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Love
Teaching Text: Hebrews 3:1–6
Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest. He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house.Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything. “Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house,” bearing witness to what would be spoken by God in the future. But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmlyto our confidence and the hope in which we glory.
Themes
Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:
Hebrews
Formation
Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:
The book of Hebrews is written for exactly these reasons to show people who are suffering the story they are in, and how to rely on resources beyond themselves in the moments of their lives.
It’s so important to remember this book is not just a theological treatise on how Jesus fulfills Torah. It is an endurance manual for people in the furnace of life.
Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest.
– Hebrew 3:1–2
Hebrews is a book that helps define faith for us, it is a book that helps define home for us, and it keeps giving us this beautiful and powerful instruction …
Fix your thoughts on Jesus. Let them return there over and over again. Not merely as some religious duty but as way to return each day, moment by moment to the love of God, to the person of our salvation.
To Christ who is here described as an Apostle and High Priest.
To fix your thoughts on Jesus is to consider this One who has been sent to us.. To show us what God is like, what God cares about, how God loves …
But also this Apostle is our High Priest
One who represents God to us - the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being and also One who represents us to God - the High Priest
To the One sent for us - to show us God
And to One who has been through what we have been through and now represents us to God - as a Priest...
...we learn that faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God. Believing, then, is directing the hearts attention to Jesus. It is lifting the mind to "behold the Lamb of God," and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives. At first this may be difficult, but it becomes easier as we look steadily at His wondrous person, quietly and without strain. Distractions may hinder, but once the heart is committed to Him, after each brief excursion away from Him, the attention will return again and rest upon Him like a wandering bird come back to its window.
– AW Tozer
Moses has to get to know this God - that’s a huge part of his vocation - burning bush and bygone
And then Moses has to let the people know this God - Apostle and Priest
We have been saying that Hebrews was written in particular to urban followers of Jesus who were experiencing tremendous resistance and challenges to their faith.
They needed resources for strength, for endurance in suffering.
And the author is saying fix your thoughts on this Jesus.
The One who is building the house God has been building all along.
Know you are connected to this story
ALONE AND TOGETHER
The instructions here are to fix your thoughts are something we can do on our own at any moment and in any situation with no equipment or privileged information or years of training.
You can fix your thoughts on Jesus at any moment. Turn the 'gaze of your soul to Christ or back to Christ.
We to know that we can do that on our own at any time and in any condition, but the next part we cannot do on our own.
We are the house of God together
As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
– 1 Peter 2:4–5
This is our home. To know we are God’s home. And we are being built together. United as those who fix the gaze of our souls on Jesus.
Lets turn the gaze of our souls to Him
Know you are not alone. We are being built together into the house of God.
We together are a fuller picture of God and God’s love than any of us could be on our own.
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter….
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
