Greetings;
Today I want to remind us all as leaders that our role is to provide New Covenant leadership to those we lead. We cannot slip into the pattern of Old Covenant methods in our leadership. The New Covenant is not a transition in time two thousand years ago. The New Covenant is a transition of relationship. It is NOW reality in relating to God. The New Covenant is a personal relationship with God that is empowered by Christ within the believer. The New Covenant is a NOW covenant and it requires NOW leadership.
Jeremiah 31:31-34 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah — not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
The New Covenant is dependent upon what God says today. Old Covenant ministry was dependent upon what God said yesterday. It was a ‘remember when’ covenant. God would show up in the power of His presence with His instructions and commands. The people were then instructed to remember the day and to remember the words that were given to them in some past event with God. The Old Covenant was a covenant that took people by the hand to lead them, but the New Covenant is one where each one knows God. In the New Covenant we do not teach our neighbor or their brother to know God, for even the least has a personal relationship with God in their hearts. That relationship is not merely based upon an experience with God in the past. It is a personal relationship with God each day, every day, and it is NOW!
In the New Covenant we become the place that hears God in relationship with Him.
It is a place of being able to hear, read, and keep the words that are given to the believer in Christ (Rev. 1:30). There is a daily personal relationship with God in our hearts, therefore, there is a remembering of the things that God has said and done for us. Because we hear God in the NOW place of relationship with Him, we are also empowered from within to do what He desires. His voice within us becomes an empowerment of faith and passion to walk in His ways. Jesus is standing in the midst of His Church.
Revelation 1:10-12 I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, as of a trumpet, saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” and, “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.” Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band.
Leaders in the New Covenant must be the first to recognize God in their lives. They must demonstrate an example of faith towards God. The New Covenant is about knowing God and walking with Him in all things. New Covenant leaders don’t merely tell people what God is saying, they demonstrate a testimony of what God is saying in their lives. They stand among the congregation to be the first to give a testimony of the corporate letter God is writing in the expression of Christ life community they are part of.
The Old Covenant and New Covenant offer two different means of governing the human soul. The Old Covenant was one of information while the New Covenant is one of transformation from within. In a governmental system of the knowledge of good and evil people are informed of the knowledge of God so they can administrate their lives according to that remembered information. In the New Covenant people are transformed from within and they are dependent upon the life of Christ within their hearts to empower God’s desires from within.
Human beings are made of three parts in the dynamic of their human expression. Every person has the substance of power within them, a throne of administration, and a physical expression of whom they are to reveal the authority of their lives. These are the power, throne, and authority of being human (Rom. 13:2; 1Thes. 5:23). Human beings were designed to be led by God’s Spirit in the power, throne, and authority of their lives.
We don’t hear God with our souls, we hear with our spirit. When we allow God’s Spirit to food our human spirits we come alive from within. We do this by stirring up the Spirit of Christ within us. Christ within us is the hope of glory. It is the hope of coming fully alive as a human being. When our human spirits become empowered by Christ’s Spirit within us it floods our soul. It floods the throne of our will, thought, reasoning, imagination, and emotions. It is there that we begin to give human expression to that which we have heard in our spirits. When our spirits flood our souls with life, our souls flood our physical expressions of life with life. God’s Spirit is to flood the human spirit, the human spirit is to flood the human soul, and the human soul floods the human life. As leaders in the New Covenant we must lead to activate this process or hearing an manifesting God’s will in the lives of those we are called to lead. It begins with us as leaders. We must be activated, facilitated, and released with the life of Christ within us and then we serve to activate, facilitate, and release those we lead into the life that God has for each one.
When we live by law we submit our souls to the law as God’s voice, but when we live by the Spirit we submit our spirits to God’s Spirit as the voice of God in our lives. This floods our lives with the sanctifying salvation of God in all things.
Food For Thought,
Ted J. Hanson
