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Month: January 2015

Three Rules for a New and Better Life

Posted on by Bob Christopher

Jesus said this; “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me…” (John 14:21).
This is very clear. Obeying Jesus’ commands is proof that we love Him.
But what commands?
Is Jesus referring to the Ten Commandments or the 613 other commands that are listed in the Mosaic Covenant? Or did He have different commands in mind?
The writer of Hebrews stated, “For when there is a change of the priesthood, there must also be a change of the law.” This verse will help us answer this last question.
The New Covenant is a changing of the guard. The Levites were the stewards of the Old Covenant. They had specific duties and responsibilities all anchored to the Law of Moses. Jesus’ death on the cross ended those duties. He was the once for all sacrifice for sin. He fulfilled the Old Covenant in its entirety.
Today, we live in the New Covenant. Jesus Christ is our high priest, appointed to be so by God the Father. With this change in the priesthood, there was a change of the law.
The new commands are these.

  1. Believe in Jesus Christ (I John 3:23)
  2. Hope in God’s promises (1 John 3:1-3)
  3. Love God and people. (John 13:33-34, Romans 5:5)

Faith, hope and love constitute the law of the New Covenant.
God writes these laws on our hearts and in our minds. This is the first promise of the New Covenant. God empowers us to live out faith, hope and love through His Spirit.
The laws of the Old Covenant were the responsibility of the people to Israel to keep. They didn’t have it in them to do so. Neither do we.
In this New Covenant, God gives us a new heart and His Spirit to mark our lives with the laws that are most important to God – faith, hope and love.

What If…

Posted on by Bob Christopher

What if the Old Covenant was God’s final word to man?
What if the Ten Commandments were the only means available to you to gain entry into heaven, or to earn God’s love and acceptance?
Where would this leave you?
What would your eternal fate be?
How would this affect your life here and now?
The Old Covenant was God’s word to Israel. Not His first word to Israel, nor was it His last. But it did define Israel’s way of life as a nation from Moses until Jesus.  And, as Moses explained to the people before they entered the Promised Land, it did have a specific purpose for Israel.

“The LORD commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the LORD our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness” (Deuteronomy 6:24-25).

We know they story. Israel did not obey. She did not obtain righteousness through obedience to the law. Instead of being the blessing of life and prosperity, the law issued a curse on Israel’s disobedience. The law judged and condemned the nation.
Try obedience to the law as your means of righteousness. You’ll prove Paul’s words to the Romans: “Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in his sight through obedience to the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin” (Romans 3:20).
So where does the law leave you? – judged, condemned, fearful and dead in sin.
That’s the Old Covenant, a ministry of condemnation and death.
When read correctly, the Law is God’s word about man, the plain, stark truth. It answers these questions: What is the destiny of a people caught in the throes of a lie? What will be their end? According to the Law, the final stop is death, but only if the Old Covenant is God’s final word.
The denouement of this story has a twist. It is revealed on a hill called Calvary, outside the walls of Jerusalem. A man hung there on a cross, suspended between heaven and earth. He was no ordinary man, and the death he died was no ordinary death.
The man whose hands and feet were pierced was the Lord Himself, the unblemished Lamb of God. His death was in place of ours. Live out the full story of the Law and it ends at the foot of this cross. Look up and see God’s final word to man – Jesus.
Death is not God’s end for man, it is Jesus. In Him we have forgiveness of sins, righteousness and a new way of life defined by the New Covenant.
What if you truly believed that Jesus was and is God’s final word to man?
Where would this leave you?
How would it affect you here and now?
The New Covenant answers – in Jesus fully alive!

Four Promises that will Change Your Life

Posted on by Bob Christopher

This is an astonishing claim. But it’s true. I am talking about the four promises of the New Covenant.

These promises are better than any other promise that is out there.

They are laid out for us in Hebrews 8:10-12. I’ve numbered them for ease of reading.

  1. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.
  2. I will be their God, and they will be my people.
  3. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.
  4. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.

These are better promises because they satisfy our deepest needs. We need power and the internal motivation to live out the Christian life. We need  assurance that we belong to God and that He loves us. We need a personal  relationship with God, to genuinely know Him. We desperately need to know that our sins have been forgiven once and for all.

On all of these points, the New Covenant provides. Jesus’ finish work guarantees all of these promises to be true.

I’ve juiced each one down to one word. In this New Covenant we have

  • Power
  • Assurance
  • Relationship
  • Forgiveness.

The world, religion and even the flesh make outlandish promises, but they never deliver. But not Jesus. In Him, you have everything you need.

Take hold of these four promises and your life will never be the same.