This sermon emphasizes the unbreakable covenant between God and His Son, Jesus Christ, where God promises to hold, protect, and deliver Jesus through perfect obedience. This covenant extends to all believers who are in Christ, assuring them of God's faithfulness and loving-kindness even in times of failure and sin. The message highlights the importance of understanding righteousness by faith and the assurance that God will never abandon His children, always extending mercy and grace.

Please, please help, I'm desperate. All of the struggles we hear from people all over the United States and around the world, feeling that because sin has entered their life, even though they've loved the Lord, even though they're Christians, I can't get victory and I'm so doomed, and then they'll go to church and they'll hear these messages just come thundering down about sin and they come under under a blanket of guilt and fear and condemnation. Folks, I want to take you on a trip that should absolutely once and for all erase from your mind any idea that when as a Christian you fail God that he's going to give up on you. I want to show you something from the Scripture today that is really my answer to these and others who write to us, because they'll be getting this in the newsletter. I hear people say, Pastor Dave, yes, you say it's by faith. I have made righteousness by faith in the finished work of Jesus, but I have gone that route. I believe the Lord the best I know how. I've trusted him. I honestly love him. I pray. I seek the Lord and the best of my ability. I'm walking by faith, but I'm still failing, and I feel so doomed because if faith is the only way, and I've tried faith and it didn't work, then what hope is there? I'm near giving up because I've tried the faith route. Otherwise, faith is so complicated I don't understand it. Folks, I've been that route. There are times in my past life, especially when I was a younger man, I tried to pump up faith to please God because it says it's by faith, so I kept pumping it and pumping it until my pumping of faith became a more work of the flesh than if I tried to do it on my own. Pumping faith became a work of the flesh. Do you understand that? You can try so hard to produce a faith that you think will be pleasing to God that you've settled back into the law and back into works, and then your effort to pump up faith becomes a sweating, striving thing. I want to give you the key to understanding righteousness by faith. I'm going to try to do this next 15-20 minutes. Fashion your seatbelts. Oh, hallelujah. Thank God for the new covenant. The old covenant says, if you do what is right, shall you not be accepted? If you do what is right, will God not accept you? That's the old covenant. The new covenant is not that new covenant. God comes to you in your troubles and trials and sin and says, I will. I will. I will do it. I'm going to show that to you now. Let me try to explain the new covenant to you because you and I are under a new covenant, a new agreement. I don't know when this happened. It could have happened from the foundation of earth. It could have happened just prior to Christ agreeing to become mediator and come in the flesh, but God in his own Son, Jesus, made an agreement. They made a covenant, and the covenant was made. In fact, the Scripture makes it clear that Christ was given as our covenant. Jesus made an agreement with the Father. In fact, the Father presented this to his Son. He said, if you will go and you become a mediator, you come in the flesh and take on human flesh, God says, I make an agreement with you. I covenant with you that I will hold you by the hand, and I will carry you through. I'll never allow Satan to touch you. I will deliver you, and I will hold you by the hand, and I will keep you. Jesus, on the other hand, said, I will go, Father, and this was his side of the agreement or the covenant. I will go, Heavenly Father, and I will not do anything except what I see and hear from you. I will not do anything in my own human flesh. I will obey you exclusively. I will put my life, I will come, I'll take on human nature, but then I'm going to give that human nature back to you, and I'm going to put every confidence. I won't do anything. I'll go anywhere, including the cross, if you lead me. I will not do anything except what I see and hear you do. But Jesus said, as a part of this agreement, I'm going to obey you fully. I'm going to fulfill the law, every command of the law. I'm going to obey you perfectly, and I can only do that if you are holding my hand, and if you have, I have in me this promise from you, Heavenly Father, this covenant agreement that you will be with me and you will hold my hand. He said the only condition, and this is the condition by which Christ accepted this, that not only do you hold my hand, not only do you carry me through all the powers of hell and darkness, but my seed goes with me. All my children get the same privilege. My obedience is going to be their obedience, not their own. My obedience will be offered to you for my whole seed. You understand why Jesus said to his disciples, I can do nothing on my own. He's under covenant. Folks, when you begin to see what the cross is about, when you understand this new covenant, you can never again be afraid of the devil. You can never again be afraid of sin. This covenant, I hear many Bible teachers say that started the cross. No, no, no. It started in the manger, because it had to do with his obedience. This had to do with his whole life. It was in the very manger itself