The New Covenant | Hebrews 8:6-13
Brian Hedges | September 1, 2024
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to Hebrews 8.
I want to begin with an illustration that may seem as far from Hebrews as possible. That’s an illustration from the TV show The Office. Now, my guess is that if you are under 40 years old you’ve probably seen this show and maybe even love this show. If you’re over 60 years old you probably would find this show pretty offensive. It is what you call “cringe humor,” and there are parts that I think are funny and there are parts that I don’t particularly care for. But there’s one episode that I think illustrates what I want to talk about this morning.
It’s the episode called “Scott’s Tots.” It’s about this visit that Michael Scott, the manager of this office, played by Steve Carell, he makes this visit to a high school where, about ten years before, he had made a promise to a group of underprivileged third-graders that if they would work really, really hard and they would graduate from high school, he would pay for their full college tuition.
Now, he had assumed that within the next decade he would become a millionaire, but he has not achieved that dream, so he reluctantly visits the high school students. He walks into the room and they greet him with a standing ovation. I mean, they’re standing, applauding, expecting that this generous guy is going to pay for their tuition, and he has to admit to them that he doesn’t have the money, he can’t pay for it, but he will buy each one of them—not a laptop computer—but a battery for their laptop computer!
It really is cringy to watch, and it illustrates something that all of us, maybe to a lesser degree, have experienced—that is, broken promises. We’ve all experienced this in our lives, where someone has promised something to us and then didn’t come through. We might think, of course, of politicians, who make promises during election years and usually don’t fulfill most of those promises. We might think of an employer who promised a promotion or promised a raise or promised there could be a future in the company and it never really materializes. You may think of a parent who promised something and then never really kept that promise.
More tragically, we may think of a partner or a spouse who promised faithfulness to us, promised to be with us till death do us part, and then broke that promise. You may think of a close friend who somehow broke a promise or betrayed your trust.
But this morning, in contrast to that, we come to worship a God of promise. We began our worship this morning talking about that.
“God of Abraham,
You are the God of covenant,
Of faithful promises.
Time and time again
You have proven
You’ll do just what you said.”
All the promises of God are faithful and true and yes and amen in Jesus Christ! We serve a God who makes promises and who keeps promises. In fact, someone has suggested that we could call the two parts of our Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, we could call those two parts of the Bible “promises made” (that’s the Old Testament) and “promises kept” (that’s the New Testament).
That’s really the theme of the passage we’re going to look at this morning in Hebrews 8. We’re working through this letter to the Hebrews. The theme of the whole letter is “Jesus is better,” and we’ve seen in the course of this series that Jesus is a better priest and he gives a better rest, and so on. And today we’re looking at this passage that’s all about the better covenant or the new covenant.
Now, that’s a theological word that most of us are not used to using. I’ll explain what it is in just a moment. But as I read this passage, I want you to notice that key word, “covenant,” that appears seven times in this passage, and also the word “promise.” “Promise” only appears once, but as the writer to the Hebrews addresses his audience here, he quotes from some of the Old Testament promises of God found in the prophet Jeremiah. He’s quoting from Jeremiah chapter 31, and it’s all about this new covenant. Let’s read the passage, Hebrews 8:6-13.
“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 word.
So the theme of this passage is the new covenant. This is theological language; we don’t use it all the time, so we need to explain it. So here’s a road map for the message. It’s all about the new covenant.
1. The New Covenant: What It Is
2. The New Covenant: What It Gives
3. The New Covenant: How We Get It
1. The New Covenant: What It Is
We’ll be brief here, but let me just ask two questions.
(1) First of all, what is a covenant? Let’s put some definition on this word. Here’s a definition from a glossary of theology: “A formal agreement with binding obligations.” That’s what a covenant is: “A formal agreement with binding obligations.”
Now, you might think of this in terms that maybe we’re more familiar with. You might think of a contract. In the realm of business—when two businesses enter into some kind of formal agreement, they draw up a contract and both parties sign the contract. There are certain obligations, a certain amount of money paid for service rendered.
You might think of a treaty between nations, where nations draw up this legally binding agreement that defines the terms of peace and how they will relate to one another, maybe in trade and in other ways. Or you might think, in the realm of family, of something like an adoption, where there is a legally binding social contract where parents adopt a child into their family, they become the legal guardians of that child and are responsible for their welfare, providing food and shelter and clothing and education and healthcare, and so on. There are binding obligations, legally binding obligations, because in a covenant you promise to do something.
