This sermon was preached on April 25, 2021 at The Grove Church in Maple Grove, MN. View the sermon here.

Introduction

Good morning.  I’m Bill English. Along with Kathy, my wife, we have been attending here for roughly 12 years. For those who are visiting, I am not on staff here, though I am seminary trained to be a pastor. Right now, I work in business in the turnaround field – the firm at which I’m a partner takes businesses which are within days or hours of declaring bankruptcy and we make them profitable again. In a good year, we’ll save over a thousand jobs. Enough about me.

Last Fall, pastor Scott and I started to have discussions around stewardship in our church and what we could do to help others experience God’s best for them in the area of stewardship and generosity. In early January, Scott asked if I would do a series on stewardship which was originally slated to be delivered after the It’s complicated series. He had assigned me the last two Sundays in May and the first two in June to do this series.

But COVID has affected a few of our staff members, including Pastor Scott and others have had to quarantine due to COVID exposure. So I was called this past Monday to see if I could move up my series and start it today. I agreed to do so.

This means we’re going to take a pit stop from our current series, It’s Complicated and take the next four Sundays to go through this series titled A Generous People. After that, we’ll finish It’s Complicated series. This will give our staff time to get past COVID and rest up.

BTW – I wanted to say that I spoke with him yesterday. He’s not physically well, but he and Erica are in good spirits. He wanted me to relay to all of you their gratefulness for your prayers, the meals you’ve brought over and how you all have supported him and his family. I know he’s chompin-at-the-bit to get back here with us, so please keep him in your prayers.

The purpose in doing this series is to give a clear teaching on what the Bible has to say about stewardship and generosity. We’re not spending time on this because our church is experiencing a financial shortage. There are no hidden agendas here. We’re not doing this to guilt-trip anyone nor are we interested in shaming anyone. Instead, we’re doing this series because we love you and we want God’s best for you!

And frankly, next to the problems we sometimes have in connecting with other people, the connection to our wealth is the next most common area where we most likely miss out on God’s best. 

I recognize that this series may be the most direct, sustained teaching on stewardship and generosity which many have heard in a long time. So I’ll be teaching from the assumption that the content we’ll cover over these four Sundays will be new to many who are listening right now.

Central Idea

So, let me start this series with the central idea that sums up all four Sundays in one sentence:

Sneak Preview of Series

Today: The Context of Stewardship – Covenants, faithfulness and believing loyalty. We’ll learn that covenants form the context for stewardship and generosity.

Next Sunday: The Foundation of Stewardship – specifically, ownership and entrustments in Matthew 25. We’ll learn that God owns everything and all which we have are merely entrustments from God.

May 9 – Mother’s Day: The Life of Stewardship – look at a Biblical view of debt and saving and hoarding. We’ll learn that the Bible discourages but does not prohibit debt. We’ll also learn that hoarding is excessive saving.

May 16: The Heart of Stewardship – look at a Biblical view of generosity and giving within the context of our covenant relationship with God.

Undeniable Truth

I now fully believe that financial generosity is the solution to so many problems in our church and society that it is difficult to overstate or exaggerate the importance of Christians becoming generous with their money and their wealth.

For the first part of this sermon, I’m relying heavily on two mentors of mine.

One is Dr. Michael Heiser, his books and his podcast called the Naked Bible podcast. Don’t let the title fool you. He takes the inspired Word of God and strips away all the tradition and baggage we put on it and just expounds on the text. Listen to episode #350. The other mentor is one of my seminary professors from whom I learned about covenants – Dr. McComiskey – who wrote the book The Covenants of Promise.  I highly recommend the works of both men to you, though, I will warn you, both are highly academic.

God has chosen to implement His redemptive plan through covenant relationships. And it is within the relationship of covenants that God asks us to steward all that He has entrusted to us.

Covenants are a rarely taught theology in most Evangelical churches. We tend to think of salvation in terms of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in which our sins are forgiven and we try, as best we can, to live righteously before God. While this is all true, it lacks the context of covenants.

