The New Covenant


Sermon by Cory Brock on October 11, 2020 Hebrews 8:1-13

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We are working our way through Hebrews on Sunday nights and we are up to Hebrews chapter 8. And really what we’re going to do tonight in Hebrews 8 is kind of the groundwork for the next two weeks. This is one of those passages, and I think you’ll see this when we read it, that needs a lot of explanation. And that means sometimes you have to preach these sermons where you’re giving background and explaining more and building up over a few weeks than necessarily pulling the heartstrings. And that’s what Hebrews 8 does. It’s a chapter that’s all about covenant. You’re going to see that word pop up here and there all over the passage. And you’ll see it especially in the fact that Hebrews 8 has the longest Old Testament quote found in the New Testament. It quotes Jeremiah 31:31-34, and that’s the longest Old Testament quote anywhere in the whole of the New Testament, and that’s a quote about the Old Testament’s prophecy of the new covenant.

When you read the Bible, you get the sense as you start to work through it, that covenant does for us the exact opposite of what sin does to us. Sin comes in and fractures everything. Sin destroys. Sin causes chaos. Sin works from the inside out and rips us apart. And covenant is what God does to put us back together again and to put existence, really, back together again. And so let’s pray and then we’ll read this great chapter.

Father, we ask now for the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, that You would, Spirit, come down and meet with us now, that we would know Your presence as we read and think through Your holy Word. Speak, O Lord, we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

So let’s read Hebrews chapter 8 together:

“Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.’ But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.

For he finds fault with them when he says:

‘Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue in my covenant, and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord:  I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.’

In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.”

This is God’s holy Word.

Well you saw it right there at the very end of the passage in verse 13. It says the new covenant has made the old covenant obsolete. And so Hebrews 8 leads you to four questions or four things, really. The first is – What a covenant is. We have to know what a covenant is. Second – What’s the point of a covenant? Third – What the new covenant does. What does the new covenant do? And finally – How does it change us?

What is a Covenant?

So first – What is a covenant? And if you’ve been around for the Hebrews series, when you hit chapter 7 and work through chapter 10 you start to get the sense of why the book of Hebrews is called Hebrews, because this is an incredibly Jewish text. It’s spoken by a Hebrew, by a Jew; preached by a Jewish Christian to Jews in the first century. And it’s talking all throughout 7 to 10 about the Israelite system. So we get texts that’s all about priests and sacrifices and temples and law and bulls and regulations and cleanliness and clothing. It’s talking about the things of the Old Testament. But underneath all that, all the detail, is the framework of covenant. This is all covenant talk, everything that we’re reading about in all these different details. And when you open the Bible, as soon as you start to read Genesis 1 and you go forward from there, you start to see covenants popping up, all throughout the Old Testament. And you quickly learn – if you pay attention and read through it and see these covenants – that the only way, the only way to relate to God is to relate to Him by means of a covenant. Are you in a relationship with God tonight? And if the answer is “Yes,” then that’s because of covenant. The only way to relate to God is through a covenant.

So what’s a covenant? Well, it’s a relationship. It’s a relationship. And if you lived in the ancient Near East in the time of the Old Testament or you lived in the first century when Jesus was alive in the Greco-Roman empire, you would have been immersed in a world of covenantal relationships. People were making covenants all the time, all around, but we don’t live in that world. And in our world, we’re not immersed in covenant relationships as much as we are immersed in market relationships and consumer relationships. That’s the primary relationship that we see all around us.

What’s a covenant relationship? And here’s just a basic, rough, general definition. A covenant relationship is “a radically loving vow to lose individual freedom for the sake of a lifelong, binding relationship.” It’s a radically, self-sacrificial vow to lose your individual freedom for the sake of a lifelong, intimate, loving relationship. Covenant is enduring, it’s secure; it creates trust, it creates safety, it creates intimacy like no other relationship can. It’s the meeting place between law and love, covenants are. Because it’s on the one hand legally binding and sacrificially loving at the very same time. It’s where law and love truly come together in a relationship. That’s what covenant is. That’s what covenant does. It’s when you say, “I will give myself to you in an enduring, ground altering sort of way.”

