The new covenant that I will make with the people of Israel will be this: I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. None of them will have to teach a neighbor to know the Lord, because all will know me, from the least to the greatest. I will forgive their sins and I will no longer remember their wrongs. I, the Lord, have spoken.” (Jeremiah 31:33, 34, Good News Translation).
Dear God I surrender my heart to be your parchment. Please keep writing until the story of my life brings You glory. I ask this in the precious name of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The sound of the title of today’s devotional may have brought to mind a familiar Negro spiritual: Ride on King Jesus. It goes on to say “no man’s gonna hinder me.” Although no pun was intended, I do believe that if we were to surrender our will to Jesus and allow Him to write His law within us and upon our hearts no one could “hinder” us. That is, we would have the strength of character to resist the wiles of the devil! No obstacles placed in our paths by the Adversary would allow us to fall. By God’s grace we would be “more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Romans 8: 37)!
Let us pay close attention to the different components of this covenant promise:
I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts. This is all God’s doing! He is going to do the putting and the writing. He alone has the power to convict and convince; therefore He alone can enable you to walk in His precepts by “direct[ing] [your] steps by [His] word” (Psalm 119: 133).
I will be their God, and they will be my people. Once again – it is all about God. He declares Himself to be our God, and He claims us as His people. We have no merits of our own by which to claim Him or be called His people. It is God’s grace working hand in hand with God’s love that makes us accepted.
I will forgive their sins and I will no longer remember their wrongs. It is quite evident, is it not? Who alone can forgive and forget like God? Try as we may to forgive, the memories of the wrong others have done to us keep coming back. Not so with God. His being God makes it possible to both forgive us and forget all the wrong we confess and turn over to Him. If the King keeps writing, I am sure that by His grace we will gain the victory.
All that we need – not to be “hindered” in our Christian walk is to be found in Jesus. This covenant that God established with the children of Israel (both Israelites by birth, and Israelites by faith), has been established upon grace. That means that the only thing we can do is accept the terms by faith.
What will be the result? None of them will have to teach a neighbor to know the Lord, because all will know me, from the least to the greatest. Have you heard the poem I would rather see a sermon than hear one any day? Well that poem is just Jesus’ words amplified and written with rhyme and metric. “And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my disciples” (John 13: 34, 35, GNT).
When the writing is completed no preaching will be needed; for they will know the Lord by our love! Therefore my prayer is: Write on King Jesus!