Well, let's read together then, 2 Corinthians 2.12-3.6. And this is Paul wanting to explain to these Christians in Corinth who are being turned against him, some of them didn't need much turning, the genuineness of what he's been doing and the wonder of what he had been preaching because the basic issue is that as people are being encouraged to dismiss Paul, then they are being encouraged to dismiss his gospel. Now, when I went to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me, I still had no peace of mind because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I said goodbye to them in Troas and went on to Macedonia. But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ's triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one, we are an aroma that brings death. To the other, an aroma that brings life. And who is equal to such a task? Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit. On the contrary, in Christ, we speak before God with sincerity as those sent from God. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant. Not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Well, Paul, here is, as I was saying, ministering to the Corinthians by this letter. And what he's wanting to minister to them again is the grace that he had preached when he was amongst them. So he's ministering grace. But he's ministering love. And so the grace is not simply the content of his message. It's the way that he writes. It's the way that he feels about them. The grace that he's preaching has transformed him. So that what he preaches and the way he preaches it is part and parcel of the whole gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so just as God's grace has reached Paul in his own conversion, and just as he knows that he lives by God's grace, so he's always wanting to communicate that grace. And it's just one of the hallmarks of Paul's ministry. that time and time again he has to fight for grace, which sounds odd, doesn't it? You would think that the grace of God would be so wonderful to people, particularly to those who are converted, that there would be no competition. You would think that when we first heard about grace, when God opened our eyes to the wonder of his love for us, This grace which is God's love, even though we have demerited it. This grace which is unconditional in terms of us receiving it, because all the conditions of it being given to us were fulfilled by Christ. This grace which we sometimes say is God's riches at Christ's expense. This grace which is God's undeserved or demerited favor. This grace which is the same as gift, the word charis behind it. this grace which is getting what we don't deserve, distinguished from mercy which is not getting what we do deserve. You would think that once this has invaded the darkness of your heart with all the light of the glory of Christ, and when you've been shown this grace by God, and you know that the grace is sufficient, You know that the gospel of grace is a gospel which tells about Jesus who said, it is accomplished from the cross. You would think that when you've got that, you wouldn't want anything else. Everything else would just seem paltry and useless and a snare to you. But Paul has to keep ministering grace to people again and again and fighting for grace. because as in Corinth and other places, there were those who came in to the churches in their infancy and youth who preached something that appeals very much to the flesh. Grace, of course, in one sense, slays the flesh, as we were thinking last week. Grace is a weapon of warfare. Grace slays our flesh because grace tells us we can't deserve. Grace tells us that we have no leverage with God. Grace tells us that we couldn't possibly warrant what He's done for us. It's a gift. We cannot earn it. But our flesh longs to earn it. Our flesh longs to justify itself. Our flesh always is trying to find some way of, if you like, patting ourselves on the back for what we've got. And the more we've got, the greater desire that we have to pat ourselves on the back for it. And so, because we'd like to believe that we're better than we actually are, or more capable than we are, or more able to negotiate with God than we are, or because something in us would like to be up there with God and so we think we've got some leverage with God through our works and our supposed virtues, We don't take seriously that grace tells us that all our righteousness is as filthy rags. And so there's this constant thing in us that wants to replace grace and being saved by grace alone with being saved by some of what we do and of course God's grace. And so that sum of what we do, that capacity that we have constantly to try and justify ourselves rather than put all our faith in Christ to justify us, that fastens on to what we might call law, whether we're talking about the Old Testament law of Moses or any other law that people might substitute the New Testament law of Moses with are rules and regulations, are legalisms. And that's the heart of legalism. Not that it necessarily loves law, it's just self-justifying. And it's some way that we can find of climbing a few rungs up the ladder so that God's grace might reach us. And that was a problem right