Please turn in your Bibles to Jeremiah 31. When the church has confusion about the Word of God, it always results in confusion in faith. It results in great problems. Perhaps one of the greatest areas of confusion, scriptural confusion in the church today, is in the area of the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Or, as we could even properly say, between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, which is what the word Testament means. What does it mean to be a member, a partaker of the New Covenant? And how do members of the New Covenant think about the Old Covenant? You'll hear the phrase, we are New Testament Christians. which is a nice sounding phrase, but it could carry a lot of bad ideas along with it. How do we, as those who live after Pentecost, think about the Old Testament? And how do we look at the Old Testament? We're going to see in Jeremiah 31 one of the most clear Old Testament expositions of the New Testament. This is one of the best passages about the Gospel in the Bible. And here it is right smack in the middle of the prophet Jeremiah. And we're going to see a clear passage about the New Covenant. And what we'll see eventually through the sermon is that Christ's fulfillment of the New Covenant means that you have the fullness of the Spirit. Christ fulfilled the New Covenant in order that you would have the fullness of the Spirit. Let's give our attention to God's Word, Jeremiah 31, beginning in verse 31 to the end of the chapter. Behold, the days are coming, declares 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 on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. My covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts. 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, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar, the Lord of hosts is His name. If this fixed order departs from before me, declares the Lord, then shall the offspring of Israel cease from being a nation before me forever. Thus says the Lord, if the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will cast off all the offspring of Israel, for all that they have done, declares the Lord. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when the city shall be rebuilt for the Lord, from the tower of Hananel to the corner gate, and the measuring line shall go out farther, straight to the hill Gerab, and then shall turn to Goa. The whole valley of the dead bodies and the ashes and all the fields as far as the brook Kidron to the corner of the horse gate toward the east shall be sacred to the Lord. It shall not be uprooted or overthrown anymore forever. Let's pray. O Lord, we have come to submit ourselves to Your Word, to place ourselves under it, to allow ourselves to be cut apart by it, believing, Lord, that we will find here not just rebuke, but correction and training in righteousness. Lord, use Your Word to inform our minds, to change our hearts, and to change our lives so that they might be more like Christ. We do pray in His name. Amen. Jeremiah was a prophet, as many of you know, in very, very dark days. Jeremiah was one of the last prophets to the southern kingdom of Judah. His ministry came a couple of generations after Isaiah's ministry. There were some high points in the ministry of Jeremiah. He prophesied during the reign of Josiah, who is one of our heroes in the faith. And we can maybe think that Jeremiah's preaching has something to do with Josiah's reformations. But mostly, Jeremiah lived and prophesied during a spiritually dead and dark time. He saw the rise of the Assyrian Empire. This Assyrian Empire grow, which Isaiah had promised in Isaiah 7 and 8. But that empire was already beginning to crumble, and the Assyrian Empire and then the Babylonian Empire began to grow. And through Josiah's reign until the end of Judah in 586 BC, Jeremiah was there when all the exiles went to Babylon. In that time, Jeremiah witnessed great paranoia in the nation, great rebellion, vicious politics, pro-Egyptian groups and pro-Babylonian groups battling together, bickering together. And in the middle of it all, in the middle of a spiritually dead nation, was Jeremiah. At the beginning of his ministry, Jeremiah had a focus and an emphasis in his message, and that was, repent. Turn and come to God. Turn away from your sins and come, and you will be forgiven. But as we read the book of Jeremiah, we see a shift in emphasis throughout his life. Jeremiah went from preaching repentance to simply being a prophet of doom. What happened was that as God's people further and further condemned themselves, the cup of the wrath of God was filled up and judgment and devastation became inevitable. So Jeremiah, in a sense, stopped preaching repentance and simply told the people what was coming. God's wrath is coming. The city will be destroyed and all of you will be taken out of it. And he was right. Jeremiah witnessed that. Jeremiah was part of the band, this very small group that stayed behind. After most of the exiles left, Jeremiah and the rest of the unimportant people stayed behind in Jerusalem. And then after the governor of Jerusalem was assassinated, he went with that very small band of exiles down to Egypt. And in Egypt, tradition tells us that Jeremiah died as a martyr, still preaching against the sins of the nation. So Jeremiah was not what you would call a popular preacher. His sermons would not be pulled offline quite often to be listened to. People would not flock to his conferences. He was a preacher of a dark message in a dark day. But yet, even in the book of Jeremiah, the book that got him the title, the weeping prophet, we find glimpses of hope. We find