The Bringer of the New Covenant

What we behold — what our heart loves and finds beautiful and compelling — will determine how we behave. The goal of this Advent series is to help us behold Jesus. Each week we’re going to look at an aspect of Jesus’ identity, and together these vignettes give us a fuller picture of the One who is worthy of our beholding. 

In today's message, we explore how Jesus is the bringer of the new covenant.

Transcript

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The sermon text for today is from Jeremiah chapter 31, verses 31 through 37. You can find this passage in the Blue Pew Bible on page 1197. Please listen as I read God's word. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me. From the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. This is what the Lord says. Only if these decrees vanish from my sight, declares the Lord, will Israel ever cease being a nation before me. This is what the Lord says. Only if the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below be searched out, will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done, declares the Lord. Here ends the reading.

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And uh one piece of good news is uh it's really cold out. That's not the good news. The good news is today's the shortest day of the year, which means that from today onwards, the days are only getting longer, which means summer is almost here. Aren't you excited for summer? I'm very excited for summer. That's the attitude I'm choosing to have this Christmas is that I'm excited for summer. If I haven't had the chance to meet you yet, uh my name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood. Uh two quick things before we get into the message today. Uh, number one is for our end-of-the-year stewardship drive, we have been raising money for a new speaker system, which is a uh large portion, uh big piece of what we do here on Sunday mornings. We asked you uh for$25,000 towards that project, and as of uh today, we have raised just under$22,000, which means we only need about$3,000 to cross the finish line and to meet that goal. So thank you to those of you who have already contributed to that. Thank you to those of you who are continuing to pray and ask God how He would have you contribute to that as well. If you would like to contribute, you can uh there's little envelopes that are in the seatback in front of you that look like this. Uh you can put your donation in there, drop it in the offering box, or you can select uh Be Rich from the drop-down donation menu on our online giving platform as well. Uh secondly, if you're newer to Elmwood, I want to invite you to our next welcome party. Uh it's coming up right after the service on uh Sunday, January 11th. And all this is is a chance for you to connect with people who are newer to Elmwood. There's a whole bunch of you who are newer to Elmwood this time of year, and uh, this is a chance for you to connect with others who are newer and to connect with our staff and other church leaders. And there's also going to be cupcakes and snacks, and uh so we invite you uh if you're new to Elmwood in the last like three months or six months, or if you've just never been to one of these and want to come eat cupcakes, please come. Uh, we'd love to have you. Uh you can RSVP on the digital bulletin, or you can uh fill out one of these blue cards and just write welcome party on it and drop it in the offering box as you leave here today as well. Uh with that, let me invite you to join me in prayer. God, this Christmas season, we are asking that you would give us rest. Lord, there's so much that is going on in our lives and in our world, so much that leaves us feeling restless and frantic. And God, we ask that you would give us rest this Christmas. We ask, Lord, that as we look into these verses today and glean what we can about the reality of the new covenant that you have created and established, we ask that you would meet each of us and provide, as you always do, exactly what we need here today. Help us to see Jesus more clearly. Help us to love him with our whole heart, mind, and strength. And help us to walk in obedience to everything that he has commanded. Ask all these things in his name. Amen. Each one of us is a complex web of identities. So, for example, if someone were to ask you, who is John? It's not something that you could easily answer in one word, right? And of course, that is because I am a husband, and I am a father, and I'm a brother, and I'm a son, and I'm a cousin, and I'm an uncle, and I'm a pastor, and I'm a friend, and I'm a photographer, and I'm a self-taught mechanic, and as some of you know, I'm an amateur cake artist. And so all these things are a part of my identity, what makes me me, and we could probably come up with a whole list of a few dozen other things that are all aspects of who I am and aspects of my identity. And the same thing is true, of course, for each and every one of us as well, because our identity is a multifaceted thing. This Christmas season, we have been spending time looking at different aspects or different facets of the identity of Jesus. And this Christmas season in particular, our goal has been very simple. We want to behold Jesus. We want to see Jesus because that's where true life change begins. It doesn't end there. We have to live and walk in obedience, but the place where true life transformation and life change begins is by having a clear picture of who Jesus is, by seeing him and beholding him. And as we behold him, our