Can you imagine turning round to almighty God, who has given us a good gift, and telling him he’s given us something that will either make us sin or is just plain bad for us? (one for the teetotallers among us to chew on.) But, of course, it applies to all of us. We can so easily call bad what God calls good and refuse to enjoy what God has given us to enjoy as though we are either more holy than him or just might offend him if we enjoy the thing he gave us.

As we’re heading into Christmas, no doubt many of us are thinking about presents. Not just the presents we might like to get but the various presents we will buy for others. There is something especially lovely about thinking about others, what they might like, and seeing them really enjoy the thing that you bought them.
There wouldn’t be much that would disappoint me more than spending an absolute fortune on some amazing gift for my children only for them never to play with it. Obviously, if I miss the mark and get them something they don’t want that’s more frustration with myself that I either didn’t know them well enough or just got it wrong (shout out to all the folks who bought someone a football top because you know they support ‘a red team’ and inadvertently buy a Man Utd shirt for a Liverpool fan!) But I am even more disappointed if I get them something I know they’ll love – and they do love it and thank me for it – but still they never play with or use it. That doesn’t please me at all!
The reason I get my kids presents – and not only my kids, but my nieces and nephews, my parents and my friends – is because I want them to enjoy it. I don’t really have many skills of any use whatsoever, but one thing I’m alright at is getting presents. I don’t always get it right, but more often than not, I can generally land a decent gift. Even where I don’t hit the bullseye, I think most people can at least see why I thought the gift was a good idea for them. The execution may not be bang on, but the thought behind it (I hope) is clear enough. I like it when people really enjoy the gifts I get them and I can cope if they tell me I didn’t hit the mark but they get why I thought it might. I don’t mind really if people are honest and tell me they just didn’t really like what I got them altogether (they’re grateful for the thought but please don’t get a carpet sample catalogue again!) But I am most disappointed of all by the present that is received with great joy, one I know they really do want, but they just refuse to play with it or use it.
Just imagine, this Christmas, you buy your kids an absolutely fantastic gift. You know they want it and you absolutely know they’ll enjoy it. They unwrap it on Christmas Day and they are so pleased. They love it. It’s just what they wanted. But because it’s so special to them, they never use it. They just keep saying, ‘thank you for the gift’ over and over to you. When you encourage them to use it, they tell you it’s far too special. They just kind of stare at it, repeatedly telling you how grateful they are for it, but never actually enjoying it.
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In our very text the author told us how sacrifices of thanksgiving and praise can now be offered continually by acknowledging Jesus as the Christ before all men and by doing good to our brothers. But there is maybe no greater display of this heavenly mindset in the author than this final command: pray for us. We find prayer so difficult precisely because it is spiritual work that can only be done by faith. Yet because prayer is appealing directly to God and calling upon the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, who is also our Father through Jesus our Lord, to act on our behalf, what can be more important?

Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.
Pray for us, for we are sure that we have a clear conscience, desiring to act honorably in all things. I urge you the more earnestly to do this in order that I may be restored to you the sooner.
Hebrews 13:15-19 ESV

As we have been observing, this final chapter of Hebrews is largely a series of quick closing exhortations. Of course, these commands do not stand in a vacuum but are predicated upon everything that the author has labored to explain over the previous twelve chapters. Indeed, although the rest of the book also contains plenty of pointed exhortation, the purpose of this chapter can be captured in the question: How then shall we live?
The first verse, which I believe to be thesis of the entire chapter, called for us to continue in brotherly love. Such love for our brothers and sisters in Christ will be shown through our hospitality, our caring for the imprisoned and mistreated, our honoring of marriage, and our contentment with our earthly possessions. Such love cannot grow up out of strange and diverse doctrines but can only be rooted in our faith in Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We concluded our previous passage with the author reminding us of the reproach that Christ bore to deliver us from our sins and calling us to also bear the reproach of marking ourselves as His disciples.
In the passage before us, the author explicitly binds the public confession of our faith in Christ to the love that we ought to show to one another, calling these pleasing sacrifices of praise to God. We will then see how submission to godly leadership is a safeguard against being led astray into strange and diverse doctrines and the importance of prayer as the greatest good that we can show to one another.
Pleasing Sacrifices // Verses 15-16
Particularly in the center of the book, the author of Hebrews labored to show that Christ is the absolute, perfect, and final fulfillment of all sacrifices for sins, according to the Old Testament law. Indeed, he noted that the chief benefit of the sacrificial system under the old covenant was to constantly remind God’s people of their sins and of their need for a perfect Redeemer.
