Promise Believers: Better Promises

We are going through a series called Promise Believers.

Promise Believers.

And this morning's sermon is entitled Better Promises.

Better Promises.

So you can get your Bibles and turn them to Hebrews chapter 8.

Hebrews 8 · chapter mention

Hebrews chapter 8 is where 8 and 9 is where we're going to kind of be camped out, and I'm going to highlight a few themes.

Hebrews 8 · chapter mention

This series is based off of a class that I took in Bible college with a man named Bob Hoekstra.

And he named his series called Promise Believers.

And he was teaching this right around the time that Promise Keepers was popular.

And he was kind of playing around, being a little bit nitpicky.

And it's this idea that as followers of Jesus, we are not, God's not looking at us saying, hey, you need to make a bunch of promises to me.

Like I saved you, and now you're going to live by pulling up yourself by your bootstraps and making these promises on how you're going to behave.

No, what's supposed to continue is that we as followers of Jesus are just believing the promises that he makes.

So we, while the promise keepers movement was awesome, especially the racial reconciliation piece was critical.

The actual posture of our walk with the Lord is to be a people who understand that God extends himself to us in these precious promises.

And he says, look, you can be partakers of my divine nature through these promises.

And so we're spending a few weeks just considering this idea of promise.

And so we find ourselves in Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 8.

Hebrews 8 · chapter mention

But I do want to put in front of you.

So when we talk about the promises of God, I just want to read a few of them because a lot of this conversation is theoretical.

And as I said last week, what I want us to do is I want to not just be here on a Sunday and talk at a 30,000-foot level.

I want to talk at a granular level.

So tomorrow morning we have a greater sense of like, this is what it means for me to be a Christian.

And here's what this is how it works itself out as I'm driving in my car and I'm getting my coffee and I'm like beginning to wake up.

And so some of the promises, here's one.

This is do not fear.

This is Isaiah 41.

He's going to be our help.

Do not fear, for I am with you.

Do not be afraid, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you.

I will help you.

I will hold on to you with my righteous right hand.

Do you like that one?

Is that helpful?

Yeah, that's a good promise.

How about this one?

Deuteronomy 31:8.

Deuteronomy 31:8

The Lord is the one who will go before you.

He will be with you.

He will not leave you or abandon you.

Do not be afraid or discouraged.

He's promising that he's going to remain with his people.

Psalm 32.8.

I will instruct you and show you the way to go.

How many of us need to know the way to go?

I know, I need it.

I don't know how to do life that well.

I need instructions.

And here's a promise.

I will instruct you.

I will show you the way to go.

With my eye on you, I will give you counsel.

Man, the older we get, the more life beats us up, the more we realize, man, Lord, I need your counsel, your guidance.

Here's another one.

Psalm 37, 23 and 24.

A person's steps are established by the Lord, and he takes pleasure in his way.

One more.

Though he falls, he will not be overwhelmed, because the Lord supports him with his hand.

You feel overwhelmed?

The Lord is going to be your support.

So keep those in mind as we go along here.

Some writers have said that there are over 30,000 promises in the Bible.

As we've gone, as we talked last week, I've compared it to like financial wealth.

We have access to a very good life on earth and an amazing eternal existence if we will simply believe the promises of God.

It's on us.

Like so God comes along and he says, I'll give you count, I will give you counsel, I'll teach you the way to do life, I will be with you, I'll take away the premise of your fears, I will remove.

Like God extends himself with these amazing promises.

Let's say there's 30,000, right?

And I haven't gone through and counted all of them, right?

Let's say there's 30,000.

Like there's a lot there for us to take advantage of, but it's on us to respond to him and let him make those promises and fulfill those promises to us.

While we are called to believe what God promises, it is a bit more nuanced than that.

We read, we study, we memorize, we believe the promises of God because of the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is our legal standing, giving us access to the promises of God.

But he is also the priest who applies the promises to our lives like a doctor giving out a prescription to an illness.

So these promises are made, but what we're going to focus on this morning is how deeply these promises are tied in with the person of Jesus Christ.

