The New Covenant

The good thing about Christianity is that it will meet you where you are. If you are new and confused and struggling, Christ accepts you. You don’t have to pass a test or meet a minimum requirement. Just believe and Christ will meet you where you are and bring you in.

The bad thing about Christianity is that it will meet you where you are. If you are a mean spirited, thin skinned bigot, you can be a Christian, you can become part of Christ’s church and remain a mean spirited, thin skinned bigot. You can even pick the Bible apart and justify being a mean spirited, thin skinned bigoted Christian, but hopefully, as you become a better and better Christian, you also become a better and better person.

The goal, the focus of my spiritual life is to lead a completely spiritual life. I try to avoid ritual and Legalism and I pay no attention to the mythology, if you will, of our religion. Can I achieve a completely spiritual life? Probably not until I die.

There’s a guy in one of the churches I attend who likes to stand up every time we pray. He’s the only one. There he is standing up, while the rest of us are sitting down. I know this because I don’t bow my head.

Paul tells us in Romans that we are to accept our differences. He talks about vegetarians and about Holy Days specifically. What he says is that if someone does something, whether it’s abstaining from a food or dressing a certain way or standing up when they pray, and they do it in order to honor God, then we are to accept it because they are honoring God.

Could you smoke marijuana and say you are doing it to honor God? I suppose you could. If you could honestly support it and sincerely believe it, not just use God as an excuse to do what you want to do. We get back to the whole new hat in church thing. If you’re standing up during prayer just so everyone can see how devout you are, and I‘m not saying that this guy is, then no, you’re not honoring God.

I’ve told you about saying Thank you Lord when I get the bridle on a horse. A little ritual. When I say a formal prayer, I end it with In Jesus’ Name I Pray. I don’t believe it’s necessary, but I do it. I’ve heard people say that God doesn’t hear a prayer without those words, but I don’t believe that, because when you are continually in prayer, talking to God all day long, there‘s no beginning, no ending, no time to throw that phrase in there, and yet God hears those prayers. I spend next to no time in the Old Testament and I never look at Revelations. Do not debate whether there will be marriage in Heaven, how big our mansions will be or if suicides will be there. Those things hold no interest for me.

That is not to say that people who do those things are wrong. There are very good Christian people who do these things and cause no harm. But. I think we need to be sure that those things don’t become the focus, that the ritual or the details or the arguments or the history don’t become more important than our relationship with God.

I, personally, am trying to take advantage of being a Christian in the Age of Grace. I am very happy to be a Christian of the New Covenant.

The New Covenant was a promise written out in the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah and fulfilled by the birth, the life and the death of Jesus Christ.

The New Covenant is a wonderful thing. Whole books could be written about it and probably have been. I particularly like verse 10 which says that the law will be put in our minds and written on our hearts.

The New Covenant removes us from Judaic Law. From the Law of Moses. You can forget about most of Leviticus. We no longer have to slaughter a dove and enter the temple through a maze to speak to God. It’s not okay to burn a witch or to own a slave, even if he’s a foreigner and you’re nice to him.

And I know this is where I am going to lose some of you, there is no prohibition against homosexuality. How can I say that when I know there are whole ministries devoted to turning people around. Because first of all, I know a lot of Christian gay people who say that God accepts them just the way they are. Whether or not God condemns them is between them and God. And Secondly, because the prohibition against homosexuality is Jewish Law, is Mosaic Law and we do not live by Mosaic Law.

Now, I understand why someone would not believe that. Jesus said that He was not putting aside or changing the Law. And you can ask how I can ignore that. I don’t ignore it, but I also have to ask the question when did He say it, who was He talking to, and how did His death, the rending of the veil change that statement. I think it changed it quite a lot.

Paul talks about leaving Judaism behind when he talks about circumcision in Galatians. He takes it to an extreme, but what he‘s basically saying that if you‘re going to be Jewish, be Jewish. But if you‘re going to be Christian, you need to walk away from Jewish tradition.

Which kind of throws out the entire Messianic Jewish church.

And yet, we know that there are good Christians doing God‘s work in the Messianic Jewish church.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors, on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; for they did not continue in my covenant, and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord.