behavior will change and our behavior will follow. And so we have been spending uh this Christmas season looking at these different aspects of who Jesus is and his identity. And so far we've seen that he is the one the prophets foretold. We've seen that he is the source of salvation, he is the servant of the Lord, and this morning we get to explore how Jesus is the bringer of the new covenant. He's the bringer of the new covenant. Now, the context of the verses that you heard read just a few moments ago is that God's people are exiled in Babylon. They have been forcibly taken out of their home and have been transported and carried off to another place, into another culture, into another different religious climate. And while they are in Babylon, they're there because of God is disciplining them for their sin and idolatry, of course. And while they're there in Babylon, in that place of exile, they receive a word of hope through a prophet whose name is Jeremiah. And you heard that read this morning. Jeremiah says, A time is coming when God will establish a new covenant with his people. A time is coming when God will establish a new covenant relationship with his people. And that new covenant is what we're going to be thinking about together this morning. So as we look at these verses today, we're going to see two sort of main things. We're going to see what defines those who are a part of this new covenant, what defines the people who are a part of this new covenant community, and we're also going to see, okay, how can we be a part of it? How can we participate in and experience all the benefits of this new covenant community? So, first, what is it that defines those who are a part of this new covenant community? What is it that defines them? The first thing we see here is that they will receive a new heart. They'll receive a new heart. So verse 33, we see God is uh speaking here and giving this contrast, saying, I'm going to create a new covenant. It's not going to be like the old one. And then he says, Here's what it is going to be like. And verse 33, he says, This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. Now, if you were one of the Jewish people who first heard this, you might be a little bit confused. The reason is because for generations, the Jewish people have been formed and shaped by this thing called the Shema. You may have heard of this, it's from the book of Deuteronomy, and it's something that the Jewish people, even until this day, continually recite and declare and say over and over again. And the Shema is this hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your heart. And so if you're a Jewish person who received this word from Jeremiah, and God says, I'm going to create a new covenant, and in that new covenant, the law is going to be on your hearts and on your minds. You might be like, huh? The Shema, this thing that we've been steeped in for generations, commands that God's law and his instruction be on our minds and be on our hearts and be internalized and integrated into our lives. So you might hear this and think, how in the world is this new? This is something that has been forming our community for many, many years. I think the point is that those who are a part of this new covenant community are going to be transformed to a degree that they were not transformed under the old covenant. There's going to be an inner transformation that's going to take place at a different level, to a different degree than they were transformed before. When God says, I'm going to put my law and my instruction on your minds and on your hearts, it's pointing to a deep heart-level transformation that's going to take place within the people. Now the prophet Ezekiel spoke about the same kind of new covenant realities, and he used this language of the heart. So listen to Ezekiel chapter 36, where God says through Ezekiel, he says, I will take you out of the nations, I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. And the word of hope and the word of encouragement he gives them is one day God is going to take out your heart of stone. This dead heart of yours is going to give you a heart of flesh. He's going to give you a soft, tender heart that is receptive to the instruction of the Lord. And remember that in the Jewish Hebrew way of thinking, the heart was not the center only of your emotions, like we might think of it today. The heart was not only the center of your emotions, the heart was a center of your very person. And so what Jeremiah and Ezekiel are saying, I think, sort of in stereo here, is that in the new covenant, God's people are going to be fundamentally changed and transformed at the deepest possible level. The instruction of the Lord is going to be written in the very core of their being. They're going to be transformed at that deepest level. So that's the first thing that is true of those who are in this new covenant community is that they'll receive a new heart. But the second thing that defines them is this they will know God experientially. God says, I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. So in this new covenant community, God's people will know him both personally and experientially. And of course, the people who lived under the old covenant, they could know God personally as well. So we could give so many examples of this, but just a couple of them here. Think about Moses. Moses met God in a burning bush. He had a conversation with God in front of a bush that was on fire, and the fire never consumed the bush. Moses spread out his hands over