In the Beginning: Covenant with Noah

Continuing our fall sermon series going through the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistory in Genesis. If you want to turn in your Bible or look on the screen, we're going to read together from Genesis chapter eight verse 20 through nine seventeen.

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man. For the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand, they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is its blood. And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning. From every beast, I will require it and from man. From his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, team on the earth and multiply in it. Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth with you. As many as came out of the ark, for it is of the earth. I will establish my covenant with you that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, this is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations. I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring the clouds over the earth and the bow clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. God said to Noah, this is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth. — Genesis 8:20–9:17

Now, I know when we open up a passage like this and study the Old Testament, that is really challenging for a lot of people. It's challenging to feel like you know what to do with this part of the Bible. And for a lot of people, it feels like this part and the last part really are almost like two separate books that have very little in common. In fact, I know a lot of churches where you only hear on a Sunday morning people preach from the New Testament, and they might do the Old Testament on a Sunday night or a Wednesday night.

Why the Old Testament is Challenging

There are a lot of reasons why the Old Testament is hard for us. First, the Old Testament is written about God's people as a nation. And of course, we're not God's chosen people with God's law as our national law. We're also not people who have prophet, priests, and kings in our churches or in our communities. So it feels like some distance there.

The New Testament is actually written in Greek and in the worldview of the Roman Empire where Greek was the language, which is much closer to our Western world than the Semitic Old Testament.

And finally, a lot of the Old Testament—more of it is story than teaching. More of it is descriptive than prescriptive. The New Testament has a lot of prescriptive: do this, don't do that, this is how to think about these things. And so it's a lot easier to know how to apply something that's prescriptive with God's teaching than it is something that's descriptive like a story. So a lot of people stay away from this or don't know what to do with this.

Understanding the Old Testament Through Covenant

A really helpful grid for understanding the Old Testament and its relationship to Jesus is the idea of covenant. Now covenant theology is one way of looking at the Old Testament, and our church—a reformed church—is in the kind of family tree of the people of the church of God that looks at this as a theme for the way to understand how scripture is held together.

In other words, how this book is telling not two stories—an Old Testament one or New Testament—but one story that's all the way throughout, and it's all connected. This morning, we're gonna talk about the covenant with Noah, and this is the first time the word covenant appears in the Bible in the story of Noah.

There are six covenants in the Old Testament. We've already done the covenant with Adam. Today is the covenant with Noah. And over Advent, we're gonna cover the covenants with Abraham, Moses, David, and finally with Christ. And we're looking at that as a way of understanding the one story that God is telling.

Understanding Covenant

Now, I know when we use the word covenant, it's really confusing to us. It's not a word that we use very often. You might have the only experience you have with this would be your HOA, your homeowners association, and that's not a very positive one. But covenant, as I'm gonna define this here, is a promise in blood by God. A promise in blood.

I know promise is also not one of those words that we use a lot or that is really helpful to us. You think of promise, you could think of advertisers and politicians, both of whom break their promises. But when I say promise in blood, you know what I mean by when I say something is written in blood or signed in blood. It means two things: it's permanent and it's perfect.

I want us to see as we look at this covenant with Noah, how God moves toward his people in a way that is also still permanent and perfect. Remember in seminary, one of my professors quoted the North African bishop Augustine, fourth century. Augustine said:

The old is in the new revealed. The new is in the old concealed.

Let me say that again. The Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed. We understand how they connect. And the New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed. This morning, I want us to take the thread that God's offering us with this covenant of Noah and trace that.

The Covenant with Noah

Let's look at this covenant. The beginning of the covenant with Noah is actually not here in chapter nine, but back in chapter six. God comes to Noah and this is before any instructions on how to build the boat, how to build the ark. He says, I'm gonna make a covenant with you. I'm gonna make a promise in blood with you. That's really important you pay attention to that timing.

It's not as if Noah builds a great ark and God says, "Well, because you did that, now I'm really pleased with you and I'm going to make this promise, this covenant with you." No, this is God moving toward Noah first. This is what we see over and over in the Bible. God makes the first move with sinners. God is gracious toward Noah. He graciously moves to Noah, makes this promise before Noah does anything.