These aren't just like confetti paper that's thrown out there to grab a hold of, but they are the promises that are applied like a prescription by our high priest to our life.

They are personally guaranteed because of the work that Jesus did on the cross.

They are ours personally because of Jesus.

So Hebrews 8, 6.

Hebrews 8.6.

Well, let me give you again, just so that you have this idea, because this is the, this is kind of my big idea for the sermon this morning.

Jesus is our legal standing, giving us access to the promises of God, but he is also the priest who applies the promises to our lives like a doctor giving out a prescription for illness.

Hebrews 8 6 says this, but Jesus has now obtained a superior ministry, and to that degree, he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been established on better promises.

Now, there's a bunch of technical words in there, and so I just want to ask and answer some questions around the words found in this verse.

When it says that Jesus is mediating a better covenant, what does he mean by covenant?

What's a covenant?

Do any of you kids know what a covenant is?

A promise, yes, a promise.

That's going to be kind of here in this definition.

A covenant is a chosen relationship in which two parties make binding promises to each other.

It is a chosen relationship where the parties make a binding covenant.

They make a binding promises to each other.

So, what does it mean for Jesus to mediate a better covenant?

The function of a mediator is to intervene between two parties in order to promote relations between them, which is which the parties themselves are not able to affect.

The situation required the office of a mediator, it is often the office of a mediator is often one of estrangement and alienation, and the mediator affects reconciliation.

So Jesus is in our verse here in Hebrews, Jesus is called the mediator of a better covenant.

He's the mediator of a better covenant.

Imagine when you go up to the drive-thru at McDonald's, okay?

And you're hungry, and you know you want that Big Mac, right?

And you are like, I need that.

And so you drive up, and all of a sudden, through that crackly speaker, there comes this voice.

Welcome to McDonald's.

How can I help you, right?

Or it's something like that, if the speaker's broken, right?

And you know that you're supposed to make an order at that point.

That person on the other side is there mediating on your behalf between you and McDonald's, right?

They're helping you access the meal that you want.

Jesus is the mediator of this covenant on our behalf.

Jesus is the one who is helping us be reconciled back to the Father, but to access all these better promises in this covenant.

So if you go back to Hebrews 8.6, it says, Jesus has now obtained a superior ministry.

In our context, as we look at this, superior ministry is a Jesus is better than a Levitical priest, right?

He's better than the priest that served in Israel, in the tabernacle or in the temple.

He has a superior ministry, and to that degree, he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been established on better promises.

So the question is, what is this covenant?

What is when he says there's a better covenant, what's he comparing it to?

And if we just go to the next verse in verse 7 and 8, we see for if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion for a second one.

So there's a first covenant that the writer of Hebrews is talking about and saying, well, that one was flawed in some ways, evidently, because God sees it necessary to come along and make a new covenant.

Now, if you got the email, the church email this morning, you saw your homework was to read about the new covenant or the promise of the new covenant from Jeremiah 31.

And the writer of Hebrews is pointing back to Jeremiah 31.

In fact, he's going to quote Jeremiah 31 in just a second, starting in verse 8.

But here in verse 7 he says, For if the first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion for a second one.

But finding fault with his people, that's where the fault lied.

The fault was not so much with the first covenant, as much as it was the faultiness of the human condition.

He says, See the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.

So this is the section in Hebrews.

This section, it continues on with Jeremiah 31.

I'm going to read to you a little bit more out of verse 10 through 12, just to show you what are these better promises.

Okay?

Let's see if my underlining wasn't retained in my slide here.

But here is this is Hebrews, but quoting from Jeremiah.

For this is the covenant that I'll make with the house of Israel in those days, says the Lord.

I'll put my law into their minds and write them on their hearts.

I will be their God and they will be my people.

Let's stop there for a second.

Okay.

If you are Jewish, we have anybody in here that's Jewish?

Nobody's raising their hand.

Okay.

So all of us are non-Jewish, which means we're what?

We're Gentiles.

Okay.

Now, the Jews were given this promise in Jeremiah 31.

Now, what what this is a triv a little Bible trivia for you all.

