Dennis Tuuri

Now these wonderful texts mean so much more when we understand Zion and the scriptures. This was not the temple mount. It was the mount where David’s tabernacle was put, where the ark of the covenant was placed. Even while animal sacrifices were going on at Gibeon before the temple was built by Solomon, David established this tabernacle of David, so-called at Zion. There the ark was apparently directly in the presence of the worshipping community—no veil there. We apparently have Gentiles and Jews coming together, even serving in the context of the musical worship that went on there. We did not have the establishment by blood, but after that, the tabernacle of David was a place of sung worship, instruments, singing—obviously. What the tabernacle of David was—this beautiful picture of new covenant worship in the midst of the old covenant story.

The worship of Zion was then melded into the worship of the temple. The ark, when it was brought from Zion to Mount Moriah, the temple mount, brought also the songs of David and some of that symbolic nature of that worship onto Mount Moriah into the temple. And then later, Hezekiah, for instance, uses the tabernacle of David motifs in the worship that was ongoing at the temple. We’re told in the New Testament that God said he is going to restore the tabernacle of David.

And so this is what Zion is. This is what we’re going to talk a little bit more about today. It’s this beautiful picture of what Jesus would accomplish. And it’s really what we enter into in Lord’s Day worship. Praise God for it.

Today’s sermon is really on just a single verse from the book of Hebrews 4:16, and I’m only going to put it in the context of one other verse—restraining myself here. So I’m going to read Hebrews 4:15 and 16, and we’ll focus on verse 16.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Hebrews 4:15: “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the delightful promises contained in this commandment, this statement urging us to a particular action. We thank you, Lord God, that because of the work of Jesus, our great and sympathetic high priest, and yet without sin, we can come boldly before you, recognizing that we come before your throne, and yet it is a throne of grace. We ask now for help in our time of need, that you would grant us miserable sinners an understanding of your word. May Jesus speak to us through the scriptures today. Transform us by the power of the Holy Spirit, Lord God, that we may be increasingly a people of corporate, individual, and family prayer.

In Jesus’ name we ask, and for the sake of his kingdom ruled over from his throne. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, I’ve restrained myself to one verse. None of those chiastic things. Well, there’s a little bit. We’ll see it, but not much. Simple prayer. I pray to God that I don’t mess up what is a very simple statement in scripture here, and yet so profound and so important to us.

Now, what we’re going to talk about today is this verse that, as we mentioned last week, as we covered the entire section, here particularly in this last part of the third section of this sermon—that is, Hebrews—that in this last section, 4:15-5:10, this is really the only statement of command here: that we’re to come boldly before the throne of grace.

So it’s kind of like it has importance there, because it’s the one thing we’re supposed to do in response to all that stuff we talked about last week. Additionally, it picks up on the very introduction to this whole third section. Remember we said that as we go through Hebrews, what we see is it’s a beautifully composed sermon, where every little section ends with the beginning of the next section, all linked together.

Remember we said that the third section is really introduced at the end of the second section. Second section: Jesus is the son of God, son of man, name greater than the angels. Those are the names, and we see this reflected in the third section where Jesus is faithful and yet sympathetic—son of God, son of man. And remember we said that was introduced at the end of the second section, and very specifically in chapter 2, verses 17 and 18.

Turn there in your scriptures. Look at 2:17 and 18. This was the introduction to this third section that we are concluding. Now we’ll move on to the fourth section in a couple of weeks. 2:17 says, “Wherefore in all things it behooved him to be made like unto his brethren.” Remember, this is talking about Jesus as the son of man, that he’s made, his incarnation is that he might be identified with us. “Be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people.”

So that introduced the third section by talking about Jesus as a priest. He’s merciful and faithful. The third section began with saying he’s faithful, and then it said he’s merciful. Little chiasm. He’s merciful. Faithful. He’s faithful. Merciful. You hook up the merciful and the faithfuls, you got an X—Greek letter chi or kai—you got a little structure there. Well, the point is that here in today’s single verse that we’re looking at, verse 16, we’re to come to God, who is the throne of grace, and we’re to obtain mercy there.

And it’s the same word here: mercy. So it’s repeated. And then look at the very next verse, in chapter 2, verses 17 and 18. “For in that he himself has suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor—King James—help, another translation—help them that are tempted.” Or we’re to go to the throne of grace boldly, that we may find mercy and grace, and find help in time of need—needy, need, timely help. And it’s the same root word here for this word succor, or help.

So what we end up with as a result of application of this verse today really fits, it kind of summarizes the purpose of the entire section: that Jesus is merciful to us, and we can go to him and find help. And so this single verse is important. It’s the single admonition in this last section of the third section. And it’s important too because it kind of sums up what the whole point of this section was all about.

So it’s kind of significant, and that’s one reason why I singled it out for a sermon today by itself instead of taking it with many others. Additionally, Victor Corey asked a couple of weeks ago in the discussion time, the question-and-answer time, whether we could have a sermon on prayer as we go through Hebrews. Well, here it is. Here’s the prayer right in the middle of this section. And then its importance is pointed to us in several ways.