And I just wanna remind you that grace is not a concept that Jesus invented one Saturday afternoon. This is throughout the pages of your Bible. We've already seen this. After Adam and Eve fell, they ate the forbidden fruit. They clothed themselves with fig leaves. God graciously moves toward them and clothes them himself. And then he makes this gracious promise. He speaks to the serpent. He says:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. You shall bruise his heel, but he will crush your head.

God's making a promise even there of his gracious move toward people. And here in chapter eight, we see that just all that is extended, and it's made bigger.

Now last time I preached on the covenant, it was the covenant with Adam. And I said this: in the Old Testament, the background to all of this was this idea of covenant that was very common in their society. Covenant is agreement between two parties. Most commonly between a landowning warlord maybe and the peasants surrounding them. And there'd be a covenant that goes this way: "Hey, peasants, you pay me some of your crops, and I'll provide protection for you." Right? There's an exchange.

And the vestiges of those ancient covenants are still visible today in buildings like this and with people like me on lots of Saturday afternoons—weddings. I'll have a bride and a groom do this in a couple weeks, come down an aisle, and they stand in front of me and they make promises: richer, poorer, sickness and in health. Right? They make these promises. They say I do.

Now, imagine this. Imagine if one of these weddings, the couple comes forward, the bride and the groom, and I say, "Well, one of you can sit down in the front row and I go through the vows with one person." I mean, you'd be like, "What kind of a wedding is this? Only one person is making vows in this wedding?" Well, that's what's going on in this passage. And so like ancient readers or ancient audiences hearing this covenant with Noah would be like, "What is going on here?"

In this passage that we just read, God is coming to the altar and only he is making any promises. No one stands up and says anything. No one takes any "I do's" or "I wills." It's God who's doing that. And you should scratch your head and say, what is going on here? God is making an unconditional promise, just him.

Now why would God need to make a promise like this? A promise in blood to confirm that he's never gonna flood the world again? The answer is there's no reason. You know, when I do weddings, there's always an outcome that we're looking for. The bride and groom come down the aisle, they say lots of words together. What would be the outcome of a wedding? This is audience participation time. Right. They get married. Right. You hope that at the end of this, any wedding I do, at the end, they're married. Not here. There's no reason. There's no outcome we're looking for where God is like, once we all make these promises, then this will happen. No. God alone is making promises. There's no apparent reason for this unless the point of this is not an outcome, but it's that people would trust his character. Unless the point of this is that God's people would know what kind of God he is, what kind of character he has, his orientation toward people. That's what I think is going on here.

And then look, how does he reassure them? A covenant sign. So every time I do a wedding, it always comes after we've done the vows. I always ask this very formal question, which always sounds kind of silly. What sign do you give of these covenant promises today? Right? The bride and groom are supposed to say, a ring, which, like, what do you think I was gonna say, Jeff? A rhinoceros? No, a ring. Right? The ring is a sign that I'm going to keep the vows that I have just made today. That's what we do. We give the sign.

In this passage, it talks also about God's sign of the covenant. Now in all of God's covenants, there is a deeper connection between the sign and the content of the covenant. In the covenant with Adam, the sign of that was the tree of life. We talked about that a couple months ago going through that. This one though is what? The rainbow. Right? The rainbow. Very good. The rainbow.

Now I wanna think with you about the rainbow because in Hebrew, there is no word for rainbow. There's only the word for bow—that's bow and arrow kind of bow. That's the only word that there is in Hebrew. So when God says, you're gonna see the bow in the heavens, he's talking about an instrument of war. And I want you to think about that. That's really important. This is more than God just saying, hey, I got a great gun rack in the back of my truck. I'm gonna put my gun back there. It's not just a convenient holding place for that. For God to hang up his bow is to say I am done using the weapon of wrath against humanity. I am done with my work of destroying, and I'm going to hang this up and you can see it every time it rains. Every time it rains and the sun comes out, you can see the sign that reminds you, covenant people, of what I'm like. I'm hanging up my bow. I'm all done.

