This is the thread that runs all the way through the Scriptures: our identity, our belonging, and our purpose flow from covenant faithfulness to God’s covenant faithfulness to us; it binds us to God, to one another as God’s people, and to God’s purposes to bless the whole world.

Jesus invites us to follow him, to imitate him, to see what he sees, as he sees it. Jesus is offering us life, new life, life that is full and meaningful. But we must set our minds and hearts on the things of God. Those things that lovely, pure, beautiful, and true. We must stop trying to suck the life out of things that only make us blind or half-blind.

Who are you? What is your identity? The most important thing about you is that through Christ you are in relationship to God who will never break his promises to you.

We have been through some real hardships in Texas this past week. Houston keeps having a series of 100-year floods and now a deep chill. In Genesis, after becoming disgusted with the state of human sin, God makes a covenant promise never to drown all flesh again. That, however, does not mean we won’t have natural disasters. At the cross, Jesus definitively deals with human sin, making a new and final covenant in his blood that promises eternal life to those we believe in him.