when he came born as in human flesh. Now you say, I find that hard to believe. All right, let's go to it. Here's the exact wording of God's agreement with his Son. Go to Isaiah 42. I want you, we're going to go to the Scripture now, and I'm going to prove this to you. And if you, if you can't leave this church this morning, absolutely changed by the Word, your ears are closed. Ask God to give you an open ear now, and an open heart, and give you eyes to see. Isaiah 42, verse 6, I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, this is speaking of Christ, and will hold thy hand, and I will keep you. This is the covenant God is making with his own Son. He said, if you go in human flesh, you become the mediator for man. He said, I the Lord will hold thee in righteousness. I'm going to call you in righteousness. I'll hold your hand. I will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles, to open blind eyes, bring out the prisoners from the prison, and to sit in darkness and out of the prison house. Hallelujah to God. This is the covenant God made with his Son. You go, I'll hold you. I'll keep you. The Word be to God. He said, God said to his Son, if you go, I'll be responsible for you, to keep you, and bring you back to glory. The whole time you're gone, I'm responsible for you. I'll take full responsibility. No power in heaven or hell can touch you. And then he says, I'll do the same for your seed. You don't believe that? Hey folks, you know what the seed is? The children of faith. You are the seed. I am the seed by faith in Christ Jesus. You told everybody you belong to Jesus, didn't you? You sit here saying and believing in your heart, I'm a child of God. I am the seed. Oh, hallelujah. Turn to Psalm 89. Here's where it gets real good. Starting verse 27. I'll wait till the leaves stop rustling. You have it? Psalms 89 verse 27, begin to read, also I will make him my firstborn higher than the kings of the earth. That's the Father's. I'm gonna make you higher than all the kings of the earth when you take on this this call. My mercy will I keep for him forevermore, and my covenant shall stand fast with him. His seed also will I make to endure forever, and his throne is the days of heaven. If his children forsake my law and walk not in my judgments, if they break my statutes and keep not my commandments, I will visit their transgression with the rod, their iniquity with stripes. Nevertheless, this is for you and me. This is this promise to the seed. He's making this to his son. He's saying to his son, nevertheless, my loving kindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail. My covenant I will not break, nor alter the thing that's gone out of my lips. Glory be to God. Folks, the Bible said we're to lay hold of the covenant, lay hold of the promises of God, whereby we're made partakers of his divine nature. Let this jump into the stream and flow with it right now, because this is the word of the living God. God said to his own son, I make a covenant with you. I will make you higher than all the kings of the earth. If my children sin against me, I will, I'll put the rod to them. I'll put the rod to the flesh. What happens, even Paul introduces the concept of destruction to the flesh, that the soul may be saved. Oh yes, Christian, when you sin, you'll be chastened. There'll be the rod of God, but it'll be a rod of love. He said, I will never, no matter what you've done, if you will trust me, if you'll come back to my love, I will never cast you away, never, never. I can say to this woman who wrote this letter, with all of your problems, her 17-year-old daughter's been raped, her 16-year-old daughter's run off with a married man, she has all kinds of problems, her own husband's a drug daddy, and I can say, hold on sister, he'll never take away his loving kindness from you, never. You see, you win the victory over the devil when you get rid of the fear. It's the fear that has the torment. Not only will I hold your hand, my son, as long as you're in human flesh, not only will keep you from Satan and all of his devices, I make the same promise to every believer who trusts in you, I will count them as one party to this covenant. And folks, he doesn't make the covenant with me, except as I am in Christ. It's a covenant between two partners only, between God and his Son, and when I'm in his Son, this is a corporate body, then I am in the covenant. I am in the covenant because I'm in Christ. He made it with Christ. He didn't make it with me, he made it with Christ, but he made it with me because I am now in Christ, and everything of the covenant is now mine. I am in the covenant. Boy, I'll get chasing with a rod, and some of you have been chasing now. I've known some young Christian young men and women who fell back into homosexuality, and they picked up AIDS, and I have buried a few in this church. Fine young men, loving Jesus, went out repentant, but went out in victory because they came back to the loving kindness of Jesus Christ, but they paid the price, because the wages of sin is death. Doesn't say the wages of sin is hell alone, because you see when you come back to the covenant, you come back to the mercy and the grace of God, and repent before him, you find out he's never left you, he's always there. For his part, Christ promised the Father perfect obedience, first on his own behalf. I want you to go to Psalms 40 now. Turn left to Psalms 40. Now it gets even better. Psalms 40. Folks, look this way please. I want to show you now that Jesus says, first of all, I am going to be obedient to you.