It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.
It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.
It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.
Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. 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. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. 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. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old 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. And then in verse 33, 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. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.
Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. 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. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. 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. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old 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. And then in verse 33, 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. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.
Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. 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. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. 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. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old 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. And then in verse 33, 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. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.
Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. 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. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. 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. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old 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. And then in verse 33, 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. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.
Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. 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. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. 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. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old 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. And then in verse 33, 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. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.
Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. 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. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. 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. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old 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. And then in verse 33, 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. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Boy, Steve, I don't know if you can hear it from up here, but that was the best singing I've heard in like a year and a half. That was amazing. Great job, everyone. One of my greatest joys as a pastor, truly, is to sit in the front and just sometimes I stop singing and I just listen to the body that I get to be a part of praise our God together. And it's just a really sweet and special thing. Thank you for being here this morning. Thank you for joining us online or listening throughout the week. If that's your habit, we are grateful for all of that. This is the third part in our series in the book of Hebrews called Greater. When we're moving through the book of Hebrews, we're looking at the comparisons that the author makes between Jesus and some of the figures and facets of the Jewish faith. You'll remember that he writes this letter to Hellenistic Jews, which are Jewish people who grew up outside of Israel in a Greek-dominated culture, probably grew up as practicing Jews, and then converted to Christianity somewhere as adults subsequent to the death and resurrection of Christ and are now trying to work out their new faith. Not only are they trying to work out their new faith, but they're being oppressed by the Roman government violently and physically, and then they're being rejected by their culture. So they're being persecuted from without and from within. And so the author writes this letter to compel them to persevere in their faith, to hang in there in the face of persecution, to hang in there in the face of isolation and stay true to Jesus, their Savior. And again, he does this by making different comparisons over the course of the letter. And so this morning, we arrive at the comparison of Jesus to a high priest, and he makes the point that Jesus is our great high priest. And as I broach the subject of high priest, and we think about Jesus being our high priest, we may feel about that news a little bit like I felt in December of 2008. December of 2008, it was the first year of our marriage. We got married in that July, and Jen's family decided it was high time that we go to Rome, Italy. They had been planning this trip for a while. Now I've married into the family, so my poor father-in-law has to pay my way to Rome as well, and I get to go and schlub all the bags all over Italy, all over the place, wherever we're going. That was my role. While we're there, we're staying in, we rented an apartment, I guess, like it was Airbnb Rome, I guess. And we're staying in this apartment, and it's a couple blocks away from the Vatican City, from St. Peter's Basilica, St. Peter's Square, and all that stuff. And we happened to be there on Christmas Day. And I knew that on Christmas Day, the Pope was