An Introduction to God, part 16, is a bridge message about Jesus Christ as the pure and perfect sacrifice, and about living your life by a compass instead of a clock. Dr. William P. Hohman teaches that Jesus came to replace a performance-based relationship with God with a destination: we are made righteous by one offering, so we stop measuring ourselves and start heading where God is taking us.
Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a clock-versus-compass comparison, a timestamped outline, and practical steps for walking in what the perfect sacrifice has already given you.
Sermon at a Glance
This message comes from the An Introduction to God series at NTC Ministries, which walks through the redemptive names of God. It was posted on March 12, 2024, in the weeks before Easter, and runs about 76 minutes, ending with an invitation to salvation and communion. Pastor Hohman calls it a connection message: the week before he taught on Jehovah Gamola, the God of recompense, and at Easter he planned to teach on Jehovah Hoseenu, the Lord our Maker.
In between, this An Introduction to God message turns to the pure and perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ. God rewards everything done for His kingdom, always with interest, so no one can outgive God. Even Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before Him, and believers share in that reward.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Speaker | Dr. William P. Hohman |
| Series | An Introduction to God (part 16) |
| Main text | Hebrews 10:1–14 |
| Key theme | Jesus, the perfect sacrifice, gives us a destination instead of a performance |
| Length | About 76 minutes, ending in communion |
A Compass, Not a Clock
Pastor Hohman starts with a local habit: up north, people measure every distance in minutes. Many people live their whole lives that way. They judge themselves by their achievements, measured against their age and against other people their age: they are doing this by now, and I am not. That kind of measuring always leaves people feeling condemned.
His answer is that we have to live our life by a compass, not a watch. The only questions that matter are whether we are going in the right direction and whether we are still on course. When you reach your destination, the hiccups along the way fade. He compares it to childbirth: a mother forgets the pain because of the joy of new life (John 16:21).
He links this to Jehovah Rohi, the Lord my shepherd, who leads us in paths of righteousness (Psalm 23:1–3). Our part is to thank Him for who He is and what He does (1 Thessalonians 5:18), not for every bad thing that happens.
Life is a pursuit of a destination, not an accomplishment. God may give you a task along the way, but its real purpose is to change you. He uses the prayer tower built at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa: God did not need a tower, but He used a common task to change the people who built it.
Religion says that once your life is perfect, God will accept you and maybe hear your prayers. Jesus came to take that away. Because of Him we can come boldly to the throne of grace and find help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16), not when everything is perfect. When older people come to Christ and say they wish they had done it thirty years earlier, Pastor Hohman reminds them that God perfects what concerns us (Psalm 138:8).
That is not permission to be a sluggard; the willing and obedient eat the good of the land (Isaiah 1:19). But many Christians do not believe their own prayers are heard, so they try to gather enough people to “gang up on God,” hoping someone is good enough. Christianity, he says, is not about performance. If God gave His only Son, how much more will He freely give us all things (Romans 8:32).
| Living by a clock | Living by a compass |
|---|---|
| Measures life by achievement and age | Asks only, am I still on course? |
| Compares itself with other people | Follows Jesus toward the destination |
| Sin-conscious and performance-oriented | Righteousness-conscious through His work |
| Feels condemned and doubts prayer is heard | Comes boldly to the throne of grace |
| Sees tasks as the goal | Sees tasks as God’s tools to change us |
| Lets time corrupt the garden | Trusts the God of order to perfect it |
The God of Order, Not Disorder
Under the law there were 613 commandments, a work Pastor Hohman says no one could accomplish. Yet people still judge sin by performance. The Pharisees pointed out what they thought was sin in Jesus while lying and cheating themselves, and He called them whitewashed tombs, beautiful outside but full of dead men’s bones (Matthew 23:27).
Jesus, by contrast, reached His destination. On the cross He said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). Time, Pastor Hohman says, corrupts everything. He worked hard on his flower gardens for a family wedding at his house, yet this earth-cursed system eventually makes any garden look disheveled.
God is not like that. 1 Corinthians 14:33 says God is not the author of confusion. The whole universe runs like a clock for days, times and seasons, and Jehovah Sabaoth, the Lord of hosts, commands even the stars. What brings the most disorder is death. When Adam sinned, God had said that in the day he ate he would surely die (Genesis 2:17), and the pains of death came again and again.
When someone dear to you dies, you feel that disorder; we call it grief. But God did not take them. The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy; Jesus came to give life more abundantly (John 10:10). This orderly God, he adds, is why reincarnation is impossible. He is the God of all comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3).
Death is also a process, as lives get worse and worse. That was never God. He wants to supply all your need according to His riches in glory (Philippians 4:19). Pastor Hohman points to Haggai, where people lived in their own paneled houses while the Lord’s house lay desolate, and earned wages only to put them into bags with holes (Haggai 1:4–6).