But isn't it interesting? And I think this is really fascinating in this passage. God knows already that this whole covenant thing he's doing right now is not gonna work in some ways. Do you notice this? Listen, it's so funny. Listen to what he says in verse 21:

"I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth." — Genesis 8:21

I'm sorry, but that don't make no sense. That makes no sense at all. It's not like God saying, well, I'm going to never again curse the ground because of man because I know that this time, this second chance, he's gonna get it right this time. No. God says, I know that you're gonna continue getting it wrong. I mean, does that strike you as odd in any way? I know that you're gonna get this wrong, so I'm not gonna destroy you. What's going on here?

God is saying, destroying the wicked is not gonna work. This is not gonna work this way. God points us with the bow to a need for a completely different kind of salvation. The clue is in verse 13:

"I've set my bow in the cloud. It shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth." — Genesis 9:13

In other words, God will not accomplish his plan for ridding the world of evil by shooting arrows of wrath at people.

It was Charles Spurgeon who pointed out how you hang up a bow, and what a bow looks like in the sky. Because the business end of the bow, when you hang it up, is pointing upward. And God hanging this up is saying, I'm not going to shoot arrows of wrath at you anymore. The way that wickedness will be dealt with in the world is that the arrows will come at me. I will be pierced. I will be the one who is pierced.

And this is where again we see in this story of Noah that this all points us like a thread through the Old Testament to the greater Noah, Jesus. Noah is described as a righteous man who obeys the Lord and by doing so is able to rescue a remnant as God rinses the world clean. And yet there's still a need for more cleansing. God says that here, it's not working. And it shows us that there's a greater Noah, Jesus, the one who comes who was both God and man who perfectly obeyed his Father, who did everything sinful people couldn't do in order to wash not just the world, but the inside of us to provide a cleansing for us that is two things: perfect and permanent.

Remember, this covenant is a promise in blood. This passage shows us whose blood—the blood of Jesus. That's what brings us the full assurance of our salvation. I mean, isn't that good news this morning? Oh my goodness. Are you serious? Isn't that good news this morning? Yes. This is the character of God toward people and he hangs the bow in the sky so you can be sure. This is how he relates to you. Now, that's great news, but the thing I love about the covenant of Noah—the Noahic covenant—is it shows us how big salvation is. One of the things that we do often as Christians is we sort of shrink our salvation into just me and God's spirituality or the spirituality of the church. And the thing you can't do with that is you look at the story of Noah and it tells us how big and broad the implications of God's saving work really are.

I want to show you this. These are the "therefore" of salvation. Yes, God gives us a renewed relationship with him, but he also calls us into a renewed relationship with the creation and also with one another. And I'm going to look at both of these briefly.

A Renewed Relationship with the Earth

Think about this with me. Did you notice how strange the language is in this passage? God makes a covenant not just with people. Listen to verses 9 through 10:

Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you. And with every living creature that is with you, the birds and the livestock and every beast of the earth.

Or listen to verse 12:

This is the sign of the covenant between me and you and every living creature.

The covenant is not just with people. It's with all creation. And God restates the creation mandate that he gave them way back in Genesis 1: fill the earth, multiply. Again, what is God up to here? Well, God is showing us that we can't have a salvation that is just about spirituality. The creation mandate that's restated here and the covenant that's made with all creation has major implications for us. It means that the world is not ours to use up and destroy and use however we see fit. In other words, this is a basis for—can I say this phrase in church?—Christian environmentalism. Bet you never heard that one before. Christian environmentalism.

It's fascinating in a time where we're talking about the environment a lot and some of you are like, I don't want to talk about the environment. But what's fascinating—I mean, Christians have sort of been known for our lack of care for the environment or this idea that it doesn't really matter. What matters is what's spiritual. But listen, as one commentator puts it, God never calls anyone into a covenant relationship unless it's also a saving relationship. Think about that. God never calls anyone or anything—here, the whole creation—into a covenant relationship unless it's a saving relationship. What is God saving the created order from? Animals and birds? What's he saving them from? Well, it's right here. If you read in the passage, verses 20 to 22:

Never again will I curse the earth because of man, because the intention of his heart is evil from youth.

