WHEN GOD WANTS TO KEEP A COVENANT WITH A MAN, HE IS INTERESTED IN WHAT THAT MAN DOES, DAY-TO-DAY.
IF GOD IS IN A COVENANT WITH YOU, YOU CANNOT JUST GO ANYWHERE YOU LIKE. OTHERS CAN DO WHAT THEY LIKE, BUT YOU CANNOT.
GOD DOESN’T PUT MEN WHO HAVE A COVENANT RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM IN THE SAME CLASS AS THOSE WHO ARE JUST ON THEIR OWN. HE IS USUALLY MORE DELIBERATE ABOUT THOSE WITH WHOM HE IS IN A COVENANT.
- Pastor Gbile Akanni at RCCG Australia Pacific Virtual Conference 2021 themed “Covenant Keeping God”
Day 2, Session 2
Genesis 12: 1-2
God was looking for another man He could use after the flood had taken place. Now, He found Abraham. I know so many of you are very excited when you sing “Abraham’s blessings are mine”, but I wish you will want to put yourself in the lineage of men like Abraham, men with whom God could strike a covenant, men and women with whom God could enter a covenant, knowing that they would not fail Him. Abraham was called out, he had to let go of the visible and pursue the invisible. He had to let go of his family and all he could call his inheritance, he left not knowing where he was going. That is a man with whom God could enter a covenant.
While I would love to speak about the covenant-keeping God, I would also like to talk about the men with whom God keeps covenant, because that is the major issue. We are looking for men and women, out of this conference that will say, ‘If Abraham was a man when you entered into a covenant with him; if Noah was a man living in a particular village when you entered into a covenant with him; and if all those who carried your covenant blessing were men and women like myself, why not me?’. In that chapter 15, God again appeared to Abraham, because when God wants to walk with you in a covenant relationship, your life matters to God. ChurchGist. When God wants to keep a covenant with you, your life can’t be zig-zag. God is interested in who you are and who you will become because of His covenant with your life. When God wants to keep a covenant with a man, He is interested in what that man does, day-to-day.
I saw that when Abraham went down to Egypt in Chapter 12, he was going to walk out of the will of God, he was going to walk into something that was contradictory to the intention of God for his life. When he walked to Egypt because there was famine, you see how God organized and compelled the king of Egypt to send him out. When God is in covenant with you, you can’t go anywhere you like, others can do what they like, but you cannot. Famine, difficulty, inflation or deflation must never in any way come between you and God, because you are a child of covenant.
In chapter 13, you see God again when Abraham’s and Lot’s herdsmen were struggling. Lot could stay with a man of covenant but God had no covenant with Lot. So, you may see people that have no lot in God’s lot, grabbing things that look like they are important, but when a man has entered into a covenant relationship with God, God is much more deliberate about him. Genesis 13: 14-18. ChurchGist. Because God is committed unto His covenant relationship with Abraham, God did not allow him to be struggling with a Lot. God doesn’t put men who have a covenant relationship with Him in the same class as those who are just on their own. Will you be man or woman with whom God can strike a covenant?
Genesis 14: 14-24. Did you notice that the king of Sodom already went out to meet Abraham after his return? Verse 21 would have been the next verse, but in between verse 17 and verse 21, we saw a divine interruption? Why? God was so jealous about Abraham; He would not allow him to contaminate what He was doing in his life with something from Sodom. So, we saw a strange king, Melchizedek, a man who must have come from heaven, he came and blessed Abraham. In between verse 17 and verse 21, Abraham had an encounter that repositioned him for God’s purpose for his life.
My brother, my sister, the covenant that God wants to make with your life, which may even transcend you and pass on to your children and all those that God wants to bless through you, are you already destroying it by taking the goods of Sodom? The contaminated inputs of the world system? God was meticulously working to bring Abraham into this covenant that he would not want him to destroy or fail, when Abraham refused that, chapter 15 came as God renewing His covenant with him. Genesis 15: 1-6. Abraham asked God, ‘How will this thing be?’ Then, God gave him a token as He gave Noah a sign in the cloud, God gave him a token here, Genesis 15: 13-14. Do you know that God was watching that aspect of the covenant? ChurchGist. The day the children of Israel were to leave Egypt, the Bible said they left with great plunder, Exodus 12: 35-36. They didn’t go empty-handed. According to the covenant that God made with Abraham in chapter 15, four hundred and thirty years earlier, it came to pass.
The issue have we have raised is that God is a covenant keeping God, there is no controversy about that; God would keep his covenant, there is no doubt around that; every word that comes out of the mouth of the Lord, He watches over it to bring it to pass, brothers and sisters, that is settled; if God says a word to you, heaven and earth may pass but not one jot would go without being fulfilled, that I want to assure you, is true. It was not only true in the days of men of old like Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it was not only true with them, it is true with us now.
A covenant relationship is always between two. We have established God on one side as the covenant keeping God, we need to deal with the second component of every covenant, YOU; what manner of man or woman you ought to be. For Noah, God could enter into a covenant with him because he was righteous; by obedience, he could condemn the men of his generation. Abraham was an obedient man who could leave all he had to follow God’s word without knowing where he was going. I want to ask you tonight, can you be a man, can you be a woman with whom God can strike a covenant? ChurchGist. The covenant-keeping God has no problem with keeping covenant, the major challenge is, do we have men and women with whom God can strike a covenant even now? Can you present yourself to God and say, here I am? Are you harbouring secret sin and expecting God to keep a covenant with you? Is there something standing between you and your saviour? God never breaks covenant; it is man that walks away from covenant. The biggest covenant God is making now is Jesus Christ. Christ is the epitome of the covenant God is making with us on the surface of the earth now.
#RCCGAustraliaPacificVirtualConference2021
#8thOctober2021
#CovenantKeepingGod
#PastorGbileAkanni
#ChurchGist
