Charlie Dates - Pastors' Conference 2020

[Music] tab media is more than a newspaper while we have grown to be a podcast a radio show an online news source and have a social media presence we are more than those things too we desire to empower our readers and listeners to live out discipleship in all parts of life we want to help you always shine bright as a light in the darkness tab media is more than a newspaper it's a mission hello my name is dr charlie dates senior pastor of chicago's progressive baptist church a landmark historic african-american church here in chicago and also an affiliate professor of church history and homiletics at the trinity evangelical divinity school in deerfield let me rush to express my gratitude to those who are responsible for my participating in this pastor's conference i was really looking forward uh to being in montgomery this year with you face to face but i hope you'll pray with me and that you'll tune in with an expectant heart around this passage today from hebrews 10. so thank you again for giving me this privilege to join you and do it all be it virtually i also want to thank those uh kind of tongue-in-cheek from my who are responsible for my being with you because they assigned me a passage and anybody who preaches every week knows what it's like to have another passage thrown into the mix and so i i pray that you will be kind and gracious in one sense and uh that god will speak to us anew and afresh from this passage today it's hebrews chapter 10 verses 19 through 25. uh i'm reading from the new american standard bible beginning of verse 19 therefore brothers and sisters since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of jesus christ he has inaugurated for us a new and living way through the curtain that is through his flesh and since we have a great high priest over the house of god let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering since he who promised is faithful and let us watch out for one another to provoke let us watch out for one another to provoke love and good works not neglecting to gather together as some are in the habit of doing but encouraging each other and all the more as you see the day approaching this wonderful passage one sentence in the greek new testament uh lots for us the kind of exhortations that the church should give to one another one primary exhortation that i want to lift is the encouragement for you and i to go in to the sanctuary in a time where many of us are not able to go in physically to our sanctuaries but our streaming church and going to church remotely this is a passage with a kind of new striking force i think you would you would appreciate i want to tag this text in our exchange let's go in one talk from the thought let's go in let us pray together our father and our god great king above all kings we ask you now i ask you for power to proclaim your word i pray that you would give me singular focus help me to preach the truth and i pray that you would use the preaching of your word through the power of your spirit to get through the airwaves and even to communicate on the other side of the camera the truth of your word to those listening in jesus name we pray amen to dwell above with the saints i love that would be glory to dwell below with the saints i know well that's another story those are the words of mother teresa from calcutta many many decades now ago and she captures for us the true sentiment of life within the church it reminds us that the job of the christian the development of the christian community is more outward at times than it is inward beyond the spiritual disciplines like monks and hermits in a monastery a top of a mountain somewhere across the world you and i are developed more rigorously at the urban center in the suburbs in our rural areas as we come in contact with one another sometimes if i'm honest i kind of long for a priestly ministry that's remote that doesn't have a whole lot of contact with people who can feel abrasive or even sometimes when i am abrasive sometimes i long for those remote opportunities but isn't it striking that there are many passages like those that you and i are listening to being preached through this conference that focus on and highlight the one another feature the communal nature of the local church it's as if the writer of scripture the real writer of scripture the holy spirit who impressed upon the pens of those who documented his inner workings within the church that christian character is seen in our concern for one another that the demonstration of our real membership in the local fellowship is the care and the concern with which we take care of each other well the writer of hebrews urges upon us a kind of trifecta of encouraging exhortations they are not merely for us to employ but mainly these exhortations are for us to exercise you can feel even in the noun structure as if you were running your finger across the scripture underlining it as it were the communal tone of these exhortations let us let us let us it's a reminder that the christian life is not a lone ranger sport well even the lone ranger had tanto batman had robin and steph curry has had kalei thompson it's it's as if nothing great has been done alone nothing wonderful to enjoy has been accomplished in isolation but doing the christian life with others is part of the undergirding tone of our text and not only that but perhaps one of the greater features too underneath this text is from where the christian gets the power to do our work the authority by which the christian is granted to have access to god those are the underlining underlying motivations