Scott Brown discusses the importance of church covenants as a way to follow the example of Christ's covenant with the church. He emphasizes that the local church is a separate society, a body, and a voluntary association. Church covenants should be rooted in Scripture and serve as a promise, a tool to educate, unify, clarify, protect, and warn. Brown outlines the elements of a church covenant, including a commitment to the gospel, unity and love, evangelism, loyalty, financial support, attendance, family life, genuine love, self-control, mercy, and discipline. These covenants help maintain the unity, love, and commitment of the church community.

The following message is a presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where we're proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life. More information about the NCFIC is available at www.ncfic.org. Is available at www.ncfic.org. Our subject is church covenants, and the first thing that I think that we should consider when we bring the subject of church covenants up is that the Lord Jesus Christ has made many covenants toward his people. If we would have the mind of Christ, and we should have the mind of Christ, then we should also have similar kinds of covenants with one another.

We walk in the way that He walked. We love one another according to the love of Christ, so it's always appropriate for us to look at Christ and What he's done, and then say how can I best fulfill that that's a tall order Consider just a few of the covenantal statements of Christ toward us? Matthew 28 29, Behold I am with you always, even until the end of the age. What a blessing it is to have people that have that spirit toward one another in the church. If the Lord Jesus Christ has this commitment toward the church, think of how important it is and how blessed it is to have a similar heart toward the church.

In Matthew 16 18 he said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. That is a covenant that he made. This is a promise. The church will prevail. The church may lose a few skirmishes, but she's going to win in the end, because God will make her stand and win.

But how will the church do this? Only because of this great covenant that Christ has made with her. In Hebrews 13 5 & 6 there's another very precious covenant that we need to hear over and over again. I will never leave you or forsake you. How's that for a covenant?

Or John 14, 8. Or John 14, 18. I will not leave you as orphans. These are marvelous covenants. These are beautiful commitments that Christ has made to his church.

Or consider Hebrews 10, 15 through 17. This is the covenant I will make with them after those days, says the Lord. I will put my laws into their hearts and in their minds I will write them." And then he adds, "...their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more." What a covenant! What a marvelous promise from the Lord Jesus Christ. And so it's appropriate for us to have the mind of Christ and to, as best we can, to fulfill his own heart toward the church in our own lives.

Of course we are not the Lord Jesus Christ, but we are to put on the mind of Christ and that means that every everything that he says and does we should look at and say how might I fulfill this in a way that a human being can. And so when we when we speak of church covenants there are a number of things that we need to consider. And the first thing is the nature of the church. There are two ways that we can see the church operating in the world. There's the universal Church comprised of believers worldwide.

We are part of a great family that's collected up from every tongue, tribe, and nation, and we are part of the Universal Church. But there is also the reality of the local church, and for example, we see many illustrations of this in Scripture. There's the church in Ephesus, there's a church in Colossae, and the church in Ephesus we know had specific elders, and the Apostle Paul spent time with the elders of the church in Ephesus. So you have these local expressions. The church is not just one worldwide morass, it is also collected into into small communities.

This is God's will for the church. People don't just go from one church to another all the days of their life and say, I'm a member of the universal church, where am I going today? What flavor would I like to taste of the church today? No, That is not what the Bible would lead us to do at all. God would have us, you know, collected into local bodies, gathered peoples where they know one another, where they're able to bear one another burdens, where they hear common preaching, where they're involved in common prayer, where church discipline is exercised.

You know, so many of the commands of Scripture assume a local body and local accountability and local membership, however you want to however you want to explain it. We've just explained it here in the last session. But there is the local church. That's why Peter, when he speaks in 1 Peter 5, 1-11, he speaks of the local relational character of the church. He says, shepherd the flock of God, which is among you.

So there's a local brother and sisterhood here that's collected together. And he says, nor as being lords over those entrusted to you. So there are those that are entrusted to you. If you're an elder in a church, the whole world is not entrusted to you. Everybody in the church in your town or your state is not entrusted to you, but those in your local body are entrusted to you.

So there's this aspect of the local church. And then he says, yes, all of you, be submissive to one another. What does that mean? Does that mean that we're submissive to the global church, to every single believer on the planet we somehow to be submissive to? Well, maybe in some way.

I think there are ways that we have a submissive spirit toward one another in the family of God, but there's this local family of God collected into a relational atmosphere called a local church. And the nature of the local church is critical to understand. First of all, let's just give some handles on what this local church is, because understanding what the local church is helps us to understand why it is that church covenants are important. It is a separate society. We are distinguished from the surrounding world.

