Verse 22, for it is written that
Abraham had two sons, one by a bondmaid, the other by a free
woman. But he who was of, that of relates
to origin, he who was of the bondwoman was born after the
flesh. But he of the free woman was
by promise. which things are an allegory,
for these are two covenants, the one from Mount Sinai which
gendereth to bondage, which gives birth or bears to bondage. which is Hagar. This Hagar is
Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and
is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above
is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written,
Rejoice thou barren that bearest not, and break forth, and cry
thou that travailest not. For the desolate has many more
children than she which hath a husband. And now we, brethren,
as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But as then, he that
was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit,
even so it is now. Nevertheless, what saith the
scripture, cast out the bondwoman with her son, for the son of
the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman.
So then brethren, we are not children of the born woman, but
of the free. We have laid out before us throughout
the scriptures two families of humanity. laid out before us in Galatians
with particular emphasis this. Paul is writing to this church
that heard the Gospel, responded to the Gospel, and then some
Jewish people from Jerusalem came along to tell the believers
that it's all very well to trust Christ. But you must do something
else. There are a few little things
that you can add to simple faith and simple trust in the Lord
Jesus Christ. You can add circumcision. You
can add law keeping. You can add Sabbath days. You can add food. dietary regulations, you can
add dress regulations, you can add all sorts of things. And
by adding to these things in some measure, in some way, you
can enhance and polish the work of the Lord Jesus and make it
more acceptable. See Paul's writing, knowing full
well that in response to the Gospel there is a division amongst
humanity, and in response to the Gospel there is a division
amongst the humanity that's gathered in the Church. Both of these
men that we hear of here, both these women, they were both wives
in a sense of Abraham, and the sons were both children of Abraham. There are two families of humanity,
there are two origins of those families. There are two lives
in those families, lives of activities, lives of communion, lives of
desires. There are two lives between those
families and there are two destinies. that are laid out before us.
So these are weighty matters. As John says, as the Lord Jesus
said, there was a division among the people because of him. There will be a division among
the people because of him. There are two religions in this
world. There are just two. If you boil it all down and simplify
it and distill it, you just find there are two religions in this
world. There's the religion of Abel
and the religion of Cain. There is the faith religion of
Moses and there is the religion of Korah and others. There is
the God declared by Moses and Aaron and there is the deceptive
deceitfulness of Balaam. There are in this world those
who cling to the shadows and there are those who live in and
in relationship with the reality. There are those for whom Christ
is all and in all. Christ is our life and there
are those for whom Christ is okay and he's helpful, but we
must do something of our own to enhance it. There are two
ministers, aren't there? There are the ministers of Christ. There are those who are really
his servants, and there are those who masquerade as angels of righteousness. Satan has his ministers in this
world. There are two different thirsts,
aren't there? There is a thirst for Christ
and a thirst for communion with Him. And there is a thirst for
self and the things of this world. There is in Him a food that satisfies
and we are not satisfied apart from Him and we are not satisfied
outside of His presence and outside of His promises being life to
us. And there is all this food in
this world, isn't there? There are two different sorts
of fruit in this world. I love what the Lord Jesus says
in John 7. He says, He that believeth on
me. Just believe. If you go away
from here with a simple God-given heartfelt faith in the Lord Jesus,
you'll go home skipping like a calf let loose from the storm. He that believeth in me, as the
scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living
waters. I love how the blessings of God
are plural so often. out of his belly shall flow rivers
of living waters." There is, in the religion of Christ, as
we've read in these verses here, there is a liberty, there is
a freedom, and there is life, and there is a religion. A religion
which is common in this world, which engenders to bondage, which
is legalism and the ends there are, are the ways of death. There is a way, says Proverbs,
twice. There is a way that seems right
to a man. There is a way that seems right
to a religious man. And the ends there are. ends thereof are the ways of
death." Here we have in Galatians 4 this
extraordinary picture that is just so profound and so deep and so gloriously mysterious
and less uncovered by the Holy Spirit, but speaks so evocatively
of what was going on in the early church and it speaks powerfully
and wonderfully and faithfully about what is going on in this
world around us. And unless we can say As Paul
said, this is the Jerusalem which is now, unless we are led by
God the Holy Spirit through the Word of His becoming life to
us, to see that there is still, in a sense, a Jerusalem now. That Jerusalem was destroyed,
but the Jerusalem he's speaking about is the Jerusalem and the
religion of the Jerusalem, isn't it? In fact, it's interesting,
as you read the Gospels, and particularly John's Gospel, he
continually refers to the festivals of the Jews, and he says it's
