- Blog Home
Twitter Feed
- Tonight is our first night of EGS on the new night-Thursdays! The Burning Ones course with David Gordon starts tonight!
- EGS Tonight: The Burning Ones course begins
- Hi everyone! We're running a test to see if this Tweet will update FB too! Bless you!
Posts Tagged new directions
Covenant God
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
This past week, I have been learning a lot about covenants and what God thinks of them. I realized that God doesn’t just admire covenants; He is the one who invented them and has bound Himself them out of love.
The definition of a covenant is the following. “…the strongest most solemn agreement that can be made between two parties. It cannot be changed by time, space, government, circumstances, or men. It is unbreakable, and enduring to following generations.”
In the west, we don’t hear the word “covenant” at all. We are familiar with agreements, testaments, legal documents or certificates but never a covenant. We are used to “changing our minds”, “waiting till we’ve fulfilled the requirements” or “seeing if it will work out”. It seems too pre-historic or binding to use a covenant and we have totally lost the meaning. A covenant originated with God when He made the very first covenant with Noah after the flood. No one had ever made a covenant before. Gen. 9:13 “I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between be and the earth.” After that first covenant, a knowledge of covenant then spread to all the generations following.
It is interesting to note that God does not take a covenant lightly. When someone makes a covenant, He sees it as real. In Joshua chapter nine, we see Joshua had fought against Jericho and Ai and had crushed them. The Gibeonites heard it and decided to deceive the men of Israel and dress up as foreign envoys to pursuade them to make a peace covenant. So Joshua made peace with them and made a covenant to let them live. Three days later, Joshua found out that he had been tricked.
Nevertheless, Joshua and the men of Israel had sworn to them and made peace so they did not kill even one of them. Now, a King named Adoni-zedek found out that Israel had made a peace covenant with Gibeon and that Gibeon was a “great city” and “all its men were mighty”. He got afraid, so he called four other kings to go up and attack Gibeon. So they did, and the Gibeonites called Israel for help. (One of the characteristics of a covenant is “my enemies are your enemies and your enemies are mine”.) Israel came and fought against this enemy. The Lord told them that He had given the enemies over to Israel and not one of them would live. Israel had a great victory, and it says that the Lord helped them by throwing “large hailstones from heaven on them….and they died”. Wow, if God stands with someone who made a covenant out of deceit, He must really, really see a covenant as very important!
God wants us to see how serious he is when He says things. He doesn’t have to make a covenant because His very word should be enough for us. However, God wants us to be sure, for we are doubtful most of the time. He gave us many examples of what a covenant is and how He backs them up. He wants us to know Him as a “covenant God”. He is not a far away, apathetic, unfeeling God. He is real, intense, and full of passion and emotion.
Gracey Guetterman
New Prayer Room Location
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
For the last four years, IHOP-AC has been blessed by Life Fellowship Church to use their facilities freely. With the event of their new church merge and relocation, we have been given the opportunity to set up the prayer room at New Directions International. Since being in this new prayer room, we have felt a new sense of unity and comradery in our times of corporate intercession. We are excited to see what the Lord is going to do here! Pray with us as we continue to labor for God to raise up day and night prayer & revival in the region!
connect