God is saving the world from human sin. Paul writes this in Romans 8:

The whole creation is standing on tiptoe, waiting for the sons of God to come into their own, waiting for all of creation. The creation itself will be set free from bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

All of creation is chomping at the bit for the day that all of it's put back right. That's crazy. I mean, Psalm 19 tells us:

The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the works of his hands.

That all of creation—when you go to the beach and you go to the mountains, you look up at the stars and all those things we love to do that make us feel part of a larger thing than us—all of that is proclaiming the praises of God, if you have ears to hear. If you have ears to hear. It's shouting this: a God of infinite beauty and power is at work in the whole universe. It's all his, and he wants you to join in. Sally Lloyd Jones, who wrote the Jesus Storybook Bible, she writes this: God wrote, I love you.

He wrote it in the sky and on the earth and under the sea. He created everything in his world to reflect him like a mirror to show us what he's like. To help us know him, to make our hearts sing. What that means for us now is that one of our jobs as stewards of creation is to help it keep speaking clearly, to make the creation reflect the glory of God.

The Christian worldview gives us a vision of the world that urges us to love and care for it in ways totally beyond other faiths. The view that this whole world is going to hell in a handbasket, when God's done with this, he's gonna be like a Big Mac wrapper, he wads up and tosses. That's Islam. The idea that the spiritual world is all that matters, don't care about the physical, that's Hinduism. Christianity teaches us. The gospel teaches that creation is an expression of God's goodness. Creation can't wait until sin is eradicated and it can sing with full throated joy. All of the glory of God.

Elizabeth Elliot wrote this way. She says, a clam out sings us in glorifying God more than we do because it's being a clam. One day, we'll experience all of that. It's like the creation saying, come on brothers and sisters, let's get on with it. See, this is the foundation for biblical environmentalism.

A Foundation for Justice

Second, this is also a foundation for a renewed relationship with other people. Listen to this:

And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning. From every beast, I will require it and from man. From his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of men, by man shall his blood be shed for God made man in his own image. — Genesis 9:5-6

This is fascinating. Sometimes I hear a distortion of reformed theology where it's like God doesn't think people have any value. God thinks that we are somehow worthless, that humans have no value in and of themselves. And of course, we preach things like this: You have nothing to bring to the table in your salvation except for the sin that required the blood of Jesus shed for you. We don't earn or merit our salvation in any way by any righteousness. And yet that doesn't mean we have no value. You can measure the value of a person in God's economy by what he's willing to pay for it. Here, a life is worth a life. And we see the ultimate value placed on people who are made in God's image by the sending of his son, Jesus, right? For our salvation, for our redemption.

This is the foundation for a biblical theology of justice. I know some of you are thinking, I don't want to hear anymore about justice. Everybody's always talking about justice and we need to be careful about that word. Justice kind of means whatever people want it to mean. It's like a wax nose right now. And we think justice is anytime we judge something unfairly. That's what we think of as injustice. But the definition of justice depends on who gets to define it. We have to be really careful about this because we don't want to define it in ways that God does not.

For example, you could say, well, the killing of any animal, that's a great injustice. Well, not according to what we just read, and this is our standard, right? This is what God's revealed word says to us. How do we define justice? We define biblical justice toward one another the way that God does—the thriving of his image bearers. That's what God wants. Again, the focus is on people made in God's image. So no, the killing of every animal's death is not a great injustice. Sometimes those are good for food. That's what we just read. But this is what God says: the thriving of his image bearers.

Every human being—whatever race, color, age, economic status, level of intelligence, level of development—bears God's image and is precious in his sight. This is why Christians, of all people, no matter who they're aligned with or who they're against on the political spectrum, should always be on the side of compassion and caring for those who are God's image bearers who are being harmed in some way. Any abuse of law, any way that people are being put down and trampled—this is why we care about the unborn. This is why we care about the terminally ill. This is why we care about those who have nothing to offer society, those who are immigrants.

