Covenant Preaching Series

At my new church in Cape Town we will be following a 6 week sermon series based on the Wesleyan covenant prayer (as rewritten by John van de Laar) culminating in the Covenant Service on the 24 February. It promises to be challenging to both myself as a preacher but also to the congregation as we really get into the meat of the prayer. I would greatly appreciate any comments...even on the future themes for the next 5 sermons to come :).

The series themes are as follows:

13 January – God’s Association: May you decide what I should do and with whom I should do it

20 January – God’s Guidance: May you guide when I should be active and when I should rest

27 January – God’s Sustenance: May you sustain me when I am well and when I suffer

3 February - God’s “Success”: May you be reflected in me when I am praised and when I am challenged

10 February – God’s Provision: May I give thanks to you when I enjoy abundance, and when I know what it is to go without

17 February – God’s Call: May my whole life be given in service of your love and salvation, use all that I have and all that I am for your purposes

24 February – Covenant Service: And may I always remember that you, O God, and I belong to each other. This is my commitment - I stand by it

Here is the first of the sermons...

God’s Association: May you decide what I should do and with whom I should do it

Readings: Acts 10:9-28

Introduction

Introduce the series
· For the next 6 weeks we will be focussing on preparing ourselves for the Covenant Service. The way in which we will be doing this is by means of using the Wesleyan Covenant Prayer as rewritten by John van de Laar in Knysna and looking at each of the imperative sentences so that we can have a better understanding of what it means to renew our covenant with God.
Covenant prayer
· The prayer itself reads as such:
God of the Covenant,
I place my life in your hands – for it to be yours to direct and not mine
May you decide what I should do and with whom I should do it;
May you guide when I should be active and when I should rest;
May you sustain me when I am well and when I suffer;
May you be reflected in me when I am praised and when I am challenged;
May I give thanks to you when I enjoy abundance, and when I know what it is to go without;
May my whole life be given in service of your love and salvation, use all that I have and all that I am for your purposes;
And may I always remember that you, O God, and I belong to each other.
This is my commitment - I stand by it.
And I ask that you, Jesus, bear witness to it.
Amen.
Theme: God’s Association
· So today we will be looking at the sentence that says: May you decide what I should do and with whom I should do it. The overriding theme will be God’s association.
Association – club of like minded people
· Now God’s Association may well ring as some sort of a club or group of like minded people. If I think of football or soccer, the FA (Football Association) is a group of like-minded people with the same goals. So I would not be surprised if you were to say to me that you are certain that the sermon will be about who we as Christians should or should not associate with.
Sermon re: first line of prayer…not a comfortable prayer
· Here’s the thing; this sermon is about the first line of the Covenant Prayer. This particular prayer does not sit well with anyone who wants to sit back and not be challenged by their commitment to God. It does not sit well with people who want to remain comfortable in their faith. This prayer has everything to do with challenging us to the point at which we must change. That is why I decided to do a series on the Covenant prayer. I have seen far too often how people will say the prayer and not really be interested in what it says, or how it challenges the way we live our lives.
Does offer some comfort
· Now let me say this, although the prayer offers little comfort to us, it does offer comfort at the end of the prayer… And may I always remember that you, O God, and I belong to each other. An assurance that God is indeed always with us and offers us a peace that surpasses our understanding.

1. God deciding what we should do

First part of the sentence… all have said it as long as it fits us
· In the first sentence it says; “May you decide what I should do”. I think that most of us would happily say that as we have for many years that has passed. The trouble is that often it is a case of I will do it if it fits in my construct of what God should want us to do. We would assume that as long as it makes sense to us or fits our construct then that is what God is saying.
Illustration: Bank robbery
· A story is told of two men who worked in the audit department of a large bank. They made an overnight trip to a distant branch of the bank, and were dining in a local restaurant. The chief auditor told the other man, “First we’ll hit the tellers, and then get the vault.” They arrived at the bank the next morning, only to be promptly arrested by the state police. Upon inquiry, they discovered that a police captain had eaten at the same restaurant and had overheard the conversation about “hitting the tellers and getting the vault.” The police captain had made a very good assumption about the situation, based on the information as he had overheard it, but his assumption was also very wrong.