Many think the New Covenant did away with all of the Old Testament covenants.  This isn’t true. What we’ll learn this morning is that the promises in the Old Testament covenants are in force today and will be throughout eternity. How we obey them changes with the New Covenant, but the New Covenant builds on the permanency of the promises God gave within the Old Testament covenants.

I’m first going to look at three terms in the Old Testament, then we’re going to look at Deuteronomy 7 and other passages as a way to put all this together. 

Covenants in the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, there are two words associated with each other that express the concept of covenants.

The first word is loving kindness. It’s a straight-forward phrase and it means to be gracious and loving toward one who is in a covenant with you. But it’s not a spontaneous emotion. It’s not an uncontrolled love. It is a decisional, intentional love. Sometimes translated as steadfast love, loving kindness is often associated with obligation and performance.

This is why loving kindness often appears together with the Hebrew word for faithfulness. When they are used together – as they often are – we have the concepts of love and loyalty linked together. When we combine loving kindness with loyalty, we have a more accurate understanding of what a covenant relationship is. This is where the phrase believing loyalty comes from.

Finally the word covenant appears often when these two words are associated in the text. So here is the trio of words: loving kindness, faithfulness and covenant.

Let’s look at Abram and God’s covenant with him in Genesis 12:1-3:

¹Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ² And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

What did God promise Abram?

1. That he would make Abram’s descendants into a great nation
2. He would bless Abram
3. His name would be great
4. Abram would have God’s protection
5. Abram would be a blessing to others

Many believe this Abrahamic covenant to be unconditional with no strings attached. But this isn’t the case. Covenants always come with stipulations. Covenants always contain benefits for obedience and penalties for disobedience.

For example, in Genesis 17, the Abrahamic covenant language is repeated but linked to Abram becoming circumcised.

Let’s read Genesis 17.3-10:

And God said to him, ⁴ “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. ⁵ No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. ⁶ I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. ⁷ And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. ⁸ And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.” ⁹ And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. ¹⁰ This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

In order for Abraham to enjoy the benefits of his covenant with God, he had to obey God by becoming circumcised.

So at the age of 99, Abram obeys and all the males in his house along with himself were circumcised. When Abraham obeys, it is because he believes in the God who promised Him – he believes in the terms God promised in His covenant in Genesis 12 and he believes that God will deliver.

Because Abraham believes, he obeys.

This is why the phrase believing loyalty is an accurate phrase that describes how the Bible views salvation in both testaments. We believe and because we believe, we want to obey. We demonstrate our loyalty to God through our obedience. Our obedience is our way of expressing our believing loyalty to God.  When we believe, our hearts are transformed and we want to obey God.

In this covenant relationship, we become His people and He becomes our God. Believing loyalty means that we don’t switch gods – we don’t run to Allah or Moroni or Buddah or some other god. We are loyal to believe in the God of the Bible.  He is our God. We are His people. We are in a covenant with God.

Those who spurn God’s love are not recipients of His loving kindness or His faithfulness.  You must choose to enter into a covenant relationship with Him. You must believe that God can deliver on His promises and no one else can. This is consistent across both testaments. Those who enter into a covenant relationship with God believe that only He is able to save them from their sins. Only He is able to give them life eternal in his presence. Only God is able to do this. We believe this. And we become His people and He becomes our God. And He literally changes our hearts.

Now, there is a corporate aspect to covenants. When God says…

“I will establish my covenant between me and you and I will be your God.”

…He is speaking both corporately and individually. This is where it is important to understand that when we enter a covenant relationship with God, we are transferred from one kingdom to another, from one family to another, from one nation to another.

Let’s look at Colossians 1.13

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves…

We become part of God’s family – His Kingdom – when enter into a covenant relationship with Him. And in so doing, our heritage – our pedigree – our lineage goes all the way back to Abraham. We become part of this great heritage God started with Abraham. We become part of the Covenant in Genesis 12.