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, of the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.

Hebrews 8:8-12

Healed By Faith

My nephew recently loaned me a book, Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan, which is supposed to be a revisiting of the life of Christ through a modern eye, or something like that. I read the back of the cover, and I read the flap and I read part of the intro, and I was getting kind of uncomfortable with the general direction it seemed to be taking. So I went to the index and I found a passage about one of the healing miracles.

The story I found was the healing of a leper. The author went into an excellent explanation of why lepers were so worrisome to the Jews at that time. That helped a lot. And then he went on to describe the act of Jesus telling the man, the leper that he was now clean. And the author said something like, “Obviously, He didn’t actually heal this man,” and then he turned himself inside out trying to explain how Jesus could say to the guy Go now, you are clean, when He hadn’t actually healed him and he wasn't actually clean.

And I gave the book back to my nephew.

I think there is a tendency among some people to try to intellectualize religious belief, to try to take the emotion and the hocus pocus out of it. But I think, personally, that without those things, scary as they might be, you lose the essence, the true power of the belief.

A friend of mine told me once that when she was young, she went to church with the neighbors. She had not been raised in a Christian household, she was just going with the neighbors to be going, and that when they told her about God, in her young mind, God was just a man. She said that if she had tried to understand God as anything more, at that point, she would not have been able to accept it.

So I am not going to say that Mr. Crossan has to believe the same thing that I do. Or that his belief is less than mine. The good thing about Christianity is that it will meet you where you are. I am just going to say that I find his version of Jesus to be severely lacking, and I am not going to read his book.

I touched on faith healing several weeks ago, when I talked about the laying on of hands on a horse with a suspected slab fracture, and how I had not been raised to believe in faith healing. My nephew, same nephew, made a comment that there are a lot of charlatans out there saying they are faith healers.

I accept that. I recognize the whole tent show, here to get your money, “Be Healed!” show. That’s not the kind of faith healing I want to talk about.

There are several times in the Bible when Jesus healed a person. Sometimes He laid hands on them, sometimes He healed them long distance through another party. Frequently He said Don’t tell anybody about this. And the first thing they did was run off and tell everybody they knew.

My favorite one of these stories is the Bleeding Woman. I have heard a couple of very good sermons on this story, you can look at it from several different angles.

This is the one where the crowd gathers around Him, and there is one woman in the crowd who has had some kind of illness which caused her to bleed for years. She said If I can just touch His clothing, I will be healed. So she fights her way through the crowd, reaches out and touches his cloak.

And He stops. Because He felt her. This part gives me chills. This crowd is pressing Him, grabbing at Him from all sides, and He feels her touch, and He stops.

And He says to her, Woman, your faith has healed you.

Anyway, in almost every instance, He says Your faith has healed you.

“Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly. -- Matthew 15:28

He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Mark 5:34.

Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. Mark 10:52

I believe that faith healing works, because I believe that faith healing works. The important thing is my belief, my acceptance that Jesus meant it when He said “Very Truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” John 14:12.

At the track, we put horses on mechanical wheels, which make them walk in a circle, so they can get a little exercise or be cooled out after working. The wheel mechanism is loose enough that if they decide to stand still, it will stop, but also if they decide to run, they can do that too. The running is really not good. You can put four of them at a time on the wheel, and if one starts running, they all have to run, and someone could easily get hurt.

So one day they started running. And we were standing out there, yelling whoa and waving hats at them, and they didn’t care. They were just running. And I thought because of some of the discussions we had had in church, that if I just had enough faith, if I just knew the right word to say, I could stop those horses. So I stepped forward, put up my hands, and I yelled “Calmness”. And they stopped and looked at me, like Yes, and what can we do for you.


When I put my hands up, when I said that word, I felt the power of the Lord move through me. When I prayed for the blood to stop running in my nephew’s head (different nephew) after his stroke, when I took authority over it in the name of Jesus and stated that the blood would stop, I felt the power of the Lord make it so.


I didn’t heal anyone. I didn’t stop that wheel. My faith in the power of the Lord did it.

