12 What Good is Faith? (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for downloading the Wednesday and the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta. Today we're looking at Jeremiah chapter 31, verses 31 through 34. This is the twelfth talk of our series on the book of Jeremiah. You can find links to everything mentioned in the talk and follow along with lecture notes on our website. Go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Jeremiah 12. I'm so glad you joined us. When I became a Christian, I thought that I now had the power to change. And that was one of the things that drove me to Christ in the first place, because I was a failed perfectionist. In fact, I'm still a failed perfectionist. But repeatedly hitting that brick wall of being unable to change myself is part of what drove me to see, I need something else, I need a savior. So now that I had come to faith, I figured I have the power of the Holy Spirit, and that's like my get out of jail free card. So that's going to enable me to finally start making some positive, permanent changes. So first on my list was I was going to change my tongue and take control of my speech. I gave myself two weeks to get that done. Still waiting. Needless to say, that didn't happen. But that raises the question, can people really change? And if not, then what good is faith? So can I really change my attitude? You know, I read all these self-help books and they say things like, you know, get organized. I'm like, well, that's the problem. Or keep a positive attitude. And it's like, well, that's the problem. How do I keep a positive attitude? Can I really be less selfish? Can I learn to love my job? Can I really improve my marriage or my relationship with my kids? Or stop getting angry so quickly? Be more generous, more charitable, be a better friend, or mother, or sister, or wife. You know, we resolve to make these changes, and then nothing ever seems to change. And I don't think my experience is unique. A lot of people come to church seeking change to, you know, kick old habits or get rid of selfishness or anxiety. And they come to God wanting Him to change us, to change them, and He does, but sometimes we get frustrated because change doesn't seem to come quickly enough or easily enough, or nothing seems different after years of following Jesus. Or it can be frustrating when it seems like people who don't believe in God are doing just as well, if not better, than people who do believe. So that's the question we're going to talk about today. Can I really change? And if I can't, then what good is faith? So does faith in Christ really change anything about us? Now some of you have probably known Jesus a long time, and maybe you're getting restless, wondering why my life doesn't look the way I thought it would look at this point or by now. Some of you may be new to the faith and share my experience of saying, Oh, I want to change, but it's difficult, it's harder than I thought. And some of you maybe are skeptics, saying, Well, I'm curious about who this Jesus is, and I want to know if believing in him will really do anything. So all of that is exploring the question, what good is faith? What does believing in Jesus do for us? And that's the question we're going to look at with Jeremiah today. So we've been going through Jeremiah looking at passages that answer difficult questions, and the path the question we're going to look at today is, what good is faith? And you'll remember that Jeremiah preached to the Israelites living in Jerusalem while their city was under siege by the Babylonians, and he tells them God is about to let the Babylonians conquer Jerusalem, level it to the ground, burn down the temple, loot the temple, and they will be taken into exile because they've rebelled. He also tells them the exile will end and they'll be restored, but that's a long way in the future. They have to wait 70 years in exile, and some of them may not live to see that promise fulfilled. So I suspect these people were struggling with the same question. What good is faith? If the Lord's going to let our city be destroyed, he's going to send us into exile and make us slaves again, well, what good is believing in him? And then there's the flip side, or kind of the further question of, well, if he does restore us, and we can we come back, we blew it once, how do we know that it'll be any different the second time? So maybe faith isn't cracked up, isn't what it's cracked up to be. So in this section, God tells Jeremiah to reveal a little bit more about what he's planning for them, and he gives them a taste of where faith in God will eventually lead them. And that's the answer to our question, what good is faith? So we're looking at Jeremiah chapter 33. We're going to do verses 31 through, I'm sorry, we're looking at chapter 31, verses 31 through 34. And these words come right in the middle of what's known as the book of consolation. So chapters 30 to 33 of Jeremiah are referred to as the book of consolation because in those chapters, Jeremiah gives some of the most hopeful promises we ever find in the Bible. So after all these prophecies of judgment is coming, then we get these three chapters of there's hope, there's return, there's restoration. And what we're looking at today is kind of the highlight of the book of consolation. It's perhaps the most well-known passage in the entire book of Jeremiah. So let's read it. Jeremiah 31, 31 through 34. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. So Jeremiah announces this new covenant. And before we look at what that is, we're going to define what's a covenant, and then we're going to look at the old covenant, and so we can answer the question, what's new about the new covenant? So first let's define what a covenant is. Like all ancient Near Eastern cultures, the Israelites would have been familiar with this, the idea of a covenant. It was as common to them as the idea of a contract is to us. So a covenant is simply an agreement between two people that defines the terms of their relationship. So there were all sorts of covenants. There were political covenants, business ones, marital ones, social ones. And while covenants and contracts are very similar, there are significant differences. So a contract is impersonal and legalistic. A contract is made between two people who may not know each other at all. It's usually based on distrust and self-service. So there's a high likelihood that one party in the contract is gonna fail or cheat or lie or do something underhanded. So we try to spell out precisely who's responsible for what and what the consequences will be. So if we trusted each other, we wouldn't need contracts. So a contract would be made between business partners, people who have to work together, who may not know each other, strangers, that kind of thing. A covenant is personal. A covenant is based on gratitude, trust, and hope. A covenant is made between two people who have a relationship with each other and they want to keep that relationship. So it's a commitment to act a certain way or to treat someone a certain way within a relationship because they like each other, respect each other, and at some level want to maintain the relationship. So marriage is a covenant, a business deal is a contract. Okay, there are two kinds of covenants in the Bible: there's bilateral covenants and unilateral covenants. Bilateral, as you can probably figure out, is a commitment made between two equals, and they make the covenant to fulfill certain promises. So marriage is a bilateral covenant. Two people of equal standing are making an agreement. Jonathan and David made a bilateral covenant. In a unilateral covenant, one party is greater than the other. So you in a unilateral, it's a commitment of the greater party makes to a lesser party. So a father would make this to his son or a king to his people. And the majority of covenants in Scripture are unilateral and they're made between God and his people. So obviously, God being the greater party and his people being the lesser party. So God brings his commitment, his loyal love to the relationship, and we are supposed to respond in faith and trust. Okay? So contracts are impersonal, covenants are personal. Most of the covenants in the Bible are unilateral. God is making them to us. He's the greater party, we're the lesser party. There are five particularly significant unilateral covenants in the Old Testament, and I'll put links to these in their scripture references on the website. You can find that at Wednesdayandheword.com slash Jeremiah twelve. So here are the five. There was the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, the Old Covenant, which was made through Moses to the nation of Israel. Then there was the covenant with David, and now the new covenant, which we see in our passage. So you have Noah, Abraham, and David, and then the old covenant and the new covenant. So if we're going to understand the new covenant, first we have to understand what the old covenant was so we can see how this one's different. So let's talk about what that was. The old covenant is the one that was established, that God established through Moses at Mount Sinai after he took the people out of slavery in Egypt. He made it a little over 800 years before Jeremiah writes these words. It starts in Exodus 19. That's where we first start, God starts spelling it out when God meets Moses at Mount Sinai. It continues through the rest of Exodus, goes all the way through the book of Leviticus, and then again in Deuteronomy. So it's a we're going to try to summarize it in a few sentences, but you can guess if it goes through Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. But it spells out how God's going to treat his people, what he promises to do for them, what he's committing to, and then it also spells out how the people are to respond and how they are to treat God. So for our purposes, there's a good summary in Deuteronomy 26, and I'm going to read you 17 through 19. You have declared today that the Lord is your God, and that you will walk in his ways and keep his statutes and his commandments and his rules and will obey his voice. And the Lord has declared today that you are a people for his treasured possession, as he has promised you, and that you are to keep all his commandments, and that he will set you in praise and in fame and in honor high above all the nations that he has made, and that you shall be a people holy to the Lord your God as he promised. So that's kind of a that's a pretty good summary. So the people say, Here's what, here's our side of the bargain. We're going to obey God, we're going to walk in his ways, we're going to follow all his law. And what do they get out of it? They get a completely faithful and trustworthy God, a divine father in the best sense of that relationship. So he promises they will be his people, he will shower them with these blessings, and in response, they declare, You're our God. So the heart of the old covenant is like a marriage where Israel says, You're the only God for me, and God says, You're the only people for me. And in fact, marriage is the most common metaphor used to describe that relationship. But by the time we get to Jeremiah, as we've seen, this marriage is in shambles. The people have turned to other gods, they've repeatedly broken the old covenant, they have followed other gods, they've worshipped other gods, they've broken the law, they haven't kept it, and this has been going on for 800 years. Now, there are consequences to that. Breaking the covenant has consequences. They're spelled out in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. And one of them, one of the consequences of breaking the covenant is that God says, I will take the land away from you, I will send you back into exile in a foreign land, and you will be slaves once again. And historically, that's what happened in the Babylonian exile, and that's what