the Jews' Passover. And the Jews, this, doesn't say
it was God. They went, as Cain and Abel did,
they went to church. They both went to a church service. They both heard the Gospel declared
from Adam and Eve." It's really simple, isn't it? One brings,
Cain brings the works at his hand. and Abel brings the Lord
Jesus Christ. God has forever been pleased
with His Son. He's extraordinarily pleased
with His Son. He's marvelously and wondrously
and righteously and justly and in a holy way continually delighting
in the work of his dear and precious son. We have eternity laid out before
us and we have in the response of these people at this time
in their lives, we have the response of those who are heaven born
children and we have the response of those who are, as the Lord
Jesus called the Pharisees, children of the devil. They are weighty
things. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father,
we pray that you might be merciful and gracious to us today, that
you might bring great glory to your holy name, our Father, by
causing your Son to be lifted up. And may you, by your grace,
Heavenly Father, cause us to be people who hear your word. that You would give us spiritual
ears to hear and spiritual eyes to see, and that You would take
Your Word, Your Word which You wrote by the hand of Your servant
Paul, and You would cause it, Heavenly Father, to be a living
Word perfectly and wondrously suited and fitted for our circumstances
in this world today. Heavenly Father, we are continually
made by your grace to be aware of the depth of our frailty and
our weakness, and how much we are wanderers in a wilderness. And we pray, Heavenly Father,
that you would cause us to come up, as the shulmite did in Song
of Solomon, to come up out of the wilderness, leaning on her
beloved. Help us to lean hard, our Father,
to find ourselves at rest in Him. And we pray, Heavenly Father,
for the message of the Gospel to continue to go out with clarity
as You have promised. Use us, Heavenly Father, for
Your glory. For we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. We looked at some of this allegory
last week, and I just want to deal with a little bit more of
it today and look more particularly at Hagar and look more particularly
at what it means for these two religions to be in this world. And that division, that division
amongst humanity. And in the Galatian Church there
would have been a division in the Galatian Church. and the
division would have been reflective of where God was at work in the
hearts of those people. And we must remember, we must
continue to remember, that the salvation of souls is an extraordinary
divine mystery. It's a mystery revealed But the
wonderful thing is that the person, the man who wrote these words
for us, penned these words that we have before us, was one of
these Judaizers in some sense. He was a legalist. The difference
between Paul and the Judaizers was that the Judaizers put on
a cloak of the Lord Jesus over the top of their pharisaical
attitudes. Paul writes with passion because
he knows what it's like to be entrapped in work's religion. We are led to see, aren't we,
that there are two children born, one father, two mothers. The one, verse 23, that was of
the bondwoman, from the bondwoman, was born after the flesh, but
of the free woman, he of the free woman was by promise." And
we read of those promises last week, and we looked at the way
God led Abraham and Sarah to a place where they had no ability
in themselves whatsoever, that every fruit that was going to
come into their lives in response to the promise of God was going
to come by divine miraculous activity. And we have in Hagar
and Ishmael, we have these two covenant children of God, Abraham
and Sarah. We have them acting as religion
does today, and religion has always done. It says, it's all
very well for God to have done what He's done. It's good for
God to make these promises and it's good for God to reveal Himself
in the way He did. It's good for God to show us
the depths of His judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, for example.
But, because He's delayed, we must do our bit. We've got to remember, this activity
in the production of Ishmael is the activity of two of the
saints of God. I don't know about you brothers
and sisters, I've produced bucket loads of Ishmaels, have you?
Have you? Again and again and again. Ishmael represents that covenant
of works. It represents the covenant of
works that was made with Adam. And it's a simple, simple declaration
to Adam, isn't it? There is just one tree in that
garden, that one tree represents God and His sovereignty, God
and His rulership over all things. And Adam has a simple way, isn't
he? It's do this and live. Religion. Religion in this world,
and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what colour it is and
what form it has, is saying exactly the same thing again and again. Buddhism is saying, do this and
live. Islam is saying, do this and
live. Anglicanism is saying, do this and live. The Baptist
religions of this world are saying, do this and live. Pentecostalism,
just keep naming them. Add the isms to them all. normalism,
they all do this and live. God only deals with people on
the basis of covenants. There is that covenant of works,
that covenant of the law, and there is the covenant of grace. And we spoke last week about
Christ in the covenant of grace. It's the covenant of peace, it's
the covenant of love, it's the everlasting covenant. Salvation,
salvation is always and only and will always be only in the
covenant of grace. You'll be saved if you are saved
by God doing something supernatural. God doing something supernatural. You can see it there, look down
in Galatians 4.26. But the Jerusalem, the mother
of us all, the Jerusalem which is a representation of the entire
family of God. The city of peace. The Jerusalem which is above.
