Whiteboard: On Their Hearts

From a favorite old devotion book of mine:

"The heart would make a lousy bulletin board. It is, after all, a muscle, an organ in our bodies, not something to write on like paper. When Jeremiah tells us to write on our hearts, we know what he means – not the cardiac muscle itself but something else, though we can’t exactly locate it. But oh, to take this promise literally…what it could mean! That the word of God – God’s promises and commandments – be written literally on the walls of our hearts. And, as our hearts pump blood, the word is taken with that blood to every sinew, ever cell, every corpuscle, every nerve, every marrow. That our very bodies might be so infused with the word of God that to say “Know the Lord” would sound as silly as telling someone to breathe! Imagine that!"

This Sunday we continue our Advent Sermon Series on the Covenant Promises of God by turning our attention to the prophet Jeremiah -- to the promise of a new covenant that will be written on the very fabric of our being.

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Jeremiah 31:31-34 A New Covenant

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 

It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says 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. 

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.