What if the New Covenant's primary act of confession isn't the one you were trained for?
Most of us learned a single direction of confession: name your failure, ask for forgiveness, return to God through the door of what went wrong. That is real. That is necessary. The cross is where the covenant begins. But Hebrews 10:23 gives the new covenant priest a second — and primary — act. The Greek is homologia tēs elpidos: the spoken declaration of hope. Hold fast. Without wavering. This episode unpacks that second act — what it is, why it matters, and why the church has trained only half of what the New Testament actually says.
HEBREWS 10:17–18 — THE COVENANT OF DIVINE FORGETTING
Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31: "Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more." This is not metaphor. This is covenantal architecture. God actively, covenantally does not retain them. Which raises the confronting question: if God has forgotten — what are you doing when you rehearse them back to Him?
HEBREWS 10:23 — THE PRIESTLY ACT
Homologia tēs elpidos. The spoken declaration of hope. The writer has been building toward a new priesthood throughout chapters 7–10: not the Levitical priests who offered sacrifice repeatedly, but a new order whose sacrifice has been made once for all. The new covenant priest doesn't keep returning to the altar. He holds fast the confession of what the altar already accomplished.
HEBREWS 6:19 — THE ANCHOR
Hope in the New Testament is not optimism. It is an anchor — firm and secure — gripping a reality beneath what is visible from the surface. The confession of hope is what you say when you drop it: I am forgiven. I am the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Kingdom of God is within me. He who promised is faithful.
1 CORINTHIANS 3:16 + LUKE 17:21 — WHAT YOU'RE CONFESSING
Paul writes with the Greek emphatic ouk oidate — "Do you not know?" — that you are God's temple and His Spirit lives in you. Jesus says in Luke 17:21 the Kingdom of God is not an external event: it is within you. The new covenant priest confesses these realities not to earn them, but to agree with what the covenant has already established.
HEBREWS 11:1 — THE SUBSTANCE
Faith is the hypostasis — the underlying substance — of things hoped for. When you confess hope, you are not manufacturing positivity. You are agreeing with what is already structurally true.
THE WIDE TABLE MOMENT
This might feel backwards if you grew up confessing failure primarily. The new covenant does not eliminate confession of sin — it establishes the primary confession as hope. A declaration of what is already true, not a petition to make it true. What you confess primarily shapes what you believe you actually are. Confess failure primarily and you live as a failing person who occasionally receives grace. Confess hope primarily and you live as a priest who occasionally returns to the altar.
THE CONNECTION TO THE SECRET PLACE
Last episode built the room. This episode gives you the language for what happens in it. The confession of hope in the Secret Place — with the door closed and no audience — stops being performance and becomes trust. An anchor dropped in front of the One who already knows the water is deep.
Key Scriptures: Hebrews 10:17–18 | Hebrews 10:23 | Hebrews 6:19 | Hebrews 11:1 | 1 Corinthians 3:16 | Luke 17:21
The Upside-Down Kingdom is a teaching podcast hosted by Seth Tillotson — a former AI developer, commercial helicopter pilot, and serial entrepreneur who found, after a season of collapse, that the Kingdom operates on entirely different principles than any system he had ever built. Season 2: The Architecture of Abiding gives you the tools. Confessing Hope is the language you speak inside them.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