The Jerusalem which is above. It comes from above, doesn't it?
The Lord Jesus came from above and came with his work on the
earth and he went back to heaven. All of God's children are born
from above. That's what it means to be born
again in John 3. It's literally to be born from above, a supernatural
birth from above. Can you trace the origins of
your relationship with God now to something supernatural? is your freedom is free. This Jerusalem which
is above is free. Have you been brought to a place
of rest and freedom? Freedom is a simple expression,
isn't it? I own nothing. I own nothing. And I'm able to
do what I want. I owe nothing to God. And God,
by His grace, grants us to have our desires, because the desires
of God's people are tied up in relationship with Him. That's
what Paul said, isn't he? He summarised Christian life
in Philippians, isn't it? He just wanted to know Him. that
I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship
of His sufferings being made conformable unto His death, if
by any means I might attain to the resurrection of the dead."
And he acknowledged that it hadn't all happened as he was like,
not as though it had already attained. either or already perfect,
but I follow after, that I may apprehend that for which I am
apprehended of Christ Jesus, that ye might know him, ye might
know him. He says in Philippians 3, we
are the circumcision. We are the true Jews. We are the ones who are really
circumcised. Because true circumcision is
not a physical activity. True circumcision is a circumcision
of the heart. And the word circumcision means
to cut around, which is what the process is when they do it
to young boys. They cut around. It's a circumcision
of the heart. God's children have a heart transplant,
don't they? They have a new life, a new life
given them. We read those verses in Ezekiel
36. We read them often because they
are worthy of being read often, because they are so wonderfully,
wonderfully descriptive of what Paul is talking about in terms
of the covenant of grace. And God, you can go and read
the chapter at your leisure when you go home, but God does all
that he does for his holy name's sake. Salvation is the glory
of God first and foremost. God must do something with God
to save your souls. He says, I will sanctify my great
name. that's been profaned. It's been
profaned why and who by? It's been profaned by religious
people. It's been profaned by professing
Christian people. For this God says, He says, I'll
be sanctified in you before their eyes, and then verse 24 of Ezekiel
36, for I will take you from among the heathen. Just look
for the ifs and the buts and the maybes in these verses. For
I will take you from among the heathen, I'll gather you out
of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will
sprinkle clean water on you, John Newell. And I, and you shall
be clean." Cole talked about what it is to be clean. It is
to be perfectly, perfectly clean in God's sight. It's to be justified,
cleansed perfectly. You shall be cleaned from all
your filthiness and from all your idols. Will I cleanse you? As we've looked at in Galatians,
we've seen that Paul, as he does in Romans 3, he equates idolatry and legalism, they are exactly
the same. Anyone who is relying on anything
that they do to make themselves right with God is exactly the
same as the worst idolater you can imagine in this world. We
need to be cleansed from our idols. I will cleanse you, verse
26, a new heart Also will I give you and a new
spirit will I put within you. These are the promises of God.
And cause you to walk in my statutes. And you shall keep my judgments
and do them. And you shall dwell in the land
that I gave to your fathers. And you shall be my people. And I will be your God. I will also save you from all
your uncleannesses, and I will call for the corn, and will increase
it, and will lay no famine upon you. I will multiply the fruit
of the tree and increase, and the increase of the field, that
you shall receive no more reproach of famine among the heathen."
This is the other work of God in the hearts of His people,
and this is what Paul has brought in the Gospel to
these people the conviction of sin, isn't it? Then you shall
remember, you see, after God has done His work. See, it must be a supernatural
activity of God even to reveal what we really are. Then you
shall remember your own evil ways. You won't blame anyone
else for them. You will take full responsibility
for your own evil ways and your doing which were not good and
shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquity and
for your abominations. The new birth gives a new heart. The heart of stone is removed
and a heart of flesh is brought into the lives of God's people.
