Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Ask anyone and they'll tell you they'd rather live under the New Covenant than under the Old. But what does that mean? What practical, day-by-day benefit or difference can it be?
The New Covenant impinges on you directly, personally, individually. It's the promises that the Lord God made to Abraham and his children to give them everything: the whole earth for "an everlasting possession," plus the everlasting life to go along with it, plus the righteousness necessary to inhabit the new earth (2 Peter 3:13). And on top of it all, meanwhile, the happiest life possible here and now while you await the coming of Christ and His new earth.
All seven of God's promises to Abraham are yours (Gen. 12:2, 3). And best of them all, the promise to make you to be a blessing to other people as long as you live and wherever you go ("you shall be a blessing, ... and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed"). Yes, that's promised to you.
It's the full spectrum of the 23rd Psalm placed as a gift directly at your feet, as though it was written especially for you. Henceforth you "shall not want." "No good thing will [the Lord] withhold from [you]." Beyond your wildest dreams, "the Lord will give grace and glory" (Psalm 84:11; read the entire psalm, it's blessed good news).
You were born with a natural tendency to dis-believe all this Good News. At best, you were born a descendant of Abraham and Sarah, both of whom spent the greater part of their lives in disbelief of the New Covenant and in submission to the Old Covenant.
Probably you've spent years walking in the shadows of doubt. And now it's the hardest thing you've ever done to believe all those promises wholeheartedly. (That's the only hard thing about being saved eternally--learning to believe like Abraham did.) But thank God you have a new day; you can choose to believe, and pray with the distraught father of Mark 9, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief" (vs. 24). God will never despise that prayer!
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: August 9, 2004.
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