This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome back to our look at Hebrews chapter 9. This is day two of our look.
We're going to look at verses 9 to 14 today.

Yesterday we looked at the tabernacle and how Jesus is the fulfillment of all
the worship, all the sacrifices that were done in that tabernacle. He was what
it all looked toward, looked forward to. We pick up at that in verse 9 and then
in verse 9 we also begin to hear about what that means for us, for our lives,
for even our inner conscience, how we live, how we look at life.

Listen to what verses 9 and 10 have to say. This is an illustration, the
tabernacle is an illustration for the present time indicating that the gifts and
sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper.
They are only a matter of food and drink and various ceremonial washings,
external regulations, applying until the time of the New Order.

Well now is the time of the New Order, now is the time that Jesus has come.
Before that we're told that because the high priest had to go in every year and
make a sacrifice one more time, one more time every year, the illustration is
the conscience wasn't cleared. If it was cleared it would be done, it would be
over, but it was not done, it was not over.

Now in these verses we're going to look at today there's a lot about our
conscience, your conscience. So we're going to talk about some principles for
dealing with your conscience that promise to change the way that you live your
life. And before we look at these two major principles, let me just begin with
saying what's a conscience?

Everyone of us has a conscience, but what is it? And you may not be able to
analyze it or figure it out. Many times you can't control it, but every one of
us has a conscience.

Someone's defined a conscience as that still small voice that makes you feel
smaller still. Or one little boy said it this way, it's that which feels bad
when everything else feels good. It's the thing that tells you I'm going the
wrong direction here, but it's also the thing that tells you that's a good thing
to do.

Conscience is the internal voice that sits in judgment over your will and
actions. Now there's a common idea out there and it says your conscience is the
way that you know right from wrong, but that's not the truth. The conscience is
not the way you know right from wrong.

It is the training and righteousness the scripture teaches us that helps us to
understand what is right and what is wrong. It is a trained conscience by God's
word that's empowered by God's spirit that can know right from wrong. But our
conscience tells us maybe what's right and wrong, but it could be right, it
could be wrong because it could have been trained by the wrong person.

It could have been trained in the wrong way. Your conscience can be mistaken. It
can be very mistaken.

It's not a safe guide by itself. It accuses you when you violate whatever moral
standards you have, but that moral standard might be a wrong standard. It says
you're doing a great job when you do whatever is good according to your moral
standard, but who knows you might have grown up in a gang which says a good
thing to do is to kill somebody from a rival gang.

So you feel good about yourself, but the truth is your conscience has not been
trained to know real right from real wrong. Paul understood this. He says in 1
Corinthians 4, 4, "My conscience is clear, but that doesn't make me innocent.

It's the Lord who judges me. " If you look through the Bible, it speaks of a
guilty conscience, a stricken conscience, a clear conscience, a weak conscience,
having no conscience, having a good conscience, and tells us very clearly you
can't depend on your conscience, but you must clear your conscience. You must
clear your conscience.

And once you clear your conscience as a believer, then you begin to train that
conscience so that all of a sudden you can live with a new conscience before
God, a new sense of what's right and what's wrong. So if you have to start by
clearing your conscience, because no matter how you've been trained, how you've
been brought up, all of us have sinned, all of us have things that we've done
that we know are wrong. These verses focus on how do you clear your conscience.

You might have noticed we just read the sacrifices that were given year after
year. They were not able to clear the conscience of the worshipper. So here's
principle number one, two principles.

First principle is external regulations and practices cannot clear the internal
conscience. Something you do on the outside, going to church, going to worship,
using prayer beads, something you do on the outside, some kind of ritual, some
kind of practice, that can't clear your conscience. Having a daily quiet time
can't clear your conscience.

An external regulation or practice can't clear your conscience. It's the person
who says, "You know, I do all I can to serve the Lord, but I still feel guilty,
and then I feel guilty about feeling guilty. " Well, the problem is doing all
you can and expecting that's going to clear your conscience.

This is talking about the poverty of activity. If I try to get right before God
with just my activity, I'm never going to get there. I'm not going to get there.

Activity does not equal acceptance. Me being active in doing worshipful things
does not equal me sensing the acceptance that I have before God. So external
cannot clear the conscience.

What does clear the conscience? Well, let's read in verse 11. Verse 11 down
through verse 14, "When Christ came as high priest of the good things that are
already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is
not man-made.

That is to say, not a part of this creation. He did not enter by the means, by
the blood of goats and calves, but he entered the most holy place once for all
by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. The blood of goats and
bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean
sanctify them so that they're outwardly clean.

How much more then will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit
offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead
to death so that we may serve the living God. " So external practices can't
cleanse your conscience. This tells us the blood of Christ will cleanse your
conscience.

And we walk through these phrases in these verses, a high priest, Jesus is a
high priest of the good things that are already here. What are those good
things? They're the new things that come into our lives because of Jesus's death
for us and his resurrection.

We're told here that he went through a greater and more perfect tabernacle. A
couple of weeks ago, we talked about the fact that this tabernacle is the
tabernacle of heaven, the perfect place of God's presence. We're told here that
he entered that most holy place once for all.

