The Sufficiency of Christ's Work — Hebrews 10-11

0:00 We're continuing our study in the book of Hebrews. I am taking chapter 10 today and chapter 10 has 39 verses. So buckle up. Thirty nine minutes, 39 verses. There's a lot in this chapter.

0:22 You can divide it into, if you want, two different sections or three or four. The two that I'd like to break it down into are the first half is talking about the the sufficiency of Christ's work and then in the second half, it gets to talking about what seems at first glance the insufficiency of Christ's work and you could spend a week or two delving into the topic of the sufficiency of Christ's work and and the issues of can a believer fall away from salvation. Can a believer lose their salvation? It's a very in-depth topic and maybe in a few months, when we're done with Hebrews and if anyone ever asked me to speak again, we could go through maybe and do a back to back double feature and maybe cover both of these topics in a little bit more depth because I'm going to fly through everything today and give you an overview and you could study it on your own and then like I said, maybe we come back and visit this to get through the material more in-depth because there's a lot here and you have a couple of really big arguments that are presented you know, even among Christians about this whole issue about believers falling away and how how you reconcile that with the completeness of Christ's work and does the Bible contradict itself and how we look into all of that, okay?

1:54 So, as is my standard practice, I'd like to read through Hebrews 10 to give us a flow of the way the whole chapter goes. We have in chapter 10, a lot of repetition in its in just the chapter itself but there's also some repetition from earlier on in the book and has been pointed out when we started this study in Hebrews is that an interesting way to look at this is that this book is actually a sermon maybe. Perhaps this book is really more of a sermon rather than epistle and if you think about it in that kind of regard, it seems to make a little bit more sense and it's actually helped me as I've looked through it. So let's start reading in Hebrews chapter 10. I'm reading from the New American Standard.

2:39 For the law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things can never by the same sacrifices year by year which they offer continually make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered because the worshipers having once been cleansed would no longer have a consciousness of sins but in those sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins year by year For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, when he comes into the world, he says, sacrifice and offering thou hast not desired but a body thou hast prepared for me. In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin, thou hast taken no pleasure. Then I said, behold, I have come in the role of the book.

3:22 It is written me to do thy will, oh god. After saying above, sacrifices and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast not desired nor hast thou taken pleasure in them which are offered according to the law. Then he said, behold I have come to do thy will. He takes away the first in order to establish the second. By this will, we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all and every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices which can never take away sins but he having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time sat down at the right hand of god waiting from that time onward until his enemies be made a footstool for his feet For by one offering, he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.

4:07 And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us. For after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord. I will put my laws upon their heart and upon their mind, I will write them. He then says, and their sins and their lawless deeds, I will remember no more. Now, where now where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin.

4:29 Since therefore, brethren, we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he inaugurated for us through the veil, that is his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart and full assurance of faith, having 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 his faithful and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love in good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together as is the habit of some but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near. For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of truth, there is no longer, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins but a certain terrifying expectation of judgement and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who is trampled underfoot the son of god and has regarded as unclean, the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified and has insulted the spirit of grace?

5:39 For we know him who said, vengeance is mine. I will repay and again, the lord will judge his people. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living god but remember the former days when after being enlightened, you endured a great conflict of sufferings partly by being made a public spectacle through reproaches and tribulations and partly by becoming sharers with those who were so treated. For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence which has a great reward.

6:15 For you have need of endurance so that when you have done the will of god, you may receive what was promised. For yet in a very little while, he who is his coming will come and will not delay but my righteous one shall live by faith and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him but we are not of those who shrink back to destruction but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. Take a breath. Alright. Let's get into this.

7:08 What was what good the law did or good it did not do, the old covenant, the covenant of sacrifices, and the whole judicial system and the legal system. He's saying that the law here is a shadow, it's an image. Is an image or a picture? Is that ever as good as the real thing? Once in a while, Jessica will, drive to Columbus to stay with her parents for a weekend.

7:37 I don't usually go because I work on Saturdays. And so she'll stay there for a weekend and I'm at home by myself. And no matter how many times I stare at her picture and tell her that I'm hungry and I like her to make a sandwich, it doesn't happen. So, no, the picture is not as good as the real thing. It it it is a very poor substitute for the reality.

