Today’s reading is Hebrews 2.
Does Hebrews 2:10 puzzle you a little bit? It does me. If Jesus was sinless His whole life, how can this passage say He was made perfect through suffering?
Because the author of Hebrews is not saying Jesus was made sinless through suffering. He is saying through suffering, Jesus became everything the Father wants Him to be and everything we need Him to be. Through suffering He became our sacrifice, our true High Priest, our source of salvation. This is illustrated in Hebrews 2:18. Because Jesus suffered when tempted, He became the One who can help us when we are tempted. He became what we need through suffering.
But notice the process. He became that total package through suffering. How many times do we say about our own walk with the Lord, “God can’t mean that. That would be too painful. Surely He doesn’t expect me to suffer like that.” Aren’t you glad Jesus didn’t take that approach? Don’t misunderstand. The point is not that everything God asks of us will cause us to suffer. There are plenty of joyous, happy, pleasurable aspects of serving God even in this life. However, let us not think we will become all God wants us to be or all our brothers and sisters need us to be apart from suffering. We are not made sinless through our suffering. No, we are actually made sinless through the suffering of Jesus. However, we will be completed and perfected through suffering. We will become what God has intended us to be through suffering.
This is a big part of why the Hebrew Christians were drifting. The non-Christian Hebrews were persecuting them. They were suffering. How tempting it was to back off from faithfulness to Jesus if it would save some pain. Yet, that is the path our Savior walked. And notice where it led Jesus. Because of the suffering of His death, He was crowned with glory and honor (Hebrews 2:9).
We will suffer. All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will. However, that is the path to completeness. That is the path to being perfected. That is the path to glory and honor in King Jesus. Hang on to Jesus through suffering just as He hung on to us through suffering. It will be worth it.
Tomorrow’s reading is Hebrews 2.
PODCAST!!!
Discuss the Following Questions with Your Family
- What are your initial reactions to the chapter and the written devo above?
- What kind of sufferings have you been through on behalf of Christ?
- What kind of sufferings have other Christians you know or heard of been through?
- What advice would you give to others to help us hang on to Jesus no matter what we suffer for Him?
- What do you think we should pray for and about in light of this chapter and today’s post?
Read the Bible 
“”For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” Hebrews 2:10.
BELIEVING THAT GOD foreknoweth all things, we cannot but come to the conclusion that he foreknow the fall, and that it was but an incident in the great method by which he would glorify himself. Foreknowing the fall, and fore-ordaining and predestinating the plan by which he would rescue his chosen out of the ruins thereof, he was pleased to make that plan a manifestation of all his attributes, and, to a very great extent, a declaration of his wisdom. You do not find in the method of salvation a single tinge of folly (…) Once more, let me remind you that Christ is a perfectly successful Savior. I mean by this that, in one sense, he has already finished the work of salvation. All that has to be done to save a soul Christ has done already. There is no more ransom to be paid; to the last drachma he hath counted down the price. There is no more righteousness to be wrought out; to the last stitch he has finished the garment. There is nothing to be done to reconcile God to sinners; he hath reconciled us unto God by his blood. There is nothing wanted to clear the way to the mercy-seat; we have a new and living way through the veil that was rent, even the body of Christ. There is no need of any preparation for our reception on the part of God. “It is finished,” was the voice from Calvary; it meant what it said, “It is finished.”
Delivered on Sunday Morning, November 2nd, 1862, by
Rev. C. H. SPURGEON,
At the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
The sorrows of Christ lead to the birth of our saving daystar !
“Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain…”
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1897
LikeLike