Sermons 2024

Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34

Outline
1.    Broken Covenant
2.    New Covenant

Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

My dear beloved flock, the text for our meditation today is the Old Testament lesson of Jeremiah chapter thirty-one verses thirty-one through thirty-four.

Boys and girls, I pray that you are doing well today. Have you ever made a covenant? A covenant is a promise that people make with other people. For example, if mom says to clean your room and if you do that, then she will give you ice cream. If you do not, then you go without ice cream. If someone gets married. They make solemn promises that they will be faithful to each other throughout their whole lives. These are examples of a covenant, two people promising that they will do things for the other person. In our text, God promises that He is going to make a new covenant with the house of Israel and Judah. What was the old covenant? What is the new covenant? Ponder those questions as you hear the rest of the sermon. You may go back to your seats and those who love you.

1.    Broken Covenant

The Lord declares though the prophet Jeremiah that former days He made an old covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant was etched into tablets of stone at Mount Sanai. They were given as sign of the relationship between God and the people. The Lord says that He was as a husband to them. They had a solemn vow of faithfulness, similar to the vows that husbands and wives make today. The Lord expected that the people were going to be faithful to Him just as He was faithful to them. It is a relationship that the prophets, Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, to name a few, use quite regularly to explain the relationship of the Lord to His people. 

The people were expected to keep the relationship. Yet, what they do? The Lord was faithful husband to them. They were a constantly unfaithful wife. They broke the relationship that they had with the Lord by following other gods. The old covenant imposed many rules upon the Jews, rules they found impossible to observe. Hence the old covenant certainly proved that no one could be saved by keeping it. For that reason the Lord says of their fathers, “They broke my covenant.” We would say, Before the ink was dry, they broke the covenant with the sin of the golden calf.  When they entered into the promised land, they were unfaithful choosing to follow the fertility cults of Ashera. Thousands worshiped Baal. They sacrificed their own children to the abomination Molech.
 

We are like unfaithful Israel. The Lord has made a relationship with us in the waters of Holy Baptism where He calls us His very own beloved children. He expects that we will be faithful to Him. Yet, how often are we unfaithful like the people of Israel? We are unfaithful in thought, word, and, deed twenty-four seven, three hundred sixty five days of the year. We follow other gods that we have set up in our own minds and thoughts. Our money, status, power, authority, worldly pleasures. When we are not content with the good blessings God has given to us and we want more and more. When we put our own wants and desires before the needs of others. We justify our own actions for our own sinful pleasures. We listen to the lies and gossip of others rather than the truth of God’s word. When we give into the temptations of Satan and our own flesh. Truly, we are an adulterous and sinful people.

2.    New Covenant

What is a faithful husband to do? He could seek revenge, and that would be just and fair for Him to do. Like Carrie Underwood sings in Before He Cheats, God could spiritually “took a Louisville Slugger to both headlights. Slashed a hole in all four tires. Maybe next time, he'll think before he cheats.” 

God could rightly and justly punish us just as He did under the old covenant by removing the people of Israel from the land. We deserve present and eternal punishment for our unfaithfulness. That is well within His power to do. It is what He should do for our unfaithfulness.

Yet, what does He say? 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.   The Lord is making a new covenant! He is making a different one that the one He made at Mount Sanai. The old covenant pointed to Christ as its fulfillment. By its very nature, then, it was temporary and passing. Many of its activities—the repeated animal sacrifices, for example—emphasized its transitory nature.  The Lord is making one that is not transitory, but permeant, one that can not be broken. Why? Because it is not dependent upon the actions of the people but on the faithfulness of the Lord. It is fully and totally dependent upon what Jesus Christ has done for us by His death and resurrection from the dead. How faithful is Jesus? Totally, fully, completely faith as the only-begotten Son of the Father. 

The priests under the old covenant could offer only the blood of bulls and goats, for without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. But Christ, the mediator of the new covenant, offers the supreme sacrifice. He offers the sacrifice that matters. He offers the once-and-for-all sacrifice that pleases God and removes sin and guilt. He offers himself. Freely and willingly, he sheds his blood and by the shedding of his blood takes away sin forever. By his sacrifice he opens the way to heaven. Nothing bars the way. The one who trusts him has a wide-open approach to God. At Christ’s triumphant words “It is finished,” the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom, showing that a new and better way to God had been opened.

This new covenant proclaims a salvation complete, finished, and, above all, free for the asking. It is a salvation won in and through Christ. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). 

Under this new covenant, we are given of the Holy Spirit that we can cry, Abba, Father! A covenant signed and sealed in blood, not bound by law after law, but one given freely by the grace of God. That when we are unfaithful, we remember the grace He has given to us in Holy Baptism. He is faithful for He cannot deny Himself. He holds to His promises. Thus, we remember our baptisms daily that the old Adam may drown and die, that the new Adam may live. Heaping grace upon grace, in an equally wondrous and marvelous way, our Lord shares the meal of the new covenant with us.

In that Communion meal, he draws us to himself. He gives us the supreme gift: with the bread, his body given on the cross; with the wine, his blood poured out on the cross. With these sacred gifts, he gives to us the forgiveness of sins. With them he removes all doubts that might linger in our hearts. He comes to each of us personally and gives. We are sure. We belong to him. We are one with him. All that is his is ours.

We are united and bonded to him. But this bond goes much further. Because we all eat of the one bread and are with him through faith, so we are joined to one another in the body of Christ, the church. Such is the vision Jeremiah saw. He saw the day of Christ and was glad. Such is the gift we taste and know.  

That is the blessing that we get to share with others. God has made a new covenant for the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of souls. He has fulfilled all of the old covenant by the work, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, given freely by His grace. 

The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard and keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.