O Come, All You Unfaithful – 12/21/25

My name is Andy Henderson. I’m one of the elders here at North Hills Church. And it has been a joy over the last couple of weeks to hear messages on the humanity of Jesus. That really matters.

Studying the humanity of Jesus is not simply something to be done in a seminary class. It’s essential for a healthy Christian faith. We confess together that Jesus is fully God and fully man, so the birth of Christ is not just some sentimental season we revisit every December. Christmas is actually at the very center of our salvation.

The eternal Son stepped into our world. He took on our humanity. He embraced our weaknesses, and he became like us in every respect to bring us to God. So when we think about his humanity, we’re not dealing with just some abstract doctrine. We’re looking at the lengths to which God went to rescue us. As David Mathis wrote,

“Jesus is like us in every respect—human body, heart, mind, and will—except for sin (Hebrews 2:17; 4:15). How amazing that the divine Son of God would not just take on part of our humanity on that first Christmas, but all of it— and then take that true humanity all the way to the cross for us, and now into heaven and the new creation. Jesus took a human body to save our bodies. And he took a human mind to save our minds. Without becoming man in his emotions, he could not have rescued our hearts. And without taking a human will, he could not save our broken and wandering wills. In the words of Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘That which he has not assumed, he has healed.’ He became man in full, so that he might save us in full. He is a truly marvelous Savior.”

Hebrews 4:14-16, our text for this morning, has always been one of the richest encouragements to my own soul about Christ’s humanity. But the beauty of these verses is even more striking when you consider two key backdrops to our text, backdrops that the original hearers would have immediately recognized. It would not have been lost on them. One is a historical one, and one is a contextual one.

Here’s how I’d like to approach the passage this morning together. Number one, an introduction to talk about those backdrops. After that, we’re going to break down the text into two sections. You’re going to find two seemingly illogical invitations, based upon the backdrops that we’re going to talk about. Then, four reasons why those invitations are not illogical at all. In fact, they make perfect sense. But let’s begin with a word of prayer.

Father, I pray that you will open our minds this morning, open our hearts. God, would you do a work in all of our hearts this morning as we listen to your Word? Father, I pray that we’ll come away today with a fresh amazement at your Son, Jesus, and why his humanity really matters for us right now in this moment. It is in his name that we pray these things this morning, amen.

For the last several years of my dad’s life, he worked at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A couple of years ago, my family went back to the Pentagon for a ceremony in honor of his service.

The Pentagon is not a place that you just go and stride nonchalantly into. Before you ever go, there are preregistration requirements, there are background checks. When you arrive, you have to have a sponsor. You have to have a valid ID. You then have to pass through intense security with metal detectors and bag checks. Even with all of that, you still have to be escorted at all times.

Every step in the Pentagon as a visitor communicates the same thing: access here is restricted. It’s a serious thing. For Israel, the presence of God functioned like that, only far more dangerous.

The historical backdrop of our text for this morning is the Day of Atonement, back in ancient Israel. The events of this day are recorded for us in Leviticus 16.

This was not a festival. It wasn’t a joyous occasion. It was the most solemn day on Israel’s calendar. It was the day that the high priest would go all the way inside the tabernacle, past the holy place, through the heavy curtain, into the Most Holy Place — the very room that symbolized God’s presence on earth. He went there first of all to sacrifice for his own sin, and then he would bring a sacrifice for the sins of the nation.

Don’t miss the drama of that day. We’re kind of far removed from this being in 21st-century America. Imagine standing outside the tabernacle on that day. The camp was still. There was no work being done. Every household would have been quiet. There’s a heavy tension that hangs over the people because everything depended upon what that one man was about to do.

All year long, the sins of the nation were accumulating. They formed a kind of spiritual defilement that threatened the purity of God’s dwelling among them. On that day, the defilements had to be removed, or judgment could fall.

