These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
—Deuteronomy 6:5-9 (NIV)
Just as Moses told the Israelites that they are to teach His decrees to their children, we teach and share God’s Word. Unlike what Moses told the Israelites, we do not write the law on our doorframes and gates to tell us how to live. We have something that is too good to be true! The Grace of Jesus is written on our hearts, and the Holy Spirit guides us into all Truth. The law given to Moses could never change the human heart. It only exposed failure and need. Only Jesus, the son of God, could, once and for all the time, be the perfection that the law required. Jesus became our sin so that we might become His righteousness.
Jesus has fulfilled the law. He is the New Covenant. His perfect sacrifice for our sins has canceled the performance-based requirements of the Old Covenant. We no longer follow the law because it is required. We surrender to His love and live His Grace because He has changed everything. Jesus has given us the gift of His life. The law demands that our actions be righteous, and that is impossible. We have no righteousness to give. Only Jesus in us is righteous. Anything we do becomes self-righteousness. When we receive His Grace, we receive what we could never earn through work and performance. We receive by faith His righteousness. Receiving by faith is believing in who He has made you.
When we receive the Grace of Jesus by faith, His Truth changes us. And His Grace fills us with joy! Full of the wonder of His life we have received, we joyfully share what He has wrought in us. We speak the new life of the Spirit instead of the death of the law. “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant,” Paul wrote, “not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6, NIV).
“This is the covenant I will make with them after that time,” says the Lord. “I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds. Their sins and lawless acts, I will remember no more” (Hebrews 10:16-17, NIV). Instead of being written upon the "doorframes” of our outer performance, His law is now written upon our hearts. The “outer” doorframes of the law have surrendered to the inner heart of His perfect sacrifice. Our sins are no more.
When we allow His Grace to renew us daily, we discover His joy in giving as He gave His life for us. Obedience to the faith flows from our love for Him—from the Grace, which has made us new. We are one with our Savior who fulfilled the Old Covenant so we might receive His righteousness. And that is His Truth. Only Grace sets us free!
© 2019 Lynn Lacher
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