In forming the new covenant, God obligated himself by an oath to supply the enabling power and strength to fulfill every condition and demand of the covenant. When God says by oath, “I will do it,” faith in us responds, “Let it be so.”
Let me show you a wonderful truth from the new covenant. It suggests that the Lord can never get close enough to his people, and that he can never bring them as close as he desires. Therefore, he unites and fashions us to himself with this binding contract. The new covenant is all about our Lord’s commitment to keep his children from falling, and to console, comfort and assure us that the power and dominion of sin can and will be broken by the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.
This truth is the only hope for those believers who have lost heart in their struggle against a besetting sin. Only by having the new covenant unveiled to us can we learn the secret to having total victory over sin.
Death is the only way out of the old covenant and into the new. Flesh faith has to die. No more striving to believe. If I am to have faith—true faith, the faith of Christ—he must give it to me. We have been given a measure of faith, yet if it is true that I can do nothing of myself, then this includes having divine faith. That is why scripture calls it “the faith of Christ.”
Are you sin-sick? Are you truly yearning to live a holy life, free from the habituating lusts of the flesh? Get ready to die. Get ready to embrace the cross. The old covenant will bring you to your wits’ end, to nothingness. When you have given up all hope of overcoming sin by your own human power and will, then you are ready to enter the glorious realm of life and freedom through the new covenant.
“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2, NKJV).