Christian living

As I left the podium someone in the audience called out, “You did not disappoint.” Though the remark gratified, it sort of rolled off me. However, his remark became more meaningful a few minutes later when I asked my wife how the previous speaker had done. I didn’t have the opportunity to hear him as I was teaching the youth at the time.

“It was a total bomb!” she said. The vehemence of her reply rocked me back on my heels as she is normally so gracious and quick to point out the positive. It seems that the speaker – a young man, newly married, without children, just starting out in ministry – declared to his incredulous audience that from that moment forward they could live their lives without sinning. (Please note that I do not hold those attributes against the man. I only mention them to point out his lack of experience and seasoning.)

How being in covenant should impact us as a church.

In a previous post, I wrote about what it means to be in the marriage covenant. In this post I want to explore being in covenant relationship with God and what that means to the church. When we realize what it means to be in covenant relationship to God, it changes our whole perspective. We learn to look at God differently. We look at Scripture differently. We look at the world differently.

It follows that when people who have learned to look at everything through the lens of covenant, come together as a church, that church will also see things differently than it did before. Imagine a church filled with people who are alive to what it means to be in covenant relationship.

Before talking about that, let’s explore the concept of covenant a little more.

What motivates us to do right?

My daughter aspires to a career writing children’s literature. I think she’ll succeed. She has a good imagination, she’s developed a unique voice in her writing and has the necessary discipline to park fundament in chair in front of computer for the requisite time to capture her plots. Where she may have some trouble is on the business side of things. You see, these days there are too many choices to make. It isn’t like the old days when there was basically only one route to publication.