"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 | |||
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He Took a Seat | |||
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She hopped off her stool and came to help me. I was standing
at a rental car counter in one of those long strings of such counters you
find in airports. I noticed that the agents behind every counter had
places to sit--until a customer arrived. Then an agent would stand up,
type on a keyboard, check a driver's license, run a credit card, and
print out a rental agreement to be signed. Only when it was all done and
I had received instructions to head for the car in space H17 in the
garage did she sit back down. Taking her seat was the signal that I was
ready to go find my car. I walked out confident that a tan Ford Focus was
waiting for me. In this week's text from Hebrews 10:11-25, Jesus sitting down is the sign that you and I are, through the forgiveness He accomplished, ready to enter into God's presence. The commentaries tell me that the priests in the Hebrew temple always stood in the presence of God. The writer to the Hebrews takes that as a sign that their work of obtaining forgiveness for sins is ongoing, incomplete. Jesus sitting down at the right hand of God means that His work of providing forgiveness once for all is complete. He can sit because what He came to do is done. We can trust in it with utter confidence. Yet our confidence in Christ's work does not seem to mean that we are to sit down, at least not right now. We can be confident and steadfast in our hope and faith because our Lord is sitting. He has accomplished all we need. Yet that hope and confidence calls us forward, striving to appropriate fully what Jesus has done for us. Verses 24 and 25 talk about spurring one another on to good needs and not neglecting to meet together, an active response to our Lord's glorious repose. So this text places us in that constant spiritual tension between the now and the not yet, the sense that all our salvation is complete and finished and the sense that we still have to keep going forward, moving toward the goal and completion of our faith when we kneel before that throne on which Christ our Lord is sitting. Let's not neglect to meet together this Sunday to praise our Lord and talk about this text some more. | |||
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I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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