#5.

Access to God in prayer is one of the blood-bought privileges of the believer

Hebrews 10:19–20 Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the
blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is,
His flesh,

This passage from the letter to the Hebrews gives us a most important reason to pray - and it is
essentially this - "because we can".

The writer has spent much of the letter showing how much better the New Covenant is than the
Old one. Founded on better promises by a better mediator, with a better High Priest and better
sacrifices, in every respect the New Covenant outshines the Old.

But then the writer says something that we need to pay particular attention to. In Chapter 9,
verse 7-8, he shows that under the Old Covenant, access to the presence of God was restricted to
the high priest, once a year, on the basis of sacrifice. The way into the holy place (meaning
God's presence in heaven) had not been revealed while that first, physical temple was in use.

Now look at our text and see the situation we are in under the New Covenant. Our High Priest
has taken His own blood into the most holy place in heaven. Since His sacrifice is perfect and
completely efficacious for His people, He has opened up a way for all true believers to draw near
to God in the most holy place!

Here is one of the most sublime privileges that we have as believers. Access into the presence of
God. Before we came to know Christ, we were cut off from His presence and His anger burned
against our sin. Had we entered before Him truly, His holiness would have consumed us as a
burning flame. But now, not only can we come before Him, but we are welcome to do so and we
may even call this infinite Being, "Abba" - Father!

Once we have been Christians for a while, it is easy to get into two different but unfortunate and
even damaging frames of mind with respect to prayer. First, we come into God's presence
thoughtlessly, forgetting what God had to do and the price He had to pay so that we could come -
we take it for granted. Second, and worse, we can come to neglect this privilege altogether and
therefore to estimate it as having little value for us. That is the condition we are in when we
leave off praying. God wants us to come and has paid an infinite price to open the way for us,
and then we turn our backs on him and neglect such a precious privilege.

Think about these things in the coming week, and let's all renew our efforts first to appreciate the
privilege of access to God, bought with Christ's own blood, and second to make use of it often,
and respectfully - especially at the prayer meeting of the church.

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