Hope Blog

▶ 1:08:50

Easter Sunday at Hope began with a bare cross at the front of the room and
buckets of flowers along the aisles, the congregation invited to come and cover the wood while
the band played — and, before that, with Job’s confession read aloud by a man who could barely
get through it:
“I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Matt came up with a sore throat and a helper. Michael read every passage in the message aloud,
which Matt hoped would not be a distraction but the opposite — God highlighting the main points
“through two witnesses instead of one.”

The question underneath the empty tomb

▶ 1:10:13

The detail Matt wanted the room to sit with is what the women carried away from that
graveyard: they ran
“with fear and great joy.”
Both at once. “A lot of us wear pastel colors and look for eggs,” he said. “We celebrate new
chapters in our lives. Does that fill you with fear and great joy?” Many people suspect there is
something deeper going on and cannot name it. There is. And the way in, Matt argued, is to stop
asking only what we receive and ask what God’s heart’s burning desire is — “what does he get out
of it?”

Three things hidden in one sentence of Paul’s

▶ 1:12:44

Three things, in order. Christ abolished death and brought immortality to light. He
called us to a holy calling — “something beyond recycling and planting trees,” Matt
said, something you have to be called into rather than something you stumble upon. And he did it
because of his own purpose. Not ours. “He’s scheming something,” Matt said, “and he has
been for a long time.” The rest of the message was an attempt to say what.

Why make us at all?

▶ 1:14:10

Genesis tells us we are made
in God’s image
without ever telling us precisely what that means. So Matt worked at it from the other
direction — by ruling out the reasons God did not do it. “God has no need of more butlers, or any
butlers at all,” he said. If he wanted fetching done, his ministering spirits of flame and fire
and wind are better staff than we are. Does he need a bigger choir? “Some of us sing off key
anyway.” Does he need to be told how great he is? He knows. Paul settled it in Athens: God is
not served by human hands, as though he needed anything.

What is left, when the useful explanations are gone, is a capacity we have that the animals do
not: we can understand glory, and we can ache for it. “You long to see God and his glory,” Matt
said, “and he longs for you to walk in it with him.” Food and drink grow boring in this life.
Heaven is not more of the same, upgraded.

He intends to reward a cup of water

▶ 1:16:38

Before answering the why, Matt had Michael read a passage that lands sideways at first —
“the one who is not against us is for us”
— and said so himself: “It doesn’t seem relevant yet, but it will.” Then came the line he was
after, one of Jesus’ stranger promises:
“whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.”
“Jesus plans to reward us richly for teeny tiny things,” he said — for handing someone a drink.
“This goes back to the heart and soul of why he saved us. He earnestly desires to reward us even
for the small stuff that he still doesn’t need, by the way.” That tells you something about the
character behind the plan. He is looking for reasons to give.

Called to his eternal glory

▶ 1:18:40

Michael read from the top of the paragraph, so the promise arrived with its context still
attached:
an adversary prowling “like a roaring lion,” and “the same kinds of suffering… being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.”
Glory, in Peter, is not offered instead of suffering. It comes on the far side of it — “after you
have suffered a little while.”

Restore, confirm, strengthen, establish — Matt noted there will be a great deal in us needing
restoration when we finally see him. But the phrase he did not want anyone skimming past is the
one in the middle. “He has called you to his eternal glory. That’s not just religious
gobbledygook Peter throws in because he wanted his letter to be longer.” The death and
resurrection of Jesus go far past the good-cop-bad-cop question of whether we are in trouble.
We are forgiven, yes. We are also invited into communion with God.

▶ 1:19:25

Then he put the guardrail up himself, before anyone could run the wrong way with it. “This is
not a new-agey self-affirmation that we’re going to discover that we’re all the divine light. No,
no — I’m not saying that. And God’s not here to affirm and glorify everything we do.” The loyalty
is still required: “We indeed lay aside the deeds of darkness and pledge in every temptation to
battle against sin and to express our loyalty to Jesus in new ways.” But well past that struggle
is a work of Jesus that “washes us clean, sets us free, and transforms us” — a calling that, Matt
said, if we understood it thoroughly, would blow our minds.

Heirs — and the tension that comes with the word

▶ 1:20:56

“Does this not astound you?” Matt asked. “This is a passage you could dwell on for hours.” He
was candid about the tension in it, and named the verse that creates it before anyone else could:
“my glory I give to no other.”
We are not being folded into God’s unique identity. There is no one like the Lord and there never
will be. And yet:

▶ 1:22:31

Jesus is not confused about the difference, and neither should we be — “that they may be one”
is a purpose statement, Matt said, “it’s not the identity of it.” But there is some high order of
glory he gives the church, deliberately. “You are not called into a club of do-gooders,” Matt
said. “You are called into his bride, which he plans to present to his Son radiant and glorious.
And I know that you long for that, because that’s how God made you.”