bright rays of God's grace. And that's what we have here in Jeremiah 31. We have grace even after the devastation of the coming judgment. Many of you, after having read this passage just now, it's familiar to your mind. You know you've heard this before, but it might not be because you're very familiar with the book of Jeremiah. Not many of you have probably memorized Jeremiah front to back. But the reason you're familiar, some of you are familiar with this passage is because it's in Hebrews. And it's very significant that when the writer of the Hebrews wanted to explain Jesus' role in the covenants, he turned to Jeremiah 31. And instead of just explaining and quoting a little bit from Jeremiah 31 and explaining what Jeremiah meant, he quoted the whole thing. And you can go and look sometime, maybe later today, you could study Hebrews chapter 8 and see that the writer of Hebrews just pulls this passage right into the New Testament and says, this is what Jesus means for the New Covenant. So what we see, just thinking about the context of Jeremiah's life, is that the darkness of his time and of his message, of his emphasis, really serves to highlight the amazing grace of God. The darkness of when He was preaching and what He was preaching really goes to show us more and more of the greatness of the Gospel that He promised would come after the devastation. To this exile band, God promises them something very amazing. And imagine yourself in this context. You are going to be taken away to Babylon. Everything you know is behind you in Jerusalem. And God promises not just restoration, but He gives to that people greater gospel promises than anyone in the Old Testament had ever had. So with that in mind, let's dig in now to see what does it mean? What is this new covenant's plan of God? Verse 31, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Which immediately brings us to the question, New, how? How is this covenant new? What does it mean to have a new covenant and an old covenant? And if we automatically assume that we know what the word new means in this context, we may be led into error. And words can have different definitions according to the context, of course. And new, that word new, scripturally speaking, does not always mean distinctly different. It doesn't always mean qualitatively something else. It can simply be a greater fulfillment, a greater completion, a greater clarity. And what we understand from this passage and from all of Scripture is that the New Covenant that God is promising here is not something completely different than the covenant He gave at Mount Sinai, what we call the Mosaic Covenant, referring to Moses. But the New Covenant is the ultimate fulfillment of the Old Covenant. The New Covenant is the ultimate clarity and the ultimate revelation of the Old Covenant. And I might give you a couple of illustrations to hopefully help show what this means. If I came to you with a glass and I gave you a glass, and in that glass I put some water, I would have really given you a glass of water. But if every so often I came and I put a little more water in your glass, you could say in one sense that you have given me a new glass of water. And finally, if I got to the point where I filled the glass to the brim, I could say, this is your new glass of water. not qualitatively different than the glass you had before, but new and filled to the brim. Another illustration used by B.B. Warfield, an old theologian, goes like this. He says, you can imagine the difference between the old covenant and new covenant as a room, as a dark, dark room. And at the beginning, somebody goes into the room and just lights a candle. And by the light of the candle, you can see a few things in that room. And what you see is true. It's true knowledge, but you don't know everything that's there. And every so often you add another candle and another candle, and then maybe you get electricity and the lights begin to come on. And over the course of time, you get a greater sense of what is in that room. And that's what the gospel and the covenant is like. All the gospel promises are in the Old Testament. They're simply shadowed. It's a darker room and you have to look harder to find them and you have to look through the lens of the New Testament. So this is the sense that Jeremiah means. This is what it means to have a new covenant. Not totally different from what the believers of the Old Testament had, but more fulfilled, more clear. Well, what about the old covenant? Why do we need a new covenant? Why does it need to be more clear and more fulfilled? God tells us this in Hebrews 8 and in verse 32 in Jeremiah 31. Hebrews 8 tells us that the new covenant is better because it's built on better promises. It's built on better promises. And think in your mind throughout the history of the Old Testament as the covenants progressed. through Abraham and the patriarchs, and then Moses and David. Every time God came to His people and made a covenant with them, the Gospel promise became a little more clear, a little more big, and a little more all-encompassing of the world. It always just grew throughout the Old Testament. Well, the Gospel promise was always there, but the clarity of the promise came. The full clarity of the beauty of God being with his people would not be seen until the covenant arrived in its fullness, until God came in the form of a man and revealed in the form of a person who could be seen and touched the new covenant in its fullness. Another problem with the old covenant is shown in verse 32. God says, I don't want that covenant. It's not enough because they broke that covenant. The old covenant