Devotional: Commanded & Commissioned for Abundant Life

by Superintendent Garth McGrath

All Covenant Churches are guided primarily by two passages of scripture. The Preamble to the  Constitution of the Evangelical Covenant Church – which is found in the organizing documents of every Covenant Church – states that the Evangelical Covenant Church is a communion of congregations gathered by God, united in Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to obey the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.

The Great Commandment is in Matthew 22:34-40 “Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together.  One of them, an expert in the law, tested Jesus with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest command in the Law?”  Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.”  If Jesus had stopped here the Pharisees who heard him might have relaxed. It was a direct quote from Deuteronomy 6, the Great Creed of the Jewish people. But Jesus didn’t stop there. He continued immediately in verse 39, “And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

As Scott McNight points out so clearly in his book, The Jesus Creed, Jesus’ interpretation of the Greatest Commandment indicates that it says two things: First, if you want to respond to God’s love for you, love God back with everything you’ve got: heart soul and mind. Second, if you want to respond to God’s love for you, love your neighbor! In other words, loving God back didn’t mean just writing down, memorizing, and obeying laws. It meant more than having an intellectual grasp of the concept of God, more than just having a ‘religious experience’ and more than simply following a list of rules. Loving God back meant entering into a personal relationship with God by receiving His forgiveness of sin, and by trusting that Jesus was who he said he was – the son of the living God, the way, the truth and the life, the only means by which a person can enter into the kingdom of God. And By Loving God back, Jesus meant devoting one’s  life to consciously and intentionally following Him day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year.

In my experience, people in Covenant Churches have responded to God’s gifts of grace, unconditional love and forgiveness of sin with years (and in most cases decades) of faithful, vibrant worship, years of faith study of God’s word, years of contributing sacrificially to Kingdom work to their local church, Conference ministry and the larger Evangelical Covenant Church, and years of striving to be genuine followers of Jesus in their work places, schools, and neighborhoods. But just as Jesus didn’t stop at the end of the Jewish Creed our churches have not stopped there either!

Members and attendees in all of our Covenant Churches do well in loving their neighbors inside their church. Warm fellowship and friendship are always evident in the churches I visit. And most of our churches do well in loving at least some of their neighbors outside their church, too.  Typically, Covenant Churches are very intentional about meeting the physical needs of people in their community through some kind of ministry of mercy that meets such needs.  Many of our churches extend that kind of love to people in other parts of the country and overseas through support of – or partnership with – Christian organizations that provide physical care or education to impoverished people. Some of our churches demonstrate their love of neighbor by striving for racial righteousness and by initiating ministries of justice in their community and beyond.  They recognize that loving a neighbor means doing what you can to assure that he or she is treated justly and fairly by others.

The second passage of scripture that guides all Covenant Churches is the  GREAT COMMISSION found in Matthew, chapter 28:16-20: Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.  And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. 

It is a clear calling and a grand mission, which the early church took seriously. And off they went to make disciples starting  in Jerusalem, then Judea and Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth. Within decades there were churches started in cities all over the Mediterranean basin. Churches where the gospel was preached, people came to Christ, and disciples were made through the careful teaching of the Christian faith.

Most Covenant Churches are faithful to the “baptizing them…” and the  “teaching them…” aspects of the Great Commission. Sunday School classes, Small Group ministries, Men’s and Women’s groups and Confirmation Classes can be found in most of our churches.  And many churches support outside evangelistic ministries like our Camps, Inter-varsity, Cru, and ECC serve-globally personnel.  But where churches tend to be not as strong, is in the part of the Great Commission that calls us – each of us individually and personally – to engage with others in such a way that people who do not yet know Jesus can have the opportunity to meet Jesus and begin to follow him.

I came to a personal faith in Jesus after reading the Bible for 9 months because a medical doctor took a risk, picked me up while I was “hitch-hiking” on I-94 outside of Ann Arbor, MI, and in the course of an easy conversation about his life (which I asked him about) he spoke of having a personal relationship with God. Intrigued, over the next 9 months I read the Bible cover to cover and in the process realized that I was a sinner in need of a Savior. I have been growing in that relationship ever since, learning what it means to love God and love all my neighbors. I don’t recommend that you hitch-hike, or pick up a hitchhiker. But as we prepare for a year of ministry through our churches, I do encourage you to pray about who might be the one person in your world that God might be prompting you to build a relationship with that could lead to an opportunity to have a conversation about faith, or at least an invitation to a worship service or a special event at your church. Someone who doesn’t know Jesus yet. Someone God can use to impact hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives for God’s glory and neighbor’s good, if only someone would open the door for them.  “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore, (you) go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.