19 March 2023
A Covenant life recognizes four types or roles in this world.
Notice that I'm not saying this is what people are, but rather what role they play in your Covenant life. This is the breakdown of how you respond to other humans based on their significance under the Covenant. The fundamental feudal nature of human existence means you must decide in any given context how to address the people involved. Those who are family warrant more of your attention, and have a valid claim on you and your resources. Allies are rather like hired help for the covenant family, but having no vested interest in outcomes. That third category is not as insulting as it seems; they are still people, and could potentially change their roles by how they act. They remain important enough to consider as people, but the role they play is minimal in Kingdom business. Thus, they are rather like servers who have more important things to worry about than your business, or simply bystanders, people passing through the scene. They represent an unrealized potential. And the final category is anyone who seeks to undermine your covenant obedience, aggressing against God's commands as you understand them from Word and conviction.
The core issue here is their involvement in your covenant mission. Everyone plays a role, and within the Covenant boundaries, everyone has a mission. For example, childhood is itself a mission, though not so much a calling. A calling has to do with a conscious sense of drive, an awareness that your convictions demand something. We seek to instill in children this awareness; we strive to create an atmosphere in which they develop a sense of heart leadership and moral sensitivity, of gradually becoming more aware of their fleshly nature as a threat.
We are building the Kingdom of Heaven. We make no pretense of investing ourselves outside of the Covenant community. We don't expect the world to take us seriously, and we certainly don't take their ambitions seriously. We may be involved for the sake of infiltration and the harvest of souls, but we never get caught up in human concerns. The Covenant is everything. What isn't part of the Covenant is of no real interest.
Most human religious activity is outside the Covenant. There's nothing wrong with being member of a church, if your convictions require it, but you should never forget that most churches are organized and act outside the Covenant boundaries. The biggest hurdle is the tribal feudal organizing principles in the Covenant; this disqualifies the vast majority of church organizations. Indeed, I'm not aware of a single institution that builds on that foundation. And yet it is the core of Creation itself. So for us, church people are often allies at best, and they can easily become enemies.
By the same token, you'll recognize that the Code HOWTO is not very specific. There's a very good reason for that: Each covenant community must build its own, unique identity under elders and pastors. Notice one of the fundamental concepts here:
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15)
and
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)
We should be like surgeons with the Sword of the Spirit. We should be able to discern when something in the Bible is contextual to the time and place recorded, and when something is universal to our human existence. But we are accountable to the Holy Spirit speaking in our convictions, not some scholarly standard erected by mere men who seek to rule over your conscience. In practice, each member of a covenant body must discern the difference between divine command and the elder's contextual application. There must be a living, dynamic grasp that recognizes someone has to draw the lines so they can provide spiritual covering for the rest. Your duty is to choose a body and elder you can tolerate, because there will always be some tension between your best understanding and his.
And elders need to avoid taking themselves too seriously. They should not presume to control more than what God has placed in their hands. The end goal is a body of members who need less guidance, because they have a strong sense of moral boundaries of their own. Elders should seek to work themselves out of a job, while knowing they'll never arrive at any particular accomplishment. Their guidance is conditional on the member choosing to remain under their covering, and sooner or later many are likely to graduate and move on to something else, and some will fall away for any number of reasons.
But there's something that must register in everyone's soul: It's the process, not the end product. What the Covenant boundaries look like on the ground depends on the ground. The Covenant life is necessarily contextual and experiential. Each body must put meat on the bones. You must actively defer to your convictions, individual and shared, and work out with fear and trembling how to blend it all together. Make it fit the context so that God is glorified. The reason I keep urging people to build a Covenant existence over the next twenty years while the Lord demonstrates His patience is because we don't have a good historical legacy of Covenant life. The church leadership quickly lost their way, so that by 300 AD, they had been seduced to seek pagan government approval to lighten the load of persecution. We haven't had a lot of genuine Covenant living since then, though at times some elements of that glory did shine through.
The point is that we have almost nothing right now, and if we are going to send a message of divine truth, the only way is to manifest it in practice. We don't expect to change the world, but we do have an obligation to serve notice on how God defines sin, and how His wrath falls on it. In practice, we cannot separate between saying it and doing it. If we don't do it, nothing we say matters. Sure, prophesy of sin and grace, but that prophetic word must stand first on the platform of living it. We preach Covenant and conviction; build a life that gives the message meaning.
Don't worry about how the message is received; that's not our department. Just make sure the message goes out clearly as God defines it. If you stand alone where you live right now, give God time to change that situation. Just do the best you know. However, make your heart and mind ready for others to join you when the Lord moves in the hearts of others based on your testimony. A critical part of your message is how you harvest the miracles and blessings of His Covenant. Secure those blessings where you are right now.
But we need a vision of how God works to bring His sheep into the green pasture and quiet waters that miraculously appear wherever any one soul stands for His Covenant. Seek His face; realize that He has given us a little time to raise up something He will remember when we stand before His judgment throne.
We have about twenty years folks; get started already.
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