The New Covenant  | Hebrews

Hebrews 8:7-13


I am going to read to you this morning from the book of Hebrews 8. We have been looking into this letter for a number of weeks.

And I want to talk about one of the main themes, one of the main climaxes, if you like, of this book as the writer takes his readers through all the issues in the Hebrew history and how that these issues have come to a fulfillment in Christ, which has transformed them and enriched them in a way that is deeper and more far-reaching in their lives.

And I come this morning to Chapter 8 where we read about the New Covenant. Let me read to you from Hebrews 8:7.

“If there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.

“But God found fault with the people and said, ‘The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.

“ ‘It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord.

“‘This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people.

“ ‘No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.

“‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.’”

That is as far as I am going to read.

And if we talk about the New Covenant today, it presupposes there was a dysfunctional Old Covenant, which this now is going to supersede.

God made covenants with people on several occasions in the Bible. God made a covenant with Noah that He would not flood the earth again.

He made a covenant with Abraham that his family, his descendants, and the seed of his descendants, which was Christ Himself, would be the means of blessing the world.

God made a covenant with Moses when, at Mount Sinai, He gave the law to Moses who took it to the people and they agreed to keep it.

But the effect was that this covenant only exposed the failure and weakness of the people. And it is this covenant made with Moses on Mount Sinai that is the covenant to be replaced by the New Covenant.

After Moses had spent time with God, he called up to him his brother Aaron and seventy elders of the nation of Israel. And it tells us in Exodus 24 that he took the Book of the Covenant (that was the law), the Book of the Covenant, and he read it to the people.

And they responded [vs 7],

“We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.”

Well, this was a very noble start, but when Moses came down the mountain eventually, carrying the tablets of stone on which were written the Ten Commandments, he discovered that in his forty-day absence that the Israelites had pooled their gold, had melted it down and built a golden calf and they were worshiping and having some kind of orgy around this golden calf.

And when Moses looked at the commandments in his hand on the two tablets of stone, the first said, “You shall have no other god before Me.” The second said, “You will make no graven image.”

And here were the Israelites making a graven image and worshiping it. And Moses was so shocked, do you remember, he took those tablets of stone that God had written with His own finger, and he smashed them on the ground and had to go back up Mount Sinai to get some more.

Moses was shocked because in his naiveté, when the people said earlier, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey,” he assumed they had the wherewithal and the capability of doing it.

But of course, they didn’t because the Old Covenant had a fundamental fault line that was running right through it.

In Hebrews 8:7 that we just read,

“If there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.”

What was wrong with it?

Well Hebrews 8:8 says,

“But God found fault with the people.”

The fault line that was running through the Old Covenant was not a fault with God – it does not say, “And the people found fault with God for giving to us a covenant that does not work,” but rather God found fault with the people by their inability to live according to that Old Covenant.

But this fault finding was a necessary process to expose to the people the depths of their need, the depths of their weakness, the depths of their inability, the depths, in fact, of their depravity.

And this was a necessary process in order to prepare people for what the New Covenant was really going to be that would transform all the failings of the Old Covenant.

And as a result, Verse 8,

“God found fault with the people of Israel and said…”

And then he quotes from the book of Jeremiah,

“The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.

“It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord.”

The Old Covenant met the inability, the frustrations, the failure of the people, and had the effect only of leaving them in that state of frustration.

So, the New Covenant is going to be based on a new principle, and the new principle is in Hebrews 8:6,

“The ministry Jesus received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.”

This New Covenant will be superior for this reason: it is founded on promises. The Old
Covenant was founded on obligations. The New Covenant is founded on promises.

And this is a vital distinction between the two. And if we understand this distinction, we will not fall back into Old Covenant living of the Christian life, which so many, many, many Christians do – by instinct almost.

You notice the Old Covenant was on peoples’ ability. So, the law of the Old Testament says this: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony. You shall not covet, etc.”

Now who is under the obligation of that law?

Well of course, you are, I am. “You shall, you shall, you shall, you shall, you shall.

But the onus of the New Covenant is on God’s ability. You read it carefully. “I will put My law in their minds. I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God. I will forgive their wickedness. I will remember their sins no more.”