And that means there is a difference in covenant relationships and contract relationships, market relationships. A market or contract relationship is where the individual needs of each party are more important than the relationship itself; where independence is prized above self-sacrifice, above the union in the relationship.

Let me give you an example. At our house we have grown to really like Costco. It’s beat out everything else for us. And when you go to Costco, we go once a month and just load up and try to cover six people for the whole month from one trip. And you just have this massive cartload of goods. And you take it up to the front and you’re just pushing this thing and it weighs so much and you get there and when you see the person at the checkout – what happens? You enter into a relationship. Did you know? Every time you approach the checkout line you begin a relationship with that person. And what they say to you is, “Do you want to take all this stuff home that you’ve gathered over the last three hours around the store?” And you say, “Yeah.” Well if you want to take this home, then you need to stick that card in the machine and transfer symbolic money into our bank account. That’s what the person tells you. That’s a market relationship; a contract relationship. It’s where individual freedoms are prized. If you want to get out, if there’s something that you don’t like, if the price isn’t right, you say, “I’m putting that back. I don’t want it.” You can get out of a contract relationship.

In the Western world, in the Western world, radical individualism and a consumer economy have moved you implicitly, in our subconscious – this is the culture we live in – to treat covenant commitments often like market relationships. And of course we see this in the marriage economy, in the friendship economy, but even in our relationship with God sometimes this happens. Think about it. If you struggle, if we struggle to be consistent in prayer and we go through a season in life where we don’t pray very often, but then finally we find ourselves in that hard place, that difficult circumstance that’s risen up, and we go to God in prayer and we say, “There’s something that’s finally come into my life where I need You now, and I need you, Lord. I know I haven’t been in or abiding in communion, but I need You to get me out of this circumstance.” That’s treating a covenant relationship like a market relationship. It’s ultimately coming to God when you need an exchange of goods. And it’s something we all, as human beings, struggle with.

Look, Hebrews 8 comes to us and says that the underlying truth of history, the underlying truth is that God has chosen to truly covenant with human beings. He binds Himself to humanity. God makes an enduring commitment to people. That’s what Hebrews 8 is telling us. He initiates, He pledges, He swears by His own self, His own character. He does this. You see, the reason we have covenant relationships between humans is because God invented covenant. God determined that He would covenant with us and that is the only reason covenant relationships exist between us. God did all this first. This type of relationship is what God chose to have with humanity.

And really you could say that He does it twice in all of history. God makes two covenants with human beings in all of history. The first is when you open Genesis 1 and 2. You see God say to every single human being through Adam, through Adam, through the first Adam, “I am covenanting with you. Obey Me. Obey Me and I will be your God forever.” And humanity said, “No,” to that covenant. So then God comes again with a second covenant and He said, “The Father covenants again through a people, through the second Adam.” He covenants with all of humanity through the first Adam and then He comes again when we broke that covenant, when we rejected that covenant, and He covenants with a people through the second Adam. He’s only ever really made two covenants with people. The first we call the covenant of works. The second we call the covenant of grace.

What is the Point of a Covenant?

And before we flesh out a little bit of the details of that covenant of grace in Hebrews 8 we’ve got to then ask, secondly, “What really is the point? Why this relationship? Why does God do this?” And you can see that – or at least one way to get at this is to see the ground leads us to the goal of the covenant. First, when you look at the covenant, when you look at the fact that God makes covenants with people, the fact of the covenant tells us at least two things about God. The first is that God loves the world despite human rebellion. You can look at the covenant and you can say, “God is love.” We learn that when we look at covenant. God is a God of love. But on the other hand, we also see that when He covenants God will not forsake His own character of justice. You see, you can look at the covenant and you can say, “God is love,” and, “God is just,” at the very same time in the way that He relates to us, in the way that He relates to the world.

And what that means is that covenant destroys any one dimensional picture of God like we see in the minds of most Westerners. You see, a lot of people in the public square today think of God as a God of rules, a God of wrath, and a God of justice. And then there’s another group of people in the public square that think of God entirely as a God of love. God is a God of love and love is love and that is that. He loves everybody no matter what. And covenant comes through and says, “That is one dimensional!” The relationship God has made to the world of covenant comes in and says, “No, God is loving and just at the very same time.” God’s covenant, the covenant, is God’s “Yes” to us in the midst of our “No” to Him. And it means that God will find a way to be in relationship with you without shirking the justice of His own nature. The legal and love come together in the fact of the covenant.