The high priest, usually decked out in a very ornate costume, on that day was just in simple white linen. He approached the Most Holy Place knowing full well that entering God’s presence in the wrong way meant death. God had already struck down priests who treated his holiness casually.

A later Jewish tradition really reflects the fear of that moment: Some say that a rope would be tied around the ankle of the high priest as he went into the Holy of Holies, so that if he died in the Holy of Holies, his body could be pulled out.

Whether or not that story is factual, it conveys an important truth: Stepping behind the curtain was a life-and-death act. That thick, heavy curtain communicated, “Access here is restricted.”

Outside, the people fasted in silence. They waited. If the priest emerged alive, it meant the sins had been covered and God’s wrath withheld.

The Day of Atonement proclaimed two unavoidable truths:

1. God is unapproachably holy and
2. Sin carries devastating consequences.

We also see the same idea in the contextual backdrop (Hebrews 4:12-13). The writer of Hebrews adds another layer to this in these two verses right before our text.

These are some of the most unsettling verses, apart from Christ. These are two of the most unsettling verses in all the scriptures. Many people have probably memorized these passages. Many of you could quote this this morning, but I wonder how many times we’ve really thought about it. This is a terrifying passage.

“For the word of God is living and active… [It cuts deep. In fact, it discerns] the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account” (Hebrews 4:12-13).

Those words tell us that God’s word isn’t passive. It cuts, it lays us open. It doesn’t just discern what we say and do (which is scary enough), but it actually discerns the thoughts we never voice and the motivations that we barely understand ourselves. Every corner of our heart is uncovered before him. Nothing escapes his gaze.

If the Day of Atonement showed that one could not stride into God’s presence, Hebrews 4:12-13 shows that sinners cannot hide from God’s presence either. You can’t run from his holiness, and you can’t conceal anything from his sight.

Given those two backdrops, the expected response (the encouragement) that you would expect to hear after knowing all that information would be run, hide, distance yourself. But instead, the writer of Hebrews here gives two invitations— two really stunning, unexpected invitations.

In verse 14, the invitation is “let us hold fast” our confession. Then verse 16 adds another invitation: “let us draw near” to God’s throne with confidence. Those two things don’t make sense with what we just read and what would have been going through the minds of the Israelites as they heard this being preached the first time.

These two invitations are a major theme in the book of Hebrews. We find both of these invitations together again, in reverse order, in Hebrews 10:19-23.

“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, [here’s one of those invitations:] let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. [And here’s the second:] Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:19-23).

The only reason that the writer of Hebrews can move from the terror of the Holy of Holies in the Day of Atonement and God’s all-seeing eye through his word, how he could move from those things to the comfort of invitation, is that Jesus actually stepped into both of those realities and resolved them completely.

Jesus, the Son of God, passed through the heavens, our text says, into the true Holy of Holies—not with the blood of animal sacrifice, but with his own once-for-all sacrifice—and fully satisfied the holiness of God.

If you read the Gospel accounts, in at least a couple of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death (his crucifixion), you will see that the veil/the curtain in the temple was actually torn in two, symbolizing access to God where no access existed.

As everything is exposed to the Lord, the same Jesus covered our exposed guilt with his own righteousness. That’s what we’re celebrating here at Christmas: that the eternal Son took on flesh. He took on our humanity so that he could become a merciful and faithful high priest. As Peter preached last week in chapter two of Hebrews,

“Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest” (Hebrews 2:17a).

Because of what Jesus accomplished in his death and resurrection, these two invitations actually now make sense. Let’s hold fast to our confession. We can squeeze tightly onto it. That’s what this word means: to grasp. We can do it with confidence, privately and publicly.

We’re to hold fast to the confession that Jesus is our Great High Priest and that we have been fully reconciled to the Father through him, that Jesus’s own record of righteousness belongs to us. It is ours, and nothing will ever separate us from him. There’s confidence in these words. There’s no fear.