And so I thought it’d be good to do this. Let me say in passing that I highly recommend in our studies on prayer, R.G. Rushdoony’s systematic theology. He concludes, concludes that two-volume systematic theology with a section on prayer, and he concludes the section on prayer with prayer and thankfulness. A wonderful conclusion to a big theological work—a systematic theology—and you will find particularly in that concluding section on prayer very practical, very helpful instruction from the word of God. Very astute, of course, as Rushdoony always is. But I can’t commend that last section too much. We have, in times past, in the monthly prayer meetings at least at ours, gone through that section.

There’s like I don’t remember—10, 12, 14—mini sections of two or three pages. It’s very easy. And basically what he does is go through the Lord’s Prayer. It’s wonderful. And one of the neat things about it is that he begins by saying, “You’ve heard me say this: that when he got married, he didn’t need to find a manual to help him to figure out how to talk to his wife. Now maybe after 20 years guys need manuals. Women need manuals to draw them out paracoretically. But you know, when you fall in love with someone, it’s not tough to talk to them.” And he says, “In the same way, you know, there’s all these books and manuals about prayer, but prayer is just talking to God, talking to Jesus Christ, talking to the Father through Jesus, talking to the Holy Spirit. And you know, we’re told that we’re to pray without ceasing.

That doesn’t mean we’re on our knees all day long. It means that our work is always in the midst of sentence prayers to God, spoken or just thought. You know, our lives are ones of communication with the God that we love.” And I don’t want anything I say today to mess that up. I want you all to feel emboldened to engage in conversational prayer with God throughout your lives. And Rushdoony places that sort of emphasis in that section very wonderfully, I think.

So it’s important to say that as we get started here. So I’ve got on your outline that we’re going to be talking about this particular verse, and then all we’re going to do is talk about what it says, going through it kind of word by word. And that’s the textual comment side, and then there’s some quick applications at the end. And then I want to kind of make a special application as we come to a conclusion that I prayed about whether I should bring up or not, and I’m going to at the end.

So we’ll do that at the conclusion. But first, textual comments.

So you all draw near. “You all draw near” is what that first word means in the text. “Let us therefore come boldly.” Well, “let us come” is really the word that comes first in the flow of the words here in the Greek. So the “therefore” is really the second word. So “let us come.” “You all draw near.” The “us” is plural, and as we look at this, we’re to draw near.

And you wouldn’t know this necessarily. Here’s an example of why I chose Psalm 87 as a responsive reading. We in America tend to be so individualized in our Christianity. And so we read this verse and we immediately make application to private prayer. Well, that’s okay. That’s a wonderful application. And I affirm that today, and I’ve already affirmed it. I’ll affirm it many more times. The context of this sermon. But what is it, knowing what we know now at this point in the sermon to the Hebrews?

He compares positively Jesus to Moses as a priest. Remember, and Jesus positively to Aaron as a priest. Now he’s a better, greater—he’s the greater Moses. He’s the greater Aaron. There’s going to be distinctions, but remember that the contrasting elements of those two sections begin with comparison. There’s continuity, and the sermon states this continuity over and over. In fact, we saw that in this very next section. It talks about how there remains a Sabbathkeeping for the people of God. He doesn’t stress discontinuous break with the worship patterns of the Old Testament.

And if we remember that, and if we know a little bit about what’s coming, you see, then we’re going to look at this verse a little differently. We’re going to say, “Well, there is kind of a religious, temple, Zion sort of aspect to what this text is saying.”

This text is using terminology—”the throne of grace”—that would immediately to these people bring connotations, not of you know, our individual prayer life in our closet to God. That’s the kind of connotations it brings to us properly. But in this period, in what he’s talking about to them, the connotation is going to be the mercy seat. And he’s going to make this clearer later on in the same sermon, in Hebrews chapter 10. He’s going to talk about this as well.

Now listen, he says in Hebrews 10, beginning in verse 19—it sounds very similar to what our verse says today. You got to keep—am I in the right chapter? Yeah, this is a different chapter. But listen. “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter what? The holiest, the holy of holies, by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he consecrated for us through his veil, that is his flesh, and having a high priest over the house of God.”

He’s just talked about that in this immediate application of the third section, verse 22. “Let us draw near. Same word, you see. “Let us therefore come. Let us, all y’all come, corporately. Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Paul’s body was washed in pure water, and he’s brought near. He becomes a member of Zion, and he’s brought nearer to God.

This phrase that’s repeated in Hebrews 10 and then also in our verse here—”Let us y’all draw near, come”—this particular Greek word is the Septuagint version. Now the New Testament is written in Greek, right? So this is a Greek word, and the Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Old Testament. And you know, it was the version—I mean, the Eastern Orthodox Church, they think that the Septuagint is the inspired translation of the Old Testament, and we don’t got to know Hebrew anymore. That’s odd, and that’s wrong. It’s very wrong. But it’s only a little more wrong than our ignorance of the Septuagint, because Jesus and his men, okay, the church of the first century—that’s what they used. When you find most of the quotations of scripture in the New Testament, it’s Septuagint, you see, and it gets us confused.

