Submitted by admin on Mon, 04/02/2008 - 9:07am
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02-03-08 message by Pastor Rich Doebler
Hebrews 8:10-13 (CEV) 10 "But now I tell the people of Israel this is my new agreement: `The time will come when I, the Lord, will write my laws on their minds and hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 11 Not one of them will have to teach another to know me, their Lord.' "All of them will know me, no matter who they are. 12 I will treat them with kindness, even though they are wicked. I will forget their sins." 13 When the Lord talks about a new agreement, he means that the first one is out of date. And anything that is old and useless will soon disappear.
Why is the first agreement "out of date"? Why is it "old and useless"? NIV (v 13): "By calling this covenant ‘new,' he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear." Why is the OT obsolete?
Last week Fred talked about how the lessons of the OT were written down as examples for us (1 Cor 10:11). Now this week, the text calls the old covenant "obsolete."
Really? Is reading the OT obsolete—like trading in your SUV for a horse-and-buggy? Is reading the OT like sending smoke signals instead of email?
In the early days of radio broadcasting, Ronald Reagan was a sports announcer. But there were no live, long-distance hook-ups from the game, so he would be back in the studio, receiving the play-by-play on a telegraph machine, sort of a ticker tape machine. He would act as though he were right in the stadium—even cracking his pencil on the desk to make the sound of a bat. CRACK! "It's a deep fly to center field! Way out there! It's going...going...gone!" Tonight millions of people around the world will gather around wide-screen television monitors with surround-sound to watch the Super Bowl live. Ticker tape sports announcing is obsolete. Is that what it's like to read the Law?
In what sense is the old covenant obsolete? And if it's obsolete, why is it still part of our Bible?
Quick lesson: Hebrews is not saying the old covenant cannot teach us. It is filled with history and examples to teach us about God. The NT says the Law is our "schoolmaster" or "tutor" to bring us to Christ (3:24). The OT teaches us. It informs us.
Hebrews is not saying the old covenant has no value. It lays the foundation for salvation by grace through faith.
Hebrews is not saying the old covenant has been abolished. Jesus didn't come to destroy the Law; he came to fulfill it.
What Hebrews IS saying is that the old covenant can't change us. It cannot transform sinners into saints. The old sacrificial system was a temporary system—people had to keep coming to continually offer more sacrifices. But Jesus was an offering for sin "once for all." You need to come to the cross once, and you can be changed.
We need more than information; we need transformation. Now that we have Jesus, we can go beyond being informed. We can be transformed.
1. Transformation goes beyond information.
You see, all through the OT God sent his message to the people. God spoke through Moses when he delivered the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone. God gave the five Books of the Law to teach them what was pleasing to God—and what was not. God sent prophet after prophet to the people—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, and dozens of others. Occasionally the people listened, but usually they ignored the prophets. Sometimes they resisted the prophets outright and rebelled against God's message.
God had to keep repeating himself because the people wouldn't listen. They were not changed. Isaiah, the prophet, said: "this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears..." (Matt 13:15)
It was as though God was dealing with a bunch of children who wouldn't listen or learn. Because of their disobedience, God punished them. As though he were dealing with children, God put them in time out. He grounded them. He took away their privileges. He allowed foreign powers to conquer them and rule over them and even take them away into captivity. Then God would send more prophets to teach them the truth—and still they could not get it.
One of the prophets, however, predicted something supernatural was going to happen one day—when God's Word would finally sink in. It wouldn't be written merely with ink on a scroll or chiseled in rock. It would be written on the inside—on hearts and minds. In other words, it would transform people.
Jer 31:31-34 (CEV) 31 The LORD said: "The time will surely come when I will make a new agreement with the people of Israel and Judah. 32 It will be different from the agreement I made with their ancestors when I led them out of Egypt. Although I was their God, they broke that agreement. 33 Here is the new agreement that I, the LORD, will make with the people of Israel: ‘I will write my laws on their hearts and minds. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 No longer will they have to teach one another to obey me. I, the LORD, promise that all of them will obey me, ordinary people and rulers alike. I will forgive their sins and forget the evil things they have done.'"
