God’s Glorious Church
The Covenant Relationship
1Thessalonians 1:1-10
Woodlawn Baptist Church
April 10, 2005
Introduction
“Paul, and Silas, and Timothy, unto the church of the Thessalonicans which is in God the Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers; remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labor of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of god and our Father; knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God. For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance, as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake. And ye became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost: so that ye were ensamples to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia. For from you sounded out the word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith to God-ward is spread abroad; so that we need not to speak any thing. For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.”
Today I want to continue our study of the Lord’s churches with a look at our covenant relationship, and while there are probably several churches in the Bible that enjoyed a great covenant relationship before God and one another, I can’t think of a passage in the Bible that expresses everything that our Church Covenant embodies the way that this passage does.
I know our covenant hangs on the wall, but most of you probably have not read it in some time if you’ve ever read it at all. I’ve given you a copy of it in your notes, and in your study time this week I want you to read it and pray that God would give you a great heart for your church and for your place in it.
Do you know what a covenant is? Or what the difference is between a covenant and a contract? While you might get varying definitions in your dictionaries, I want to give you one of my own. I want you to think of a contract as an agreement made between two parties, whether it is written or spoken. When you bought your car, you signed a contract. When you got your Visa, you entered a contract, and you can think of plenty of other examples. Contracts can be made and they can be broken. A covenant on the other hand is different. While a contract is an agreement made between two parties, I want you to think of a covenant as an agreement made between two parties before God. In fact, you’ll find in the Bible several covenants were God was one of the parties. That’s why we don’t call marriage a contract, and those who do don’t have any problem breaking it.
In Bible days, when a covenant was made, the two parties would take an animal or several animals and they would cut them in half long-ways. They would then place the halves end to end, separated down the middle with a space wide enough to walk through. The two parties would join hands and pass through the carcasses of the animals together, and while we may fail to see the significance of the act, suffice it to say that it was recognized as serious.
When two parties enter into a covenant agreement before God, what they are communicating is that they intend to keep up their end of the agreement with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their might. So, what does that have to do with the Church Covenant? Everything!
An Assessment
Folks, people are starving today for the greatness of God. I know and you know that most people don’t realize that their greatest need is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ: a genuine, life-changing, intimate and dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. They don’t know they’re starving for His greatness. They don’t know they’re starving for His holiness. They don’t know they’re starving for His righteousness, for His presence, for His purpose and for His power. They’re literally starving to death and don’t know it.
What is a shame to me is that not only are the people on the outside of our churches starving; now the people on the inside are starving too. Listen to me – your deepest need is God! He is the Bread of Life for the starving soul. He is the Living Water; He and He alone can quench the thirsty soul. But in our world where the significance of church and church ministry has diminished, we have lost sight of our purpose of serving Him up to people who are hungry and thirsty!
I am convinced that people want what Jesus has to offer. We are living in a time in history when spirituality is at an all time high. It’s on television, on the radio, in print, on the Internet, in the book stores, and everywhere else you turn its there. Oh, it may not be the spirituality that you and I know about, but the fact is that people are searching, they’re longing, they’re starving for a taste of that living bread and thirsting for a long drink from the well that never can run dry.
Now in case you’re wondering what any of this has to do with our Covenant Relationship, I want to show you. Consider how marriage is under attack today. People are living together in all sorts of relationships. Men and women living together, gays and lesbians living together, and all over the world reports say that marriage doesn’t work, and whether we like it or not when people say that they point their fingers at Christianity and say that it is irrelevant and unnecessary. The divorce rate among Christians is higher than among lost people today.
Now, does marriage work? Sure it does, but only when the marriage covenant is honored: when men and women love one another like the Bible teaches and when they relate to God in that relationship as they ought to. If there is a breakdown in those things, then there is a breakdown in the marriage. I say all that simply to say that because the marriage covenant is not honored today, marriage is not seen as all that important.
Body life in the church is no different. Because we have neglected our covenant relationship, church is not seen as all that important. We can take it or leave it, because from the outside looking in, and all too often from the inside looking around, we are a powerless, boring option that can be dropped in favor of time better spent somewhere else doing something else.