the Red Sea and experienced the power of God as God parted the waters in front of him. Moses sat on top of Mount Sinai in the cloud, the glory, in the presence of God for 40 days and 40 nights as he received the instruction of the Lord. Moses, we're told, he met with God and talked with God as one talks to a friend in the tent of meeting, or this thing called the tabernacle. Moses knew God. He experienced God. Or think of Hagar. Hagar was pregnant with Abraham's child, and she fled into the wilderness because she was mistreated by Abraham's wife, who suggested that he father a child with Hagar in the first place. If you're confused, you should be. It's weird. And it's an act of disobedience, okay? But she flees into the wilderness, into the desert, in this place of great pain. And she meets God in the wilderness. She experiences God in such a way that she gives God a name. We're told she called him the God who sees me. Because she encountered him and experienced him in the wilderness. Or think about David and the other psalm writers. They knew God as their rescuer, as their defender, as their shield, as their fortress, as their rock, as the one who satisfies. They knew God. Which means what God is saying here in Jeremiah 31, he's not saying he will become personal in the new covenant. Anyone who reads the Bible just at face value can see he already is. So God is not saying, I used to be this distant and impersonal force in your life, and now I'm going to make myself available and accessible to you, and we can have a relationship. That's not what it is saying. Instead, what this means is that in the new covenant, God's people will have access to God's presence in a new way. God's people will know him experientially and walk with him experientially in a way that they hadn't before. They will know God experientially. So what defines those who are a part of this new covenant community? They'll receive a new heart, deep inner transformation, they will know God personally and experientially, and third, they will walk in complete forgiveness. The end of verse 34 says, I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. Now, by this point, you may be noticing a pattern. You may notice that the defining marks of the new covenant are not entirely new. All these things that God says, I'm gonna make this new covenant, here's what it's gonna be like. You're like, well, all those things were in part in the old covenant as well, right? There's continuity between the old covenant and the new covenant, where God's people did experience a level of inner transformation under the old covenant, but they'll experience it in a new way. Similarly, God's people did know him personally and experientially, but they'll know him in a new way. And is the case with forgiveness. Forgiveness of sin was available to people under the old covenant. Now, of course, the mechanism of that forgiveness is really bizarre to us. Animal sacrifice and all the sacrifices and offerings that people would bring to the temple or the tabernacle, all of that stuff feels so distant and so foreign to us. It feels so, you know, sort of uh outdated and and you know, just feels so weird to us to think about people relating to God in that way. But we what we need to do is we need to sort of suspend our quote unquote modern sensibilities. And we need to not be uh, as C.S. Lewis called it, we shouldn't have chronological snobbery, thinking that we're smarter than everyone else who came before us. And yeah, this looks pretty primitive and weird, but we know better now. We have to suspend those modern sensibilities and take the Bible on its own terms, and as we do, what we see is that those animal sacrifices, as strange as they are to us, that was the means by which God made provision for the sin of his people. God instructed his people, offer these sacrifices in faith, and in doing so, your sin will be covered over. It feels so weird to us, but that is the provision that God made for the sin of his people. So sin, forgiveness of sin was available to the people in the old covenant. But with that being said, the New Testament, the New Testament book that we call Hebrews, makes it really clear that forgiveness did not come because of the death of an animal. Forgiveness of sin came through faith in the God who commanded the sacrifice. All those sacrifices that were offered were meaningless and useless and accomplished nothing if they were not accompanied by faith. If they were not offered by a person who said, This doesn't make any sense to me. How does killing an animal forgive my sin? I don't get it, but I'm gonna trust God. And offering that sacrifice in faith is the way that God went about bringing the forgiveness of sins for his people. Apart from faith, the death of an animal meant nothing and accomplished nothing. The sacrificial system was a temporary provision, and Jeremiah points us forward to a time when God's people will experience a deeper, more permanent kind of cleansing. So these are the defining marks of those who are a part of this new covenant community. They'll receive a new heart, they will know God experientially, and they will walk in complete forgiveness of sins. And of course, this leads us to the question: how can we be a part of this new covenant community? How do we participate in and take hold of all of these amazing benefits that we see here in this new covenant community? And the answer to that question is we gain access to the new covenant community through Jesus, who is the bringer of the new covenant. The night before his