This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you to day five of our look together through Hebrews chapter
8. We're going to focus on one verse today, verse 13. Let me begin by reading
that verse, Hebrews 8, 13.

By calling this covenant new, he's made the first one obsolete, and what is
obsolete and aging will soon disappear. He talks about the old and the new here.
He talks about the obsolete.

The idea behind the word obsolete, the Greek word here, is the idea of being
worn out. This reminds you of what Jesus said to us in Luke 5, 37. You can't
pour new wine into old wineskins, or he gave almost the same illustration there
sewing a new patch on old clothes.

It just won't work. Hebrews 8, 13 in the Phillips translation says, "When a
thing grows weak and out of date, it is obviously soon going to disappear. " And
this is true with the covenant.

That's what he's talking about here. "If you have something new," he's saying,
"a new promise from God, you no longer need something old. " Remember, that's
what those that the writer is writing to were struggling with.

They had something new, but they thought they needed something old also. And he
says, "No, no, no. The old is no longer needed.

" Some of you maybe even watch television shows about this group of people that
are sometimes called hoarders. We're fascinated by people who take more and more
and more things into their houses. They buy new things, or they find new things,
but they try to keep the old things as well, and eventually their house becomes
a mess, just an entire mess.

What we're being told here is don't be a spiritual hoarder. Don't let the
spiritual life that God has given you become a mess by trying to hold on to both
the new and the old. This old covenant, he says, it's going to disappear someday
in heaven.

It's just going to be totally non-seen in heaven. But it's already, he says,
obsolete. So why would you hold on to it in any way?

It's obsolete. Now, today, with that truth in mind, the spiritual truth that's
behind this, I'd like to take a little bit of a different twist on these verses.
What's true as a fact with the covenant is also true as a principle when we talk
about the old and new here in every area of your life.

When things become old and obsolete, you need to let go of those things so that
you can pick up what is new, what God is doing in your life. In one sense here,
we're talking about the bell curve of life. You know what that is.

Where you go up one side of the bell curve, you reach this place of success,
maybe in a business, maybe in your family, maybe in a church, maybe in your
schooling, maybe in your spiritual life or growth. But then you've depended on
an old way of doing things that's worked for you. But then you've reached that
place, and then you start to come down the other side.

And you realize it's not growing anymore. I'm on the other side of the bell
curve. I don't know how to tell you all the symptoms, but I can tell you at
least three symptoms of being on the other side of the bell curve in a family or
a business or even in personal life.

Three symptoms. Number one, growth has stopped. So your business growth has
stopped or your church growth has stopped or your own growth has stopped.

Number two, conflict has increased. When you're on that other side, you find
that conflict increases on a team or a group of people if they're all on that
other side together. And if it's about you, your personal life, you find
internal conflict increasing.

You're more and more wondering, why am I doing this? Why am I involved in this?
Conflict has increased, growth has stopped.

And number three, discouragement has replaced vision. Instead of thinking about
the vision so much, you're thinking about the discouragement. You're thinking
about what was and how we're never going to get back to what was.

This could be true of an organization like a business or a school. This could be
true of a body like a church. In the organization of that body, it begins to
grow.

Great things happen, but then you get on the other side of that. You're no
longer growing. What's happened?

And when you find yourself on the other side of that bell curve, you need
renewal. You need to hold on to what is new. When you think about renewal, there
are really four phases of renewal.

There's personal, and then corporate, and then missional, and then structural
renewal. Personal renewal is my own life being renewed. So if you think about
this with a church, for instance.

If a church has grown and then it's reached a great place of growth, but now
it's been on the other side of the bell curve, it's declining, how is it going
to start to grow again? Well, first there has to be personal renewal in the life
of the leaders and the life of the body. And without that personal renewal, my
renewed attachment to Christ, there's no opportunity for growth.

It starts there. Then there has to be corporate renewal. That's when it's not
only in my life, but it's also in my relationships with other people.

It's in my relationships with what's going on in the church. You see corporate
renewal happen in a church when you begin to see the church have a new sense of
vision for the future. And out of that comes missional renewal.

Not only is there an excitement about the future, but there are goals. There are
ideas. Where are we going to go?

Here's what God has for us to do next. No longer are you talking about what you
did 20 years ago, but you're thinking about what God might do through you 20
years from now. Now this missional renewal does not have to mean that the church
all of a sudden gets to be the same size as it was before.

Renewal is not always about size. It might be that at the size that you are now
or you're in a declining neighborhood, God may never bring you to that size
again, but he wants to use the resources in that church to start new churches or
to do mission work around the world or to do translation work that needs to be
done. He wants to use you in a new mission.

