We Have Been Sanctified By His Will
Hebrews 10:1–10 – Jesus Is Better
Fifth Sunday of Lent – March 22nd, 2026 (am)
Perhaps one of the deepest desires, or even the deepest needs, we face as humans, is the desire or need to be clean. To be pure. To be right. Or if we want to use a Bible word, sanctified. If we were to ask around as to how to go about becoming sanctified, or clean, or pure, or right, we might find a million different answers as to how one achieves this aim, but I’m confident that every person has an answer. Think back to your week - did you ever defend something you did? As though to declare innocence or purity? Did you ever rationalize something that happened that, in normal circumstances might’ve been wrong, but in this case was defensible and therefore you weren’t really at fault, or you weren’t really dirty? How are you, believer and unbeliever alike in the room this morning, how are you made right? How are you made clean? By what standard are you measuring your life to determine your eternal status?
To an audience facing immense pressure to turn back to Judaism amidst the intense persecution of Christians, the author of Hebrews has been reminding his readers of why Jesus is better, why every aspect of the new covenant He sets in motion is superior to the old. In today’s text, the author will continue by adding another layer, comparing the sacrificial system under the old covenant with the new covenant initiated by the sacrifice of Jesus himself. And, like has been done before, the author will use the Old Testament itself to show it, the sacrificial system under the law, was pointing all along to Jesus, and that is where, and only where, we find full, complete, and final sanctification.
Our outline this morning falls into three sections you’ll see outlined in the bulletin - A Reminder, Not A Remover (1-4), Christ Came To Do The Father’s Will (5-7), and Sanctified, Once For All (8-10).
A reminder, not a remover
As has been done previously in this letter, the author gives the metaphor of a shadow vs. reality. The law had a shadow of the good things to come, but it lacked the true form of these realities. My mind went to several potential present day comparisons we might make - could it be like comparing a movie trailer to the movie itself? Have you ever been asked what is the movie you are most embarrassed to admit you’ve never seen? It’s a great ice breaker question. If you’ve been asked the question, have you ever responded with confidence that you’ve seen the trailer? Of course not. They don’t compare. Yet this analogy breaks down of course, as nowadays a trailer can make any movie seem appealing and completely disguise what might be a terrible cinematic experience (or vice versa). I also thought of someone jumping in on a conversation pertaining to travel to an exotic or popular location by adding that, while not having been themselves, they have seen pictures or knew someone who had gone. Imagine the look you’d receive. The picture you saw or stories you heard gave a sense of the place, created some categories for what it was like, but it is a categorically different experience having been there. Yet nowadays, the quality of photo and video can get us remarkably close to experiencing a location, even from afar. Or what about a person’s shadow? To those married in the room, how many of us knew we’d found our future spouse when we saw his or her shadow, or saw their silhouette in a dark photo? None of us? Why not? A shadow doesn’t help us get to know a person, does it? It alerts us to the presence of a person, which can bring comfort or fear, right? The shadow seen around the corner of a loved one whom you’re longing to see brings excitement, while the outline of a shadow outside your window at night brings fear - but in both cases the shadow communicates the presence of something without giving us anything tangible, or anything of substance.
However, we want to think about shadow, a movie trailer, a postcard, or a silhouette, hear the word foreshadow - the law had a pointing forward of the good things to come, but it did not have the true form of these realities. Don’t confuse the shadow with the true form. Like in each of the examples shared, once the true form has been known, experienced, seen, the shadow becomes irrelevant.
Lest it sound negative, let me be clear - this is not a bad thing. The sacrificial system outlined in the law was a God-given way for His people to be ceremonially clean in His presence. And in that it foreshadowed a reality of real cleansing. But while it contained a helpful shadow, a beneficial pointer, it lacked the ability to actually make its followers perfect.
The author says that it, the law, and referring to the sacrificial system, can never make perfect those who draw near. Why? He asks rhetorically, wouldn’t sacrifices have ceased since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But instead, the same sacrifices were continually offered every year. We see a contrast here between once and continually. The only reason something would be continually done is if the first, or second, or third, etc. time it was done didn’t accomplish, in a final, complete way, the intended result. If only we could mow the lawn or take out the trash once for all time, right? Repeated things need done because aims are not met or reminders are needed.