of the Old Testament, the religion that the people were operating under was less powerful and less perfect than what we have. God says that the new covenant is going to be more pure, more powerful, more protected from brokenness. That is, now that we live in the new covenant, there are individuals who can break the covenant. All of us know covenant children who have left the faith and we would consider them covenant breakers. But God says in the new covenant, there will not be a mass exodus. There will be no more mass breaking of my covenant. The people as a whole cannot break this covenant. And Hebrews tells us one more difference between the covenants. And that is the difference of visibility. The old covenant was a very, very visible covenant. It had animals and candles. and bread, and a bronze basin, and instruments, and knives, and blood, and scads of priests with all the strains, get up on the twelve stones, and everywhere you looked, if you remember the Old Covenant, there was something visual pointing you to see Jesus Christ. But what do you have here? You have baptism, and you have the Lord's Supper, and you have the preaching of the Word. The New Covenant is far less visible But the whole emphasis of the book of Hebrews goes to the new Christians and says, though it is less visible, it is better. It is better. You should not lament that you cannot see all the things of the Old Testament, because what you have is better. Now, we need to be clear and say, as we often say, that the faithful people of the Old Testament were saved in the same way we were saved, by faith in Jesus Christ. They were partakers in the covenant of grace, but they were under the old covenant. Matthew Henry notes that God is here comparing two dispensations of the covenant of grace. The covenant under Moses was a gracious covenant. It was just a darker covenant, less clear, less fulfilled than the coming revelation in Jesus Christ. And we find a little bit more about this covenant then in verse 33. This is the covenant, God says, that I will make with the house of Israel after those days. I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts. Jesus' fulfillment of the New Covenant means that God's law is sown into your hearts. Now that the Spirit has come at Pentecost, the law of God has come into your heart in a new and more powerful way than those of the Old Testament had it. Now, we know that people of the Old Testament love the law of God, don't we? All we need to do is go to Psalm 119, David's extraordinarily long, epic love poem to the law of God. And certainly we would say the Law of God was written on his heart. But what God is saying here is that in a new way, in a more powerful way, I will write the Law of God on all of my children's hearts. And this was fulfilled with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And now what you experience because of the presence of the Spirit in your life is the answer to many great promises of the Old Testament. Some of these you'll remember. Deuteronomy 6, verse 6. These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. Deuteronomy 30, verse 6, And the Lord your 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. Ezekiel 36, verse 27, I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey all my rules. And then the Spirit comes and fulfills this, writes the law in your heart. So before we move on, let me give you, by way of observation, three parts of life in the New Covenant. What does it mean to live in the New Covenant? First, life in the New Covenant means obedience is a privilege and a possibility, not a purchase order. Obedience is not something we use now to buy anything, but that which we are able to do. because of the work of the Spirit. This was first fulfilled by Jesus Christ. We're going to sing after the sermon, Psalm 40, in which Jesus says, I desire to do Your will, O my God. Your law is within my heart. Jesus was the first one to perfectly desire to do the law of God. And then we see this about the righteous in Psalm 37. The righteous, the law of His God is in His heart and His steps do not slip. Practically speaking, what this means is that now, as members of the New Covenant, you love to obey God. You love to obey God. And all you have to do, if you are a true believer in Jesus Christ, is review your own history and ask yourself, when have I been most fulfilled? When have I had the most joy in life? When have I had the greatest sense that I am fulfilling my purpose in life? Is it not when you have been the most holy? Is it not when you've been most in line with the law of God? And some of you are without joy this morning. Some of you are with God. You're saved. And you wonder where the joy has gone. Might I suggest that the joy has gone the same place your holiness has gone? If you were to grow in joy, grow in holiness, the law of God now as members of the New Covenant has gone from being two huge tablets of stone just waiting to crush us to being the yellow brick road, that which we walk upon to the greatest blessing. The law of God for us now is a blessing. And this is what we sang in Psalm 110. God the Father promises Jesus, Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of Your power. God says to Jesus in the New Covenant, the people that I'm going to work in, they are going to love to obey you. They're not going to obey you out of guilt or out of shame or to purchase anything, but they're going to obey you because they love to do it. Secondly, life in the New Covenant means the fullness of God's presence. The end of verse 33, and I will be their God and they shall be my people. And we have in one sentence the summary