SOURCE - A Covenant God
… He has consented to bind Himself by covenant, as if He could not be trusted.
Prayer
Holy Father, cause us to truly know You as our Covenant God and to know exactly what Your Covenant promises us; cause us to have unwavering confidence of expectation that ALL of its terms WILL be fulfilled to us; to know what a claim and hold it gives us on You, the Covenant-keeping God Yourself.
Please grant us a true and living faith in it; grant that we would truly have the full knowledge of what You want to do for us; and please gran us the assurance that it will be done by Your Almighty Power. Please, draw us ever nearer to You in personal surrender, and dependence, and waiting to have it done in our lives. O Lord God, May Your Holy Spirit give us some vision of this glory of You as our Covenant-Keeping God.
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We were designed in His image and likeness in order to have God living and working in us
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The only condition for this to take place was that we were to yield ourselves in loving dependence upon God
- to be the recipient
- the bearer
- the manifestation of a Divine life
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The key to our happiness was to trustfully surrendering our whole being to the willing and working of God.
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Sin broke this relationship with God
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Man cannot redeem himself; GOD must do it all.
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We had to be brought to desire redemption; to yield our willing consent, and entrust ourselves to God
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All God wants us to do is believe in Him.
What a man believes, moves and rules his whole being, enters into him, and becomes part of his very life. Salvation could only be by faith: God restoring the life man had lost; man in faith yielding himself to God’s work and will. The first great work of God with man was to get him to believe.
Where (God) found faith He could do anything. Nothing dishonoured and grieved Him so much as unbelief.
Unbelief was the root of disobedience and every sin; it made it impossible for God to do His work. The one thing God sought to waken in men by promise and threatening, by mercy and judgment, was faith.
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This is why God used Covenants with men; to enable men to trust and believe in Him.
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God’s Covenant
- was always a revelation of His purposes through definite promises what God was willing to work in those with whom the Covenant was made.
- was a Divine pattern of the work He intended to do in our behalf, that we might know what to desire and expect, in order that our faith might nourish itself with the very things, though as yet unseen, which God was working out.
- was to be a security and guarantee that the things which He had promised would indeed be brought to pass and worked out in those with whom He had entered into Covenant.
- was to be the anchor of the soul, pledging God’s truthfulness and faithfulness and unchangeableness for the certain performance of what had been promised.
- was, above all, to give man a hold upon God, as the Covenant-keeping God - to link him to God Himself in expectation and hope, to bring him to make God Himself alone the portion and the strength of his soul.
Prayer
O Lord God, that we might know how You long that we should trust You, and how surely Your every promise must be fulfilled to those who do so! Oh that we would know how it is owing to nothing but our unbelief tat we cannot enter the possession of Your promises, and that You cannot … do Your mighty works in us, and for us, and through us! Oh that we would know how one of the surest remedies for our unbelief - Your chosen cure for it — is the Covenant into which You have entered with us!
Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant with them that love Him. — Moses
The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall My covenant of peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. — Isaiah
I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me. — Jeremiah
The Covenant secures alike that God will not turn from us, nor we depart from Him: He undertakes both for Himself and us.
- Begin to examine the terms of the Covenant
- as the title-deeds of our inheritance
- and the riches we are to possess even here on earth
… if we will think of the certainty of their fulfilment, more sure than the foundations of the everlasting mountains; if we will turn to the God who has engaged to do all for us, who keepeth covenant for ever, our life will become different from what it has been; it can, and will be, all that God would make it.
We accept salvation as His gift, and we do not know that the only object of salvation, its chief blessing, is to fit us for, and bring us back to, that close intercourse with God for which we were crated, and in which our glory in eternity will be found.
And that only is a true and good religious life, which brings us every day nearer to this God, which makes us give up everything to have more of Him. No obedience can be too strict, no dependence too absolute, no submission too complete, no confidence too implicit, to a soul that is learning to count God Himself its chief good, its exceeding joy.
In entering into Covenant with us, God’s one object is to draw us to Himself, to render us entirely dependent upon Himself, and so to bring us into the right position and disposition in which He can fill us with Himself, His love, and His blessedness.
Prayer
Oh Lord God, help us to undertake our study of the New Covenant, in which, as believers, You are at this moment living and walking with us. Cause us to have a true and honest purpose and surrender, at any price, to know what You wish to be to us, to do in us, and to have us be and do to You. O Lord God, cause Your New Covenant to become to us one of the windows of heaven through which we see into Your face and Your very heart! Please, help us O God!!!