The Old Covenant was all about “you shall,” and the obligation sat on the ability of the people. The New Covenant is all about “I will” and the obligation sat on the ability of God.

Anything based on obligation, “No, no, no I have to do this” and thereby on human ability, is going to destroy your Christian life or create a pseudo version that is basically religiosity dressed up as Christian, when it’s “I have to do it, I’m trying my best.”

It is the presence of God Himself within us; it is the power of God Himself. It is His transforming of our desires and transforming of our abilities that is the basis of Christian living.

Now the New Covenant that He quotes here from Jeremiah works from the final effect and goes back to the cause of that effect and then back to the cause of the cause of the final effect – there are three stages in it.

Let me just point this out to you. Look again at Hebrews 7:10:

“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.”

Now that’s the end result. The Lord God is going to be integrated into your heart and into our minds. “I am going to put it there,” says God.

How does that come about?

Well, the next stage says, Hebrews 8:11,

“No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest.”

So, the reason why the law of God is going to be written on people’s hearts is because “they will know Me, they will actually know Me.”

How will they know Him? Go back to the cause of that. Hebrews 8:12:

“I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

I am going to divide this up into those three parts. I am going to call, first of all, a new righteousness – that is the law of God written in our hearts – is created by a new relationship that we actually know God. And that is caused by a new redemption.

Let’s look at these three areas.

First of all, there is going to be a new righteousness.

“I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.”

It is the same law that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, but instead of it being an external law on tablets of stone – you might read them on the wall and say, okay, let me try and do them – it is going to be internal, written by the Spirit of God in our hearts and in our minds.

He even made clear that the New Covenant does not abolish the law of the Old Covenant. In fact, Jesus said in Matthew 5:18,

“Until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law.”

Not a dot from an i or a stroke from a t will ever disappear from the law. Why? Because the Law is a revelation of the character of God, the moral character of God, and therefore the Law is unchanging.

It is not an arbitrary set of rules designed to keep the people out of mischief or to force them to behave in a certain way. It is much more profound than that.

The Law expresses the moral character of God. It is the image in which human beings were first created in the Garden of Eden. We were created to be a physical, visible expression of what God is like in His moral character. The way Adam treated Eve, the way Eve treated Adam, the way they handled the animals in the garden, the way they went about their business was designed to show you what God was like, an exact representation of His being. That’s what it means to be in His image.

The Law was given to give a practical revelation of what being in God’s image will be like. So, when, for instance in the Law of God it said, “You shall not steal,” the reason is more profound than simply that it’s not nice to steal. It’s because God is not a thief and you were made to be in His image, so do not steal.

When He said, “You shall not bear false witness,” it is because God never tells lies and you were made to be in His image, so do not bear false witness.

When He said, “You shall not commit adultery,” it is because God Himself is totally faithful and you were made in His image, so be faithful and don’t ever commit adultery because that would be the moral expression of the character of God.

When He said, “You shall not covet,” it is because God is not greedy and we were made to be in His image.

When He said, “You shall not murder,” it is because God, though He has the power of life and death, does not arbitrarily murder.

Even when it says, “Six days shall you labor and on the seventh day do not work,” it tells us why: because God rested on the seventh day. Not because He was tired, as I have said before, but because He was finished. And the invitation is: live in the finished sufficient work of God.

And so, the law of the Old Covenant was given to reveal the character of God, but given only externally to the people. They could read it. They could understand it. They could see it. But they could not do it.

And so, Galatians 3:24 says,

“So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ.”

The King James Version there says,

“The law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.”

There’s the sort of image there - I think a very good picture - that the law taught us in such a way that it exposed our inabilities, it exposed our brokenness, it exposed our failure, it exposed our sin, not to humiliate us but to bring us to Christ. We might discover that what is impossible to me is possible to Him.

That’s why when you really come to Christ and you really see a transformation taking place in your life, as many of you have, and many of you yet will, you come in a spirit of failure, inability and sin.

And if you are not in that position of facing the inherent failures of my heart, the inabilities to live as I deep down really want to live, you won’t look for Christ, you won’t need to look for Christ.