the way through the New Testament. It's a problem now in every church there is, just because churches are filled with human beings and we all tend to do that kind of thing. And it was a problem in Corinth. So Paul ministered grace when he was preaching there. He keeps having to minister grace and fight for it. in his visits and in his letters, he keeps having to fight for the consequences of grace in the behavior and the attitudes so that those who have received God's grace begin then to show God's grace to one another, over against the divisions and the kind of spiritual snobbery and all the rest of it in Corinth, and showing grace to those outside the church. So that when you've got it into your heart that God didn't need to save you, you really get it in your heart that he doesn't need to save anybody. And then when you know that he has saved you, you get it in your mind that he can save anybody he wants to. So you go anywhere with the gospel, to anybody with the gospel, and you don't choose on God's behalf. So all the time Paul is having to minister grace and fight for grace. Grace in their minds, grace in their conduct, And he does so full of grace. So here we see it sort of panning out for the church in Corinth. And it takes us right to the cross, which we'll come to when we look at our smelly preaching. You've heard about Messy Church, it's going to be Smelly Church. Verses 12 and 13 kind of lead into it and they bridge from the previous section where Paul is explaining why he didn't make two visits to Corinth as originally planned when he was making a quick trip to Macedonia, somewhere between his second and third missionary journeys. So on that journey, he was making that journey having sent Titus to Corinth to find out how they were doing and to press home some of the content of the first letter and to minister on Paul's behalf there. He'd sent Titus there. And on his way to Macedonia, not this, not, you know, having changed his mind from going the southern route up from Corinth up to Macedonia, having changed his mind going across the top, Troas and then down, Troas and across and into Macedonia that way from the top, so to speak, Philippi and then into Thessalonica, which is where, into Macedonia proper. Having made up his mind to take that northern route, out of grace for the church in Corinth, He's waiting, he gets to Troas, and he's waiting to hear from Titus. And what he's basically saying in 12 and 13 is, look, I was just so disturbed, I had no peace of mind. I was so agitated in my own mind about how you were doing and what you were thinking of me and the gospel and what affection there was or wasn't in your hearts and how you were treating me and all that kind of thing, I was so totally agitated about that kind of thing, I had no peace of mind, and I couldn't stay in trance. I went there to preach the gospel of Christ, found the Lord had opened the door for me, all looked great, but I just couldn't do it. And he's not presenting this as a fault or a failing, he's presenting this because he wants them to know, not so they go and condemn him for not preaching and being agitated, but so that they know how much He was concerned for them and how grievous, picking up the language of grief from previous passages, how grievous their sort of attitude towards him had been. So he waved goodbye to the people of Tros, hello and great opportunity, but not for me, thank you, I'm off. And so I said goodbye to them and went on to Macedonia. And then the rest of it is him saying, but you know, whatever happened there, This is the gospel that I was preaching to you. Whatever happened with respect to the opportunity in Troas that was there and that was opened, this is how I've preached to you. And it's almost as if Paul is saying, never mind what's happened in other places. Never mind what you hear about me doing this or doing that. Never mind what capital other people are making from the information that they glean on the grapevine. This is about you. And so, 14 through to 3.6, he focuses on them. It does serve to emphasize, put there in the handout, that Paul is no sort of detached professional. He's not just sort of a preaching machine. He's not doing this sort of, you know, leave your heart at the door when you go into work kind of thing. In fact, that whole notion of the detached professional, which has infected the ministry in the West enormously, the kind of the professional cleric, so to speak, or whatever, it would be absolutely anathema to Paul. So much so that as far as Paul is concerned, not having any peace of mind because he didn't know how things were going in Corinth and those people meant so much to him, is a sign of the authenticity of his ministry. Precisely because he's not detached, precisely because he could care about them so much, he wants them to know that what he's been doing is genuine. So it begins to talk about it in these terms, about our preaching smells. Verses 14 to 17. So let's just get how verses 14 to 17 work and how the imagery works. Let's read 14 to 17 again together, and then we'll look at how the fragrance imagery works. But thanks be to God who always leads us as captives in Christ's triumphal procession. and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who have been saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death and to the other an aroma that brings life. And who is equal to such a task? Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit. On the contrary, in Christ we speak before God with sincerity as those sent from God. Let's focus on the fragrance imagery. There are these sort of four elements to it that we take in order. First of all, spreading the aroma of verse 14, God uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of Him everywhere. Spreading the aroma means preaching the Word of God. That phrase that he uses about the Word of God in verse 17. So, when you're sharing the Word of God, what's happening is a little bit like the, you remember the woman with the alabaster jar of perfume, and she broke the neck of the jar and poured it over Jesus, and the Gospel tells us that the whole room was filled with the aroma of it. So this isn't like cheap air spray that you room spray or something. This is a strong aroma that just spreads. It doesn't need aerosols. It just spreads out. And that's what you're doing when you communicate God's word to people. You're getting it out of the bottle and it's filling the air. which just immediately tells us, you know, this stuff is so powerful and great and good. Don't keep it bottled up. Don't bottle it up inside your own heart. It's there like perfume, like fragrance, not to stay in a bottle. Or if we change the analogies for a moment, Becky Bippert, who's coming in November, her book, Out the Salt Shaker, like salt is no use if you keep it in the salt pot. Well, the gospel is no use if you keep it bottled up in yourself. By definition, it's there to be announced. It is euangelion, it is good news, it is gospel. And there's no usage of euangelion, either in the biblical material or in the extra-biblical material, that indicates that it's something you keep to yourself, because the euangelion, as we were saying at the lunch times of yesterday, an announcement of good news. It's not just content, you know, information, it is the announcing of it. So somebody is angeloid, angeled, sent, and they're not sent to stay stumb, they're sent to make the good announcement. the emperor is coming to your village today, there's been a great battle won. You've just won the Roman lottery or whatever it happens to be. So this preaching the word of God is, if you like, let's understand it this way, it is doing what the word of God insists on happening. It exists to be told. It is a word. and the word is something that is uttered. So the word of God, verse 17, is by definition something that is a communicative thing, right? It's not just the truth about God, which you can keep in your own heed, it is the word of God. On the contrary in Christ, we speak before God. So, from the word God, this idea of spreading the aroma, preaching the word of God means spreading the aroma, is just telling us that as far as God is concerned, a gospel that you keep to yourself is not a gospel that, you know, that's not how he thinks of it at all. It's not why it was given, it's not what it's about. The gospel is part and parcel of the very language, euangelium. It is a communicated thing. rather than just a known thing. So keeping it to yourself is running contrary. It's cutting against the grain. Keeping it to yourself is as daft as buying expensive, wonderful perfume and never ever opening the bottle and wearing it. I mean, how daft would that be if you spent a lot of money on some really expensive perfume or aftershave, gentlemen, and just kept it in the bottle? Or what would it be like if you bought somebody some really expensive perfume and it cost you an eye-watering amount of money, and five years later it was still sitting on the dressing table, unused and off? And how would you feel about that? So spreading the aroma, you know, it means preaching the word of God, speaking the word of God, announcing the good news. Now, the fragrance that Paul and his companions spread is the aroma of the crucified Christ. It's the aroma of the crucified Christ, who is victorious because of his death and resurrection. And so we're making Christ known. So verse 14 again, and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. So we are making Christ who has been crucified, Christ the savior. We're spreading that everywhere through the preaching of the gospel. We're spreading him everywhere. We are making him known. We're not just declaring some truths. This isn't kind of, you know, sort of fancy intellectual apologetics where we've got to go and win some arguments. And we're not just communicating some facts that we happen to know, or some neat arrangements of propositions that we can do. It's a person. So spreading the aroma, it's a personal thing, because we're talking about Jesus. It's the good news, and as we were thinking yesterday, opening Christianity Explored, the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Christ. So the fragrance of Paul and his companions spread is the aroma of the crucified Christ, who is made known through their preaching of the gospel. Now, what happens is that some people just see the cross that is being preached by Paul, you