We are a holy people. We are a people for God's own possession. We are set apart. We are aliens and strangers in the world. And so what makes up the Church includes these collections of believers.

They live differently and they are a separate society, separate from the world, and so their agreements are different. One of the things that I am so thankful for is the fact of the true quality of the church. The church is the best society that's ever been created. Now all of us would say our churches have weaknesses. All of us would say some churches are really a mess.

But my view is this. It's 100 times better. The worst church is 100 times better than the Kiwanis Club. It's 100 times better than the political government, absolutely, because it's governed by Christ, because it has principles that it walks by, it has leaders that are real and present in the church, it has many things that govern it that make it far, far better than any other institution. There is no better institution on the planet than the Church.

But it's a separate society. It's a different society. It's also a body. And this body is organized, it has government, it has practices that cannot be found anywhere else, but it is a body, and it is a body of Christ, and it is also a voluntary association. It's not a, at least the way that we understand the Church, it's not a parish.

The parish system, you know, established geographical lines for churches, and that defined the fellowship. So Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and some Reformed, you know, some Reformed, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, functioned in the parish model and you went to a local body because you lived in a local community. Well, there obviously are some some good things about that, but the way that parish churches, you know, worked in days of old is that the civil government enforced their requirements. The Zwingli's church was like that. There were very little distinction between the church and the government in those days.

Church covenants may have arisen as a result of a reaction to the whole parish system that the local church is a voluntary association of believers who come together, and church covenants were a helpful tool to unify people around the gospel, not their geography. And so the church is a voluntary association. And we believe that the nature of the local church implies the principle of a covenant and the importance of making covenants with one another. And these covenants never replace Scripture, they do not supersede Scripture, they don't stand above the Bible, they are not sacred, but they are reference points that provide different helps to the people in order to fulfill the commands of Christ in the church. And so, you know, in all of church covenant should be an encouragement to embrace the Word of God, to love one another, to cast off worldliness, to embrace all of the commands of Christ for the church.

And so we hope that church membership covenants are helpful tools to help us fulfill all the calling that God has given to us in the home and in the church and in the community. So let me let me just give you some of the some of the I think helpful aspects of a Church Covenant. First of all, it's a promise. It's a promise that we make to one another for the way that we will behave. It's not Scripture, but it must be rooted in Scripture.

I would just suggest if you have points on a church covenant that can't be directly tied to scripture the the point in the covenant should disappear and so but Whatever promises we make Should be founded in Scripture We ought not to be making promises that are just out of our own brain. It's also a tool to educate, you know, those of you who use church covenants and have them repeated regularly in your church know the blessing of that. That people hear the covenant repeated regularly and it forms an impression in their minds and they get to know better and better and better by review. This is one of the things that we constantly need. We constantly need review.

Why did the Apostle Paul say so many things so many times? We need the review. And we don't read a letter of Scripture and then we move on forever. No, we need it repeated. We need to remember it.

And church covenants help us to be educated better than we would if we didn't have them. Thirdly, it's a tool to unify. There are obligations that are recited, and when a church covenant is read, it brings the church together around a central set of commitments that are biblical and help to cast the vision of the people and also to keep them walking together instead of off in different directions. They also are tools to clarify, to remind, and to make things plain again. They are also tools to protect.

Those who would walk according to a Church Covenant may find themselves walking apart from it and contradicted. And so a Church Covenant becomes a tool to correct, to bring us back to the things that we established at the very beginning and to be faithful to them. It's also a tool to warn. Someone may have thoughts going in a wrong direction and a Church Covenant could possibly bring them back before there's a problem. In the same way that our time of celebration and communion brings us back, it's self-examination.

It's one of the early levels of Church discipline where you discipline yourself And a church covenant can help the body actually discipline itself and bring itself back into line so that it's functioning rightly. It is a tool to warn against lukewarm treatment of the church. I have a great concern about people who have a lukewarm treatment of the church. They think the church is chopped liver. They think the church is something that they are a part of when the time is convenient or if something doesn't conflict or if it seems to work with their already established schedule.

My view is that the people in the church should arrange their schedule around the church, not the other way around. There is a terrible lack of honor and respect of the church when people skip out of their meetings because they're tired or they're going through something that makes them feel like they just can't be there. I think that's wrong. I really do. There's a priority that the church has in our lives and it must be maintained.