What makes it possible for us as Gentiles in this room to take the Jews' promise of a new covenant and apply it to us?

We accepted Jesus.

That's right.

That is that is in a nutshell, that is it.

Say again?

Is the word of God, that's right.

That's right.

Oh my gosh, you guys are really like A plus plus plus this morning.

Oh my gosh, you're like blowing me away.

Yes, and yes, and yes, that is right.

That is gonna be like the sermon next week with Abraham.

And so, like, don't forget that, because that's gonna be in the homework at the end of the sermon here.

Okay?

Yes, exactly, right?

So God makes his promise to Abraham.

It's like your seed is gonna be this blessing, right?

The blessing comes through Jesus.

And when we get to, when we when we see that it is the word of God, what we're seeing is that um in so Jesus talks about the new covenant when he gives and he ordains um the Passover cup and bread, and he gives new meeting, and he says, Okay, from now on I want you as my followers to do this, do it in remembrance of me.

He says, This is the blood of the new covenant.

Remember that?

But then when Paul writes the letter to the Corinthian church, which was predominantly a Gentile church, 1 Corinthians 11, Paul quotes Jesus' words verbatim, and he says, This is my blood, the blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you.

So Gentiles, and also we got Acts 10 and 11, the story of Cornelius' house, and they all received the Holy Spirit just like the Jews did, and all the Jews are like, they're blown away.

Wait, this promise was for the Gentiles just like it was for the Jews, right?

So it may not have been all that apparent, although it seems like Jesus is like, yo, it should have been apparent because of this passage that was given to Abraham.

But Paul, thank God for Paul, he unpacks the idea more, and then books like Hebrews unpacks it all that much more.

So we have this new covenant, right?

What's the first covenant, though?

What's the old covenant?

Where was that covenant made?

Okay, so so yeah, you guys, let me clarify.

So you do have the Abrahamic covenant, right?

But even before the Abrahamic covenant, we have another covenant before that one.

You know what it is?

You have the Adam and Eve covenant, the Adamic covenant, then you have the come on, Nathan.

The Noah covenant, there we go, that's right.

That's a covenant that God's going to not destroy the earth again with a flood, right?

Yeah.

Then after the Noahic covenant is what's the next covenant?

Abrahamic covenant, right?

And that's the one about this seed.

I'm gonna give you a seed.

This lineage is gonna bring a blessing upon all nations, right?

After the Abrahamic covenant, what's the next one?

The Mosaic covenant.

The Mosaic.

Moses goes up onto the mountain and he receives the ten commandments from God about making the temple.

We get the Levitical priesthood, we get the order of the nation.

It's basically like a constitution for the children of Israel, right?

They become a nation.

To be a nation, you have to have a common, you have to be a common people, a common land, uh, common people, common land, and a common constitution, right?

And so with that common constitution, the nation is basically formalized through the Mosaic covenant.

And when you think of the um Ten Commandments, how would you summarize it?

We could basically say that the Ten Commandments is be perfect, be loving, be holy, right?

You gotta be perfect, you gotta be loving.

It's a list of here's what you do, here's what you don't do.

It's a lot of laws.

Now, did that, was that covenant good enough for the people to experience the blessing of Abraham?

You think so?

I think that in Hebrews it says no.

Well, wait till next week.

Wait till next week.

There was the the blessing was not able to come to the nations through the covenant.

Now, there was it was a blessing because it was a moral code, and there are people that were expected to join and become converts over to Judaism, but it was unable to change hearts.

Well, let's just read it here, because this is the new covenant that comes in.

He says, I will put my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts.

What was the material that the old covenant was written on?

On stone.

That's right.

Was the old covenant written on hearts and minds?

No, it was an external covenant.

It couldn't, so when now this is a metaphor.

When you have a law written on your in your minds and in your hearts versus written in on a tablet of a stone or on a piece of paper, what's the difference between those two?

Internal and external.

Internal and external, yeah.

So we have the idea of like a sign that's up on the um up on the highway that says, you know, you go don't go faster than 65 miles an hour, right?

That's an external sign.

It's a it's that's the ministry of ink.

