Greetings,
As leaders, God wants us to lead in a New Covenant manner. I believe that another name for New Covenant could be the Living Covenant. The New Covenant is the Old Covenant revealed as fully alive in the hearts and minds of those who believe. It is not a shadow conveyed through Biblical principles and rules to live by. It is the testimony of the influence of the Principality Christ Jesus in the hearts and minds of those who believe.
It is a covenant with God that brings life to those who receive it from within their hearts. It is the power of light shining from within and the testimony of Christ within that brings to pass the testimony of God’s glory. I believe that glory could be defined as men and women becoming fully alive in Christ and thus revealing the likeness and image of their heavenly Father to the world around them. Only in the New Covenant can the original mandate of mankind be restored. God’s commission to mankind in Genesis chapter one was for man to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and have dominion on the earth. Man was given dominion over the works of God’s hands. To be fruitful, multiply, and to fill is taking what was and repeating it over and over again. Subduing and having dominion is going beyond repeating what has been and opening the door for things that have never been.
The Old Covenant offered glimpses of the New Covenant, but no real change for mankind. Because of its inability to subdue and to offer true dominion, the Old Covenant created cultures and societies that were governed by means of control and manipulation. This is still true today for those who choose to embrace a government of information of good and evil over a government of intimacy with God from within the human heart. The governments of the world are based upon knowledge, and perceived knowledge, of good and evil. The governments of the world create take and take environments. The New Covenant offers the life of the kingdom of God within our hearts and the kingdom of God is a give and give environment. It is a government of grace and truth and it is the only means by which we can finally subdue and have dominion in the earth. Without grace and truth we cannot subdue and have dominion. Grace and truth are the true source of God’s life that serves to turn on the light! The warfare of the New Covenant is one of life. It is a warfare of manifested light! When the light is turned on the darkness flees. When the life is made manifest all manner of death is destroyed. It is a warfare that empowers a transformation in the lives of those who believe and it is not a battle of information. We are not here to inform our enemies of their defeat. We are here to enforce their defeat by the power of Christ made manifest. This is a New Covenant testimony.
I am presenting some basic foundational truth to inspire New Covenant paradigms in our leadership style and focus in the Church. We are here to see humanity manifest as sons and daughters of God in the earth. We are not here to merely do good works of God. We are not here to lead works of ministry, but to empower people to minister life in every aspect of life. We are here to empower God people to do good works from the testimony of their identity in Christ.
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a different kind of human being entered the earth. He was filled with grace and truth (Jn. 1:14), and He was the first born to secure a new race of a born again humanity that also manifests the grace and truth of God in the earth. The life of Jesus was not meant to give those who believe in Him a way out of the world. It was to give them the power of heaven within their lives to be able to change any circumstance they might face in life. It is the life of Jesus that destroys the works of the devil. Through His death and resurrection, Jesus crushed the foundation of the world kingdoms.
Daniel 2:36-45 “This is the dream. Now we will tell the interpretation of it before the king. You, O king, are a king of kings. For the God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory; and wherever the children of men dwell, or the beasts of the field and the birds of the heaven, He has given them into your hand, and has made you ruler over them all—you are this head of gold. But after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours; then another, a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, inasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and shatters everything; and like iron that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush all the others. Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile. As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay. And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Inasmuch as you saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold—the great God has made known to the king what will come to pass after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure.”
It was the stature of Christ that crumbled and crushed all that represented the statue of human self. A Prince with God crushed the throne, rule, power, and influence of every principality of darkness. It is the manifestation of Christ in bodily form that crumbles the lies and deceptions of the enemy. Those lies and deceptions are dispossessed by the life and the truth of God in Christ. The high places of the human heart and mind are transformed by the likeness and the image of God the Father being formed within. The stature of Christ is meant to become a great mountain in the earth. It is the mountain of the Lord. This is a kingdom made of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation on planet earth. It is a kingdom revealing the power of Christ from within. It is nothing less than the human race manifested as the likeness and the image of their heavenly Father in the world. This is the testimony of the true Israel of God, princes and princesses of nobility reveling God’s kingdom to the world. These are those whose beliefs, actions, imaginations, and influence in the world are all based upon the testimony of Christ within them.
Jesus came to redeem human kind. He came to transform the lives of people who had been fashioned and formed in the likeness and the image of flesh to become a testimony of flesh made to become expressions of God in the earth. Jesus came to redeem the human spirit, soul, and body to be a testimony of the influence of life to the world.
Hebrews 1:1-5 God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. For to which of the angels did He ever say: “You are My Son, today I have begotten You”? And again: “I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son”?
A true human being is someone who was created in the likeness and the image of God. Leaders in the body of Christ must keep this objective in mind that all humans are meant to reveal the glory of God through lives that have been transformed from within. Whether this is in the lives of individual believers or in corporate expressions of believers, we are leading for the kingdom of God and the testimony of His praise. We are not leading for the kingdoms of men. We are leading for the testimony of a New and Living Covenant with God and men. We are leading to see the sons and daughters of God made manifest in every aspect of human society in the world.
Food For Thought,
Ted J. Hanson