From one degree of glory to another

▶ 1:24:06

Michael read the run-up as well as the famous verse, and the run-up matters: the veil that
lies over the heart whenever Moses is read, and what happens when it lifts —
“when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed… and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
Transformation starts with an uncovered face.

▶ 1:25:27

This, Matt said, is the project — the secret plan from ages ago. And he turned it directly on
anyone in the room who had walked with Christ, stumbled, and drifted: the invitation is not God
in his office checking whether he has any forgiveness left over from last month. “He’s the one
beckoning you.” Which is also why refusing the gift is not the pious move it feels like. “You
might think it’s really spiritual to say, ‘Oh no, Lord, I’ll just take the janitor’s closet in
heaven, I’ll just be in the back eating the crumbs’ — as if that’s humble. Receive what your
Father wants to give you.” The chain in
Romans 8:28–30
runs the same direction and ends in the same place: foreknew, predestined, called, justified,
glorified — and verse 28 says it happens according to his purpose.

▶ 1:26:22

The middle link of that chain is where the question Matt opened with finally gets its answer.
We are predestined “to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the
firstborn among many brothers.” That is what God gets out of it: “to create for himself a
precious possession, that we would be conformed into the image of his Son, for his own good
pleasure.” And Matt refused the charge of prooftexting before it could be made — “this isn’t just
tucked away into one verse that I’m taking out of context; this is all over.” The destination has
a name: “You are called to join into the very body of Jesus, which we also sometimes refer to as
the church, or the bride of Christ — radiant, stunning.”

Partakers, not spectators

▶ 1:28:28

Partakers. Not admirers at a distance. And the route is not a technique — Matt leaned on the
first phrase: “It’s all through the knowledge of him, through us communing with him and knowing
him.” He then traced how that participation is actually delivered, and it runs through blood.
Leviticus 17:11
says the life of a creature is in its blood, which is why blood made atonement on the altar. So
when Jesus gives us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink, he is giving us his own life —
“allowing us participation into his very self in the deepest of ways.” It is the same logic under
baptism:
united with him in a death like his, united with him in a resurrection like his,
and the same logic under the command to
put off the old self and put on the new.
Matt was honest about how it lands: “This seems too good to be true.” He prayed for the Spirit to
come in power, because he did not think we would believe it otherwise.

Sown in dishonor, raised in glory

▶ 1:33:04

Paul spends the verses before this cataloguing glories — sun, moon, stars, one differing from
another — before applying the word to bodies that get buried. Matt read the dishonor and weakness
as ours right now: short lives, tired lives, frustrated lives, hoping at some level to belong to
something significant. “You feel like there is more out there because there is more. You have
been called into the very family of God, which is scandalous beyond description.” The analogies
Scripture reaches for are the most intimate ones available — father to child, bride to groom.
Matt was careful to say those are the Bible’s pictures, not his.

▶ 1:34:17

“One more, Michael” — and Michael kept going to the end of Paul’s argument, where the two
bodies get names:
“The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit… as was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.”
We have borne the first image already, without ever choosing it. The promise of Easter is that we
will bear the other one. The reading ended where the argument ends: “Thanks be to God.”

What to remember on Monday

▶ 1:35:48

So “in the midst of madness and pain in this life — troubles, persecutions, fear, loss,”
Matt said, remember what you have been called into, and remember that “there’s nothing quite like
the return on investment for everything you give to him in this life.” Remember it while you
fight sin, resist temptation, walk in godliness, grow weary, spend yourself on his callings.
“He intends to reward you abundantly, like you’ve never seen ever happen on this planet — but
even more than that, he desires to walk with you in intimacy and in glory.”

The desire for dignity and belonging did not come from nowhere, and it is not a futile hope,
“because he will satisfy that desire. He gave you that desire to walk in dignity — a place of
respect, a place of belonging. Your heart will be filled of it more than you can even predict.”
Which is why the arithmetic comes out the way it does: “Everything you give him in this life is
worth it, and beyond — well worth it.” Matt closed short and hoarse: “With a mighty arm and
outstretched hand, help us believe you. Fill our hearts with hope.”