know, we preach Christ crucified, our resultant are nothing amongst you save Christ crucified, that kind of thing that Paul, when Paul talks about what he preached when he was preaching the gospel. Some people just see the cross and Christ's horrendous death and they are rejecting the message. They cannot see nor do they want. That is, they cannot see that in that cross is their life. They cannot see that in that horrendous death, their sin was being carried. Their death was being died. Their punishment was being received. Their fall was being endured in all its consequences. They don't want that. They don't see it. And they don't want to see it. They don't want anything to do with that death. They don't want anything to do with that thing. They don't want anything to do with the death that says, you're a sinner. They don't want anything to do with a God who is weak and crucified. You want a God who's great and spectacular. You don't want a God who is weak and crucified. And this was a scandal of the cross. To the Jews, an offense, God being cursed, no. To the Greeks, what was it? It was just stupid foolishness to the Greeks, folly. What sort of God is weak like that? We don't want a weak God. We don't want a God who is bruised and battered and naked and hacked around and bloody and messy on a cross. We don't want that. I'm not weak. My sins don't need that. My sins wouldn't get judged. I'm not weak. And I don't want a weak God. I don't want a crucified God. And Paul says they are perishing then to verse 15. So to these people, what we preach, what we bring is death to them. It only speaks of death And because they're rejecting it, they're going to die. They're already perishing. However, that's only some. There are those who, as this aroma is released, as the neck of the alabaster jar is broken, so to speak, as the gospel is spoken out in people's hearing, there are those who are being saved. And to those, we are now preaching the gospel, are an aroma that brings life. Same words, same good news, Christ died for our sins. But a completely opposite response. What do they see? They see their death being died. They see their sins being taken away. They see life in the death of Christ. They see the cross as being their hope. And so the gospel is an aroma that brings life. They acknowledge that they are weak and broken and sinful. They see the incredible grace of God, that He in the person of the Son in His own body would bear all the horror and the pain and all the separation, all the death that should be theirs. So the weakness of God in Christ on the cross is not weakness, it's God's strength. It's not foolishness, it's God's wisdom. which is what Paul writes about a lot in 1 Corinthians 1, isn't it? That the foolishness of God is wisdom, and the wisdom of man, that's foolishness. So others see the grace of the cross, a life-saving death, and they're the ones who see and want, and they are already being saved. And so we have two sorts of people. Not those who have two destinations, now Paul does write about that, but here he's not talking about two destinations, he's talking about two paths that you're already on, one or the other. You're already perishing without Christ. You're already dying. The state you are in, is death. Paul would write that to the church in Ephesus, remember? That when we were dead in our transgressions and sins, or you're already being saved. Now all that, and this is going to come out a little bit more in the next section, all that comes from God, unlike so many. Who is equal to such a task, he says. This is beyond us, really. We just get on preaching the gospel, but it's all beyond us. There's a mystery about the work of God that actually you experience as even more of a mystery when you see it working. It is even more of a mystery that people should be saved. And so you ask yourself, not when nobody's responding, but when people are responding, you think, well, who's equal to that? That must be God. That must be God at work. It says, unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit. On the contrary, in Christ, we speak before God with sincerity as though sent from God. What is he saying there? He's saying, well, either way, either no to the gospel or yes to the gospel, either the aroma being a stench of death or the aroma being the sweet fragrance of life. Either way, we're not actually preaching before the people. We're preaching before God with sincerity because the people didn't ask for us to come. God sent us. apostles sent ones. You've got the messengers, the Angeloi, the Evangelion with a good message, the apostolic thing about being sent. We're not there because of people, and we're not there to please people, and we're not there being judged by people. No, we preach before God in Christ. with sincerity that he sees, because we're sent by him to do this smelly work. And then he goes on then, and you can see the natural sort of flow into chapter three, verses one to six. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Are we sort of, you know, am I kind of boosting myself up so that I look bigger and better than all these other people? No, not at all. These false teachers, these super apostles who've come in with all their bling and their highfalutin oratory and charging great sums of money for people to go and listen to them preach the gospel, peddling the word of God for profit, verse 17, these people have got it, you know, it is completely, totally 180 degrees wrong. And so Paul isn't going to try and get the Corinthians' affections back and their belief in his gospel back by sort of outdoing them. He's saying, no, we're not beginning to commend ourselves again. We don't need to. You are our commendation. You are our letter of recommendation. The fact that God used the gospel that we preached amongst you. The fact that you're still following him. And God has written you on our hearts. I'll come back to the New Covenant thing in a moment. God has written you on our hearts, our affections. Because he's written his grace on your hearts, your wills. The word heart is used in the two different ways there. Verse two, you yourselves are our letter written on our hearts, that is upon our affections. But the gospel that has been written and the law of God, the word of God that has been written, and it's in New Covenant language, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts, i.e. theirs, the Corinthians, the heart there is primarily referring to the will. as we'll see in a moment. Now all this from one following is Paul leading into his talk about preaching the new covenant, being messengers, ministers of a new covenant. And this is why it has brought life, this is why it brings life, because the spirit gets in there and it's the spirit who gives some to hear and to smell life when they smell the gospel, so to speak. Some of you will remember Isabel Russell, one or two of you will remember Isabel Russell who used to worship here many, many moons ago when I was a student. Went down to Falkirk, I think it was, isn't it? Home there. Isabel Russell was a larger-than-life character. Huge smile, big teeth, and wore, frequently wore in winter, a red coat with a hood. It's like the Red Riding Hood thing, except there's nothing little at all about Isabel. And I think I'd only been, it was 79, 1979, I'd only been in Guildford a few Sundays and I was chatting away at the back of the church. I was with Graham Black at the time and this woman in red came sort of striding up and smiling and she just stood in front of me and she said, you smell like a Christian. It was a huge relief. You're never quite sure what you did smell like as a student but to know that you smell like a Christian was great. Well, when he's talking about what he's been preaching, he's talking about this thing that has this aroma. He's talking about the New Covenant. So, let's understand what the New Covenant is all about. So if you turn over, this is where it goes. You may remember seeing this several years ago, this picture that I sort of did to try and explain how the main covenants work over the whole Bible storyline. So we pick up the first really sort of obvious dominant saving covenant, that is God's promise to Abraham, which was announced in Genesis 12 and gets repeated through four or five other passages in Genesis. And as it goes down in generations, the promise to Abraham and to Isaac, to Jacob. And that promise becomes a foundational promise for Joseph, and it becomes a foundational promise in the Exodus for the two spies, Joshua and Caleb, who said, no, let's go in God's given this land. He's promised it. So that promise to Abraham. or to Abraham, strictly speaking, as he was when he first got it in Genesis 12, was that from Abraham, for whom God would make his name, would come a people through whom every nation on earth would be blessed and kings would come from him, a people, and they would have a place. I remember going through the early chapters of Genesis a few years ago, if you're here then. We already count a people and place in the story of creation in Genesis 1 and 2. So you end up at the end of creation, at the end of the six days, you've got these people, Adam and Eve, in this place and everything's good. So you've got perfect people in a perfect place. And then you get Genesis 3. From Genesis 3 onwards, with the promise there in Genesis 3.15, the first good news, the first announcement, the Proto-Evangelium as it's sometimes called, that God would crush Satan's head and with one of Adam's seed, your seed, he gives a promise to Eve, your seed will crush his head and he, the serpent, will bruise the heel of the seed. So there's going to be a battle. The serpent will lose, but it will be costly for the one who crushes his head. In the gospel there, that's the start of God reworking, bringing to a great and final conclusion, which is more glorious than what was lost, the people and place again. And so it begins, the two people are cast out of the perfect place, from then on it's a recovery. Not in the sense of, oh it's gone wrong and I was caught out by that and now we've got to do plan B, but of humanity recovering through God's work, what humanity had lost and more beside. So you get to the point where the people are so badly wrong that they start to try and make a place for themselves, which is Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. They want to make a name for themselves, they want