Jeremiah's been predicting. Now that should be the end of the story, because God made a covenant, here were the terms. They said, You'll be our God, God said, You'll be my people. They broke their side of it. He enacts the just and legal consequences done. End of story. He is not obligated to do anything else. Now let that sink in. That was the agreement. They broke it, he kept his side, he enacted the exile, that was a just and legal consequence. That should be the end of the story. Now, for us that seems harsh. We're thinking, well, you know, leveling Jerusalem, deporting them, taking them into exile, that seems a little harsh. But let's think about this. How much of the law were they supposed to keep? I'm going to read you several passages and just listen for the answer to that question. This is Deuteronomy 5.33. You shall walk in all the way which the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may live and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which you will possess. So you shall walk in all the way which the Lord your God has commanded you. Deuteronomy 28, 58, and 59. If you are not careful to observe all the words of the law which are written in the book, to fear this honored and awesome name, the Lord your God, then the Lord will bring extraordinary plagues on you and your descendants, even severe and lasting plagues and miserable and chronic sicknesses. Deuteronomy 29, 29. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law. Getting the picture here. Okay, well, that's just Deuteronomy. What about Leviticus? Leviticus 20, 22. You are therefore to keep all my statutes and all my ordinances and do them, so that the land to which I am bringing you to live will not spew you out. And then Leviticus 26, 14 through 16. But if you do not obey me and do not carry out all these commandments, if instead you reject my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinance, so as not to carry out all my commandments, and so break my covenant, I in turn will do this to you, and then he lists some consequences. Now, that's just a small, I mean, I could go on for like twenty minutes reading you verses where he says, You are to keep all of my statutes, all of my ordinances, everything I'm commanding you. So how much of the law are we supposed to keep? All of it. And how many chances do we get? We get one chance. The covenant agreement was all or nothing, one strike, and you're out. And here we've seen the people rebelling for 800 years. This is not, you know, they just, this is a one-time thing and God comes in. He gave them 800 years in the land to get it right, so legally he has already done more than enough. And yet, here in Jeremiah, we see he's giving them another chance. So instead of just enforcing the terms of the old covenant, he's saying, I'm giving you one more chance and I'm gonna replace that broken old covenant with a new one. Now, we're in the same boat because the covenant, the standard of holiness and righteousness of behavior has not changed from what God told Moses. So if we think, oh, that was then, this is now, and the law is different, the law is not different. If we are gonna try to approach God on being good enough, we have to keep all the law all the time. So we when you stop and think about that, we too have sinned, we've rebelled against God, left to our own devices and re and uh resources, we would face that same one strike and you're out rule. So if we think we're gonna be good enough, you know, well, I'm I'm good enough, I've got that middle class morality going, I'm not like those prostitutes and drug dealers and people. So, you know, I'm good enough. Go back and read those all the law passages again because we need a second chance. Now let that sink in. God does not have to offer a second chance at all. He did not have to give Israel 800 years to get it right. That wasn't part of the agreement. The commitment of the old covenant was you keep all the law all the time, one strike and you're out. So it would have been fair for him to judge them and be done with it. Because he kept his part of the agreement. But now we say, not only is he giving them another chance, he's giving them something new and us something new. And this is what's so amazing about grace. I think today we're so used to the idea that God loves us that it's hard to realize he doesn't have to love us. He's not required to love us, he's not required to offer a new covenant. I think that's why the marriage example is so helpful. Because even in our broken view of marriage today, we do not require a faithful spouse to take back an unfaithful spouse. There's no state has a law to that effect anywhere. And yet you probably know someone who took back an unfaithful spouse, and it's an amazing display of God's grace and forgiveness. So the picture we have here is a husband who has caught his wife repeatedly cheating, deliberately cheating, with premeditated forethought cheating over and over and over again. And what we see essentially is he gets down on bended knee and proposes all over again. That's the picture of this new covenant. She's come she, his people has proven completely untrustworthy, faithless, and he's saying, I'm not only going to bring you back, I'm proposing all over again, and here's the new deal. That's pretty amazing. So judgment alone doesn't work. That's part of the lesson of the flood and the covenant with Noah. The judgment and the flood didn't solve our problems. After the flood, we got another chance with the Mosaic covenant, but we broke that one too. So we're these faithless followers trading God for idols and like money, homes, fame, fortune, whatever. We, if we're this is gonna work, we need something new. Because if we've already failed the old covenant, now we come back to the land. What's to say we're not gonna fail this one too? Won't we just make the same mistakes over and over and over again? Which is actually part of the lesson of the book of Judges. God raises up a judge, and there's a cycle of them making these mistakes over and over again. So, given another covenant like the old covenant, we're gonna make the same mistakes. So now we see how is this one gonna be different? How is this gonna be different than the last one? And God says, This time I'm gonna write the law on your hearts. Look at 3133. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Now that should remind us of a few things. First, it should remind us that God was the one that wrote the law of the old covenant. He wrote it on stone tablets that he gave to Moses, and then Israel carried those stone tablets around in the desert for forty years and kept them in the holiest place they could construct. And you also might remember back to Jeremiah 17, which we looked at early in the series, where God told Judah that they had sin inscribed on their hearts. So he pictured their hearts as this hard stony rock, and then engraved on it like with a diamond-tipped stylus was sin. So instead of the holy law being written on the stone, sin is permanently etched and scratched into it like Mount Rushmore. Remember that from Jeremiah 17. Now we complete that picture. He says, under the old covenant, the law was written on these stone tablets, not on us. Our hearts were hard, engraved with sin, and now God's saying, I'm gonna do something new and different. The external law written on stone tablets did not solve the problem, so I'm gonna go deeper. I'm gonna write the law on your hearts. Essentially changing their very nature so that they be we too become people who can and want to keep the law. Ezekiel promises something very similar, and he says that God will give his people hearts of flesh and then write his law on that. This is Ezekiel 11, 16 through 20. Therefore say, Thus says the Lord God, though I remove them from far off among the nations, and though I scatter them among the countries, yet I have been a sanctuary to them for a while in the countries where they have gone. Therefore say, Thus says the Lord, I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel. And when they come there they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations. And then 11 19 and I will give them one heart and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes, keep my rules and obey them, and they shall be my people and I will be their God. It's the same idea. I'm going to remove that heart of stone I'm going to give them a heart of flesh and that is our only hope. That is the only way the new covenant is going to work. The only way it will work is if God changes something about us. So it's not the system that was broken. It's not the covenant that was wrong. It's us. We need to be changed. And so God says I'm going to give you something you didn't have before I'm going to give you a heart that follows me. So the problem with the old covenant is we were slaves to sin and death. It's a different metaphor but the same idea that we have the sin inscribed on our hearts. And apart from the grace of God and the blood of Christ we are unable to choose the right thing. But thanks to the death and resurrection of Christ the penalty for our sins have been paid and then we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit such that we can be the people we were meant to be so do people really change? Yes, because God steps in and changes us from the inside out. Now that's yeah that's really good news if you stop to think about it because we all have those parts of our lives that we're ashamed of. You know the things we desperately wish weren't true like things we said or did in the past or things we left undone or did or didn't do and we hope you know we hope I hope my friends never find out about that because I don't want to be that kind of person. We need hearts that are fashioned from the character of God and we need a faith that will change us from the inside out and that's the promise of the new covenant that's the promise of the gospel. Change is possible it is real and it is guaranteed but not today. It's not guaranteed by Friday or anything. The other metaphor that's frequently used to describe our relationship with God is God is our Father and we're his children. So like a child progresses from infancy to maturity change is this growth process that he takes us on. So he doesn't change us in a magic puff of smoke. It's this journey a long process where we grow in wisdom, we grow in maturity and the primary tool he uses to bring that about is testing and trials. So the first thing we learn about the new covenant is that it is different in that the law will now be written on our hearts instead of on stone tablets. The second thing we're going to learn about the new covenant is there are no more intermediaries between God and us. Look at 3134. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother say, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more. So remember under the old covenant there was a group of people who would stand between God and the people so there were priests there were prophets there were kings and all of them were to administer the old covenant to enforce the old covenant to teach people the old covenant explain it and God says no longer are you going to need those people you won't need someone between you and me because everyone will know me. That's a huge shift when the new covenant is fully realized I'm going to be out of a job. I mean my particular gift is going to be utterly useless and I'm willing to bet I am not going to care. Because he's saying under the new covenant that won't be necessary because everyone will know me. Why? Because he's changing our hearts so that we will know him and love him. Jesus picks up this same idea in the gospel he talks about it's the same idea he doesn't use the term having the law in your hearts and being able to keep it but he talks about the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of heaven is at hand or the kingdom of heaven is close by or it's