going to come out, who was Pope Benedict at the time, and give a papal address. And so I thought it would be a really fun experience. When am I going to be in Rome on Christmas again, a couple blocks away from the Vatican? So I get up that morning, get dressed, and go to St. Peter's Square for the papal address. And it is packed with, I think it was a couple hundred thousand people. It was amazing to see flags from different countries all over the place. I worm my way up towards the front, and Pope Benedict comes out, and he gives his address. And I remember being incredibly impressed with him because he gave the address seven or eight different times in seven or eight languages. And he did it flawlessly. And I don't think he was reading off of anything. It was a really, really impressive thing. And for me, I didn't grow up Catholic. I have no Catholic background. I knew less about Catholicism then than I do now. And I only know a little bit more now than I did then. So it was all just kind of a new experience for me. And I remember at the end of the address, somehow or another, I learned this. I don't know if I heard him say it. I don't know if I read it on the screen where it was giving us the closed captioning of it, but at the end of his address, he offered all of those in attendance. He gave us, I got to see if I can get this right, a verbal plenary indulgence for non-mortal sins in 2008 for that year, which is great news. I was thrilled to have this. Now, I don't want to be disrespectful to Catholicism because for some people that was very meaningful. And what an indulgence is, it basically meant that the Pope forgave me of all of my non-mortal sins in 2008. I don't know what the difference is between mortal and non-mortal sins. It seems like we should try to invest our sinning in the non-mortal kind. I really don't know. But for those sins, I do not have to pay my penance in purgatory. I'm not going to be punished for those in purgatory. And as I received that news, I thought, well, that's great. But I don't really believe in purgatory. And I don't want to be disrespectful to the Pope, but I don't need your forgiveness for my sins. Jesus offers me that. So like I'm all squared away here on the verbal plenary indulgences for non-moral sins. But thank you. I'm good. And I think that that's a little bit how we as 21st century Christians receive the news that we have a great high priest. Oh, I have a high priest. Well, that's great, but like I'm a Christian, I'm all squared away here. I have direct access to God. I don't need an intercessor. Because we might understand a priest to be someone that we go to the priest, and then the priest goes to God on our behalf. And you might be enough of a biblical scholar to kind of start to piece this together from the Jewish perspective, where the Jewish people, they grew up with a high priest. You would go to your priest, and your priest would go to the high priest, and the high priest would make sacrifices on your account. You didn't go directly to God. You went to the high priest, and was your conduit to God, right? And then we know because we're Christians, we act like we have direct access to God. We can pray. We can go to God whenever we want to. I can go into the very throne room of God. I don't need a high priest. I can go directly to God myself. So that's cool that Jesus is the great high priest. It's neat that it's explained like that, but that's probably more for the Hebrew audience than it is for me, because as a Christian, I know I can go directly to God. Except for here's the thing. No, you can't. You cannot go directly to God. I'm going to tell you why in a little bit. But what I want us to understand as we begin this discussion of Jesus as our high priest is that we absolutely need a high priest. We need a high priest. We need someone to go to God on our behalf because we cannot go into the perfect throne room and the perfect presence of Creator God Almighty on our own. We cannot do that. We would be consumed by His glory in an instant. So we have to have a high priest. We need one of those. Before I tell you why we need a high priest, why we need someone to intercede to God for us. I want to tell you about your high priest, because there's some things unpacked in Hebrews. Really, the end of chapter 4 to the end of chapter 7, so close to three and a half chapters, the author invests in this comparison of Jesus as a high priest and explaining to us just the very nature and importance and grandeur of our high priest. And he introduces this idea to us in this way. If you have a Bible, turn to Hebrews. We're going to be in chapter 4, and then we're going to be in chapter, I think, 5, and then we're going to spend the rest of the time in chapter 7, and there's lots to read along with today. But if you have a Bible, turn to Hebrews chapter 4. This is how the author introduces to us the idea of our high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who, in every respect, has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then, with confidence, draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in the time of need. There's a couple ideas there, and it's important that we understand them. There's the idea of because of Jesus, we can draw near the throne of God with boldness. We can go to God with boldness. This idea that we've inherited as Christians that we go directly to God, he says that we can do this. So we go directly to God with boldness, and we're going to talk about how we do that in a little bit. So to kind of put a pin in that idea, and we're going to circle back to it later. But he also says that