Jesus, Our Priest

Well, we’re coming now to our point in our time of worship this morning when we worship God by preaching the Bible and listening to it. It’s a very strange and awesome moment. I’ve been doing this for many, many years now, and I’m still overawed by it and intrigued by it, because if I understand correctly, then I’m endeavoring to be a vehicle of God to bear his Word—but I can’t. Therefore, the task before me is impossible, unless God chooses to do something.

I’ve been reading a lot of this in recent days, thinking about it intensely. I read this quote before we pray so that you might pray a little more earnestly than perhaps you usually do. In a book entitled The Trivialization of God, [McCullough], who should be read cautiously, writes,

The preacher may be delivering a half-baked sermon, thrown together with as much doubt as faith, and the hearers may be distracted by strained efforts to quieten gassy stomachs or irritated from fighting with a spouse … or worried about a visit to the doctor, but when the [word of] the gospel is preached, … Christ walks among his people. [It is] the miracle of Christmas all over again: Christ cloth[ing] himself in humanity, spurning the language of angels to speak with the tongues of [mere] mortals.[1]

Now, that is what I anticipate happening. Do you?

Let us pray:

God our Father, we’re not interested in the futile exercise of hearing the ramblings of a man’s mind. We desperately need to hear from you. That’s why we’re turning to the Bible, because there you have given to us your clearly revealed truth. Speak, then, Lord, in the stillness. We wait upon you. In Jesus’s name. Amen.

Well, we are in the middle of a three-part series focusing on Jesus in his office as Prophet, Priest, and King. And last time, we saw that Jesus comes to us as our Prophet, speaking into our darkness and our ignorance, because we desperately need that. Our focus this morning, as would be clear from our reading in Hebrews 9, is upon Jesus as our Priest—the Priest coming to deal with our estrangement and our alienation.

Now, last time we said that there was an inherent judgment in the very designation of Jesus as a Prophet. Why would we need him to come and speak to us? Well, we say, “Because our hearts and our minds are darkened as a result of sin, and we’re actually ignorant of God, and therefore, he comes and he speaks.” He spoke in many and various ways of old by the prophets, and then, says the writer to the Hebrews, “In these last days he has spoken to us [in] his Son.”[2] Therefore, if we’re going to give any consideration to Christianity at all, we need to be putting ourselves in the place where we might hear Jesus Christ speaking to us as our Prophet.

By the same measure, we need the Lord Jesus as our Priest. Because not only are our minds darkened from the inside, and therefore we are ignorant of God, but we are actually estranged and alienated from God. By our very nature this is so. It’s not a contemporary view; I acknowledge that. The notion that is abroad in every bookstore that you will find—I’ve been twice this week to one particular bookstore, and at least once in the religious section—and as I stood there surrounded by all of these religious offerings, the message (really, the unspoken message) is “You can pick up any one of these books. It doesn’t really matter which one it is. They’re all a variety of books that will allow you to tap into God. And if you want to know about him, if you need to know about him, then just pick up one of these books, and you will be on your way.”

Well, no, actually, that is not the case. Because the readers of these books are themselves estranged and alienated from God. That’s the message of the Bible. That’s the bad news. Our song said that God makes sinners sad. And people say, “Well, I didn’t come to Parkside to be made sad. I came here to be made happy.” Well, if you are unconvinced of who Jesus is, then I hope that you will be sad. I hope you will be saddened by the fact that you don’t understand or believe the good news. And then I hope that you will believe the good news and join the company of the glad. But the bad news comes first.

And here at the very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis chapter 3, we have a very interesting picture: Adam and Eve turfed out of the garden. They’d been there, living with God, enjoying intimate relationship with him, but they decided to take a stab at life on their own—turned their back on him, went their own way, chose to disobey his one command. And as a result of that, they were banished from the garden, sent out into a period of estrangement and alienation. And at the end of Genesis 3, you have this graphic picture of the cherubim placed on the east side of the garden, wielding a flaming sword and flashing it back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.[3] So, far from the notion being “You can just bump into God,” as it were, there is guarding the way to life cherubim with a flashing sword, making entry except by one and one means only possible.

We cannot by ourselves draw near to God, and therefore, we need somebody to act as mediator.