But God, in His wonderful kindness and mercy will let you slip, slip, slip, slip until one day you say, “I can’t deal with this,” in order that you might then be pointed to Christ.

So now under the New Covenant it is the same law that was written on the tablets of stone, now in a different location – written in their hearts. That is, it becomes intrinsic within you.

To be written in our hearts means that our desires have been changed, the desires of our hearts. And the Scripture teaches us that that God works in us, both to will and to act according to His good purposes. He puts the desires within our hearts and then He puts the dynamic within our hearts that what we will, He enables us to do.

And there are many, many folks – and I have met many – many of you here today – and when Jesus Christ came to live in your life, it wasn’t a case of, “Oh man, I’ve got to stop doing these things I have always enjoyed;” you actually didn’t enjoy them in the same way anymore. You had new appetites, what Jesus called a hunger and a thirst for righteousness.

The word righteousness simply means rightness as depicted in the character of God.

Ezekiel gave a version of the New Covenant in Ezekiel 36:27,

“I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”

“I will put My Spirit in you. What’s going to happen? I’m going to move you, I’m going to lead you, I’m going to direct you to follow My decrees and keep My Laws.”

It is the same laws but now not fulfilled by simply human ability, but by the revolution that has taken place in our hearts where the Spirit of God is at work within us and the Law of God is placed within our hearts.

And so, the essential difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant is that the commandments under the Old Covenant have become promises under the New Covenant. The commandments of the Old Covenant are now promises under the New Covenant.

I have told this story here before but it is worth telling again. It is the true story of a man who was converted to Christ in a prison. He was in prison for stealing. He was a thief. And I think it was probably on the weekend, a Christian man had gone to visit him regularly and had some Bible studies with him in his cell. And in the course of time, he became a Christian.

When it came time for his release, one of the first things he wanted to do was to visit a church. He had never been to a church. And so, on his first Sunday of release he picked a church at random. He didn’t know what church to go to.

He went in, he sat down, he looked up to the front, and there on the wall of this particular church were written the Ten Commandments – five down one side, five down the other side.

He sat down and he looked up and he thought to himself, “That’s the last thing I wanted to see. I know my history, I know my failures, I know my weaknesses; the last thing I want to do is to read those laws that only expose me and condemn me.”

But as the service went on, he did read them. And when he read them, he realized he was reading them totally differently.

Previously he had read things like this: “You shall not steal.” It was a command. But this morning when he read it, it said, “You shall not steal.” It was a promise.

Previously when he had read it, it said, “You shall not bear false witness.” It was a command. This morning it said, “You shall not bear false witness.” In his heart he said, “Thank You.”

It used to say, “You shall not commit adultery.” It was a command. But this morning it said, “You shall not commit adultery.” It was a promise.

It used to say, “You shall not covet.” It was a command. But this morning it said, “You shall not covet.” It was a promise.

And he might have said, “Thank You Lord!” Why?

“Because that law is now in your heart, that law is written into your mind. I have put My Holy Spirit in you and He will move you to keep My laws and follow My decrees.”

And this of course is the marvel of the Gospel. The law worked from the outside in, trying hard to make us behave. And you can behave to a certain extent that way as long as you have got big enough punishments to make it worthwhile. The alternatives are worse than breaking that law.

And you know that because when you drive your car down the road, if there is no cop around, you are happy to go 140 km. an hour, 150 km. an hour because you know there’s no trade-off here. But a cop suddenly comes behind, flashing his light, there is a huge trade-off. You get fined; you get your insurance rocketing through the roof.

And so, with a big enough incentive, yes, you can keep the rule. Without incentive our hearts instinctively probably don’t.

So, the law which worked from the outside in is now replaced by the same requirements of the same law because of the moral character of God, but now fulfilled by the life of Jesus Christ inside of us by His Holy Spirit. And God creates a hunger and a thirst for righteousness.

God works in you to will and to act; one version says, to desire and to do according to His purposes.

And when we understand that and we take the New Covenant and go back and read the Old Covenant, we discover we have got a whole new set of promises we never knew existed in the Bible.

Some people have tried to count the promises. I picked up a book one day with something like 967 promises or something in the Bible. I wonder if these were there, you see, is there somebody here this morning who has a problem with stealing?

