The Grace of the New Covenant | Hebrews 12:14-29
Brian Hedges | March 2, 2025
The great Puritan theologian John Owen, in his book on apostasy from the gospel, said that people can turn away from the gospel and turn away from God in three ways: by forsaking gospel holiness, by forsaking gospel doctrine, or by forsaking gospel worship.
I think Owen was right, and it corresponds to the three ways that we see people turn away from Christ today. Some people turn away from Christ by forsaking the purity of biblical doctrine, and they embrace ways of thinking that are out of step with the truth of Scripture. Others forsake the holiness of Christian behavior, and they adopt attitudes and behaviors and lifestyles that are out of step with the gospel. Still others forsake participation in worship with a Christian community.
We could state these three things positively and say that every vibrant Christian needs an understanding of the gospel—that’s truth—they also need genuine reverent worship in a church—that’s worship—and they need to cultivate a life of holiness that is shaped by the gospel.
We need those three things, and those are the three threads that you see woven together in this passage in Hebrews 12:14-29, if you want to turn there in your Bibles.
We’ve been studying together this letter to the Hebrews for some time now, and we’ve seen that this is a letter that was written to Jewish believers who were confronted with opposition, even persecution, and they were tempted to draw back into the old forms of old covenant worship and to forsake their faith in Jesus the Messiah. It seems that some of these believers were beginning to drift away from the gospel. They were being tempted to apostasy, to turning away from faith in Christ; and throughout the letter, the author is reminding them that Jesus is superior, Jesus is supreme, Jesus is better. He’s a better priest who has offered a better sacrifice; he has inaugurated a better covenant that’s based on better promises; he leads us into a better rest. “Jesus is better. Don’t go back to the old. Instead, recognize the great privileges you have in the new covenant, inaugurated in the blood of Jesus Christ, and hold fast to the faith. Hold firm the confidence of your faith firm to the end.” That’s the message of this letter.
Throughout the letter, there have been this series of warnings. We’ve seen time and again how the author has warned his readers of the danger of apostasy, and today we come to the fifth and the final warning.
In many ways, this passage is the climax of this letter. It is a crescendo in this letter where the many themes that he has spoken of throughout the letter really come together in one great finale. It’s a passage that has tremendous weight, and as I was working on the message this morning, I was struck with the weightiness of this passage. Few passages in Scripture, I think, have this kind of weight and gravity.
So let’s read it, Hebrews 12:14-29. As you read, let me encourage you to be praying that God would work in your heart this morning and would apply his word to your heart. Hebrews 12, beginning in verse 14.
“Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.
“For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, ‘If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.’ Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’ But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
“See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.’ This phrase, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
This is God’s word.
This is a very solemn passage, and it’s a passage that calls us to three responses in light of the great realities of the new covenant. It calls us to pursue peace and holiness, it calls us to embrace the great truths of the gospel as understood in terms of the new covenant, and it calls us to worship our God with reverence and with godly fear.
Or, to put it more simply, this is a passage about:
1. Gospel Holiness
2. Gospel Truth
3. Gospel Worship
I want us to look at each one of these three things.
1. Gospel Holiness
You really see this call in Hebrews 12:14-17. Let me just read verse 14 again. It says, “Strive for peace with everyone and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”
This passage reminds us that the Christian life is not passive, it is active. It calls us to action. Here it calls us to pursue peace and holiness. The word “strive” or “pursue” right there is a word that sometimes carries the idea of pressing forward in an athletic race, so it fits the overall context of Hebrews 12, with the race that is set before us that we are called to run with endurance. In fact, this is the word that Paul uses in Philippians 3 when he talks about pressing forward in order to lay hold of the prize that is set before him, the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Here, the exhortation is to strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. So two things: peace—that is the peace in the community, the unity and the harmony in the Christian community—and holiness is sanctification. It is the life of holiness, the life of being consecrated, set apart for God.
I think the idea here is not so much that these are realities that we are called to create for ourselves; they are, rather, the objective realities that are secured for us through the work of Jesus Christ, where Christ is the one who unites us to God, unites us to himself, and unites us to one another in peace and the bonds of the Spirit. Christ is the one who is himself our sanctification, and when we are united to Christ and his death and resurrection, we are sanctified, we are set apart to God through him. But the call here is to press into the realization of those great gospel realities in our own lives, to live into those realities of the gospel.
This is followed by another exhortation. “See to it,” literally “watch,” “that no one fails to obtain the grace of God.”