of the Gospel. We have maybe the greatest verse in the Bible. This is everything that the Gospel is. John Piper recently wrote a book entitled God is the Gospel. God is the Gospel. When somebody asks you to explain the Gospel, how do you explain the Gospel? What is at the heart of the Gospel? If you have been in the Reformed church for a while, you might begin to think that justification by faith alone is at the heart of the Gospel. Adoption is at the heart of the Gospel. Sanctification, effectual calling, irresistible grace. You would be wrong. God is at the heart of the Gospel. Why does justification exist? To clear away the guilt so that you can be with God. Why does adoption exist? So that God can bring you into His family and you can be with God. Why does sanctification exist? So that you can be made more like God, more in His presence, walking more in His steps. The heart of the Gospel is God. God has offered Himself to you to be with you. There is absolutely no way to exaggerate the greatness of this promise. There is no possible use of hyperbole that could go beyond the greatness of what God has promised. Matthew Henry said it this way, God's being to us a God is the summary of all happiness. Heaven itself is no greater than this. Think throughout the stories you love of the Old Testament. God being with His people, appearing to His people. God appearing to Moses in a burning bush. God walking with these three men in the fiery furnace. The angels fighting the Assyrians. The stories of power and of God's presence. And we read those stories and sometimes, mistakenly, we long for that. Oh, that I could be there. Oh, that I could have God at my side in the fiery furnace. God says what you have as members of the New Covenant is greater by far than anything the saints of the Old Testament had. They were saved by grace and they were with God, but what you have because of the fullness of the Spirit in you is better than anything King David ever had. You are closer to God now than Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were when He walked by their side in the furnace. What a promise. Finally, thirdly, life in the New Covenant means no more priests. Verse 34, a cryptic verse, 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. No longer will you need any more teachers. So that mean I should go home. Paul tells us that Christ gave teachers and preachers to the church. So it cannot mean that we need to get rid of our Sunday school teachers and our preachers and our fathers and mothers. So what is in mind here when God says you won't need anyone else to teach you? Well, John, the Apostle John helps us here in John 6. Jesus is responding to some who do not believe in his divinity. He's revealed it to them in such a way that those who had the Spirit would believe, and those who didn't, wouldn't believe. And he answers them by quoting Jeremiah's promise, and he says, they will all be taught by God. And what he's saying to his naysayers is, you don't believe because you've not been taught by God. Not because you don't have the necessary information, but because God has not become your teacher yet. And anybody in spiritual leadership should understand this. I, as a preacher, can put information before you. I can raise my voice and shout. I can whisper and try to give you goosebumps. But at the end of the day, if you leave here more holy than when you came in, it was because God has taught you. Fathers and mothers can give all sorts of information to their kids, but if they are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, it is because God has become their Teacher. This is what is in view here. That God promises to come to the hearts of those He has chosen and teach them to believe in Christ. Paul helps us out here too. He writes to the Thessalonians. And he's writing to Thessalonians a lot of instruction about life in the church and about faith, and he's going into all these things. And suddenly in 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul says, let's talk about love. But then he says, about love, you don't need anyone to teach you. What an odd thing for Paul to say, a teacher. You don't need anyone to teach you about this. How could that be? Could it be that they had been taught by the Spirit who is in them? The Spirit who bears fruit? Fruit like love? joy, peace, patience and so on. So what this means for us as members of the New Covenant is that we have no one. We do not need anyone else to change our heart other than God. We need no more priests, no more intermediaries between us and the Father, because we have Christ, who is both God and man. Now, if you've understood some of the truths in this passage up to this point, if you are beginning to grasp even a small tint of the greatness of what it means to live in the New Covenant, you can begin to identify with the exiles. Imagine yourself leaving Jerusalem and having these promises stuck in your head. Everything you know is in ruins behind you. Yet, God has said, I will be your God and you will be My people. You might become weary. You might begin asking, how can this be? How can this be? How can such a gospel like this be? Let me suggest that if you've never asked that question, if your heart has never been led to wonder how could such a great gospel ever be true, that you have great room to grow in your comprehension of the gospel. The infinite greatness of God's grace always begs the question, can this really be? Do I dare believe this? And so God comes and He answers those questions in verse 35-37. He sustains His people and answers those doubts. And He gives two proofs. Two proofs of the Gospel. Two ways