I have got a promise for you. It is written in Exodus Chapter 20, which used to be a command. It used to be written on stone. But now it is written by the Holy Spirit in your heart and it says, “You will not steal.”

That’s a promise if you live in Jesus Christ.

Somebody here who is greedy? I have got a promise for you. It’s in Exodus Chapter 20. It used to be a law written on tablets of stone; now it is written by the Spirit of God, that same law in your heart that says, “You shall not covet.” You will actually be satisfied with yourself and with your circumstances. You won’t be greedy.

Anybody here facing sexual temptations you feel you can hardly deal with? Well, here’s a promise. It used to be a command in Exodus 20 written on tablets of stone. Now same is a promise written by the Holy Spirit, “You will not commit adultery.”

Somebody here who gets all their priorities mixed up and get confused because of it? Well, here’s a promise that used to be a command in Exodus 20, written on tablets of stone, now a promise written on your heart that says, “You will have no other gods before Me.” Your work will not control your life. Your money will not control your life. You will have no other gods. All those other things will fall into place.

And these are to be received and appropriated by our trust in Jesus Christ.

But you may be tempted to say – and I understand this – well, that’s a bit unrealistic, isn’t it, - sounds good.

But read on to the next clause. The next clause, second part of Verse 10 [Hebrews 8:10],

“I will be their God and they will be my people.

“No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”

This new righteousness is created by a new relationship. It does not stand on its own. And this new relationship is that “they will know Me,” they will know God.

And you will find if you read Scripture carefully that it is knowing God that is the root of every spiritual benefit and blessing in your life.

Let me read you 2 Peter 1:3,

“His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness…”

(Fantastic statement!)

“…everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Christ who called us by his own glory and goodness.”

How do I have everything for life and godliness? It is through our knowledge of Christ.

The richness of my knowledge of Christ will be expressed in the richness of the “everything I need” being experienced in my life.

And if everything we need is in our knowledge of Christ, lose our knowledge of Christ – and I will say in a moment this is not about intellectual stuff – lose your knowledge of Christ, your experiential knowledge of Christ and you will lose everything because the “everything” of First Peter is through our knowledge of Christ.

2 Peter 3:18 Peter writes,

“Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

How are you going to grow? You grow in grace, God giving you what you don’t deserve, and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this knowledge of God is not academic; it is spiritual. It is not propositional, learning the creed, learning your systematic theology with all the bullet points that tell you things about God, important and good and necessary as that is. But that is not the knowledge of God. That knowledge of God is experiential.

In fact, you won’t go to seminary to find this. You go to seminary, you find the academics, but you can actually go there, find the academics and come home totally devoid of any true knowledge of God, because to grow in the knowledge of God is to grow in the experience of God. When Jesus said, “This is life eternal, that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” the word “know” there is the word “experience.”

“They experience You and they experience Your Son,” said Jesus.

You know many of the key people in the Bible of whom we have any detail about their lives, were brought into an experience of God which led to a knowledge of God, often painfully, often through a period of time – sometimes a long period of time – and very, very rarely overnight.

You look at Abraham and I haven’t time to comment on any of these people. You look at Jacob who had to wrestle with God for a period of time. You look at Joseph, you look at Moses; you look at David.

We have talked about some of these men recently from this platform. And if you look at their stories, their knowledge of God was, as they allowed God to take them down a journey that was a mixture of their own selfishness, a mixture of their own self-interest, but allowing God to take them down, that little by little he would break that and make them people He used in significant ways.

We are very tempted to want our Christian lives to be a series of instant events. Boom! Next step. Boom! Next step. Over here. Next step. “Oh yeah, this happened on that date and this happened on that date and this on that date and this on that date, and I’m really doing well.”

No often you can’t date it; it’s a process. But when your heart says, “God, I do want to know You, I really want to know You; more than anything else I want to know You,” you will find Him. But not when you wake up tomorrow morning; it is going to be a process which God will honor what you have said to Him and lead you through.

Now we of course must take time in His Word to learn the nature of His character, His purposes, and His presence. It is not outside of time in His Word. But along with that, God uses life itself. God uses those wrestling times with God. God uses our pains, God uses our grief, God uses our disappointments; God even uses our sin as a steppingstone to knowledge of Himself.