and insights of this passage as it addresses the christian community we have a boldness given through our great savior our path maker our real high priest our great savior that gives us entree into the presence of god these one another passages oh they in my mind are kind of like boomerangs i tend to work with images in my mind as when we were children you you take that oblong shaped boomerang and you you toss it and given its shape it would go into the wind and against the wind and as it reached far out it would wrap back around and come back in it's a picture of how the kind of work we do and the force we exert as we send it out within the local church it actually comes back to us the church in other words is unlike anything else in the world it is the reciprocal place of grace it is the call and response of favor it is the beauty of a selfless community operating in the power of jesus christ and here's how we find it we find a boomerang of godly love within the church can't you see it here therefore brothers and sisters since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of jesus christ and since we have a great high priest let us draw near let us hold on to the confession of faith and let us watch out for one another do you see that let us hold on let us draw near let us watch out for one another those three rapid exhortations what i call the trifecta of encouraging exhortations actually sit upon some significant foundation uh foundation what an interesting idea maybe you saw it like i did many years ago that the loader rivets lotus river condominium complex in shanghai the day it was scheduled to open some more than 400 condominium buildings the day it was scheduled to open fell down flat like a child's lego system these wonderful complex structures with the cornices still intact they just fell over multiple stories high in the air uh these apartments these condos just fell over and when you look at the pictures if you were to google it you look at the the uh river or lotus river towers in shanghai when you look at the pictures of how they lay on the ground you can look at the bottom and see it's as if they are attached to nothing no foundation laid to hold the weight of these buildings no sturdy ground able to hold the extreme dead weight load and the live weight load that's coming upon it it's as if the people who built it did not think it needed to be situated upon something and and here is the power of our text the the weight of the christian life the heft of the christian church has to sit upon something and here is the beauty we have a foundation as it's lauded throughout hebrews this wonderful picture of our prophet priest and king who is superior to the created order superior to the angels the the magnificent look at our high priest jesus christ we see that he is the foundation that gives us the ability to hold up under the weight not only of these exhortations but of the pressures of life and that which greet the church listen now to the description of our foundation we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of jesus he has inaugurated for us a new and living way through the curtain that is through his flesh and since we have a great high priest over the house of god these towers of encouragement sit on the foundation of jesus christ and the first picture we get of jesus here is the all-sufficiency of his priestly ministry to enter the sanctuary through the blood of jesus a new and living way through the curtain you know by now that that harkens back to old testament priestly ministry where the priests in the old testament and i would say even zacharias in the new testament show us how they handled their ministry of going into the holy of holies they went into the sanctuary the place where the manifest presence of god dwelt they would go in on the day of atonement on behalf of the people to make sacrifice for the people really not to fully and finally ever deal with their sin but to roll over their sin as it were to the next year i mean why would they have to go back the next year if their ministry the year before were fully and finally effective but because the presence of god is so heavy and weighty and judgmental in a real sense towards sin the the priest on duty had to dress a certain way well he wore bells around his ankles and around his hands he was made to stay up all night the night before to kind of keep his mind pure and clean also to keep him away from his wife in case he were to to go into marital relations with his wife he couldn't for a certain amount of time have any contact with the opposite sex in that regard and then they would fasten a rope around his waist so that as he went behind the curtain not a flimsy curtain but a curtain some say the thickness of which was thicker than the size of a man's hand the palm of a man's hand and he would go in there he would take his incense at first and let that sweet smelling aroma come before the presence of god and then he would walk in and he would perform his priestly duty he went on behalf of everybody else nobody else went in with him he went in on behalf of anyone else and if he went in without reverence irreverently if he went into rashly the presence of god was known to take a priest down and so those on the outside would grab that rope and they would pull them out after they heard the bells not moving anymore you didn't want to be that priest who went in but couldn't come out so now we see a new picture of a priest not one who goes in timidly not one who goes in with the rope around his waist not one going in hoping for god's approval but we see a high priest who has gone in and given