▶ 1:04:31

Steve Hawthorne has preached Palm Sunday at Hope Chapel fifteen times since moving to Austin in 1991, all of them in this room, and he opened by admitting the obvious risk: he has probably said everything that can be said. Then he made the case that the day is bigger than what we usually hear about it. The last time he preached this particular text was nine years ago. “Nine years later it’s fresh.”

What the day actually was

▶ 1:06:00

Christmas appears in two gospels. Palm Sunday is the crescendo of all four — “a big loud wah.” The Bible never calls it Palm Sunday, and never calls it the triumphal entry either; a triumphal entry was what a Roman general got coming home from conquest, cheers compulsory. Jesus does triumph, Steve said, but far more than the simplistic version where our side wins. John mentions palm branches; the other gospels have people breaking off whatever was to hand. “They defoliated the place.”

The setting is Jerusalem days before Passover, a festival drawing thousands from across Israel and beyond, every room in the city taken — which is why Jesus was camping in the olive trees on the hillside, and why Judas could offer to lead men to him in the dark. It may have been the only crowd Jesus never tried to escape.

Both lines the crowd shouted come from the same place — Psalm 118:25–26, read in full as liturgy near Passover. The crowd picked out the two lines they liked. Hosanna appears there and nowhere else.

▶ 1:14:13

Steve read verse 16 twice, and the second time slowed down on the pronouns. These things were written of him. They had done these things to him. Something was happening for Jesus. It was not about the crowd, or Jerusalem, or the temple. And the inner circle did not follow it while it was happening — they worked out only part of it, only after he was raised and enthroned. What they could see was that everything appeared to be going his way. Even the opposition sounded finished: “You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.”

The Greeks, and five perplexing statements

▶ 1:16:56

The Pharisees say the world has gone after him, and the very next verse produces the world: Greeks, up for the feast to worship. God-fearers, Steve called them — Gentiles who had listened in at synagogues wherever they lived, read the scriptures in Greek, and concluded there was no God like this God. They were wealthy enough to make the journey, and they were not admitted to the temple, so they took what they were allowed. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida and spoke Greek, and Andrew with him. “We wish to see Jesus” — a courteous way of asking for an appointment.

To Judas, listening, that first sentence must have sounded like the announcement he had been waiting for — we are going global, starting today, and here are the men to do it with. Instead came five statements that seem to have nothing to do with each other and nothing to do with the Greeks. Most of them describe a fork in the road, two ways of directing a life: a seed that must die to bear anything; loving your life and losing it, hating it in this world and keeping it; “If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also” — strange to say to men standing right next to him. Then, from the great teacher everyone was ready to follow, the strangest of all.

▶ 1:22:10

The word behind “soul” is psychē — the same word translated “life” two verses earlier. It is the word you use when you say your life is a mess. Not what gurus say. The self-help shelf offers principles; Jesus offered a troubled soul and a prayer.

Then the answer, which the crowd heard as thunder on a cloudless day, and some nearby heard as words from an angel, and the inner circle heard clearly: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” You would expect comfort here — don’t worry, son, I’ll raise you. Instead: “This voice has come for your sake, not mine.”

Lifted up, twice over

▶ 1:28:50

Circling back, Steve pulled out what the statements have in common. The hour has come is a claim about time — something drastic happens within days. “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out” is a claim about power: not annihilated, not thrown into hell, but flipped out of his position of prominence. And then the promise.

The Greek does not say “all men” in the sense of males; it says simply all — all peoples, all tribes, whatever you can fit under that word. And “lifted up” means two things at once. John says plainly that Jesus was indicating the death he was going to die. But to lift someone up is also to speak of them highly. To be raised on a cross for sins, and to be exalted in praise — that double meaning, Steve argued, is what the gospel is.

▶ 1:33:21

He then proclaimed it in his own words, and it is worth having whole: “Jesus is the one sent by the Father. He gave his life a sacrifice to bring many to God. In his death he carried all the sorrows of every child or woman or man throughout the many generations; the weight of that grievous darkness crushed him. He laid down his life in obedience and in love, doing so in faith that the Father would raise him from death — and he was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. He is the new Adam. In him humanity begins all over again. By dying he has slain death itself. Never in history has he been as hated and opposed as he is this very day, but never in history have as many millions praised him with costly love.”

The lesser glory

▶ 1:35:30

Which is why missions is not, in Steve’s phrase, religious sport — the Baptists getting more people to their thing, the Pentecostals to theirs, the Catholics claiming seniority. It is not superior rhetoric and better music enlisting more people into our lifestyle. A momentary popular following is precisely the small thing Jesus was transcending.