Now, it is imperative that we understand that. Otherwise, the idea of a priest who creates access to God will fall upon deaf ears. If I believe myself just by nature to have access to God anytime I want and anywhere I want, then, of course, the notion of somebody making access and dealing with alienation and closing the gap will have very little to say.

Well, that’s really the essence of priesthood all the way through the Bible. The Old Testament introduces us to various individuals who provide by their sacrificial work access to God. We cannot by ourselves draw near to him, and therefore, we need somebody to act as mediator.

Now, since some of you will be saying, “Well, I wish that you would give chapter and verse for the assertion that you’ve just made about being separated from God; I’m not sure I like the sound of it,” I don’t want to be exhaustive, but I will give you one portion of Scripture for your homework: Isaiah chapter 59. And if you like, you can turn to it right now and see that it’s actually in the Bible. A number in the first service turned immediately to it, because I don’t think they liked the sound of this alienation business. And then they said, “Oh, well, that’s exactly what it says.”

Isaiah 59:1: “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear to dull to hear.” In other words, that’s good news. God can save people, and God can hear sinners when they cry to him, and you need to know that. And then the conjunction that begins verse 2:

But [the problem is that] your iniquities have separated
 you from … God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
 so that he will not hear.

If you’re on a journey at the moment, a spiritual journey, and it feels to you very much as though God has the telephone off the hook, that you’re constantly getting the busy signal, and you can’t figure out why it is—well, here is the explanation: “Your iniquities have separated you from … God,” and “your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”

The prophet goes on to explicate this, pointing out the implications of being in that position of alienation, and he comes up with these amazingly graphic metaphors down around verse 10. For those of you who like the English language and like the pictures that are provided in it, you will, I’m sure, benefit from this. Here we are, he says:

Like the blind we grope along the wall,
 feeling our way like men without eyes.
At midday we stumble as if it were twilight;
 among the strong, we are like the dead.

We all growl like bears;
 we moan mournfully like doves.
We look for justice, [and] find none;
 for deliverance, but it[’s] far away.

And then again he comes back to explain—verse 12: “[You see, our] offenses are many in your sight, and our sins testify against us.”

Now, if that isn’t a picture of contemporary man, I don’t know what is. You say, “Well, I haven’t heard people growling like bears or moaning like doves.” You haven’t? I think I routinely hear them growling like bears. “That stinking… Bleh!” Or moaning: “Oh, I don’t know, oh… Oh, oh, oh!” Listen tomorrow. Just listen. Listen to the bears. Listen to the doves moan. Why do people moan and groan like this? They don’t even know why. And part of the message of the Christian is to go to the groaning and the moaning and say, “I can explain that. I can diagnose that noise you’re making. I know why you go, ‘Uh!’ It’s actually written about six hundred years before Christ. You’re in the Bible, you big bear, you.”

“Oh, what’s wrong with you today?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I feel like a bear with a sore head.”

“Oh! Isaiah 59:11–12. You’re in!”

And enlightened man, stumbling in the middle of the day as if he was caught in the darkness, man in all of his great progress, like a blind man groping along the wall, just trying to find his way home to his house: the Bible says, “Listen, we are desperately in need of a priest to give us access to God. Here is our predicament.”

That’s why when you read through the Old Testament, you discover that the priestly function is none other than that, classically put for us in Leviticus chapter 16 in the description of the high priest on the Day of Atonement; worked out through the Psalms as the lines of kingship and priesthood and prophet begin to coalesce; quoted, then, in the Gospels as Jesus identifies himself by means of these anointed categories; and then, in the Epistles, explained for us in the most cohesive and helpful fashion, best of all in the book of Hebrews. And perhaps chapter 9, from which we read, is as good a place to anchor ourselves as any.

We read there, back in 9, “When Christ came as high priest of the good things that are already here, … he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.” And what the writer to the Hebrews does is essentially this: he shows how the anointing of God upon the Old Testament priest finds its fulfillment in the anointing that rests upon the Lord Jesus in fulfilling the role of our Great High Priest. And he does this by pointing to two strains, as it were, or two streams which flow, then, into the confluence of his work—namely, his identity and his activity. And I want to point this out to you as best I can.