7:59 Also, if I get cold in bed, having her picture there in the bed doesn't, it just doesn't do anything, okay? So, this in a really practical terms, this is what the law was. This is what the old covenant was. It was pointing to Christ. It was pointing.

8:12 It was a picture of what was to come. It's not the real thing and it was a very poor substitute. Now, god instituted it. God created the old covenant for a purpose, okay? But it it could not the old law could not accomplish what god demanded.

8:29 The old covenant could not do what was needed. The author of Hebrews here make some redundancies in these first couple of verses to emphasize his point. The law is only a shadow, not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices, year by year, which they offer continually, four times. He's emphasizing this whole thing, okay? He in four different ways.

8:59 He's he's saying, it doesn't cut it. It does not do what it needs to do. So, what what did the law, what did it accomplish, if anything? Well, it reminded everyone of their sin. It didn't cleanse them from it.

9:15 The animal sacrifices did not cleanse them from their sin. It it was not an everlasting forgiveness. All it did was remind them of their inadequacy and remind them that, you know, they can't follow the law. There was all these rules and regulations. There was this law and no one could actually fulfill the law.

9:35 No one could actually do everything that it said and not do everything that it said. So, it was a reminder. The day of atonement, the the once a year trek to the temple. That was, it just reminded them of their sin. It did nothing.

9:47 It covered them but it didn't it didn't take care of the problem. Do any of us when we get sick, take medicine, right? A lot of us do. A lot of us actually in this particular group if I think about it, a lot of us don't because we don't believe in medicine, do we? Just drink more water.

10:14 I'm a firm believer in that myself by the way. But sometimes when I can't sleep, I will take some NyQuil and because I can't breathe. But does... You know, does that actually take care of my problem? If I'm sick and I have an issue, no matter what I take, is it going to take care of the problem?

10:29 No. It covers over it. It might give me temporary relief but it doesn't actually solve the problem. This is what the law did. It didn't take care of anything.

10:39 It covered. It did not remove the sin. It did not it did not it did not cover the problem. That's where it's one through four, okay? Verse five, let's let's let's keep rolling and and we get into this another redundancy because he quotes Psalm 40 in in verse five through seven and then he basically quotes it again in condensed form in verse eight.

11:05 Why is he doing this? Why is he being so redundant here? And even what he's drawing here, he he's hearkening back to what he said in chapter seven and chapter six. This is very repetitious. So, something we should probably get out of this, okay?

11:17 Therefore, when he comes into the world, he says, sacrifice and offering thou hast not desired but a body thou hast prepared for me and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin, thou hast taken no pleasure. If he's taken no pleasure in it, then why did he create it? Why did he institute it? If this didn't do anything, why why did he do it? After he lists that god took no pleasure in it, then, as it were, here's Christ that steps right up.

11:45 Then, I said, behold, I have come in the role of the book. It is written of me to do thy will, oh god. And the writer of Hebrews then says, well, after saying the above and he condenses it, sacrifices and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin that was not desired, no errors have taken pleasure in them, which are offered according to the law. So, they did this. They they offered the sacrifices as they were commanded but it did not change the way god viewed them because it did not take their sin away.

12:42 Another reason why the old law and the legal system wasn't sufficient was because well, if all you had to do was follow the law and you went through all these rituals, you went through all of this stuff, you did all these things like you were supposed to do and that kind of, I guess, took care of you for your life and then you get to go to heaven and and that's just kind of the end of it. You're, it didn't require your heart to be in it. And something we look at in scripture in in multiple places is this issue of lip service as it were or you know, this problem with the Jews thinking that they were fine just by carrying out the rituals that they were supposed to do but there was no heart in it and when we look at the New Covenant and and the New Testament is full of this. The New Covenant is based not I don't want to say based but a large part of it is that the what we do as Christians, as born again believers, as regenerate Christians, the things that we do, the if you want to call them the good works, if if coming to the meeting on a Sunday is a good work, if you want to just as an example, okay?

13:55 But that's supposed to be an outpouring of what's in our heart. We're not coming here on Sunday or we shouldn't be coming here on a Sunday because we think this is what god wants us to do because this is going to increase our favor with god. That's not what it's for. Why are we here on a Sunday? We're here for him.