That's about as far as the Levitical priesthood and Moses could go.

It's the ministry of written in stone.

There is another way that you drive, which is an internal sense of how safe do you feel when you're driving down the road, and you have this own sense.

Like if you're driving a car like mine, which is old and rickety, and I'm going around a curve, it doesn't really matter to me what a sign says.

There's another law that's going on in my heart and in my heart and in my mind, which is I don't feel safe going around this curve much faster than this, right?

That's an internal sense of law, right?

There's a wisdom that is there.

And so with the old covenant, the old covenant didn't go far enough with its instructions.

It was external, right?

It was a list of do's and don'ts.

Let's see what else was in there.

Because in verse 11 it says, oh, wait, no, we gotta go back first.

Because here's the law, and then he says, I will be their God, they won't be my people.

What kind of language is that?

What kind of promise is that?

It's very relational.

Yeah, it's super relational.

It goes further in the relational saying, each person will not teach his fellow citizen and each his brother saying, Know the Lord, because they will all know me from the least to the greatest.

If you were born, and you if you were born as a Hebrew in the wilderness, and you wanted to understand who God was, and you wanted to know like God's will for your life.

Just think about um do you remember the story of Saul?

His dad loses a bunch of donkeys and he goes out to find them, right?

And he's stuck.

Now, does Saul have this sense at that moment when he's lost his donkeys?

And we all have lost our donkeys.

Come on.

It's a very universal story, right?

We've all lost our donkeys at some point or another.

At that moment, does Saul feel like he can just pray and ask God for wisdom?

Do you remember how the story goes with Saul?

No, his servant says, There is a man of God in this city.

Let's go ask him for help.

Do you remember that?

Saul's living under the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant, right?

He's many generations past Moses, but he's in this position where he has a problem and he needs help.

And he cannot, he does not have the ability to just go and ask God.

He needs a mediator to speak on God's behalf and give him wisdom on what to do about his lost donkeys.

That is the Mosaic covenant.

Whereas the new covenant says, look, each person will not teach his fellow citizen and each his brother or sister saying, Know the Lord, because they will know me from the least to the greatest.

It's a personal relationship with God.

That's what this covenant is about.

It's a personal relationship with God.

This is where we as Protestants deviate a little bit from Catholicism because we We believe and teach heavily that you get should get up in the morning and you should read your Bible.

You do not need a priest to mediate on your behalf to know God.

You have the Holy Spirit living inside of you, helping you understand the will of God.

Now, there's still God gifts to the church pastors and teachers.

That's still a gifting, but there is this personal relationship that you and I have with God that Saul didn't have.

That those who were living under the Mosaic covenant, they did not have.

And so going back to that question, was the Mosaic covenant good enough to bring about the Abrahamic blessing?

It was not.

It was external.

It relied upon a set of clergymen or priests who could mediate up on your behalf.

Then, what this text doesn't talk about, but which also is included, is how do you put away sin?

When you sin, did you have a person or an animal that would be killed to put away your sin under the Mosaic covenant?

What was it?

It was an animal, right?

You go and you kill an animal, and that is what, but could the animal put away the sin?

No.

And so again, he says, here's the person, but here it's in goes further.

He says, For I will forgive their wrongdoing, and I will never again remember their sins.

Wait, wait, wait.

Where is the sacrifice?

How can God just say, Y'all are gonna have a personal relationship with me under this new covenant?

There's not gonna be a need for a Levitical priesthood anymore, and there's gonna be forgiveness of sins?

Wait, you're just cutting out.

What are the Levites gonna do?

You're putting them out of a job, right?

You're basically no longer having a place for the Levitical priesthood based off of this new covenant?

Are you tracking with me?

Are you seeing that there's a difference between the Mosaic covenant?

Now, how many people, how many followers of Jesus do not recognize the difference between Ten Commandments and the Mosaic covenant versus a new covenant?

How many followers of Jesus are thinking that, well, I believed in Jesus to forgive my sins, and now I need to go and do the Ten Commandments in order to make God happy so that my life will work out?

And do you see that they're playing by two sets of rules?