Jesus’ Identity

The link between Jesus and the Old Testament priest comes across, then, first of all, when we consider his identity—his identity, first of all, as a man, as a real man who existed in real time and space. Isn’t it interesting that Mel Gibson is having such a dreadful time to find anybody to back this great movie that he has prepared on the person of Jesus of Nazareth? Somehow or another, there is a problem, lest we would discover the nature of the humanity of this Christ.

And in order for a man to be a priest, according to 5:1, “every high priest is selected from among men.” “From among men.” And therefore, for Jesus to fulfill the role of priest, he was going to become flesh—not as a phantom, not as one who seemed to be human, but one who was fully human. And the writer to the Hebrews is at pains to show the solidarity of Jesus with us in our humanity. And part of the reason for this is because it is foundational to his fulfilling the role of high priest.

And so we’re introduced to him in his flesh and blood. We’re introduced to him in his suffering. We’re introduced to him as the one who has been tempted in all points as we are and yet without sin.[4] We’re introduced to him in his vulnerability, as with great cries and groans he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”[5] And we’re introduced to him in his death.

I said to you a few weeks ago—and it bears repetition—that if we’re tempted to think of the work of Jesus in a theoretical or in a formulaic fashion, it is probably because we have never really thought about the fact that Jesus was a real human person, and that the Jesus that we have in our mind’s eye is a Jesus of medieval art or even contemporary art; or of a Jesus of a sort of sentimental, sing-along type; or a Jesus of triumphalism; or some kind of jigsaw-puzzle Jesus. But when we think of him in all of the normality of his human psychology, in all of the normality of the nerve endings in his body, in all of the way in which human friendship was precious and important to him, we begin to understand that this High Priest, this Jesus, was a real man. And so his identity is given to us as man, but his identity is also given to us as God.

And the book opens up with this great statement: “In these last days”—1:2—“he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.” And “the Son,” he says, “is the radiance of God’s glory … the exact representation of his being.” “The radiance of God’s glory”: the effulgence of God, the outpouring of God. The Old Testament reader understood this, because they had read enough of Moses. They had read enough in the Pentateuch, in the first five books of the Bible. They were familiar with the way that God had made himself known and disclosed himself in a bush that burned without being extinguished, and Moses took his shoes from off his feet (the ground there was holy);[6] in the descending of the shekinah glory upon the ministering priests in the temple, so much so that they were unable to continue their function because the glory of God had made itself so known.[7]

So the Jewish mind recognized that God was, if you like, in the business of bringing this effulgence, this radiance, to bear. And now, says the writer, he has done it in its totality. And this Jesus is “the exact representation of his being.” He’s not an approximation to God. He’s not something like God. He’s not a road, ultimately, to God. He’s not a concept of God. He is God. He is “the exact representation of his being.” “Here,” says the writer to the Hebrews, “God has, in space and time, stamped his being in the shape of Jesus.”

Jesus is not an approximation to God. He’s not something like God. He’s not a road ultimately to God. He’s not a concept of God. He is God. He is the exact representation of his being.

And people say to me all the time, “Well, isn’t Jesus just, you know, like Buddha? You mentioned the bookstore. There’s some interesting stuff there on Zen Buddhism and Islam and various other things.” I mean, there is no question there is interesting stuff. There is no question there that there is material that will intersect with what you may find in the Bible. But the real question is: Is Jesus just on a line with the rest of these? It is impossible, my friends. He “appointed [an] heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.” Jesus made Buddha. Jesus made Muhammad. Jesus made the Hindu avatars. Sit at night when you can’t sleep, and ponder the vastness of that thought. He is the creator of the universe—the very man who bears the nails that he fashioned in the molecular structure that made it possible to have them driven through his hands. There is nothing like this in all of religion! This story is so unbelievable, I have to believe it. It is so unbelievable! Nobody would invent this. Nobody could invent this. It is fantastic. Who is this Priest? He is very man, and he is very God.

The fact that this is difficult, that’s it’s daunting, that it’s mysterious, that it may be even distressing shouldn’t cause you to shy away from it. Run to it. Embrace it. Think about it. Shake the Bible. Read the Bible. Investigate the Bible. Challenge it. Grab it by the teeth like a dog with a bone, and investigate. It will reward your careful attention. And make sure you go and do your homework to see whether what I’m telling you is true. Jesus lived his divine human life in and through his human mind and body at every point. And therefore, his priesthood is conveyed to us by the writer first in his identity.