14:13 We're not here for us and so and that that's that's a big part of what the New Covenant is and that was a big part with the problem with the Old Covenant was that it didn't it just it just meant that you had to do what you needed to do and there wasn't heart in it. There wasn't soul in it. And not to mention the fact that you making it to heaven or making god's favor had to do with you performing certain things. It was all based on you and I don't know about you but I would not want to be a part of a religion where it depended on me whether I got to heaven or not because how would I how would I possibly know over the course of my life if I had done enough? Or if I was failing in some way?

14:56 How do you know? Until you finally die and then you get there. Get there. I don't know. Before the big white pearly gates or before Saint Peter or or or whatever have you.

15:08 You know, I like to have assurance of this faith that I'm a part of this covenant where it doesn't depend on me. It doesn't depend on me. It doesn't matter what I do or what I don't do. I don't have a set of rules to follow in in that sense. I don't have a a set of rituals that I need to follow.

15:26 My salvation is already done. It's complete. And he goes on to explain some of the sufficiency of Christ's work. In verse nine, then he said, behold, I have come to do thy will. He takes away the first in order to establish the second.

15:46 There was no room for two different covenants. One had to be completely put away in order to establish and to make room for another one. And he's repeating that quotation here to emphasize that displeasure with the Old Testament sacrifices. Christ and he's showing here that Christ stepped up to do what god's will was. God's ultimate will was for Christ to die.

16:17 God's ultimate will was for us to be saved through his work which ultimately glorifies him because it's not about us. If we had any part to do in our salvation or if we had any part to keep our salvation, well then, we get some of the glory for doing a good job but no, it's not about that. It's not about us. It's about him. It's about the glorifying of him.

17:10 It it pleased Jesus to do the will of the father and we look at in the gospels, Jesus is discussions with the father that we have documented there. You know, I have come to do thy will and if it was the father's will, let this cup pass from me but it's not my will, it's your will. Jesus delighted. Jesus came to do what was the will of god and the will of god the will of god is what brought about this ultimate sacrifice and it's by the will of god that we've been sanctified. Now, the word sanctified depending on the Greek word that's used.

17:54 You have a couple different ways to take it. Generally, we can interpret the word sanctified as set apart to make holy. Now, in this sense, the word sanctified is referring to those of us who have been saved and it's also talking about, it is talking about our positional sanctification because there is our positional sanctification that as a born again, regenerate believer, we have been sanctified. We have been made holy through the blood of Jesus but in elsewhere in the New Testament, we know that the Holy Spirit is responsible for working out and continuing our sanctification process. So, here when he's talking about sanctified, he's talking about that positional sanctification, not our practical, the everyday and and our ongoing sanctification, okay?

18:50 And this this sanctification is accomplished by the will of god and the completeness of Christ's work and I'm going to reference a little bit here. First Corinthians six eleven. There are so many references for this kind of stuff. This is why this is such a huge topic and you can go on and on, you know, being presenting both sides of this argument and and so much. There's so many references but I'm just trying to pull a couple.

19:16 First Corinthians six eleven and such were some of you but you were washed but you were sanctified. Same Hebrew word there by the way. But you were sanctified but you were justified in the name of the lord Jesus Christ and the spirit of god and I also want to read Romans three twenty five that most of us probably don't even need to turn to. Romans three twenty five whom god displayed publicly as a propitiation in his blood through faith. This was to demonstrate his righteousness because in the forbearance of god, he passed over the sins previously committed.

19:59 Now, the word there passed over. We're going to get on to this in verse 11. When you had that verb take away which is a different word but Paul here is pointing out in Romans, the sins were previously passed over. They were not removed and actually here in Roman, that's the, I believe it's the only occurrence of this particular verb in this particular case but he's talking about what happened to the sins under the old covenant and so under the old covenant, those sins were not removed. They were passed over.

21:06 The the the the Greek word there is a complete repudiation. It's a complete removal. So, it's a different word there and so what he's saying is so the the offerings that the priest does can never do this. It can't remove them and then go back to to Romans when Paul says that they were passed over, merely passed over. It's interesting to note.

21:35 If you want to pick apart such things but he says in verse 11 and every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices. The ironic priest, the the Jewish priests stood. I I ventured to think that there weren't a whole lot of chairs in the temple because the priest stood there all day, every day because if you look, you look in in the Old Testament to see all the sacrifices that were to be made for all the various sins and and cleanliness and and all these sorts of things. Goodness gracious. I mean, they had a very busy job.