Well, so we don’t want to do what the Eastern Orthodox do and reject the word of God prior to translation, but we also don’t want to ignore the Bible that Jesus and his men used. And so it’s important to understand that whether or not the writer of this sermon agrees with it, he’s going to understand those words and their connotations. And particularly when he’s writing to a group of people considering going back to the old temple ways, you see. And he uses a word here self-consciously that is used in the Septuagint to translate statements and verses in Leviticus about drawing near and coming into the holy of holies by the high priest, drawing near by the people of God to the temple, the tabernacle—tabernacle first, Leviticus, what would later be the temple, okay?

So he doesn’t use a word that just comes along. It’s a corporate word, and it’s a word that has particular emphasis in drawing near to the formal worship of God in the old covenant. And he’s going to make the case, as we said, that you know, that we are to have a continued Sabbathkeeping. There remains a Sabbath rest. The Christian Sabbath is the Lord’s Day.

So I think that the point here is that if you understand all of this, that the verse begins by using worship, corporate worship imagery. “God loves the gates of Zion more than all the tents of Jacob.” Loves the tents of Jacob. Loves our individual homes. But when we convocate together in worship, you see, the corporate entity of Zion is placed forward by God. He loves it. This is the particular dwelling place. He dwells in our homes too. I’m making all that application. But in its first instance here, I believe the verse is talking about entrance into, again, Lord’s Day worship and the corporate prayers of the church.

I in no way want to demean or lessen personal prayer and family prayers. They’re important application of this. But what I do want to do is re-stress again the corporate prayers of the church.

You probably know this if you’ve heard me preach much: but why are we here? To hear a sermon? No. Take the Lord’s Supper? Well, not really. I mean, I’m using emphasis here, and I don’t want—it’s all we’re here for, the whole thing. But it’s interesting that in the New Testament, the book of Acts, the whole worship service can be referred to as “the prayers of the people.” The whole service is a prayer. The whole service is a coming boldly before the throne of grace for help in time of need. That’s what’s being referred to here.

First Timothy, when Paul wants to tell Timothy what the most important thing about doing church is, he says, “Well, first of all, of primary importance is prayer—for leaders, prayer for all kinds of people—but prayer.” Solomon dedicates the temple. What’s its purpose? It’s to be a house of prayer. What does Jesus say the temple is to be? A house of prayer for the nations, you see.

From one perspective—okay, from one perspective—the sermon is preparatory to the great prayer, the pastoral prayer of the church. The Levites had two jobs: to teach the word and to lead in prayer. That was it. You look at their job description in the old covenant. That was it. Bible and prayer. God talking to the people, the people talking to God. And that’s what worship is. The Bible is preached. You respond in prayers, corporate prayers. Your actions are prayer-like. And so, you know, prayer is forward-facing in the worship service of God.

And so I think that we want to see that the beginning emphasis in this text is this corporate nature. Now, “you all come forward, you all draw near”—you know, Leviticus. That’s the whole purpose of the offerings. In fact, the very word for the offerings in the first seven chapters—you know this if you’ve been here much—but when it says, you know, “you bring your offerings,” “offering” means literally “to draw near.”

So when you draw near with your drawing near—may it be a bull or a sheep or whatever it is—but the whole purpose in Leviticus is to demonstrate the proper way, carefully, to draw near to God. The whole emphasis is on carefulness, you see, because if you draw near too quickly, if you draw too near into the holy place, the Levites are going to put a javelin through you, see? So you got to be careful. If you get too holy—we won’t go through the details of this—but there are sections in Leviticus where you can get too holy, too near, when you’re not supposed to, and you got to go get unholy somehow. Sounds weird to us, but see, the idea is that the system is continuous with what we’re doing. We’re drawing near. But there’s a discontinuity because now the writer says we’re to draw near with boldness. And then later in Hebrews 10, we’re to draw near with boldness to the holiest place, you see.

We miss the wonderful blessing of all of that if we don’t connect this up with the ritual uses of it in the tabernacle and temple. And we miss its immediate application to the context of the church. You’re going to you’re going to drink Jesus and eat Jesus here, right? Well, we’re to draw near really close, intermingling, paracoretically with Christ. But we’re to do it, you see—we’re to draw near with boldness.

So “you all draw near.” And then there’s this word “therefore.” And you know, you’ve heard this a million times, but whenever you see a “therefore” in the Bible, you always want to ask, “What is it there for?” It points back to something. And what it points back to is verse 15 and well, the whole thing up to now: Jesus is son of God, but also son of man. Jesus is faithful. And wow, that’s scary, because he’s faithful to execute judgments and everything else God tells him to do. But he’s merciful. He is the son of God, but he’s become son of man. So he can feel our weaknesses. He can be an empathetic, sympathetic, helping priest, you see?