God has set it up that way. He has set up regular, rhythmic meetings so that we wouldn't just go off into our own thinking about things, but that we would constantly be gathered back together. I do know that there are times of it there are seasons of excessive busyness there are seasons of that that really you know impinge upon us and I think we have to be patient with one another but hey let's let's let's make this really clear it's wrong to be lukewarm about the church and a church covenant can help your people maintain at least their understanding of how important the church is. I'm tempted to just continue to talk about this for a long time, but I think that church covenants can really help to warn against a lukewarm treatment of the church. Now what I'd like to do is walk you through our own church covenant at Hope Baptist Church just to give you a flavor.

There are many church covenants that are excellent. This isn't the only one. This isn't the best one probably, but it's the one that we use and we would be happy to continue to be improving it, but I'd like to just give you the character of some of the issues that we address in our Church Covenant, and the first issue is the issue of the gospel because a church covenant should be a covenant between those who have embraced the gospel. And so our first stanza in our covenant addresses that issue, That we're gathering people together, not as a social club, not as a group of people who like family integrated churches, we are gathering people together who believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so that's why our covenant reads, having been led as we believe by the Spirit of God to repent, believe, and receive the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior and profess our allegiance to Him, having been baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit we do now in the presence of God angels and this assembly most solemnly and cheerfully enter into covenant with one another as one body of Christ and you can see a number of references there.

Acts 2 38, Mark 9 23, John 11 26, Hebrews 11 6, John 1 12 and 13, 1 Peter 2 6, Matthew 28 19 and 20, and Romans 8 1. Well, we exist as a church because of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so this is why when we induct people into church membership, we make sure they understand the gospel. We always ask them to explain the gospel of Jesus Christ and if the whole family will go all the way down the line as far as age will allow. And to understand the gospel is so critical.

People are fuzzy about what the gospel is, and they cannot be saved unless they understand their sin, they understand the blood of Jesus Christ, his atoning work on the cross, that He died and was resurrected and He cleansed them from all of their unrighteousness and He sits at the right hand of God praying for them and He will finally bring them to heaven. And their salvation has nothing to do with their own works. So the gospel is really critical to understand. I don't believe you can have a happy church unless people understand the gospel. How can you be happy unless you know that your sins have been atoned for by a holy God?

How can you love your brother if you think that you are somehow righteous? You cannot. There will not be love in the church. Personal happiness and corporate love is destroyed when the gospel is gone in the church. How can we be free?

How can we look one another in the eye and say, brother, I realize that we disagree on this matter, but I do know that the Lord Jesus Christ has forgiven us of all of our sins, even the sin that we have between one another of not understanding something rightly, because one of us is wrong, okay? So anyway, this is a covenant between those who have embraced the Gospel. So that's the first element of our covenant. Secondly, it's a covenant agreement on the priority of unity and love. It's a covenant agreement on the priority of unity and love.

So this stanza addressing this reads like this, we will work and pray for the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace and by the aid of the Holy Spirit to walk together in Christian love. So we start with the gospel and then we move to the greatest commandment, to love one another. These are the great priorities of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And if we cannot love one another, how can we be a church? How can we call ourselves a church if we cannot love one another?

And so this priority is so critical for the church. If the whole law is summarized by the word love, then it must be part of our lives together. A loveless church is a church in which the Lord Jesus Christ is not Lord over. A loveless church is a terrible place to be. So we have to call our people to maintain love for one another.

And then the next element of our covenant is a covenant for evangelism, and our covenant reads like this, we will seek the salvation of our kindred, acquaintances, and strangers who have not repented for saving faith in Christ, to be in prayer for the spiritual awakening of the lost in our community, and to be a faithful witness of the gospel both here and to the remotest part of the earth. So we have this element, a covenant of evangelism, to help us understand our calling. Yes, we are a separate people, We are a holy nation, but we're not hiding out and staying to ourselves. We work, we live, and we must be involved with unbelievers. We cannot have a holy huddle in the Church of Jesus Christ.

We cannot just hang out with people that are like us. It's wrong for us just to hang out with people who are like us. You know, you should hear, your ears should be hearing foul language. Your clothes should be from time to time soaked with smoke by the people that you hang around. It's not right for us to extricate ourselves from society.

We are to be in the world, but not of it. And so we are called to preach the gospel to all the nations and to be involved in it. So this aspect of a covenant for evangelism is critical. And then the next element of our covenant is a covenant of the priority of loyalty. And so we say we will strive for the advancement of this church in knowledge, holiness, and comfort to promote its prosperity and spirituality, to sustain its worship, ordinances, discipline, and doctrines, and to submit to its leaders as they are faithful to Christ.

