A New Heart, A New Covenant | Jeremiah 31 & Luke 22 | Maundy Thursday

Watch the Sermon: “A New Heart, A New Covenant”

In this Maundy Thursday meditation, Pastor Mark Groen walks through Jeremiah 31:31–34 and Luke 22:7–20, showing how the promised new covenant was fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ. As we remember the Last Supper and prepare our hearts to receive the Lord’s Supper, we are reminded that the law has been written on our hearts, our sins have been forgiven, and the covenant has been sealed in His blood. Come in remembrance, rest, and joy—Christ has done it all.

📖 Click to Show the Transcript of this Sermon

We have passwords for most everything these days, and we are long past the day where you should use the word password as your password. You're still doing that. Go home after the surface and reset it. Okay? If you sign up for anything now, you will not only be prompted to create a password, but it is also accompanied by several requirements for this password you're creating. Right? There's a minimum character requirement. You need to have a symbol, a number, and a capital letter. And if you use the password archive feature of your favorite web browers browser, you may also be regularly reminded that you have several Passovers that are identical, that you've reused them, and they will tell you that it isn't good to use the same one over and over.

Few years ago, I decided to pay for a service that helps you keep your passwords straight and secure, and it also helped me to generate passwords. So the passwords that this service randomly generates for you to fulfill all those qualifications that I just mentioned, they are basically impossible to memorize. They have more than 12 characters. They have all these symbols. Memorizing one of those passwords would be tough. Keeping all of them for, you know, 50 plus services and accounts that you have these days is way beyond the capacity of my 50 year old brain. I can't do it. That's what the software is for, to keep all these things safe and secure.

Well, to get into this archive, I had to create a special password. It had to be one that I would know. It was the key to all of the other passwords. Well, this had to be very strong. It had to be something I would know. Sure. I'm going to keep it somewhere, but I don't wanna have to look it up every time I wanna access the other 50. Right? It had to be something that I knew, something that I cared about. So when I made this password, I knew that it had to be something that meant something to me. It had to be made up of something that was personal, something memorable because I didn't want to have to look it up several times a week and on the the day you pay your bills, several times just that day. Right? Again, it had to be something personal, something deep down, something that meant something to me.

What a world where we're always trying to remember the right password. God promises something far greater than just something that means something to us that we can remember. Right? Jeremiah, we read of a day when his truth won't need to be looked up. It won't need to be retrieved. We're told that it will live inside his people. It'll be etched on their hearts, not stored in the cloud somewhere, not locked away in a vault, not scribbled on a sticky note on the side of your comp well, computer monitors really don't have sides anymore, do they? On the front of your computer monitor, it would it will be internalized. It will be known. It will be loved. That's the promise of the new covenant. It's not about information that we're we're trying to hang on to. It's about transformation. A transformation that God works within us.

And tonight, we're going to look at that promise as Jeremiah, and then we're gonna look at how Jesus showed us what this all means on the night that he was betrayed. It was all pointing to a new covenant that gave his people new hearts, and he gave us a new meal to remember this covenant.

So as we come to Jeremiah chapter 31, he speaks of a coming day where there'll be this new covenant, a covenant that was was made with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, a covenant that he made with our fathers. This is a covenant of the past, and there's gonna be a new one. But first, we need to consider this old covenant. Now the old testament had several covenants, and all of them are very memorable. There was the covenant with Noah accompanied by the sign of the rainbow, a promise that God would never again flood the whole earth. And we also know of the covenant with Abraham, that he will multiply his offspring and he would give them the promised land. And we're also very familiar with the covenant with David, the covenant that was promised that there would always be one of his offspring on the throne, and that would ultimately be the Messiah. But the covenant that's being spoken of here in Jeremiah is a specific covenant. It's the covenant made at Sinai.

That's where god gave them the law, not just the 10 commandments. When we hear the word law, we often think of the 10 commandments, but it was the whole law that was given there. The whole ritual law that included the whole sacrificial system. God established this covenant with the people, and they agreed to it. We read that they say, all these things we will do. This is was the covenant that was made with them when they came out of Egypt. The covenant made before they were going into the promised land. And this covenant, it's important to understand that the that one of the chief points of this was to set them apart from their pagan neighbor neighbors and the way they worshiped. The pagans in the land were not set apart by God. Their worship was to be different than their worship to their pagan gods. They were the people that God had chosen. They were to be different, not only when it came to morality, but to worship. Their worship was to look different from the people that surrounded them.

