*Title:* Keeping the Covenant — Pastor Kyle Baldwin, May 16, 2026

“Have you ever heard someone say that they are a new covenant Christian?” Pastor Kyle Baldwin opens this sermon with a question most churchgoers have heard — and many have never stopped to test. If we are under a new covenant now, does that mean the old one, with its Ten Commandments, is finished? And if the new covenant replaced the old, who exactly is it for? The answers, he shows, are simpler — and more surprising — than the slogans suggest. The sermon begins where the covenant itself begins: at Sinai, after the golden calf, when God told Moses to cut two new tablets and then “wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant” (Exodus 34:28). The Ten Commandments are not an appendix to the covenant. They are the covenant — its very terms, which is why the chest that held them was called the ark of the covenant.

But before God gave a single commandment, He reminded Israel what He had already done: He had brought them out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Deuteronomy 7 explains that God chose Israel not because they were numerous or impressive — they were the fewest of all people — but because He loved them and kept the oath He had sworn. God is the initiator of the covenant, and He is its finisher too: Ezekiel 36 promises a new heart and a Spirit who will “cause you to walk in my statutes.” The people at Sinai answered rightly — “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do” — yet they broke the very words they had heard God speak. That is why Jeremiah 31 announces a new covenant, made, remarkably, with the same house of Israel and Judah.

What makes that covenant new is the question the sermon turns on, and the answer dismantles two common errors at once. The new covenant is not for Christians instead of Jews: Paul says a Jew is one inwardly, that all who belong to Christ are Abraham’s seed, and that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. And it is not new because the terms changed — the terms are the same words, the same Ten Commandments. What changed is where they are written: not only on stone, but “in their inward parts,” on the heart (Jeremiah 31:33). Ancient Israel honored God with their lips while their hearts were far away, and the word they heard did not profit them because it was not mixed with faith. The sermon closes where the gospel always closes: Jesus came to set the captives free from sin, the covenant has not changed because God has not changed, and through faith we become the commandment-keeping followers He always intended. The only question left is the one Pastor Baldwin leaves with the congregation: will you keep the covenant today?

*Key texts:* Exodus 34:1, 27–28; Exodus 19:5–6, 8; Deuteronomy 7:7–8; Ezekiel 36:26–27; Jeremiah 31:31–34; Romans 2:28–29; Galatians 3:28–29; Hebrews 4:2; Isaiah 29:13; Isaiah 61:1–2; 1 John 3:21–24

*Watch:* https://youtu.be/TK6ovLB7x3g · *Listen:* https://cloud-1de12d.becdn.net/media/original/da56e29f39aab273fe6050dc7f2d1a9a.mp3