheep. Now have you ever reflected on what the Bible is telling us? When the Bible calls us sheep, all over the place it calls us sheep. Have you ever thought about, have you received what the Bible is saying when, when the Bible calls you sheep? Well, if not, I'll force you to. Right now look, you and I, most of us are urban, suburban, we really don't know much intimately about sheep. So when we see the image of sheep and we think of sheep, you know, our imagination goes into soft focus. We think of green hills, pastures and beautiful waters and we think of downy, fluffy little creatures, little lambs, wittle whams and. But you know, John Stott, who is the British pastor, well known British pastor, has a cottage in Wales in Pembrokeshire and one of his neighbors is a sheep herder farmer. And one day he said to John Stott, quote, sheep are not at all the clean and cuddly creatures they appear to be at a distance. On the contrary, they are dirty, subject to nasty pests and need to be regularly dipped in strong chemicals in order to rid them of lice, ticks and worms. And in addition, they are extremely unintelligent and obstinate. And John Stott says, I hesitate to describe the people of God as dirty, literally lousy and stupid. But, but that's the force of the image. That's. Why do you think the Bible Calls us sheep. You take other domestic animals, you take any other domestic animals you know, and you take them out. Take dogs and cats or horses, you take them out and you let them loose. And they'll do one of two things. They'll either go out into the wild and live in the wild or else they'll find their way home. But sheep can't do either. They are too helpless to fend for themselves or defend themselves in the wild. And they have absolutely no sense of direction. Sheep will die without a shepherd. They will die without a shepherd. They can't be their own shepherd. Now, let me. My wife says, never mix your metaphors under the same point. But I'm going to anyway. Another metaphor that gets gets across this idea, though, it's a completely different metaphor. You know the story, the great Greek epic, the Odyssey, it's the story of Odysseus. And Odysseus is trying to get home, and he's commanding his ship, he's the captain of his ship, and they're trying to get home. And he goes by the island of the Sirens. Now, he hears or he understands, that when he hears the song of the sirens, he's going to go insane. He's going to lose his mind, and he's going to seek at all costs to get to the island. And he will drive his ship toward the island and destroy it on the rocks unless he finds a way to resist. And so what does he do? Well, what he does is he ties himself to the mast, he sets the course, and he puts wax in the ears of all of his sailors. And before the wax goes in, he says, I have set the course. Now get me there. I'm going to go crazy. I'm going to yell and scream. I'm going to do all kinds of things. Ignore me, get us home now. What did he do? Odysseus knew that if he kept absolute individual control of his ship, he would lose his ship. Odysseus knew he would never stay the course, he would never get home unless he shared control with his men. He was making them, as it were, into shepherds. Or. What does this mean? If you know yourself, you should know that you will never stay the course all of your life. There will be times, spiritually speaking, in which you will lose your mind and you will never make it home unless there are some people around you that you have authorized, deputized to share control with your life, of your life, to whom you should be accountable, to whom you must be accountable, without which you will never get home. There'll be times in your life unless you have authorized people to come and say, we're not going to listen to you. We're going to get you to the course that you know you should be going on. We are going to get you to the destination that you want to get to. The true you, not the you. Right now, you're kind of out of your mind. This is the direction. Do you have anybody who can talk to you like that? If you don't some point, you're going to run your life into the rocks. We need shepherds. We are sheep. We will die without a shepherd. So the first thing we see here in the whole Bible, whenever it calls us sheep and says that we are the flock, it means that we need shepherd. It's what I call it, an insulting need. When the Bible calls you sheep, it means well, but it's a huge insult. Have you received it as such an absolutely true, well meant, crucial to believe insult? So first of all, we see our need for shepherds. Now the second thing we learn here is the surprising identity of the shepherds that we need. Who should the shepherds be? Now, before we jump into what the text says, let's consider something. And that is there are two equal and opposite mistakes you can make about shepherding. We've already just dealt with one. One great danger is own shepherding, being your own shepherd, not being accountable to anybody, not letting anybody in to your life, not giving anybody the right to tell you how to live. I'll call that being your own shepherd. Own shepherding. It's a disaster. It won't work. But on the other hand, there's over shepherding. On the other hand, there's seeking human beings as shepherds in an unhealthy way. Notice verse 17 says, Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. Now that's interesting. It means that you need someone in your life with authority. Authority is a good thing, but authoritarianism is not. Now, what is authoritarianism? Well, let me give you a couple of examples. Let's talk about emotional authoritarianism. Emotional authoritarianism is when you look for the great shepherd of your life in some human relationship. Someone who will come in and fix everything. Someone who will make everything all right. If you look at any human being, whether parent or child, whether boyfriend, girlfriend, whether friend, whether spouse, if you look at any other human being and say, because this person loves me, I got meaning in my life because this person loves me, I know I'm not lousy. I know that I'm worth something. This person's love gives Me, meaning in life, if you look at anybody like that, you've made that person the great shepherd of your soul. The person will fix everything. That person will ruin you. You will ruin the person. You're an emotional slave. The dependency, the obsession, the problems that are going to come from that are tremendous. Emotional authoritarianism. There's also leader authoritarianism. Now, there