us a route into the sanctuary he is the curtain and so when christ was crucified on the cross we know from the gospel account that the veil in the temple was torn in two and it was torn from the top to the bottom don't miss that it was not torn from the bottom up we do not have a bottom up kind of faith no we have a top-down kind of faith where god has come to us and rent it seamlessly down and then in this regard god did not just come out to us but through the blood of jesus christ we have been made entrance we have been given access to come into god can't you appreciate that that in the old testament system the priests went in and could not bring other people in but in this system through jesus christ through his flesh we get to go in right behind him and this friends is an amazing gift no other would-be faith could claim this kind of gift no we don't need someone else to get to god for us we have been given access to god on our own it makes me think we had a possum near the church the other week it made me think of the possum who will not go into certain places if they see only one track of footprints going in and no track coming out it's as if the possum has more sense than many human beings the possum can read footprints and say now if something went in there and it didn't come out i don't want to go in there but it didn't amazing that the christian sees at the grave a pair of footprints going in and a pair of footprints coming out many feet have gone in but only one set has gone in and come out and so now we see that jesus has made a way for us he has shown us that there is a way to go in behind him we got to know who to follow and we have this foundation underneath which is the all-sufficient ministry of jesus christ and not only does the text say that he has given us entrance into the presence of god the manifest presence of god without fear of condemnation or without having to hope for approval but jesus has given us boldness this word bold shows up in hebrews more than once we can come boldly before the throne of god to find grace in our time of need we don't have to come timidly i think of my daughter who one sunday when we were meeting in person and lord willing those days are going to come back she she came to me and she asked me for some candy that was actually in my hand someone had just given it to me so i gave it to her and she just kept hitting me on the side i was talking to some members at the altar when churches kept hitting me on the side i looked over and she did like this she had brought some other kids from children's church with it and she came to me and that said everything i needed to know that was claire's way of saying i know that if you got some from me you got enough in there for the people i brought with you and if my daughter has that kind of boldness to know that her father who is human who at his best still falls short if she had enough confidence in me to say i know that if you got enough for me you got enough for them can you imagine the kind of confidence that jesus gives to us that we can come boldly knowing that if god has given on behalf of jesus he will not withhold from us anything we rightfully need to enjoy and to take life this is the beauty the old way was the way with the curtain but the new way is the way of life we have as our foundation the off-sufficiency of jesus but we also have the omnipotence of christ's supervision look at this the text says since we have a great high priest over the house of god there's so much here uh to to pull out we don't have as much time as i i'd like to enjoy but notice now that jesus is not like the regular high priest who's a part of the order of god's house no but jesus here is over god's house therein is a picture of the supremacy sovereignty and sufficiency of jesus christ our savior the reason we can enact these godly exhortations let us and let us and let us it's because we have a priest who is all sufficient but we have one the buck stops with him who is over the entire house of god so what are they what are these exhortations here we go an exhortation to draw near an exhortation to hold fast and an exhortation to watch out for one another i think of james when i read hebrews chapter 10 verse 22 if we draw near to god he will draw near to us here is an invitation to draw near with the true heart and full assurance look at the language sprinkle clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water this is beyond ceremonial cleanliness friends this text speaks at the purification of our souls i won't soon forget kirsty and i my wife are about to celebrate oh we just celebrated this year 14 years but next year we're about to celebrate 15 years of marriage and i remember when we were about to have our first argument at the treasure island grocery store in hyde park we had just been newly married we're moving into a new apartment and we were buying everything for that apartment groceries and cleaning supplies and when we got to the cleaning aisle i told her i got this i can handle this part there's one thing mother dates gave us she gave us a remedy and a recipe for cleaning so i walked down the aisle and i waited till i found it i i spotted it a little green tube with white letters on the top powdered bleach called comet cleanser i dropped about three or four of those in and i saw some brillo scotch pads off to the side i got those put them in the cart and she said dear what are you doing and i said well i'm getting material to clean the bathroom i mean we don't know who's had this apartment before us and and she said is that how it works i said yeah you know you've got to actually