In Hebrews 10 (we just read the passage), we’re told to hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering at all. There’s no doubt involved. The reason for that confidence is not due to anything about us. It’s all due, Hebrews 10 says, to Christ’s own faithfulness.

We’re not only invited to hold fast our confession of hope with confidence, we’re also amazingly invited to draw near to him with confidence. Before Christ, access to the presence of God was available to the high priest alone. That was one day a year, accompanied by a lot of fear and a lot of trepidation, but now we’re invited to come in continually with confidence.

Jesus’s work as our Great High Priest was not something that he accomplished on the cross for us only. Sometimes we think about it that way, that the high priest part was back on the cross. That’s a glorious reality, but his ministry as our Great High Priest is today. It’s an everyday ministry of Jesus on our behalf as his people.

We can hold fast our confession, and we can draw near to the throne of grace today in this moment because of four ever-present realities of Jesus as our Great High Priest. They’re embedded in the text and they surround these invitations.

Why can we hold fast to our confession of hope and draw near to God’s throne with confidence?

1. Jesus stands in our place.

Because first, as our Great High Priest, Jesus stands in our place. We’re not there alone. We couldn’t be there alone. We have a Great High Priest. This is what high priests did. They stood in the place of people. As our Great High Priest, Jesus represents us in a way that no earthly priest ever could.

The priests of Israel went in trembling. They stood trembling before God’s presence, unsure if they themselves were acceptable. They had to offer sacrifices for their own sins before they could even think of representing anyone else. But Jesus, the sinless Son of God, “passed through the heavens” and stands—not tentatively, but triumphantly—in the very presence of the Father.

He doesn’t stand there as a mere example for us, or a distant advocate. He stands in our place, carrying our names on his heart, like the high priest bore the names of Israel on his breastplate. Because Christ’s sacrifice was absolute perfection, and because his righteousness is unblemished, his standing before God the Father guarantees our acceptance with God.

Our confidence does not come from the strength of our grip on Christ (or we would fall, every one of us), but the confidence comes from the strength of his grip on us. His unchanging presence before the Father means that, if we are in Christ, our relationship with God is as secure as Christ’s own Sonship.

When the Father looks at you, he sees the righteousness of the Son who stands in your place. We can hold fast our confession of hope, and we can draw near to the throne of grace with confidence because Jesus stands in our place.

2. Jesus sympathizes with our powerlessness.

A second reason in our text is because Jesus sympathizes with our powerlessness.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 14:15).

Jesus is not a distant or detached High Priest. He’s not cold and clinical and unmoved by your struggles. He is able to “sympathize with our weaknesses,” a word that includes anything in which we find ourselves powerless, limited, frail, tempted, exhausted, fearful, confused, or hurting. He sympathizes with all of it.

Because he truly became human, he experienced everything that makes life in this fallen world difficult. We hunger, but Jesus understands that. He lived it. As Ryan preached a couple of weeks ago, weariness, Jesus understands our weariness. He understands rejection. You say, “I’ve been betrayed.” Jesus understands betrayal.

Maybe today you feel like, “You know what, I’ve been completely abandoned by the Father.” Jesus understands that. He experienced it on the cross. He experienced the full force of temptation, yet he never sinned.

It’s tempting to come and look at this and say, “Well, Jesus never sinned, so he really can’t fully understand my own temptation towards sin.” But his sinlessness does not make him less sympathetic. It actually makes him more sympathetic. Unlike us, he knows the true weight of temptation without ever giving in. He knows the burden of human frailty in a better way than any other person who has ever lived.

Because he’s risen and reigning right now, this sympathy for our weaknesses and our powerlessness is not a distant memory for him. This is a present reality because he’s still human. At this very moment, the heart of Jesus moves toward your weakness, not away from it. Your limitations, our failures, do not disqualify us from his compassion. They actually draw that compassion out.