The danger is that we get so caught up that he’s the son of God and that he’s faithful that we’re going to be fearful of coming, approaching him. But God says, “No, no. On the basis of what I just told you—that Jesus is the sympathetic high priest, yet without sin—he’s like us incarnated. On the basis of that, on the basis of who Jesus is,” you see, “that’s what the therefore is there for. To point us back that the only reason we can do this, we can screw up the courage to draw near, let alone draw near boldly, is because of this perfect work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He has provided the way. He has opened it. He’s ripped the veil in two. He’s applied his precious blood on the throne. He’s made propitiation for our sins. He knows our weaknesses. He’s going to have mercy and grace because he knows who we are. He’s been there. You know, every time I hear about something going on in, in overseas—you know, I think people that have been there. If I hear something going on in Poland, see, I’ve been there, and it means a little more to me. There’s a connection. And so Jesus has been there. He identifies with us, you see.

And on the basis of all of that, then that’s how we can draw near to God. He has shed his blood. He has cleansed us from all our sins. He is able to save to the uttermost. The Bible says, “Seeing he ever lives to make intercession for us. He has passed into the heavens as the text has just previously told us.”

So the “therefore” is a reminder of the work of Jesus Christ and the reason why we can move on to the next phrase.

“You all are to draw near, therefore, with confident speech, boldly, to the throne of grace. Let us therefore come, and how are we to draw near? With boldness.”

Now I’ve got, you know, “with confident speech,” because that’s the original idea here. In the Greek language, this word that’s translated “boldness” was the word that was used for the public assemblies of the citizens. And they had freedom of speech—we would call it. They had confident ability to speak forth their mind in terms of public matters relating to the palace or city. That was the idea of this phrase, this word.

It certainly has the implication of boldness. Good translation. We’re to have confidence, you see—confidence to do what? To speak, to have our lips moving when we pray. We’re to come with freedom of speech. We’re to come, you know, with a boldness and confidence before God.

Now, again, you know, the Greek—the Jewish writers that these people would have been reading, the way we read commentaries on the Bible—they talked about Abraham using the same word. Abraham was said in Genesis 15:2 and 3, he was described as coming before God with courage and well-timed frankness. That was a way to translate the way the Jewish commentators spoke of Abraham. He was a friend of God, right? So he had that boldness and a well-timed frankness of speech. This is to characterize the way we come before God. An unreservedness of utterance and not being fearful to speak your mind, to open your mouth.

Now, the implication is when we pray, our lips ought to be moving. Now, it’s okay to pray silently. Again, I’m not putting that down. But in the first application here, we’re to come forward and either our representative or we are to be moving our lips. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re moving our lips, you see.

It’s too easy with us coming from Greek Western civilization and culture to turn prayer into kind of an abstract thing—just me and Jesus, abstract. I just think about them, you know, and I don’t ever move my lips. It becomes kind of that word that’s way overused, but gnostic. It does kind of become that. Prayer can become that for us. And when we move our lips and change our body posture—you know, this can have an effect. And this word, this boldness, implies the movement of our lips. It implies freedom of speech. We’re to come with boldness, speaking boldly, confidently, cheerful courage, without any connection necessarily to anything that’s going to detract us from that speech. Boldness, publicly speaking if necessary, boldly praying in the context of others, moving our lips, speaking forth with boldness in our prayer.

So our prayer, our corporate prayer and then our individual prayers, are based upon the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and they’re to be characterized by a sense of boldness in how we approach God. Confident speech.

“Let us therefore come boldly. Where do we come to? Well, now we have the throne of grace. What a beautiful phrase.”

You know, as you meditate on that phrase, it really keeps us from a couple of huge problems. There’s two ditches for us, right, when we come to pray. One is we forget that we’re approaching a throne. When we come before God, we’re coming before the king of the universe, see? And we need to remember that we’re coming to a throne. You know, encourage a different kind of dress in worship, coming into the formal presence of God. The way you’d come into the emperor of the world—now we’re talking about the emperor, the ruler of the universe. He sits on a throne.

This also helps us to remember that when the Lord’s Prayer tells us that we’re to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” that all of our prayers are connected to that throne. We’re asking for the throne to be manifest in the world. So it’s quite important that as we come boldly to God in prayer or in worship, we do so recognizing there’s a throne, and we do not want to be too familiar with the one on the throne in the sense of being sloppy about it.

You know, we don’t want to be sloppy about it because he sits on a throne. So we don’t want to, you know, get too sloppy, agape kind of ease of approach to God, that our world tends to sort of suffer with—Jesus being nicer than, or us Jesus being nicer than anybody he really is in the scriptures: not the exalted Lord and King of the universe, or a sovereign, but somehow just our brother. You know, he is that. I’m talking about emphasis here.

In the same way, in the medieval church, the problem was on the other side. There was so much stress placed on the throne aspect that people got afraid of Jesus, deathly afraid of him, and the church became corrupt. And the church used those fears of the people, you know, to have them think about a mediator other than Jesus. And the church wanted to have people look at them as the kind ones to approach Jesus. And this, according to R.G. Rushdoony again, is a source of Mariolatry, the worship of Mary.