In some ways, we could say that God’s grace is kind of the overarching theme of this passage. It’s all about the grace of the new covenant. Here, the exhortation is to see to it that you don’t fail to obtain this grace. It’s a reminder here of the possibilities of apostasy, where even though the grace has been proclaimed, and even though in some sense that grace has been embraced, if someone forsakes Christ, turns away from Christ, then there’s a loss of the grace that is in Christ.
It’s not to suggest that a person can lose their salvation, but it is to say that the only way we know that we have received and experienced God’s saving grace in our lives is through a continual and an abiding faith in him.
There’s an echo here of Deuteronomy 29:18-19, which said, “Beware lest there be among you a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit. The Lord will not be willing to forgive him.” So here the author says, “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”
The idea here is not so much that he’s warning against the sin of anger and bitterness—many passages in Scripture do that—here it’s a metaphor. Just as a weed, if it’s not weeded out of a garden or out of a crop, the weed can actually take over and stifle the fruit of that garden; in the same way, in the Christian community, when sin is left unchecked, is not dealt with and turned from, that sin can defile others and lead to disaster in the Christian community.
Then there’s another exhortation, now using the story of Esau. You see this in verse 16, “...that no one is sexually immoral or unholy.” The word “unholy” could carry the idea of being profane or irreligious or even secular. “...that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal.”
So Esau has been called the archetype of the apostate. When you read the original story about Jacob and Esau in Genesis 25-27, it’s not so much that Esau was sexually immoral in that passage—the only indication of that was that he married the Canaanite women, so maybe it's a reference to that. But he’s rather someone who traded the blessings of the covenant in order to gratify his bodily appetites, his bodily desires.
Maybe you remember the story. He comes in from a day of hunting, comes in one day, stumbles into Jacob’s tent; he’s famished, he’s hungry, he’s weary, he’s tired. And the rich aroma of stew fills the air, and Esau says to Jacob, “I have to have some of that stew. Would you give me a bowl of your stew?”
Jacob, who’s always looking for a way to get the upper hand, says, “If you’ll give me your birthright, then I’ll give you the stew.” And Esau recklessly trades away his rights as the firstborn, trades it away for the satisfaction of his appetite in that moment.
Then, two chapters later, in Genesis 27, after he’s been hoodwinked out of the blessing as well, when Esau comes weeping to his father Isaac, seeking for some kind of blessing, there’s no blessing left for him. He’s lost it all through the recklessness of his self-indulgence and his appetite.
That’s the story that’s used here, as Esau is presented as an archetype of an apostate. And the author here is warning that we not allow sin, and especially sexual sin and immorality in our hearts and lives, that we not allow that to pull us away from faithfulness in Jesus Christ, that we not trade the blessings of the new covenant in order to gratify our desires.
Now, this is a passage that has troubled many people, especially because of verse 17, which says, “You know that afterward when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent,” literally, no space or place of repentance, “though he sought it with tears.”
So some people have supposed that this means that once a person has committed a certain kind of sin, there’s no possibility of repentance for them. Does this mean, for example, if someone commits sexual sin that it’s not possible for them to repent? I don’t want to get too technical here, but there is an argument to be made that what Esau sought here was not so much repentance as he sought the blessing. The pronoun “it” refers back to something, and that pronoun is in the feminine. “Blessing” is also in the feminine. So probably what it means is that he sought the blessing and was not able to obtain the blessing.
In fact, when you read Genesis 25-27, there’s no indication ever that Esau wanted to repent of his sins. What he wanted to do was recover what he had lost through his sin, but there was no attempt at repentance.
Nevertheless, the author here is warning, in keeping with the rest of this letter, where he’s all already warned about those who fall away, how it’s impossible to renew them to repentance—the author here is warning about a kind of apostasy, a kind of turning away from faith in Jesus Christ, that can leave someone in a state where they are no longer able to repent.
Do you remember the story from The Pilgrim’s Progress when Christian sees this man who is locked in an iron cage? He’s in the Interpreter’s house and he sees this man locked in an iron cage and he’s in absolute despair. He’s lost all hope.
Christian asked him, “What’s wrong?”
He answers the question. He says, “I left off to watch and be sober. I laid the reins upon the neck of my lust. I sinned against the light of the word and the goodness of God. I’ve grieved the Spirit and he’s gone. I tempted the devil and he has come to me. I provoked God to anger and he has left me. I’ve so hardened my heart that I cannot repent.”
That’s a frightful illustration of someone who has so hardened themselves against God that there’s no desire, no inclination to repentance left.