22:24 It seems to me and they stood there day after day offering the same sacrifices over and over and over. However, in verse 12, but he, having offered one sacrifices for sins for all time, what did he do? He sat down. I just think it's an interesting use of language there. He sat down because he was done.

22:49 He offered one sacrifice and is now seated. He's done. That's not to mean he's not going to get up in in in the rise in judgement and all that. He's not sitting forever in that sense but as far as making sacrifices, that's done. He is sitting at the right hand of god offering one sacrifice for sins for all time.

23:15 There's no sacrifice left. There's none needed, not forever. Now, Let's see. This is why I gotta keep reading here. Verse 13, waiting from that time onward until his enemies be made a footstool for his feet.

23:34 For by one offering, he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. In this chapter, the author or speaker, if if we want to think that he's giving a sermon here, he uses a lot of these absolute terms repeatedly. How often is he saying the word never? How often is he saying forever? How often is he saying by one?

24:01 You know, he he's very repetitious and he brings out these absolute terms a lot. For by one offering, he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. Now, those who are sanctified. Again, that's talking about regenerate believers are positional sanctification. So, those of us who had accepted Christ, who are born again believers, and are sanctified, he's perfected us forever.

24:24 We have a perfect standing before god. God accepts us as he accepts his own son. He looks at us through the work of Christ and he accepts us as his own son and Oh, I lost my place here but we have a perfect conscience now in the sense that there is no sacrifice for sins that remains. We have a perfect conscience. He he mentioned in the beginning of the chapter when he was talking about the Jews.

25:03 Let me find it. In verse two, that they having once been cleansed with would no longer have had a consciousness of sins. So, the Jews were constantly, it was constantly at the back of their minds because they were constantly being reminded about their sin and how it had to be paid for. Whereas, we have a perfect conscience in the sense that the penalty for sin is forever paid. God will not demand any further payment and so, our conscience involving that sin is clear.

25:39 That doesn't mean that of course, we sin and the Holy Spirit speaks to us and you know, you have all of that aspect of your conscience but we do not have to be concerned with needing further payment. So, yes, as born again, regenerate believers, do we sin in our day to day lives? Of course, we do. Of course, we do but we can have a clean conscience in the knowledge of the fact that god will not demand for their payment. Having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time.

26:12 He has perfected for all time by one offering those who are sanctified. That's us. We are the ones who are sanctified. And he quotes Jeremiah 31 starting in verse 16. Well, I'll start in verse 15 and the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us.

26:35 So, the Holy Spirit's involved here now. The Holy Spirit is a witness through the Old Testament, through the Old Testament that our sin is forever paid. In Jeremiah 31, he says, this is the covenant that I will make with them. After those days, says the lord. I will put my laws upon their heart and upon their mind, I will write them.

26:56 He then says, and their sins and their lawless deeds, I will remember no more. So, god was talking about, again, here's another reference to the new covenant and how this was going to work back in the Old Testament. This was given to Jeremiah. Their sins and their lawless deeds, I will remember no more. They're gone.

27:15 They're done. They're dealt away with. Christ's sacrifice was complete forever. No further payment is due. No offerings exist for what's been forgiven.

27:26 If something's been forgiven and it's been truly forgiven, there's no offering that's left. There's no there's no further payment that's due. It's been forgiven. When a debt's been forgiven, it it it's forgiven. It's it's that simple.

27:41 It's that simple. So, the writer of Hebrews has spent these 18 verses going into the fact that Christ sacrifice was completely, totally sufficient Where in every case, the old covenant was insufficient to satisfy god's demands, to to reconcile sinners to god where where that was completely inadequate. Christ sacrifice was completely adequate. It covered everything forever. Yes, we keep on sinning and there's the process of continual sanctification.

28:17 There's a process of the spirit continually cleanse, continually cleansing but we can have faith in the fact that it's forever done. So, Christ sacrifice was complete and he's seated now. Whereas every other priest stood there forever. There for the entire term that they were there at the temple offering sacrifices. They stood there and that must have been a tiring job.