to support the faith of those who would dare believe in such a great Gospel. And we see in verse 36, the first proof. And it's simply this. God says, look up. Go outside and look up. Do you see the sun? Do you see the moon? Do you see the stars? Have they ever changed? Has the sun ever forgotten to rise? The stars ever kind of jumbled around at night? Or are they not set from creation? Have they never wavered? And God says, when those skip a beat, when the stars move, when the sun doesn't shine and the sun doesn't rise, that is when I will give up my people. That, that's when I'll give up my people and not a day before. Proof number two. God says, get out your tape measure. Verse 37. Start at one end of the universe and stretch your tape measure to the other. And when you can measure the length of the universe and the height of the universe and the width of the universe, and when you can accurately discern all the mysteries of creation, then I will give up my people. Then I will be to them not a God. It's not so much as proofs as it is calling us to remember God's greatness and His infinity. You can believe in this Gospel, not because it all makes sense, but because God is really God. The question before us then is, Based on the promises in the first part of the chapter, based on the proofs of the second part, are you willing to believe the greatness of the Gospel? Not just the Gospel. Are you willing to believe the greatness of the Gospel? You believe the Gospel. Most of you are saved by faith in Jesus Christ. You believe the promise of the Gospel. But are you ready and willing to believe the greatness of it, the extent of the promises that God has given? If so, and you are ready to hear the last part of this chapter. You are ready to enter into God's rebuilding and reclamation program. Verse 38, the days are coming when the city will be rebuilt for the Lord, from the tower of Hananel to the corner gate. Hananel and the corner gate might not mean anything to you, but they were pieces of the wall in Jerusalem, the wall that had been destroyed by the Babylonians. And God says it's going to be rebuilt. which was, of course, fulfilled partially by the ministry of Ezra and Nehemiah, who led some of the exiles back to Jerusalem and began rebuilding the wall. And then he goes on, verse 39, the measuring line shall go out farther, straight to the hill Gerab and then shall turn to Goa. To be really honest, We don't know where Gerab is, and we don't know where Goa is, except this. They're not inside Jerusalem. And so what God says is this, I will build Jerusalem, and then the expansion is going to start. Then the measuring line will go out farther to the suburbs, to the hills, to the rural country, and it will expand. And in some of your minds, you're hearing the echo of Acts 1, verse 8. You will be my disciples in Jerusalem. And in Judea and in Samaria and in the ends of the earth, God is going to expand His kingdom. What this means, then, is that this is the Old Testament version of Jesus' promise in the New Testament. I will build my church. Regardless, regardless of the failures of the church, regardless of how many evangelical leaders fall into sin, regardless of how many mainline denominations steer into theological liberalism, Jesus will build His church. And you and nobody else can stop it. It has become a new, maybe a newer popular way to make some money. And they call it flipping a house. If I understand it right, what it means to flip a house is that you buy a house low and you sell it high. You buy a house that you can fix up and then you fix it up and then you sell it, hopefully to make a profit. Let me ask you to consider whether or not Jesus is the ultimate house flipper. What did Jesus get when he bought you? What did he get when Jesus spilled His blood of infinite worth. What did He take home from the store that day? Did He not get the very definition of worthless? When He paid for you, did He not take home not just worthless, but worse than worthless? Somebody who hated Him. Somebody who would have torn down the kingdom with your fingernails if you could have. And yet, what is Jesus doing? Even right now, what is He doing? He's flipping the house. He's taking these worthless things, and He's turning you into priests. He's turning you into prophets with an F. Prophets for the kingdom. You, who used to hate God, are now able to bring other people to Christ? Are now able to minister to the saints? He's letting some of you raise children. Christ is turning the house around. And at the end, At the very end of it all, Jesus Christ will go to God the Father and we will all be behind Him. And He will turn and He will say, these are my people. This is my house. And behind Him will be a perfect people. Holy, sanctified, holy and perfect. Jesus is Ba and Mo. And when He brings us to the Father, we will be perfect. He is building His church. Personally, this means for each of you that God will continue to rebuild you since you are His temple. Let me give a word of personal testimony. This is why I'm a pastor. I love to see people built up in Christ. I love to see people progressed in spiritual maturity and the lost brought into faith. But I've been a pastor long enough that I know that I can't do it. I can't do anything for you, but God has called me to participate and he's promised that you will be built up and simply called me to help. This is why I'm a pastor, this is my confidence as a pastor, and it means corporately that Jesus Christ will always continue to build his church throughout the world. Do you have confidence in Jesus building his church or do you wonder sometimes? You wonder, Jesus