covenant

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.

A look at the practical application of covenant.

Several years ago a friend of mine opened my eyes to the importance of covenant. He pointed out that we Christians can’t really understand our relationship to Christ and God without understanding covenant. He’s right. That’s how the New Testament describes our relationship. When you get right down to it, the Bible is not so much a record of history as it is a record of covenant history. In fact, the word “Testament” which we use to label the two major sections of the Bible is simply another word for covenant.

But what is a covenant? It’s my observation that even though we are in a covenant relationship with Christ and though Christ called the Communion we celebrate – many of us each week – a new covenant in his blood (1 Corinthians 11:25, etc.), few Christians really know what a covenant is. They would be hard pressed to define it or explain covenant to someone else.