He had the favor. Palm Sunday was the hour to build the fan base, the buildings, the branding. He never once hinted at starting a Jesus synagogue, which he could have had easily. And Steve named what such a movement would actually have been: a social club running on mutual admiration, handing out prizes for the best of us, playing boundary maintenance — we’re not like those guys, and we had to remove this one because he didn’t comply. “This is repulsive. But it’s very common. That’s how humans cluster together.”

▶ 1:39:36

John says it happened even then: many of the authorities believed but would not confess him, for fear of being put out of the synagogue, because they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. The word is doxa both times. Steve’s point was not that glory-hunger is the problem. God made us to want to be named, known and celebrated, and he intends to satisfy it himself. The problem is settling for the version we hand each other.

The story of his name

▶ 1:40:49

So what was Jesus asking for? Here Steve warned the room he wrote his doctoral dissertation on this and would keep it to seven minutes. Exodus never says “Let my people go,” full stop. There is always a comma — that they may serve me. And the plagues, each a strike against a particular Egyptian god from one of the most respected pantheons in the ancient world, were not aimed at wiping Egypt out.

Egypt was left standing in order to tell the story. God’s name is a summary of who he is, and he is determined not to be anonymous.

▶ 1:42:50

Solomon builds a house for that name and dedicates it, remarkably, with the foreigner in view — someone who comes from a far country for your name’s sake, which is exactly what those Greeks in John 12 had done.

The same three words Jesus prayed turn up in the psalm — “All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name” — and the Old Testament closes still on it: “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations.” It is what Jesus taught us to ask for first — hallowed be your name, meaning sanctify it, make it known and clear and greater than every other god — and it is how Paul stated his own commission: the obedience of faith among all the nations, for the sake of his name. Worship, Steve said in passing, is not the singing portion of a service. It is what broke at Cain and Abel, and the whole story is about who gets it.

The fork

▶ 2:03:24

Two prayers were genuinely available in that hour, and God would have answered either. Gethsemane makes it explicit — “let this cup pass from me… nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” — and so does the arrest, where Jesus says he could appeal to his Father and be given more than twelve legions of angels. He was never trapped. Save me from this hour was a real option: continued life, tranquility, happy circumstances. He asked for something greater, better and harder.

Every follower reaches that juncture, and Steve thought some in the room were standing at it that week. You can want no more than God’s saving work and his help getting you to heaven, and there is nothing wrong with it. But he was blunt about what most of us actually want instead: a helper God, orbiting our affairs, our projects, our finances, arranged to underwrite the best version of the life we already planned. That is not the offered relationship. “Where I am, there will my servant be” is not a promise to show up for you; it is an invitation to join what he is doing — “not just serve him once in a while, but lock yourself in, like that’s your identity.” And the honor that follows comes from the Father, which is the glory-hunger finally being fed from the right hand.

Three ways in

▶ 2:08:48

He closed practically. First, lift up Jesus — tell the gospel clearly and simply, without being pushy, and tell how his story has intersected yours. You are not responsible for drawing anyone; he does the drawing, we do the lifting. Second, pray for his glory specifically: for the people across the street, the family moving into the apartment three doors down, Afghanistan and those who serve there. Third, keep the finish of the mission in view — peoples among whom Christ is not yet named — which is why Hope Chapel has invested where it has among the least-reached.

Then he had the congregation stand and read John 12:27–28 aloud together, and blessed them: not to follow Jesus occasionally but always, not to serve once in a while but as an identity, with difficult things ahead and a reason for them.

▶ 1:04:54

Matt opened with the karate gym he attends for fun, where the only way he gets in
trouble is by going too easy on his partner. If you choke someone gently, they never learn to escape.
If they drop their guard and you do not hit them, the teacher stops the class. He took it as a lesson
about speaking clearly, and then spent the next forty minutes doing exactly that with a doctrine most
of the room had never heard questioned.

Why Good Friday, two weeks early

▶ 1:10:23

Hope’s series in Hebrews paused for the morning. Hope Chapel’s Good Friday service is, in Matt’s
judgment, one of the best things the church does, and he had no interest in interrupting it to teach
about it. Palm Sunday deserved its own week, Easter the week after. So the theology of Good Friday
landed here.

▶ 1:10:51

There are two ways to hear that line. Either Jesus is calling
Psalm 22
to mind so that everyone watching can see the prophecy unfolding in front of them — or he is telling
us that the relationship between Father and Son has broken. “You might think potato, potato on that,”
Matt said, “but it’s important that we in the church are really careful with our words. If anything,
this is and should be our bread and butter.”