really knows what's going on in the American church. He does. He's building his church regardless of what we do. And finally, let me turn your attention to verse 40, and this is where we will conclude. The whole valley of the dead bodies and the ashes and all the fields as far as the brook Kidron to the corner of the horse gate toward the east shall be sacred to the Lord. It shall not be uprooted or overthrown anymore. So God has already said in verse 39 that he's going to build the church and he goes on to speak of the valley of ashes. What is? The Valley of Ashes. If you're taking notes, you can jot down Jeremiah 7, verse 31. The Valley of Ashes was a place outside of Jerusalem where God's own people had constructed high places and altars to Molech and to other gods. And it's where they had killed their children. It's where they had crushed them. It's where they had burned them. and worship of other gods. And God calls it the Valley of Ashes, and it's not a figurative name. The ashes were still on the ground. The bones were still there. So now notice what God says about the Valley of Ashes. He says, it will be sacred to me. it will be sacred to me." This is what it means to be a part of the New Covenant. When God returned to Jerusalem and built Jerusalem back up, there was a valley of ashes. And instead of going around it, instead of putting a fence around it and saying, we're just not going to talk about that place anymore, that's the first place He went. And He turned it over. And he turns it into a garden and he says, that's a sacred place. And this is what God does in our lives. What wretchedness is in your heart? What wretchedness is in your past? Understand now what God does to those of the New Covenant. He comes into your life and those places where you are the most rebellious, He goes right there and He says, not only am I going to save that, but that is going to be sacred to me. And so, you men who struggle with anger, God will turn you around and make you passionately gentle. You who struggle with lust and have committed sins in the past that you've not told anyone about, God will go to that part of your life and He will make you passionate for your husband or your wife. This is what God does to His people in the New Covenant by the power of the Spirit. And you need to look for this and expect it in your life. Some of you are holding on to sin. Some of you, members of the New Covenant, are letting it just stay in there deep down. The valley of ashes is in your heart and you know it. Would you give it to God? Would you understand what Jesus' plan is? He will go in. He will uproot it. It will not be pleasant, but He will turn it over and He will plant in that very spot a garden. If this is you, if the valley of ashes is in your heart, the charge before you this morning is to deal with your sin, not in any flippant way, but to go to God and lay before Him the valley of ashes. Go to your pastor. Go to your counselors. And let God turn it over. Do you know what happens when a forest burns? Do you know what happens when you put ashes in your garden? Is it not one of the best things you can put there? It fertilizes the roses and it will come up beautiful. This is what it means to be a member of the New Covenant. You are blessed beyond measure. You have a great gospel to lay a hold of. and God will turn everything over in your life and make it a sacred place for Him. Let's pray. Our Lord and our God, we are before You this day as members of the New Covenant, scarcely believing these promises. Hold in our breath, Lord, could this be true? That You would be our God and we would be Your people. Lord, thank You. Thank You for Your goodness to us. And we do pray, Lord, that You would come into our lives and our hearts. and turn over the valley of ashes and make it into a garden sacred for You. Do this, Lord, so that we might have joy and that You might have glory. We pray with confidence in Jesus' name, Amen. Let us sing Psalm 40, Selection E. Again, the book of Hebrews tells us that Psalm 40 is Jesus Christ's song. I especially want to turn your attention to stanza 4, which is verse 8. You'll notice in stanza 4 that it's in quotation marks. That's not an accident. That's because those are the quotation of Jesus. This is the song of Jesus. To do Your will, O God, to Me is My delight. Your law is part of Me, deep within My heart. If you are a member of the New Covenant and have the Spirit, Through your entrance into the life of Jesus, this is now your song as well. So let's stand and sing together Psalm 40E after the benediction. Psalm 89i will be our doxology. I waited for the Lord, He shook and heard my cry. He brought me from the pit, out of the dungeon mire. My feet set on the ground, my footsteps made secure. Why did he give us all a song to praise our God? Many will see me with awe, and so will trust the Lord. Let he who trusts in God, and turns not to false men. You have worked wonders, Lord, no one compares to you. Should I be there each one, their number is too great. You want no offering, nor ask a sacrifice, but you have given me a ready ear to hear. You have no offering burnt, nor sacrifice for sin. So I say, here I come, and in the scrolling shrine To You, O Will, O God, to Me is my delight. Your love is part of Me, deep in my heart, O God. In the creation frame, I hold your righteousness. You know, Lord, how I spoke out. I did not close my lips. Receive now the blessing of your God. The Lord Himself will go before you and will be with you. He will never leave you or forsake you. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. Amen. Let it be the Lord forever. Amen and amen.