The Covenant

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

The series that we're beginning today is called Jesus BC.

The communications team has done an incredible job again with the graphics and the design for this series.

And you might be very confused about what Jesus BC actually means.

I would love to tell you now, but that would ruin everything that we're about to do.

So I'll hold off on that.

Today's message, though, is titled The Covenant, The Covenant.

I'd like to say also that a couple months ago, I got the opportunity to go to the country of Jordan, and many of the events of the Old Testament took place in the country of Jordan, and we got to see amazing sites and things like that.

And right before I went on that trip, I picked up a book that had been sitting in my pile of books to read for about a year.

It had been given to me.

Pastor Tommy Briggs and Pastor Olin Griffin had teamed up together to give me this book.

And uh it had been sitting there for so long, and I thought, I'm about to go on a trip and I'm gonna be on an airplane for a long time.

I'll just read this book.

And the book is called Who Ate Lunch with Abraham?

And it's by a man named Asher and Trader.

I've made sure that we have copies in the bookstore at every campus.

So if you want to grab it, you can do that.

What I preach has been influenced by this book, but don't take that to mean that I'm saying everything that Asher believes or that I'm trying to give a summary of the book or anything like that.

Um, so don't attribute what I say to be equated to him, but this book has been very impactful to me as I've been studying this.

And so uh that's available in the bookstore if you would like to pick it up.

I got a chance to uh even talk to Asher on a Zoom call for a little while.

He lives in Israel, and uh and it was a great conversation.

So I'm extremely excited about this series and what we're going to cover.

And I if you want to go deeper on this topic, I would definitely recommend that book to you.

Let's get started.

If you have your Bibles, you can turn to the book of Luke, chapter two.

If not, it'll be on the screens.

We are gonna start in verse 21.

And it says here in Luke 2, 21, eight days later, when the baby was circumcised, he was named Jesus, or uh the the Jewish word that would be used here is Yeshua, the name given him by the angel even before he was conceived.

I know what you're thinking.

Every single time you listen to a message, you turn on a podcast, uh, every pastor starts off with the circumcision of Jesus.

I know it's common.

Everybody's preaching about the circumcision of Jesus.

I get it, all right?

I get it.

I immediately when I got to this, you're like, oh, I've heard this a million times.

Everybody wants to talk about the circumcision of Jesus.

This is uh this is so common.

Uh I have a point to this, okay?

I'm not trying to uh randomly insert the the circumcision of Jesus, but there's something that's really important for us to capture in this passage.

So one is that Jesus did submit to the Jewish practice of the circumcision on the eighth day.

Granted, he was a baby, but he foreknew everything that was going to happen, so he took care of that.

He knew that he was going to be circumcised.

He was a Jew that followed the Jewish practices of the day, uh, a committed uh Jewish follower or believer.

And and and what would take place is that at the bris at eight days, that's whenever they would do the circumcision of the child.

And what you also notice in that passage is that's the moment that they gave him his name.

Now, the name had been foretold by an angel that visited Joseph and Mary, but they obeyed and they called him Yeshua.

Now, uh the the I someone sent me a TikTok video one time, uh, and it was pointing out, well, Jesus is not really his real name.

If you look in like Greek and Hebrew, they don't even have a the letter J, and there's not even something that represents the letter J, that sound, the ju sound, does not exist there in that language.

And so uh this TikTok video was saying Christians make up everything, they invent everything, his name wasn't even Jesus.

Uh and so I'm not gonna go into all the history of how this took place, but um, what happened was that the scriptures were translated, the that very first translation is kind of known as the Septuagint.

And in that, in the the mixture of separating to these languages, uh, he became known as Jesus.

And then that in English was translated as Jesus.

Uh there's no there's no reason for us to stop calling him Jesus.

If you travel to another country and you hold up a book and you talk about the book, the book has many different ways of uh uh or many different words based on what language you're speaking that describe the book, but the book doesn't change.

Okay, so our translation of the word is Jesus.

His name was Yeshua, which is a shortened version of Yhoshua.

Remember that Joshua in the Bible was named, it was he his name was changed, and Joshua was the one who saves, who's gonna redeem, who's gonna bring them into the promised land, the one who's gonna save.

This is a play off of that word, Yeshua.

Jesus saves, he redeems.

There's a lot more to it.

If you ever want to look at the history of it, it's fascinating.

You can go through, but I don't have time to go through it now.

But this is where we get the name Jesus.

I'm gonna be reading a lot from the Tree of Life version today.