When we turn Jesus into such a sovereign that he does not care or love us or have compassion upon us, then we’re opening the way for some other kindly person to intercede between us and the sovereign. And that became Mary, you see.

So “throne of grace”—one wonderful way to keep us centered as we come to prayer. We come with boldness. We come to a throne for kingdom purposes, right? And it’s a throne of grace, of grace and kindness to us. So it’s so important to leave those two things together.

Another thing I should mention: with the confidence, I mentioned the medieval church, and I’ve mentioned this before too. And we began, what I hope is a discussion—an ongoing discussion amongst the elders—several months ago about posture and prayer. And again, Rushdoony says that when people knew they could approach the throne of grace boldly, the approach, the confidence and boldness of the approach, is you’re going to get answers. When you ask for kingdom purposes, you’re going to get answers.

And the reason I chose the particular coloring picture for the little children today is there’s an aspect of throne worship going on. He’s on his knees, but his hands are open and up. “I’m going to get something.” Your kids come to you at birthday. “What do I get?” You know, Christmas, their hands are open. They’re looking up expectantly at you. “What are you going to give me?”

Well, that’s kind of the idea here. The early church, as it Christianized the barbarians and saw the success of God as pioneers, their prayer life was that way. They would typically pray with their eyes open, looking up to God, with their hands open, expecting that God is going to give them something. And that’s why I picked that picture. It has this combination of carefulness—they’re on their knees—but eyes open, looking up expectantly, receiving a blessing.

And then Rushdoony says that as they got more and more distanced from the throne of grace—Jesus on that throne—then the prayers became, the posture of prayer became, the feudal serf’s position. You know, when the Lord would come, he would get on his knees, he would fold his hands, and put his, close his eyes, and put his head down, because he really expected no blessing from the Lord. His whole intent was to show fealty and submission, not expecting to get a darn thing from the Lord, you see.

Well, I you know, I still think it’s good for little children particularly to fold their hands—they don’t play with things while they’re praying—and to close their eyes, even kind of focus. But you know, we sort of are leading children to this view of prayer that it is sort of not related to the world. And when we pray with our hands open, expecting a gift, and our eyes open, and begin to teach our children that, it imitates God. It brings that throne of grace into our world, and we expect God to manifest his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. We have this boldness to ask things for the purposes of that kingdom, and we can certainly expect that God will certainly answer every one of those prayers.

Turns out and so we come to the throne of grace, expecting the blessings and benediction of God on our request.

Now, of course, the implication is that our requests are proper. You know, we sometimes—it’s well, what does the text say we’re going to receive from the throne of grace? We’re going to receive mercy and grace, finding. So on the C portions here of the outline, I’ve got “to receive mercy and grace finding” because that’s the way the Greek words flow there. It’s you know, the verb and the noun, the noun and the verb. So when we come to the throne of grace, we receive mercy, we find grace, and I did it wrong here—I should have had it that way. Two phrases: “receive mercy,” “grace find.” And when you do that and then you hook up the grace and the mercy and the receive and find there, you get that little X. That’s the root of chiastic structures. Chi, the Greek letter X.

“Never be fooled by a kiss or kissed by a fool.” And if you put that in two phrases and hook up the common words, you get a chiasm. “Never ask what you can do, what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.” You see, if you start looking at this, people always use this stuff in speeches because it sounds so cool, and it’s really quite nice. But that’s what’s here.

And so the emphasis here is on this middle section of the things that we’re going to receive and find—that it’s two things. I mean, they’re combined together. The way it’s written in the Greek, they’re really combined into a unit. They do have connotations, slightly different connotations: mercy and grace.

Mercy and grace—mercy is a different word than grace. Grace and the throne of grace are the same basic word—keratos, charis—charismatic gifts, charity. I think my daughter’s name comes from the Latin keratos. Grace has those kind of connotations to it. The word for mercy is eleos or elios. And I couldn’t remember how it was written, but I finally, at the end of last night, finally found this word I’d read before, and I read the benevolence structures of Geneva that we’ve at times talked about being a model for the church today to reempower the diaconate in terms of the benevolent reforms that Calvin instituted in Geneva. And these things, in older language books, are referred to as elimos, eleemosynary institutions—elemosynary—because they built an English word by directly transliterating this elios here—this mercy. And when we say “benevolence activities,” we’re just doing good deeds for people. But when we use the word elios, or el-eleemosynary institutions, we’re stressing that we’re giving things to people that have no demand or right to them. And in fact, we’re stressing the miserable state of the person we’re giving the elios, or mercy, to.

When we come to the throne of God, it’s a sense of our own miserableness, our own sinful state, and more than that, our pitiable state before God. God has pity upon us, you see? He has mercy to us. And then he also has grace—unmerited favor from God. But that stresses the idea that we’re unmeriting the favor. But the mercy aspect stresses our miserable state—that we’re pitiable creatures that really need, you know, all kinds of help.