Peter bases God’s will on his own assumption
· One man in the bible made a similar mistake; he had based what he thought God wanted him to do on his own experience of his faith and its rules. That man was Peter, a good upstanding Jewish man. We read about the vision that he had and what it lead to. The very thing that Peter would never have done was to eat anything that the law did not allow…this would have been unacceptable to God in his mind. Yet God surprises him, God challenges him. The passage tells us that he was challenged to eat what was unclean, even though that did not fit into his understanding of what God would have required from him. He had heard right in terms of the law but assumed wrong in terms of thinking that God could not do something different in his life.
Don’t let preconceived ideas stop us from seeing what God wants us to do
· Don’t let our preconceived ideas of how God works stop us from being open to the fact that God is pretty creative and will usually surprise us. We just need to look a little past our constructs of God…God is not as small as we think.
God’s point was to tell him to associate with anybody whom God shows.
· We all know though that, according to the passage, that the point of what God was trying to get across was not about Peter having to eat unclean food, although I am quite pleased since this passage frees me from the guilt of eating bacon and seafood (both regarded unclean according to Levitical law).
· So that brings me to the next part of the prayer sentence… and with whom I should do it.

2. “Free association”

Free association and AFM
· I was watching a documentary on the AFM church the other day and how the so called white church and black church reconciled and were joined once again in unity. I remember that during the process of all of this was a cry for the right to “free association”. In other words, we can choose with whom we associate with or not. So that meant that, although the church was united, people could still choose to keep a congregation white or black. Now I guess that most of us would hold on to a right like that in our personal lives because we know that there are just certain people that we personally don’t feel comfortable associating with…we are human after all.
If we hold onto the right we may miss what God want us to do
· But here is the challenge; we are going to prayer this prayer as a covenant to God in 6 weeks time. If we are to hold on to the right to free association and only associate with the people we want to, we will be insincere in that prayer. We may also miss what God wants us to do because it may mean that we need to associate with those people we choose not to.
Vision was to challenge Peter to associate with Gentiles
· The Challenge was there for Peter as well. As much as he knew he was not to eat anything unclean, he was also not to associate with anybody that was unclean…that was the law! But the very vision that he had to eat what was “unclean” according to the law lead him to have to associate with people who were regarded unclean…gentiles.
Take a step back – Jesus hung out with “uncleans”
· Now let us just take a step back here. Let us look at Jesus and his ministry. I seem to recall that Jesus spent most of his time and ministry around the people who were unclean and rejected by society. It is little wonder that he challenged Peter to do the very same thing…associate with the Gentiles.
We can miss out on God’s blessing if we choose to “associate freely” but exclusively.
· I trust that what was true for Peter would be true for us as Christians 2000 odd years later. We can so easily miss out on God’s blessing on ourselves and others when we choose to exclude certain people because they don’t fit our construct. Can you imagine if Peter had his way…the church would not be where it is now, it would have been just for the Jews. What I find interesting is that the church can be the greatest place of exclusion. And when we do include it is often a very limited inclusion…we are not always happy to allow God to work through the “excludeds”.

Conclusion

Here the challenge – it won’t result in Lightening bolts if we break covenant
· So here’s the challenge for us for the next 6 weeks, as we prepare to say those words… May you decide what I should do and with whom I should do it. It is easy to make a covenant and break it…we do it all the time, I mean there aren’t exactly going to be lightening bolts coming down when we break it…but there will be consequences.
Consequence of breaking covenant is missing out on God’s blessing
· In every circumstance were any human has not kept their end of the deal with God in a covenant, there have been consequences. People haven’t died but they have excluded themselves from the very thing that God wants them to do and thus bless them. The Israelites had to winder for 40 years before they could see God’s promised blessing.
God has our best interest at heart
· God has got only our best interests at heart, that I can promise you. Trust that when we allow God to put us to work or to associate us with anybody he wants us to…that is when God will bless us. Allow God to surprise you, don’t let your own will supersede his.

Amen.