And so God’s character then tells us something about what the goal of the covenant is. You see, God’s character – He is love and He is justice – the ground of the covenant, but the goal, the point – why? Why would God do this with us? Why would God choose the infinite, Almighty, to make covenant, to make a relationship like this with human beings? And we get it in our passage in verse 10. If you look down at verse 10, quoting from Jeremiah 31, he says this. “I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts,” and here it is, “and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” If you read through the Old Testament, if you read Hebrews 8, it couldn’t be clearer. What is the point of God making covenant with human beings? It’s this. What’s the point of Christianity? Why does our religion exist? It’s God saying, “I am making covenant so that I can come and I can be with you. I want you. I want to dwell with you. I want you to dwell with Me forever.” In other words, Christianity is the announcement that God has made a way to dwell with human beings. That’s the point of life – God with me; me with God. God with us; us with God. That’s Christianity. He has made a way. That’s the point of it all.

And that means, then, that all this talk of priest and sacrifice and temple is profoundly pastoral because it’s all about God saying, “I want to be with you. I want to dwell with you.” Human beings, by nature, know that there is a just God who we have sinned against and whom we desperately desire to be with forever. It’s built in; it’s innate knowledge of God, as we talk about in theology. And it’s for that reason why every single religion on the planet has a system for sacrifice, temple, and priesthood. Because those are all idolatries, but at the same time there’s a fragment of truth. We all know that there is a covenant God who we are made to be with and we’ve broken His laws and He is just. And Christianity comes in and says, “But He’s made a way and the answer is covenant.”

What Does the New Covenant Do?

And so third, let’s ask then, the details of our passage – what the new covenant is. That’s really what this passage is about, is God covenanting with us in the new covenant. Now if you were living in the first century when Jesus was alive, Jesus did this at least one time. In Mark 12, He took a denarius and He put it in His hand. And you can go see a denarius – denarii, I guess, is the plural. In the British Museum today there are some there and in other places. And on one side of the denarius there is a picture of Caesar, the emperor of Rome, and under it, it says, “Pontifex Maximus.” And that means in Latin, “High Priest.” And pontifax, the word “priest,” is really the perfect term in some ways because the Latin, what that truly translates to from Latin to English captures exactly the covenantal meaning of the details of the priesthood because pontifax literally translates to “bridge maker.” Bridge maker – in the priesthood, in the temple, in the sacrifices, and all the things that we’re reading about here is all about bridge making.

You see, if God’s point in covenant is to make a way to dwell, to reconcile Himself to humanity and to dwell with us humans, then there needs to be a bridge, a bridge where love crosses over justice. And pontifax means “priest;” in some sense means “bridge maker.” The Biblical term for it that we see in Hebrews 8 is “mediator.” We need mediation. And that’s why it’s talking about all this stuff. It’s all covenant language to the effect of bridge making. God covenants and comes to dwell with us by way of temple, sacrifice, and priesthood. We see that over and over again throughout the Bible.

Here in Hebrews 8 it’s talking about how He does that in terms of the old covenant and the new covenant. In the old covenant and the new covenant, the first thing to say here when you read this passage, is that both the old covenant and the new covenant have all these elements – temple, sacrifice, priesthood. In the old covenant you have a priesthood. The Aaronic, Aaron’s priesthood. You have a temple built in Jerusalem or a tabernacle that moves with the people of Israel. You have a sacrificial system under Moses, the blood of bulls and goats. You have all that. But in the new covenant here, what we’re being told is there’s a deep continuity. You have a priesthood, you have a high priest, you have a temple, you have a sacrifice. The elements are the same. There’s a deep continuity here. And what we learn is that this is all the old and the new covenant that we’re learning about in Hebrews 8 is all part of one gracious covenant, one work that God has always been doing. It’s always been the same work. It’s always been about one thing.