Yet we should also remember that sin offerings were not the only kind of sacrifice that could be given. “Others were required as acts of worship denoting praise and thanksgiving to God and denoting the consecration of the worshiper to God. Of such kind were the burnt-offerings and the thank-offerings. The question naturally arises: The sin-offerings of the old covenant have been set aside by the offering of the reality to which they pointed. Have the offerings of praise and thanksgiving to God and denoting the consecration also been set aside? Does God still require his people to appear at the temple to perform sacrifices of worship and consecration as under the old covenant? Or with the superseding of the old covenant system is this also done away with?”[1]
Indeed, we can easily imagine that becoming a line of argument from some Jewish Christians: “We aren’t making sin offerings; we know that Jesus did that once for all. We’re only making sacrifices of thanksgiving.” What then is the answer? Have such offerings ceased, or are they still required of God’s people? The answer is yes and no. Yes, God’s people are still to bring to Him freewill offerings of thanksgiving and praise. We read that explicitly in verse 15: let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God.
However, making physical animal sacrifices has ceased. Just as the blood of animals in the sin offerings pointed toward their perfect fulfillment in the sacrifice of Christ, so the blood of animals in thanksgiving offerings also pointed toward something greater to come through Christ. You see, as long as these offerings of praise were bound to the animal sacrifices, they were severely limited. They were limited to being made only the temple. They were limited by the availability of the priests. They were limited by the resources that each person had.
Our sacrifices of praise no longer have such limitations under the new covenant. We are able to offer them continually… to God because they are no longer being made through the blood of bulls and goats but through him, that is Christ. All of our freewill offerings of praise and thanksgiving to God are now made through Christ, who forever sits interceding for us in prayer before the Father. Therefore, we can give continual sacrifices of praise to God because Christ is continually interceding for us and we have continual access to Him as our Mediator and great High Priest.
But what exactly do such sacrifices of praise look like today? The author himself clarifies what that ought to look like: that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Continually acknowledging (or confessing) the name of Jesus is the sacrifice of praise that God now desires from His people. We certainly confess Christ’s name each Lord’s Day as we sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to Him. But since author just commanded us to go to Christ outside the camp and bear His reproach, we should think of this more in terms of not being ashamed of Christ before those who would mock Him or (as is more common with us today) who we fear may mock us because of Him.
Of course, even within the Old Testament, there were explicit declarations that confessing lips were more pleasing to God than the blood of animals. Consider David’s great prayer of repentance in Psalm 51:12-17:
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,and uphold me with a willing spirit.Then I will teach transgressors your ways,and sinners will return to you.Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,O God of my salvation,and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.O Lord, open my lips,and my mouth will declare your praise.For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it.you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,a broken and contrite heart,O God, you will not despise.
With David’s prayer in mind, Richard Phillips is right to note:
Far more valuable to God than any outward religious display we offer, is that we should sacrificially devote our speech to him. This is something we should seek in prayer and cultivate as a Christian duty. Ask God to sanctify your lips, that they would be servants of his will and a source of pleasure to him. Of course, this will require the sanctification of your heart, which is the whole point. In large part we measure our heart sanctification by the sanctity of our speech, as gossip and coarse joking and cursing and complaining give way to encouraging, edifying, wise, and God-praising words.[2]
Such sacrifices of praise imitate the faith of those who have finished their race before us and glorify Christ as our altogether lovely Savior. Verse 16 presents another means: Do not neglect to do good and share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. Just as acknowledging Jesus’ name has cost many Christians their lives and has heaped scorn upon many others, so too is doing good and sharing what we have with others always sacrificial. Because we live in a world that is still broken under the curse of sin, sinning is always easier (at first) than obedience. More specifically to the author’s point, it is also always easier to neglect doing good to others, just as it is always easier to neglect hospitality (v. 2). Yet in doing so, especially to the household of faith, we are also doing for our Lord (Matthew 25).
I think it is worth pointing out again that the author specifically has doing good to and sharing with our fellow believers. Although this may make me sound rather Scrooge-y, I believe that the general emphasis in many churches upon large mercy ministries is often not worth the time or financial commitment given to them. Like large outreach events, I certainly acknowledge that good and even salvations have come through them. However, mercy ministries often (again, a large generality that does not apply everywhere) seem to bear the fruit of Christians feeling good about serving the poor and perhaps the poor who were served thinking, “What nice people.” If our focus was primarily upon radically doing good and sharing with one another and with those connected to us, we would better present a community that people would actually desire to be a part of. Remember that the world (that is, non-Christians) will know that we are disciples of Christ (Christians) by our love for one another. If would do the best good for the world, we must give a glimpse of Jerusalem to those who have only ever known Babylon.
such sacrifices are pleasing to God. Recall from Hebrews 11 that this idea of having please God is connected to our being commended by God, which is the highest joy that can ever be known. As Lewis called it, it is the joy that the inferior takes in pleasing the superior. And what greater delight can there be for any creature than to know that the Creator is pleased with it. It amazes me to see my seven-month-old already trying to impress with whatever she is doing, but that is the natural inclination of a child to its father. A mother’s love is a child’s security, but a father’s approval is their confidence. If that is true of flawed, earthly fathers, how much more with our heavenly Father?
