Ten Great Truths That Make God's Last Days Message Unique
NUMBER SIX (con'd): The New Covenant is a marvelously simple teaching of Good News.
It is the promise of the Lord Jesus to save you all the way, one hundred percent. That means that your own promises are "like ropes of sand," promises that depend only on you for their fulfillment; and both you and I are notorious for our "broken promises and forfeited pledges" (see Steps to Christ, p. 47).
We have a popular hymn in our book entitled, "O Jesus, I Have Promised to Serve Thee to the End." A sincere clergyman wrote the hymn for his teenage daughters who were to be confirmed in church the next Sunday. He was eminently sincere and did the best he could with the limited knowledge that he had of the gospel of Jesus.
But the dear Lord is too wise to ask us to make promises to Him; for He knows that we cannot keep them. No, He asks us to believe His promises to us!
When we make our vain promises to Him, we may think we are doing something meritorious; to make the promises makes us feel good; we feel like we are doing what the Lord Jesus wants us to do.
But a wise author says that "the knowledge of [our] broken promises and forfeited pledges weakens [our] confidence in [our] own sincerity, and causes [us] feel that God cannot accept [us]" (see same reference above).
To believe the promises that the Lord Jesus makes to us enlightens us immediately to the futility of our own promises; in fact, we cannot truly trust the Lord's promises to us until we renounce all confidence in ourselves.
Jesus is our Savior one hundred percent, which means that we are not our Savior from sin even one percent.
"But aren't we to cooperate with Him in saving us?"
Yes; but we truly cooperate with Him only when we surrender all our confidence in self, and henceforth "rest" only in Him. "Rest in the Lord!" exclaims the Psalmist (37:7). There is life-giving, comforting, quickening truth in that call to us all to "rest in the Lord."
Give up your confidence in self, and place your confidence totally in Him!
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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