I'd like to thank Pastor Gawbe for giving me the opportunity to preach again this morning.

My first thought was to preach on the gospel lesson because it's a little interesting to me that,

as Jesus says, the sun will make you free, the people say, we have never been in bondage to anyone.

And I wonder about the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Amarites

and the Canaanites and the Philistines and the Greeks and of course the Romans whose very

barracks is standing within view of where they stand in the temple. And it occurs to me that sometimes we forget the truth.

And that's really what I want to talk about this morning,

is forgetting the truth, and I want to talk about two different reformers

who bring us back to the truth.

One you may suspect, and the other one you may not.

So let's look at the Old Testament lesson this morning.

The Old Testament lesson comes morning the old testament lesson

comes from the prophet jeremiah from jeremiah thirty one

and jeremiah has this very optimistic vision of the future

where he sees that god will gather israel and judah

he will gather them back to him

he will make a new covenant with them, unlike the covenant that their fathers broke.

He will write his law, rather, on their hearts and on their minds.

Everyone will know the Lord.

They will all be forgiven and they will all be obedient.

And that is pretty good news.

Especially from a prophet who spent a lot of his time giving us not good news.

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