to make one people of themselves, and they want to give a place to themselves, and lo and behold, the place is heaven. So it's, you know, the old temptation in Genesis sort of just reworked now on a larger scale. We want heaven, we want to be gods. So it's out in the Tower of Babel, God looks down and scatters them and confuses them with languages, which is still confusing for many of us, even English. And then that was their attempt to sort of do what? To do exactly what Adam and Eve had done wrong. Now that's Genesis 11. Immediately in Genesis 12, God begins the work that he has planned from before the foundation of the world, reading Ephesians and 1 Peter, and so he starts to form a people. And they're going to be the descendants of Abraham. And Abraham and Sarah can't have children, so it's going to be a work of God, not a work of man. And he doesn't negotiate, he just says, this is what it's going to be like. So it's not a covenant as in an agreement between two equal parties that's negotiated, it's a diatheke, it's a top-down covenant. Not a syntheke, two people on the same level coming together synthesizing something, but a diatheke, that means coming straight from God to us. So it's announced, not negotiated. And from you will come nations. And all nations, I know, will be blessed through your seed. And there'll be this place everywhere you put your feet, Abraham. It'll be yours. So God is reconstructing a people and a place that he will make and he will provide. That's that first promise. Now that one is the great overarching promise and covenant of the story, so to speak. And that one is what gets fulfilled. That's why I've got that big arrow going right over to the end. That's what's fulfilled in Revelation 21. So the promise to Abraham was, I will be your God and you will be my people. And you'll be in the place where I put you. And what we find in Revelation 21, Now the dwelling of God is with men and he will be their God and they will be his people in the place where he puts them. You have a new earth and no barrier between the two. Now, making a people and taking them into the promised land, so we're getting now to Exodus and Moses, God gave them again, it was a deer that he'd come down from, you know, top down. He gave them the instructions for how to live as his people in the land that he was providing. So, you know, I'm fashioning a people, I'm making a people for myself. They're coming from me. So he calls Israel his son. And I'm gonna take them to this land flowing with milk and honey. where they'll be free from all the oppressions of Egypt. And they can be my people there and worship me and serve and enjoy me. So he gives them the instructions as to how to live there. And that's what the old covenant was. It was a covenant through Moses at Sinai. The people said, yes, we're up for that when they got into the land Deuteronomy, when they were about to go in, they said yes. No, when they went, they said yes. When they got there, Joshua again reiterated, it's all wonderful, we're gonna do it. But actually the story of the rest of their time is of them breaking the old covenant. And the word covenant is the same as the word testament. Old testament simply means old covenant. It's the Moses one. And so we find the prophets calling them back to the law. But the law was always standing against them because they were always breaking it. And they were breaking it from within. So the Old Covenant through Moses, the Sinai, the whole of the Old Testament, it's the record of it being broken. And of people sinning. And of them bringing death upon themselves. Sometimes literally. So when Paul says, in our passage, the letter kills, that's what he's talking about. The law written down on tablets of stone, all those laws codified written down there, all that did was kill you because you kept breaking it. If I wrote a command saying, do not covet, immediately, Your flesh fastened on that, and you started coveting. It's the old one about don't step on the grass. As soon as you see it, you want to walk on the grass. It wouldn't have entered your mind to go walking on the grass otherwise, but as soon as you see the sign saying don't walk on the grass, something in you, think, I'm going to do that. And if you're polite and British, you tend not to. We were wandering around Bletchley, you know, where the Enigma code breaking thing was, and there are still a couple of grass tennis courts at Bletchley, sort of redone from the wartime days. And they're marked out, there's a net there and everything else, and there's a sign saying, don't step on the grass. And I've got a photograph of it. You think, hang on, there's something wrong there. You're supposed to step on that. How can you have a game of tennis on there if you're not supposed to step on the grass? So I had this vision of all these people hovering around like playing Quidditch or something. Harry Potter does Wimbledon at Bletchley. Anyway, that's just my warped mind. So you see, the letter kills. Because the letter condemns you, the letter shows you what a sinner you are. The law written down on tablets of stone all the way through the Old Testament just showed you what rank sinners you are, showed you that inside your heart there is rebellion against God. God says do this, you will do that. God says black, you will do white. God says don't step on the grass, you'll go camping on it. That's what the letter does. It brings the curse of the law upon you. It brings death. And so as we go through the Old Testament, we find that God begins to promise that there will be a new covenant. And so here we are with Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Let's read them. 