come upon you. And so we have this well what is what does that mean? Well first the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God are synonyms. They mean one and the same thing. And the Jews understood the kingdom of God as the place where God would rule as king. So you saw this in the old covenant that the Jews believed God is their king and that he would rule over Israel insofar as Israel obeyed the law. So the rabbis would talk about taking the kingdom on yourself. By that they meant obeying the law unquestioningly and thoroughly and that that way they would bring about God's rule in their lives. And they thought that eventually God's rule as king would cover the whole world so they hadn't seen it yet but they talked about the kingdom of God coming as something yet to be revealed where he would be more than the king of Israel, the whole world would recognize him and his rule would would be in effect over the whole world. So you had this present aspect of you could bring the kingdom about by keeping the law and this future hope when it would be over the whole world. So that was kind of the Jewish mindset and Jesus comes along and says the kingdom of God is at hand or it's near or it's come upon you. So the Jews must have thought what is he saying well what he's saying is God's rule will be effective in your life now in a way that was never effective before because of the new covenant something has changed. God is now writing the law in your heart so before you were a slave to sin you couldn't keep the law you couldn't obey him. Now God's rule is effective in your life in the sense that you obey the law because God is changing you from the inside out making you the kind of person who wants to keep the law. So that rule of God in your life is now at hand because Jesus is here and he's going to bring that about so God rules in your life not because you earned it not because you allowed it not because you merited it somehow not because you have some divine spark within that God recognized but because God in his grace chose to save you grant you faith and make you his child and then begin this process of writing the law in your hearts. So Jesus is saying the kingdom of God is at hand because now it's possible in a way it was never possible before. So before the law we were under the law we had to keep it to live and gain God's blessings but we couldn't keep it because we had hearts of stone with a new covenant he's saying I'm going to give it to you as a gift. Not because you deserve it because we don't deserve it we don't deserve a second chance not because we can do it alone because we can't but because he's a loving merciful compassionate God. So how does he do this? Look again at verse 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying Know the Lord for they shall all know me for the least of them to the greatest declares the Lord for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more That almost seems like a throwaway line in here but I think that's actually the key to all of this. And it's where Jesus comes into the picture as far as the new covenant's concerned. Because the new covenant is built on forgiveness. God says I'm not going to remember your sins anymore. Now how does an all-knowing God forget something? That's not what he's saying. It's not like he's wiping his memory clean this is remember in the legal sense I will not hold it against you. I will not credit it to your account. Instead your debt will be wiped clean. This is a legal term of I will not hold it against you. So he's saying your account will be cleared the charges against you will be dropped and we know from the New Testament what makes that possible is the sacrifice of his son. So it's Jesus' death and resurrection that brings about that solves our debt to justice that brings about our forgiveness. Okay this is maybe a review for most of you especially if you've heard me teach a lot I always work this in but I just to be clear and make sure everybody understands this is my hand's analogy of what Jesus did for us and why he would say I will forgive their iniquity what does that mean? So my my left hand is us my right hand is God. Before the fall in the garden we start out face to face with God so I've got the palms of my hands facing each other. So we're in relationship with God. God is granting us life and blessing and everything is wonderful. However we rebel. So we in a sense turned our back on God. So I turn my left hand so the it's facing away and we essentially said okay wait I want to be God I want to decide what's right and wrong. I don't want to listen to you anymore. I'm going to do things my way and in that that's the fall that's sin I turn my back on God and decide I'm going to be God in my life. Now that has two consequences sin is both an act of rebellion and it's a crime. So there are two consequences. The first is we experience sin and death. So we are now under God's wrath. God in Romans Paul says he gave us over to our sins so now we're prisoners unable to escape from it. So the first consequence is that we now experience death in all its forms. So not just the end of life but murder bitterness anger tyranny despair frustration broken lives strife office politics all that stuff that makes life not very good that's death. And when Paul says the wages of sin is death that's what he means all that brokenness, sin, rebellion, anger, war, tyranny all of that is death and that's what we get because we chose sin. So the first consequence is we experience sin but there's a second consequence and that is God turns his back on us. So I've got my hands now with the palms facing away from each other. Because sin is a crime justice must be satisfied God says I can't that debt must be paid so in a sense he turns his back on us says you want sin, you got it. And in this state if we could turn around it would do no good. Now theologically I don't think we can turn around apart from the grace of God but let's just assume