are a lot of people, evidently, who are so empty on the inside that they get strength by attaching themselves to some very charismatic leader. And then they give they cede to that person or that person takes or combination of the two. Way too much detailed authority over every single part of the person's life. Now, we know that there are the famous demagogues. Hitler, for example, somehow pulled off with an entire nation. How he ever did it, we're still trying to figure out. But then, of course, you have the religious, not the political. You have the religious demagogues like David Koresh or Jim Jones who, you know, horrible situation where they led their followers into death. But in most cases, of course, we're not talking about any people as demagogical or as deranged as that. But we have lots of people, lots of people who in politics and in religion and other situations, give themselves to very authoritarian leaders that exercise way too much control over every part of their lives. Well, why don't we do that? Here's why. Own shepherding and over shepherding actually fuel one another. They stimulate each other. People who got too little shepherding growing up, parents who neglected them, parents who gave them no standards, parents who actually gave them so much freedom that they had a kind of spiritual vertigo. Very often people who have had to be their own shepherd completely rush into over shepherding. Or you might say they can be sucked in somehow to over shepherding. Or if you've been the victim of over shepherding, if you've come up in very authoritarian home or a very authoritarian church or some other culture or some situation or institution, you can overreact to that. You know, the average American says, I'm spiritual, but I don't like the church. And very often it's because they've been burned by authoritarian or abusive churches. But you know, what, what does that mean? Now you're into own shepherding. You're not going to be accountable to anybody. You're not going to cede control of your life or share control of your life to anybody else. And that's just as much of a disaster. And so an awful lot of us go, you know, as Martin Luther says, human beings are like a Drunk man on a horse, who, having fallen off the horse on one side, leaps up to promptly fall off on the other. And that's how a lot of us are going. But when you see what the Bible says about who our shepherds should be, you see this astonishing balance, this astonishing comprehensiveness. Who should the shepherds be in your life? Three answers. First, your peers in grace. Other people who've experienced the grace of God, who are no smarter, no more mature, no really better than you are to be your shepherds and you're to be theirs. Look at the very first verse. It's way. It's actually the first verse on the page is chapter three, verse 13, where it says encourage one another daily so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. Now that is a much more significant saying that maybe it looks, if you go down to verse 22, this is sort of the end of the book. And notice something. The Hebrews writer, who has just written this enormous theological treatise, extremely sophisticated, very deep, a book of the Bible, all right, extremely authoritarian, calls his book a word of exhortation. The Greek word is paraklesis. It means to give direction. It's a shepherding word. It means to give direction. It means to direct people, to guide people, to coach people, to counsel people. And he says, I have been trying to shepherd you with this book, but guess what? Even though you can't tell it by the English translation, it's the very same word he uses in chapter 3:13 to describe what we're supposed to be doing with each other. It's the same word, parakaleo one another. He doesn't say I am the authority, I am the great theologian, I am the great minister. Let me be the one who guides you alone. He doesn't say that. He says you should be shepherding one another. What does this mean? Look at the verse with me. This means this. There shall be some other people who are your peers, other who have experienced the grace of God. There should be some other people that you're letting into your life. Pretty far. Your life together is so intense, notice the word daily, that they can see the sins that you tend not to see because they're deceitful. They're the sins that hide themselves. There's gotta be some people who you actually say, my private life is your business. I'm going to tell you everything I can about what's wrong with me, about what my sins are, what my flaws are, what my weaknesses are, what my temptations are. But I want you to get to know me well enough that you can actually see me and you can show me things that I don't even see. I give you the green light. I give you a hunting license to come into my life and to tell me, call me to account, to live the way Jesus wants me to live. And then, of course, they do that for you. It's mutual shepherding. Is there anybody you're doing that with? Do you realize, by the way, if you come to church every single week and take notes, that's not fulfilling this verse, that's not active enough in a Christian community. Are you exhorting one another daily lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin during this service? No, absolutely not. It's not happening. Where does that happen? And you say, now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Shepherd one another, open up my life to other people who are no smarter. They're not counselors, they're not therapists, they're not ministers. Why? What qualification have they got to help me live the way I should live? And the answer is ready? They're not you. That's their main qualification. They're not. You see, there's all kinds of things that almost any not you that you spend enough time with will see that you won't see. You don't know what you really sound like. You don't really know what you look like. You don't know. Have you ever listened to yourself on tape? Isn't it awful? Why is it awful? You say, oh, I don't sound like that. And everybody around you says, yes, you do. Yes. Well, why don't you know what you really sound like? You don't know what you really sound like. Evidently, they say, because you actually hear yourself through the bones in your neck, and that's the result. Your voice to you sounds much more filled with gravitas. And my way, it's just far more, you know, beautiful and mellifluous, when actually it's not. And any not you can see you right now. It's the nature of sin to deceive.