The sacrificial system under the law gave a shadow, but lacked perfection. It gave a reminder of sins, but lacked the removal of sins. Again, lest we be quick to diminish the help provided by the law, let’s think on the benefit of this annual reminder of sins. Think of the tangible reminder - the sounds, the sights, the smell - of slaughtered animals. Imagine if that animal was one raised in your own home - you cared for it and raised it. The emotional weight of killing an animal would have been a stark reminder of the presence of sin and guilt, of the need for repentance, the need to realign our lives in accordance with God’s ways, and the cost of forgiveness. These regular reminders served to clearly state that sin cannot simply be dismissed or ignored. Sanctification and cleansing before a holy God must be accomplished in order to be in His presence. And these sacrifices - the means through which God instructed His people to be near Him - gave physical, tangible hope for forgiveness and cleansing. In offering these sacrifices, the offerer could say, “God, I trust in your atoning of my sins, my sin is costly, forgive me and remove my guilt, I place my trust in the means you’ve provided for the removal of my guilt.” Sin was not just a problem for Israel; it’s a problem that every one of us in this room and in every corner of the earth must deal with and these sacrifices pointed towards the way to deal with sin before the Lord.
So, this reminder was not a bad thing, it was a good thing. But it was just that - a reminder. The sacrificial system under the law lacked the ability to remove sins. Why? It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Yes, without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins (9:22), but not just any blood will do. An animal sacrifice cannot remove the moral guilt of a human being. As one commentator said, “This was not the aim of the law - something didn’t break. It wasn’t intended to permanently remove sin. The spiritual value “lay in its being a material foreshadowing or object lesson of a moral and spiritual reality.” (F.F. Bruce) Animal sacrifices were never intended to remove the guilt and stain of sin - they were intended to foreshadow another sacrifice.
The sacrificial system of the law did a good thing in serving a reminder of sins, but the sacrificial system was powerless to make perfect, to cleanse, to make right those who followed its rules.
Christ Came To Do The Father’s Will
Where then does that leave us? The reality to which the law foreshadowed is here. Christ has fulfilled the law. As he has done so well throughout this sermon, the writer takes us to the Old Testament to support his point - even there it stated that the sacrifices themselves were not the aim. He could’ve gone to several locations:
In Jeremiah 7 (21-23) God says that when Israel came out of Egypt, His first words were not regarding offerings and sacrifices, but his command was to obey His voice and walk in His ways.
In I Samuel (15:22) Samuel says that to obey the Lord is better than sacrifice and to listen is better than the fat of rams.
Hosea 6:6 God says he desires steadfast love and knowledge of God over sacrifice and offerings.
In the opening chapter of Isaiah (1:10-20) God says the offerings are vain and the incense is an abomination; He hates the appointed feasts and cannot endure the solemn assembly. Why? His people are dirty with evil deeds, injustice, and oppression.
David writes in Psalm 51 (16-17) that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a contrite heart.
Proverbs 21:2-3 says that living out righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice. The Lord weighs, or evaluates, the heart.
And like in Isaiah, God says in Amos 5:21-25 that He hates, He despises their feasts and assemblies, that He won’t accept or look upon their offerings. Even the songs being sung are just noise; God won’t listen. What does He desire? Justice and righteousness.
All of these passages drive home a similar point - God desires obedience, righteous living, a heart inclined towards His ways - not the flesh and blood of an animal. If we make it about ‘the thing’, we’ve missed the heart, quite literally!
But instead of these passages, the author takes us to Psalm 40. A potential key factor in this psalm, and why the author chooses it here, instead of other passages, is the fact that “the king was involved in the Divine Service at the sanctuary. While he was strictly excluded from the performance of the sacrificial ritual in the Holy Place and the altar for burnt offering, he, as the head of the congregation and on its behalf (I Chr 16:7), presented offerings (2 Sam. 24:25; 2 Chr 8:12) and performed the song of praise to the Lord through the temple choir in the daily services and in the triumphal celebration of the Lord’s victories over his enemies.” (John Kleinig)
And so we see in Psalm 40, the king celebrates the Lord’s deliverance in his life and says the one who does not turn away to the proud or to lies, but who makes the Lord his trust, is blessed. The delivered king delights to do God’s will, His law being in his heart. The Lord’s aim in His deliverance was not merely sacrifices and offerings, but “an open ear”, an ear that hears, a heart that obeys. The delivered king goes on to proclaim what the Lord has done and continues to ask for His mercy, love, and faithfulness as “evils beyond number” surround him. The psalm closes with an eye on the great salvation of the Lord and a call to rejoice. The author of Hebrews attributes these words, originally penned by King David, to Christ, spoken ultimately at the incarnation. It was ultimately spoken by the King of Kings who leads His people in worship through the sacrifice of His own body.
Verse 6 of Psalm 40, or verses 5-6 of Hebrews 10, use four words - sacrifices, offerings, burnt offerings, and sin offerings - these represent the entire Levitical sacrificial system, the first two being more general terms and second two more specific. The repetition and precision drives home the point - the sacrifices themselves are not what God was after.
