Paul DeCelles gave this talk at a 1990 Servant Branch community meeting. After briefly talking about consolations and desolations, Paul talked about our covenant. He described how our covenant binds us together, for good or for ill, and how the world’s culture is not one that promotes commitment. He concluded with a stirring proclamation that our covenant enables us to give our whole lives to one another and the Lord.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
PAUL: In the past several years, we’ve had occasion to talk about the discernment of spirits and the way in which the enemy works in our lives and the way—because of the way the enemy works, we’re in position, actually, to capitalize on whatever initiative he takes and turn it to our benefit and to benefit from any initiative the Lord takes, of course, and move forward with that.
I’ve talked about it in terms of a pole-vaulting experience, where you kind of—you’re running along and you have this pole in your hand, and the pole becomes the vehicle for changing your energy that’s going in this direction upwards, and gets you over a high obstacle, like a bar on a pole vault. It gets you to a new plane.
And that mechanism that I’ve talked about before was the whole business of consolations and desolations. And how it is that when you’re feeling really good in the Lord, the Lord’s moved your heart in a particularly strong way, that’s a very good time to make new resolutions, and to commit your—to deepen your love for the Lord, to give more of your heart to the Lord, and to resolve to do things better for the Lord, and to follow up on all the initiatives and all the opportunities you have to build his kingdom.
But when you’re feeling down and the Lord seems very far away from you, in fact, it may even seem to you that he isn’t even around anymore. But you know he is; it’s not that you’ve lost faith, it’s just that you’ve lost the appearance of his light in your life. When you’re feeling so desolate and so alone, so lonely in the Lord, that’s the time when you should not make any decisions. That’s when the “ratchet effect” should set in place; it’s another analogy. It’s something like, you know how these ratchet wrenches work: when you’re going in the right direction, you can crank ’em; and then as long as you feel the strength, you know, you can give a good pull on that ratchet wrench. And then when you’re tired, you can kind of rest a bit with some confidence that the ratchet’s gonna hold you in place, and you won’t slip back. So when you’re feeling desolate, don’t give up on the initiatives that you took when you were feeling good, when you were feeling very powerful in the Lord.
And that’s the mechanism to keep in mind. When you feel the wind at your back, so to speak, when the Spirit is filling your sails or something, and you—you can move forward, well then, go quickly, with every initiative possible. And when you feel like you’re in the doldrums and everything’s at a standstill, don’t jump overboard. Don’t change your course. Don’t throw the compass in the lake or something. So—rather, hold onto the good things that you decided when things were going well.
Well, today, anyway, I was—by the way, that was just a reminder of something I think I’ve talked about here before [Paul chuckles]. I want to talk about something different today, but it’s the same kind of mechanism, something that we can use in our life as we try to grow in the Lord.
I want to talk to you about covenant love. And I want to show you how it in particular can be an instrument for moving us forward in the Lord.
Now we’ve talked about covenant love, also. I know there’ve been a zillion teachings on covenant love to the body here, and I’m not going to add anything much to what has already been said. But I’m also not gonna go back over that; I just want to present a couple of different aspects of covenant love for your consideration that might help you to continue to grow and to use covenant love as a mechanism for moving forward in the Lord (if you don’t mind me talking so mechanistically). But, the point is [Paul chuckles]–isn’t that it’s a mechanism that’s sure-fire; it’s rather a strategy and an approach to our Christian life that will give us direction at all times as we’re leaning into the Lord, yearning for the days ahead.
So, a lot of what I have to say—everything I have to say—presupposes that you have studied covenant love before. And I know you all have.
We live in a time and a situation in history unlike any time prior. I mean, that’s old news; everybody knows that. But the part of it that I want to focus your attention to in particular, these days, is the speed with which things change. We live in a time—this is also clear to everybody—where there are far more opportunities, more opportunities for each one of us as individuals to make decisions.
In fact, because of that we can get a little jaundiced, I think. I’ve noticed this especially with some young people: they tend not to want to settle on what their actual opportunities are at the moment, for the future, because they want to keep their options open. Sometimes you might—have you ever noticed this?—sometimes you’ll invite somebody even to a party, to your house the next night, and they’ll say, “Well, let’s see, I’ll—maybe I’ll be there.” And they don’t want to say that they will be there, because they know that they—something better might come along. And we’re something like that, actually, in the spiritual world. We can become spiritual opportunists, sort of, not committing to what is at hand, because something better might come along in the near future, or in the distant future, even.