So it's gonna refer to Jesus as Yeshua.

I'm not trying to start a movement where we all say Yeshua.

Jesus is our English way of saying it, I'm fine with that.

But as we look at the the Jewish scriptures here or through a Jewish lens, where we may call him Yeshua several times in the message today, but that is his name.

Um, since he sort of in many ways shares a name with uh Joshua, I've been encouraged by that.

I uh I mean, does it make me feel good?

I share a name with Jesus a little bit, honestly, yeah, it does.

Um and you could take it however you want.

I'm just telling you that uh we're buddies, we got the same name.

And uh so uh Yhoshua, and and actually this was a good year for me to be thinking about this because uh the earlier this year I turned 40 years old, and um I did not like it very much.

Um it was not a good good year for me turning 40.

Raise your hand if you're in this room and you're over 40 years old.

Okay, guys, let's get some younger people in this church.

Now hold it up.

Now all right, hold it, keep it up.

If you're over 40, I'm sorry, I'm drawing attention.

But it's me too, all right?

I wouldn't do this to you if it wasn't me too.

All right, so all right, now put it down if you did not have trouble turning 40.

Only keep your hand up if 40 was a tough year for you.

Oh gosh, I was the only one.

All right, there's a few here.

Thank you, thank you.

It was tough for me, and I'll tell you one of the reasons, the most ridiculous reason that it was tough for me, was because as I was getting older, I started thinking about my name is Josh, and I've never met an old Josh.

Never.

I started thinking about like my kids are getting older, and I'm gonna be, I'm not that far off from being a grandfather.

And have you ever in your whole life heard anyone go, hey Grandpa Josh, it's never happened.

It's never happened in the history of the world.

And I was like, wait a second, what in the world?

Like, do Joshes have an expiration date that I don't know about?

Because this is important information.

And I started looking everywhere, I was Googling for old Josh's, couldn't find any.

They all die young or they're young.

I don't know what happens.

They're just no old Joshes.

And so as I do, I started having like a mini panic attack about it.

And I was telling my friend George Thomas, I was like, dude, there's no old Joshes.

Have you noticed this?

Like, is this the end of it for me?

Like, I need to know.

And he pulled out this app on his phone that showed you could look up uh the popularity of names over time.

And what I learned is that from about 1978 to about 1984, every single Christian family in America named their son Josh.

Before that, no one, no one was named Josh.

Right in that little window, everyone was named Josh.

I went to a very small private school, like I never had more than 32 kids in my grade, my whole grade.

Like it was a really small private Christian school.

And in all of that time, I went there from kindergarten until I graduated high school.

In all of that time, I was never the only Josh in my class.

Out of 32 kids, 60% of them were female.

We're talking about maybe 14, 15 dudes in this class, and at least sometimes three of them were named Josh.

That's what I've been dealing with for my whole life.

But, so sure, you can't find old Josh's right now.

Wait a little while, and everybody that's old is gonna be named Josh, just so you know.

So, you know, uh the it was a struggle, but Jesus' name is important.

The name that he was given, the time that he was given that name.

And so uh as we as we look at this moment of Jesus' circumcision and the name that he was given, we remember that Yeshua abided by the Jewish practices, and that began with his circumcision.

All right, so today we're gonna talk about covenants, and uh, I want to talk about the covenant specifically with Abraham, but before that there was a covenant made with Adam and Eve that God will would fulfill his portion of the covenant if they fulfilled their portion.

They couldn't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or else they would be breaking that covenant.

Then God made a covenant with Noah through the rainbow, and he continued to make covenants with men over time, trying to redeem what had been lost at the fall.

And then that brings us to the covenant that he made with Abraham.

So we're gonna read a lot of scripture today.

I'm gonna do my best to go through it pretty quickly.

But every one of these things, I know I'm reading a lot, every one of these things is really important.

Um, for a little while, you're gonna be like, this message makes no sense at all.

And then at the very end, if you've done a good job of cataloging everything that we're talking about, you're gonna be like, oh, I uh it's all coming together now.

So bear with me, stay with me on this.

I'm gonna read 10 scriptures right off the bat.

So this starts in Genesis 15, starting in verse 1.

After these things, the word of Adonai, that's God, it might say in your Bible, Lord, Adonai came to Abram.

Remember, this is before God changed his name to Abraham.

So he's talking to Abram, but this is still Abraham, in a vision, saying, Do not fear, Abram, I am your shield, your very great reward.

Abram's thinking, I don't even have an heir in my name.

What kind of reward is this?