You never surprise him. You never embarrass him. You never weary him. He knows your frame, and he meets you with tenderness. In his book, Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund writes of this statement in Hebrews 5:

“Consider your own life. When the relationship goes sour, when the feelings of futility come flooding in, when it feels like life is passing us by, when it seems that our one shot at significance has slipped through our fingers, when we can’t sort out our emotions, when the longtime friend lets us down, when a family member betrays us, when we feel deeply misunderstood, when we are laughed at by the impressive— in short, when the fallenness of the world closes in on us and makes us want to throw in the towel—there, right there, we have a Friend who knows exactly what such testing feels like, and sits close to us, embraces us. With us.”

Why can we hold fast to our confession? Why can we draw near to the throne of God with confidence? Because Jesus sympathizes with our powerlessness.

3. Jesus summons us into God’s presence.

A third reason in our text is that Jesus summons us into God’s presence. The earthly high priest entered God’s presence alone and in fear, but Jesus does the unthinkable. Think about the total reversal that we find from the Day of Atonement to what we experience now. He actually invites us to come with him. He’s not some distant advocate in there with God while we wait outside.

He invites us right into the throne room with him because he opened the way through his flesh and tore down every barrier between sinners and a holy God. He can summon us to draw near, not tentatively. Not with fear. Not reluctantly, but with confidence.

This is not self-confidence. Our access to God does not depend upon our own worthiness, but upon his worthiness. And guess what? We don’t wait until we have it all together before we go.

“I got a few things to work out, and then I’ll get right with God.” No. No, we go straight to the throne of grace. The throne we approach is a throne of grace. It’s a place where the unfaithful and the weary and the weak and the struggling are welcomed with joy.

When you come to him, you’re not shouting into a void. You’re entering a place where the living, loving, Great High Priest has already brought your name before the Father. You are wanted, and you are welcomed. So we hold fast our confession with hope, and we draw near to his throne of grace with confidence.

4. Jesus supplies us with his unlimited provision.

There’s a fourth reason we can do so in our text: Jesus supplies us with his unlimited provision “that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Every time we come to the throne of grace, we find exactly what we need at precisely the moment we need it.

\Jesus didn’t just clear a path and then say, “Okay, go, you’re on your own.” As our Great High Priest, he continually supplies us with mercy and with grace and with timely help.

You say, “Well, I failed so miserably, and I keep on failing so miserably.” That’s where his mercy comes in. Mercy is there to help us with our failures. You say, “I’m overwhelmed, and I just feel weak.” We have grace to help in our moments of weakness. Help comes in our moment of crisis.

The old covenant had rituals that took place annually, but Christ gives provision that is constant, personal, and inexhaustible. His supply is not rationed out. Like, “You get this much, but if you fail too much today, it’s going to run out. There’s only a limited supply.” His compassion does not fluctuate.

We come into the throne room, it’s not his compassion is going down because we failed once again. It does not fluctuate. We never approach a God who is depleted or hesitant. His grace never runs dry. He gives out of his fullness. That’s important because that means everything he has as the Son of God and the Savior and Sovereign of the world is available to his people.

We come to One who delights to give, whose power is made perfect in your weakness, whose grace is always sufficient, and whose mercy is new every day. You come to a fountain that never dries up. You come to a high priest who always supplies. His mercy, his grace, and his help are unlimited.

How do we go from this place and apply these truths that we see in our text about Jesus as our Great High Priest today in this moment? There are many possibilities. We could go a lot of different directions with application, but we’re just going to focus on one today. And that is prayer.

This truth radically impacts how we approach prayer. We come to God as our father, not as a stranger, not as an intruder just hoping that somehow we will not be turned away. We’re not tolerated.

That’s kind of how we might act toward people who have consistently failed. We tolerate them, but that’s not the way that we are tolerated as God’s people. We’re welcomed. We’re not trying to break down a door to gain access to his presence. Jesus has already opened that door.