He named the cluster of ideas he wanted to test, because they always travel together: God cannot
bear to look at sin; therefore the Father turned his face away; therefore Jesus was cut off from God;
therefore that pain and separation is what pays for sin. It is in our books and it is in our songs —
How Deep the Father’s Love is a genuinely good song, and it has us singing that the Father
turns his face away. Away from whom? From the Son.

1. “God cannot bear to look at sin”

▶ 1:16:56

One verse carries this claim, and it is nearly always cut in half.

Read whole, it is a man in a raw place working out his own tension — I thought you couldn’t
look at this, so why are you looking? It is a complaint, not a definition. And we do not build
doctrine on someone’s confusion.

▶ 1:18:47

The rest of the Bible settles it anyway. In
Job 1
there is a parade of beings presenting themselves before God, and Satan is in the line. In the
Gospels there is no scene where Jesus squints and turns aside because all he can hear is sin — not
with Peter, not with Judas, not with the woman at the well.

▶ 1:20:05

Defending the claim costs more than people realize: it quietly demotes Jesus. He becomes the
non-conductive rubber glove God uses to handle a gross humanity, the ten-foot pole. But Paul will not
allow the distance —
Romans 9:5
calls the Christ who came from Israel’s race “God over all, blessed forever.” Not only before the
incarnation, and not only now in his glorified state. Even then, Matt said — “even then, when he let
sinners touch him, wash his feet, share meals with him, spit on him.”

2. Jesus quoted the whole song

▶ 1:22:31

In a culture without hymn numbers, you summoned a song by its opening line — the way the Hebrew
Bible names its books by their first word. The crowd at the cross knew Psalm 22 from home and from
synagogue. So Matt read it aloud, slowly, and asked the room to watch for what the people standing
there would have been watching for.

They are all in it. Mocked and scorned, heads wagging.
“He trusts
in the Lord; let him deliver him.” Bones out of joint, tongue stuck to the jaws, hands and feet
pierced, garments divided by lot
(Psalm 22:14–18).
This reads less like David’s biography than like a report from the hill.

▶ 1:27:44

Then the psalm turns, and the turn is the whole argument.

“The afflicted” there is singular in the Hebrew — one suffering man. David was scorned by men, not
abandoned by God, and he knew it. If the song is more about Jesus than about David, the same holds,
and harder. “Isn’t it ironic,” Matt said, “that the very song Jesus quotes is then used as proof that
God did something that that very song says he doesn’t do.”

The psalm ends where the cross ends. Verse 31 closes with two Hebrew words —
he has done it — which is a fair rendering of
what Jesus
says from the cross: it is finished.

3. So where was the Father?

▶ 1:33:37

Matt noticed something about how we tell this story: we talk as though there are two persons in
God, not three. Nobody ever asks what the Spirit was doing. Hebrews answers.

Son and Spirit, in harmony, on purpose. Which would leave the Father as the odd man out — except
that Jesus says otherwise, plainly, and his disciples note that he has stopped speaking in figures
(John 16:28–29).
In John 8:28–29
he ties it directly to the crucifixion: when you have lifted up the Son of Man, you will know that
the one who sent me is with me.

▶ 1:35:42

The scattering is the crucifixion. That is the hour Jesus is talking about, and he says of that
hour that the Father is with him. As for what the Father was doing there:
“in
Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”
Not a face pulled back. An arm reached out.

4. Then what does “forsaken” mean?

▶ 1:37:59

Peter says Christ suffered — and says precisely what the suffering was.

Put to death. Not given the cold shoulder. And there is a real abandonment in the story: the
Father left him there to die. Matt walked the pattern that makes it visible. Nazareth tries to throw
him off a cliff and he passes through them
(Luke 4:28–30).
He heals on the Sabbath and they plot
(Matthew 12:9–14);
he heals the lame man and they seek to kill him
(John 5:16–18);
the crowd wonders whether he is the Christ and no one lays a hand on him
(John 7:25–30);
he says before Abraham was, I am, and they pick up stones
(John 8:58–59);
he says I and the Father are one, and they pick them up again
(John 10:30–31);
people believe in him and the council decides he must die
(John 11:45–53).
Seven times protected. Then not.