Now don’t make a mistake this morning. If you see today your need to repent, if you’re convicted of your sin and there’s something in you that desires repentance, and if you are willing to get on your knees and confess your sins and to ask God to forgive you, and you trust in the work of Jesus Christ—if that characterizes you, you can repent and God will forgive you. God will receive you and will have mercy on you. The problem is with those people who sin for so long and harden their heart to such a degree that that desire is no longer there. There’s no desire left. There’s no will left to repent. That is the state of apostasy, which the author is warning us against here.
It’s a call to gospel holiness and a warning against the sin that would lead us away from God.
Now, before we move on, I think this suggests two lessons for us.
(1) First of all, a warning. The warning is this: temporary pleasure is never worth eternal loss. How many people, for just momentary satisfaction, will compromise their faith in Jesus Christ and start down a path which eventually will lead them away from God? All of us are tempted to do that at some point, and if you find yourself tempted in that way, if you find yourself enmeshed in some kind of sinful pattern of life, where it’s really just the gratifying of your appetites, but it’s hardening your heart and it’s hurting your relationship with God, don’t refuse the warning. Instead, let today be a day of repentance, where you turn again to God, ask him to forgive you, and deal with the sins in your heart and in your life. Don’t give up the blessings, the faith in Christ for temporary pleasure.
(2) The second lesson is clarification. The clarification is this, that the grace of the gospel does not exempt us from the call to holiness. It’s possible for us to emphasize grace to a degree to the neglect of other biblical truths that we essentially think of grace as just a cover for all of our sins, a “get out of jail free” card. We think of grace as that which just gives us a pass with God, and we completely neglect all of the commands and all of the exhortations in the Bible to live a holy life and to deal with sin and to pursue spiritual growth.
Passages like this remind us that that’s not the case. This is a warning not to fail to obtain grace by neglecting the call to holiness. I think we’re on better grounds to say that grace is the source of holiness. It’s not that you get grace and then get holiness apart from grace; it’s rather that, in dependence on God’s grace, it’s seizing the grace of God offered in Jesus Christ. You pursue holiness. But it requires something of us. It requires a kind of sanctified and holy, persevering effort in our lives.
Dallas Willard has rightly said, “Grace is opposed to earning, but it’s not opposed to effort.” Alright? You need to exercise some effort in your spiritual life as you pursue gospel holiness. So gospel holiness, that’s first.
2. Gospel Truth
You see this in Hebrews 12:18-24. This is a very dense passage, and it is one of the most climactic summaries of the whole thrust of the letter to the Hebrews in one place, where the author is contrasting the old covenant with the new covenant. And he’s doing that in terms of two mountains: Mount Sinai, where God had given the law to the children of Israel, given the Ten Commandments to the children of Israel (Exodus 19-20)—contrast Mount Sinai with another mountain, what he calls Mount Zion. I want you to see each one of these briefly.
(1) First of all, Mount Sinai in Hebrews 12:18-21. As I read it, notice here the sensory language and the auditory language. The author here is just evoking the imagery of Exodus 19 and the experience of the children of Israel at the base of that mountain. He says,
“For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them.”
When the children of Israel were at the base of Mount Sinai and they heard the thunder, they saw the lightning and the smoke and the darkness and so on, they could hear this voice speaking from the mountain; they were absolutely terrified. It was such a terrifying scene that even animals were not allowed to transgress the boundaries of the mountain. If so, they were to be put to death.
Verse 21 says, “Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’”
This was the old covenant. God here was constituting the children of Israel as his people. He had redeemed them out of Egypt, he was giving them his law. But here they are confronted with the holiness of God, and they’re a sinful people. God’s teaching his people a lesson here. He’s teaching them that God as the Holy One cannot have fellowship, he cannot have relationship, he cannot have communion with his people unless there is some kind of provision to cover their sins.
So part of what God gives in the revelation of the law is he gives the tabernacle. He gives the priests. He gives the sacrifices. He makes a provision for them so that they can enter—in a limited degree—into the presence of God. But it’s all foreshadowing something that would come later, that would come in Jesus Christ.
What’s interesting here is that the author says, “You’ve not come to this mountain.” This is not the mountain you’ve come to! You haven’t come to Mount Sinai. You haven’t come to that mountain with the fire and the gloom and the darkness and the sound of trumpets and all of that. That’s not what you’ve come to. “You’ve come to something much better; you’ve come to Mount Zion.”
Look at verse 22. “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God.”
Now remember, already in this letter he’s talked about how the patriarchs had been looking for, searching for a city whose builder and maker is God. They had their hearts set on something in the future, and now the author is saying, “You’ve come to it. You’ve come to this new reality.”
Then he just gives a list here, a litany of the various blessings and accompaniments of the new covenant. It’s really painting a picture here for us of the gathered people of God who come to worship God in terms of this new covenant in Jesus Christ and the tremendous privilege that it brings.