The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:23). People who live by a clock stay sin-conscious, and condemnation keeps them from receiving. God’s thoughts toward us are of peace and not evil (Jeremiah 29:11). Others will try to talk you out of His will, but great peace have those who love His law, and nothing causes them to stumble (Psalm 119:165).
The law we now live by is the law of liberty. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, because the law of the Spirit of life has made us free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:1–2). It is appointed for men to die once (Hebrews 9:27), not daily. Paul died daily to himself (1 Corinthians 15:31), but believers are not meant to live in fear and striving.
The Law Was Only a Shadow
Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all (Romans 5:12). Every person is born with a corrupted nature, Pastor Hohman says, except one: Jesus. That is the point this An Introduction to God message is building toward, and he says we must look at it spiritually rather than through a natural view of birth.
Before turning to Hebrews, he adds a note on the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17). The first four are about us relating to heaven; the last six are heaven relating through us to people.
Not doing your job, he says, is stealing from your employer. And instead of coveting, we rejoice with those who rejoice (Romans 12:15), because it was our Father who blessed them. If our relationship with God is right, our relationships with everyone else will be right.
Hebrews 10:1–4 says the law was a shadow of good things to come, not the very image, and could never make those who approach perfect. Pointing to his own shadow on the platform, he says a shadow looks like you but is not you. The law showed what God wanted for His people but could not perfect them.
The answer to not walking in God’s blessings is to repent, which means to change your mind. It does not have to mean groveling at an altar. Your mind has to be washed by the truth, line upon line, and that is why he teaches the way he does. Had the old sacrifices worked, they would have ceased; the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. Instead there was a reminder of sins every year.
It is not possible, the passage says, for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Pastor Hohman explains that each sacrifice only covered sin; that is the idea of atonement. Even then the priest came out declaring God’s blessings, which is why he refuses to apologize for preaching blessing: the gospel is good news.
Some Christians still want believers to stay sin-conscious, weeping and waiting for judgment. His answer is that all judgment fell on Jesus at the cross, and God, as Jehovah Gamola did with Noah, will raise His people above the world’s confusion.
An Introduction to God’s Perfect Sacrifice: A Body Prepared
Christ’s death fulfills God’s will, and there is no more to do. Taking up your cross and following Him is not a burden but a cross of victory. Psalm 40:6–10 says sacrifice and offering God did not desire. The sacrifices were a huge object lesson that people cannot save themselves and need a Savior.
In that psalm the speaker is Jesus: “Behold, I come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do Your will, O my God, and Your law is within my heart.” When we believe, He puts His law in our hearts. Jesus proclaimed the good news of righteousness in the great assembly and did not hide it, and Pastor Hohman says that is why He was hated.
Hebrews 10:5–10 repeats the psalm with one key line: “a body You have prepared for Me.” You got your body from your mother and father, Pastor Hohman says, but the Father in heaven prepared the body of Jesus. Had He not, Jesus could not have been the pure and perfect sacrifice; He would have been born in sin like us. He takes away the first, the law, to establish the second, and by that will we have been sanctified once for all.
That is Jehovah M’kaddesh, the Lord who sanctifies and sets us apart for His purpose. Our part is to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold of eternal life (1 Timothy 6:12). Our actions still need tweaking, and He keeps changing us; even the job you want to quit was given to help you mature.
How did that happen? Luke 1:30–38 tells how the angel told Mary, a young woman engaged to Joseph, that she had found favor with God. She did nothing to earn it. The Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Highest would overshadow her. Mary answered, “Let it be to me according to your word.” Pastor Hohman says she was made pregnant by faith, by the word God spoke.
That is how believers receive too. You take a word, such as by His stripes you were healed (1 Peter 2:24), and it becomes a seed that gives birth to the fruit of heaven within you. Elizabeth’s greeting then fortified Mary’s faith (Luke 1:39–48).
Perfected Forever by One Offering
Animal blood cannot take away sin, but a body was prepared for the Son of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. On the cross all sin came on Jesus, and He cried, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). No one took His life; He laid it down to take it up again (John 10:17–18).
When you are born again, the change inside is dramatic. The problem is the mind, still on the clock system and blind to what the sacrifice of Jesus accomplished. Paul warns that those who measure themselves by themselves are not wise (2 Corinthians 10:12). Pastor Hohman’s answer is to set your compass: through His sacrifice you are the righteousness of God. Your actions do not match His, but He sees Jesus when He looks at you.
He then gives thanks for the redemptive names the series has studied, as he names them in the message:
- Jehovah Gamola: the God of recompense, who rewards and blesses everything done for Him.
- Jehovah Rohi: the Lord my shepherd, who leads in paths of righteousness.
- Jehovah Sabaoth: the Lord of hosts, the general of heaven’s armies, thanked for His victory.