we don't have a high priest who cannot sympathize with us. It's important that we remember that Jesus walked this earth, that Jesus was human, that Jesus faced the same temptations that we do. We see him in Matthew in the desert after fasting for 40 days being tempted by Satan himself. He's tempted with his desires, with his appetite for bread. He's tempted with the desire for authority. He's tempted with his ego. And we see that Jesus was tempted as he moved through life in much the same way as we are all tempted as we move through life. And so as a result, we understand that there's no temptation that we face that Jesus has not dealt with. It's not as if Jesus didn't have to manage and master his own propensity to lust in his own heart. It's not that Jesus didn't have to manage and master his own ego, his own greed, his own selfishness. When we feel fatigued and people need more and more and more from us, moms, moms, I think, are chief among this. Moms, they never get to go through their day without somebody needing something, right? Jesus felt that fatigue. He knew what it was to perform miracles, to serve and serve and serve and give, and then to go off to a quiet place, the bathroom, and have someone knock on the door, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Yes, what? He knew what it was not to lose his mind with that, right? He knew what it was to be tempted by his ego. He knew what it was to have people say things to him and have it within him to crush that person. Have it within them to verbally spar with this person in such a way that they would never speak again. And he bit his tongue. He knew what that was. There is no temptation that we face that Jesus did not walk through himself. Because of that, we have a high priest that empathizes and sympathizes with us. I think we tend to think of Jesus on the throne judging us, looking down on us, being disappointed in the things that we do, and that's not it at all. Jesus sympathizes with us. He looks at us and he says, I've been there. I understand why you made that choice. Don't make it again. It's not good for you. He offers us his sympathy. That's a really, really powerful thing. But this isn't all that the author says about Jesus as our high priest. He actually compares telling you, is the most mysterious, fascinating figure in the Bible to me. I have my whole life since I encountered him, since I read this verse, I was probably in high school and I encountered this verse and my first thought is, the order of Melchizedek, who is that? Because here's the thing, there's an order of priests in the Old Testament, the descendants of Aaron. When God sent Moses to Egypt and said, free my people, he sent him with his brother Aaron. And Moses was the civil authority and Aaron was the spiritual authority. And through the tribe of the Levites that follow from, that come from the line of Aaron are named all the priests and high priests throughout the ages. So you would expect for Jesus to be named high priest in the order of Aaron, because that's the order of priests that have moved throughout the Old Testament. But that's not what the author says. He says he is the high priest, not in the order of Aaron, and we're going to see why in a minute, but in the order of Melchizedek. And if you're paying attention, you're saying, no, what now? Why? Well, let me tell you why. Hebrews chapter 7, verses 1 through 3, we're told a little bit more about this figure. He writes this, for this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him. And to him, Abraham apportioned a 10th part of everything. He is first by translation of his name, king of righteousness. And then he is having neither beginning of days nor end of life. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. And then he is also king of Salem. That is king of peace. He is without father or mother no genealogy? He has no father or mother? He resembles Christ. He continues as priest forever. Who is this dude? And why don't we know more about him? He only shows up three places in the Bible. We see him in Genesis 14. This is what he's referring to. And I love how flippant the Bible is. Like that's an unimportant detail. Abraham was returning from the slaughter of the king. So don't worry about that or the slaughter or anything, but let's pay attention to this. I just love the Bible. It's not much for detail sometimes. But in Genesis 14, Abraham has a nephew named Lot who's dumb and gets himself in trouble. And Abraham goes to rescue him. And on the way back, he encounters this king named Melchizedek. His name literally means king of righteousness. He is the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, the first king of Jerusalem that we see in Scripture. And when Abraham encounters him, he gives him a tenth of everything that he owns. All his riches, all his wealth, all his livestock, everything that he owns, he gives Melchizedek a tenth of it. This, incidentally, is where we get the idea of the tithe. That's where the tithe started. Tithe just means tenth. And in the New Testament, people disagree on whether or not we're supposed to tithe, but no one disagrees on whether or not we're supposed to be generous. And generally, we take that 10% rule as this is the starting point. And as God grows your heart for generosity and your ability to be generous, we do all that we can. But we trace the tithe back to this incredible interaction that Abraham has with Melchizedek in Genesis chapter 14. And it's incredibly interesting that Abraham felt compelled to tithe to Melchizedek and acknowledge him as a priest. Because to this point in Scripture, all we