So Abraham said, or Abram said, My lord, Adonai, what will you give me, since I am living without children?

And the heir of my household is Eliezer of Damascus.

Then Abram said, Look, you have given me no seed, so a houseborn servant is my heir.

Then, behold, the word of Adonai came to him, saying, This one will not be your heir, but in fact one who will come from your own body will be your heir.

He took him outside and said, Look up now at the sky and count the stars, if you are able to count them.

Then he said to him, So shall your seed be.

Then he believed in Adonai, and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.

And then he said to him, I am Adonai who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans in order to give you this land to inherit it.

So he said, My lord Adonai, how will I know that I will inherit it?

And he said to him, Bring me a three-year-old young cow, a three-year-old she-goat.

I don't know what a she-goat is.

I tried to Google it.

The the Tree of Life version will give you some very fun words to play with, but a she-goat is at the top of my list.

A three-year-old ram, a turtle dove, and a young bird.

So he brought all of these to him, and then what did they do next?

They cut them in half, as one does.

All right.

And then they put each piece opposite of each other, but he did not cut the birds.

Cutting birds in half is really hard, all right?

I was doing research on this message.

I tried it, it was terribly hard, all right?

I'm gonna jump down to verse 17 now.

When the sun set and it became dark, behold, there was a smoking oven and a fiery torch that passed between these pieces.

On that day, Adonai cut a covenant.

When we hear cut covenant, we might think that that means to break the covenant.

Cut covenant means to create a covenant with Abram, saying, I give this land to you, to your seed from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River.

All right.

In a covenant, it typically always requires some kind of cutting of the flesh and some blood.

That's the that's the standard elements for a covenant.

So what they would do is when when in Abraham's time, when they were making a covenant, they would take these animals and they would cut them in half and they would separate the two halves and make a uh a pathway between the bloody animals.

Um we're just talking about circumcision, chopping animals in half.

This is a great day already.

And uh so then the two people that were making a covenant with each other would walk through the the body parts, okay, the pieces of the animal, and then they would separate and go their own way, and they would go around the body parts.

They would come back and meet in the middle, and then they would walk through it once more.

That was how they developed or concreted or cemented the covenant that they made with each other.

The problem was Abram he was cutting animals in half.

He got tired, all right?

He went over, he took a little nap.

When he woke up, he saw that a fiery torch and a smoking oven, those two things were walking through the cut animals and they were separating and coming back.

And so the covenant then was made in the spiritual realm by God in a glorified form, and Abram never actually entered into the covenant.

So Abram does enter into the covenant, and we'll talk about how in just a moment, but when he had fallen asleep, God walks through those pieces.

Adonai cut covenant with Abraham.

All right, remember, cut covenant does not mean that you break the covenant.

That's how you begin a covenant.

The cutting happens at the beginning, so that no cutting has to happen after that.

Genesis chapter 17, verses verse 1, it says, When Abram was 99 years old, Adonai appeared to Abram, and he said to him, I am El Shaddai, continually walk before me, and you will be blameless.

Genesis 17 · chapter mention

My heart's desire is to make my covenant.

My covenant, the covenant that God made, he made that covenant, and he said, But my desire is to make my covenant between me and you.

So this is where Abram gets in on the covenant, and then I will multiply you exceedingly much.

Abram fell on his face, and God spoke with him, saying, For my part, because my covenant is with you, you will be the father of a multitude of nations.

No longer will your name be Abram, but your name will be Abraham, because I make you the father of a multitude of nations.

Jumping down to verse nine.

God also said to Abraham, As for you, my covenant you must keep, you and your seed after you throughout their generations.

This is my covenant that you must keep between me and you and your seed after you.

This is how Abraham enters the covenant.

All your males must be circumcised.

You must be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and this will become a sign of the covenant between me and you.

Again, remember, all of these elements are important.

The sign of the covenant between Abraham and God is circumcision.

Okay?

They were to keep this covenant, and if they did, then God would be their king yet again, and they would be blessed under his rulership in a similar way to how Adam and Eve were blessed, living under his rulership before the fall.

So the question we need to ask today is who cut a covenant with Abraham?

God.

God cut it.

It was God.

We know that, all right?

We saw that earlier.

It was God.

God cut covenant with Abraham.

But it might not be as simple as it sounds.

Jewish people have had a belief that God is shapeless and formless and that no man can see him.

And we believe something very similar to that, but with one distinct difference that we'll talk about later.

So let me show you what we believe about God the Father and our ability to see him.

John 1.18 says, No one, no one has ever seen God.