Being brought into His kingdom means that we enjoy the benefits of fellowship with each other. We also enjoy the loving kindness and loyalty of others who themselves have covenanted with God.

We commit ourselves to others in our church because they too have covenanted with God. We need to see ourselves as connected to a larger whole whom God is building to do significant ministry in our communities. And so we stick with each other. We do this because love and loyalty are foundational to a covenant relationship.

This is why Peter said in 1 Peter 4.8: “love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” When we love others, we’re being loyal to them. And when we give love and loyalty to each other, we’re living out our covenant relationship with each other and with God.

Now, we see all these elements in Deuteronomy 7:9-14:

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, ¹⁰ and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face. ¹¹ You shall therefore be careful to do the commandment and the statutes and the rules that I command you today. ¹² “And because you listen to these rules and keep and do them, the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the steadfast love that he swore to your fathers. ¹³ He will love you, bless you, and multiply you. He will also bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your wine and your oil, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock, in the land that he swore to your fathers to give you. ¹⁴ You shall be blessed above all peoples.

In this passage, we see all the elements of a covenant.  We see both love and loyalty. And we see our response of Believing Loyalty.

We see God’s loving kindness – translated here as “steadfast love”. And we see His faithfulness to us.  We see loving kindness, faithfulness and covenant in the same passage.

Covenants in the New Testament

In the New Testament, we find this connection of love, loyalty and covenant in John 14.21, 23-24 when Christ is speaking with His disciples in his Farwell Discourse as He is facing crucifixion:

Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them… ²³Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. ²⁴ Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.

Again, what do we see?  Believing Loyalty. We see that those who believe are also loyal. Those who believe obey God and they obey because they believe.

Application

So one of the big take-aways this morning is this:

When we enter into a personal relationship with Christ, it’s not a relationship in which we enjoy a full suite of fire-saving benefits where obedience to God is optional.

Instead, when we enter into a personal relationship with God, we enter into a covenant relationship in which we obey because we believe. We enter into a covenant relationship in which we pledge ourselves to be faithful to Him knowing that He is faithful to us. It is a two-way street. It is a covenant. And belief must precede behavior. This is not optional. You can’t earn your salvation. You must believe, by faith and then obedience will follow.

One note of encouragement here:

That which cannot be gained through performance cannot be lost through lack of performance. We don’t gain salvation through our performance because performance follows belief. But we also don’t lose our salvation through lack of performance. The basis of our covenant with God is focused on believing loyalty to God. We don’t switch Gods. But we also keep the right order in mind: we believe first, then we obey. This is essential and is consistent in both testaments. Salvation comes through genuine belief. You don’t obey to believe. You believe, then you obey.

In the Old Testament, believing loyalty was evidenced by keeping the law. You believed, so you obeyed the law.

But over the years, the old testament law devolved to a system of duty where outward obedience became all that mattered. Believing loyalty didn’t matter. They put the cart before the horse.

So, when Christ came, He ushered in a new covenant which was initially outlined in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

The New Covenant

So, let’s look more closely at this New Covenant.

Let’s read Jeremiah 31.31,33:

³¹The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah… ³³ …“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

The core of this new covenant is that God would write his law into our hearts – obedience would be administered not through an outward set of laws and rules which focused on behavioral change, but through an inward change in our hearts such that we would want to do what God has commanded. We would want to be faithful to God.

Did you catch what God would do?  He would write his law in our minds and on our hearts.

When God writes His laws on our hearts, He is transforming our hearts to love what He loves and hates what He hates. That which brings God joy will bring us joy. That which brings God sorrow will bring us sorrow as well. God gives us the love for Him which we need in order to be faithful to Him in our covenant with Him.

As part of this new covenant, God places His Spirit within us. Let’s read Ezekiel 36.25-28:

²⁵I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. ²⁶ And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷ And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. ²⁸ You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

When God puts His Spirit within us, He will “move us” – literally cause us – to follow His decrees and His laws.