And those of the Galatians who responded As Paul wrote with
tears and anguish in his heart to these people, there were those
who were cut to the heart, no doubt, and responded and were
so thankful, as Peter was to Paul, for being led by God to
rescue them yet again from the idolatry that they had been led
into. And there are those that continued in the hardness of
their heart and in their man-centered, man-based, satanic religion,
and they called it Christianity. In fact, these days, the closest
you can get to it is called Reformed. It's not a nice word. Calvinistic
reformed, conservative Calvinistic reformed. This is about as close
as you can get to the Pharisaical Judaizing religion that Paul
is referring to here. In the Covenant of Grace, The covenant of grace is the
covenant that was made between God the Father and God the Son. And in that covenant of grace,
that better covenant, as Hebrews 7.22 says, Jesus was made the surety of
a better testament, a better covenant. And it goes on to talk
about how he remains a priesthood forever. He is an unchangeable
priesthood. The law made nothing perfect. but he has this remarkable high
priestly ministry. He goes into the throne room
of God with his own blood for our sins and he pleads his own
work and his own righteousness and his own sin bearing death
and his children are free. He's the surety, he was made
the surety of a better covenant, a covenant of grace and that
covenant of peace. There is in this world and in
this world's religion, and I pray that God would cause us to see
it, it's a hard thing to encounter. that we would see, by the grace
of God, we would see the hand of the bondmaid and we would
be led by God to see what works religion dressed up in the most
wonderful finery that Satan can put upon it, that we would see
what it was like and that God would rescue us. See, one's the
son of a bondmaid, one's the son of a free woman. One, the
son of the free woman is born as a result of promise. Their
origin is from promise. Their origin is from a covenant
that God has made. The son of the bondmaid, she
came from Egypt. Hagar means stranger. She was a stranger to the family
of Abraham. She was a stranger to that family
of covenant promise. She was born, Ishmael was born
after the flesh. He was born first, but he was
born of the fleshly desires. As I said earlier, it seemed
as if God was delayed and God somehow couldn't keep His promise. You think of all the religious
activity that all of us have been involved in, in some way
or another. At the heart of it so often is that we're going
to actually make this thing happen. If we don't make this thing happen,
if we don't make these people to look like they're Christians,
if we don't make these people to be evangelists, if we don't
make these people to give, if we don't make these people to
do all these things, then God and His purposes will not come
to pass. His promise needs the help of
man for it to be fulfilled. I get tired of reading religious
tracts and other things and reading the websites of churches, but
I'm sort of led there in various ways and again and again and
again. You find them in their tracts saying the same thing,
isn't it? God has laid out laid out as this great gift. God the
Father has done all He can do in loving you, and God the Son
has done all He can do in dying on the cross for you, and God
the Holy Spirit has done all He can do in trying to get you
to do something, to try and get you to believe. And now it is
up to you. Be up and doing. That's what
Billy Graham did, didn't he? Get up and come to the front.
Pray the sinner's prayer. Pray the sinner's prayer and
then you assure yourself that you are from there on in a child
of God. In fact when I first went to
church they'd get you to actually write in your Bibles John 3.16
and you had to leave out the gap there and you had to put
your name in it and then you had to put the date beside it
so you continually reminded yourself that when you made your decision
You walked the aisle. You did something. You went down
to the front. This one fellow said to us some
years ago, don't you dare take my decision away from me. He
said, if I didn't go down to the front, I would never have
been saved. I remember John Chapman saying
that if he hadn't made his decision, He'd made his decision five minutes
later and God had come. He wouldn't have been saved.
The difference in salvation is the decision that he makes. We
mustn't think that that religion is far from us. Paul is talking
in the very present tense, isn't he? The Jerusalem which is now.
Now is and is in bondage with her children. There are two religions,
isn't it? For this, verse 25, is Mount
Sinai in Arabia, and it genders the bondage. Mount Sinai in Arabia
is the covenant of works, that law that God gave, that represents
in a sense Hagar. She came in afterwards, but she
did a work in the lives of God's people. She was there for a purpose. She was there to bring conviction
of sin. She was there used of God to
reveal. But Mount Sinai is in Arabia. Mount Sinai is outside of the
land of promise. Moses wasn't allowed to bring
the people into the land of promise. It was Joshua our Jesus who brought
the people into the land of promise. And it gendereth to bondage,
it gives birth to bondage. They're created in bondage and
they live in bondage and they want to have other people in
bondage with them. The Jerusalem which now is and
continues to be is in bondage with all of her children. But the Jerusalem which is above
is the mother of us all. There's a verse that I go to
often that I think the Apostle Paul would want us to think about
again and again. He uses an expression in Hebrews
13, 13. He says, let us go. Let us go therefore outside the
camp. Go unto him without the camp
bearing his reproach. So what was the camp? What was
the camp in the days of Paul. The camp had the most extraordinary
city, didn't it? Jerusalem was a magnificent city.