Jesus’ Activity

Second, in his activity. Hebrews 8:3: “Every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices, and so it was necessary for this one also to have something to offer.” Perfectly logical, isn’t it? The priest was appointed. The priest was to take sacrifices. The priest went into the Holy Place; we read it there in Hebrews 9. Routinely, the average priest went into the first room, the holy room, but only into the most holy room was it the privilege of the high priest to go. And so the writer says, “This Jesus is our Great High Priest. And since every priest offers gifts and sacrifices, it was necessary, then, for this one to offer something himself.” Well, what was he going to offer?

Well, back in chapter 9, it was written down for us, in 9:12: “He did[n’t] enter by means of … blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all”—notice this—“by his own blood.” “By his own blood.” The Priest becomes the sacrifice. You see, every other priest up until that time took in an animal. An animal could not ultimately substitute for a human, because the animal was not psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, physically involved in the process. The animal was mute. The animal was subservient. The animal was dumb. The animal was not offering up itself. That could never finally do the business. The sacrifice that would atone for sin was going to have to be humanity for humanity. And since the sin that needed to be forgiven was willful sin as well as the sins of ignorance, the one who would be the sacrifice for willful sin would be himself willfully offering himself up. And isn’t that what we find in the garden of Gethsemane? “Here I am, Father. I am here to do your will. Nobody takes my life from me. I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to pick it up again.”[8] Look at the Priest!

The sacrifice that would atone for sin was going to have to be humanity for humanity.

Now, in the fascination of the way in which the Bible fits together, you go back hundreds of years, thousands, to the same scene, to the same mountain, and you’re back in Genesis 22—the scene of another sacrifice, father and son. Leaving the servants behind, Abraham said, “If you folks stay here, the boy and I, we’ll go up. And then we’ll come back to you.”[9] I can’t wait to meet Abraham. I want to say to him, “You know, when you said, ‘We’re coming back,’ what did you really think? I mean, what was going through your mind as a dad?” Because he is taking his boy, for whom he had waited all these years, his wife Sarah keeping him forever and ever and ever before she gives him a baby. Well, that’s not Sarah’s problem; I know that. But they had a long time before they finally produced offspring. And then the word comes: “I want you to take your only son, Isaac, and take him to the mountain that I have appointed to you, and offer him as a sacrifice.”[10]

You take that journey up the hillside with your son—bright boy, strapping lad, helping his dad. “Dad, how’s it going?”

“Well, not bad.”

“Dad, we’ve got a problem. We’ve got wood. We got fire. We’ve got a knife. No sacrifice.”

And Abraham said, “Well, the Lord himself, he’ll get us a sacrifice, Isaac.”[11] What a moment! What an unbelievable moment!

And then he takes his son, and he binds him up. Did he have to fight his arms behind his back? I don’t know. If his son was the age of my son—twenty-four—I couldn’t do this to him. He can tie me up; I can’t tie him up. So, perhaps in the dawning awareness of it all, Isaac submits to his father’s will, and he’s laid upon the altar. And the knife is raised, and the voice comes: “Hey, if you look over there, you’ll find a ram caught in a thicket.”[12] And now you come forward all these years, and once again the hand of God the Father is raised above his only begotten Son. And the knife falls, and no one comes in his place.

My dear loved ones, this is not a mechanism. This is not a formula for getting into heaven. This is a flesh-and-blood reality. “Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place, condemned he stood,” and he “sealed my pardon with his blood.” Therefore, we say, “Hallelujah! What a Savior!”[13] You see, what he was doing was providing our only hope.

Paul, when he addresses us in 2 Corinthians 5, in a verse that has just become my companion now for months and months, even over a year… I set myself the task of finding out what 2 Corinthians 5:21 really means: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” That’s what’s happening. Our High Priest is our sacrifice and our substitute.