But as Jeremiah makes very clear here, they didn't keep this covenant. They broke it. They followed after the foreign gods, and they've decided to forsake the commands of a holy god. And notice the way it is described by god here. Even though I was their husband, they broke the covenant. There is that imagery that we see all over the Old Testament, that god is the husband of Israel and his people are their bride. And even when they are unfaithful to him, he is faithful to them, and he calls them to return to him continually. He is the faithful husband. They are the unfaithful bride.

But our passage for this evening isn't just calling out their failure. Isn't it just reminding them that they have broken the covenant? God isn't saying here that that he's been the face faithful husband this whole time, and this is the last straw. I can't take anymore. I'm done with you, Israel. I'm not gonna keep the promise to bring the Messiah through you. I am over this all. Nope. That's not what's being said. Because God doesn't break his promises. He is faithful. God does not abandon his people.

And instead, here we find that God makes a promise to do something about the problem altogether. There's a day on the horizon when the covenant won't just be written down on tablets of stone or on scrolls. There's going to be a covenant that will be written on the hearts of the people. This new covenant. It's not just a reboot of the old, and it isn't putting the old covenant on pause for a little while. This is a renewal. It isn't a new or better list of rules. It is God giving his people new hearts.

In the old covenant, the law was good. It showed the people how to be holy, but they did not keep the law. The people continually fell into the sin of idolatry. They were forsaking the God who had rescued them. They had the law. They knew it, but they didn't keep it. The law could have brought them freedom, but instead, the law continually showed that the people were in bondage to sin. They had been freed from slavery in Egypt, but they were still slaves, slaves to sin. And what the law did was it exposed the condition of the fallen human heart. The law was given clearly, and they were promised reward if they kept the law, but they never did. They didn't love the lord their god with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength, and they didn't love their neighbor as himself. They did not keep the law of God. But here, we see that a new covenant is coming where that law would be written on their hearts.

God was going to do something new in the people, and it would go deep down into them. They would know his grace, not as something external, not as something abstract, but as something that was planted deeply in them. Like that master password that you never forget. Not because you worked hard to memorize it, but because it's personal, because you understand it. It's a part of you. It means everything to you because it changes who you are at the deepest level, this grace of God. And so you know it more deeply than anything else. And Jeremiah shows us that what this new covenant will accomplish is new hearts for God's people.

But it isn't until the night where Jesus was betrayed that we see a glimpse of how this will be fulfilled, how Jesus foreshadows on Thursday what is happening Friday. That night, Jesus took bread and wine, and he instituted a meal, the meal of the new covenant, a visible picture of the sacrificial love by which God rescues his people. And we know the story very well. This is a significant part of the story of redemption, and it's something that we commemorate regularly.

Well, in the story of Jesus, he goes to Jerusalem, and he has this Passover with his disciples. And the Passover was a meal that was an important part of the old covenant. They were remembering that God had rescued their people from slavery in Egypt in a miraculous way. But, ultimately, the Passover was pointing to something greater. It was their greatest celebration, but it was pointing to something greater. The blood of the lamb that was put on the doors of the Israelites was a type and a shadow of the lamb of God who had shed his blood for his people. And little did the disciples know that evening with Jesus that they were eating the meal of the Passover with the one that it was pointing to all along, the lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world.

And at that table, Jesus was instituting something new, a new meal that would point to his saving work that was a mere few hours away. And he took bread, he gave thanks, and he broke it. And he said, this is my body given for you. And then he poured out the cup and said that it was the new covenant in my blood. And it was typical that covenants were established with blood. And this wasn't some ghoulish thing. Right? The reason covenants were made with blood is it was establishing the severity of the oath that was being made. This was serious. Blood meant death. It meant finality. It was saying that this agreement, this covenant is being established and it's unbreakable.

