Slides supporting a message by Mike Popovich, Freedom Ministries, Church, Colorado Springs, CO. Topic: Jesus - Our Rest, Liberation, and Restoration Date: 8/31/14 Link to Full Message: http://freedomministries.tv/media-library/8-31-14/jesusourrest/

1. The Blood Covenant – It’s
Called Grace BecauseWe
Didn’t Do Anything to
Deserve It

2.
Psalm 89:34
“My covenant I will not break,
Nor alter the word that has gone out of My
lips.”
God wants us to be sure and secure in His
covenant.
Religion bases the covenant on man’s
obedience – which creates doubt

3.
2 Samuel 9:7 So David said to him,“Do not
fear, for I will surely show you kindness for
Jonathan your father’s sake
The covenant is based on the obedience of
Jesus, not based on our obedience.
The covenant was cut between Jesus and God
the Father. We were the sleeping partner. It
is an unbreakable covenant of grace.

4.
Our covenant is based on belief in Jesus, not
our obedience.
If it is based on our obedience, we will always
wonder if we did everything right.

5.
Romans 4:13-15 That famous promise
God gave Abraham—that he and his children
would possess the earth—was not given
because of something Abraham did or would
do. It was based on God’s decision to put
everything together for him, which Abraham
then entered when he believed. If those who
get what God gives them only get it by doing
everything they are told to do and filling out
all the right forms properly signed, that
eliminates personal trust completely and turns
the promise into an ironclad contract!

6. That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business
deal.A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed
lawyer and with plenty of fine print only
makes sure that you will never be able to
collect. But if there is no contract in the
first place, simply a promise—and God’s
promise at that—you can’t break it.

7. 16 This is why the fulfillment of God’s
promise depends entirely on trusting God
and his way, and then simply embracing him
and what he does. God’s promise arrives as
pure gift.That’s the only way everyone can
be sure to get in on it, those who keep the
religious traditions and those who have
never heard of them. For Abraham is father
of us all. He is not our racial father—that’s
reading the story backward. He is our faith
father.

8. 17-18 We call Abraham “father” not
because he got God’s attention by living like
a saint, but because God made something
out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t
that what we’ve always read in Scripture,
God saying to Abraham,“I set you up as
father of many peoples”? Abraham was first
named “father” and then became a father
because he dared to trust God to do what
only God could do: raise the dead to life,
with a word make something out of nothing

9. When everything was hopeless,Abraham
believed anyway, deciding to live not on the
basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on
what God said he would do.And so he was
made father of a multitude of peoples. God
himself said to him,“You’re going to have a
big family,Abraham!”

10. 19-25 Abraham didn’t focus on his own
impotence and say,“It’s hopeless.This
hundred-year-old body could never father a
child.” Nor did he survey Sarah’s decades of
infertility and give up. He didn’t tiptoe
around God’s promise asking cautiously
skeptical questions. He plunged into the
promise and came up strong, ready for God,
sure that God would make good on what he
had said.

11. That’s why it is said,“Abraham was declared
fit before God by trusting God to set him
right.” But it’s not just Abraham; it’s also us!
The same thing gets said about us when we
embrace and believe the One who brought
Jesus to life when the conditions were
equally hopeless.The sacrificed Jesus made
us fit for God, set us right with God.

12.
No matter what situation you are in – we
have an unbreakable covenant of favor and
grace through Jesus
Romans 8:31 What then shall we say to
these things? If God is for us, who can be
against us? 32 He who did not spare His own
Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall
He not with Him also freely give us all things?
…

13.
Romans 8:35 Who shall separate us from
the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or
nakedness, or peril, or sword?

14.
Romans 8:37 Yet in all these things we are
more than conquerors through Him who
loved us.
“more than conquerors” – hupernikao – one
who is super victorious, wins more than an
ordinary victory

15.
No matter what the situation looks like, we
have an unbreakable covenant of grace.
Hope is the confident expectation of good. We
can be sure that good will always come because
Jesus cut a blood covenant and said,“In blessing
I will bless!”
Obedience makes us insecure. We will always
wonder if we did everything right!
Belief in Jesus makes blessing, favor and victory
sure! We never have to wonder!

16. I Corinthians 11:24
“Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for
you; do this in remembrance of Me.” 25 In the
same manner He also took the cup after supper,
saying,“This cup is the new covenant in My blood.
This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance
of Me.”
26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink
this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He
comes.
.