It had the most amazing religious structure. It had that temple
that Herod had been working on for 42 years, glorious, one of
the seven wonders of the ancient world. It had all of that religious
activity, didn't it? It had all of that religion and
it had religion for anyone's taste. Just like there is Christianity
for everyone's taste in this world today. There is the Pharisaical
religion of legalism and rules and do's and don'ts and go back
to the law and go back and watch and do this and Sabbath keeping
and do, do, do, do, do. There is In Jerusalem, in Paul's
day, there is the religion of the Sadducees. This is liberalism,
isn't it? They mixed Greek philosophy with
their Christianity. See, they were all Christians.
If you'd asked these people whether they believed in God and whether
they were looking forward to the Messiah coming, every single
Jew would have put his hand up, I can't wait for the day. They
would have been excited and they would have known so much about
them. And there were those, weren't they, the Christians, whose interests
were in the things of worldly power and influence. They were
called the Herodians. They got their name from that
puppet king, Herod. There were also just all sorts
of myriad other groups, weren't there? There were the Zealots,
and there were the Mystics, who thought that the best way they
can make themselves more holy is to separate themselves from
this nasty, wicked, evil world and go into little communities
and spend their time in caves, they didn't realise that the
nastiest wicked thing in the world was something that was
there inside of them. It wasn't out there that the
problem was, it was in there. But they were all so-called believers,
weren't they? They were all so-called Christians
in their day. And as you read the The writings
of Josephus in 70 AD when God was destroying that place, they
all thought that the safest place on the planet earth, the safest
place was inside the walls of Jerusalem and as close to the
temple as you can get. But you put them all together
and they squabbled and fought. did the most appalling things
to each other until the Romans came, and when the Romans came
they all joined forces together. It's a shocking, shocking story
to read it, but how typical. But all of these religions, all
of these various names of that Jerusalem which is now, and it's
here in this world alive and well today, all of them did one
thing. All of them did one thing in
common. As soon as the Lord Jesus revealed Himself to be God, as
soon as the Lord Jesus revealed the covenant of grace and not
the covenant of works, as soon as He was revealed, it was Him
that they all joined hands over, wasn't it? They all joined hands
in enmity against the Lord Jesus. They were in bondage. to sin,
they are in bondage to the law, they are in bondage to death
and they are in bondage to Satan. That is the Jerusalem which is
now, that is the Jerusalem which is in this world. I think one
of the most evocative, I won't be long, one of the most evocative
verses in all the scriptures to describe the religion of man
and the religion of God in the life of His people. What it is
to be a child of God and what it is to be joined with the world's
religion is in Isaiah chapter 50. I'd like you to turn there
for a second because it's just so evocative. It's evocative
of the life of a believer in this world. It's evocative and
pictures so beautifully the fact that they are but a few. They are but a few amongst the
many. Verse 10, Isaiah 51. Who is among you that feareth
the Lord? There are a multitude out there,
but who is there among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth
the voice of his servant, and that walketh in darkness and
has no light." So much of our journey in this world, brothers
and sisters, so much of my journey is so pictured in this. To walk
in darkness, to walk in this sort of darkness is to be without
the evident light that had been so clearly a part of your experience. I don't know about you, there
are times when God reveals Himself in such extraordinary ways and
in such extraordinary closeness that you live basking in His
presence and in His glory. And there are times in my life,
you can speak for yourselves, where it seems as if the heavens
are as brass and that you are find yourself very much in a
wilderness world, and the light seems to have dimmed. You fear
the Lord, you obey the voice of His servant, You fear Him
and you believe Him and you trust Him and then what does He say?