And so when we come before this throne of grace boldly, we will find there not just grace but mercy—a response by God to our pitiableness, you see. So we’re not to hold back. We’ve screwed up our lives. We’ve messed things up with our sin and stupidity. And boy, do I even deserve the right to pray to God about this because I haven’t been obeying his word?

And at church, they’re always talking about the blessings and cursings of the law, and I know I’m just suffering my own results of what I did wrong. And so we tend not to come boldly. But that’s the very time you’re supposed to come boldly—in that time of need, as the text will go on to say. When you’ve made yourself into an even more miserable state, or your family into a more miserable state than it was before, you’re not to hold back then, because that throne of grace is also a throne of mercy. God loves you. He pities you. Your child breaks something or does something wrong, or they know that they’ve messed things up. And are you going to reject them because of that? No, you’re going to pity them because you know their weakness. At least you should.

God is that way toward us. He loves it when we approach his throne. He pities us in a positive sense. He brings us help and mercy and grace. And so, and so we’re urged to come with that understanding that what we’re going to find there is not just the throne of grace but also mercy from God.

Now, the implications of that is we’re to be merciful to others. In my Sunday school class this morning, we were reviewing the first of the first ten of the thirty sayings of the central section of Proverbs, which repeat the first four commandments. It spends seven verses kind of talking about the need for diligence and skill. You know, before you can get a house, you need vocation. And to get vocation, you got to move in terms of the fourth commandment. Six days shut you do it well. That’s the key to establishing households.

And at the very center of that section, it says, “Don’t work hard so you can gather riches. They’ll fly away.” When you get old, as some of us are, we know that we’ve lived long enough to see money fly away—from us or other people—for no reason that we can see. So it corrects our motivation of our labor and work. We don’t want to gather money to gather money.

And what it tells us, at four and a half of those, is it talks about a concern for the poor. Our motivation for labor, for the young men, for these kids that graduated yesterday, as they enter vocation more and more—their motivation for accumulating is not to build their nest egg, which they love and feed and care for, as the ad says these days. A very important part of the motivation of the accumulation of wealth is to show mercy.

God moves in terms of mercy and grace through his church, more often than not, you see. And the answers to the prayers are, you more and more. And I urge the young kids in my Sunday school class—hope you don’t get mad, folks, parents—you know, I urge them that each one of them, I’d love it if each one of them filled out a commitment card to mercifully send money to some missionary overseas, beyond their tithes, they make from their jobs. If it’s just a penny a month, you see, I don’t care about the amount. But I do care that we are a congregation that wishes to show mercy, whether it’s benevolent needs here through Love Inc. or missionary needs of Love Inc. overseas. Probably needs help, you know, to establish that church in a context that culture is impoverished because of communism. So I urge them as a demonstration of commitment to what we will find—grace, but we’re also to be those that give grace and mercy to those in pitiable states. And this verse says that at that throne of grace, we will receive these wonderful blessings of God.

And then finally, it says that we will find timely help. Good things will come to us, as we said, to chapter 2, verses 17 and 18, that Jesus will be good to us, you see. We’ll find good things in a timely fashion.

Now, this is important, you know, for framing our prayer lives. All this stuff comes together into a picture of prayer for us. We’re to come before the king, and we’re to come seeking kingdom purposes. And when we do that, we’ll find the pity of God toward us and helping us, his grace, and we’ll find timely help from him—help right on the right time. God answers in a timely fashion. But we have to be asking in terms of those principles.

Right at the end of Proverbs, Agur is this wise, humbled old guy, probably Jacob—can’t say for sure, but probably. And you know what he prays for is a model for us. Hate to mention this premise here today—maybe not. Well, so Jacob or Agur, he prays for two things: “Don’t make me—don’t give me a lot of money because I’ll be tempted to forget you. And don’t make me poor because I’ll be tempted to rob you.”

You see, when the—in the Lord’s Prayer, when we pray that God would keep us from evil and temptation, it’s a personal word in that Lord’s Prayer. And we can really make at least application, if not the first interpretation, of the Lord’s Prayer to our own evil. The evil that is us, right? Pogo, “We met the enemy and it’s us.” We were joking last night that we’re the Sith. We have absolutes, but we could also be the Sith in a negative sense. So God, keep us from our evil. Keep us from the evil one that dwells in me.

And we, our prayers, are for the purposes of the kingdom and to help us avoid temptation. So often our prayers are for the purposes of getting stuff that actually will be bad for us. God will grant those requests, you see. Well, wise old Agur, the humble man, he knows this. Now probably he doesn’t have enough money. He’s not worried about—he’s not asking for riches. Dan isn’t every month. Those of you in his prayer group know we’re talking about it. It’s a joke. It’s a public joke. He doesn’t mind if I say it, you know. He’s not saying, “Make me rich.” He’s asking for adequate money. And that’s what Agur prays for as well: “Don’t make me poor, that I might be tempted to steal.”