Do you see how that happens?

And the the reality is, is there was a set of followers of God who understood God only through the Mosaic covenant, and they were hoping to and trying their best and even promising God, like God, I am gonna, we're gonna do it.

And yet they failed over and over again, and then Jesus brought in a new covenant of better promises.

It's it's this amazing, amazing thing.

Amen.

The writer of the Hebrews continues his line of thinking by explaining.

So if you go on past this verse, he keeps going and he riffs on it, and you should read it on your own.

Hebrews 8, it continues on talking about the um Levitical priesthood, and the writer of Hebrews is trying to help modern-day Jews see the weakness of the Mosaic covenant.

Now, as Gent, now we're not Jews.

Like we're not wishing for the temple to be re-established and celebrating Shabbat and going to the sa uh to the synagogue on um Saturdays.

Um we're not practicing Jews.

And so, again, how does this apply to us?

Here's why, it's because we have this innate religious sense where we default to legalism, where we think that God is either going to bless us because we did the right thing today, or he's going to ignore us and we can't pray and we can't access grace because we failed today.

I've told you guys this before, but this is just the my favorite example from my own life was as I was learning these things in Bible college, I was in a room with um, I was a I was sharing a room with five other guys in Bible college.

And I was too lazy or too cheap to buy my own shampoo.

And so for a whole semester, I think this was my third semester of Bible college, I faced the temptation of stealing my roommate's shampoo.

And when I would give in to that temptation, I had this way of thinking if I steal my roommate's shampoo, my day is over.

God can't bless me because I'm a thief.

And I was too dumb to just ask for their permission to share the shampoo, and I was too legalistic to understand that that's just not how it works relating to God.

That is not the new covenant grace of God.

The work of God in our life, we obey God not to earn his favor.

Like, let's say that I resist the temptation to steal my roommate's shampoo, but the day still goes horrible.

If I'm a legalist, I go back and I say, God, look, I resisted temptation.

I didn't steal my roommate's shampoo.

And you should have blessed me.

That's the legalist talking, right?

Or if I fail and I don't and I violate my roommate by stealing his shampoo and then don't talk to God, then I'm not honoring the work that Jesus did on the cross, right?

I'm failing to live according to the new covenant.

So the writer of Hebrews is deconstructing their attachment to the Levitical priesthood so that they could be married to Christ and the new covenant.

If your heart and my heart is bent towards legalism and doesn't recognize the free grace of God, then we need also to walk through that process of deconstruction so that our hearts can let go of that legalistic relationship with God because Jesus paid for you and I to relate to God according to grace.

We have to, for the sake of time, jump over to Hebrews chapter 9, verses 11 through 14.

Hebrews 9:11–14

Hebrews 9, 11 through 13.

Just imagine you were reading all of chapter 8 and a big chunk of chapter 9, and you're all read up on the priesthood, and then it starts talking about Jesus.

Okay?

So we have the but here.

So this is a but, Christ, in contrasting against the Levitical priest.

But Christ has appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come in the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is, not of this creation.

He entered the most holy place once for all time, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.

For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow, sprinkling those who ha are defiled, sanctify for the purification of the flesh?

How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse our conscience from the dead, from dead works so that we can serve the living God?

In other words, how much more awesome is Jesus?

Right?

That's the idea.

How much more awesome is Jesus than the Levitical priests?

Jesus used his own blood to have access to a heavenly tabernacle to go into a high, into this place, this holy place that only the priest could access before, and it was on earth.

This one's in heaven, and he's done it on our behalf, and now he's able to cleanse our conscience from dead works, so that we can serve the living God.

Because this is, I know you're like, how does this tie with the covenant and the promises?

Here it is, right?

Here is verse 15.

Therefore, he is the mediator of the new covenant.

This is Jesus, right?

So that those who are called might receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

Do you see that?

So Jesus took on this role of being the high priest so that we could have this new covenant, this better covenant, and receive the better promises, the better promises and the eternal inheritance.

So while the Bible is full of promises, we stand at a unique place in history having better promises through the new covenant.

Jesus mediates those promises for us.