Words can be informational; or words can be transformational. Words can fall on deaf ears; or words can penetrate the heart. Words can be obsolete; or words can be life-changing.
When I was in the fourth grade, I was not doing well in math. I was sloughing by, barely getting "C's," not really trying, and not really caring. It wasn't the teacher's fault—she was giving me all the right information. But I wasn't making the connection. So one evening my father sat me down at the dining room table. (Fifty years later I can still remember it.) He asked, "Why are you having so many problems with math?" I said, "Who needs it? It's just a bunch of useless problems, stuff I'll never use, stuff I'll never need to know." My father said, "Oh, but you don't know how important it is. You'll probably use math every day of your life." And he took out a pencil and paper and proceeded to show my how I would need to know math to know how much money was in my bank account...to know how many miles a trip might be...to know how much gasoline I'd need for that trip...to know how much the gasoline was going to cost... He showed me example after example of how math was extremely relevant. And something clicked inside me. He gave me information—but he really gave me more. He gave me a whole new perspective. It changed my whole attitude. And from that day, all the way through school, I began to get "A's" in math. I don't remember studying any harder; I was just coming at it from a completely different perspective.
That's the difference between the OT and the NT—between Law and grace, between rules and relationship. When we come to Jesus, when we admit that our lives are messed up with sin, we invite him into our lives to be Lord of our lives, when we ask him to forgive us and to cleanse us from sin—that's when the Word accomplishes a miraculous, supernatural change within us! The gospel says: The Word became flesh and lived among us... (John 1:14)
2. Transformation happens when the Word comes alive.
Heb 8:10 (NIV): I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.
God doesn't want to change us from the outside in—forcing us to follow rules that we hate. He wants to change us from the inside out. God wants his laws imprinted on our minds; he wants his Word written on our hearts.
A miracle happens! With God's Word written on your heart, with Jesus the living Word within, God's ways will become second nature, your automatic reflex. When God's Word becomes part of who you are, your old instincts can be eradicated. The Word of God overrides your sinful nature.
Fred talked last week about hiding God's Word in our hearts as one of the tools God gives to help us resist temptation. The Word helps us win the battle with temptation, but it does even more. It helps us avoid sin, but it also helps us do good things we'd never otherwise do. It changes us and enables us to live higher and better.
It's more than a text book—God's Word is supernatural! Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free!" (John 8:32, NIV) It goes beyond knowing...it takes us to freedom!
Maybe you know a lot, but you're still in bondage to something. Maybe you're read the Bible, but you're still looking for freedom! If some sin or destructive habit or negative attitude is holding you down, you don't just need information—you need to encounter the supernatural power of God's Word in Jesus! Only supernatural power can overcome our natural tendencies!
The Apostle Paul described this: 1 ...[we] were dead in [our] transgressions and sins... 3 ...gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions... (Eph 2:1,3-5, NIV)
"We were by nature..." The original Greek word for "nature" is phusis—where our words physic or physical come from. It meant: "natural endowment or condition (inherited from one's ancestors)...natural characteristics or disposition..."
We use that as an excuse: "I can't help myself. I can't help it if I was born German. Of course, I'm stubborn. I can't help it I'm hot-headed, because I was born Irish."
But forget about our nationalities! We have more in common than that. We're all born human. And by human nature, we all instinctively sin. No one has to teach us how to do sin. We don't have to go to school to learn how to sin. It comes naturally to us.
The Bible calls this natural tendency to sin: the "old man" or the "old nature" or the "flesh." We are sinners by nature and by instinct.
We see examples of instinct in nature. Animals are "hard-wired" to behave in certain ways. It's a mystery how it works, but species of animals do things by nature. They don't have to be taught!