we could it would do no good because there's still this problem of justice that needs to be solved. This is where Jesus comes in. His death on the cross pays our debt he pays our debt to justice so that God can now turn back around and offer us life. So this is what we mean by justification. He has solved our legal problem so that now our debt to justice has paid has been paid and we are justified and then God can give us a new heart so that we turn back around to him. And that's what solves our problem. So because of Jesus's death on the cross God says I'm not going to hold your sins against you. Your account is wiped clean I can now turn back and offer you life and then he offers us the law gives us faith so that we turn back to him. So it is forgiveness granted through the cross that makes all of the new covenant possible and that's why he includes that in 34 I will forgive their sins. That has to be solved before God can be in relationship with us again. Okay? Clear? I know I'm going fast but there's still two more ideas I want to give you so the first thing we learn about the new covenant is the law will be written on our hearts which makes obedience and holiness possible in a way it was never possible before. The second thing we learn is that we won't need priests kings or prophets or teachers between us and God because God is going to give us the law and we will all know him. And then the third thing is that forgiveness is what makes it possible for God to do this. So this passage doesn't spell out the role of the cross but we know that from later scripture for example Romans 8 Paul says this is 8 3 for what the for God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin he condemned sin in the flesh he's talking about the law couldn't solve this problem of our debt but j but God solved it by sending his son to pay the penalty. So thanks to the death and resurrection of Christ the penalty for our sins has been paid. That's what he means what the law in the old covenant couldn't do God did in the new covenant. So does faith change anything? What good is it? I would say faith changes everything. Because this blessing of having the law written on your hearts is enjoyed by people who have faith faith is your ticket to the kingdom of heaven. If you have that you have everything worth having and if you don't have saving faith you have nothing because the blessings of the new covenant are given to those who have faith. Alright so that's a pretty strong statement to make so what is faith? What must I have to say that all those promises are mine? So I want to define saving faith for you. It is the permanent ongoing trust that God one day will free me completely from sin. So it's trusting God to once again grant me life. So it's trusting X for Y. It's trusting in God the God of the Bible not my own self-effort not some divine spark or the force or something but trusting the God of the Bible the Father of Jesus Christ the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the one who sent his son to do something for me and what I'm trusting him for is righteousness, holiness, moral perfection, being one day freed completely from the power, penalty and presence of sin. And that is a gift from God. Again that's not spelled out in this passage but it is made clear in the New Testament. Although I do think it's implied in this passage because God says I'm going to change your hearts it's implied in the fact that he's the one who's doing the changing is the idea that this is a gift he's giving us. So we don't manufacture it, we don't earn it we don't deserve it. It's not that we have some divine spark that God's obligated to give us another chance it's God in his mercy decides to satisfy his wrath by sending his son to provide a way for us to escape this problem of our sin and then all that requires on our part is trusting him that he will in fact do that. So saving faith has four aspects to it. The first is a genuine desire for holiness in and of itself. So this is what Jesus Christ means by hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Faith means I'm sick of sin. I want all that stuff about myself to be changed. I want to be the kind of person who loves the things of God. So it's not just I don't want to get caught or I don't want to pay the penalty it's that I want the things that God wants. I have grown weary of sin. I want to be freed from it. So it's a desire for holiness and righteousness a desire to escape my sin. So you wouldn't say oh great God's going to forgive me so in the meantime I'll pursue all the sin I can get because that's the very thing I want him to free me from and why would I pursue the thing I want to escape? So the first aspect is a desire for holiness in and of itself. The second is an understanding that I am not capable of getting there myself. So I'm trusting God to give it to me precisely because I don't have it I can't earn it I can't muster it up no amount of religious discipline and effort on my part is going to bring it about I'm trusting that God will give it to me as a gift. So I am incapable left to myself of getting there by myself. So a desire for holiness knowing I'm incapable of getting there myself the third thing is understanding that God owes me nothing that he is not obligated to give this to me. So this is the difference in the attitude between the Pharisee and the tax gatherer in the parable in Luke 18. So the Pharisee thought God was obligated to bless him because he was doing such a stellar job at lawkeeping the tax gatherer says I'm guilty. I need a way out I need an escape. So it's that understanding that I have done nothing to deserve my salvation. In fact I deserve condemnation I have no standing before God apart from his grace and the work of Jesus Christ. And again those are things we can say as a doctrinal creed you know this is how I'd vote in a theological quiz but it's got to be like the working principle of your life who you understand yourself to be.