Let me give you one more verse and then I'm going to give you a little bit of homework.

One more verse and then a little bit of homework.

Okay?

James 2, 5.

Listen, my dear brothers and sisters, didn't God choose the poor in this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that He has promised to those who love Him?

Yeah, to be prom He has made these promises to us, and He's chosen, like we happen to be a church that ministers to people that are not very wealthy.

Like if you're wealthy, we're glad you're here.

We need your tithes and offerings.

That's awesome.

But generally speaking, we are a poor church, right?

And that's fun.

And the cool thing about James is he's like, look, God chose the poor.

He chose those of us that are poor to be poor in this world so that we can be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that He has promised to those who love Him.

Do you see this word heirs?

Do you see that word heirs?

It goes back to another word here, right here.

Inheritance.

The same root word.

Heirs and inheritance share the same idea.

An inheritance is what is given to an heir.

An heir to the throne, we just saw, right?

An heir to the throne this last week.

The queen died.

Who became king?

Her son, right?

Not some random guy voted into office.

It was literally an heir to the throne.

What we're going to look at next week is this idea of the promises are ours through inheritance, right?

And we participate and become the inheritors.

We become the heirs to the promise of God through faith.

So here's what I want you to do this week.

Two things.

I want you to, number one, I want you to find three Bible promises that you can talk to Jesus about.

That you can talk to Jesus about.

Now, two weeks ago, and and maybe you all don't get this, and so what I'll do is I'll put it on the website as well, the church website.

There is a free PDF with all the promises of God or something like that.

It's just was it was out there and it was tons of scripture, a little bit of introduction.

So what I want you to do is I want you to go and I just want you to find three promises.

Three promises that you can have a conversation with Jesus about.

Now, when you have a conversation with somebody, usually that means that you've meditated on it, you've thought a little bit about it.

But what I want, what I want for us is I want us to take three to the bank this week.

I want you to just talk to the Lord and say, Lord, you promised this.

And I and but I'm feeling like this, or I am I am facing, remember in the middle of our worship service, I asked you to just confess inadequacy and insufficiency?

Just words that express.

We had the word stuck, we had the word impatient, we had the word anger.

We had different words that were thrown out there to express our insufficiency, right?

I want you to go and grab three Bible promises this week that you can talk to Jesus about, and that you can basically a promise.

We talk about, we have that song, Standing on the Promises of God.

A promise is something where you can have a conversation with Jesus and you can say, you can be so bold as to say, God, you have promised this, and I need it.

I absolutely need you to come true on this promise.

I need you to make it real in my life.

I want you to do this so that next week, when we come together, some of you can share what promise you were holding the Lord to.

Now, it may seem like you're being demanding, you're not.

The Lord extends himself to us in promise.

He wants for us to base our relationship with him on these types of promises.

And the second piece of homework is just to read Galatians 3 and Romans 4.

That's going to be our text for next week.

We're going to look, and then for extra credit, which is not up here, if you want to read Genesis chapter 12 through Genesis 17, that's the story of Abraham, and that's where God's coming to Abraham over and over again and extending himself in promise.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

Okay?

So you've got Genesis 12 through 17.

You're going to see in Galatians 3 and Romans 4, it's all about Abraham.

And so it's going to keep pointing back to those passages.

And um so if you will do that, you'll come in next week ready.

Okay.

We're going to um we're going to take communion together.

Um, and so our last worship song is very, very long.

And so I think the way that I want to do this is let's go ahead and can we pass the can you just take the tray and start with you guys?

Let's just pass it around the room.

And um take take the communion elements.

We do, and and as we're passing out the elements, thank you so much, brother.

Um we take communion uh now, every Sunday, um, one because we feel comfortable enough being through COVID that there's this like hand-to-hand um contact that isn't so scary.

Um but the second reason why that's that's kind of getting out of COVID.

But what we do and why the communion elements sit here in the middle of um the room is because we're remembering the work of Christ on our behalf.

And this the what we happen to be talking about this morning is so deeply tied in um with this idea of the covenant that was made in Jesus' blood.