- Jehovah M’kaddesh: the Lord who sanctifies and sets us apart.
- Jehovah Shalom: the Lord our peace.
- Jehovah Nissi: thanked for raising us above the tribulation of today.
- Jehovah Tsidkenu: the Lord our righteousness.
- Jehovah Hoseenu: the Lord our Maker, the theme he planned for Easter.
When those names are at work in us, we start acting with a better attitude and seeing people with better understanding, because the goodness of God leads to repentance (Romans 2:4). Then comes Hebrews 10:14: by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified. You messed up yesterday? Yesterday is part of forever. Satan will bring up what you did twenty years ago, but you have been perfected forever by one perfect sacrifice.
2 Peter 1:1–4 closes the teaching. Peter writes to those who have obtained like precious faith, the same faith that saw people healed in his shadow, by the righteousness of God, not by performance. Grace and peace are multiplied through the knowledge of God, not knowledge of the latest news. His divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness.
We are given exceeding great and precious promises, that through them we may be partakers of the divine nature. Never let anyone talk you out of those promises, he says. Let us labor to enter that rest (Hebrews 4:11).
Jesus did not come to stop the world’s problems but to bring a kingdom no one could imagine. Unless you are born again you cannot see the kingdom (John 3:3), but once born again, you see the goodness of God.
Living It Out This Week
Pastor Hohman invites anyone who has never given their life to Jesus to pray, saying now is the acceptable time (2 Corinthians 6:2). He tells of a toy company he once bought, which the Lord told him to name Big Kingdom Business, and says God wants to do big kingdom business with every life. Then the church shares communion. These steps come from the message:
- Check your compass, not your watch. Ask daily whether you are still following Jesus, and stop measuring your life against other people’s timelines.
- Stop ganging up on God. Pray with confidence that you are heard, because you come through the perfect sacrifice, not your performance.
- Treat tasks as training. Before quitting a hard job, ask what God is changing in you through it.
- Rejoice with those who rejoice. When someone is blessed, celebrate it as your Father’s goodness instead of envying them.
- Receive a word like Mary. Take one promise, say “let it be to me according to Your word,” and let it grow within you.
- Remember His sacrifice at the table. Take communion in remembrance of Him (1 Corinthians 11:23–26), thanking Him for His goodness.
Timestamped Outline
- 0:00 Recap: Jehovah Gamola, the God of recompense
- 2:17 Live by a compass, not a watch
- 5:37 A destination, not an accomplishment
- 11:45 The 613 commandments of the law
- 17:27 God is not a God of disorder
- 21:01 Romans 6:23 and sin consciousness
- 27:47 Born in sin, except Jesus
- 32:39 Hebrews 10: the law was a shadow
- 38:12 Psalm 40: I delight to do Your will
- 42:02 A body You have prepared for Me
- 49:20 Luke 1: Mary and the word of God
- 53:41 2 Corinthians 5:21: made righteous
- 57:52 Hebrews 10:14: perfected forever
- 1:00:38 2 Peter 1: precious promises
- 1:06:53 Invitation and Big Kingdom Business
- 1:11:19 Communion
Frequently Asked Questions
What will believers do first when they get to heaven?
Pastor Hohman shares a light moment from a prayer meeting where people talked about greeting loved ones in heaven. He says he will probably push right past his grandmother because he will be running to Jesus, adding that he would come back to her in a minute. His point is that death holds no disorder for a believer. It is appointed once, and when it comes you simply go into the hands of Jesus.
Is it wrong to save money if God provides everything?
No. He says it is good to be prepared for your life. The problem is a mentality that is more about storing up for yourself than building the kingdom. He points to Jesus saying the birds of the air do not sow or gather into barns, yet the Father feeds them (Matthew 6:26). If your focus is on storing rather than blessing others and building His kingdom, he says, you need to change your mind.
Should Christians think of themselves as worthless?
Pastor Hohman says he does not believe Christians should grovel like worms. If you were good for nothing, Jesus would never have died for you. He put great value on you, not because of who you were but because of who you would become in Him. Instead of one Jesus walking the earth, he says, there are now many believers who can carry the same confidence and fearlessness, even in the face of death.
Scripture References
All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:
- Hebrews 10:1–4 — the law was a shadow
- Psalm 40:6–10 — I delight to do Your will
- Hebrews 10:5–10 — a body You have prepared
- Hebrews 10:14 — perfected forever by one offering
- Luke 1:30–38 — Mary receives the word
- 2 Corinthians 5:21 — the righteousness of God in Him
- Romans 8:1–2 — no condemnation
- 2 Peter 1:1–4 — exceeding great and precious promises
How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.
Watch More Messages
If this message helped you see what the perfect sacrifice has done for you, there are hundreds more teachings from NTC Ministries waiting for you. Browse the full sermon archive and keep following your compass toward the destination God has for you.
