All three of our pastoral staff are away this morning. Pastor Randy is in Hamilton, Massachusetts at a conference. I don't recall the specifics about where James Swanson and Rick Penny are, but none of them was available to fill the pulpit this morning. And so they reached down and found someone else. So here we are. My name is Paul Rainbow, and I have no official role in this church, other, I guess, than having been recently put on the elder board, so I'm about the youngest and newest of the elders. This morning, we're going to look at a series of texts that fit into the series that Pastor Randy has been preaching. He's been doing a series on how God communicates with us by means of words, the words theme in Scripture is started in Genesis, and I think he's probably headed for revelation, hitting high spots in between, making the point that God communicates with us. He reveals himself. He discloses himself to us by means of words. Those of us who attend this church regularly do so because we want to know God and we want to make him known. That's our motto. And we're committed to the view that God makes himself known to us and invites us to make him known to others using words. And so this words theme is what Pastor Randy has been preaching about. He's just finished the Old Testament segment. of that series and he told me when he comes back for Sunday in July is going to launch into the New Testament segment of the words of God theme in Scripture and so I asked him if I could do something that would fit into the series and he said do anything you want. So we're going to be looking today at an Old Testament a group of Old Testament passages They do have something to do with that theme, and they form a kind of bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament parts of the series. We're going to be looking at a group of passages that talk about the new covenant. That's the covenant that we live under as Christians were presently in the time of the new covenant, but we're going to be looking at some passages that view the new covenant from an Old Testament perspective, so this was all in the future yet at the time when these passages were written. Nevertheless, they give us some deep insights into how God relates to us now. There's an old puzzle that philosophers sometimes argue about. Imagine a forest and in the middle of the forest there stands a great tree. and one day a strong wind blows and that tree breaks and falls to the ground. The question is, does it make a noise when it crashes to the earth? Well, obviously, if there is a person nearby, the ears will pick up the vibrations in the atmosphere made by the crashing of the tree and will say, yes, there was a noise. But what if there's no human ear to hear it? What if there's no recording device to capture that phenomenon? Should we speak of a noise in that case? If there is no ear, is there a noise? What do you think? Some would say, of course there's a noise. Because the tree crashes and it creates the vibrations, the only thing that's lacking is the hearing ear. Objectively speaking, obviously there is a noise. But is not a noise something that we perceive? Is not our perception important in defining a noise? Can we really speak of a noise if no one hears it? if the vibrations are simply sent out rippling through the air and there's nothing to pick them up. There would have been a noise if there had been an ear to hear it but is there in fact a noise. Well this is the debate that philosophers have about the tree falling in the forest and that debate is relevant to what we're going to be looking at this morning. God has spoken to us God has given to us all kinds of words. in Scripture, but if there's no human ear to hear those words, to respond in faith and love and obedience, is there any communication from God? Think about it. Let's pause for a prayer as we come to our lesson for this morning. O God, would you open our hearts to give heed to your words that, increasing in faith, hope, and love, we may know you, the only God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent, through whom we ask it. Amen. This morning's sermon will be a little bit different from the usual sermon, where we're used to having the pastor take a single passage and develop three or four points out of it. Today, I'm going to take five passages from the Old Testament and preach a single-point sermon. So we'll do it just the other way around. We'll turn everything on its head. God, in His grace, gives us not only His but a delight in hearing and obeying them. The point I'd like to make is that it's a gift of God's grace that he not only speaks with words but also enables us to respond to his words so that the communication event is complete and total. God in his grace gives us not only his words but also a delight in hearing and obeying them. This is part of the doctrine of grace. God not only reveals himself to us objectively, not only gives us in Scripture true words, sentences, propositions about himself, but he also by his Holy Spirit opens our ears so that we can respond in faith and obedience. Let's turn to a number of passages, five passages in all, from the Old Testament. We'll just take them one by one, and each of these passages will give us a different image of how God prepares us to respond to his race, beginning with Deuteronomy thirty verse six. So, if you have your Bible, I'd invite you to turn there. We'll be doing a fair amount of flipping this morning. We'll take these passages in the order in which they lie in the canon, beginning with Deuteronomy chapter thirty, verse six. And the Lord God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul that you may live. The background to this passage, of course, is the circumcision ritual that God commanded the Israelites to practice. Every boy born to an Israelite mother on the eighth day after birth was to be circumcised. There was a cutting around the foreskin and a removal of that bit of flesh. It was a right of purification. This was a symbol that represented the removal of corruption from a person's life. We find the command way back in Genesis seventeen where God first tells Abraham, I'm going to be your God, you will be my people, and this will be the sign of the covenant that I make with you that every male Israelite will be