No one has ever seen God.

If you're here or you're watching online or at one of the campuses or the gatherings, you are a someone.

If you can take in the information that I'm telling you, you are a someone, and that means you've never seen God.

All right?

No one has ever seen God.

But the unique one who is himself God is near to the Father's heart, and he has revealed God to us.

I'm sure you know who that is, but let's keep going.

John chapter 5, verse 37.

John 5:37

This is Jesus speaking himself, and he said, And the Father who sent me has testified about me himself.

Listen to this, you have never heard his voice.

We just read over and over about God speaking to Abraham, but here Jesus says, You have never heard his voice or seen him face to face, and you do not have his message in your hearts because you do not believe me, the one he sent to you.

In John chapter 6, verse 46, this is Jesus speaking again.

John 6:46

Not that anyone has ever seen the Father.

Only I who was sent from God has seen him.

Colossians 1, 15, Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.

Can any of you see things that are invisible?

Like if you can, let me know.

We can do some things together, all right?

Rob some banks or something, I don't know.

But if no one can see the invisible God.

All honor and power to him forever.

You getting it?

No one can see God.

Let's keep going just for fun.

First John 4 12.

No one has ever seen God.

Could it be any more clear?

No one.

No one has ever seen God.

First John 4 20.

If someone says, I love God, but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar.

For if we don't love people that we can see, how can we love God whom we cannot see?

We can't see God.

The Bible makes that abundantly clear.

We can't see God.

The Bible describes him in several instances, and we're gonna look at those later in the series.

But he is the ancient of days, the one who never dies.

His glory is so intense and so powerful that we have absolutely no chance of seeing him unless we have been purified.

We have no chance of seeing him.

No one has seen God.

But I just read to you that Adonai, God, appeared before Abraham.

Let me show you one more instance.

It's gonna be the most important instance of God showing up to Abraham.

Genesis 18, starting in verse 1.

Then Adonai, God, Lord, appeared to him at Mamur's large trees while he was sitting in the entrance of his tent during the heat of the day, when he lifted up his eyes to see suddenly three men.

These people looked like men.

This is the way that Abraham saw them.

Three men were standing right by him.

When he saw them, he ran from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed down to the ground.

And then to one of them he addresses, My Lord, if now I have found favor in your eyes, please do not pass by your servant.

Please let a little water be brought so you can wash your feet and make yourselves comfortable under the tree, and let me bring a bit of bread so that you can refresh yourselves.

Then you can pass on, since you have passed by your servant.

And then jumping down to verse.

It says, then he took butter, this is Abraham, butter and milk and the young ox that he had prepared and set it before them.

And while he was standing by them under the tree, these dudes ate food.

Sorry, that blows my mind.

Two angels and God show up, but they look like men, and they sat and they ate food with him.

They ate food with him.

There are two angels there with him, but the other one is called Adonai.

He is called Lord.

He's called the Angel of Yehovah.

He is speaking as God directly to Abraham.

It's a dude.

It's a guy.

What you have here, I don't know if you know what happens right after they eat lunch, but the two angels are like, hey, we got to go check out Sodom and Gomorrah.

We're thinking about blowing that place up.

And uh so we're gonna go check it out and see what's going on over there.

And then God in human form and Abraham stick around, two bros, two dudes just standing around, like, hey, what's up, dude?

And they stand there and they talk.

And I don't know if you remember what happens, but they negotiate in typical dude fashion, they negotiate with each other on something.

Do you remember this?

They're standing there and they're looking towards Sodom and Gomorrah.

The angels have left to go check it out.

And uh Abraham goes, uh, hey dude.

And uh Jesus is like, What's up, bro?

And uh he goes, Do you really have to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah?

And he's like, Yeah, their wickedness, uh, it kind of made it all the way up to heaven, and uh there's a big stink about it.

I gotta do something about it.

Um, so we're gonna head down there and take care of it.

And uh uh Abraham's like, uh, well, let me ask you a question real quick, since I got you here.

Um, what if there's like 50 good dudes down there?

Would you kill everyone if there was 50 good dudes down there?

And Jesus or the God is like, you know, uh, I don't know, man.

Uh dude, I was thinking about blowing the whole place up.

But yeah, if there's 50 good dudes down there, then I'll save them.

And uh, you know, typical fashion, it's like he agreed.

You can't accept that.

You know, we're in a used car sales battle right now.

Like he agreed to that.

I gotta wait till he doesn't agree with this anymore.

What about 45 good dudes?