sprinkle the bleach into the tub run some water in and take the brillo padding using some elbow grease you got to scrub your way scrub that tub clean she said oh dear technology has advanced since you were a little child she said we have something else here she pointed to the other side of the aisle it was a sc johnson wax a can of scrubbing bubbles and i said what is that you trust that she said oh dear it's new technology it's a spray foam where you put it on the the tub it loosens up the dirt and you come back in a few moments and you run the water and sparkling clean no no more having to scrub scrub with your elbows or turn the music up loud and be in there for a long time well to avoid the argument i said let's buy both and we bought both and we went to the house and she said i said i'll let you try your first she said okay she sprayed it i'm not going to stand here and watch it she said you can stand here i'll be back in just a moment you know what happened between me and you those bubbles started to foam up and loosen up dirt i hated to admit it she was right but while i sit there watching those bubbles those bubbles started to preach to me they said to me pastor charlie i'll preach if you let me look i'm doing the work on your behalf said there are a lot of people out there trying to scrub their souls clean try trying to wash their own consciences right with good deeds trying to please the father and win god's approval by what they do but you will never fully and finally be able to win god's approval and what you do you will never be able to scrub your own soul clean you can get as many degrees as you want but education will only polish your filth you can get all of the money in the networks you have but it'll only make you a more expensive and communal center what you and i need is the blood of jesus christ not scrubbing bubbles not a powder bleach we need what is sacrifice on our behalf and so i got to ask you the way that my 88 year old deacon james taylor would ask me what can wash away our sin what can make us whole again nothing but the blood of jesus we have a high priest who has made us clean and so for that reason we can draw near but not only that the writer of hebrews in one long sentence says let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering since he who has promised is faithful have you noticed that what makes for bad grammar in one sense one long run-on wordy sentence is actually good ecclesiology for us ours the writer of hebrews says is a confessional faith let us hold on to the confession of our hope and see christianity and belief in christ is not a coercion it's not being forced to do it but right now we confess we with our own mouths admit to god being right and this text says that we can hold on to this confession without wavering because the one who promised is faithful let me let me highlight the nuance of this passage that grabs me and and move on there are a lot of people giving up on their confession these days no i'm not here to talk about the perseverance of the saints and get into all of that what i'm saying is it's been really odd to see people who used to once attend church so faithfully and regularly start to attend sporadically and inconsistently or maybe some of you have noticed this with some of your streaming numbers you watch when times were tough and rough people watched with great anticipation the numbers were big and then they started to dwindle down and here it is we get the exhortation to hold on to our faith to our confession of hope that even when moments are dark and days are grim that you and i hold on to what we believe and friends this is one of the wonderful places in scripture we see this that is actually our ability to hold on to our faith that demonstrates if our faith has a hold on us and this is the encouragement you and i together are to hold on we're not just to hold on in isolation and we're not simply supposed to hold on on our own but no together i see you holding on to your confession of hope and you see me holding on to my confession of hope and that's how we get the inspiration to hold on together i don't know if it works for you in your local church like it doesn't mind but that's an encouragement to me i saw denise mitchell come to church on sunday morning that may mean nothing to you but the day before she had buried her husband a man she had been married to for more than 40 years and the day after which when anybody should be able to stay home when anybody should be able to relax it was her confession of faith that prompted her to come to church the next morning and when i saw her lift our hands in church that sunday something happened to me i recognized that she had been to the bottom and had come back to testify that there was a rock at the bottom and that boost my faith friends there's something about the community being together and proclaiming its great hope in god that inspires the rest of us who are not as strong when we watch the others who've gone through come back to testify that god is able that's the testimony that's to let us hold on to our confession of hope because we have one who is faithful the one who promised does not ship well friends i need to leave you but but i need to give you this last one the closing trifecta of christ exalting exhortations let us watch out for one another oh yeah i could stop there watching out for one another notice that the text does not say let's trip one another let's tempt one another let's demean or be derogatory toward one another lord let me lean in a bit here let's act like some lives don't matter although they are part of the one another i've been