This business of change is, actually, a wonderful thing. At no time, I would say, have we, as human beings, experienced the opp- —as many opportunities, you know, per second almost, for making free decisions to follow the Lord. We have lots of opportunities to exercise our free will.
But sometimes the change is really—can cause real problems for us. For example, we may set out on a certain course, [and] only shortly down the path decide that, well, there’s a better option going the other way. Or take this path off to the left now instead; maybe it’s more interesting over there. “I’m kind of bored with this way things are going; I’ll go over here for a while.”
Some of us may do this, for instance, in the things that we read. There’s something new coming along, and somebody says, “Hey, have you heard about New Age?” “Oh, no; what’s New Age?” “You know, I think—I’m kind of—I haven’t been getting much out of my spiritual reading, and I haven’t been getting much out of reading the Scriptures lately; nothing much is going on. Let’s see what’s over here.” And we start—and we go off down this tangent. And that one in particular can lead to a real lot of trouble.
Sometimes the things that we say, “Well we’ll study Scripture regularly every day for. . . .” We’ll make some kind of an outrageous commitment, like an hour a day. And most of us can’t do that. But we promise in a moment of exhilaration that we’ll do that, and then halfway down, or maybe two days later, when we’ve run out of time and we cannot possibly do it and still maintain our obligations for the next day, you know, we say, “Well you know, actually, it probably was a bad idea. I shouldn’t be studying Scripture. I should be doing something more in Servant School. Or perhaps I should go to work in the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit seminar.” And so you—I mean those are both good things. But in fact, you start off this direction, and you change your direction, and it weakens the impact you can have on what’s going on.
In the body we have an even more interesting phenomenon. This is a little more complicated to explain. If you don’t get it, raise your hand or something, and I’ll try to—we can talk about it a little bit more. But in fact, because we are living in a covenant relationship with each other, what one of us decides to do strongly influences what somebody else might decide to do. In fact, it can be the case that each—say, take two people, each of them having a wonderful plan to execute in the name of the Lord. If they were in fact working by themselves, their insight would be wonderful. And it would just move off, and it would do something good. Each one of them, doing something good. But because they’re part of the body, it turns out—let me give you an example—it may happen, and sometimes does, that because of the phasing of what’s going on, they can actually undo the good that the other would do, and they wind up doing very little good, together. In that instance, covenant love would be—it would be better if there weren’t a bond between us; it would be better if we just did our individual things.
For example, suppose that there are two people, and they are both evangelizing a third person. One—both members of the community now here, okay? They go to this—one guy goes to this fellow and says, “I really think you should make a Fellowship of the Holy Spirit seminar. t’d Ibe just terrific for you! You know, we’ve talked about the baptism in the Spirit; I’ve shared with you what the Lord’s been doing in my life. . . . In fact, a great miracle is going on, and all these people who are praising God; you should—it’s amazing! You get together and you hear prophecy and all this—you should really come to a Fellowship of the Holy Spirit seminar. I know you’ll get a lot out of it. Everybody who does, does.”
But the next guy, your brother or sister in the Lord, goes to this same person, and says, “You know, I was praying about you, and I think what you should do is enter a period of time where you don’t do anything but pray. You really should grow in contemplative love, and contemplative prayer. You should avoid large assemblies.” [Paul and others chuckle.] Not knowing that the other person has just invited him to a Fellowship of the Holy Spirit seminar, of course, where average participation is about 150. Isn’t that the case here, isn’t that what—right, Louis [Grams], isn’t that what you told me? You know—no, not yet? [Paul laughs.] Actually, they won’t work very well if they get that big. So you should stop inviting people to a particular one when it reaches 35 or so.
At any rate, you can see what I’m getting at here. That—here are two really good things: Fellowship of the Holy Spirit invitation and the recommendation that people should pray more profoundly and deeply and privately. And yet, when they’re put together in the same body, same people evangelizing this person, they actually can confuse that person and undo each other, and they wind up with no good net effect.
And of course, if somebody is doing—if somebody in the body, I mean—take it one step further: if somebody in the body is doing something really bad, then in fact it really destroys the good that others do. And that’s one aspect of covenant love which deepens the significance of our wrongdoing. As well as heightens the significance of our good.