29:01 Since therefore, brethren, we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus by a new and living way. This new and living way gives us the confidence to enter the holy place and this way, this new way, he inaugurated for us through the veil that is his flesh. And since we have a great high priest over the house of god, let us draw near. So where the old covenant required distance, as we see in the Old Testament, we have the fact that you had the the outer court of the Tabernacle and that was where all the the public could be. Inside the temple, the holy place, only the priest could enter there and then of course, you had this incredibly thick veil that only once a year, only the high priest could go in there.

29:55 And we have the fact that when remember the the time when god was speaking to the people and he said, don't anybody touch the mountain. Not even an animal can touch the mountain. When when god had descended on the mountain, No one, you were not allowed to get close. And there was great noise and flashes and all this kind of stuff. So this was the old covenant.

30:16 It was, you know, God God is fearful. We can't get close. The priests can do their thing and kind of pass by our sins for a little while but you know, this was the old covenant. It's distance and so the new covenant is now the opposite. We are supposed to draw near.

30:34 It's it's it's a command but it's a privilege. It's our privilege to draw near. There is no fear of condemnation. For those that are in Christ Jesus, for the born again believers, there is no condemnation. There are no human mediators.

30:48 There's no one between us and we we and our direct access to god the father, the lord Jesus Christ, and the holy spirit. There are no barriers. We have there. It's all been gone. It's been dealt away with and we are now all priests.

31:01 We can all be priests Whereas before you had to be a Levite to be a priest, well, now we can all be priests and Christ is is shown here and throughout in Hebrews as our high priest. We have access to the holy place and the most holy place. The veil that he talks about here is symbolic of Christ's body. The veil that had to be torn to be removed. It was not Christ's sinless life that accomplished all this work.

31:34 It was his death. The veil had to be torn. The body had to be torn. The body had to be broken. And if Jesus is now our high priest, if we are priests and he's our high priests, how assuring is it to know that we will have full assurance and full acceptance by the father?

31:57 If Jesus Christ is our mediator as is shown in the New Testament in Timothy, Paul writes to Timothy, he says this, there is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, and that's the man Christ Jesus, our high priest. And if God... If Jesus is our high priest who mediates between us and god, if if Jesus, I'm sorry, if the father fully accepts Christ's sacrifice once and for all and and god views that sacrifice as sufficient and and Jesus is the one that's going to make intercession for us then, We should just all be sitting here with smiles on our faces because we know that we have full assurance of this faith. We have full assurance that the payment is done. So, we spend all this time showing us all this completeness of the sacrifice.

33:10 And when he says, he says to draw near with a sincere heart, a pure heart, if you want to look at it that way, since the new covenant does not depend at all on anything we do. It has nothing at all to do with anything we do or don't do on a day to day basis. So, if it's if it doesn't depend on that, again, this is where, like I mentioned earlier in the chapter, this is where that whole... The pure heart, the pure intentions comes in. This is where the new covenant and our our Christianity is not based on what we do.

33:46 And so the good works come from the heart. We serve god through our heart and the fruit then comes from there. So, the Holy Spirit bears fruit bears fruit through us through the good deeds that we do out of the outpouring of our hearts of the love of god. This is the concept that our our Christianity, our faith is built on us accomplishing things through the power of the spirit. It all comes from within.

34:27 Have, you can't just perform an action and expect to have anything come of it. Those sorts of things, they don't mean anything under the new covenant. That's the pure heart. When we accept Christ, we assume we appropriate the value of his blood. That's his sprinkling bit.

34:51 So, it's figuratively sprinkled, of course, but this is reference again back to the old covenant where blood was sprinkled on the altar at Passover when the blood was sprinkled over the doorposts. Now, as believers, we appropriate, we assume the value of Christ's blood by having that sprinkled on our hearts and sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Perhaps, we could think of the term bodies there as our lives being washed with pure water. We are cleansed permanently from the guilt of sin through his death. We are also cleansed continually through the spirit's work as I mentioned before and and the water could either be the word We see in Ephesians five twenty five could be the word or the water could refer to the Holy Spirit as we see in John seven thirty seven and whether the Holy Spirit refers to indwelt or the continual work, that's up for grabs.

35:53 But I like... You can insert all of those meanings into this portion. And... Okay, I got five minutes. So let's skip over the remainder of that and let's get a little bit just into the section that starts in verse 26.