Well, with just five minutes, let me say a word or two by way of application. This is essentially the message that we proclaim. It’s a message that we ought to delight to proclaim, because it addresses the fundamental needs of the human heart. This message addresses men and women’s need for forgiveness. For forgiveness. Says James Denney, “There is something in [the] conscience that will not allow it to believe that God can simply condone sin.”[14] “There is something in [the] conscience” of a man or a woman “that will not allow it to believe that God can simply condone sin.” And all of us, if we’re honest, know that that is the case—unless we’ve reached the point where our “consciences,” as the Bible said, are “seared as with a hot iron”;[15] they’ve become cauterized; we’re almost immune to any sense of moral response. I would take it that none of us are there. Therefore, we know that Denney is right.

Therefore, since our consciences accuse us of sin, we’re going to have to do something with it. Option number one: repress it. Shove it down. Stick it somewhere. Put it in the basement of your psyche. Drive it away into a closet somewhere, and just stuff it there, and wait for the volcano to erupt. The repression of sin only delays the eruption. It’s not an option.

Well then, we could rationalize it, couldn’t we? We could say, “I am prepared to admit that I am sinful, but I’m not half as bad as most of the people in my class. I mean, I’ve seen some people in my office. Those are big-time, you know… They are out there. But me?” Rationalize it we may, but again, our consciences don’t allow us to believe that God will condone.

Or we could run from it:

Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pick-up,
[And] take it [out] to LA,
[And] find a place to call my own,
And try to fix up
[And] start a brand-new day.[16]

That’s Neil Young from a long time ago. People are doing that all the time, running from it: “And I go running to the shelter of my mother’s little helper.”[17] That’s Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones—an earlier era as well. Running, running, running.

I spoke to a girl on the phone yesterday. I wasn’t trying to speak to her on the phone. I was trying to speak to a man on the phone. I ended up speaking to a girl on the phone, and I was on the phone for twenty minutes at least as she told me her life story, and essentially, her life story was this: “I have been running from God all of my life—running into alcohol, running into drugs, running into relationships, going anywhere I could to deny the fact that my conscience confronted me with my need for forgiveness. And,” she said, “the amazing thing is this: that in an Episcopal church in northern Virginia, I met Jesus Christ at the cross, and I discovered that repression is no good, and rationalization doesn’t work, and running from it can’t fix it. I just reckoned up to it. And suddenly, my heart was full when I realized that Jesus as my Priest had paid it all.”

Now, listen, Christian friend: you and I need this story too. We need to be told day in and day out that all of our acceptance with the Father is on the basis of the priestly work of Christ. If you and I cease to rest in the work of Christ’s priesthood, we will inevitably begin to rest in something else. If we do not believe ourselves to be justified by grace through faith on account of what another has done, we will very quickly slip into justifying ourselves by being a pastor, justifying ourselves by preaching sermons, justifying ourselves by listening to sermons, justifying ourselves by going along.

And when you meet somebody—especially if it’s yourself in the mirror—and you find that your notion to the living of the Christian life is determined by your activity, then listen to me carefully: the living of the Christian life is determined by his activity. It’s so simple, and yet it’s so wonderful. It answers the issue of forgiveness. It answers the question of sympathy. Scott Peck, in his book The Road Less Traveled—which I haven’t read from cover to cover; I bought it when it came out years ago, I made a stab at it, but I was a horrible failure. But I think I remember the first sentence. His book begins, “Life is difficult.”[18] Now, that almost guarantees going to the second sentence, doesn’t it? Because it reverberates in our hearts and minds.

And when I preach Sunday by Sunday to you and to the other congregations that come, I recognize that I preach to people that have come from all different places, but many of you are sitting, frankly, in quiet desperation. Quiet desperation. Oh, you don’t want to admit it. You’re not going to tell the person next to you, say, “Good morning. How are you? My name’s Joe, and I’m quietly desperate this morning. And …” No, you say, “Hey. I’m Joe! Yeah, oh yeah, going to the picnic? Great, yeah. Great, okay.” But maybe what you want to say is “I’m Joe, and I’m busted. I made a hash of my marriage. I don’t talk to my teenagers. My credit card is completely maxed out; it’s embarrassing every time I go in the bank. And I come in this place, and I play the game with everybody else. And I don’t know if I can talk to anyone, ’cause I don’t know if there’s a sympathetic ear around here. Everybody apparently is fine.” No, no! No, they’re not! Just scratch a little. Talk to me if you want to know anything. That’s fine. But talk to Jesus. He’s a Priest, and he answers the issue of the need for human sympathy for the disillusioned and for the unhinged, for the distracted, for the abused. And it’s not sentimentalism. It’s because he’s really human. It’s because he’s really God.