But you’ve got to notice in what God is doing – the discontinuity. And that’s really where Hebrews 8 focuses in on, what’s discontinuous, what’s not the same about the old covenant and the new covenant. And the first thing to say is this. The new covenant comes in, Hebrews 8 tells us, and solves an old covenant, an Old Testament conundrum. And you can see it here in Hebrews 8 verse 8 and 9 quoting from Jeremiah 31:31 and 32. And this is what it says. He finds fault with them, God does, when He says, “Behold, the days are coming, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not like the one I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand. For they did not continue in my covenant and so I showed no concern for them.” Look, when God rescued Israel out of Egypt across the exodus, He brought them to Mount Sinai. And what He says to them is, “I have saved you. I have rescued you. You are My people. You are My treasured possession. You are My covenant people. I will not leave you. I will not forsake you.” And then just a few verses later, He comes and says, “If you obey and you keep My covenant, then you will be My treasured possession, you will be My people forever.” And so first we have this language of unconditional covenant where God says, “I’ve saved you. I’ve rescued you. You’re going to be My people. Unconditionally.” And then three verses later He says, “If you obey and if you keep My covenant, then you will be My treasured people forever.”

And all throughout the Old Testament when you read it, sometimes it seems like God is saying, “This covenant I am making through Moses is completely unconditional.” And then sometimes it looks like it’s saying, “But you’ve got to obey it. If the priests don’t do the priesting work and if the people worship idols, then I’m going to leave you forever as well.” It seems, sometimes it seems unconditional and sometimes it seems conditional. And the question is, “What is it?” Hebrews 8. Hebrews 8 comes in and says the new covenant comes in to solve the great conundrum. You see, if the covenant was completely conditional, if God came to be in relationship with us upon the grounds of our obedience, then all we would have is legalism. It would just say, “Obey Me fully if you want to be accepted.” But if God came, on the flipside, and said, “I’ll be your God no matter what you do, no matter how you live,” then that would be cheap grace, that would be easy believism. “I’ll accept you no matter what you do, no matter what idols you worship, no matter what god you believe in.” That would be cheap and easy grace.

The new covenant comes in and asks, “Is the covenant that God made – the covenant of grace – to humanity, unconditional or conditional?” Yes. Yes. You see, the new covenant says it’s unconditional for us because it has been conditioned upon Him, the second Adam. Unconditional for us because all the conditions that we were wrestling with in the Old Testament have been placed upon Him, the second Adam. You see, the Old Testament, in the one covenant that God has been outworking throughout history, has always been building to that answer – unconditional for us because it’s conditioned upon Him, the second Adam.

Now that means – well how? Second part of point three – “How?” Well look at what you’ve got here. The language in Hebrews 8 – we’ve got priests, we’ve got temples, we’ve got sacrifice. We’ve got the same types of things we saw in the old covenant appearing here in the language of the new covenant. So if you just look at verse 1, the old covenant had a high priest, verse 1, and the new covenant has a high priest. And if you have a Bible you can look back just a few verses to verse 25 to 27 of chapter 7. It says in the old covenant the high priest, in the old covenant, he would get old, he would die, and as every SEC coach always says, “The next man up.” He gets injured, he dies, the next man comes up. And that’s how the old covenant priesthood worked, the high priest. He would die and the next guy would take his place. It says in the old covenant, the old high priest. When he would enter into God’s presence, he was guilty. He needed to make sacrifices for himself to be able to work as a bridge maker between God and the people. He was not innocent. He was not holy by nature. Hebrews 8 comes in and says, “But we have a high priest, we have a high priest whose work is so completely effective because He is both holy and indestructible. He’s sinless and death could not hold Him.” We have a high priest now, a final high priest – it’s just like the old covenant had, but better.

Or secondly, you’ve still got a temple. Verse 2 and 3 talk about this. You’ve still got a temple. What is a temple? A temple is anywhere that God chooses to dwell. That’s a temple. Wherever God chooses to dwell. In the old covenant, what was the temple? The temple was a confined space, an individual building where God would come and reveal Himself to one man, the high priest, usually once a year. It’s confined. But what Hebrews 8 says is, “Yeah, you still have a temple, but that temple in the old covenant was only a copy. It was only leading up to the bigger truth which was that the heavenly temple where God dwells, you now have a high priest who entered the temple forever, who dwells in the presence of the Godhead, who is God Himself, who can constantly mediate, who can be our intercessor forever. It’s the real one. It’s the place where God really dwells, not a building on the earth but the heavenly throne room of God Himself.”