In the Bible, God related to his people through covenants, these formal, legally binding relationships. And at the heart of the covenant formula in Scripture was this simple statement: “I will be their God and they shall be my people.” You see that in verse 10. “I will be your God and you shall be my people.”
This is what God would say to his people. You can see this all the way back in the Old Testament when God makes this covenant, this promise to Abraham and then to Abraham’s family, and then there are a number of different covenants that are made in the Old Testament.
(2) But this passage is concerned with the contrast between the first covenant and the second covenant, or the old covenant and the new covenant. So the second question is, what is the new covenant?
Now, it’s implied that the first covenant here is old. It’s not called “old covenant” here. In fact, that phrase “old covenant” is used only one time in Scripture, 2 Corinthians 3:14. But the phrase new covenant is used eight times in Scripture—once in the book of Jeremiah, then seven times in the New Testament, four of those times in the letter to the Hebrews. There is this contrast between the old covenant and the new covenant, the first covenant and the second covenant.
The first covenant that this passage is talking about is the covenant that God made with his people when he brought them out of Egypt. It all happens in the Exodus. Most of us are at least familiar with this scene. Even if you don’t know much about the Bible, you may know something about the Ten Commandments. Don’t you remember when God gave Charlton Heston the Ten Commandments? Right? You’ve seen that movie The Ten Commandments, where Charlton Heston plays Moses? So Moses is up on the mountain, and God gives him the Ten Commandments written in tables of stone, and this is the law that is given to the people of Israel. Then a few chapters later, in Exodus 24, all the people pledge their oath, make this promise to God, that “all that God has commanded we will do,” and this covenant is sealed. There is this binding contract now between the nation of Israel and God himself.
The problem is that the nation of Israel doesn’t keep the covenant. They forsake the covenant. They turn away in all different kinds of ways, so God eventually promises that there will be a new covenant, and that’s what Jeremiah was talking about. That’s what the author here is bringing out.
You can see a contrast here, in a table or a chart, between the old and the new, the first and the second. The mediator of the old covenant was Moses; the mediator of the new covenant is Jesus.
The old covenant was inaugurated at Mount Sinai, but the new covenant was inaugurated by Jesus in his death. You remember that the night before Jesus died, when he first had the Lord’s Supper with his disciples, he broke the bread and said, “This is my body, given for you,” and he poured the wine into the cup and he gave them the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” It was inaugurated at Calvary.
The old covenant is defective or obsolete, we read in verse 13, but the new covenant is better, it’s a better covenant established on better promises, and it is established for us. The old is temporary, the new is eternal. Those are just some of the differences between old and new.
A little sidebar for those four or five of you who really want to dig into this: I recommend John Owen in his massive commentary on Hebrews, where he draws out seventeen—I’m not kidding—seventeen differences between the old covenant and the new covenant. It’s glorious stuff, really good. But that’s not the sermon this morning.
What I want to do before we move onto the next point is just make an application. I know this is theological stuff, I know this can be hard to track with, but this passage is teaching us how to read the Bible. My guess is that all of us need a little bit of help with that this morning. Some of you are reading the Bible, but you struggle to understand, and some of you have given up. You’re not reading the Bible at all; you’ve tried, and you found it so difficult that you just quit. I get it. The Bible is not an easy book. That’s one reason it helps for us to have teachers who can help us learn and can explain things in the Bible.
But I don’t want you to give up. Don’t give up reading the Bible; instead, learn how to read the Bible. Here are some principles that I think we can learn for how to read the Bible.
Here’s a key thing: you need to know that the Bible is a book with a developing storyline. It starts somewhere and it’s going somewhere, and anytime you read the Bible, any part of the Bible, you have to understand where you are in the developing storyline. That’s really going to affect how you interpret it and how you apply it to your life. This is the storyline: it’s really about God’s plan to save the world. Most of the Old Testament centers around the family of Abraham and his descendents and the nation of Israel and God’s relationship with them, and along the way all kinds of things happen. We’ve already talked about Moses and the Ten Commandments, but there are all these priests and there are sacrifices and there are prophets and there are kings. There’s a lot of bad stuff that happens as the priests ignore God’s word and as the kings forsake God and commit adultery and as the nation serves other gods, even to the point of child sacrifice, which is why the prophets come on the scene and say, “God’s going to judge you because you have not obeyed him. You have not been faithful to him. You’ve become idolaters and you’ve become wicked and evil, and you’ve forsaken the Lord.”