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 covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, the Moses one, Sinai, Ten Commandments, and all that, because they broke my covenant. that I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord, after the Old Testament time is all finished. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts, the seat of the will. I will be their God and they will be my people. I'm going to fulfill everything that it means for them to be my people and for me to be their God that they couldn't fulfill with the Moses Code. They just kept breaking it. I'm going to make it happen and I'm going to do it through this new covenant. And when I do this, the law won't be enough tablets of stone externally to be impressed upon them, but in fact only responded to with rebellion. I'll write it on their hearts. When I've done this new covenant thing and it comes to people's hearts and I put it in their minds and write it on their hearts, what will be the difference? The difference is that you will want to do my will. And when you see my instruction, you will delight to do it. And you will prove, if you pick up language from Romans, by your obedience that will come from you that my will is good and perfect and acceptable. So it'll come from in you because of me writing it on your minds and on your hearts. And then you will really be my people. You'll live as my people should live. And you will know that I am your God. Verse 34, no longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, know the Lord, because they will all know me. All my people will know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their wickedness, and will remember their sins no more. So the route to being a new covenant person is through forgiveness and the covering of sin, which happened where? On the cross. So Paul is preaching, as he's preaching the cross, he's preaching the new covenant. He's not saying, do this, this, this, and God will like you. and do this, this, this, and this, and if you try very hard and you don't break all that many laws, you might actually function like one of his people, and then he might think of being your God, which was the Judaizers' message, and everything that Paul had grown up with. And he's preaching the gospel of grace, forgiveness, and the removal of iniquity and guilt through the cross, and then God writing by the Spirit, as we'll see in a moment. God writing his law upon our minds, and on our affections, and our wills, our hearts. And so we read the next New Covenant promise, Ezekiel 36, 24 to 28. For I will take you out of the nations, I will gather you from all the countries, and bring you back into your own land. People, place. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you'll be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone, resistant, granite on the inside, and give you a heart of flesh, living. and I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. And that little phrase there in 27 parallels what's being said in I will put my law in their minds and write it on their heart. What was happening at Pentecost? The people were being birthed. But these are new covenant people. The old covenant people were birthed into a moment when an external code came down from heaven with fire. The new covenant people were birthed at Pentecost with God's will written on their hearts and fire as the Spirit came down. And so the church was born, the Bride of Christ. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors, you will be my people and I will be your God. Same covenant phrase that we've got in verse 33 of Jeremiah 31. And crops will begin at the end of Revelation. How is the new covenant fulfilled? There's Jesus, Luke 22. In the same way, after supper he took the cup saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Not the blood of goats and bulls and sheep, in my blood. which is poured out for you. I'm dying the death. The blood. I'm giving my life. The life is in the blood. I'm giving it on behalf of you, for you. That little phrase time and time again we keep reading in the New Testament and if it ever helps you then do this. Cross out the word for and put in on behalf of because that's what it means. I'm doing it in your place. I'm doing it on your behalf. I'm doing it as one of you for the rest of you. The one on behalf of the many. which is being poured out, not as a presentation to you, you know, here I've got this present for you, not that, but I'm doing this for you, you can do this, I'm doing it for you, on your behalf, as your representative, in your place, vicarious substitutionary atonement. A new covenant fulfilled again, Hebrews 9, 15. There are other passages in Hebrews, of course. For this reason, Christ is the