And then third, we still have – what we do have? We still have a sacrifice – 7:27 all the way through 8 picks up on this. He has a better ministry, a more excellent ministry. Why? Why? Because the true High Priest offered His own holy self in the heavenly temple before the true and living God in perfect holiness to satisfy God-defined justice. You see, look, in the old covenant you had many, many, many sacrifices for some people. Everybody had to come and bring their bull and their goat and their turtledove. You had a lot of sacrifices with a lot of different priests for some people. In the new covenant, you have a once for all sacrifice with one priest, never, never to be enacted again. The cross is once for all. He died for all His people. We’ve moved from many for some to once for all – old covenant to new covenant.

See, we need the bridge making. We need the temple. We need the sacrifice. We need the priest. It’s just that Jesus Christ is the finality of all those elements that we read about in the Old Testament. He’s always been the point of the old covenant elements. It’s always been about moving towards Him. Is the covenant of grace unconditional or conditional? And tonight, His promises, His grace, is “Yes” to you. It’s unconditional for you because the perfect, holy, indestructible High Priest made Himself the once for all sacrifice satisfying all the terms of the covenant for us. Unconditional for us because it was completely conditioned in Him. He did it all, from top to bottom.

Do you remember – before we step into the last point – do you remember when Jesus uttered the words we read about here, Jeremiah 31? There was one moment in Jesus’ ministry when He also quoted from Jeremiah 31 like we’re reading about here in Hebrews 8. It was the night that He was betrayed. We read the words this morning. He looked up and He said, “This is the new covenant in My blood.” In other words, what He was saying is that what was about to happen when His blood was to be poured out upon the ground, all of this was to be – all this stuff that we’re talking about – it was all to be enacted, the better promise. That day, that afternoon in the middle of history, that one afternoon when it became dark, in the middle of history He died, He was cursed for us, He was sacrificed, and at that moment He enacted all of these promises, a better promise. The union of love and justice, of the legal, of God’s character of justice and His love for us. He enacted, He completed it. The covenant was conditioned upon Him so it could be unconditional for us. He made the whole move. He went to great lengths to bind Himself to us.

And you know, if you ask the question, “Why?” – Josh asked this earlier – if you ask the question, “Why?” then the only answer you can give is, “He loves us. He loves you.” And then if you ask, as once when I was in seminary at RTS, a professor wrote on the board, “Why does God love you?” and all these students gave all these answers, very high-level pontification of answers about election and providence and as detailed as you can get. And then he wrote this line under it. He said, “Why does He love you? I don’t know.” Because He loves you. He loves us. He loves us in Jesus Christ.

How Does the New Covenant Change Us?

Finally, fourth – how it changes us, very briefly. Let me just mention two things, there are more, but the new covenant, we’re told here, does two things to us. And the first thing you see, if you have a Bible you can see in 7:25, just the end of chapter 7 and all of chapter 8 are really one unit. And in 7:25 it says that this high priest in the new covenant, at his death, has secured for us “utter salvation.” And that’s not a cattle reverence, “utter salvation.” If you go down to chapter 8 verse 12 you see him explain it when he’s quoting from Jeremiah. Chapter 8 verse 12, “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities and I will remember their sins no more.” So it says the new covenant has gotten for us, for God’s people, utter salvation, which is that He will remember our sins no more. In other words, in the new covenant what you have is a level of freedom from guilt and condemnation like no one in the Old Testament knew. What you have here is a level of freedom from guilt like had never been seen before in the history of humanity, the day that Christ died for us.