That’s why there are these promises that someday God’s going to do a new thing. He’s going to bring a redeemer, he’s going to bring a new king, a Messiah, who’s going to set everything right, and he’s going to bring a new covenant.
You have to read a long time in the Bible before you start to see the pieces fit together, but they finally do, and they do with Jesus. Really, it’s only then, it’s only when you get to the New Testament that you begin to see how the Bible fits together.
It’s kind of like seeing a movie where at the very end of the movie there’s this big reveal that changes everything else about the film. Have you ever seen The Sixth Sense? That’s a classic film. You get to the very end of The Sixth Sense and you learn something that changes everything about that film, and you just have to go back and watch it again. I won’t spoil it for you if you’ve never seen it. But there are films like that, and you have to watch the whole thing all over again in light of the ending, and the Bible is like that. That’s how you have to read the Bible.
To put it another way, you have to learn to read your Bible backwards. You read it from back to front. You read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. You read about Abraham and Moses and David in light of Jesus.
Hebrews is teaching us to do that, and it’s doing that as it brings this new covenant to the forefront of our minds. It’s telling us that somehow Jesus has brought about this new covenant with all of its life-changing promises.
Listen, if you’ve never read the Bible at all and if this all sounds foreign to you, that’s okay. My advice would be to start with the stories of Jesus in the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—the first four books of the New Testament. Start there. Read them through. Read them through several times, and then as you get familiar with the story of Jesus, start branching out to other parts of the Bible, and start to see all the hot links between the rest of the Bible and the life and teaching and words and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Bible will begin to come alive for you.
Well, that’s what the author of Hebrews is doing for us in this passage with this whole idea of covenant. He’s connecting it to Jesus.
2. The New Covenant: What It Gives
So we’ve seen what a covenant is; now, secondly, what it gives. Why is this relevant for our lives? What if I could promise you this morning that you could have the kind of relationship with God that would change you from the inside out, completely transform your character, would give you a deep, personal, intimate relationship with the God of the universe, and would guarantee that all of your sins would be completely forgiven? Does that sound like good news? Well, that’s what the new covenant promises. The new covenant promises that.
Let’s look at it in detail for a few minutes.
(1) First of all, it promises a changed heart. Look at Hebrews 8:10.
“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.”
Now, that word “laws” carries the idea of instruction. It’s the Torah in the Old Testament; it’s God’s instruction, it’s his teaching. It includes the Ten Commandments, but it includes really everything that God is revealing about himself and his instructions for how to live.
Remember that God had written the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone, tables of stone. But here’s the problem with instruction that merely comes to us externally: it doesn’t change the heart. You can know the right thing to do, but that doesn’t give you the desire to do what is right. You can know what is wrong, but that doesn’t give you the desire to avoid what is wrong. You can have the law on tablets of stone and it will not change you. You can’t legislate morality. You can maybe contain it, just a little bit, through incentives and punishments and so on, and that’s what laws do, but laws don’t change people. They don’t change the heart.
I’ve said it many times: the law is like an X-ray machine. If you break a bone, the law will reveal the fracture, but it has no power to set the bone and make it right. The law can’t do that.
But what God promises to his people through Jeremiah the prophet is that he will do something far better than give them an external law; he promises that he will change them from the inside out, that he will write the law not in tablets of stone, but he will write his laws on their hearts. It’s a heart change; it’s a changed heart. God begins to change us from the inside out so that we begin to love what he loves, delight in what delights him, we begin to love righteousness and hate evil, we begin to love God himself and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That’s the whole fulfillment of the law, isn’t it, to love God and love others. But it only happens when we are changed from the inside out.
Let me give you an illustration. You know that I love golf. I love this sport so much. I try to play as often as I can. It’s really an emotional rollercoaster playing this game! I played with some of the men from Redeemer Thursday night and played terribly. I just had a terrible night. Then I got up and played with somebody else early Friday morning; I had my second-best round ever! It was great. I parred the last four holes in a row. So much fun.