If we ask, “how do we know God?” don’t miss this very important point in Hebrews 8:11.

“They will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”

That is a deliberate progress. Not from the greatest of them to the least, like we see much of society when we talk about the trickling down effect from the greatest to the least.

But this is from the least to the greatest and the starting point is that God brings us down to the point of being and feeling and experiencing and believing we are the least before He begins to build us up.

Luke 9:48 Jesus said,

“Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For he who is the least among you – he is the greatest.”

Now this is the spirit of our hearts in which we are going to get to know God. We cannot know God with an inflated ego.

You might say, “Well, that’s simply my personality.”

Well, deal with it. You cannot know God with an inflated ego. You cannot know God with a narcissistic way of living where it is all about me and how do I fit into this, and I might do something for somebody else, as long as they are grateful to me, because it is all about me.

You won’t know God that way. You can know Evangelical Christianity that way, but not God where it is living and vital and fresh.

We can only know God in humility, not on the basis of intellectual capacity, but on the basis of spiritual disposition.

That’s why if you go into our Friendship Class, which takes place every Sunday morning, where many adults meet who are challenged in all kinds of ways mentally and physically, you will find amongst them people who know God far better than many of us do because it is not on the basis of intellectual capacity, but spiritual disposition.

That’s why children trust much more. We actually grow up to become cynical. It is getting back to that childlikeness.

In Matthew 11:25,

“At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.

“‘Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.’”

Hidden them from the wise and learned, why? “Because they think that is My access to them. But You have revealed them to those with childlike disposition.”

We don’t attain the knowledge of God; we receive the knowledge of God in humility.

And the measure to which the law of God is written in our hearts and the commandments have become promises to us, will be in direct proportion to our knowledge of God. And our knowledge of God will be in direct proportion to our humility before God. That’s the pattern that Hebrews has written about.

But there is a third step. There is a new righteousness, the law in our hearts that is created by a new relationship (“they will all know Me”); that is caused by a new redemption. That is what I am going to use.

In Hebrews 8:12:

“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

This is the way in to experiencing God. The knowledge of God begins with cleansing. The first act of the Gospel is the removal of our sin, when we acknowledge God and we confess it to Him.

Under the Old Covenant sin was never removed. It was only covered. And that is an important distinction. Hebrews 10:1 talks about,

“The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming – not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.”

This is done year after year but it is not the real thing; it is only a shadow, he says. It did not transform anybody because it needed constant repetition.

Hebrews 10:11:

“Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices,” (listen) “which can never take away sins.”

Why in the world did they do that? Again and again, day after day, but it could never take away sin.

Well, obviously the Old Covenant was God-ordained, and let me just explain briefly the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant in this regard.

Under the Old Covenant they offered the blood of bulls, of goats, of rams, of lambs, which could never remove sin; it only covered it.

Under the New Covenant it is going to be removed.

So, what happened? What do we mean by they covered it?

Let me give you an illustration, if I may. A cheque is itself an intrinsically worthless piece of paper. I brought a cheque with me this morning. I have not signed it so you can steal it and you can write a million bucks on the top line and it won’t be of any value at all because it has not got my signature.

This is itself an intrinsically worthless piece of paper. I could take this piece of paper and tear it into a hundred pieces; I would lose absolutely nothing.

But if I were to write your name on the top here and I were to write a thousand bucks over here and I was to sign it, and you were to take this and take it to your bank, conditional upon there being a thousand dollars in my account, you can cash it and it becomes yours.

If you owed somebody some money but you had no cash in your account, you might come to an agreement with them where you say, “I will postdate this cheque to the first day of the next month after I have had my salary.”

And so, on the first day of the month I write your name, I write the thousand bucks, I date it to the first day of next month and I give it to you and it sits in your home for the rest of this month, again a worthless piece of paper.

But on the first of the month, you go into the bank and you pass it over and it suddenly becomes a thousand bucks has transferred into your account.