It was establishing that the ultimate price was being paid. And the people had agreed to the terms of the old covenant, but they had failed time and time and time again. But now Jesus is establishing that new covenant in his blood. His blood was shed. He was going to die. He would accomplish the work of the new covenant, and we know what that work is. His body is battered, and he shed his blood to bear the wrath of God for our sins. All of humanity has failed to keep God's law. We have not loved God. We have not loved our neighbor. We break his commands, but Jesus came and he obeyed the law on our behalf and to suffer and die to take our punishment. His blood was shed that he might die in our place.

In the new covenant, it's not the blood of animals. It is his blood shed for us, and we receive the gift of his perfect righteousness because of this. We are holy. We are set apart before God, not because we have kept the law, but because the perfect righteousness of Jesus is credited to us by grace through faith. And when we receive this gift from God, he gives us a new heart, A heart that is no longer dead in sin, but is now alive to Christ. And the promise spoken of by the prophet Jeremiah has come to pass because of the work of Jesus for his covenant people.

And so what do we do with this great truth tonight that we are the new covenant people of God? Well, first, we hear and we obey the words of Jesus that tell us to do this in remembrance of him. But we have to understand that this remembrance that we do tonight isn't just us marking a historical event that took place on a Thursday evening nearly two thousand years ago. When we come in remembrance, we're not just remembering that one story on Thursday night or on Friday or what's gonna happen on Sunday. We're remembering the whole of the story of redemption, the whole work of God to bring us to himself. When we come to the table, it is it is us remembering that we are incapable of perfectly keeping the law on our own. And so God the Son took on our flesh and was bruised and beaten, suffered and died because he loves us, because he wanted to bring us into covenant with him.

And this meal shows us God's desire to be in communion with us. Because in the Lord's supper, remember, we're not just observers of the covenant. We're not viewing it from afar. We are participants. We ourselves taste and see that the Lord is good. We receive the elements. In the old covenant, it was just the priest in the temple who who witnessed the sacrifice and made the offerings. Just them. The people were outside. They just smelled the stink of death and the sound of bleeding animals. They were not participants in the covenant. But we are participants when we taste and see that the lord is good. When we take those elements upon our lips, we are apart. That's why it's called communion. We're communing together. Not because of anything we've done, but because we are united to Christ.

Second, come to the table resting in the work of Jesus for you. The old covenant was a covenant of works. The people said, all these things we will do. The covenant was on them. They made the agreement. But just as I said, the new covenant is about what Jesus has done. And so come to the table and realize that you're being served. Christ fulfilled the law. His body was broken. His blood was shed. You have a new heart. Come to this table and rest in the news. Be served. This this imagery, this this reminder of God's mercy and grace, the work of Jesus accomplished for you.

And finally, tonight as we come to the table, rejoice. What you will receive this evening is more than just a picture. Right? It's not just an image on the table. It is a foretaste of the feast that is to come. Yes. It's small. It is very little. I'm when I was a kid, I wondered why they called it a meal, but it's a foretaste of the feast to come. And so as you take the elements on your lips this evening, be reminded that one day, we will feast in the house of Zion. We will feast at the marriage supper of the lamb when his kingdom has fully come. Rejoice in that salvation. Taste and see that the lord is good and that he has done everything to bring you to himself.

So come this evening in remembrance, in communion, and in hope, knowing that because you are in Christ, you belong to him, the lamb of God who has taken away the sin of your the world, and he has taken away your sin. He has given you a new heart all because we are the covenant people of God. This new cover that has been sealed by his blood. Amen.

Let us pray. Almighty and everlasting god, we are blessed to be your people. You have brought us to yourself. You came and you suffered and died. You rose again and you ascended to the right hand of the father, And we have been united to you, and so we have union with one another as well. So we pray that we would be reminded of this beautiful new covenant, this covenant that shows us your grace, this covenant that is written on our hearts. We pray that the good news of the gospel would spring up within us. There would be something that would impact us, that would change us to the deepest core of our being, that we might be your witnesses, that we would rejoice in all that you have done for us. So we pray that we would come to the table this evening, fed, refreshed, and nourished to be your people and a witness to the world. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.

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