But you see the point of that is that our prayers, you know, understand the temptations we have and ask for God to keep us from that sin. That’s the kind of grace, timely help, that God will give to us.

So you know, what we have here in these verses is a call to kingdom prayer that is boldly going before the throne of grace—that Jesus, knowing that Jesus, because of everything we’ve learned, that he’s not just son of man, he’s a son of God. He’s son of man. That he’s not just faithful but he’s also compassionate and merciful. He’s incarnated. He knows us. Because of these things, we can come boldly before God with kingdom prayers. And this is what we ought to be doing. We are to be a people of prayer. That’s what this text is all about.

Now, help in time of need. What was their time of need? Well, the whole point of this is that they might hold, uh, confidently, again, boldly, the same word, their profession of faith, their confession, to the end. Their point of need, their help was living in a pluralistic culture where they were a tiny subset of that culture. Their help was they didn’t want to be unfaithful to Christ. That was their time of need. That was the help they needed.

And so often that’s our help that we need. We talked about the importance of simple praise of Jesus in the context of our lives, in the public, in the workplace, in governmental structures. Well, that’s what these guys needed. And what the sermon tells them is that to get that kind of confident profession of faith fulfilled out in their vocations, their relationships with people, all that stuff, he tells them what they should do is build on this truth of the doctrine of Christ and come repeatedly to worship services where the pastoral prayers will ascend on behalf of the people before that throne, the mercy seat of God, that we can now come boldly to because of the work of Jesus Christ. And God will answer those prayers and give them timely help so that they can have that full confession of Jesus Christ in the world.

This is what we need as well—timely help. And this is what the text tells us.

Pastoral comments. Once more, we are exhorted to attend the worship services, the prayers of the church—this corporate aspect.

Second, by implication, we are also to be characterized as men and women of daily prayer. You know, again, what happens on Sunday is the model. It’s not the end of it. It’s the beginning of the whole thing. This sets up the pattern. And when we come boldly before the throne of God for kingdom purposes in a controlled and structured way in Lord’s Day service, guided by men who have studied prayer and can lift up our prayers before God, we then get the model that we’re to apply individually in our lives when we’re alone. We’re supposed to be praying this way. In those sentence prayers to God, we are boldly having this relationship, this love relationship, with Jesus that allows us to day by day, moment by moment, pray without ceasing, raising up prayers to God, expectantly receiving answers for kingdom purposes, that we might find the timely help we need at that moment in our particular lives.

So we’re to be men and women of regular, daily, ongoing prayer.

And also by implication, we’re to have families of prayer. The corporate nature of the church is given here, and it is certainly. We can apply it individually to approach the throne of God boldly, but certainly as well, families should be led together and should be communities of prayer as well.

We are to pray confidently and boldly, forgetting neither throne nor grace. Forgetting neither that we’re coming before the sovereign that we ask for kingdom purposes with a degree of respect and all of that, but on the other hand, we’re to remember that it is a throne of grace, and not hold back but be bold and confident.

The end result of people that pray in this way—the future of such a praying people—is bright beyond all imagining. It’s beyond our imagining because we are not yet those kind of people of prayer. I don’t think. I think that in our culture, prayer is probably waning in the culture of the corporate church. This kind of bold, confident—”Lord God, grant us our kingdom desires and wishes”—I think that we will find tremendous blessings as we apply ourselves to this text.

As we say, all of this great doctrinal explanation of who Jesus is comes to a singular purpose. In a way, as this section moved towards a conclusion, and that singular purpose is knowing all of this about the word of God: to encourage us to be people of prayer. So now, what can we pray for?

And I want to mention a couple of very specific things, and I’m going to ask you to be praying for this week and over the next few weeks as well.

What are our times of need?

I thought about global warming. I did, listening to an article about global warming. What if they’re right? What if the data actually reveals—not because of what we’re doing, we can’t affect a whole lot—that the climate is changing? That’s something to pray about, right? What are you talking about?

Well, you know, one of the beautiful things about using set prayers in the historic church is to remind us that the things we take for granted shouldn’t be taken for granted. The regular set prayers of the Book of Common Prayer, you know, has the pastor, every service of prayer, you know, beseeching God for the weather, for the weather, because he’s in control of it and he uses it for his purposes. Ultimately, our response to global warming should be one of prayer. If it’s actually going on in the next 20 years, if you kids find out it is, then it’s to usher up prayers to God, who controls the climate, understanding what he’s accomplishing with that warming and then what he will do in answering our prayers to change it back, to make a more livable situation.

You know, God used the climate—a global, no, a localized cooling—to drive the Huns down into the barbarian tribes and to drive them down into contact with his church, so that they would bring a Germanic influence of law and ruler, and help the church develop that way instead of the Roman way, which was the ruler, the emperor, was the law maker. He changed the weather, and the end result of a change in weather was a pushing forward of a group of barbarian nations into contact with the church, that they might become Christianized, but also that they might paracoretically indwell the church and bring a more biblical concept of the relationship of law to ruler. God uses weather, and we should be praying for the weather.

