red bull racing

The Red Bull team rather blew it all in yesterday's Turkish Grand Prix.

I'm not a connoisseur of Formula 1 by any means. But I know what's going on. Roughly.

I know that it's not just to do with the drivers. It's to do with the cars as well. That's why they have the Constructors' Championship as well as that for the Drivers.

I know that at the start of the season Red Bull had the best car. No two ways about it. I also know that the rest of the teams didn't pack up there and then and simply concede.

And not just because the cars have still to be driven: after all, anything can happen through the course of a race. The fastest car has still got to make it past the chequered flag.

But also because through the course of the season each car can be given a series of brand new engines. So all the time that the drivers are hitting the headlines, behind the scenes in the dust and sweat of the workshops, the engineers and mechanics are working away right round the clock to give to the drivers a brand new, much improved engine.

It's a good illustration of what's at the heart of the gospel. If we think of our hearts as our 'engine', we have to admit that they're flawed. They get us round the track, perhaps. But they're flawed. They don't do the job.

We can know how we're meant to be living. We can want to be living that way. But we still get it wrong. The engine's flawed.

That's the drift of the message that my namesake, Jeremiah, brought in the promise which God made.

"'The time is coming,' declares the Lord, 'when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,' declares the Lord."

That was the problem. A flawed engine. It kept breaking down. They knew how to live: they had every incentive to live that way. And yet, perversely, they got it all wrong.

Time for a new engine.

"This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,' declares the Lord. 'I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts ...'"

He puts the 'Jesus engine', the 'engine' that powered the life and living of Jesus - he puts that 'Jesus engine' in the framework of our lives. In Grand Prix terms it's like we get a brand new car. We're made a new person, from deep, deep within. By the power of the Spirit of God.

Of course, that doesn't solve all our problems. We've still got to learn to drive the car, to know how to handle the power. We've still got to learn when we need to brake, how to go through the gears, what to do to be getting the best from the car.

And as the Red Bull team showed the watching world, you can still go out and crash your car and mess up others too.

But at least we've now got an engine that will do the job.

I'm working through "Coming Alive!" again with a group of folk. And tonight we were at it once more.

Still on the first chapter, which is all to do with the new 'life' that we're able to know in Jesus.

A new family. A new person. A new start.

We spent the time on the second of these tonight. A new person. How the Lord can transform our whole lives from within, by replacing the 'engine' we have with a new and well-tuned engine.

A new heart, a new engine, a new spirit. A remarkable bit of holy engineering!