“But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”
You see the tremendous blessing. The author here is essentially saying that when you gather as the people of God to worship, you have a kind of access into the presence of God, a kind of boldness in the presence of God, an entry into the presence of God, that the Old Testament saints never had. You are in the very presence of these innumerable angels and festal gathering and the spirits who have gone before. You are in the very presence of God himself and Jesus, the mediator of this covenant. And through his blood, you enter into this new and living way.
You see, here’s the difference: the old covenant, while it was part of God’s purpose and plan, and while it had a temporary purpose for the people of God, the old covenant kept people at a distance. But the new covenant makes the way open so that we can draw near to God.
John Newton, in one of his hymns, captured this truth beautifully. He said,
“Let us love and sing and wonder,
Let us praise the Savior's name!
He has hushed the law's loud thunder,
He has quenched Mount Sinai's flame:
He has washed us with his blood,
He has brought us nigh to God.”
This is the privilege we have because of what God has done for us through his Son Jesus Christ. This is gospel truth, folks.
I know a passage like this is theologically dense. It’s talking about things that maybe sound foreign or strange to our ears. If you don’t really know the Old Testament, you don’t catch all of the resonances, this is hard to understand. But there’s something for us to learn here. There’s a lesson. There’s an application for us here. It is the application to go deep into gospel truth. We need these truths. They’re written for a reason, written for a purpose.
So let me ask you this morning, are you content with a surface-level knowledge, or are you pressing in to see and savor Jesus Christ? Listen, don’t neglect the truths of the gospel. Neglect of truth is one of the ways in which we drift. We eventually could fall into apostasy. We need these gospel truths. We need biblical theology, and we need to not minimize or treat lightly the rich realities of the gospel, as they’re explained in passages like this.
3. Gospel Worship
So you have gospel holiness, first of all; gospel truth; and then, in light of these gospel truths, there’s a third section here that we can call gospel worship. It’s point number three, gospel worship. It is a final exhortation that is built on the truths of verses 18-24. Actually, it’s both a warning and an invitation. I want you to see both, a warning and an invitation, both of them about worship.
(1) First of all, the warning, Hebrews 12:25. “See that you do not refuse him who is speaking.” That’s the warning. It’s a warning to not refuse the voice of God, who is speaking to us now.
Notice here that it’s phrased in the present tense. “Don’t refuse Him who is speaking.” This has been the pattern throughout Hebrews, where the author has expounded for us passages of Scripture from the Old Testament, shown us the fulfillment of those passages through the person and the work of Jesus Christ, has applied those promises and those warnings to his hearers in the here and now, and is essentially saying, “God now speaks to you through his word. Now listen to his voice. Don’t refuse him who is speaking.”
He goes on to develop this warning in verse 25. He says, “For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.”
So now the contrast shifts. It was a contrast between Mount Sinai, Mount Zion, old covenant, new covenant. But now it’s a contrast between two kinds of people, between those who listen and between those who refuse to hear the Word of God.
He says, “At that time, his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, ‘Yet once more, I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens,’” quoting here from the prophet Haggai 2:6. He’s essentially saying here that there is a day coming, a day of judgment, when all created things will be shaken once and for all. In verse 27 he says, “This phrase, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.”
So listen to the voice of God. Don’t reject his voice. It’s a call to listen. It’s a call to take heed, a call to hear and respond to the warnings of Scripture.
A lot is risked when we refuse to listen to warnings. Maybe some of you will remember that tragic event that happened in 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger was launched and in 73 seconds exploded in the air, killing seven people. Did you know that in the days prior to the launch there was an engineer who was warning NASA not to launch the shuttle because the O-rings in that shuttle had not been certified for cold temperatures? They didn’t listen to the warning, and a tragedy followed.
The application for us is obvious, isn’t it? Let the one who has ears to hear, hear. Listen to the warning. Don’t refuse the voice of God who is speaking. That’s the warning.
(2) Then there’s an invitation in verses 28-29. It says, “Therefore, let us be grateful [or that could read ‘let us have grace’] for receiving a kingdom.” But “let us be grateful” is perhaps the idiom that’s in mind here. “Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
It is an invitation to worship, but it’s an invitation to worship in a way that is appropriate to the reality of who God is. I think this suggests two final applications for us.
(1) Number one, don’t neglect worship. Don’t neglect worship. Especially, let me encourage you, don’t neglect corporate worship. There are so many people today who want to say something like this: “You know, I love God, I just don’t care for organized religion.” Or, “I love Jesus, but I just don’t care too much for the followers of Jesus.” They want to claim a faith in God, but without any kind of real commitment to the church and the people of God and any real and regular participation in public worship.