▶ 1:40:03

If the Son is laying his life down and the Father swoops in to stop it, that is not harmony. The
Father let him lay it down — and that, Matt argued, is the abandonment: handed over to his
persecutors, on purpose, to take his life up again. Which also dissolves the accusation that the
cross is divine child abuse. That charge requires abuse and a child. Jesus is God the Son at the ripe
old age of eternal and, in the flesh, a grown man who chose this. “It wasn’t God who abused him. It
was us who whipped him and spat on him and put thorns on his head to make fun of him.”

Why any of this matters on a Tuesday

▶ 1:43:16

Nothing is more foundational than the nature of God — more foundational, Matt said, than the
ground we stand on, more fundamental than the laws of logic. If at the center of everything there is
a Trinity whose persons had to negotiate over whether to love you, there is no floor under your feet.
You could approach God, but you would never know which day you had caught him on.

So the cross is not Jesus talking the Father into loving you. It is the Father’s love being shown.
There is no good-cop-bad-cop inside God, no rage held back at arm’s length until the Son goes the
extra mile. He came for the sick like a physician
(Mark 2:17) —
for the tax collector, the traitor, the leper.

▶ 1:46:23

And there is the pastoral cost of the alternative. If God has a compulsive revulsion toward
sinners, then the moment you sin you have nowhere to go. You wallow instead. You try to clean
yourself up first, which does not work. “He should be the first one we go to when we stumble and
fall,” Matt said. “And that’s why all of this matters.” He closed by praying that we would see God as
he really is.

▶ 1:15:14

Matt opened with a proposal for daylight savings reform — a hundred and twenty nights of the year adjusted by one minute forward and one minute back until the nation reaches what he called “time enlightenment” — a note on the congregational meeting on March 20, and a promise, prompted by texts he got the previous Sunday, that the prom fundraiser story ended fine. Then he got to the text he had been looking forward to.

The question people are actually asking

▶ 1:18:31

He had recently asked a small group, mostly high schoolers, how many of them had read Hebrews. Almost none had. What most of them had was a vague impression: there is a scary passage in there somewhere that says if you turn away from God you cannot come back. The week after he started this series, an email arrived from someone he had never met asking that exact question. Years earlier, when he taught algebra, a student stopped him in a hallway — not for math help — and asked whether he had sinned too much to come back.

This is why Matt reads hard passages out loud rather than around them. If you ask people to read the Bible, they will hit the hard parts, and they deserve company when they do.

Milk, solid food, and then the warning

▶ 1:21:02

Two groups, described three ways: milk and solid food, immature and mature, unskilled and trained. Then Hebrews 6:1–3 presses the same contrast forward — leave the elementary doctrine, go on to maturity, stop laying the foundation again — and runs straight into the sentence everyone is afraid of.

▶ 1:22:28

Jesus cannot literally be crucified again; he has been raised and is seated in heaven. So what does “crucifying once again” mean? Matt’s answer: those who knew him and discard him are joining the ranks of the people who saw him, knew him, and judged him worthless.

The vineyard behind the verse

▶ 1:23:37

Verses 7 and 8 turn to farming: land that drinks the rain and produces a crop receives a blessing, while land that bears thorns and thistles is worthless and near to being cursed. Many readers hear Isaiah underneath it — a love song about a vineyard that turns bitter, the way a country song does.

Every detail lines up: the ground prepared, the planting, the anticipation, the sour yield. And the speaker changes partway through — the story is suddenly being told by the Lord, and the question is put to the men of Judah as judges of his case. Isaiah names the vineyard outright in verse 7: it is the house of Israel. God created a people out of a couple who could not have children, rescued them from slavery, fed them daily, sent deliverers, sent prophets. What more was there to do?

Where the impossibility lies

▶ 1:28:40

Here the message turns on grammar. The NIV reads “it is impossible… to be brought back to repentance” — passive, a category of thing that cannot happen. The ESV reads “to restore them again to repentance” — active, with an implied someone doing the restoring. “Imagine you’re alone in the woods and you see a bear,” Matt said. “Active voice versus passive voice is the difference between eating or being eaten.”

Take the passive reading first, as a universal claim: nobody who has known Jesus and fallen away can repent. A universal claim is the easiest kind to break. If I say all butterflies are blue, you need exactly one butterfly.

▶ 1:31:00

The prodigal son grew up in his father’s house, left, came back for unimpressive reasons — he was hungry — and could not finish his apology because his father was already restoring him (Luke 15:20–24). David knew the Lord, knew that Bathsheba and the killing of Uriah were wrong, and said plainly that he had sinned against the Lord (Psalm 51:4). And if the objection is that those men had not walked with Christ himself — Peter had. He did not merely sin; he denied his knowledge of Jesus with an oath, three times (Matthew 26:69–75). He repented.