He didn't have to do it year after year. He did it once and he did it for all of
us. And having done that, he obtained eternal redemption.

The high priest had to go year after year. Jesus one time gave for all and it's
an eternal guarantee and promise. Through the spirit, Jesus offered himself
unblemished.

And then this phrase, to cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death.
Now these acts that lead to death, what he's talking about here is not the bad
things that you do. He's talking actually about the good things that we try to
do to make ourselves right before God.

But in the end, it just leads to death because you can't do enough good things.
You see, we try to ease our conscience rather than clearing our conscience many
times. You do something bad so you try to balance it out by doing something
good.

And even as a believer who has been given a clear conscience by the blood of
Christ, we can fall into this trap again. We can begin to minister. We can begin
to serve out of guilt rather than out of love, out of wanting to ease our
conscience.

There's some habitual sin in your life. You commit that sin and maybe it's
anger, maybe it's lust, maybe it's judgmentalism, maybe it's, I don't know,
whatever it is in your life. But you commit that sin and you think, "Oh, I've
done something bad.

I've got to do something good to balance that out. " So then you go and serve
somebody or you make sure you go to church that weekend or you read more of
God's word. You're trying to ease your conscience rather than accepting the fact
that you have a cleansed conscience.

It's a trap. It's a trap. It's the blame and shame trap.

I blame myself for what I've done. I feel ashamed of what I've done. So now
maybe I can go and I'll serve God out of that.

It's the trap of trying to make up for the wrong things that you've done by
doing good things. You can fall into this trap before you come to know Christ by
trying to get into God's good graces by doing good things or trying to clean up
your life enough so that now Jesus might accept you. You can't clean up your
life enough.

I'll go to church for maybe like a year and then I'll accept Jesus because now
I'll be closer to Him. We're so far from Him. You don't wait a year.

You accept Him now. You accept Him now. Do not settle for trying to ease your
conscience when you can have your conscience cleansed.

You can have your conscience cleansed by the blood of Christ. You just go to Him
and you say, "Jesus, thank you that when you died on the cross you died for all
of my sins and thank you that you cleansed my conscience. You are willing to
come in and free me from guilt.

Free me from guilt because of that. " You may have never prayed that prayer. You
can pray it right now.

You may have prayed that prayer years and years ago but you found yourself
lately trying to ease your conscience even though you're forgiven, even though
you know Jesus died on the cross for you. Go back to recognizing the cleansed
conscience that He gave you. Now I want you to notice the last phrase.

He cleanses our conscience so that, in verse 14, we may serve the living God.
Out of a cleansed conscience comes this "so that, so that I can serve. " A
cleansed conscience is vital for serving God.

The Apostle Paul talks about it again and again as he writes. He says, "We serve
God with a clear conscience. " You see, if you don't have a clear conscience,
your service for God is just you trying to make up for what you've done wrong.

And that kind of service almost always ends up tripping over itself. It almost
never lasts because the starting point is you. The starting point is your hurt,
your pain, what you've done wrong.

The starting point isn't the Lord, what He's done for you. The starting point
isn't even those you are serving, the fact that you love them. The starting
point is you.

You try to make things right. You don't start there. If you really want to serve
the living God, you start by recognizing, "I am forgiven.

My conscience is cleansed. And because of that, out of that, I can serve. I can
serve for a lifetime.

" Now let me talk to you about the reality of this. In reality, we tend to serve
with mixed motivations. Many of us, as we come to know Christ, as we first start
serving Him, the truth is there's a lot of trying to make up for the wrong
things that we've done in our heart.

We struggle many, many times with thinking about the past and wanting to outlive
the past. And what I found in my life and in many believers' life is God, as we
walk through serving Him year after year, He more and more clarifies our
conscience and helps us to recognize, "I'm not serving Him to make up for what I
did wrong. I'm serving Him because of all that He did right in my life, all that
He's given me.

" You see, as you see that process going on, as you see the old guilt dropping
off more and more, you'll find yourself more and more empowered to serve, more
and more empowered to love others. If you don't allow that process to happen, if
you continue to try to motivate yourself to serve based on the wrong things that
you've done, you're going to feel weary in serving. You're not going to last.

The fact of the matter is there's going to be some anger many times in the way
that you serve. There's going to be a sense of shame that leads to anger in the
way that you serve. If you feel that happening in your life, you need to accept
the cleansed conscience that Jesus wants to give you.

First of all, recognize it's not by keeping any external regulation or any
external practice that your conscience can be cleansed. Just give up on that
entirely. The whole Old Testament is written to tell us that doesn't work.

And then recognize that the blood of Christ has cleansed your conscience. And
out of that, out of that, serve a living God. As we pray together, would you
just join me in this prayer?

Jesus, we want to serve you today. We want to serve you not out of guilt, but
out of grace. We want to serve you not to make up for what we've done wrong, but
because we are so grateful for what you have done in our lives, who you are in
our lives.

We want to serve you as those who have been cleansed by you. Not trying to get
cleansed, not trying to get better or trying to make ourselves more fit for
heaven, but as those who have been made fit for heaven by you. Let us serve with
that kind of heart today, that kind of power today.

We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Tomorrow, we're going to look at the power in
the blood.