You see, we’ve become a people who know the Word of God, but we don’t know the God of the Word. “When [the people] saw the boldness of Peter and John…they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.” Somebody has said that the Lord’s churches used to be a lightning bolt, now we act more like a cruise ship, that we’re not marching to Zion – we’re sailing there with ease, that in the Bible folk were amazed at the passion and conviction with which the Word was proclaimed, now they’re only slightly amused.
The trouble I’m talking about this morning has to do with a lack of spiritual vitality among God’s people and a great love and zeal for knowing the Lord Jesus Christ and zealously living for Him! The trouble is that we’ve traded real, relevant, dynamic church body life that is energized by the Holy Spirit of God for doing church! I’m talking about you and me who have been called by God to pray and to preach and to pour our souls out reaching our world for Christ. I’m talking about you and me who have been called by God to come together as a church body for the benefit of one another, to help one another grow, to help one another mature in the faith, to help one another as we raise our families to follow Christ, to be Christlike in our actions and in our attitudes.
People are starving in the land for the glory and the greatness of God, and I’ve said this before that so far as I can see we in the Lord’s churches are like the disciples in John 4, those men who went into Samaria to buy food. Those men were followers of Christ; God-called preachers, walking and talking with the Lord in person, and they went into town and came back out with a sack of bologna sandwiches. The Samaritan woman went into the same town and brought back a host of men and women. Why didn’t they bring back those people? They knew the same Jesus, knew what He offered and that He could meet their deepest spiritual needs. Why didn’t they bring the crowd back? Let me tell you why – because they were playing around.
“Christianity wasn’t served up to the world on a silver platter. Christianity was born in a sophisticated, totalitarian society. The early church was walled in on one side with the mightiest military machine in history, the power of Rome. It was walled in on the other side with Greek intellectualism. It was blocked ahead by the monopoly the Jews thought they had on God. Those men who turned the world upside down had no colossal intellectual ability. They had no great financial backing. They had no social standing. They were about the most despised men in and around Jerusalem, and yet they broke out somehow – and later it was said that they turned the whole world upside down.
Think about what one man has said, “This is the church of Jesus Christ before it became fat and out of breath by its prosperity. This is the church of Jesus Christ before it became muscle bound by over organization. This is the church of Jesus Christ where they didn’t gather together a group of intellectuals to study psycho-sematic medicine, they just healed the sick. This is the church of Jesus Christ where they didn’t just say prayers, they were filled with the Spirit of God and they prayed.”
What God wants is not to fill up empty pews. He is not concerned about filling empty churches; He is concerned about filling empty hearts and empty lives and empty eyes that have no vision. He wants to fill empty hearts that have no passion and empty wills that have no purpose. And now I ask you this: how does God intend to do those things? From the first church at Jerusalem to us today God has intended to accomplish His purposes through the ministry of the local church.
The Church Covenant? It’s not the piece of paper or even the words on it that are all that important. What matters is the message it contains. If we’ll make our covenant relationship one that matters, if we’ll come alive with the purpose and the passion that God has intended for us; if we’ll ever wake up to the reality that we have been placed in the most important organization on the face of the earth and realize the power that God has given us, I fully believe the world will take notice, and people will quit walking by with only a slight interest. So what is the message of the Church Covenant? What kind of relationship is it that we have? What are the key elements?
Very quickly let me give them to you, and you’ll see every one of them in our text.
God Is Lord
Over and over Paul mentioned the Lord God, or the Lord Jesus Christ. I think sometimes we forget this. You know and I know God is Lord, but when we make church decisions, we act like money is the lord or what we’ve always done is the lord, or what others think is the lord. Listen, God is our Lord! God builds the church; God adds to the church; God directs the church; God equips us; empowers us; protects His us; and provides for us.
Whatever He says should go and whenever He says to do it we should do it. If we can say no to God, then He’s not our Lord. But if God is our Lord, then everything we are and everything we do has to be brought into the light of His leadership, His will and His Word.
Salvation Is Fundamental
The Thessalonian church was made up of believers in Jesus Christ. They had received the Word of God, had placed their faith in Christ, and now they were out preaching the same message to everyone they could find.