mediator, the bringer of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. He sinned under the law. Now you're set free in Christ. It's wonderful, isn't it? So this is what Paul is preaching. This is why he counts it the most incredible privilege, the most wonderful thing, to be a messenger of this gospel. This gospel by which we are reconciled to God so that we become his people and he becomes our God. The relationship restored that Adam lost. So this is a new covenant, and that's why it's so different from the old one. And God has written you on our hearts because he has written his grace on your hearts. So when we read in verse three there of our passage, you show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. You see what he's saying? That's all that new covenant stuff that we've just been reading from the prophecies from Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And that's why he's confident about them. Such confidence we have through Christ before God. We're confident about you, not because of our preaching as if we were wonderful and special like the competition say they are. And we're certainly not confident because of you. We're confident because of Christ. We're confident of the gospel that has been preached to you. is not only the one that we were sent with and come from God, but it's effective. It's given you life. We're not confident it's given you life because we are great preachers, and we're not confident that this gospel has given you eternal life because you're very good Christians. We're confident because of Christ, because he sealed the new covenant. with his blood. Paul writes to the church in Philippi and says that we are confident of this very thing that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on that day. Paul has no confidence in himself even though he's doing everything right before God and he's got total integrity before God. But his confidence isn't in himself and it isn't in the Philippians or Corinthians. It's in God, it's in Christ. And we are competent to do this because of him. We can actually do this. We can actually preach this new covenant that brings life because the Spirit is poured out on you. We can actually preach about what Christ has accomplished and the Spirit delivers. We're competent to do this. and our competence comes from God. Not from our oratory skills, not from our presentation, not because we look good, not because we're like those superpossils, but from God. So, two questions. These aren't for general discussion, our time has gone. Two questions. Well, three actually. First of all, I'm going to put it this way because it just seems a bit, it's the Isabel Russell moment from the back of the church. What do you smell when preaching is going on at Gilk? What do you smell when preaching is going on at Gilk? That's the first question. These are to take away and pray. Second question, what is God writing on your heart? Plenty of other people in the world. The whole world is a system for writing. The world is a word producer. The world will try and write stuff on your heart, in your mind, on your will. And we all know the kind of stuff that's going to write. What is God writing on your heart at the moment? What is God doing in your life? What's he writing on your will? What is he giving you a will to do? And then the third question, so first, what do you smell when there's preaching at GILC, whoever's doing it? Are you smelling life? Second, what is God writing on your heart at the moment? Third question, when people read you, what do they read? Or hear you, what do they hear? When people read you, what do they read? You know the old saying, you're the only Bible some people will ever read. Because they won't read the bound volume. Unless you give them one, you can get free ones through the back there, at least New Testaments and John's Gospels. Pray for a chap called Adrian who went away from Tuesday lunchtime with a New Testament and tried praying in a John's Gospel. I could just give him the lot. What do people read when they read you? Do they read Christ and grace and the gospel? Do they read the truth that is spoken? Do they read sincerity before God? Do they read the cross? Do they read something else? What do people read when they read you? Okay, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we ask that your word might be fruitful in our lives. We pray, Heavenly Father, that your word would prune, clean the vine. We pray, Heavenly Father, that this might happen so that we might be more fruitful, bear much fruit for you. Thank you that you send us out as messengers, ministers of the new covenant, of life in Christ. Thank you that you send us out with a message that you are making a people for a place that is perfect. And you invite sinners, rank rebellious sinners, to be part of that people. worldlings to be part of heaven. Thank you that you've made us messengers, ministers of the new covenant, ambassadors for Christ. Help us to be that tomorrow, Lord. May your word tonight bear fruit in our lives. May people read Jesus and their readers tomorrow. And may they hear of him when we speak. Help us not to bottle up the gospel in all its fragrance and aroma. In Jesus' name, Amen.