It’s utter forgiveness because of a completely effectual sacrifice. The new covenant – you get this by believing. Let me say it provocatively. Are we saved by works in the new covenant? And the answer is, “Yes, indeed, but they are not ours.” Yes, indeed, we are saved by faith in the work of the final Priest. He did it all. We are saved by His works through our faith in Him, the instrument of receiving the promises of this new covenant. And so the new covenant has to ask us all the most simple question. You have to ask it. The new covenant asks, “Do you believe this?” You get this by believing. You get the better promises by faith and faith is saying, “Look, on the one hand this is fact, this happened, this is real.” And on the other hand, faith is saying, “I rest in this. I trust in this. This is my God. This is the covenant for me.” That’s faith. You get this by faith. Do you believe it? Do you have faith in this? The new covenant asks that. And if you do, what it promises is that you are free from guilt and condemnation. Full stop. What happened yesterday is for yesterday, according to the new covenant. It cannot bind you. What you did and what you did not do, yesterday is yesterday. It’s gone in the promise of the new covenant.

The second thing and the last thing is this. You see it in chapter 8 verse 10 when he’s quoting from Jeremiah 31:32. He says, “This is the covenant I will make after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law into their minds, I will write it on their hearts, I will be their God and they will be my people.” Paul has a section in which he talks about the new covenant in 2 Corinthians 3 and he calls it the covenant of the Holy Spirit. And the way that’s fleshed out is by what Jeremiah 31:32 is saying right here. God says in the new covenant, “I’m going to write My law upon the human heart.” In the old covenant, how did He write the law? He wrote the law on tablets of stone on top of the mountain. But in the new covenant when Jesus Christ comes He’s going to write the law on the hearts of believers. He’s going to write the law on our hearts. What He means by that is that He is going to send the Holy Spirit to dwell with us, to speak to us, to teach us the way.

You see what this is saying? If you have the new covenant promises, if you are a member, if you believe in Jesus Christ, then this is saying that you have the Holy Spirit with you. Whereas the temple was confined in the Old Testament – Jerusalem, one city, one building – you, we have become the temple of God in the New Testament. And you see what that’s saying. If the temple is God’s sacred dwelling place and we have become a temple, then we’ve got to live sacred lives. The law has been written upon our hearts. In other words, new covenant people are all about faith and all about holiness. They’re all about faith and they’re all about holiness. In other words, we can’t be legalists. The new covenant will not let us do that because it tells us it is utterly gracious, utter salvation – you are forgiven by the works of the High Priest, not your own at all. You can’t be a legalist. But on the other hand, it will not let you embrace easy believism either. It says, “Look, the Holy Spirit has come to live with you. He’s come to change your heart from the inside out. He’s come to write the Ten Commandments not on tablets of stone but in the tablets of your heart.” It’s a calling to live out of that. It’s both faith and it’s holiness. It’s Gospel and then it’s a new law – the law of Jesus Christ.

The last thing. You know that you have the Spirit working on your heart when you move from needing to obey in order to not get struck by lightening, that’s paganism, or “Get Out of Wrath Free” card, that’s easy believism – into believing this and obeying because you want the glory of God, you want the face of God, you want in seeking the face of God to find the good for your own life. That’s when you know that the Holy Spirit is working, that the Holy Spirit is changing you from the inside out. Martin Luther said, in the time of the Reformation, he said, “Believe in Jesus Christ and do whatever you want.” Because you see, if you’re believing in Jesus Christ and you’ve got the Spirit changing your heart, then your actions will flow from a changed heart. You just do whatever you want. Believe in Jesus Christ! If you’re following the way of Christ then you live the way you want because you’re living in the way of Christ. That’s what he said. In other words, covenant says to every single one of us tonight, God made the first move. He made the whole move. He made the whole move. God has gone to great lengths to bind Himself to us. And so we tonight, if we believe this, are called to give ourselves to Him, to surrender, to be self-sacrificial, to surrender ourselves to Him. We know an unconditional salvation and this very week we are called to surrender ourselves to it in the pursuit of God’s holiness.

Let’s pray together.

Father, we ask for this. We ask that we would have hearts first that believe the facts of the covenant, that believe and long to trust and rest and reside and abide in the facts of the covenant that Jesus Christ would truly be our rest and our treasure. And from there, Lord, that we would want the heart of Christ in our heart, that we would want the things that You want, Lord. Make this our hearts. We ask for the presence of the Spirit in each of ourselves, in our church community, in that the Spirit would be poured forth in the city as we go out to our respective places of home and work. We ask for this heart and this movement of the Spirit in Jesus’ name, amen.

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