The Bible over and over describes in the Old Testament the quartet of the vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the sojourner. And those are the categories that we should be asking: Who are those people for us? Who are those people for us today?

There's a current debate that's going on in the Christian world subculture and the Christian community about the sin of empathy.

I think the idea that empathy is sinful is bollocks, as the Brits say. God calls his people to care about image bearers and to care about injustice. Some of the greatest atrocities of history have occurred when people groups were able to say, "Some people are human, some people are less than."

You had Germany—such an incredibly sophisticated society in the middle of the twentieth century—able to justify the Holocaust, the killing of thousands upon thousands of Jews, by saying they weren't human. Gypsies too. People of color too. In our country, the founding fathers wrote this incredible document about freedom and equality, yet they justified slavery and then Jim Crow. Why? Because we counted some people as less than, less than human. This is how we've treated Native Americans over and over in our country.

So something within the people of God has to push back and say, "This is wrong." We don't turn injustice into a statistic. Joseph Stalin said it: "The death of one person is a tragedy. The death of a million is just a statistic." That's heartbreaking knowing what Stalin did with that. That's chilling.

To God, poverty and human starvation is not a statistic. Every year, 9,000,000 people die of starvation. Three million of them are children. God values everyone. That's not just a random thing.

Ferguson: The World's Way vs. God's Way

Two weeks ago, I got to go with a group from Raleigh and visit Ferguson, Missouri. If you don't remember 2014, Ferguson was all in the news. Michael Brown, a young African American male, was shot in the street in this apartment complex and Ferguson exploded. We saw all kinds of riots, all kinds of demonstrations. It fueled a huge national conversation about race.

We got to visit the place and see where his body lay on the street. There's still a spray painted box in the middle of that apartment complex, and there's still little teddy bears in there and a plaque on the sidewalk. We went and had lunch at Carol's Kitchen. Carol fed all the police and the protesters, so hers was one of the few places that wasn't looted during that. We got to meet with the mayor of Ferguson, talk to people in leadership in the town, meet with pastors, and hear about what happened since then. Did all this bring about some amazing change?

We found out $750,000,000 flowed into Ferguson. This is a place smaller than Garner, y'all. We were expecting to go and see all the amazing things that had been done and built. Nothing. That's what Ferguson has to show for that. In fact, what we found over and over again talking to apartment residents in the place where Michael Brown was shot is that the apartment complex is worse than it was seven years ago.

What was surprising to me is that this is the world's plan for justice: photo op, pour a bunch of money in, and that'll fix the problems. By contrast, we got to meet Ken and Beverly Jenkins. Ken is a pastor of a church of 100 people you've never heard of and you'll never hear of him. They don't own a building. They ran their church from a Seventh Day Adventist church space. He's not the most amazing speaker or pastor or whatever. But nine years ago, before Ferguson erupted, he and Beverly—especially Beverly—started praying for that community and praying over this abandoned shopping mall that had been abandoned for over twenty years. "What could God do with this place?" they asked.

Over time, they began sharing that vision for the transformation of Ferguson. Last month, we got to go see where they finally had the building dedication because they paid $4,500,000 in cash for that property. That was just phase one. Phase two is going to be a trauma-informed early intervention center for young children, a nursing training facility, and an entrepreneurship program. They're doing the church there. They're doing a mental health facility. It's over 100,000 square feet, and it came about through prayer and community involvement and Christians just like us caring.

It's such a contrast between the world's way—photo op, pour money in, that'll fix the problem—and such a different orientation. The people in this community have things to offer. They just need to be encouraged. We should provide a space for them. It's incredible.

The Covenant and Our Responsibility

This covenant, the largeness of this covenant—this caring about all image bearers—God takes that so seriously. It shows us that if we care, if we have a renewed relationship with him, we also seek to have a renewed relationship with all our brothers and sisters, all people who are made in his image.

Now, time out. I just want to ask: how's the sermon going so far?

We doing okay? I know that when we talk about environmentalism or if we talk about justice, a lot of people just feel overwhelmed. You're like, I'm so tired. I barely got here and you want me to care about the environment and you want me to care about biblical justice? And you also do the "I'm just one person" thing. What am I going to do? I'm just one person.