When we go to the throne of grace before God, we’re not met with arms crossed and stern faces. Every time, we’re met with open arms. We’re met with loving gazes. Prayer is not for the polished and impressive. It’s for the weak and the weary and the struggling and the tempted.

How do these four reasons that we can hold fast to our confession and draw near into his presence, how do those impact the way that we pray?

1. Because Jesus stands in our place, we approach in prayer confidently.

We’re coming into that room not based upon our own righteousness. We have the righteousness of Christ, a perfect righteousness that has been fully applied to our account, so we don’t come in crawling before the Father.

That’s how we feel sometimes, right? We want to go into his throne, we want to get into the presence of God, but we feel like we have to crawl in. No. We come with confidence every time, and we come with confidence because Jesus literally stands in our place.

Because Jesus sympathizes with our powerlessness, we approach in prayer honestly and transparently. We don’t have to hide. I’m not there to defend myself, to argue my point. I have the perfect advocate to do all of that in Jesus. He knows our weaknesses intimately, and he meets them with compassion, not condemnation.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

Honest, transparent prayer is not a threat to our fellowship with the Lord. It’s actually the thing that draws him toward us. He welcomes the real me. Not the polished version that I wish I were. Or that I want everybody else to think I am. It’s the real me.

I remember in my days of deep depression, and the years that I worked through that, I’m so glad that nobody heard my prayers. They were raw, and they were real. And God was not offended. He welcomed those prayers because I can draw near to him for mercy and grace and help.

2. Because Jesus summons us into God’s presence, we approach in prayer frequently.

Prayer’s not a last resort. He doesn’t take appointments, “but I’ve got to wait.” It’s always available to us.

In his High Priestly prayer for the disciples and all of his people in John 17, Jesus said that eternal life is to know God. That’s what eternal life is. It’s to know God. If you’re a believer today, do you want to know when eternal life begins for you? Not when we die. When I was regenerated, when I came to know Christ, eternal life began.

Now, I’ll still have to go through physical death (unless Christ returns), but my eternal life began, and I can start taking advantage of all of the wonders of eternal life—although imperfectly—right now. One of the chief ways that we relate to the Father is through prayer, and we have the privilege of drawing near to the throne of grace without ceasing.

3. Because Jesus supplies us with his unlimited provision, we approach in prayer expectantly.

That sounds arrogant, but it’s not at all. We approach expectingly, we come expecting to receive mercy for our failures. Every time.

We come expecting to receive grace for our moments of need. He does not grow weary of our requests. He does tire of giving out his grace and mercy in superabundance. Every time we pray, we are drawing near to a fountain that never runs dry and a Great High Priest who never turns us away, so we come expectantly.

We expect him to work. Maybe not in our timing, maybe not in the way that we anticipated, but we come expecting something from him because of his promise to us as our Great High Priest. What a remarkable privilege that we can approach a holy God. The same God on the Day of Atonement, we can approach him in prayer with confidence, with fearless honesty and transparency, with regularity, and with expectation through our Great High Priest, Jesus.

One of my favorite Christmas hymns — we sang it earlier today. I love singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” It’s a great song. It’s an invitation for the faithful, the joyful, and the triumphant to come and behold Jesus. It is a thrilling thought.

But how about those who, at least at times, do not feel especially faithful or joyful or triumphant? Maybe you’re here today, and you don’t feel that at all. Is there an invitation for people like us? One of my newer favorite Christmas songs is called “O Come All You Unfaithful.” We’re going to sing it here in just a moment, but listen to the list of people invited here:

The unfaithful
The weak
The unstable
The barren and the waiting
Those weary of praying
The bitter and the broken
The guilty and hiding ones
Those who have nothing
You are not alone.

If you have questions about Jesus as the Great High Priest or anything in this text, I hope that you’ll come and freely ask those questions. For those who just want to come forward and pray this morning, we’ll have our prayer team here in the front as we start singing. They would love to pray with you and pray for you. I want to encourage you to do that as our praise team comes and continues our worship.