What does God say to him? Let him trust in the name of
the Lord and stay upon his God. Just let him trust in the name
of his Lord. It may not seem as if his promises
are being fulfilled. that His promises are being fulfilled,
because His eternal covenant is ordered and secure in every
detail. Just rest on Him. Just rest and
wait. Verse 11, and I think this is
such an amazing picture of the religion of man, the religion
of Satan, such a picture of so much of what passes for Christianity
in this world. Behold all ye, that kindle a
fire. There are multitudes and you
can picture them. Kindle a fire that can pass yourself
about with sparks. You kindle a fire, you're all
sitting around a fire and you throw on a stick and you get
some sparks and some warmth from it and they throw on a stick
and they get some sparks and some warmth from it. It's a graphic picture, isn't
it, of religious activity, why it is so embracing, why the religion
of man and the religion of Satan is always more dominating in
terms of numbers and so-called political power and other things
in this world. There are just so many that can
pass yourselves about with fire and you walk in the light of
your fire. And in the sparks that you have
kindled, you walk in that light. You throw your sticks on and
you find your joy and your peace in your doing and your doing
and doing and the sparks go up and we're all there warming ourselves
together. The sparks that you have kindled,
this shall you have of mine hand. You shall lie down in sorrow. The few, the few who are the
children of God, the free woman. Let him trust in the name of
the Lord and stay upon his God. If the Son makes you free, you
are free indeed. As Acts 13.39 says, you are justified
from all things which you could not be justified by the law of
Moses. Both Ishmael and Isaac, as I
said earlier, were children of Abraham. Both of them were circumcised. the natural religion of Satan
in the hearts of men. It resonates with us, doesn't
it? It resonates with our natural thinking. It resonates with our
natural sense of right and wrong. It resonates with our natural
sense of reward and punishment. There are two people in religion,
Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael, born after the flesh,
he trusts in his will and his works, he trusts in his decision,
he trusts in his place and his race. All of Adam's children
are born into that world as idolaters. Only the new birth, only the
new birth as the covenant of promise is fulfilled in the lives
of people takes them out of that idolatry, takes them out of that
death, takes them out of that pit and puts them in a place
with God. The question this verse has raised,
don't they? It would have raised in the hearts
of the Galatians. Who is your mother? Who is your
mother? Is Sarah your mother or Hagar
your mother? If Hagar is your mother, your
salvation, your place with God rests and depends upon something
that you do. It's dependent upon your works,
your worth, your will, your activities. If Sarah is your mother, your
birth is a miracle. Your life from that birth, that
sustained life, is a miracle. It's 100% a miracle of God. It's 100% the work of the Lord
Jesus. Are you just simply resting in
Him, leaning on the Beloved? Are you simply just looking to
what He has promised? In essence, is the Gospel gospel
to you? Is the Gospel good news to you? Is the Gospel, which is the declaration
of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, is it the place where you rest? Is it the place where you find
peace? Is that God as revealed in that
Gospel, that God, that predestinating God, that God who's foreknown
His people from eternity, that God who has justified His people
from eternity, glorified His people from eternity, that God
who rules and reigns over all, is He, is He Gospel to you? Is it good news? Is his character
good news to you? Is it a place of peace and rest
for you? Is it good news to know that
there was a saviour before there was a sinner? Is it good news
to know that in eternity, in this everlasting covenant, ordered
and secure in all details, everything Everything about my life was
fixed. To go back to Hebrews 13. I love
how Paul finishes this great letter of Hebrews. In verse 20 he says, Now the
God of peace, the God of peace that brought again from the dead,
our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood
of the everlasting covenant. He brought him back from the dead through
the blood of the everlasting covenant, a covenant that in
a sense had no beginning, a covenant that has no end. The covenant
that takes the fallen children of Adam, chosen, elect, redeemed,
loved, justified, it takes them into heaven, not having any regard
for their good deeds or any regard for their bad deeds. It's a covenant
of grace. If it's got anything to do with
your works, it's not grace at all. Look what it does. Look
what it does in the lives of God's people. Make you perfect. What a lovely word. Make you
perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that
which is well-pleasing in His sight. We've already said what
is pleasing in His sight, isn't it? His son is pleasing in his
sight. Trusting His Son is honouring
Him, isn't it? Trusting to simply what He says
in His Word is honouring to Him. Working in you. I'm glad it says
that He's working in us. It's not our working to something
that He's doing. And have a look again, as you
did in Ezekiel 36. Look for the ifs and the buts
here, brothers and sisters. See if you can find them. Make
ye perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you
that which is well-pleasing Christ and his people, as Colin told
us, are one We are one with Him in eternity,
one with Him in His incarnation, one with Him in His life, one
with Him in His death, one with Him in His burial, one with Him
in His resurrection, one with Him in His glorification. We
are seated now with Him. Heaven is being with Him. The
new creation is being with Him. with Him and being able to appreciate
Him. Paul again and again throughout
this letter talks about a we and a them. Do you see it there? Verse 26, she's the mother of
us all, all of us believers. 28 All of us believers are brethren,
children of the promise. 31 So then, brethren, we are
not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. May the Lord
make it so in our lives.