Look, I just want to say this is a time out from the sermon. I don't want you to leave here with guilt because I think the guilt that my salvation isn't doing enough, that I'm not producing much fruit in my life—all that stuff doesn't do much. It lasts till maybe lunchtime, right? Guilt is a poor motivator and yet God gives us something so much better in this passage than just going out of here feeling "shoulds and nots."

Justice is God's Work

First, this shows us that justice, caring for our brothers and sisters, caring for other image bearers—that's God's work. That's not our work. Look at what it says here in verse five:

And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning from every beast, I will require it and from man, from his fellow man, I will require reckoning for the life of a man. — Genesis 9:5

Who is going to make justice ultimately happen in the universe? It ain't me and it ain't you. It's the Lord of all creation, the judge of all the earth. Isn't that good news? God is a God of justice. It's not up to you to save the world. Doesn't that feel a little bit relieving this morning? It's not up to you to fix everything.

Invited to Participate

But second, God invites us to participate in what he's doing in the world. Remember how this passage began. Noah and his family get off the ark and what's the first thing Noah does? He has a worship service. He builds a little altar, sacrifices animals on it and burns them, and it says there's this pleasing aroma that goes up to God. And what does God do with that aroma?

The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma. — Genesis 8:21

Do you know that Noah's name, which means relief or rest, is actually the root word in Hebrew for the word "pleasing"? God is pleased with Noah.

This word where Noah makes the sacrifice and the aroma is pleasing to God relates to Jesus, who we saw back in Adam. He fulfills the covenant of works for us. He obeys God in our stead. He did everything that we could not do. Jesus is also the sacrifice for our sins. He is the one whose life is given for life. This is God's justice—God's justice: Jesus's life for yours. That's ultimately what makes you pleasing in the eyes of the Lord.

The New Testament tells us we are the aroma of Christ. If you're a Christian, you smell good to God because of Jesus. Think about all the things that we love that smell good—coffee, chocolate chip cookies, new car smell, freshly baked bread, newborn babies. That's how you smell to the Lord. God delights in you because of Christ. It's like you walk over to somebody's house and smell baking bread—you're like, man, can't wait. That's how the Lord views you.

And yet, listen to this: When Christians do acts that are in keeping with God's covenant promises and the way he relates to us, when we do acts of caring for this world and caring for one another, they're in line with what God is up to in this universe. You know what that does? It adds to that aroma. It's in keeping with what he's doing. It gives him glory. It's praise to him.

This is the invitation. It's not "shoulds and oughts." It's not "go out of here today and feel guilty about all the stuff you aren't doing." It's like, guess what? God's given you little ways, little steps that you also are able to participate in and give glory to Jesus and what he is doing in this world. Isn't that much better than just a little private salvation? God is inviting us to participate with him in the renewal of all things in little small ways for his glory.

You know, every time we preach the gospel in this church, there's always two parts and I hope you always hear this: there's the comfort of the gospel and there's the call of the gospel.

The comfort of the gospel comes to those of us who are sin sick and burdened and anxious and fearful about how we approach the living God of the universe. And you hear just all the invitation, all the graciousness of God pouring out of this passage to you this morning. The bows pointed up. You're invited in. His promise is in blood, but it also comes with a call.

And for those who are comfortable in their faith, those who are sitting around bored, there's always a call too. Come. God said up to all kinds of things in this world. You don't have to. I mean, it's all been paid for, but you're invited to. You're invited to be part of the glory of the Lord.

Let's pray together. Father, we honor you and thank you for this part of your word this morning that speaks to us a better word than our sin, a better word than the world of human effort and human solutions tells us—of a God who is a promise-making God, who promises in blood. And we thank you this morning that we gathered in this place can rejoice that all of that is given to us in Christ.

We pray, Father, that we would know because of Jesus we are the aroma of Christ. We also pray, Father, that you would help us to move out of places of safety and security and comfort and embrace the call on our lives—embrace in a joyful way the invitation to build more glory for our Savior Jesus. We pray these things in his name. Amen.