He found it in the middle of preparing something else entirely, on a Thursday, and it stopped him for the rest of the afternoon.
He was working through Leviticus for a series and he was not expecting anything. It is a book he knows well and he had a clear idea of where the sermon was going.
And he came to the order of the day of atonement, which he has read a hundred times, and this time he actually looked at the sequence.
Aaron brings a bullock. For himself. For himself and his house. He offers it, and he makes atonement for himself, and only after that has been done does he go and deal with the offering that is for the people.
The priest is ministered to first. It is not a concession and it is not a nice idea that somebody had. It is the prescribed order, written into the day, before anything is done for anybody else.
He sat back in his chair on that Thursday and thought about nineteen years.
Because there is nothing in his week that has that shape. Not one thing. He arrives first and he leaves last. He prepares what other people will receive. In the service itself he is the only person in the building whose name is not on a list of people being prayed for, ministered to, welcomed, or fed, because he is the one doing all four.
He is not complaining and this has never once occurred to him as unfair. He built that order himself, and if you had asked him last Wednesday whether it should be otherwise he would have said no, quite firmly, and quoted something at you about servanthood.
What stopped him was not injustice. It was the sentence in Hebrews he went and looked up afterwards, and the word in it.
He ought.
Not: he may. Not: it is permitted. The priest ought to offer for himself, and ought is an obligation word, and for nineteen years he has been running an order of service in which the one obligation laid on the priest about himself simply does not appear.
The word is ought
Let me say what this is before we go on, and I will keep to it all the way down.
Nothing is being asked of you. There is no adjustment to make, nothing to build into a Sunday, nobody to arrange anything with. If a line of this turns into a task then it has failed and you should set it down. You are being given something and asked for nothing at all.
Here is the sentence.
And by reason hereof he ought, as for the people, so also for himself, to offer for sins.Hebrews 5:3
Read the shape of the phrase in the middle. As for the people, so also for himself.
The construction puts the two in the same category. It does not say the priest may also, if there is time, once the important part is finished. It says as for the people, so also, which is a phrase that makes the second thing the same kind of thing as the first.
And the verb governing both is ought.
And now read the verse before it, because it tells you why.
Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity.
The reason the priest is obligated to bring one for himself is not that God is being kind to him. It is that his own infirmity is what makes him able to have compassion, and a priest who never brought an offering for himself would gradually become a man handling other people's need from outside it.
So hear this, in a study on a Thursday afternoon: being ministered to is not the reward at the far end of your ministering, it is part of the order. That is not my rebalancing of your week; it is what His word lays on the priest as an obligation, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an ancient sequence and lays it beside nineteen years.
Now let me be careful, because there is a version of this that becomes another burden and I will not hand you one.
I am not telling you to restructure anything. Your instinct on Wednesday was not wrong: servanthood is real, and arriving first and leaving last is not a fault, and there is nothing in this article that says you have been doing it badly.
The thing I want you to have is much smaller and it is only this: the order you have been running is not the pattern. You have assumed it was. Nineteen years of a shape in which the priest never appears has felt like faithfulness, and the actual prescribed shape has him first, by obligation, before the people.
You have not been sinning by leaving yourself out. You have been working from a pattern that is not in the book.
And here is what that means about what has been happening to you anyway.
If the order in Scripture puts the priest on the receiving end first, then the receiving has not been optional for you and it will not have been absent. It will have been happening, in whatever way it could, without an order of service and without a slot and without anybody noticing, because God does not run an arrangement in which the priest is the one person outside the provision.
You have been ministered to for nineteen years. His word makes it an obligation rather than a permission, and the Holy Spirit is not the sort to leave an obligation unmet in a man who never once thought to ask.
The order has you in it.
Not at the end, not once the real work is done, and not as a kindness if there happens to be room. First, by obligation, in the prescribed sequence, before anything is brought for anybody else.
Nineteen years of a shape with no priest in it has felt like servanthood and it is not the pattern in the book, and you have not been at fault for running it, you have simply been working from a diagram that is missing a line.
And that means the ministering to you has not been absent. It cannot have been. God does not write ought into an order and then leave it unmet, and He has not run a nineteen year arrangement in which one man in the building was outside the provision.
Nothing is asked of you here. Nothing to restructure, nobody to speak to, no slot to build into a Sunday. That was the promise at the top and it holds. You are being told what the sequence actually says.
You are ministered to first, and that order was written into the arrangement rather than added later as a kindness. It is written that because of this weakness he is obligated to offer sacrifice for his own sins just as he does for those of the people (Hebrews 5:3), and for his own comes first in the sentence. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that sequence live in a person rather than sit in a commentary.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in whatever voice you have got tonight. Not one line here is my idea about you. Every one of them stands on His word, and it is the Holy Spirit and never the wording who makes a spoken sentence land in a person. The authority in them was given to you by Christ, who is in you, and it does not run out when you do. Speak to the thing, not about it. And whatever He does in the year ahead, He does in His own way and His own time.
- Order I have kept for nineteen years with myself nowhere in it, you are not the pattern. Hebrews 5 says he ought, as for the people, so also for himself, and ought is an obligation word and not a permission.
- Assumption that leaving myself out of the sequence was servanthood, in the name of Jesus you are put out of this courtyard. The prescribed order has the priest first by obligation, and I have been working from a diagram with a line missing.
- God, You are the One who wrote ought into that sequence and has never left an obligation unmet. Your Spirit has been ministering to me for nineteen years without a slot and without anybody noticing, and I am holding my hands open and taking it.
Hebrews 5:3
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