Grace Baptist Church, Nokomis, IL.

Text:

I’m sure many of you have asked yourselves the question, “What is God’s will for my life?” “Should I be doing something more than I’m doing?” “Am I doing the right things, or should I be doing something else?” “Should I continue where I am or start looking for a new job, new opportunities to serve God in new ways?” “Should I eat oatmeal for breakfast or something that actually tastes good?” “How can I know what God’s will for my life is?” Well, I believe following God’s will is actually quite simple, and we’ll see this morning how Jesus modeled following God’s will, and how, too, can follow God’s will if we look to Him.

Read Hebrews 10:1-10

We’ve addressed the concepts of verses 1-4 several times in the last few weeks, so I don’t want to spend too much time on them this morning. But I do want to point out an interesting idea found in verse 2. It states that if the sacrifices of the old covenant had been sufficient, then the worshipers, having been cleansed, would no longer have had any consciousness of sin. Although it doesn’t state them explicitly, think of the implications this has regarding our sacrifice. Since Christ’s sacrifice was and is sufficient, we ought no longer have any consciousness of sin! Sin ought not be on our radar.

If we would truly understand and lean upon the final sacrifice of Christ, we would not desire sin. Sin wouldn’t be something we think about. Sin wouldn’t be something we feel guilt over. Because we know that Christ has paid the price for all our sin, and we should live joyful lives of obedience to God because of His sacrifice. So, if you’ve trusted in Christ, realize that you’ve been cleansed! Christ said, “It is finished!” Unlike the worshipers under the old covenant, our sacrifice was sufficient. So we worship God having been cleansed by the blood of Christ, and all our sins have been washed away.

Yet we still sin in this life. So the ultimate fulfillment of this is when we receive imperishable bodies. Sin will truly not be on our radar! We will have no consciousness of sin. Not that we won’t know what sin is, but that it is not something we have in our lives ever again. We will only do God’s will for the rest of eternity.

One stand-up comedian explained eternity like this. Have you ever heard someone say, “Every now and again.” Like you ask them, “How often do you do such and such?” And they say, “Oh, every now and again.” What? How often is that? How often is that? Every now, and again. Think about it, every now…and again. Every now. All the nows. Every single one, now now now now now now now now now now now now now now. And again? If you do something every now and again, you are doing that thing for all eternity! And again. We will forever do God’s will in Heaven! Every now, and again!

But doing God’s will isn’t something reserved for our lives in Heaven. We ought to be doing God’s will today! Every now. We ought to be loving our neighbor. We ought to be sharing the love of Christ, making disciples of all nations. In short, God’s will is that you live out His Word! Even Jesus came not to do His own will, but to do God’s will. Of course, we might say, “Duh! Jesus is God, so that’s the same thing.” But look at how the text describes Jesus coming to do the will of God (v. 5-7). This was a quotation from Psalm 40. All of this is written in contrast to verse 4: it’s impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. But Christ’s sacrifice did take away sins. God didn’t desire ineffective sacrifices, such as burnt offerings and sin offerings, but God did desire the sacrifice of the One who could completely deal with sin, by the sacrifice of His own body. This was God’s will. Jesus came to do God’s will. It was God’s will that Christ live perfectly. And it was God’s will that Christ die for our sins. And Jesus perfectly lived and died according to God’s will.

Now notice how Jesus thought about doing God’s will, because in this we find how we ought to think about doing God’s will as well (v. 8-9). Christ didn’t consider the offerings of the old covenant to be doing God’s will. Of course, those sacrifices were God’s will for a time, since God commanded that the Israelites do those things, but they were not the culmination of God’s will. In fact, the writer even goes so far as to say that this was because those sacrifices were to be offered according to the law. In contrast to obedience to the law, Christ came to do God’s will (v. 9b). Now, don’t take this too far, because Christ came to fulfill the law as well. And Christ didn’t come to abolish the law. In the law we still find God’s eternal principles that are extremely relevant to our lives today. But ultimately the culmination of doing God’s will was not in obeying God’s laws but offering Himself as the sacrifice for sin. In a similar way, for us the culmination of doing God’s will is not in obeying God’s rules, but in embracing Jesus, who was the sufficient sacrifice for our sin because can’t perfectly follow God’s law.

Even though we can’t live by God’s law perfectly, Jesus did. And we can’t do God’s will perfectly, but Jesus did. And because Jesus did everything perfect according to God’s will, we can be saved (v. 10). Because of Jesus doing the will of God, being obedient to God and being the sacrifice for our sin, we are sanctified through Him. This means that we’ve been made holy. Even in this life, though we still sin, we’ve been set apart to do God’s will. Christ died for us so that we might live for Him!

We’re not sanctified by our works, but by Christ’s death. So when we die, and God asks us why He should allow us into His heaven, we don’t point to our works and say, “Look at all the good I’ve done!” We point to Christ, and say, “He died for me.”