But I wish I could play like this guy. This is Scottie Scheffler, the number one golfer in the world. He’s won six tournaments this year, playing again this weekend, on the way to win his first FedEx cup. I wish I could play like Scottie.
Wouldn’t it just be amazing if I could just download into my mind and into my body all of Scottie Scheffler’s knowledge of the game, all of his physical skills—the eye-hand coordination and all of that—all of his movements? If I could download into my mind and into my body all of his experiences, every win that he’s ever had, all of his skill in playing golf, so that my bad day would be in the 70s instead of in the 100s and my good day would be in the 60s instead of the 80s. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Just a download of the genius of Scottie Scheffler so I could play golf like him?
That’s never going to happen; it’s just a fantasy; but it kind of illustrates the difference between getting information externally, from the outside in—and I have that. I’ve read books on golf, I’ve taken golf lessons, I’ve watched golf instruction videos, I’ve practiced and practiced, and I’ve gotten better, but not like that. Not as good as Scottie Scheffler. But if I could have an internal, inside-out change, where I get the genius of the best golfer in the world downloaded into my mind and body, then I could play a new game.
What God does for us in the new covenant is he downloads into us a new heart. He gives us his Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus his Son, and it’s the Spirit that writes the law in our hearts, and it’s a complete change from the inside out! We begin to love what God loves, and we’re given a new capacity for obedience and for righteousness and for goodness, and it comes from God himself. We might say the genius of the incarnate humanity of Jesus Christ, with all of his skill and wisdom for living, is downloaded into our hearts through his Holy Spirit.
I want to tell you this morning that God can give you a new heart. He can change you. He can change your wants, he can change your desires. You might feel yourself to be in the grip of an addiction, but God can give you a new heart and set you free. You may feel yourself to be irredeemably broken by the things that have happened to you, that others have done to you, but God can heal that brokenness. You may feel that you are so self-centered and so selfish that you really have no capacity to ever really, fully, truly love someone; but the God who is love says, “I’ll come and I’ll live inside you, and I will teach you how to love. I will love others through you. I will give you a new heart.” He can do that for you. How does he do it? He does it through the Holy Spirit. If you ask him, God will change you. He gives us, number one, a changed heart.
(2) Number two, he gives us a personal relationship with himself. Look at the end of verse 10 and verse 11.
“I will be their God,
and they shall be my people. [There’s the covenant formula.]
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.”
The point here is not that teaching or instruction in any sense is unnecessary; if that were true, the author wouldn’t have even written this letter. This letter is full of teaching. It’s rather saying that in the new covenant, every member of that new covenant knows the Lord in a personal and an intimate relationship. That’s something that was different from the old covenant. In the old covenant, all of Israel had the law, all of Israel had the ceremonies, all of Israel had the sacrifices, they all had the Ten Commandments; but they didn’t all know the Lord. Some of them knew the Lord, but they didn’t all know the Lord. But in the new covenant, every member of the new covenant, every believer in Jesus gets to know God.
Listen, this doesn’t mean just knowing about God, it means knowing God. There’s a difference between knowing about something or knowing about someone and actually knowing someone.
Some of you know about me, and you know what I say up here. You’ve seen me, maybe we’ve met once or twice. But if you’ve never sat down with me in a two-hour, personal conversation with a mutual exchange of ideas, you don’t really know me. You don’t know me deeply. In fact, it would take a lot of conversations.
There’s a big difference between knowing something about me and knowing me the way Holly, my lovely wife, knows me. She knows me through and through. She knows me so well that I can walk into a room, and if I’m really upset and I’m trying to hide it, she can see it on my face. She can see the emotion.
“How are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m fine.”
“You’re lying. What’s wrong? I don’t believe you.”
She can see those things, because she knows me.
There’s a difference between knowing about God and knowing God. You can know a lot of things about God; you can know that he’s the Creator, you can know that he’s good, you can know that he’s righteous, you can know that he’s just, but to know God himself includes knowing all these things about him, but it also means that you are in a personal relationship with the Creator of the universe, that you know this God as your Father, who loves you and who cares about you and who guides you and who directs. You have a relationship with him; you talk to him and he talks to you. You talk to him through prayer, he talks to you through his word and through the guidance of his Spirit in your life.