And finally, it’s a good story to tell because it addresses not only our need for forgiveness and our longing for sympathy, but it also addresses the issue of significance in our lives. I went to Starbucks at least three days this week—not in this area, a long way from here—went in, sat in the corner seat, and it happened to me again. It happens to me every time. Suddenly, I had a small group. I went back the second day, and the group had grown by 50 percent. I met John, Tim, Roger, Chris, and most of them told me their stories—just because it was six fifteen in the morning, and we’re all guys, and we’re all sitting there.

So I learned about the guy who developed the technology that went into the program that was here initiated in the Cleveland Clinic. I met the guy whose father’s been in real estate for a hundred years, and this kid, who’s now forty-nine, is really very rich, but he likes to act poor, and he rides his bicycle around. I met another guy who thinks he’s played every golf course in Ireland and bored me half to death telling me of every round he’s ever played. He was a dear guy from Columbus, as it turned out, and at one point told me that the “aviance” in Ireland was absolutely amazing. I interpreted that as an attempt to say the ambiance in Ireland was really amazing, and I just said, “An American.” So, there I sat. There I sat… (No, I didn’t. I didn’t.) There I sat with these guys.

And you know what came out of it? Eventually, all of them said, “If we can’t find a worldview that answers these questions, ‘Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? And does it even matter?’”—this is what they really said; this is what we came down—they said, “If we don’t have a worldview that can answer those questions, then we live without significance. If we can find a worldview that categorically answers those deep human questions, then we may live with significance.”

You see, our lives are like a bug on a windscreen. I mean, in terms… You know, even if you live for seventy or eighty years, in the scheme of things, it is so transient. It is so ephemeral. It’s not even recognizable in the vastness of the development of the universe. You wonder why it is, then, that people are groaning like bears and moaning like doves? Because they don’t know who they are, they don’t know why they’re here, they don’t know where they’re going, and they haven’t a clue whether it even matters.

And Christian, here, in a nice, kind, gracious, nonbombastic, honest way, here’s your mandate: Get back to Starbucks. Get back to the grocery store. Get back to the lab, to the office, to the schoolroom, and go tell everyone the news that the kingdom of God has come, and go tell everyone the news that God’s kingdom has come—that there is in Jesus forgiveness, that there is in Christ sympathy, that there is in the Lord Jesus the significance that comes from worshipping God in all that we do. “Aye, Jenny, he made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”[19] There’s significance.

Lord Jesus, thank you that you are such a great High Priest. Thank you for this truth, which we skirt around, which we fly over at a high altitude, which, if we had more time and better minds and more open hearts, we could unravel more of its mysteries. But for now, Lord Jesus Christ, may there be not a soul that leaves this place who does not rest in the shedding of your blood, bearing our sin and our estrangement and our alienation. For we ask it in your precious name. Amen.

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[1] Donald W. McCullough, The Trivialization of God: The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1995), 127.

[2] Hebrews 1:2 (NIV 1984).

[3] See Genesis 3:24.

[4] See Hebrews 4:15.

[5] Matthew 27:46 (NIV 1984).

[6] See Exodus 3:1–5.

[7] See Exodus 40:34–35.

[8] John 10:18 (paraphrased).

[9] Genesis 22:5 (paraphrased).

[10] Genesis 22:2 (paraphrased).

[11] Genesis 22:7–8 (paraphrased).

[12] See Genesis 22:13.

[13] Philip Paul Bliss, “Hallelujah! What a Savior” (1875).

[14] James Denney, The Atonement and the Modern Mind (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903), 80.

[15] 1 Timothy 4:2 (NIV 1984).

[16] Neil Young, “Out on the Weekend” (1972).

[17] Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “Mother’s Little Helper” (1966). Lyrics lightly altered.

[18] M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Touchstone, 1978), 15.

[19] Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson, written by Colin Welland (Warner Bros., 1981). Paraphrased.