know of is that God revealed himself to Abraham. We don't know that God has been revealing himself to other people, but clearly, somehow Melchizedek knew who God was, served God, and was this king and priest. And to the Jewish mind, for Abraham to be subservient to him, you would expect Melchizedek to tithe to Abraham to the Jewish mind. But instead, Abraham tithes to Melchizedek, acknowledging a superiority there, which would have shocked the Jewish audience. And in Melchizedek, we see, this is fascinating to me, the unification of civic and spiritual authority. In Melchizedek, we see this man who is a king. He is a civil authority. He is in charge of the military. He is governing over a group of people, and yet he is also the spiritual authority over this people. And this is not a unification that we see again in the Old Testament. From Melchizedek, we see Moses take the civil authority, and we see Aaron take the spiritual authority, and we watch those threads run through, we see those streams run through the Old Testament. But we do not see in God's Israel a reunification of the civil and spiritual authority. Actually, from here, he's only mentioned one more time in the Old Testament. David mentions him. We don't see him again. He shows up in Genesis chapter 14. Abraham pays him a tithe. He offers Abraham a blessing. Off he goes. It's this mysterious king of righteousness who's a unification of civil and spiritual authority. And then we don't see him again. And then out of nowhere in Psalm 110, David refers to him again. It's a messianic prophecy, which means David is talking about the Messiah that is to come, who we know as Jesus. And he says in this prophecy that he will be priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. And you're going, what? Why don't we know more about this guy? Why haven't they written more about him? Why didn't God include him more? And to those questions, we have no answers. But here's what's fascinating to me, and it's amazing to me that God allows David to be a part of Melchizedek's story. Because what we have in the Old Testament, if we're paying attention, and this week as I was researching this is the first time I realized it, and I thought I loved it. In the Old Testament, we see this stream of the civil authority of kingship. We see this stream of this reign of who would become David. And in 2 Samuel chapter 7, God promises David that his throne will go on for all of eternity, that his reign will persist through eternity. And we know that Jesus is the continuation of David's reign, that when he returns to earth, he's going to sit on the throne of David. And so Jesus is the continuance of David's reign for all eternity. But what we may not know is that another stream running through the Old Testament is the stream of the priesthood of Melchizedek that is also going to continue for all of eternity. But it's running parallel to this stream of Aaronic priests, priests through the line of Aaron. And it seems like Jesus is going to come back and fulfill that priesthood, and he's not. This is what I want you to know about your high priest, because I think it's amazing. Your high priest, Jesus, is the continuance of the reign of David and of the priesthood of Melchizedek and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority for all eternity. That's big, so I'm going to say it again. Your high priest, Jesus, who intercedes on your behalf, is the continuance of the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority for all eternity. Do you understand that there's these two streams running through the Old Testament that seem like they're parallel, that seem like they don't have anything to do with each other, the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek. And then in the person of Christ, those streams converge and they conclude and they are completed that the whole Old Testament is these streams running and pointing to Christ and culminating in him, that that's your high priest, the one to whom the entire Old Testament points to and culminates in. He is the completion of these two things. He is the continuance of the reign of David and the priesthood of Melchizedek. For all of eternity, they were just simply foreshadowing for Jesus, who came to die on the cross for you and to be your high priest for your sins. And he is the reunification of the civil and spiritual authority. And in Revelation, in the new heaven and the new earth, when God sits on his throne, he sits on the throne of David and continues as our king and our priest forevermore. Melchizedek is a setup for that. And Jesus is the completion of it. When I sit in that truth, I cannot help but be awed at my Savior. He is so much more than a man who came to die on a cross. He is so much more than simply the Son of God. He is the convergence and the completion of all of the Old Testament, and the promise and the hope of the New Testament, and then the completion of everything at the end of time. Jesus is a pretty big deal, and that's your high priest. And not only is he the continuation of the reign of David and the reunification of civic and spiritual authority and the continuation of the priesthood of Melchizedek, but your high priest is the perfection and completion of the earthly priesthood. He is the perfection and the completion of the Aaronic line of priests that they had in the Old Testament. And we see that in these verses here. I've grouped some together, Hebrews chapter 7, verses 11, 18, and 19. I'll kind of jump around, but this is what the author writes. Now, if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood, for under it the