Pastor Oluwaseyi Osanyinbi
[biblegateway passage=”Hebrews 9:12-14″ display=”Hebrews 9:12-14″]
A common mistake made among ministers is to focus on the person of Melchizedek in teachings about the priesthood. The priesthood is about the Person of Christ– this is the emphasis of the New Testament. Whenever we go through the scriptures, we must see Christ in them.
Christ obtained for us eternal redemption and this is enough reason for us to meditate on the life of Christ. The eternal redemption speaks about immortality. The redemption of Christ is the power obtained and has the ability to keep us from falling (and repeating the same error the devil committed, which was to look inwardly and seek to exalt himself).
When Adam sinned, he began to produce dead works. The blood of Jesus was not only meant to obtain for us the remission of sins. The blood also has the capacity to go into our conscience to purge it. When God wants to deal with a problem, He goes to its root. First, God has to deal with our conscience, and then we have to fully understand the requirements of God before we can say we are really walking in line with God.
Dead works refers to things done based on our own knowledge. We reason within ourselves that what we are doing is acceptable, without regarding His standards.
The Word of God is like the blood. When the Word comes the Holy Spirit works through it to convict us of sin. A seasoned Word of God hits us many times and convinces us of the wrong mindsets we have heard in the past. One of the principal works of the High Priest is the purging of the conscience by convincing you through the Holy Ghost.
Grace is made available to us via the Holy Spirit to minister to our conscience.
[biblegateway passage=”Hebrews 10:10-23″ display=”Hebrews 10:10-23″], [biblegateway passage=”Romans 8:21-24″ display=”Romans 8:21-24″]
When we are ‘interfacing’ and relating with Jesus, the work of sanctification is being done. Sanctification means to be consecrated or set apart for a particular purpose. God, through Christ’s one offering, sanctified us in order to bring us into perfection.
The major problem of the world is sin. We must however not prove God to be a liar by denying that we can overcome sin. The enemies of God will continue to reign if men are not perfected. The reason for redemption is to bring us into perfection, and the technology for the alienation of sin is continuous purging.
[biblegateway passage=”Romans 8:21″ display=”Romans 8:21″]
Everything that God created is subject to corruption because of what Adam did. God now seeks to deliver all creation.
Our waiting in hope cannot be passive, it must be active. Worldliness is what many minds are engaging and that is why they cannot see and hope for that which is to come. Many believers are engrossed in worldliness making it difficult to set their hearts on the hope that is before us. This is the time for us to detach ourselves from all worldliness and place our focus on the hope set before us.
Working in line with Christ has to do with loving God, and the proof that we love God is by our obedience to His commandments.
The purpose of God has not changed. It has been revealed to us as God wanting all men to be conformed to the image of the Son. The work of salvation is to eradicate sin.
[biblegateway passage=”Hebrews 12:2-13″ display=”Hebrews 12:2-13″]; [biblegateway passage=”Hebrews 12:18-28″ display=”Hebrews 12:18-28″]
It is possible in life to take your gaze off Jesus, at that point you will feel you don’t need God or have a reason to continue in core fellowship. This can happen subtly and almost unconsciously as we begin to take one wrong step after another, thinking they are inconsequential.
The way the first few verses of Hebrews 12 are arranged, we can see that there is a relationship between looking up to Jesus, resisting sin and our being chastised by God.
God’s only reason for chastising us is because we are his children. An undisciplined person is a destructive person.
When Moses was up on Mount Sinai, there was a demonstration of the Power of God and the children of Israel were afraid. Israel had an invitation to come up to God, but they refused and told Moses to go as their representative. This singular action resulted in a nation (continually) having need of priests (people who would always go before God on their behalf), instead of a ‘nation of priests’ as God intended. We, in like manner, are now called up to Mount Zion not towards fear but towards the Mediator and the blood of sprinkling which speaks better things than the blood of Abel (that is, cries for mercy).