circumcised. But the more immediate background to our passage here is the one that was read as a call to worship. You may have caught The fact that at the end of that passage, God invited the Israelites circumcise your heart to the Lord circumcise yourselves be no more stubborn. That was a command. Notice the difference between what was said in Deuteronomy chapter 10 verse 16. and the verse were concentrating on now ten sixteen says circumcised therefore the foreskin of your heart. A command. Laying a burden upon the Israelites to do this. This is a it represented deepening of the circumcision command. It's not just to be done to a part of the body. but that's meant to be a symbol of what happens to the heart itself. Corruption is to be removed from the heart. Compare that with chapter 30, verse 6, the Lord your God will circumcise your heart. What's the difference? They both have to do with the circumcision of the heart. They both involve this deepening, this spiritualization of the circumcision concept The difference is in the subject who performs the ceremony. In chapter 10, Israel is invited to perform the ceremony. Circumcise your heart, says God. In chapter 30, God takes it upon himself to promise to the people of Israel, I will circumcise your heart. There is the difference right there between law and grace. In law, God commands. In grace, God performs. And what God promises in Deuteronomy 36 is that he will perform that heart circumcision on his people. In days to come, if you look at the context, we don't have time to go into it in great detail. But if you look at the context around Deuteronomy thirty six you'll see that in the preceding verses God describes how Israel will depart from him how the covenant curses will come upon them as a nation. This happened at the time of the exile and how in in the in the great future in days to come they would return to him and at that point God says I will circumcise your heart. So this is a passage that looks forward. to what God will do for Israel in the latter days. He has a gift to give them greater than the gift of the law at Mount Sinai. In the grand future, God will do in and for his people what he's asking them to do in the law. And the result will be, if you read the rest of verse six, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul that you may live. What God had commanded Israel to do in the Shema Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad Lord our God is one and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your might. He will bring about himself by circumcising their hearts. Let's move to the next passage, Psalm 40. We'll just pick out a few verses from this psalm. Focusing on verses six to eight. Sacrifice and offering. You do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required." Then I said, Lo, I come in the role of the book. It is written of me. I delight to do your will, O my God. Your law is within my heart. What I really want to focus on is verse six. sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. If you're carrying the new international version that says my ears, you have pierced that comes a little bit closer to the literal meaning of the original language that underlies our translation. The verb there you have pierced my ears, or you have given me an open ear, the verb is actually to dig or to excavate. God digs holes into the ears of the writer of the psalm. I don't know whether he had a problem with wax in his ears or whether he's thinking in even more crude terms But the point is, as sinners, our ears tend to be dull. We tend to find it hard to give our full attention and love to the things that God says. And so God undertakes himself to excavate our ears, to dig those holes, to drill them in so that the sound of his words can hit us. and make their impact. It's a lovely image, once again, of God's grace. And the result comes down in verse 8, I delight to do your will. Oh my God, your law is within my heart. God, by opening ears, digging them out, clearing the channels, enables us to take delight in his way, so that when his revelation comes to us, we won't just turn away from it in an attitude of scorn or rejection, but so that his words will find their way straight into our heart and awaken in us, sweeten our heart so that we can love him and respond to him and the ultimate result then in verse seven is that the psalmist says low icon. I present myself to do your will. Oh my God. Let's turn to our third passage Isaiah fifty nine verse twenty one. And now, for the first time, we begin to get language in the text that speaks specifically of a new covenant in which God will do this for his people. Isaiah 59, 21, and I've taken this as sort of our central text for this morning, because this is the one that has that ties in most obviously with the theme of God's words in scripture as for me says God this is my covenant with them says the Lord my spirit which is upon you and my words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth or out of the mouth of your children or out of the mouth of your children's children says the Lord. from this time forth and forevermore. Now let's let's look at the context this time and we'll see the contrast between the way of sin and the way of faith up in verse fifteen. We read this description of life spiritual life in Israel. Truth is lacking. He who departs from evil makes himself a prey. Others will take advantage. of the good person. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intervene. Then his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him. God looked around in Israel, we're told, and he found no one who measured up. Truth was lacking. Everyone was taking advantage of everybody else, and there was no Redeemer, no one who was worthy to step in and turn things around. And so God said to himself, all right, then I will turn things around. And it's in that context that he says in verse 21, I'm going to make a covenant with Israel, whereby my spirit, which is upon you, and my words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth. God had been giving Israel words until those words. Came out of Israel's ears and went in one year and went out the other Israel has not been listening. And so God says all right I'm going to take my words and put them in the mouths of my people in such a way that they will never depart, they will never cease to be present again. There's another new element in this passage, new in comparison with the ones we've looked at, in that this passage mentions specifically my spirit. My spirit which is upon you and my words which I have put in your mouth. How is it that God makes his words to be internalized in Israel. Well, there has to be an accompaniment of the Holy Spirit with God's words or nothing will take place. Word and spirit. There's a twin gift here. By instilling his spirit into the Israelites, God will enable them to take his words in their mouths and so when God says I will put my words in your mouth. He's not he's not talking about the Israelites merely memorizing bits and pieces of Scripture, not that memorizing Scripture is a bad thing to do. It's a wonderful thing to do. We need to know what God has said and we need to have it by heart in order to respond to it, but I think we can take it for granted that Israel had been memorizing the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, for probably many, many generations, and yet they had not benefited by all their work of memorization. Josephus, the Jewish historian who lived in the first century A.D., could even boast that to the Romans he said you can you can ask is any Israelite. What are the things he believes and he'll be able to rattle off the Ten Commandments more readily than than he knows his own name. Nevertheless this was not an obedient people as we know from history and so. My words which I have put in your mouth is talking about a deeper work of God than simply them committing Scripture to memory. It's talking about that sweetening of the human heart that gives us a genuine taste for the things of God that inclines us or bends us toward loving the things that God loves, toward appreciating the truths that God speaks in Scripture. It's talking about an inner light that goes on to illumine the facts that we learn when we study the Bible. so that everything suddenly comes into focus. So far we've seen three images, then, of what God will do in the new covenant. There's the circumcision, not of the body, but of the heart itself, and God says, I will circumcise your heart. There's the digging of ears. And God says, well, the psalmist says, you have dug my ears in prayer. So God is the one who does the digging of the ears. And now God promises to pour out his spirit and place his words in the mouths of his people. Two more passages to look at. Jeremiah 31 verses 31 to 34. This is probably the best known of the five passages we're going to be looking at today. The famous passage about the new covenant that's going to come in the latter days. Verse thirty one of Jeremiah chapter thirty one. Behold the days are coming says the Lord when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel. and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord." Here's mention of the first covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the covenant made between God and Israel at Mount Sinai back in the time of Moses in roughly 1450 BC. It was a good covenant in that God imposed it, but it was an unsuccessful covenant from the human end because God's people did not keep it. They broke it. God commanded and Israel did not listen. Though God was a husband to them, a lord to them, nevertheless, they deselected themselves from his covenant blessings and brought upon themselves his covenant curses. And so, God promises, verse 33, a different covenant. This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. Sometime at the end of time, I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their heart, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin. no more. Notice especially verse thirty-three, the latter part of it, who the acting subject is. I will put my law within them. I will write it upon their hearts. Instead of simply pronouncing the Ten Commandments as God did at Mount Sinai in the Israelites were there at the mountain they heard the voice of God everything was pronounced clearly they knew exactly what God expected them to do. But instead of instead of simply enunciating his will and leaving Israel to flounder in their attempts to keep it as sinners as unregenerate people. God says I'm going to do a new thing in the latter days I'm going to take my Torah and I'm actually going to write it on the hearts of my people. Again, this goes deeper than just knowledge, cognitive knowledge of what's in the Bible. This writing of God's law on the heart means that God is going to instill his values in the hearts of his people so that they will want what he wants, so that they will be motivated to do the things that God calls them to do. But the beautiful thing about the image is that God says, I will do this for them. If it were up to us to respond to God. If it were merely a matter of God speaking and our doing our part by way of responding, we'd be goners and we'd be done Because the nature of human sin is such that the human heart is dragged away even from God's kindest and most generous invitations. And so, God says, I'll not only give them my law, but I'll see to it that that law becomes part of them at the core of their being in the center. of their hearts and one final passage then for us to look at Ezekiel chapter thirty six verses twenty six and twenty seven. And maybe we should just read a little more broadly in the preceding context here too. And we'll see that this also is talking about God's movement among his people toward the end of time pointing to the days in which we now live now that Jesus has come. Therefore say to the house of Israel thus says the Lord God I'm reading in verse twenty two by way of getting down to twenty six it is not for your sake or house of Israel that I am about to act but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. For I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land, I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And then here's the language I want us to notice. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. A new heart altogether. So there are the images. God will take it upon himself to circumcise the human heart. leading to love of him and obedience toward him. God will dig the ears so that we can hear and respond. God will take his words and place them in the mouths of his people so that they'll never depart. God will take his Torah and write it on the heart. And now the most comprehensive and the deepest and the richest gift of all, God will take out the heart of stone and replace it with a beating heart of flesh so that when we hear God's will. Our heart flutters to do it. What a difference it makes. when we not only know what we ought to do, but want to do it. As I cast about looking for an illustration of that principle, I have to apologize for using myself. They say when you preach, you should never use yourself as the illustration, but Pastor Randy does it, so I'll do it too. Sometimes one's own experience is simply the nearest and clearest to draw from. My example goes back to my piano lessons. Now, you might be able to identify with some other sphere of life if you happen not to be a musician, maybe sports or learning a new job or something else. But in my case, it's a musical illustration. knowing what I ought to do versus wanting to do it. My parents gave me piano lessons beginning from the age of six and I must admit at the age of six I was not highly motivated to practice. As a matter of fact, my mother used to sit next to me on the piano bench and we would count as I did three repetitions of each of my assigned pieces. I think I can remember one of those pieces. I'll just illustrate it using the keyboard. Three times I had to do it. each day and then present it to my piano teacher. Now, when it was discovered after a couple of years that I wasn't even reading the notes yet, because those early piano books have a little numerical scheme to indicate which finger you're supposed to use, and I was reading the numbers, it turned out, 1, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, and I was ignoring the notes. My parents wisely switched me to a different music teacher, a young high school student named Mary Ellert, I think was her name at the time. She made some flashcards and required me to memorize the notes, but Mary Ellert did something else that was really important for me. She assigned to me a different repertoire. Let me give an example of one of the pieces I learned under Mary Ellert. you If you're a seven or eight-year-old boy, which piece would you rather play? I don't remember at what point it was, but there came a time when I began to fall in love with the pieces of music that I was assigned to learn. So the practice ceased to be a chore. And my mother no longer had to sit with me on my right side, counting the number of repetitions to be fulfilled. And I simply wanted to practice. In fact, by the time I was in high school, I was practicing three or four hours a day, thinking I might even go into music as a career. God redirected me from that. But that was the thought. And by that time, my parents almost had to limit my practice time to make sure that I remained a well-rounded young person. So therefore, my own life is a kind of earthly example. There's a difference between knowing what we should be, what we should do, between having a requirement imposed upon us on the one hand and having an inner desire. a want to do that which is a good thing to do. That's what God says he will do for us under the New Covenant. Saint Augustine, way back in about A.D. 400, started out as a good, dutiful Catholic. But he quickly began to sow his wild oats, and as he came up through adolescence and into young adulthood, he found himself living with a young woman outside of the marriage bond and found it difficult to imagine himself living as a good Catholic in full chastity But his conscience bothered him, and so he prayed a prayer. Give what you command and command what you will. In fact, he found himself with a kind of sexual addiction. He wasn't able to free himself from his lusts, and so he prayed and prayed and prayed with ever greater fervency to God. Give what you command and command what you will. If you want me to be chased, in effect, he said to God, That's not what I want. I can't do it if left on my own. If you're going to raise me to that kind of a standard, you're going to have to give what you're commanding me to do. God gave it to St. Augustine and he became one of the most influential bishops of his day and one of the very greatest theologians of Western Christendom. give what you command and command what you will. And today, as we consider these new covenant passages, we're focusing on God's promise to give what he commands. Now let's turn to a time of prayer. This morning we're reversing the sermon and the prayer time, so let's close our service with a time of public prayer. I'm going to use a series of short prayers and I'll pause after each one to give you an opportunity to fill in specific details of people or situations or conditions that you know and you would like to raise to our father. And at the end, we'll close by saying the Lord's Prayer together. So let's begin to pray. Show us your mercy, O Lord, and grant us your salvation. Clothe your ministers with righteousness. Let your people sing with joy. Give peace, O Lord, in all the world, for only in you can we live in safety. Lord, keep this nation under your care. and guide us in the way of justice and truth. Let your way be known upon earth, your saving health among all nations. Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor be taken away. Create in us clean hearts, O God, and sustain us with your Holy Spirit. O God, the King Eternal, whose light divides the day from the night and turns the shadow of death into the morning, drive far from us all wrong desires. Incline our hearts to keep your law and guide our feet into the way of peace, that having done your will with cheerfulness during the day, we may, when night comes, rejoice to give you thanks. Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being. We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life, we may not forget you, but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight. Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace. So clothe us in your spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you, for the honor of your name, through Christ our Lord. Amen. And let's now say together the words that Jesus taught us to pray and will use debts and debtors. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.