The blood of bulls and goats was like a worthless cheque, no intrinsic value in it at all. But it was a worthless cheque postdated to Calvary that every man, woman, boy or girl who brought a lamb or a ram or a dove, whatever they brought for sacrifice was, in effect, saying, “I have nothing in the account, nothing to meet this need, but here it is postdated to Calvary.”

They didn’t have this understanding that I am giving you – a retrospective understanding of it, from reading the book of Hebrews.

And they offered their sacrifice, but they went home, their sin covered but not removed.

You see if I give you this cheque dated the first of next month, when you take this cheque from me, there may be two weeks left in the month, your debt is covered by the cheque but it’s not removed yet.

So, all the sins of those who came to worship in the tabernacle and in the temple under the Old Covenant, their sins were covered by their acts of sacrifice until one day Jesus cried from the cross, “It is finished!”

And His voice echoed back to the previous centuries and the message that went back to the previous centuries to those men and women who brought the blood of bulls and goats and offerings, was, “There is gold in the bank; exchange your cheques, you can cash them now.” And their sin too, in retrospect, is removed.

1 Peter 1:18 says,

“For you know it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.”

In other words, this is the real currency. I can give you that; it may or may not have validity, depends what’s in the bank; I can give you that and it is intrinsically valuable in itself. It’s a 20 dollar note. I could drop this and you could pick it up and go and spend it.

But if I drop this you can go and try and use it, it wouldn’t work because this is the blood of bulls and goats, no value in itself, but dated to Calvary, the moment the blood of Jesus Christ was shed, the real currency, the real gold, the cheques are cashed.

And so, the Old Testament worshipers will be with us in heaven on the basis of the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

But you and I today get cash. We get the whole thing. We come to Jesus Christ and we confess our sins and He forgives us. And our sin is not only covered; it is removed to the extent, the language used here is, “I will remember your sins no more” – gone, done, nothing to pay next month. It’s done; it’s gone.

And this is the New Covenant - new righteousness, which is a new character, the law of God working in our hearts, working in our minds.

And the obligation to make it work is God’s. “I will put My law in your hearts, I will write it on your minds, I will be your God and you will be My people, I will forgive your iniquities and remember your sins no more.”

I will, I will, I will, I will.

What is the response to that?

Thank You.

If I told you after the service I will get you a cup of coffee and I will get you a cookie to go with it and I will put some sugar in it and I will bring it back to where you are, what do you say to me?

Thank you. That’s all. You let me do it.

We are not in passive mode – we have talked about this many times - but because when He works in our hearts with that desire, we start to follow those desires of our hearts. And that is possible when we have a new relationship, when that is a process that goes on in our lives of knowing God, knowing Him better, knowing Him through all kinds of experiences and battles and struggles and tears. And we may know Him because of a new redemption of being forgiven forever.

You will see, as I finish, the whole of the work, the saving work of Jesus Christ is encompassed in the New Covenant. He died our death that we might be forgiven, that His blood might be in the bank as the sole means of addressing our sin.

He rose again from the dead. He is alive today that we might know Him.

“I want to know Christ,” says Paul “and the power of His resurrection.” That fact that now He is alive, I can know Him and get to know Him.

And the third, a new righteousness in our hearts is a result of Pentecost when God placed His Spirit in people and wrote the law on our hearts. And that’s why the foundation of our Christian life is the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost - those three things detached will create a malfunctioning Christian life - but living in the power of His strength.

Can I ask you as we finish, are you living in the freedom of the New Covenant? The onus is off your shoulders. Walk tall; the onus is on His. And as we relate to Him, trust Him, love Him, grow in our knowledge of Him, who He is and what He does will become visible in different ways in our lives. Not completely, for Scripture tells us we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another into His likeness.

It is a process that will last all this life, and then need to be completed in heaven. But that’s the process of the Christian life – it’s the New Covenant.

Let’s pray together.

Our Father we are so grateful for the fullness of the provision You make available to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit to enter all our hearts and live within us, to write that law in our hearts, that though we do fail and we do sin and that old nature does fight against that new nature, which is Your Spirit within us, we know that we grow in You and enjoy a motivation that is not imposed by us or anyone else, but a motivation that comes from within, which is why we so need You to live in the deepest recess of our lives and our personalities that You may come out and show Yourself.