Let me read a little bit from section 2 of the Spirit & Purpose:
Jesus is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance (this is from Hebrews, chapter 9). This covenant, inaugurated and ratified through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, incorporates us into him, so that we become one body, united under its head. We become members of Christ, continuing in our own day the ministry of evangelization which Christ began.
And then we quote Luke’s gospel. Let me go on.
We know that this ministry means death to our old selves, and may even involve the shedding of our blood as he shed his. The new covenant is a covenant in the blood of Jesus Christ, and it is the means by which we commit our lifeblood to God. As a way of participating in this new covenant in Christ, the covenant of the People of Praise establishes a Christian community. This is the specific means by which we live out the new covenant in the blood of Christ. This covenant inaugurates unique relationships with one another and between the individual and the community. God is inviting us, on his own initiative, to respond freely to his call to form a people.
And then we quote 1 Peter. [And then the Spirit & Purpose continues:]
The covenant of the People of Praise and its authentic explication sets forth the form of our life together in community. Making this covenant is the means to full membership in the community. No one is allowed to make the covenant without an adequate period of formation and preparation.
And this is the part in particular I want to talk about a bit today.
Those who make the covenant are making a definitive and permanent choice of a particular mode of life lived in response to an invitation by the Spirit of God.
Here we are talking both about the covenant that Jesus has established by his blood, between us and God. He has renewed—in fact, he has far transcended the old covenant, and given us the new covenant of the New Testament. And we recognize in this covenant our place in the community.
I want to talk about that part of the covenant of the People of the Praise which is the means we can use to achieve the purpose for which we were created. And that is that the covenant is a permanent covenant, we say. So I want to talk about how it is that the covenant is a permanent covenant.
We do live in a time of change, and a time of boundless opportunity. Yet here in the People of Praise, we sort of “plant a flag.” We say, “Yes, we will continue to change. But we also make a permanent commitment to be brothers and sisters in the People of Praise.”
All of a sudden, we step out of all of this change that’s going on around us, and we say, “We are going to stand here. This is going to remain the same. We are not going to change this. We are going to have permanent relationships as brothers and sisters in the Lord and in the People of Praise.”
This is very extraordinary today. Today you hear of so many married people going back on their promises, their solemn vows, to never leave one another, until death do they part. People say that nobody can keep a permanent commitment in this life. You see members of religious orders leaving their vows. In order to justify it, we see a whole literature which claims that permanent vows and commitments stand in the way of human personal growth, that people ought not make long-term commitments; it narrows down their freedom and their opportunities to grow and respond to new opportunities.
One, they say, should be above all else true to oneself. To some of these people, it is more important that you should do what you feel at the moment than what you promised you would do. They would rather be loved capriciously than to be loved according to the promise. The promise takes away some of the delight, joy, and newness of the love which one can experience.
This is a serious problem we face today. It is all around us. We get counsel, frequently, to break our solemn promises to one another.
But in the People of Praise, we take a different stand. We have a permanent commitment to one another. Why would we do such a thing? What can this mean? Why do we say it?
Over the years, I think we’ve learned a lot about covenant love. We’ve learned that covenant love is a serious, a solemn agreement which establishes a relationship. For us, that relationship is one of being brothers and sisters in the Lord, in the People of Praise, with all the obligations, rights, and privileges attached to that. We have the benefit and advantage of sharing our lives together, because we make this covenant with one another and with the community as a whole.
When we make this commitment to covenant love, it starts something new. It is a new relationship of brotherhood and sisterhood between each of us, one to another.
The relationship we establish among ourselves is to give our lives, our whole lives. We say we commit, we covenant ourselves to live our lives together. We can give our lives over to the Lord in a way of life whose purpose is to bring us together to the rewards of eternal life, that we can live our lives to the praise of God’s glory . . . together.
You see this in the specific statement of the covenant in section 3, “The Covenant of the People of Praise”: “We covenant ourselves to live our lives together in Christ our Lord by the power of his Spirit.”
And it goes on to talk about the dimensions of our fellowship with each other. “We recognize in the covenant a unique relationship, one to another, and between the individual and the community.”
And, “We accept the responsibility for mutual care, concern, and ministry among ourselves.”