people received the law, what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron? For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness, for the law made nothing perfect. But on the other hand, a better hope is introduced through which we draw near to God. I know that's a little confusing, so here's what's going on in that passage. The Hebrews followed the priesthood of Aaron, and the descendants of him were priests. And these priests were messed up dudes. They were human just like me and you. They were pastors. And the best that a pastor can do is be human. I mean, your pastor may or may not have snapped at his sweet daughter on a road trip this weekend when she asked one too many times if we were in a new state yet. I mean, that could have happened. We are fallible, gross humans. And the author of Hebrews points out, that's who your high priests were. They were men who sinned and first had to offer a sacrifice for themselves before they could even get to your business. And now we have a high priest that doesn't need to sacrifice for himself. They were men who lived and then they died. This high priest does not do that. The priesthood of Aaron, the Aaronic priesthood existed much like the law did to simply show you your inability to earn your way into heaven. And it said, why would we need another priesthood unless the one that you acknowledge, the line of Aaron, was fallible and ultimately showed you that it couldn't bring you to salvation. We actually needed a priest in the order of Melchizedek to be perfect and to be complete, which is what Jesus was. So he's the perfection and the completion of the priesthood that already existed. So that's who your high priest is. He is the one on whom the entire Old Testament converges and is personified in. He is the completion of the line of priests that we see run through the Old Testament. Both streams. He's a pretty big deal. But I said at the beginning that we actually need this high priest. It's not just nice that we have them. We're not just awed at the majesty of Jesus and who he is. We actually, we need him. And we're told why in chapter 7, verse 25. Verse 25 starts out consequently, is the first word there. And it starts out consequently, which means because of everything that I just said, because of everything I just said from starting in chapter 4, verse 14, moving through chapter 5, 6, through all of 7, now as a conclusion to by dying on the cross and by raising from the dead. And that in that, in what we celebrate here in a few weeks at Easter, Jesus' death on the cross on Good Friday and then his subsequent resurrection from the dead, that Jesus conquered death, he conquered sin, he conquered the grave, he conquered hell, and on our behalf, now we are saved if we simply place our faith in him on the cross. And that is true. However, Hebrews chapter 7 verse 25 tells us that unless he goes to God and intercedes on our behalf, unless he goes to God and sits at the right hand of the throne and prays for you in your salvation, that that work of salvation is not complete. So what we understand is your very salvation relies on the prayers of your high priest. Your very eternity, your spot in heaven. We sang a few minutes ago, I'm a child of God. I'm free indeed. In my father's house, there's a place for me. That is all true. But it's not true if Jesus doesn't go to the throne of God and intercede for us. The salvific work of Christ was not completed on the cross or rising out of the grave. It is completed as he goes to God and sits at his right hand and says, I got them. When they talk to you, I covered them in my righteousness. I love them. I died for them. God, they're good. At your worst moment, Jesus looks at you and he prays for you and he says, Father, they're good. Forgive them. They know not what they do. And if our faith just rests in what Jesus did on the cross and that he rose from the grave and we don't acknowledge that we have a high priest in heaven who's praying to God on our behalf, who is interceding for us, that our understanding of what's working for our salvation falls short. Our very eternity relies on the prayers of our high priest. How arrogant and ignorant is it of us to say that I don't need a high priest, I can go directly to God. No, you can't. You get to go to God because your high priest, Jesus Christ, sits at the right hand of him and allows you to do so. That's why in chapter 4, verses 14 through 16, he says it's because of our high priest that we go boldly into the throne room of God. Because if he's not there going, he's good, she's good, let her in, let her speak. Then we are dashed in the glory, we are consumed in the glory of God. We cannot hope to stand in the throne room of God. And maybe I'm just speaking about myself here, but sometimes we just arrogantly think or claim or feel that I don't need any of that, I don't need a high priest, I can go directly to God. Yes, you do, you need a high priest more than anyone. But your high priest is Jesus. He died for you. Hebrews says he was perfected in that suffering. He conquered death by raising from the grave for you. And then he goes to Father to complete your work of salvation, and he intercedes on your behalf once you place your faith in him. That's your high priest. That's what he does for you. Do you understand that that's why we pray in Jesus' name? That when you pray and you end your prayer because you heard your parents or some other person as you were growing up in their prayers in Jesus' name or the Bible study that you went to, they said in Jesus' name, and so you just started saying in Jesus' name. Do you understand