Could you do it for that?

Would you do that?

He's like, ah, yeah, 45 good dudes.

They whittle all the way down to like, if there's 10 good dudes down there, this is this is God and Abraham sitting here talking and negotiating with each other.

And yet we know that no one has seen God.

How do we explain this?

How do we explain this human-formed person of God who is clearly in the Bible called God, yet at the same time, here he is appearing to Abraham.

All right?

So uh this this this happens, this conversation happens, and here he's interacting with him, and and and it it just can't help but but but start to occur to me, and and maybe you're tracking with where this is going, but God the Father is up in heaven on his throne, the ancient of days, the the one who has lived forever and will never die.

But there's this person that kind of looks like what you might call the son of man.

And he's standing there with Abraham in human form.

And he's having a conversation with him.

And so maybe you might wonder could that be Jesus?

Could it be Jesus that made this appearance to Abraham?

Could it be Jesus that came down and ate lunch with Abraham and interacted with him?

Is that who that could be?

Because he speaks as God and yet we know that it is not God the Father.

And and I guess I was thinking maybe the best thing that could ever happen would be that Jesus would tell us that that was him.

Oh, he did.

Hold on, I'll show it to you.

John chapter 8, verse 54.

John 8:54

Yeshua answered, he's talking to uh um a group of people here, most likely uh Pharisees, I think, if I remember right, and he said, If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing.

It is my father who gives me glory, the one whom you say he is our God, the one that you say you're referring to, he is our God.

Yet you don't know him, but I know him.

If I say I do not know him, then I'd be a liar like you.

Yet I do know him and I do keep his word, and then this is incredible.

Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day.

He saw it and was thrilled.

My day means my day of visitation.

I always thought that in this passage, he's I'm about to continue it in just a second.

I always thought in this passage that when he says that he existed before Abraham, that he's just letting them know that he really is God, that he's the Son of God, that he is an eternal being.

That's what I expected that he was saying.

And I always thought these idiots think that he's talking about him actually being there at that time.

I'll show you because this is their response.

He says, He rejoiced to see my day.

He saw it and was thrilled.

And it's the Judeans he's talking to.

The Judeans said to him, You're not even 50 years old, and you've seen Abraham.

That was kind of an insult, I think, because there's no way that Jesus was older than about 33 years old.

So they were like, You don't look a day over 50.

Like, you know, I think that was kind of like a slam to them.

They understood exactly what he was saying.

They're saying, How you're young.

How in the world do you claim that you were the one who visited Abraham?

It's easy to pass over that part because then when we go on, it says, uh Yeshua answered, Amen, amen.

That's truly, truly, I tell you.

Before Abraham was, I am.

Then they picked up stones to throw at him, but Yeshua hid himself and went out from the temple.

He does not simply say in this passage that he's God.

He does not simply say in this passage that he is eternal.

He does not simply say in this passage that he is divine.

What he says is when Abraham saw me, my day of visitation, when I showed up in his presence, he rejoiced.

Standing there as a man, the angel of Jehovah, in human form, eating lunch with Abraham, talking to Abraham, giving him instructions, and more importantly than anything else, making a covenant with Abraham.

I'm not sure we realize how big this really is because for Jewish people, they have said, my covenant is with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And then here, yes, you have your prophet Jesus, this person who is clearly wise and clearly can do some incredible things, but definitely not God.

And what we need to realize is that that original covenant was made with Jesus.

The original covenant that the Jews have with God is made through Jesus.

He's in the burning bush, he's the fire that guides the Israelites by day.

Jesus in the spiritual realm walked through those cut pieces, developed a covenant with man, and then he said the sign of that will be circumcision.

Jesus shows up as a human being, then later in man form, and he himself is circumcised, completing the loop of the covenant, meaning that between the covenant between God and man is between Jesus in the spirit realm and Jesus in the physical realm.

And once he makes that covenant and lives the perfect life that no one else could live, and is then crucified and rises again, that is the only way that we as Gentiles can be saved.

Jesus is the Messiah.

He was there in the Old Testament, he was there in the covenant that was made with Abraham.

He fulfilled that covenant through being circumcised himself, living the perfect life, and then dying and rising again.

And more than anything, what we should be trying our best to do is to help Jewish people see Jesus as their one true Messiah.

Now, there's this uh um really interesting passage in Jeremiah.

Uh it's in Jeremiah chapter 31.

Jeremiah 31 · chapter mention

And what it says is, in short, I'm gonna summarize because we are so out of time.