execution, Jesus sat in a room with his twelve disciples, with the inner circle of his apprentices. And during that meal, Jesus made some claims and said some things that would have been shocking for a first century Jewish person to hear. So Jesus took the bread and the wine, he took those. Elements which are part of this Passover celebration, pointing back towards the time when God brought deliverance to his people through the Exodus and then established a covenant relationship with them. He took those elements and he said, Those things point to me. Those things actually are telling you about what's going to happen tomorrow when I'm executed on your behalf, and what's going to happen three days later when I rise on your behalf, then as well. He took those elements and he said, He took the bread and he said, This is my body, which is broken for you. And he took the cup of wine that they would have passed around, and he said, This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. So he took those elements of the meal and he pointed them to himself and said, What I do on the cross is the greater act of deliverance, the greater exodus is coming. And what Jesus did, what he said essentially is, My death on the cross will make it possible for you to be a part of this new covenant community that Jeremiah spoke of so many years ago. The people knew God promised that there would be a new covenant that was coming. And Jesus says, the time is here. And it comes through me. He is the bringer of that new covenant. Jesus is both the way we access the new covenant community, he's the door and the entryway into that new community. He's also the one that brings about every single part of that new covenant community. All these wonderful benefits that God promises will be ours as a part of that community. Jesus is the one who embodies and brings each of those to bear in our lives. Through Jesus, our spiritually dead hearts are made alive. Through him, we get to experience deep transformation. We can be fundamentally transformed and changed at the deepest level. And anyone who, any person with a shred of honesty will look themselves in the mirror and say, I need that. Because we'll look at our our thoughts or our attitudes or our motives. And any person who's honest recognizes I need to be changed in those things. There's parts of my life that are not the way they should be. And you know that because you would be mortified if anyone could ever see a videotape of what happens inside your brain. We all know that we need to be deeply transformed in our thoughts, attitudes, motives. In addition to this, there's uh there's prejudices we have against certain people or certain groups of people. There's areas of moral compromise that exist in our lives. We all need a deep inner heart transformation, and that is exactly what Jesus provides as the bringer of this new covenant. I didn't know that uh Ephesians 2 was going to be in our call to worship this morning. But let me remind you of what Paul says to the church in Ephesus. He says, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Merry Christmas. But he goes on to say. But God, in his great love for us, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. The prophet Ezekiel said that apart from God's divine intervention, our hearts are like stone. And Paul says, same thing in different words, apart from God's intervention, our hearts are dead. They're lifeless. They're not just wounded. We're not in need of a spiritual helping hand. What we need is a new heart. And Paul says, God is rich in mercy. And he, through Jesus, has made us alive. He's given us a way to be transformed at that deepest level. And he says that the transformation we get to experience, that new life in Christ is so deeply rooted inside of us that he can say, because Jesus is alive and is seated in the heavenly places, you right now are also alive with him and seated in the heavenly places. We are now so closely united to Jesus and have been so deeply and inwardly transformed that his life and his resurrection and ascension and his reign now belong to us. That's what Paul says is true of us. Through Jesus, our spiritually dead hearts are made alive. We can experience that deep inner transformation that we know that we so desperately need. Not only this, through Jesus, we can know God experientially. This is incredible to think about. Through Jesus, we are invited into communion with the triune God. Through Jesus, we can know the love of God the Father for us. We can look to the cross and we can see the lengths to which God was willing to go. In order to rescue us and save us, we can see his heart of compassion and grace and love for us. So we can know the love of God the Father for us. And also because of what Jesus has done, we now have access to the Spirit of God who lives and dwells within us, and we can now know the sweetness and the nearness of his presence in a way we couldn't before because we have the indwelling of the Spirit of God within us. In addition to this, we are invited into communion with Jesus. And we get to know him so deeply and so experientially that we can know what his voice sounds like. Isn't that wild? Jesus said, I'm the good shepherd, and my sheep know my voice. Back when everyone had uh phones that were not cell phones, that didn't have caller ID on them, uh, back when you had to like answer a phone that was connected to a cable that was connected to your wall, which is like some of you weren't alive when that happened, okay. Back in that day, you had to answer the phone