Salmon return to their spawning grounds upstream. It's as though there were some mysterious magnet drawing them back to the place where they began life. They have no maps. They have no signs posts. No road markers. No compass. No GPS units. When the salmon were young, swimming toward the ocean, they could not have memorized the route—dozens, maybe hundreds, of rivers and tributaries.
We respond to sin the same way. Sin is like a powerful magnet pulling on our natural tendencies, awakening our instincts. We don't need a map to find our way to sin. We don't have to stop and ask for directions. We can just go there in an instant—because we are "by nature objects of wrath."
3. Transformation cuts to our core—to change our nature.
So how do we change? How can we eradicate our natural tendency to sin? It's humanly impossible to do on our own.
A few years ago I read a fascinating article in the Duluth News Tribune about an experiment scientists had done at Rockefeller University in Manhattan. They discovered they could teach false songs to young male canaries. Raised entirely in a laboratory, completely isolated from adult canaries, the young birds easily learned a computer-generated song that had no resemblance to the song they would normally have heard from their fathers.
One morning, however, the scientists were amazed to arrived at the lab and discover that the birds, on the brink of adulthood, were instinctively chirping the song of their species—even though they had never heard it before.
The scientists were dumbfounded. They never expected nature to kick in like it did. The scientists succeeded in teaching the canaries new songs, but they didn't anticipate how strong the innate learning system was. Even though the birds had never heard it before, their real song instinctively broke through. And once the canaries were fully grown, they sang their species-specific song almost exclusively. Every once in a while, however, they try one of the songs the scientists tried to force on them.
We're like those canaries. If you're trying to learn a new song, trying to follow God's ways, it's not enough to learn the notes. You have to be changed from the inside out. You have to get rid of your canary nature. If you don't deal with your sinful nature, you'll go back to the old song.
Citation: "Birds know mating songs by instinct, study finds" by Jamie Talan (Newsday) in the Duluth News Tribune (May 15, 2005).
God wants to transform us. He wants to rewire our thinking. He wants to transform our behavior. And Hebrews tells us he wants to do that by putting his laws in our minds and writing his Word on our hearts. The OT taught the people how to live; but Jesus changes people so they can live.
There another example from nature you've perhaps heard about where instinct can be rewired. It happens in a phenomenon biologists call "imprinting." They've discovered that can interrupt the natural imprinting on a baby animal, altering its traits and rewiring its behavior. For example, a newly hatched duckling would normally "imprint" on its mother—which causes it to follow her wherever she goes.
But you can change that usual behavior if you replace the mother duck with another large, moving object. Within 24 to 48 hours after being hatched, the duckling will imprint on anything—no matter what it is (human, dog, boot on a string, football). The duckling will follow that object instead of the mother duck. I've read that the Chinese in the past would "imprint" ducklings to attach themselves to a special stick. They could then lead their flocks just by carrying that stick. They put the stick in rice paddies so the ducks would stay near the stick, feeding on the snails that otherwise would ruin the crops.
God wants to alter our behavior by imprinting his Word on our hearts and minds! We can be born again with a fresh start and a new imprinting, so we can stop following the world and start following him.
With his Word imprinted in our minds and written on our hearts, we will begin instinctively to follow him. Our reflexes will be to go his way instead of the way of the world.
What is imprinted on your heart? What is imprinted in your mind? Is it the old nature? Or is it something supernatural?
The Bible says: "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:2, NIV) Have you been transformed or are you still living the same way and on the same level as the rest of the human race—conformed to the pattern of this world?
Our Bible reading scheduled for this Tuesday includes 2 Peter 1:4, which says, "Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires."
Have you experienced the divine nature? Or are you still trapped by the flesh nature?
Have you allowed God's Word to transform you? Have you allowed God's truth to set you free?
God promises to write his Word on your heart and mind. His promise has supernatural power to change your old, sinful nature! You can be transformed by his Word! You can participate in God's divine nature.