Uh, what it says is that uh that that God entered a covenant by creating this creation, this world that we live in.

God entered a covenant there with them, and God entered into a covenant with the Israelites, and that those two covenants are dependent upon each other.

God causes the sun to rise every morning and to set every evening, he puts the stars in the skies for us and the moon around our earth, and all of the working order of creation that in Jeremiah also says is tied to the covenant that he made with the Jewish people, with the Israelites.

And then our covenant is completely dependent on him fulfilling the covenant that he made with Abraham.

So what we have now is a three-part covenant.

Anybody that tells you, oh, the Old Testament, that's that scripture is for the Jewish people, but doesn't really matter or make any difference to us.

We have no covenant with Christ if Christ doesn't have a covenant with the Jewish people.

All three of those covenants are dependent on each other.

And so we ourselves, as Christians, Christ followers and believers, we are in covenant with the Jewish people.

You want to know why uh Christians care so much about preserving Israel and defending Israel and all those things?

And I hope it's not at the expense of any other group, but what we're looking at is that we are protecting the covenant that God made with Abraham, and Satan is doing every single thing he can to destroy it, because that would destroy the covenant with us, which in turn would destroy the covenant of all of creation.

It would be the end of the world.

And that means that we have a binding covenant.

That in the same way we worship Yeshua as our Messiah, we are to be in covenant with the Jewish people.

And we are to pray for the protection of Israel and the protection of Jewish people and the realization that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In the fourth week of this series, I'm gonna tie every all of this together.

We're gonna go into so much more depth in this.

Um, but as I was praying today about how to end this message, um, I I want us to uh take a moment.

Gateway has always been committed uh to what the Bible teaches to the Jew first, to go to the Jew first.

The very first of all of the giving that comes out of Gateway, and it is a substantial amount of money goes directly to Jewish ministries.

So this is a church that I believe is blessed because of our commitment to the Jewish people.

So I'd like to ask you to stand because we're gonna do a quick prayer for the Jewish people.

I'm gonna ask my friend Nick to come up.

Nick Lesmeister is works in our Jewish department.

If you don't know that, we have a whole department of people staffed to help us do this mission that God has placed on us.

And it ought to be heavy as a burden on every single one of our hearts to be praying for the Jewish people, evangelizing to the Jewish people, praying for the protection of Israel and uh and and the nation of the Jewish people, um, uh even as they are scattered all over the world.

And so Nick led the trip that I was talking to you about, where I went to Nick and his wife Tabitha led the trip uh to Jordan that we went on.

And uh, and and I was so profoundly impacted by his teaching and his leading and guiding of this.

And uh, and he uh has a heart for the Jewish uh people, works in our Jewish ministry.

And uh I want to ask you to be engaged in this prayer.

I want to ask that all of heaven and hell would hear that Gateway Church is committed to the Jewish people and that God is faithful to honor every single covenant that he makes.

Let's pray.

Amen.

Join me, Lord.

We are so thankful.

We're humbled.

Lord, those of us and the most of us in this room are not Jewish.

Lord, we're so thankful that long ago it was in your heart to bless Abraham, that he might bless all families of the earth.

And so we just want to say thank you to you, Father, for being the father of every family on earth.

Yes, God.

Those of us from the nations, Lord, and those brothers and sisters of ours who are Jewish, and we want to say today, peace be upon you to every Jewish person, peace be upon you, Jerusalem, peace be upon you, Israel.

We're so thankful, Lord, that you added us to these covenantal promises that you made with Abraham, that you gave to our Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs that so faithfully brought forth to us a Jewish Messiah, the King of Israel, Jesus, the head of the church, Yeshua, the one who brings us into salvation.

And so today, those of us from the nations, we want to join in thanks.

Lord, we want to say to you, thank you for bringing us into this covenant.

Thank you for being faithful to your word.

Thank you for preserving the Jewish people.

Thank you for recreating, Lord, in their native homeland a state for them to be safe.

We bless them.

We pray, Lord, as Paul did in Romans 10, for their salvation.

Lord, not just for their eternal salvation, but Lord, that they might be delivered from every enemy.

And Lord, we thank you that in so doing, as we bless them, your word says that you would bless us.

Because you are a faithful father who loves all your children.

So today we say to you, Jewish people, here and there and everywhere, we bless you.

We pray that the light of Yeshua would shine on you, would protect you, would keep you, would give you peace, and that you would prosper.

Lord, we thank you in the name of Yeshua.

Amen.

Amen.

He's faithful, isn't he?

It's faithful.

Amen.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.