Jeremiah 31:31-33 – “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,“when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenantI made with their ancestors when I took them by the handto lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israelafter that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their mindsand write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

Covenant is the primary way God’s relationship with his people is expressed. In the OT, God said that he was their God and they were his people. But a response was required – obedience. But they couldn’t do it; they couldn’t completely fulfill what God had commanded. Something needed to change. Don’t we have similar experiences at times where we feel powerless to try to live as a Christian?

Read Jeremiah 31 again. A whole new way to have and express this relationship with God was coming; Jesus was the fulfillment of this promise. The old had gone and the new had come. No longer was the experienced norm trying to regulate our lives with the law; the new covenant was going to have the law in us and transform us from the inside out.

Jesus lived, died, was raised to life, and ascended into heaven. And the Holy Spirit was then poured out and given to make a people of God, for real. In the OT, he came upon a few; but now he is available to all who believe. He is our God, and we are his children, his people.  It is the irresistible grace of God and his fierce love for us.

Today, let’s praise and thank God over and over again for his fierce love and his irresistible grace towards us. Let us yield increasingly to the Holy Spirit who lives in us  and seek more and more of him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy9nwe9_xzw

-AP