▶ 1:33:39

So read it in the active voice, and picture the conversation. Have you heard about the goodness of the Lord? Yes. Met Jesus? Yes. Prayed? Yes. Tasted the gifts of the Spirit, been touched with healing? Yes — and I still don’t want it. Where is the impossibility now? It is in the person trying to help. Matt’s foil was a Scientology recruiter who can always invent a level five, a discount, a private party at Tom Cruise’s house, a secret handshake. “That’s not true of the gospel. There’s no secret gospel in the back.” If someone knows everything there is to know about the Lord and does not want him, all a preacher can do is lay the foundation again — which is exactly the milk the author has just told them to stop drinking.

Would Jesus fail his own standard?

▶ 1:36:06

The deeper problem, Matt said, is not a misread verse but a misunderstanding of who God is. So he went to Peter’s question about limits.

Not a countdown to the seventy-eighth offense — an abundance. And imagine standing before the Lord as he asks whether you forgave far past seven times, then telling him you fell away and were not allowed back. He read Galatians 6:1–2 the same way, with an invented parenthesis to expose the absurdity: restore him gently — “and I really only mean first-time offenders, because after that we’re all toast.” Does Jesus live by his own laws?

The oath God swore

▶ 1:40:15

The very next verse settles the tone: “Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things — things that belong to salvation” (Hebrews 6:9). This was written as encouragement. If it meant one lapse and you are finished, it would be the most discouraging encouragement on the planet.

That is what Matt told the student in the hallway. You want to repent? Yes. You want the Lord? Yes. Dead men don’t want that. You’re not dead.

▶ 1:42:12

Then the passage moves to Abraham, and to the strongest guarantee available in the ancient world. People swear by something greater than themselves and the oath ends the dispute; God, having no one greater, swore by himself (Hebrews 6:13–15).

Matt tested the anchor by rewriting it the way fear hears it: God may still love you, unless he doesn’t, but he probably does; if you want to repent that’s good, I hope he lets you. Nobody hangs their weight on that. What the text actually offers is different — the judge and your defense attorney are, in his phrase, resolutely in cahoots in your favor, and the purpose that will not change is that he would be your God and you would know him.

What to repent of first

▶ 1:46:42

So when you sin, and especially when you sin spectacularly, the last thing to worry about is whether you can talk to Jesus about it. He is the first one to go to. We can repent of our deeds of darkness, our addictions and our fears — but the thing to put on the chopping block first is the belief that God’s love has a shelf life, that it lasted a while and then he moved on to some other supernova.

His resolve is not merely to save people from their sins but to bring them in by the spirit of adoption as children who know him. “He will let you repent,” Matt closed, “but that choice remains inside of you.” Today is the day.

▶ 1:16:28

Hebrews so far has been an argument that the gospel can be trusted because Jesus can be trusted: greater than Moses, greater as leader and prophet and priest and king, and finally the Creator himself. This week the letter pivots at the end of chapter 4 into a new claim — that he is also the greater, more reliable, more perfect high priest. Matt admitted straight away that this is not automatically good news to everyone in the room. We all bring assumptions to the table.

1. A subpoena, and three faces

▶ 1:17:39

The story he told to make the point comes from 2007, his first year teaching algebra. The prom sponsor was struggling; Matt volunteered as the helper; the sponsor promptly quit. The class had no money, so he and the students bought chips out of pocket, bagged them with hot sauce, and sold them. That became boxes of chocolate bars from Sam’s, bought with the chip money, sold, and reinvested — exponentially — with the cash coming home with him.

The school bookkeeper explained that a fundraiser needs prior approval, a firm start date, a firm stop date, approved goods from approved vendors, and receipts. He had none of these. “I was basically running a highly successful chocolate-based crime syndicate that comprised just one man and a bunch of minors selling illegally obtained goods on government property.” The bookkeeper added that she was retiring, and the district always audits a school when the bookkeeper retires.

▶ 1:22:28

So when a well-dressed stranger handed him an envelope at the front office at the end of that year, Matt opened it braced for jail — Mandy was pregnant. It was a subpoena naming him a character witness in a student’s parents’ divorce. The office staff already knew, and had said nothing, because watching him sweat was the best show on earth.

▶ 1:24:28

One encounter, three reactions: delight from the staff, panic from Matt, boredom from the process server. “Our perspectives matter,” he said — and this is the question he wanted people carrying into Hebrews. Is a great high priest a relief to you, or is it noise, or is it a threat? Are we glad Jesus is our Good Shepherd because he is trustworthy and good, or nervous about him because we suspect he is a slavish taskmaster?