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What we know by nature is not that our lives are meaningless but that we are under God’s wrath for our transgressions. The cross deals with man’s ultimate problem as revealed to us in conscience. It is in the context of God’s revelation that a theologically informed gospel must be preached. God’s fury is upon the impenitent, whether there is hope of better meaning or not! The relevant-relational aspect of the cross is that hell-bound enemies can become friends with God through the one-time propitiatory sacrifice of Christ for our sins.

A pastor can be more or less Reformed, but a doctrine either is or is not Reformed.
A Debtor To Mercy
The church will always have to war against false gospels. From the time of the Judaizers to this very day, the church has been bewitched by sacerdotalism, syncretism, decisional regeneration, social gospels, prosperity gospels, Lordship Salvation and many other false teachings.
Some of these deceptions are more obvious than others, depending upon the degree of marginalization of the person and work of Christ. All false gospels promise deliverance from one thing unto another. Things become a bit trickier when the Christ remains at the center of the message.
While fundamentalists during the 1980s and ‘90s were on the lookout for anti-Christ, certain Reformed folk were setting their sights on Robert Schuller and then Joel Osteen, while still others were fighting the New Perspective on Paul and Federal Vision. During this time of disquiet, another false gospel not only received a wink but a motion toward a comfortable seat at the Reformed table. Lordship Salvation, promulgated by John MacArthur with endorsements by such notables as J.I. Packer and James Montgomery Boice, became a non-confessional doctrinal option in the broad tent of Reformed evangelicalism.
The MacArthur controversy wasn’t a fair fight. The Lordship gang of independently minded untouchables were picking on the theological weaklings within Arminian Antinomianism. Because the Reformed faith wasn’t under attack, many who grasped Reformed soteriology didn’t bother to take a side in the Lordship debate. Strictly speaking, there was no correct side to take! Both sides were wrong, though only one side positioned itself as historically Reformed. The prominent darlings within Reformed evangelicalism who weighed in on the debate were popularizers and preachers, not confessionally minded theologians. Although they took the Lordship side, the debate was largely dismissed as noise among Reformed academics because both sides were outside the tradition.
During the fog of war, a new star was arising.
While MacArthur and company were flexing their independent muscles in the Reformed evangelical schoolyard, many on the fringe of Reformed confessional theology were spooked into confusing justifying faith with the fruit of progressive sanctification. Forsaking oneself and commitment of life replaced receiving and resting in Christ alone for justification. While certain crusaders falsely, yet confidently, claimed to be defending the faith once delivered unto the saints, a new star from the multi-cultural city of Manhattan was rising above the theological smog. This talented leader was not focused on the nature of saving faith, but on the evangelistic question of what the gospel offers sinners in a postmodern context.
With the stage presence and communication skills of a CEO of a multinational conglomerate, Tim Keller sought to identify and meet a legitimate need by trying to reach the nations for Christ in the dense 23 square miles of New York’s apple.
I know no Reformed pastor who has made more disciples in such a short period of time as Tim Keller. Even Keller’s disciples are already spawning disciples!
Fast forward to 2023. The new gospel eclipses the theology of the cross.
Instead of seeing the objective act of premarital relations as sin, our greatest need is to look away from self-centered romance in order to find life’s truest fulfillment in Christ alone. The offer of Christ is no longer an offer of imputed righteousness and forgiveness for uncleanness, but rather is packaged as freedom from self-idolization and the vapid fulfillment of existential experience. Christ is offered to men and women as the door to freedom from the sin of self-imposed slavery. The world with all its social woes is our unmistakable object lesson. What unregenerate person could miss what is in plain sight! The world’s poverty, disunity and abusiveness is a result of a broken relationship with God. That’s the bad news. The good news is Jesus is the remedy for the unfulfilled life and all broken and abusive relationships. Christ will satisfy our needs if only we become satisfied with Christ. It is God who makes true worshippers through Jesus Christ. Herein we find a “take it to streets” approach to Christian Hedonism.
The new gospel would be as attractive as it is relevant to the postmodern urbanite. Of course, hell, too, needed to be reworked a bit. Hell is no longer a place of eternal torment and punishment for sins against a loving yet wrathful God; and outer darkness is no longer accompanied by weeping and gnashing of teeth. Rather, hell is a reasoned trajectory of living one’s life without Christ at the center. It’s a dimension to be pondered more than a place to be feared. Hell is a philosophical extension of life lived without God. Hell contemplates the future eternality for disembodied spirits resulting from a meaningless temporal existence. It’s the expansion of this life, as opposed to the wages of sin. (Likewise, heaven isn’t an inheritance and sabbath rest from the battle against indwelling sin, as it is the transcendent spatial trajectory for the Christian after death.)
