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.