2. Hold fast, and draw near

▶ 1:25:04

Two instructions: hold fast, and draw near with confidence. Matt pressed on both. The confession being held is Christ’s sacrifice alone for our sin, and with it redemption, inclusion, adoption — and earlier in the same chapter the writer has already said it is those who believe who enter his rest, not those who performed properly beforehand. And you are only told to hold on to something if there is a pull to let go. There are two ways to let go: reject the confession outright, or pile on to it.

3. What a priest was actually for

▶ 1:27:09

▶ 1:28:55

The hinge of the argument, Matt said, is that Christ likewise did not exalt himself but was appointed — a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, the priest-king who turns up in the Abraham stories. Same humility, so the same expectation follows: he acts on our behalf, and he deals gently. That is how we can trust every move he makes.

▶ 1:30:16

Which exposes the assumption most of us carry about the priesthood — that it existed to keep the unclean out. What did a priest actually do? He received your offering. He made sure it was offered correctly, because he was the professional who had studied Leviticus and you had not. And then he blessed you.

Matt worked it through the eyes of a poor Israelite carrying a pigeon because he could not afford a sheep — a provision written into the law precisely for him — and having no idea how to offer it. The priest has you. “This was not a barrier of entry so as to make sure you know the Lord wants distance between you and him. It’s the opposite.” The priest puts the name of the Lord on you and brings your offering, and you, in.

▶ 1:31:25

“But here’s the difference,” Matt said. “He also brought the offering.” Jesus is the priest who knows how to offer it correctly and the offering itself, God made flesh presenting himself. Your salvation is solid because the competence in the transaction is not yours.

4. “Being made perfect”

▶ 1:33:21

Two words got attention. First, that Jesus prayed with loud cries and tears to the one able to save him from death, “and he was heard.” It is not the case that heaven fell silent at the cross. “You’re like, well, but he died. Yeah — but he didn’t stay dead.”

▶ 1:33:55

Second, perfect. In modern English it means without flaw, which makes the sentence sound like a repair job. In Greek it can mean brought to completion, fulfilled, finalized — arriving at what a thing was always for. He was made perfect in the sense that through his suffering and resurrection he became the source of eternal salvation and our high priest. That is the completion.

5. Milk, solid food, and a frustrated preacher

▶ 1:35:37

Matt had the room make two columns, milk and solid food. Into milk go basic principles and childlikeness; into solid food, maturity and trained discernment. He offered a caution on that last phrase: the contrast may be less about waking up each day adjudicating good and evil than about a Hebrew idiom — in Deuteronomy the children who know neither good nor evil are simply the ones who are not yet adults. He was careful to say he could not prove it.

▶ 1:38:16

Then Hebrews 6:1–3: leave the elementary doctrine and go on to maturity, without laying the foundation again. This is not a claim that mature Christians graduate from Jesus to memorizing Zephaniah. The complaint is that these people need the altar call, the foundation, the basics, over and over — and the frustration is not that the basics are unimportant. It is that something in them is being heard and not received.

6. One argument, made three times

▶ 1:40:15

Next Sunday is a close reading of these verses, and Matt was deliberate about not leaving them hanging alone — Hebrews was written as one sermon, so you do not lift a nugget out of it and panic. He laid out the two readings people bring. One: if someone has tasted everything and still holds Christ in contempt, there is simply nothing further to tell them; there is no secret chapter after the index. Two: Jesus died once, so you get one shot, and the moment you fail the hammer falls, because he never really wanted you. “I’m trying to leave you with some hope,” he said. “That second reading is insane.”

▶ 1:42:31

The rain fell on both fields. The seed was sown on both. The difference is how the soil received it — which is the milk complaint again, and the warning again. Three images, one point.

7. Do you trust this Shepherd?

▶ 1:46:24

“Eternal life, redemption, and inclusion into God’s family doesn’t come from knowing more and more about the gospel,” Matt said — “in addiction to hearing it articulated over and over again in more and more fancy ways. It’s from believing it truly.” The question he left the room with was blunt: “I know you know about Jesus, but do you know him?”

▶ 1:48:47

And the throne we are told to approach is not a bench of hateful zeal. It is a throne of grace, and we are told to come to it with confidence, while it is still today. He closed by praying the priestly blessing over the church — the same words a priest once spoke over a poor man with a pigeon.