Does this gospel message sound familiar?
We live in a broken world in which we try to find meaning, acceptance and healing through material pleasures, careers, entertainment, community and intimate relationships. Perhaps we even try to find meaning by trying to be a good person. But no matter how hard we try, if we’re honest with ourselves we will admit that we cannot rid ourselves of emptiness. We always seem to suffer under abuse or broken relationships leading to further discontentment. No matter how often we become disillusioned with material things, ideologies and the relationships in which we entrust ourselves, we continue to turn to those idols for ultimate satisfaction and happiness even though they fail us without fail.
Our biggest problem is we are separated from God who made us to be in relationship with him. The good news is we can be restored to God who is the only one that can give our lives meaning. Jesus came to give us life abundant. But to be restored to God we must turn from self and believe Jesus paid for our sins. That is the only way our emptiness can be replaced with meaning. We need a relationship with God who is the author of all meaning. We need that relationship because God created us as relational beings.
The bad news is, if you continue to seek meaning apart from God, upon death you will enter into an eternal darkness void of all meaning and bliss. If you don’t seek in this life meaning from God, you’ll get your heart’s desire forever. You will reap for all eternity more of what you’re experiencing now, a meaningless life where self is at the center. Hell will be where you send yourself. Your punishment will be your unquenchable search to find fulfillment in created things, apart from God at the center. So, I urge you, come to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins so that you might find meaning now and forevermore. Only through Christ can God heal your brokenness and give your life the true meaning for which you were created and have been searching.
The problem isn’t that the word “sin” is utterly absent from the contemporary gospel presentation. Rather, sin is so ill-defined that the theology of the cross loses its context, and by that its relevance. If our greatest need may be motivated by a self-absorbed desire for meaning, then Christ crucified for sinners isn’t being offered.
Any gospel that denies the theology of the cross is another gospel. It’s also not very enticing!
If the “meaningless” of this life is life’s eternal penalty, I suppose most can accept that consequence without too much dread. But who will say they can embrace being cast into biblical hell? The stakes of the game of life aren’t terribly high if one actually enjoys his selfish life.
That man’s life outside Christ is meaningless is a minor point. Even Christians don’t always find fulfillment! Man has a sin problem. His very existence outside mystical union with Christ is an offense to God. The contemporary gospel isn’t that we can escape God’s wrath, gain a right standing to God’s law, and be adopted as sons of God in Christ. Today’s gospel exchanges life’s disappointments for meaning. The felt need we are to try to elicit with the gospel is one of purpose and fulfillment, not deliverance from the wages of sin, which is death.
The true meaning of the cross is contextualized not by purpose but by what is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness.
What we know by nature is not that our lives are meaningless but that we are under God’s wrath for our transgressions. The cross deals with man’s ultimate problem as revealed to us in conscience. It is in the context of God’s revelation that a theologically informed gospel must be preached. God’s fury is upon the impenitent, whether there is hope of better meaning or not! The relevant-relational aspect of the cross is that hell-bound enemies can become friends with God through the one-time propitiatory sacrifice of Christ for our sins.
The theology of the cross and the doctrine of justification unearth man’s need and by extension the biblical gospel.
Consider the multi-faceted import of the cross of Christ:

Propitiation presupposes wrath.
Satisfaction presupposes justice, which again presupposes wrath.
Expiation presupposes the middle ground of enmity being removed through a propitiatory sacrifice that exhausts God’s wrath.
Reconciliation presupposes alienation because of sins that deserve God’s wrath.
Sacrifice presupposes an offering for sin that deserves God’s wrath.
Redemption presupposes deliverance from bondage, and condemnation, which demands God’s wrath.
Love is Jesus suffering the unmixed wrath of God for unjust sinners.

The theology of the cross is not one of restoring meaning to life. The cross is a symbol of love, mercy and grace, which finds its only expression in the context of the wages of sin, which is death, not want of purpose. Because today’s gospel is not theological, it’s not biblical.
There’s a wisdom to the cross that relates to theological justification.
How the cross brings meaning to life isn’t at all obvious. However, when we begin to understand our need for a perfect righteousness and satisfaction for sins, the cross is not just intelligible but can be seen as the profound wisdom of God.
As I taught my adult daughters since they were little children, sinners like us need two things to stand before a holy and righteous God – a perfect righteousness that’s not our own and God’s gracious pardon for our sins. What we need to stand in the judgement is accomplished only through the active and passive obedience of Christ. Accordingly, our greatest need is not for meaning in life but to be justified in Christ. The new gospel dilutes our sin problem, and, therefore, the gospel’s remedy.
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