Listen, this is the very essence of Christianity. Jesus said, “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
A.W. Tozer said, “This is the supreme goal of human existence: to know God in Christ.” And just as it is possible for you to have a changed heart, so also it is possible for you to know God, to walk with God, to have a relationship with God, to know something of his Spirit in your life, his personal guidance and help; to know what it is to get on your knees in prayer with a guilty conscience and to get up with a clean conscience; to come before God in prayer with a burdened heart and to walk away—circumstances haven’t changed, but you walk away and the burden has been lifted, because God lifted it.
You can experience that. You can experience a relationship with God that is so deep and so profound and so transcendent that it utterly changes everything else about your life! You get a peace that surpasses understanding, you get a joy that is unspeakable, inexpressible, and full of glory. You can know God in a way that brings the deepest possible satisfaction and comfort and security to your soul. And you get it through the new covenant.
(3) A changed heart, a personal relationship, and then finally, forgiveness for all your sins, verse 12. “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”
This is really foundational to all the rest. Notice that first word “for.” It’s giving us a reason. What it means is this: God promises that he will give you a new heart! He will write his law in your heart and you will know him in a personal relationship, for—because—he remembers your sins no more. He’s merciful towards your iniquities. He forgives you of all your sins. This is the foundation. With your sins forgiven, your life can be changed and you can know God.
That’s one of the glorious promises in Scripture of the free and full forgiveness of all of our sins. Here are a couple more.
Psalm 103:10-12: “He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”
As far as the east is from the west—they never meet. If you start driving west to Chicago and you stay westward-bound without turning around, you’re never going to start going east. You could go all the way around the world once by plane and train and boat and automobile and bicycle and whatever else—you could travel all the way around the world, but if you go west and never turn back and go the other direction, you’ll never start going east. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
Or take this one, Isaiah 38:17: “In love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back.” God throws our sins behind his back.
I love a story that Dale Ralph Davis, preacher and expositor, tells of a woman in a town in the Philippines who seemed to really know God. She knew the Lord. She had this intimate walk with God—that’s what people said. So a local priest decided that he would test her. He saw her one day, and he said, “I want you, next time you’re in prayer, next time you seek the Lord, I want you to ask God what sin I committed when I was in seminary. If you know God, you should be able to tell that sin.”
Well, he met the woman again a week or so later. He asked the question, “Did you speak with him?”
“Yes, I did,” she said.
He said, “Well, what did God say? What was the sin?”
Here’s what she said: “The Lord said, ‘I don’t remember.’”
He remembers our sins no more. We’re forgiven.
Here’s one more, Micah 7:19: “You will have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.” I love that one.
Corrie Ten Boom, preaching on forgiveness in 1947 in post-World War II Germany, quoted that passage in her message. “God casts our sins into the depths of the sea,” and she said, “He posts a sign that says, ‘No Fishing Allowed.’” Forgiveness of all of our sins.
Listen, do you feel hopeless? Do you feel locked in a cycle of addiction and despair, of sin and guilt, unable to help yourself, unable to change yourself? Do you feel as if you couldn’t possibly be loved by God? Maybe you think he’s abandoned you? Do you feel like you’re too unworthy to go to him for help? Do you feel like you have sinned not just one too many sins but a thousand too many sins? You’ve sinned yourself out of God’s grace twenty years ago? “God couldn’t possibly forgive me.”
In Scripture we learn that God forgave David, the king who committed adultery and murder. God forgave Peter, a disciple who was cowardly and denied that he knew Jesus the very night that Jesus was dying for him. God forgave Saul of Tarsus, an avowed enemy who hated Jesus and persecuted the church. God forgave Zacchaeus, the tax collector who was an extortioner, a greedy, covetous man who had misused people all his life. God forgave the woman of Samaria who had been married to six different men and was now living with a man not her husband. God forgave the prostitutes, welcoming them into the kingdom of God ahead of the greatest theologians of the day. He’s a God who forgives. He forgives freely, he forgives fully. He promises that he will remember your sins no more. He will forgive you if you will come to him and ask him.
That’s what the covenant gives us: a new heart, a personal relationship with God, the forgiveness of all of our sins.
3. The New Covenant: How We Get It
Finally, the third thing, the new covenant: how do you get it? How do you get these promises? How do you receive this? “I want this! I might not have known what a covenant was before this morning, but listen, if it gives me a new heart and a new relationship with God and forgiveness of all my sins, I want that. How do I get it?”
