Hold Your Breath

Hebrews 4:14–16

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• "a great high priest who has ascended into heaven"
• "unable to empathize with our weaknesses"
• "tempted in every way, just as we are"
• "approach God's throne of grace with confidence"

Applying the Word to My Life:
Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest of Israel walked through the great curtain into the holy of holies. He brought blood. He carried the names of the twelve tribes on his shoulders. The people stood outside and waited. Whether he came back out was the whole question. He went in. He came out. The people went home. Eleven and a half months passed before the next visit.

Now we read that the picture has been completed. We have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven. The curtain has been crossed. The High Priest has gone through. And He is not coming back out — because He doesn't have to.

For a long time I read that as a contrast of frequency. Once a year, now always. Now I read it as a promise.

We are wholly dependent on God — we have no existence outside of Him. You came into existence because God thought you into existence. If He stopped thinking about you, that existence would end. Sit still for a moment. The next breath you take will be His decision before it is your body's. If He looks away, the whole thing stops.

That is what completes the contrast. The old priest could only intercede for the people's sins on a single day. The new High Priest is doing something underneath all of that. He is not visiting on your behalf. He is staying — and the staying is the reason you are still here to read this.

Earlier this week we stood with Paul on the beach at Miletus. He knelt with the elders. He embraced them. He commended them to God and to the word of His grace, and then he boarded the ship. His love for them did not get on the ship with him. It abided across the water. He prayed for them. He wrote to them. The abiding is what made the absence bearable.

But Paul slept. Paul got busy with the next church and the next storm. The Ephesians kept breathing whether or not Paul was thinking of them at any given moment. What kept that scene from being a tragedy is that God was doing what Paul could not. The Ephesians were not depending on Paul's memory of them to keep existing. They were being held in being, breath by breath, by the One who had already gone through the curtain and was staying there for them. Paul's love through absence is the faint human echo. God's continuing presence at the throne is the thing itself.

Which changes how we hear the verse at the end. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence. Most of us, on our hardest days, pray like we are knocking on a door — hoping the One inside notices we are there. Hebrews is telling us something stranger. The door is open. The One inside has been thinking of you the whole time. You are not getting His attention. You are responding to attention that has been holding your lungs open through every breath you have taken today.

So when you go to Him today — with the weakness you have been hiding, with the question you have not been able to ask, with the thanks you have not slowed down to give — go without apology. The room is occupied. It has been all along. Every breath in your lungs is the proof.

He has been thinking of you and holding you in His heart all along. Will you bring Him what you have been carrying alone?

My Response for Today:
Today I will pause once, notice my next breath — and bring what I have been carrying alone to God.