that this is why we do it? Because if we pray in our name, then God's not hearing our prayers. If we pray in our name, in the name of Nate, I pray. Shut up. No. In Jesus' name, we pray. It's an acknowledgement. Whether you understand it or not, it's acknowledgement at the end of your prayers. God, I'm asking for these blessings. I'm thanking you for these things. I'm confessing my sins. I'm asking for intercession here. I'm presenting all of my prayers and petitions to you in the name of my high priest who died for me and sits at your right hand and prays for me. In Jesus' name we pray. Because of his completed work of salvation by sitting at the right hand of the Father and praying for us. Now I don't know about you, but as this washed over me this week, I couldn't help but be awed at my high priest, at pulling these threads from the Bible and seeing how they all work to converge on the person of Christ, and be humbled by my arrogance in the past to think that I get to go directly to God without acknowledging my utter need for a high priest in Christ. But I do hope wherever you were in that spectrum that we will never again go to God without acknowledging that it is because of the death and resurrection and prayers of our high priest that we are able to do that. I hope that this sermon in particular this week helps us paint a more full and rich picture of the person of Jesus in our life whom we come to and whom we worship and who we submit ourselves to. I hope it enlargens our hearts with gratitude and even with awe as we consider Jesus our high priest in the order of Melchizedek. And because we can pray in Jesus's name, I want to invite us to do that now and then we're going to participate in communion. Well, there's one more thing about Jesus and Melchizedek that I'm excited to share with you. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for hearing our prayers in the name of your Son, Jesus. Thank you for praying for us. Thank you for interceding for us. I pray that you would enlarge our hearts with gratitude and faith as we revel in all that you are. Jesus, we can't wait to see your face, to see you sit on the throne of David as our king and our high priest. May we have a fresh gratitude for our salvation, God. May anyone who is listening to me now, who doesn't know you, who has not received the gift of salvation, would they please by faith receive the gift of their high priest, Jesus, whom they so desperately need? Would you please make us daily aware of our need for him? Thank you for your servant Melchizedek and how you used him. Enlarge and enliven our hearts to you, Father. And it's in Jesus' name, our high priest, that we pray. Amen. Right now, we're going to take a minute and observe communion together. So if you're watching at home and you're able to grab some of the elements, we hope that you will do that. Here we have these packets just by way of review. The very top flimsy layer reveals a stale wafer, and then under that is the juice. Again, this is the COVID-friendly version of communion. Nobody likes it, but it is nice to be able to share in it together. This represents the bread and the wine from the last supper that Jesus had with the disciples. Jesus is about to be arrested, and he starts this tradition with his disciples, and he offers them bread, and he says, whenever this is my body that is broken for you, do this in remembrance of me. And then he pours the wine, and he said, this is my blood that is spilled for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And so it became a tradition with the followers of Christ that when they would gather to consume this bread and wine and to do it in remembrance of Jesus and this tradition that he started. And we see in Acts chapter 2 that this was a defining trait of the early church. They would gather in one another's homes and they would break bread and they would share wine and they would pray together and they would remember their Savior. And the reason that we're doing it this week is back in Genesis 14, when Abraham offers a tenth of all that he owns to this king of Salem, Melchizedek. Melchizedek, in return, offers Abraham a blessing. Do you know what that blessing was? It was a blessing of bread and wine. Just another way that the life of Melchizedek tips its cap and points an arrow to Jesus. Another way that our Savior is foreshadowed in the Bible. So as we focus on this mystery of Melchizedek, let us acknowledge together that he offered Abraham the peace and blessing of communion thousands of years before Jesus came to define it so that when we participate in communion today, we don't just go back to Jesus and the disciples, we go back to the very foundations of our faith with Abraham and Melchizedek and participate in this millennia-old tradition as we focus on our Savior together. So I'm going to be quiet for a minute and pray on my own. As I do that, I would invite you to pray too. Go into the throne room of God, ushered there by your high priest. Ask God to unveil in your heart anything that is there that shouldn't be there. Ask him to create in you a renewed sense of gratitude for him. And be awed by the fact that you are participating in a tradition that goes far back beyond Christ, all the way back to the very beginnings of our faith. Let's pray for a minute. I'll say amen and then we'll take the elements together. Amen. Jesus took the bread and he broke it for the disciples. And he said, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And he poured the wine. And he said, this is my blood. This is poured out for you. Whenever you drink of this wine, do it in remembrance of me.