Careful readers of Psalm 40:6 will notice something different from how the author of Hebrews states it. In our English translation of the Hebrew, Psalm 40 says, “In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear.” Or, literally, “ears you have dug for me”. How then do we arrive at, “but a body you have prepared for me” here in Hebrews? A simple answer is that the author is using the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, and like any translation, includes an interpretive element. That said, I believe both translations lead us to the same place. An “open ear” refers to ears that listen and respond. “Ears that hear” we might say, or ‘be all ears’. This is an idiom we use today to refer to someone who not just hears, but who receives what’s being said and responds appropriately.
So, whether we use an open ear or a body…prepared [for sacrifice] both point in the same direction - surrendered will and complete obedience. Psalm 40, words ultimately spoken and fulfilled by Christ, tell us that the value in the Levitical sacrifices was not the sacrifices themselves, but the symbols they were for total devotion. That is what God desired, that is what He takes pleasure in.
“The history of Israel had shown the tendency for the sacrificial system to be regarded as an end in itself, becoming a mere formality. The need for fulfilling the will of God had been neglected, hence the pointedness of the psalmist’s words.” (Donald Guthrie)
“…sacrifice is no substitute for obedience. No offering is acceptable to God if it is not an expression of loving devotion. He cannot be bought by gifts. He looks for covenant love, righteous behavior and a contrite heart…‘[the value of sacrifices] was in what they represented.’” (Raymond Brown)
At the incarnation, when Christ came into the world, He took on a human body and demonstrated total surrender and obedience to the Father’s will. The ‘scroll of the book’ refers to the Torah. As foretold in the law, God required perfect obedience. A system was given to point to this perpetual need. Christ came to carry out this need as a human, in a physical body.
Sanctified, Once For All
And now, having quoted Psalm 40 and attributed these words to Christ, the author adds his conclusion: having stated that the sacrifices themselves, offered according to the law, were not the end, or the aim, but that Christ did accomplish the aim - namely, obedience to the will of God, in so doing He does away with the first in order to establish the second. The word ‘away’ (He does away with) is most often translated as killed, or death. The word can have a range of meanings, but it often means, ‘to take away’, or ‘make an end of, destroy’ or ‘remove’. Thus, the sacrificial system of the first covenant has been taken away, brought to an end, or we might say even killed or destroyed, through Christ’s perfect obedience as a man. The offering of his body, the perfect sacrifice, is not simply a supplement or add-on to the old sacrificial system - rather, it removes the shadow entirely and establishes a new covenant and a new system of being made right with God - the blood of Jesus.
And now, by the will, or desire, of the Father - namely Christ’s perfect obedience and death for sinners - we, we who are eagerly waiting for him (9:28), have been sanctified, cleansed. Not until the next time, not for 7 days, not until we mess up again, but once for all time. Jesus said it on the cross - it is finished. He didn’t give us a boost or help our cause - He did it all! This finality - once for all - has now been mentioned four times (7:27, 9:12, 9:26, and here).
Rephrasing verses 1-4, we might say, since the once-for-all sacrificial reality is here, those who draw near are cleansed, are made perfect, such that consciousness of sins doesn’t even exist.
Consciousness of sins doesn’t exist? Hold on. I not only don’t forget my sins, I remember what I’ve done all the time! It weighs on me, it clings to me. I think of my vast and many failings.
I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about God. In just a few more verses, which we’ll cover soon, the author again quotes the promise of the new covenant, spoken by Jeremiah, where the Lord God says, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” (10:17)
Christ’s offering on our behalf is so perfectly effective and final that all-knowing God tells us that in the new covenant He operates as though He has no remembrance of our sin and lawless deeds.
Conclusion/Application
So, back to where we began - given our collective need to be clean, to be righteous, to be pure, to be sanctified - how are you sanctified? How are you dealing with sin? What methods are you employing? I was convicted just recently, after a couple of days of feeling discouraged in my battle against sin - battling things I so wished I wasn’t battling - that I was hanging on to discouragement. And in so doing, there was an underlying belief that if I just ‘felt bad enough’, hung my head long enough, beat myself up thoroughly enough, that the sacrifice of myself, in a sense, would make atonement. I was failing to believe the promise that, in Christ, I am, once for all, sanctified. We can so easily look at ourselves through a lens of condemnation and ugliness instead of the perfection through which our Father views us in Christ. Do we believe, do we trust, that we are sanctified? Or if we haven’t put our faith in Christ, that we can be sanctified?