But I think we can see from the Scriptures, and especially a letter like Hebrews, that we can’t really honor God unless we obey God, including his commands to not forsake assembling ourselves together (Hebrews 10), to be in the kinds of relationships where we can exhort one another to listen to the voice of God and to not harden our hearts and be led to fall away from the living God (Hebrews 3). And passages like this, passages that call us to worship God with the assembly of the saints. So don’t neglect corporate worship.
(2) But then secondly, offer God the right kind of worship. Notice the passage says, “Let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
Now, that implies that there are certain kinds of worship that are not acceptable to God, doesn’t it? “Let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe.”
What does he mean here? I think it means that there are some modes or forms of worship that so dilute and demean the glorious realities of the gospel that they are unfitting.
I recall hearing a story years ago of a church where the leaders of the church, when they served communion, dressed in bathrobes to be shepherds. I mean, that was kind of the idea. They were dressing as shepherds. So they distributed the communion elements wearing bathrobes as if they were shepherds. But the whole experience was just silly, and it just demeaned the sacred table of the Lord.
Another example would be a church I heard of that one time passed out the elements, but for the elements they used soda crackers and Pepsi rather than bread and wine or bread and juice. Again, it seems like a degrading of the elements and of the sacredness of the Lord’s table.
There’s a book that was written in, I suppose, the early 2000s by a man named David Wells. He wrote this book called God in the Wasteland, where he surveyed evangelicalism in the United States and talked about the loss of theology and how that had affected the church. He said,
“It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless. I do not mean that he is ethereal, but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertiser’s sweet fog of flattery and lies.”
You get what he’s saying? That it’s possible to have a theoretical belief in God, but it just does not rest with any weight on your heart, and it doesn’t make any real difference in your life, and it doesn’t affect the way you worship.
The worship of this passage is the opposite of that. This passage calls us to worship God with reverence and with awe, for our God is a consuming fire. He’s still a holy God, and he’s still to be worshiped appropriately.
So what does that look like? Let me just describe it to you for a minute, and then I’m done.
I think the worship this passage calls for is the reverent response of a heart that has been humbled by the grandeur and the holiness and the sovereignty of God; a heart that has been enthralled with the loveliness and the beauty of Jesus Christ; a heart that is grateful for the amazing grace that God has given to us to save us from sin and death through the blood of the cross. It is a heart that is captivated by the power of the risen Christ, now working in our hearts through his Holy Spirit. It is a heart that is trembling with joy when it considers the awesome privilege of gathering in the presence of God with the company of the redeemed. There’s joy, yes! There may be clapping, there may be shouting, as Psalm 47 said in our call to worship this morning. There may be all of that, but there’s no triviality. There’s no flippancy. There’s not a casual attitude. There is instead an earnest pursuit of God himself in worship. O that God would give us those kinds of affections as we worship him.
So brothers and sisters, we see in this passage that the gospel calls us to holiness, to a deep engagement with its truths, and to reverent worship. The question this morning is, are we listening? Ask yourself, are you striving for holiness, or have you allowed sin to take root in your heart and life? Are you pressing into the riches of gospel truth, or are you just coasting in your superficial understanding of the Bible? Are you worshiping God with reverence and awe, or neglecting the privilege of corporate worship, or perhaps neglecting the cultivation of a right kind of heart and affections for God when we gather? Let’s ask God to search our hearts this morning and respond to him with faith and repentance. Let’s pray.
Father, we come now to you and we pray that your Spirit would do what mere human words, especially my words this morning, cannot do; Lord, that you would take these truths, burn them deeply in our hearts, that you would search us and know us, that you would show us anything in our lives that you want to change as a response to the truths of this passage. We pray, Lord, that you would give us a heart for holiness and a desire to pursue it in our lives. We pray that you would give us a deep and an abiding gratitude for the great realities of the gospel that are ours through Christ and his work as the mediator of the new covenant. We pray, Lord, that you would give us hearts to worship you with reverence and with awe.
Lord, as we come to the table this morning, we ask you to use the Lord’s table as a means of grace. Even as we have heard the word and the declaration of the gospel through the word, so now as we come to the table, we see the declaration of the gospel through the visible forms of the bread and juice, symbolizing for us the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord. We pray, Lord, that you would work in us what is pleasing in your sight, and that as we draw near to you in worship you would now draw near to us by your Spirit. Lord, we need the work of your spirit, and we pray for it. So come, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