And you get a sense of that. We're not trying to return to the past anymore.
We're looking forward to the future.

And then out of that comes structural renewal. You restructure the church or the
business or whatever to fit the new mission of the church. That comes last, by
the way.

A lot of times when we try to renew things, we try to put structural renewal
first. Even before personal renewal, if we just organize things differently,
then God's going to expand this business and he's going to excite this church in
a brand new way. Well, that comes last.

You do need to organize things differently, but that comes last. Now I tell you
that to make a point. It starts with personal renewal.

In every case, it starts with you. If your business is going to be renewed, it
starts with you. If you're in a school that needs to be renewed, it starts with
you.

If your personal life, obviously, is going to be renewed, your growth, it has to
start with you. If your church is going to be renewed, it starts with you. And
these verses in a very simple way have told us how personal renewal happens in
our lives.

What are the two things that have to happen for personal renewal to happen in my
life? Let me say to you very personally, right now you may have been a follower
of Christ for a long time, but you recognize as you look back that for the last
months and maybe even years you're not as close to Jesus as you used to be. You
need a personal renewal.

Or you may be in a church where there's just not the excitement that you used to
have about serving Christ, about following him, about doing the mission that
he's given you to do. You need a personal renewal. You may be in a business
where when you started it you thought about how it could serve the world and
make a difference in the world, but right now all you can think about are all
the headaches.

You need a personal renewal. You may be in a marriage, but at the beginning of
that marriage you thought about how you would together serve Christ, how you
would together love him and glorify him, but right now the conflict is just
killing you, or right now the silence is just about to destroy you. How does
renewal happen?

Well, it has to start with you. Personal renewal. And that personal renewal
means two things need to happen.

First you have to stop depending on what's becoming obsolete, and second you
have to increase your dependence, your trust on what's becoming new. For
personal renewal to happen, we'll talk about spiritually when we talk about the
New Covenant, they had to stop depending on the old covenant, the old law. But
this principle is also true in many areas of life.

You have to stop depending on what's becoming obsolete, the old way of doing
things, the way that used to work, the way that worked for so many years. It's
not working anymore. That's why you're on the other side of the bell curve.

It's not working anymore. And there has to come a moment in life where you just
admit that to yourself and say I'm depending, we're depending on what's becoming
obsolete. So what used to work for us as a couple when we have kids, now the
kids aren't in the home anymore, we need something new for our relationship to
be renewed.

It worked for years and years, it's not working now. You stop depending on
what's becoming obsolete. Now in the world of business there are a thousand
illustrations of this.

You stop depending on what's becoming obsolete, old models of doing things, old
ways of doing things, old ways of depending on certain people in the system. You
stop depending on what's becoming obsolete and you increase your trust in what's
becoming new. As followers of Jesus, that starts with our trust in him,
following him, loving him, recognizing his presence in our lives.

It starts with time in his word and time in prayer. If you want to increase your
trust in what's becoming new, you've got to spend time with him who's making
everything new. Let me say that again.

If you want to increase your trust in what's becoming new, whether it's in your
business or anywhere else, you've got to spend more time with the one who's
making everything new. You spend time with him and you begin to increase your
trust. And out of that, he begins to give you a new vision.

Here's what I want you to do now. Here's what you can do now. I've got to tell
you, as someone who has lived long enough now to be through a number of bell
curves in life, in my family life, in church life, in my ministry life, I know
what it feels like to be on the other side of that bell curve.

It can feel very discouraging and like God has no future, no hope, no plans for
you. And I'm here to tell you, he does have a future and a hope for you. He does
have plans for you.

But there's some old things you need to let go of now and there's some new
things that he wants you to grab on to now. Let's pray together about what those
might be. Father, we need your wisdom.

We need your wisdom. Help us to see what to let go of. You know, we want to be
faithful to you.

And so sometimes we try and try and try and try, but maybe it's stubbornness and
not faithfulness sometimes. Maybe I'm trying to do something my way instead of
lifting my eyes far enough to see that you have a new way. So help me to see
what to let go of and Lord, help me to see what to grab on to.

What's the future and hope that you have for me? What is it that you want me to
do now? Instead of living in the past, what I used to enjoy doing, what I was so
blessed in doing, help me to live towards the future.

What you have for me to do now, the new blessings that you have for me. Instead
of looking to how it used to be, Lord, help me to see what you want to do today,
today in my life. Thank you, Jesus, for making everything new.

In your name, I pray, amen. Well next week, join us. We're going to look at
chapter nine.

We're going to go over once again the loss that's in the old and the tremendous
gain that's in the new.