and you had no idea who was on the other side. Now, this is a whole different thing for a different time. But people of my generation, that fills us with existential dread to think about it. We don't answer the phone when we don't know who's calling. But it's like that's the that's the only way you could answer the phone was not knowing who was calling. You couldn't see who was calling before caller ID, but in many cases, as soon as you picked up the phone, you could immediately recognize them by what? By their voice. You'd say, oh, it's it's mom, or it's dad, or it's grandma, or grandpa, or it's my son, or my daughter, or it's my friend. You'd know that person you could within the first word that came out of their mouth, you'd know who it is because you know their voice. Do you know that you get to know God like that? You get to know Jesus like that. That is the kind of personal, experiential knowledge of God that is available to us because of what Jesus has done. We get to know him deeply and personally. And lastly, through Jesus, we get to experience a deeper cleansing of sin. The New Testament letter of Hebrews talks about the difference between sacrifices under the Old Covenant and under the new. The old covenant sacrifices were a temporary provision that God made, and those sacrifices were offered by other people who were flawed and sinful people. And we're told that Jesus is the greater sacrifice. Jesus is the better sacrifice to which all those sacrifices were pointing. In the New Testament, we see that Jesus is the sinless one, he's the spotless Lamb. And he offered his very own body for us on the cross, not just as a sacrifice, as one of many sacrifices, but he gave himself as the sacrifice. The once and for all, you don't need any more sacrifices, sacrifice. That's what he offered for us. Through Jesus, we can experience that deeper cleansing. In a way, those old covenant sacrifices were like cleaning up a crime scene with a paper towel. I'm really sorry for this word picture. The image that kept coming to my mind is if you ever watch shows like CSI or any like crime fighting shows or whatever, uh, there's always the situation where it's like, hey, someone did something really bad and they tried to clean them up, clean up after themselves. And so they shampooed the carpet or they, you know, scrubbed the floors or wiped out the sink or whatever it is. And it's like, hey, that no one can tell anything happened here. And then at some point the detectives and the crime scene people come in and they, you know, they spray their aluminum and then they turn on the black light, and all of a sudden it's like, wow, you can see all this stuff that wasn't there before. And it's like, well, yeah, all you did was just clean off the surface. What you did didn't actually clean down to the deepest level. It just wiped, it just wiped off stuff from the surface. Friends, we don't need just a surface sort of wiping off of our sin. We need to be deeply cleansed down to the very core of our being. And that's exactly what we get through faith in Jesus. Is we get that cleansing. We get to know and experience God personally and experientially through Jesus. We get to experience deep inner transformation and healing through Jesus. Because he is the bringer of the new covenant. All these wonderful gifts that are promised to us in the new covenant come to us through Jesus. And so this morning I want to invite you to behold him. Behold Jesus as the bringer of the new covenant. One of the ways that we can behold him as the bringer of the new covenant is to partake in the new covenant meal that he established. He gave as a gift to us that we could come to the communion table and we could relive this part of our deliverance and salvation. You know, as you as you receive the broken body and shed blood of Jesus, we're reminded on a regular basis he did that for me. He did that for you, he did that for us. And we behold him every time we come to the communion table and partake of this meal together. Now, there's some of you who have taken this meal and have come to the communion table more times than you can remember. Some of you, some of you know him deeply and experientially and have done so for years or for decades. But certainly there is someone here today who doesn't know him that way. Maybe you you grew up in the church, you heard the Bible stories, and you, you know, you you heard about Jesus, consider yourself a good or religious person, or maybe you're just here exploring Christianity or you're not really sure what you think about God or the Bible. Maybe you're here today, and as we talk about all this these wonderful benefits of the new covenant, you're like, yeah, I I I don't have that. If you don't know him, why not make today the day that you come to know him as the bringer of the new covenant? Why not make today the day that you get to experience all of these benefits that we've spent our time talking about this morning that come to us through Jesus? Through trust in him, through nothing more than faith, not cleaning yourself up, not getting your life together beforehand, through simple trust in Jesus, you can know him experientially today, and you can be grafted into this new covenant community. So I invite you to know him and to follow him today. And the first step is to come and receive Christ, to come and receive him at the communion table. So we're all gonna do that here now. I'm gonna leave just a few moments for silence and confession, and then we will uh come receive Christ together at the communion table.