I’ll be as simple as I can. Two things.
(1) Number one, you get it through Jesus’ death. Jesus is the mediator of the new covenant. The very first mention of the new covenant in the New Testament is in Luke 22:19-20, where Jesus “took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’”
He was evoking Jeremiah 31, and he was saying, “This meal, which is symbolic of the death I’m about to die for you, this meal is pointing you to the promises of the new covenant, which I am about to fulfill on your behalf as I go to the cross and die for your sins.”
I just read this beautiful quote this morning from David McIntyre, a great Scottish Presbyterian. He said,
“The death of Christ brings assurance of forgiveness to all who place their trust in the crucified. The cross is the testimony that the sins of believers have been blotted out, forgotten, ended. Again, the death of Christ has passed the death sentence on sin. The intrusion of iniquity into an unsullied creation was met and stayed by the self-revealing act of God, who is holy and eternal love, and love, warring against sin, became red with passion and glorious in sacrifice. Thus the dying of Jesus becomes the energy of a new life to all who believe.”
New life and forgiveness, and you get it all through the dying love of Jesus, the crucified, who took your sins on the cross, who died in your place.
(2) You get the new covenant through Jesus’ death; secondly, you get the new covenant through your faith or your trust in Christ; that is, believing the gospel, this good news, believing this message, and placing all of your hope and trust in Jesus Christ.
We already read it this morning, John 3:16-17. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Believing in him, trusting in him, depending upon him. It means that you’re not trusting in your own ability to make yourself better. It means that you’re not depending on a self-improvement program. It means that you are not depending on your ability to start keeping the law in your own strength and energy and effort. You already know that you can’t. It means that you are not depending on a religious observance of some kind. It’s not about coming to church or getting baptized or taking communion, as important as all those things are, but those follow salvation. It means that you are trusting what Jesus Christ has already done for you, what he accomplished on the cross, and you are saying with that old hymn writer, “My hope is built on nothing less / Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”
My hope is built on Jesus’ blood! Why? Because it took his shedding of his blood on the cross to secure the forgiveness of my sins. It’s built on his righteousness. Why? Because it took his living a perfect, obedient life in my place, living the life I should have lived and didn’t, so that I could be justified, declared right before God.
“My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ name.”
What does that mean? “I dare not trust the sweetest frame” means a frame of heart, a frame of mind. It means I’m not trusting in my feelings, I’m not trusting in my experiences. I’m not trusting in the sweetest experience I could possibly have. It’s not even about that. It’s not about the spiritual experience you have, it’s about what happened in history, on Calvary, when Jesus died on the cross. Something completely external to you. You contribute nothing to that. You just receive it, you just rest upon it, you just trust in it. You wholly trust in Jesus’ name.
When you place all of your trust and all of your faith in Jesus Christ, something changes, as God gives you a new heart, as you begin a new relationship with God and you spend the rest of your life getting to know this God who loved you and has all of your sins wiped clean. God remembers your sins no more.
Have you experienced that this morning? Do you know what it is to have embraced Christ as Savior and as Lord and to know this God of covenant, this God of promises, as your God? I invite you to trust him today if you have not and to rejoice in his promises if you have. Let’s pray together.
Gracious, merciful God, we thank you that you are the God of covenant, you are the God of promise, and that you have been faithful to your promises, you have kept them in and through your Son, Jesus Christ, and through the gift of your Holy Spirit into our hearts and lives.
Lord, many of us this morning have received those promises. We know what it is to have our sins forgiven, we know what it is to have a new, changed heart and a relationship with you, and we thank you for that today. We thank you, God, for mercy and for grace that reached down to save sinners such as we are.
Lord, there are some here this morning who have not experienced that. They don’t know what it is to be forgiven, to have a new heart, to have a changed life, to live in relationship with you, but today can begin that journey for them. Today can be the day of salvation. So Lord, my prayer for any such persons in this room this morning is that they would come to know you and trust you and embrace you as Savior and as Lord.
Father, as we come now to the Lord’s table, we ask you to remind us afresh of what Jesus has done for us through the cross. We’ve heard it in the word; now may we see it visibly represented for us in the bread and in the juice. May we not only see but may we taste that you are good, and in taking these elements may we embrace Jesus afresh in our hearts. We ask you to draw near to us, Lord, as we draw near to you. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