36:10 And there's there's a lot there's a lot to go on here and I got a couple minutes to to to get through it. So we spent this much time again explaining how Christ sacrifice is sufficient and how it completes everything that god needed. It met all of god's demands. Okay. So, how do you reconcile what happens in verse 26?

36:31 It seems at first glance and and a big argument among among Christians is that, you know, can a can a believer lose their salvation? Is it possible? Is is this portion beginning in verse 26 describing a believer who then rejects Christ? Is that possible? And I would hearken back to Hebrews first chapter six, the first six verses of that where this was dealt with somewhat where the writer creates an argument, an hypothetical argument and the Latin phrase is a reduction to an absurdity.

37:11 Where he creates an argument you know for a hypothetical sense that as he goes about trying to prove it by the time you try to prove this hypothetical situation, you realize how absurd it is. What what I would like to think that this portion of Hebrews 10 is talking about are the apostates. So, the false Christians. We could look at Judas as an example. So, what I would like to pose is that Hebrews in 26 here and you you also see this elsewhere in the New Testament.

37:51 When Christ is is talking about those who have called him lord, lord, and have performed miracles in his name and then he says, depart from me. I never knew you. So, who's he talking about? And what I think this is trying to say is those who like in the parable of the seeds and the ones that fall on rocks who accept the word and receive it and spring up. Maybe they are attending a local church and they're doing all these things that seem like they are believers and they have accepted the word and then subsequently, they reject it.

38:30 They turn away. They make a a willful, decisive move to reject Christ. So, they were not really saved in the first place and and that's what I think this is talking about because how is it that you can go through the the first half of chapter 10 because if Christ sacrifice, if if someone could fall away from salvation, then Christ's work wasn't sufficient. If Christ could not save them to the uttermost who come under god by him, seeing he ever lived to make intercession for them. If Christ's work was not that complete, if he could not keep a believer, then, the sacrifice wasn't enough and if the sacrifice wasn't enough, then, if this believer falls away, then, Christ would have to die again.

39:20 And this is where you get into this this argument and there's so much in the New Testament that I could pull from. There are so many passages that talk about the sufficiency of Christ's work. If the beginning of Ephesians was read today by Scott Doeringer and and that's part of it. There's another one. But you have all these instances where it talks about this is sufficient and we are sanctified forever and then you have portions like this in Hebrews ten twenty six and and subsequent verses where it seems like he's talking about a Christian falling away.

39:50 It's impossible and so, what he's talking about here are those who identified themselves with the Christian faith but were never really saved. He wraps up chapter 10 by giving a little exhortation and the need to persevere and the need to endure. He talks about... He he wants them to remember when they were first saved and for some of us who were saved at a later age, later on in life, I was not. I was saved at a very young age and so this is a little trickier for me but for those of us who were saved later in life and he he's he wants these Jews to remember and not necessarily Jews but but Gentiles as well.

40:45 To remember when you were first saved, the the the excitement you had, the fire you had back then as opposed to now. Whether it's a year later or or fifty years later. But he wants you to remember. He wants us to remember how we felt then and the power we had. Remember what you've been through, the suffering that you've been through, okay?

41:08 Because you know, a lot of us could say, you know, after we got saved, life got a lot harder and life just always felt that way because I've always thought I was saved young. My life just always been hard as opposed to everyone else's. But he says the just will live by faith. He says the just will live by faith. He says to remember what you went through, how you showed sympathy to the prisoners, you accepted joyfully the seizure of your property knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and an abiding one.

42:03 It is to this life of patience and perseverance that this chapter applies, but there is a principle which is the strength of this life and which characterizes it. In the midst of the difficulties of the Christian walk, the just shall live by faith. And if anyone draws back, God will have no pleasure in him. But says the author, placing himself as ever in the midst of the believers, we are not of them who draw back, but of them that believe unto the saving of the soul. Thereupon, he describes the action of this faith encouraging believers by the example of the elders who had acquired their renown by walking according to the same principle as that by which the faithful were now called to walk.

42:45 Let's close. Father, we thank you for this time we've had together to open your word, to examine it and to hear it. We pray that you would speak to each one of us individually this week and that you would open our hearts and that we might be able to ponder the things that we have heard today and that we might be able to apply them in our lives. We ask for your blessing as we go. In your son's name, amen.