2015-09-18
Good Morning Dear Ones,
We’ve finally reached the point in this “Our Covenant” series of messages where we can really personalize the point of them. It’s found in DT 8: 3b, “Man cannot live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” We are in a covenant relationship with our God, Who has shared everything with us that we need to know to live righteously with our fellow man and to know Himself with all our hearts. Does it surprise you to find that these words were written by Moses, inspired by God, sometime between 1526 BC and 1406 BC? God’s teaching is the same yesterday, today, and forever! God has always intended that we should come closer and closer to Him and understand not just the letter of the Law, but the spirit/content of His teaching as well [RO 7: 6]. When He gave us the Law [the Ten Commandments], he wanted us to know what pleases Him and what doesn’t. When He replaced the Covenant of the Law with the Covenant of Grace, through Christ’s Atonement on the cross, He gave us a way to eternal life, eternal forgiveness [1JN 1: 9], and justification [RO 4: 3]. Often I’ve said, we shouldn’t waste one drop of the blood Christ shed for us by letting our faith and genuine confession of our sins flag. We take Communion for these reasons: The bread recalls His body broken for us and all the ramifications in our lives of Christ’s sacrifice made on the cross; the wine causes us to remember the institution of the new covenant, the Covenant of Grace, that is His blood shed for us [1 COR 11: 23-25].
By now, we recognize that nothing prophesied that has or will come to pass is accidental. It is all part of God’s grand design. The coming of this new covenant was prophesied by Jeremiah, who lived from 650 BC -582 BC, all those years before Christ’s three-year ministry on earth and His death on the cross. Read JER 31: 31-34. God has once again expressed His desire to embrace us as His people and for us to embrace Him as our God. The message is so important to God that He repeated it in at least 13 places in the Bible! He has told us that He will not only forgive our sins, but will forget them too. His loving and patient heart is all over this message! It is meant for each of us and for our entire households. Long ago, when the Shema was written [DT 6: 4-8], we were reminded to “write these words on your heart and impress them on your children.” This is teaching for everyone. It encourages each of us to put God/Christ/the Holy Spirit at the very center of our lives in every way possible.
The Bible is truly God’s love letter to His people. His heart and His righteous intent is all over it. The persistence of key messages throughout the entire book of Scriptures, both OT and NT, makes God’s will clear---He wants His people to return to His side in heaven for a blissful eternity of fellowship with Him. He remembers His covenants made and keeps His promises [EX 2: 23-25]; He is the same God Who heard the groans of the Jews under the weight of Egyptian slavery, and He hears our groans under the weight of our challenges, trials, losses, and disappointments. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—our divine Covenant Partner. Repeatedly, He has commanded us not to worship idols, graven or otherwise [EX 20: 1-6]. He has told us that evil-minded people, people who serially reject Him and His Son, will suffer negative consequences. Yes, our God will draw the line at how much disobedience He will tolerate. The habitually evil-spirited people will be forgotten [LK 12: 9], and there is one sin which is unforgiveable –that of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit [MT 12: 31; MK 3: 30; LK 12: 10; LK 13: 3]. With the exception of the unforgiveable sin, God’s heart is one of forgiveness and second chances. IS 55: 6-7, “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him, and to our God for He will surely pardon.”
When traditionally Jewish people want to pray for or honor another, they might say, “May your name be inscribed in God’s Book of Life.” This is a very sweet way to let the receiver of this message know how much you care about him. It’s an eternal message, one that conveys God’s importance in the life of the sender and the receiver. As a Messianic Jewish person, I want to convey that same message to each of you. There is a personal covenant review and renewal that each of us as must go through first, before we go before the Lord Jesus to account for ourselves and be judged. We need to do a sweeping review of our own lives, relationships, service or lack thereof to God, and our spiritual lives. We know what our Covenant of Grace is, having discussed Christ’s Atonement at length and having read EPH 2: 8-10, which tells us what God’s grace is and how doing good deeds relates in our lives. Now we must assess our own faith lives and how we can (with God’s help) improve them. We must see how faithfully obedient to God we are. In the process of sanctification, we must ask how honest and open with God have we been? These are not easy issues to review, but they are necessary in allowing us to know what kind of covenant renewal, if any is needed, to meet God’s standards, in accordance with RO 12: 1-2.
PRAYER: We approach Your throne, Dearest Abba, with freedom and confidence that You will hear our prayers, guide us, and answer them [JN 15: 7; EPH 3: 12]. Today, we stand at a precipice, a time of personal assessment, with our eyes focused on You and our ears open to Your response. We are imperfect humans, who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and who truly appreciate the great sacrifice He made, so that we might have faith in Him and be saved from certain spiritual death [JN 3: 16; RO 3: 24-25]. Our imperfections interfere with and attempt to put distance between You and us. But we are here to overcome the consequence of our sins and to expunge the ones we can. We express our reverence, love, and awe of You. You are truly our God, and we are Your people. We have many questions about You and Your decisions that we pray You will answer when we are in heaven. But for now, we beseech You to give us direction as we attempt to assess our covenant relationships with You. We depend on You to continue to make Your will for our lives clear to us. We are eager to do Your will, because we know that Your intent is for us to one day return to You in heaven. We feel the need to rely on You, to look to You for help, and to recognize that we must turn to You first. You have promised never to abandon us, in PS 9: 9-10, and we are grateful for Your presence in our lives, all You do for us, and the example Your Son set for us. You are a God, Who deserves our eternal thanks and praise. We express these things today in the holy/mighty name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.
NEXT WEEK: There is more to write about God’s Book of Life, and that will be the subject of next week’s devotion. In the meanwhile, I would like to share some rather remarkable things that have been going on in my life. One of them is that I’m taking a course called “The Path To The Cross,” based on a book of the same name written by Rev. Ray Vander Laan. This author has a heart for Jewish people and their history. He takes groups of students on long hikes in Israel, teaching on spiritual issues and history in the very places where they took place. This time, he was taking students through the Judean wilderness, so they could experience the ruins of the Qumran community of the Essenes, one of the sects of Judaism during Christ’s time. Through this course, we could learn how the events and teaching of the OT pointed to Christ. The Essenes set themselves apart from the other Jews in cities like Jerusalem and lived a very plain, communal lifestyle which emphasized utter obedience to God. They built a remarkable aqueduct system (without the tools we have today) to get water, often scarce in Israel, to their homes. It was the Essenes who wrote and hid the Dead Sea Scrolls that weren’t found until 1947 AD. Other parts of the course deal with John the Baptist and the impact of his death on Jesus and Christianity in general, on the last Passover seder (The Last Supper), the testing of the “desert experience,” and how Christ’s Atonement leads us to the hope of the resurrection. This course and my on-going experience witnessing to my faith and answering the questions about spiritual matters and Christ from seekers from all walks of life (for In Search of Shalom) have jump-started and moved my faith forward. I can’t help but believe that our loving Covenant Partner has provided these experiences and the friendships that have been outgrowths of them for me. I also believe He is here providing experiences and friendships in each of your lives too, designed to further Your walk with the Lord Jesus. Our God deserves our eternal thanks and praise!
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn
JS 24: 15
© Lynn Johnson 2015. All Rights Reserved,
<-- Back to Archives