20th September 2026 (pm) - Hebrews 4:14 - 16

These are some of my favorite verses, not least because they apply to you every day.

And it's interesting because there's an invitation in these verses for you to come.

And it makes you think, doesn't it? If you've ever had a deep, meaningful friendship, talking about somebody that you would be willing to share anything with, I wonder what is it about that friendship? What is it about that person? that made you, that enabled you to share, whether it's your darkest secret or your biggest failure, what is it about them? You know, I read a little bit about counseling here and there.

I find it really helpful and interesting.

And I was reading a secular textbook on counseling.

Some of the things that apparently help a person feel confident and come and talk to us are for example the fact that we use active listening have you heard about that before it's not just listening to what the person is saying and thinking and formulating a response it's listening intently facing the person maybe it's the body language that also says to the person that you are taking in everything they're saying i wonder if that's what made you be able to share Maybe beyond that, beyond body language, beyond what you can see, it's the fact that the person you were talking to had lived through the very failure you were just telling them about.

Have you ever experienced that? I've heard so many people, especially when it comes to suffering, they were more willing to share perhaps sometimes the suffering that they themselves caused because they knew the other person had at some point struggled with the same.

I wonder what causes any of you or anyone at all to draw near to Jesus or to move away from him.

It seems that what causes people to confidently come to Jesus is realizing who he is.

And there's a lot about who Jesus is in these couple of verses.

The more we consider the qualities about Jesus, even as you stop and think, Jesus is fill in the blank with a quality about Jesus.

And you just stop and think and pray through that.

It makes you want to come to him in prayer.

It makes you want to trust him more.

That's going to be my challenge this evening.

just as there are things that people do or attitudes they can have to us that make us trust them or run a mile, if you extrapolate those to God, you will see that we will never come to Him if we think of Him as distant or judgmental or actually perhaps He's just indifferent to our little lives here in Chesterfield.

And I've met people who after one conversation, I'd be ready to tell them my darkest secrets.

And I don't know what it was, but equally, I have met people that within five minutes of talking with them, I realized I really can't trust you.

I couldn't trust you with, you know, I don't know a single memory of who I am.

I wonder which is Jesus to you? And which is it that our spiritual lives demonstrate Jesus is to us? Because these two verses are going to take some of the big obstacles that stop us from coming to Jesus, smash them down, so that by the end of this moment of considering this passage, you're going to go, I really should come to Jesus.

More, more than I should.

More than I already am.