Jesus said to him, “If you are able! -- All things can be done for the one who believes.” Mark 9:23

Two Short Stories

Here are two stories. One is how the Lord gave Leonard a tuxedo. And the other is how God locked a door for me.

I try to remember this story when things are not going as planned. When I don’t have a job, or I don’t know what’s coming next, or when I am waiting for something to happen and I want it to happen on my timetable, not God‘s.



I had a friend who went to college in Tahlequah, Oklahoma when the school there was still Northeastern State College. She was in a sorority and she lived on a sorority floor of the dorm. If there weren’t enough girls who wanted to live on the dorm floor, they had to let other people live there. At the time, many of her sorority sisters were married and they didn’t live in the dorm, so some girls they didn‘t know well came to live on their floor.

My friend makes friends with one of the girl because they liked to play music together.

But this girl, and I’m sorry I don’t remember her name but let‘s call her Leslie just to make things easy, was what my friend considered a fanatic Christian. She said that if you gave Leslie a cookie she didn’t say Thank you, she said Praise the Lord.

Anyway, there was a dance on campus, and someone asked Leslie if she was going. She had a boyfriend named Leonard, and she said If the Lord gives Leonard a tuxedo. Well, everyone waited until she left the room and laughed their heads off. Oh, yeah, sure, God’s going to give Leonard a tuxedo.

Well, the afternoon of the dance, Leonard was sitting in his dorm room, and there was a knock on the door, and Leonard goes to the door, and there is one of his frat brother standing there with a tuxedo in his hand.

This boy’s mother had surprised him by purchasing a tuxedo and delivering it to him. But this boy had already rented and picked up his tuxedo for the dance. He and Leonard were about the same size, and he knew Leonard needed a tuxedo.

The Lord gave Leonard a tuxedo.

Who buys a tuxedo as a surprise gift? Some woman who probably doesn’t even realize that she is listening to God.

This story reaffirms to me that God is an active partner in my life.

We were working at Lone Star Park, but we were living at my mother’s house, which is about thirty minutes away. My husband’s boss got us a room, because there were days when one or the other of us needed to be there either all day or late at night. We didn’t move a whole lot in, just an air mattress and a little fridge and a microwave. And since there was room for it, my husband had stored some old stereo equipment in the room.

I used the room a lot more than my husband did. We’re in Texas in June and July, it’s really hot. So I was using the room frequently to take a shower, take a nap, just cool off, have lunch before heading home or running back to the barn, and I had accumulated a lot of extra clothes and a couple of pairs of shoes, and I decided it was time to cart a bunch of it home.

So I walked out of the room with my purse and a bag on one shoulder, another bag on the other shoulder, a pair of shoes in my right hand and another bag in my left hand. I got to the car and realized I didn’t have my car keys out. So I put the shoes on the top of the car, dug the keys out of my pocket, opened the car and got in.

Drove home. Got out of the car in front of my mother’s house, and arranged everything in the same way. Purse and bag on one shoulder, bag on the other, pair of shoes in one hand, bag in the other. Went to the front door, and realized I had put the keys back in my pocket. So I am standing there trying to figure out how to get the keys out of my pocket, and I thought what did I do to get in the car. I put the shoes on top of the car. Oh. What did I do to lock the door of the room…..

I didn’t lock the door of the room.

The door didn’t have a door knob. It just had a dead bolt that you either had to lock with the key on the outside or flip the bolt on the inside. I tried all night long to convince myself that I had rearranged those bags somehow and locked that door, but I didn’t. I know I didn’t or the key wouldn’t have been back in my pocket.

What I was really worried about was someone getting in there and taking my husband’s stereo, and I was never going to hear the end of it.

So I prayed, I prayed really hard. “Please, Lord, don’t let anyone take that stereo. Lord, please, please, please.” And somewhere in there, I said “You know, You could just lock the door for me.”

So the next morning, I leave early. I drive like a crazy person, I park my car and I run to that door.

And…. you know what I’m going to say.

It was locked.

It’s just possible that God did that for me, so I could tell that story to you.

That is why I tell you to have faith that you have already received whatever you pray for, and it will be yours. Mark 11:24 [God's Word]