And, “We will serve one another and the community as a whole in all needs, spiritual, material, and financial.”
So our covenant establishes us as brothers and sisters permanently. It is a means by which we can effectively live out that covenant which God has made with us. It is stable and does not change in its purpose, although it may change in its expressions and its modes. That purpose is the goal of our lives. Namely, to live our lives in Christ together for the praise of his glory.
So in this age of constant change, we are inundated with pleasurable delights put before our eyes, yet our senses daily cry out with boredom. We are surfeited with things that please us, so we are eager to change, to move on to something new, because all these material things have dulled our senses, and make the only thing attractive something which is new and different. But in the People of Praise, we don’t take that point of view. We say that there is something about our life together, our permanent commitment to be brothers and sisters, which is better than these delights and these possibilities.
The covenant is a means by which we can transcend time. Our past is behind us. Our future is unknown. This is true of each one of us; I’m talking—this is very intimate reality. Our future is not before us at this moment. We live in a thin sheet of time called the present moment, the distance between the past and the future. Our promise to one another projects us into the future, and gives us some measure of control of it.
Our covenant is also a safeguard for our faithfulness. Each one of us can testify that because we have made our promises to one another, we have in fact done a lot of things we would not otherwise have done that we know are good for us. How many times, for instance, has your commitment to God and the People of Praise been a protection against following the path of least resistance? How many times have you prayed when you did not feel like it, because you promised you would pray, as part of the prayer ministry in the People of Praise? How many times have you met with your brothers and sisters for their good when you did not want to, because you had promised that you would be in your women’s group or in your men’s group? How many times have you served when you were tired and prone to self-indulgence and your commitment to service pulled you through? How many times have you benefited from humble submission to the direction your head has given you? Where else do you find today this—maybe except in a few pockets of Christianity—that humility is exalted and practiced among laypeople as we do?
What is stable in our lives is not our internal state. We do have desolations and consolations. We go through moments of elation and moments of depression. The content of our commitment is what is stable. That is our way of life. Our way of life is stable. We freely choose to belong to this community. We choose the way of self-abnegation and total sharing in brotherly and sisterly love. We choose to obey the will of the Holy Spirit—we say in our covenant—manifested in and through the gifts the Lord has given us. We deprive ourselves of the possibility of choosing another way.
Our covenant commitment forces us to discover, deep down within us, that point where our lives are already locked into eternity. This is the way in which our covenant is a lever for us, making it possible to reach heights we cannot otherwise reach on our own. We are, in a certain sense, spiritually shackled to one another. We may want to do wrong, but we are committed to stay together, and our brothers and sisters won’t let us continue doing wrong. They are committed to changing me. I am committed to changing them. Each of us can say that. And we say that this is what we will do for the rest of our lives as brothers and sisters. We will strive to do our best. But whatever we do, we will do together.
Our position is that we have a great love affair, a spiritual love affair. A love for God and his Christ, and a love for one another, ceaselessly renewed by the power of God’s own love, his Holy Spirit. Love desires to give all. Well, then, let love express itself according to its nature. Giving all means giving your very life, your whole life. Life is measured out to us second by second. We never possess it all at once. Except by means of a free and willing promise. This is the only way by which we can overcome the infinitely narrow limitations of the present moment. The only way in which love can give everything at once is by making a promise.
This does not weaken us as individuals. It strengthens our personality. It raises us above our instant life so that we can grasp the whole entire. By promising, we achieve some control over time itself. That is the way in which we can give our whole lives to God and to one another.
[Interruption in recording. An early manuscript suggests Paul said here, “Otherwise, if we make no promises for the future, we have nothing to offer the future.”]
. . . to offer the future. We are only living this moment. We can give this moment, and we should live this moment intensely in the Spirit of God. But at this moment, when we are filled with enthusiasm for the Lord, let us promise one another and God that we will always be with him and serve him, always seek the lowest place, always go for the cross, and always love God above everything. And always love one another to the praise of his glory.
Who is there who has been in love who has not said, “I will love you all of my life!” And that is our relationship with one another: a covenant of love one for another. And that’s what we say when we say our relationship is a permanent commitment.
The song we began with today: “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live! Praise the Lord, oh my soul!”
Alleluia. Amen.
[Applause.]
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