A Promise Written Inside Your Heart

(from Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Jeremiah was the prophet who had stood in the potter's house and watched ruined clay gathered back and shaped new. Now God had one more thing to show him, and it was the best one yet.

But first, think of a morning you know well. You wake up and make yourself a promise. Today I will be kind. Today I will not say the unkind thing. Today I will remember.

By lunchtime you have forgotten. Again.

You know that feeling, the tired one low in your tummy, the one that whispers, I keep getting it wrong. Long ago, God's people felt that very feeling too.

God had given them his words carved on flat slabs of stone. Beautiful words. True words. But words on stone sit outside of you. You can read them and read them, and still forget them by lunchtime. Stone cannot make you want to be good. Stone only waits there, telling you what you should have done.

And God watched his children try, and forget, and try, and forget. He watched them grow tired the way you grow tired.

So one day God gave Jeremiah a kind of dream. A window opened in front of him, and through it he saw a day that had not come yet. A day so wonderful that Jeremiah could hardly hold the seeing of it.

"The day is coming," God said, "when I will make something brand new with my people. No more words on stone. I will write my words on the inside of them. On their very hearts. I will be their God, and they will be mine. Every single one. The smallest and the greatest. Nobody left out. Nobody forgotten."

And then, in the dream, God said the most astonishing thing of all.

"I will forgive them," God said. "And their sins, all the times they got it wrong, I will remember no more."

No more. Gone, the way a footprint goes when the wave rolls smooth over the sand.

Now think with me. How could God ever do such a thing? How could his words come off the cold stone and go warm into a heart? How could every wrong thing be truly, gladly forgotten?

It would cost something. A promise this big always costs something. And only God himself could pay it.

Many, many years later, on the night before a terrible morning, a man named Jesus lifted a cup at supper with his friends. And he said the thing Jeremiah's dream had been waiting for all along.

"This cup," Jesus said, "is the new promise. My blood. Poured out for you."

There it was, the brand-new thing Jeremiah had seen through the window, sitting at the table in person.

Jesus would gather up every wrong thing his people had ever done and carry it away, so God could keep his enormous promise to remember it no more. And he would send his own Spirit to live inside you, and begin, ever so gently, to write God's love right onto your heart.

So when you are tired of trying, lean back. You were never the one keeping the promise. He is. And the words he is writing on your heart he will finish, letter by letter, every one.