That’s inner transformation – not outward obedience to a set of rules. In both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, they are telling us that in the new covenant, God will transform us from the inside out.

But similar to how we must choose to enter into a covenant with God, we must choose to allow God to transform us. We can resist the Spirit’s work within us. We can resist God writing His laws in our minds and hearts. We’re not passive. We’re not robots. God doesn’t program us to make us act a certain way. No. We believe, then we obey and when we obey, we cooperate with God and allow Him to transform how we think and what we love.

And I think this is how lukewarm Christians come to be – they don’t let God finish His work in them. They embrace the parts of Christianity that they like and reject the parts they don’t like.  The parts that are inconvenient or ask for sacrifice – the parts we must believe in spite of our experiences – the parts that touch their money and their wealth – well – they don’t like that. So they pick and choose which parts they’ll accept.

For example, next Sunday, I’ll be teaching that God owns *everything*, including all of your money. It’s not like God gets 10% and you get 90%. That’s not what the Bible teaches. We merely steward what He owns. This means He gets to tell us how to spend it. IOW, we spend the money in our bank accounts at His discretion, not ours. Some will not like this teaching. Their challenge will really be this: “will I let God write that part of His law into my mind and heart?” Am I going to have a hard heart toward God or a soft heart toward Him?

These lukewarm Christians – they’re trying to gain the benefits of a covenant relationship with God while also holding tight to the things of this world. They love the things of this world while trying to love God. If they are honest, they have an ongoing conflict within themselves about their affections.

You see, at the core of this series is your heart. Giving is always a heart issue.  It is never about capacity or ability.

Show me someone who doesn’t give to God’s work and I’ll show you someone who loves the things of this earth and whose heart is not fully with God. God still needs to write his laws into the heart and mind of that person.

If this is you, then know this: in the long run – you’ll either abandon your relationship with God or you’ll let go of your love for the things of this world. You’ll eventually be forced to choose. And know this also – eventually God rejects those who are lukewarm. So I urge you to let God fully write His law into your mind and heart.  You’ll fully embrace the New Covenant.

Summary

What have we learned this morning?

First, we have learned that a personal relationship with God is really a covenant relationship in which love and loyalty are combined. We have also learned that believing loyalty is visceral to maintaining our covenant relationship with God.

Secondly, we have learned that if we are to enter fully the new covenant, then we must allow God to fully write His law into our minds and hearts – to transform how we think and what we love. You cannot have all of what God wants to give you while still loving the things of this world. You cannot have God’s best and still hang onto the things you love so dearly in this world.

Closing

As we wrap up this morning, I have one question and one invitation.

First, if you’re a Christian – if you claim to be a Disciple of Jesus Christ – then my question for you this morning is this: Will you pledge yourself to God and let Him write His laws into your mind and heart? Will you demonstrate believing loyalty by allowing God to write His laws on your mind and in your heart?

My invitation is for those who don’t know if they have truly entered into a covenant relationship with God. If you’re listening this morning and you’re sensing you don’t have a personal, covenant relationship with God, then my invitation to you is to invite Him into your heart and pledge yourself to God this morning.

You can do this right now – just pray with me:

God, I confess that I have sinned and broken your law

I want to enter a covenant relationship with you.

I ask that you come into my heart and forgive my sin.

I make you the Lord of my life.

I give to you my life for whatever days I have left on this earth.

By faith, I thank you for saving me and for pledging yourself to me.

In Jesus name, Amen.

If you have made a decision to enter into a covenant relationship with Christ, be sure to tell someone today.  I’ll be here – you can always talk with me or our prayer team who will be up here after the service.

And if you don’t have a church home, we would love to get you connected here at the Grove and see how we can help you in your journey with God. Stop by the Connect Center or speak with someone today.  With God, every day can be a fresh start – a new beginning. I hope today is a new beginning for you.