Here is the revelation that is shaping my life today – there is a better way than law and manipulation – it’s the way of the heart and God has chosen it!
Hebrews 8:6-7,10 TPT
[6] …since he (Jesus) is the catalyst of a better covenant which contains far more wonderful promises! [7] For if that first covenant had been faultless no one would have needed a second one to replace it. ……10] For here is the covenant I will one day establish with the people of Israel: I will embed my laws within their thoughts and fasten them onto their hearts. I will be their loyal God and they will be my loyal people.
Observation
The new covenant is a heart covenant. It’s not obedience to laws and sacrifices mediated by priests. It’s intimate, it’s personal, it’s heart. Response to intimacy will be the motivator, not carrots and sticks. God himself will be my teacher and the classroom will be the pleasure of his presence. My heart will encounter the ways and beauty of heaven first-hand and then reflect my intimate experience from a heart that has experienced and been captured by beauty. My loyalty and obedience will flow most naturally from the depth of relational heart connectedness.
Law is easier than heart. Demands with reward and punishment, I get how this works. The only problem is it doesn’t work at reaching the goal of a people who love God and follow her. We will never become the people of God this way, that’s why she threw this way, this covenant, in the bin, never to be raised again. So we are left with no other response than to lay down our power approach to making people walk with God, and live and share what God has done – free access to himself, her love, for all, always, no conditions to be met, no measures for exclusion. The riff-raff get in for free and go on for free, I just need to embrace my riff-raff ness and join the party.
We must stop saying “What must I do,” and celebrate what has been done. Then with complete freedom, and complete robust right standing before God, we find the rhythms of life that engage with his presence. You see the most important thing in life is stillness in his presence, it’s here you get to know him. Stillness is not passive, it’s an active attentiveness and active awareness that God’s love surrounds you always and is your teacher of the ways to life. There is no manipulation of law, priests and sacrifices, only feasting in her beauty and goodness and then living a reflection of your intimate encounter. The ways of God become clearly beautiful, they capture our minds and hearts, to the point where sacrificial living flowing from love is chosen freely not forced. A desire for Him, his ways, a life reflecting his character, and a realisation that I am made in this image, a realisation that my true self is divine like these flow from his presence and shape my living.
Application
Live in the new covenant. Don’t allow the old ways to find any voice in shaping my life. Kill all attempts at law to have a manipulative voice in my life. Put priests in their place, not in between me and God. Let my life flow sacrificial from the beauty of love. Find my rhythms where love can be encountered and pleasured in. Live free, completely free of sin, condemnation, shame, exclusion, demands for acceptance, and everything else that is ugly, disqualifying, and heavily burdensome. Live in love and beauty, rest and peace, stillness and awareness.
Response
Thank you for a new covenant of the heart. Your invitation to yourself is so beautiful, amazing and compelling. I am not sure there is a more amazing invitation in all of life than to live intimately in your love. This is either the only real place to find life or it’s a fallacy, I have found life. Thank you for bringing me into a place of faith and awareness of your new covenant. I love life from this context.
Meditation
Meditate – I will embed my laws within their thoughts and fasten them onto their hearts.
Consider:
Are you living new covenant?
Do you have rhythms of stillness?
JOURNEY DEEPER