so heartbroken and i encourage you don't turn me off here listen to to this impetus from a chocolate pastor in the north if ever there were a time where christians of varying ethnicities need to stand up for other christians namely black and brown christians in the united states now is the time now is the time where where we do not need to simply proclaim all lives matter but we need to look at those lives who look like they have not necessarily mattered and to watch out for one another this is how hezekiah walker wrote the song i need you you need me we're all a part of god's body it is his will that every need be supplied you are important to me because i need you to survive that's the let us watch out for one another but far too often in american history the church has been let's look after our own kind this text urges upon us we need to look after and look out for one another and how do we look out for one another we provoke one another to love and good deeds this word provoke is a striking word it's the picture of someone riding a horse who takes the spurs from their boots and lodges them into the rib cage of the horse and that that spurring that prodding provokes the horse to move sometimes it's the sharp edge of the christian personality that prods another christian toward love and good works i think even what i just said to you it's the sharp edge if i were there with you in alabama i would tell you how in 1955 a young black baptist preacher at dexter avenue church took to the black conscience of his city and urged the black citizenry there in montgomery not to ride the buses they didn't know that it would be an entire year but almost an entire year they walked they marched to work they walked in caravan they carpooled sometimes having non-black citizens in that city throw urine on them from their car windows but they kept on walking they kept on marching and as they were on a stride toward freedom they didn't meet at the local tavern or the local joint or the local club no they met at the church to get their marching orders and and there in alabama you had a chocolate pastor and a group of black pastors who who gathered together and provoked one another to love and good deeds until even the supreme court had to say that segregation and public transportation was wrong we knew it was wrong according to god's law but now u.s law had to come to grips with god's law and we had to provoke one another and why is it that even in that context that many white pastors did not stand with those black pastors to bring equity to black and brown christians who were marching i'll tell you it's the same reason we can't get many white pastors today to stand with black and brown pastors to say that black people matter and ought to be treated with equal protection under the law we've got to provoke one another to love isn't that strange and good deeds let me go on now this sex urges us not to skip church either let us watch out for one another not neglecting to gather together as some are in the habit of doing there were challenges in the early church deep rifts of suspicion and there people didn't have really much in common except the gospel and then and in this text we we see that it become the habit of some to forsake the assembly to not gather together and and if we're honest if we had more churches in one sense that that were like this where you have people of varying economic uh degrees and and people of varying educational spectrums and and people of varying ethnicities you can see how people would come together and say i i really don't feel like going to church with those people the challenges of this early church is that they were tempted to neglect the gathering but this text says we need to encourage each other to stick with church i don't know when was the last time you called a member of your church and urged them to stick with it but let me urge you now let's do that with one another and beyond even our local fellowships how about we call another pastor and urge that pastor let's stick with the work of the church here's why the day is coming oh that day that great and terrible day that day which will be good for some it'll be bad for others i once heard the old preacher tell the story of two people who left the same gathering at a church with two different experiences they sat through the ceremony they watched the experience some clapped some wept one man got in the car with his wife when they left to say what a beautiful wedding the other man the old preacher used to say got in the car with his wife and said what a terrible funeral the same experience one experienced a wedding the other a funeral listen the day of the lord is going to be a wedding for some but a funeral of judgment for the others and as we see that day approaching and it's coming church as we see that day coming near all the more reason we have to encourage one another let us draw near let us hold fast to our confession and let us provoke one another to love and good works why because we get to go in the sanctuary even remotely there's been nothing to stop us from getting into the presence of god let's go in and enjoy the presence of our great god now god i pray that you would use this message and seal the words into the hearts of my brothers and my sisters who listened in today help us to spur one another on toward loving good deeds in jesus name amen i boomeranged you you can boomerang me god bless you [Music] bye-bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Alabama Baptist Pastors Conference

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Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020