Um and so when let me pull up 1 Corinthians 11, which I mentioned, and then and we have some kids in here, so I want to I want to just uh address our kids for just a second.

Okay, if you're a kid, raise your hand.

Okay, good.

There's one.

Joshua, raise your hand.

Are you a kid?

Yes.

Are you are you in living in denial?

Yeah.

Okay, 1 Corinthians 11 explains a church that was not doing communion very well together.

And um so here's the criteria.

If you want to take communion on a Sunday, when we do this, because sometimes we have kids in the room, sometimes you guys come back.

Um, the criteria for taking communion is that you have a personal relationship with Christ.

Well, how do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?

What does that mean?

How do you start to have a personal relationship with Jesus?

Confess him as your thank you.

Yeah, you confess him as your Lord and Savior.

You've placed your faith, you've given your life to him, right?

You've turned your life over to him.

So it's this internal thinking and feeling like God, I want to make you the Lord of my life.

If you have done that, then you're adopted, you're brought into his family, you're a child of God.

And so this meal, oh this is like a little or then a lunchable, right?

This meal, this meal is for you, right?

So that's the first criteria.

But there's another criteria with this a heart of humility, that you're um considering, you're taking into account your own position and where you're at with the Lord.

So, what my grandpa taught me, my grandpa was a pastor, what he taught me was look, before you take communion, take a minute, just confess your sin to the Lord.

Just prepare your heart.

You come before the Lord, you say, Lord, just cleanse my heart.

Like, I am sorry.

You know that I am sinful.

It's not that you're gonna make yourself more worthy, but it's an attitude of like, Lord, I have failed this week.

I need you to forgive my sins afresh, right?

That's one thing.

And the other thing is that we remember the work that Christ did, we're reflecting upon it.

So um in 1 Corinthians 11, uh Paul says in verse 17, now in giving this instruction, I do not praise you, since you come together not for better, but for the worse.

For to begin with, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, right?

So this is a messy church.

One of you, as he says in down 21, some of you eat your own meal in advance, and then some of you are coming to church drunk.

Don't you have homes where you're supposed to be eating and and drinking at home, and then you come together?

Okay.

Then he says in verse 23, For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you.

On the night when Jesus was betrayed, he took the bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and he said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

So we we take the bread.

So go ahead and pull back that top layer of your communion.

And Paul is teaching these Gentiles, he's saying, This is what Jesus gave to me to pass on to you, and he gives a time frame, and he says, Hey, when Jesus took it, he broke it, and he said, he held it up.

He said, This is my body, which is for you.

So hold up your bread.

He said, Jesus said, Do this in remembrance of me.

So let's take the bread together.

And then you can pull back the top layer of your juice.

And it says, in the same way, Jesus also took the cup after supper, and he said, This cup is the new covenant.

So hold up your cup.

Jesus held it up.

He said, This is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Let's take the cup together.

Amen.

So in drinking, in drinking the cup, and taking the bread, there's a proclamation that Jesus died on our behalf.

So it's a when you're taking um the Passover meal, there is like this, it's like a family meal.

Like, kids are there, we're all together, we're a big family.

So I know sometimes, like, and which is good, like we'll pray, we'll be singing, and we'll kind of like have our heads bowed, but there's also an appropriateness to having this meal where we're looking at each other.

Sometimes in churches they'll take the they'll um serve each.

Each other the meal, and they'll say, This is the cup, this is the the blood of Jesus shed for you.

And it's interactive.

There's not a lot of rules around this other than, hey, when you take communion, you've got a heart that's prepared for the Lord.

It's about Jesus.

We're remembering what he did.

And it is this beautiful ritual that we're called to do, proclaiming the death of Jesus until he comes.

Amen.

Lord, we so are so grateful.

We're so grateful for your death, the covenant that you made with us.

And Lord, as we close out our service this morning, we would ask that there would just be a blessing that goes into our life through these promises, but then it goes out through us into the people we interact with this week.

Lord, as we finish up with this last song, Lord, would you uh fill us afresh with your spirit and prepare us, Lord, for to be um in the mission field that you've called us to?

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.