If global warming happens, that’s it. We’re in a global war right now with Islam. Now, it’s not a hot war. It’s getting a little hotter, but it is a war. Islam is dedicated to destruction of the Christian faith. They don’t believe in what we believe. They don’t believe in Jesus Christ in terms of son of God and son of man. They’re our opponents. And when we pray that “thy kingdom might be established on earth, but as it is in heaven,” we pray for the destruction of the Islamic kingdom.

You know that, right? I mean, this is a global war, a theological or spiritual warfare. And it may well become, and partly has become, for David Spears and other like soldiers, a hot war. And I believe it’ll get hotter and hotter and hotter. What shouldn’t frighten us? Because we can come boldly before the throne of grace for timely help—for David in Iraq and for our troops over there and for the victory of Christian forces against the forces of Islam.

This is what it is, whether it is a fighting war or a praying war and a preaching war, and it’s going to be both, probably. But the point is we have a time of need approaching in our country. We have an increasing time of need approaching, and prayer is the way that we are first and foremost to answer this kind of need.

We have some Christians going down to Salem on Tuesday, that we might have boldness coming before God in prayer that we may end up with boldness of speech before civil rulers, beseeching them to not enact Senate Bill 1000, instead to move favorably on our reciprocal benefit bill. I’ll be going down. The Cones will be taking me. A lot of Christian pastors will be down there. Pray for them. It’s a time of need. The state is moving toward, you know, open acceptance and giving special rights to people with sexual deviancies that the Bible absolutely condemns. It’s a time of need for our culture and for our children and for the next generation. Be praying for us that we may take the boldness before the throne of God into that public speech, that the word is based on in terms of the civil magistrate.

And then finally, one other request for special prayer, and this is the one I wasn’t sure if I was going to mention or not, but I am going to. We have an elder meeting at Salem at TRC, and I didn’t know that there’d be Salem people here today when I first prepared this sermon and decided to make this point. And I prayed about it last night, but I’m going to say this anyway.

Trinity Reformation Church needs your prayers in a very regular fashion and in a very concentrated sense. And your elders here at RCC need your prayers about this matter. This is maybe one of the toughest things: getting wisdom on how to deal with what’s going on at TRC and the leaving of families there, and the conflicts that—not conflicts, but the problems that are happening there. Really, please pray that God would give wisdom to myself and Elder Wilson, who comprised, with Corey, the session of TRC. And please pray for Doug H. as well, Elder H. We’ve kind of brought into this, and John as well, Elder S., as we think about these things.

This is a very difficult decision that we’ve got to be making, and we need great wisdom from God about how to help. And there are people there—some who have left, some that are still there. Just about everybody there is hurting in various ways. It’s very—and it’s hard to understand why or how it happened and all that stuff. And so here’s this verse before us that I established several weeks ago to pray on: coming boldly to the throne of grace that we’ll find timely help.

Please pray for us that the rulers, the elders of your church, and also of TRC, find timely help. You know, sometimes I think that God makes these things so difficult—the way the kind of the controversy that’s going on across the country in some reform circles about doctrines—he makes it so difficult to drive us to prayer for that very purpose. And so, you know, maybe it’s an indication we haven’t prayed enough about the growth of the body at TRC in Salem.

Please pray for us. Pray for those people. Be an encouragement to them. Pray that God’s grace and mercy would flow from his throne of grace to them in the midst of all of the struggles the church is going through. And then for wisdom for the elders as well.

We’re going to sing a song here as we offer ourselves to God. The first verse: “Before Jehovah’s awful throne, you nations bow with sacred joy. Know that the Lord is God alone. He can create, and he can destroy. He’s sovereign. He sits on the throne, an awful throne, a throne full of awe and wonder and power.”

And the second verse says, “His sovereign power without our aid, his grace, his pitiable mercy toward us made us of dust and formed us men. And when like wandering sheep we strayed, he brought us to his fold again.” You see, enter to the throne of grace. May God make us a people who boldly approach that throne of grace today during the pastoral prayer of this church in its first application of this text. But then in our families and in our personal lives, may the Lord God make us a people of prayer.

All these sermons in Hebrews are worthless without it. It is the application: to take these things and know that we can go to God because of the work of Jesus Christ, that throne of grace is a place where we receive timely help, God’s mercy and grace to us.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you, Lord God, for hearing our prayers. We thank you for not just hearing them, but for exhorting and commanding us to come to the very place we need to come for grace and mercy. Forgive us, Lord God, for our sense of independence in this country and our imbibing of that same spirit in our own homes and in our individual lives—that somehow, thinking that if we just work hard enough and know enough, we can get through all of this in a way that would be pleasing to you. It is disgusting to you when we fail to come to you, recognizing our state, failing to see in you that all help comes from that throne of grace.

Thank you, Lord God, for your scriptures. Thank you that you hear, command us, and assure us that you’re going to hear our prayers and answer them.

In Jesus’ name we ask these things. Amen.