One commentator made this observation: “It has been suggested that even in some forms of Christian liturgy a “remembrance” is made repeatedly of sins to a point where the Christian’s sense of being constantly welcome in the presence of God for Christ’s sake is seriously threatened. There is a difference between the humble and contrite confession of sins to God and a morbid dwelling on sins already confessed and forgiven which might well call forth the Pauline reminder that “the Spirit you have received is not a spirit of slavery leading you back into a life of fear, but a Spirit that makes us sons [and daughters], enabling us to cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Rom. 8:15 NEB).” (F.F. Bruce)
Is our remembrance of sin a humble, contrite confession or a morbid dwelling on already confessed and forgiven sins? Unbeliever in the room, I ask you to seek the first. Believer in the room, avoid the second!
Are we living in a spirit of slavery, categorized by fear, looking at our unworthiness, or are we living under the Spirit of God, who seals us as sons and daughters of our Father and who reminds us that there is right now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus?
So, one question for us to ponder as we reflect on this passage is, how are you dealing with sin? How are you sanctified?
I think we also must ask what sort of sacrificial system we’re trusting for our sanctification. As was noted, the sacrificial system, which was a good, God-given system designed to remind God’s people of needful things, quickly morphed into rituals performed as ends in and of themselves. We see one manifestation of this in how the Pharisees in Jesus’ time seemed to externally follow the law to a T, yet missed the heart of it entirely and didn’t have any relationship with God. Each one of us is prone towards relating to God on our own terms. We love ‘graspable’ ways we can remedy our sin and right our standing with God. We love the things we can do ourselves. And we believe the lie that those things we do ourselves - giving to charities, donating our time, adhering to rules and regulations, abstaining from pleasures - that these ‘sacrifices’ these ‘gifts’ are what can earn us favor from God. These are the ways we’re forgiven and put in right standing before Him! We won’t say this out loud, of course, but if we’re honest with our hearts, it’s these things that can give us assurance and confidence each morning.
We must ask ourselves - what are those ways I’m inclined to forgive myself or justify myself as opposed to trusting the sacrifice of Christ? Friends, the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all, shows us two things we must hear. His offering of a perfect body, in complete obedience, eliminates any ability for us to point to good things we’ve done; they can’t compare. And second, the price He paid in offering Himself was so great that it can absorb any and all sin. We come to appreciate the cost not by minimizing or hiding our sin, but by owning it and confessing it, fully and freely. And we find, the greater our sin, the greater His mercy, grace, and forgiveness. Are you trusting in His sacrifice, once for all, or in your own sacrificial system?
And finally, a third question for us this morning, one that could be a sermon all by itself! - what does sacrifice look like in our lives in light of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice? Paul writes in Romans 12, that in view of God’s mercies, we, who have been sanctified by the offering of the body of Jesus, should present our bodies to Him as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to Him. And this sacrifice takes shape in the form of a renewed mind and a transformed way of living. So please don’t hear this morning that sacrifice no longer plays a role in the life of a Christian. Quite the opposite. The role of sacrifice for the Christian has two distinct realities about it though - the first is that it’s done in response, not to earn something. Our sacrifices are done in light of God’s mercies to us and in thankfulness to the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. Second, our sacrifices must be born out of the heart. The new heart spoken of in Jeremiah 31 must be the location of our sacrifices. The reality is, the things we’ve already mentioned that we can view as sacrifices - giving, serving, abstaining - these things have the potential to be easier than heart change! And when they are, we can deceive ourselves! We find ourselves checking the right boxes, yet still having cold and hard hearts, as is evidenced in countless sin patterns in our lives. That is exactly the warning we find in Scripture and the reason the author is pointing here to the superiority of Christ’s sacrifice - those sacrifices, whatever form they take, don’t remove sin, don’t improve your standing before God! He wants hearts of obedience!
My prayer this morning is that we ask ourselves how we’re dealing with sin, we reflect on the ‘graspable’ ways we try to find favor before God, we contemplate what true sacrifice looks like in light of Christ’s sacrifice, and that ultimately we see, yet again, the great salvation we’ve received. There is not a single thing we can or ever could do - Jesus has done it all.
As we turn our eyes to the Lord’s Supper, I want us to think on the word remember. We heard in our passage this morning that the sacrificial system of the law served as a reminder of sin, and in that it fell short - it didn’t remove sin. Jesus used this same word - reminder - when instituting the last supper. Here though, the reminder is not of something that needs to happen, not a reminder of what’s to come, but instead is a reminder of the removal of sin and its judgment, perfectly forever, for all who put their faith and trust in the sacrificial work of Christ for them. And so we remember with humility, contrition, and ultimately joy in what’s been done for us. Those who are trusting in themselves, who haven’t trusted in the work of Jesus, don’t eat and drink this morning, but please do pray about this and ask the Lord for forgiveness, and come talk with one of us this morning - don’t delay. Those who have trusted in this sacrifice, eat and drink with joy in your hearts. It’s been done for you, once for all.
NEXT SUNDAY: Palm Sunday: In Full Assurance of Faith, Hebrews 10:11–22