If our church isn’t about salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and Him alone, then I say we pack it up and go home! The fact of the matter is that not everyone is going to heaven, but as believers in Christ we have agreed to come together in part to do all we can to lead others to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. We’ve lost our passion for the lost. We’ve lost our way! We’ve forgotten that our job, your job is to be telling folk they need a Savior.
Why? Because before Adam sinned, he and God enjoyed a wonderful, intimate relationship with each other, but when Adam sinned, he in essence turned his back on God. God found Adam’s act so repulsive that He turned His back on man. They were at enmity with one another. The Bible tells us that “no man seeks after God,” and had God never acted, man never would have turned to seek out a relationship with God again. But God, who is rich in mercy, made a way whereby man’s relationship to God could be restored. The book of Ephesians tells us that when we were far from God He made peace possible through Jesus Christ. He broke down, destroyed the enmity and hatred that existed, so that what we have now is God turning back to man with outstretched arms offering a restored relationship. Man stands with his back turned to a seeking and saving God.
Listen, our job is to reach that man, whoever it is. It may be your momma, your daddy, your brother or sister or next door neighbor or coworker. What do they have to do to receive what God is offering? They need to turn around and face God. In other words, you’ve got to repent, turn from that life of independence from God and admit to God that you can’t do what you’ve been trying to do on your own. When we turn to God we are admitting to Him and to ourselves that we need help. When we turn to face God in repentance and confession we trust Him to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, receiving the gift of salvation and eternal life.
It’s just that easy! You don’t have to be good, you don’t have to pay up, lay anything down, clean up or turn anything over. That plan of salvation is the only one God is going to accept – and it’s the only one that will work. If you would be saved, then you’ve got to repent of your sin, confess it to God and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ – and you will be saved!
Body Life Is Important
The entire second paragraph of our covenant is about church body life. Without going into a lot of detail, the real reason church isn’t seen as all that important by the world out there is because of the way the people in here treat it. Why should they go to church when we can find more important things to do than attend?
Does the world out there see us striving for our church’s advancement? Do they see you walking in holiness? Do they see you growing spiritually? Excited about God and what you’re learning? Do they see you in worship? Do you hold to biblical doctrine? Contribute cheerfully and regularly? Does the world see us really caring about the poor? Do they see any intensity about us?
Conclusion
I know I’m out of time, so let me just point out that the third paragraph is about life transformation, and the next is about brotherly love. Listen, do you know what the world really needs to see from our church? They need to see evidence in us that God is the Lord here, that the salvation of souls is important, that we value church, that our lives are really being changed, and that we love one another. The world doesn’t need more dry sermons – it needs people like me and you to experience genuine revival and come alive!
When Paul wrote his letter to the church at Thessalonica, they were enjoying the covenant relationship we’ve been talking about the way God intends for every church to enjoy it, and the result was that more and more people were attracted to it. I believe that the same thing can happen today. Sometimes I think we wonder why God doesn’t send people our way, or why people in our community don’t seem to care about church. The reason should be obvious to us – because we are the reason.
Now you can sit back and point fingers and criticize others in our church for what they’re not doing. We’ve all done that haven’t we? I’m guilty this morning, but that’s not going to move us. A return to a biblical covenant relationship is only going to happen when two things take place. First of all there needs to be some repentance. I don’t know what you might need to repent of, but God knows and I believe that He has probably been showing you this morning. Maybe you’ve allowed something else to control your thinking besides Him. Maybe you’ve been neglecting family devotions, or private devotions, and you know that your spiritual intensity is not where it ought to be. Maybe you’ve been allowing other things to replace church attendance, or you’ve been harboring ill feelings toward someone in the church.
I don’t know what God has been saying to you, but if you’ve given your heart to Him this morning, I am confident that He’s already led you there, and now it is time to repent. The second thing that must take place for our church to experience a dynamic covenant relationship is prayer. Today I am pleading with you to get on your knees for our church; to get on your knees for God to do something great in and through our church; for people to get right; for people to be saved, to repent; for families to get together, for marriages to be healed; for us to experience a God-sized revival in every way. I’m begging you to come to the altar, or to bow right where you are, and beg God today for Him to move among us.
If you’ve never received Christ as your Savior today, He is calling to you. He is knocking at the door of your heart; He wants to come in, but the knob is only on the inside. Only you can make the choice to receive Christ as your Savior. Would you receive Him today?