So here we come to a local understanding that we are part of a family, We are part of a local body and we are loyal to that body. We don't give to every church in the community or every church in the world. We give to those who are bringing benefit to us. And so there's this focus. There's a focus on this church and we call our people to that kind of focus, that they would say, this is my church and I am going to give everything I have to it.

And then there is a covenant of financial support to the Church. We will contribute cheerfully and regularly to the support of the ministry, the expenses of the Church, the relief of the poor, and the spread of the gospel through all nations. So our lives together include the financial element, and so that we have a priority and a focus on our local church. Once that priority is taken care of, then there's tremendous freedom to give, you know, to other ministries and other needs in the world. But there ought to be a priority of financial support.

That should be the first place that we give. And then there's a covenant of attendance. Now, this isn't all that popular for people, because people kind of just want to go wherever they want to go. But if that happens in our church, then we would just bring up this covenant of attendance, in which we say, we will not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, nor neglect to pray for ourselves and others, nor avoid the meetings of the church established by the elders. And we cite Hebrews 10 25, Hebrews 5 5, and Acts 2 42 to 47.

You know, we want the church, you know, all together. We're very jealous of the times that we establish. We do not have a massive superstructure with dozens of meetings and so the meetings that we have we want everybody there and because how else how else can we equip our people if they don't come And so we say come and pray with us, come and study with us, come and worship with us, come and take communion, come and hear the preaching of the Word of God. We are going to be judged by the Lord Jesus Christ for your souls. Please come so that we can communicate with you.

Now, we're not pretending that our communication is perfect or the best in town or anything, but we are yours and we belong together and so if someone needs a different teaching they should get it and you know what you can get as much teaching as you want in this world the way that the airwaves and the internet is wired. But we want attendance and we ask our people to make a covenant of attendance with us. And then we have a covenant regarding family life. We will, and this aspect reads this way, we will also maintain family and private devotions to educate our children in the Christian faith and demonstrate the love of Christ in all of our household relationships. So this has to do with this, a fundamental building block of the church, and that is the family.

And then a covenant of genuine love is the next stanza in our covenant. We will watch over one another in brotherly love, to remember one another in prayer, to aid one another in sickness and distress, to walk circumspectly in the world, to be just in our dealings, faithful in our engagements, and exemplary in our deportment. And of course this covers love in the community of the church and outside the community, but we also have a responsibility for one another. Yes, we are our brothers keepers. That's the principle that's here.

We are connected to one another. So if one wanders off, we've got to go find them. And we express love. We walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time. There's a priority of love in our time toward one another.

We make ourselves available to one another. Then there's a covenant of self-control here that we have. We will strive to avoid all scriptural prohibitions such as, tattling, backbiting, and unrighteous anger, to seek God's help in abstaining from all drugs, food, drink, illicit material, and practices which bring harm to the body or jeopardize our own or another's faith. So this has to do with different areas of self-control. You noticed here we actually mentioned drugs and drink and the language here, you know, speaks clearly of the abuse of these things And so we will hold one another accountable if there's abuse, drug abuse or abuse of the mind and the body through pornography and things like that.

One of the questions, you know, I'm constantly asking our men and I want them to ask me is, where have your eyes been going? That's really important. And so part of this, if you make a covenant with us, we're going to be asking these questions of one another so that we are walking together. And then also there's a covenant of mercy. We will cultivate Christian sympathy and feeling and courtesy and speech to refrain from speaking evil of one another, to be slow to take offense, to think the best of one another and always be ready for biblical reconciliation and mindful of the rules of our Savior to secure it without delay so far as it depends on us.

And so here we have a number of passages of Scripture listed that give a sense of how we handle issues like this in the church, but the church should be filled with the mercy of Jesus Christ. We should be speaking the truth in love, and that's the perfect mix for it all. And then it is also a covenant of discipline. We will, if necessary, submit to biblically defined and regulated Church discipline for the purpose of reconciliation with God and man." So here is the point in which we ask our people to really sign on the dotted line that they will submit to church discipline if it's necessary. And so a church covenant is very helpful in times when someone has strayed and the covenant can be brought out and a time of careful inspection of whatever may cause a need for discipline would come out, and so it is also a covenant of discipline.

And then lastly, it is also a covenant of love for the church. We began our time talking about that. So we have this last item. We will, when we move from this place, if possible, unite with the church where we can carry out the spirit of this covenant. So here is a commitment to continue to love the church all of your life long.

God has established the church that you would be saved, washed by the blood of the Lamb, and then inserted into his family and you become part of his body. And there all your life long you are nursed by the Lord Jesus Christ and he uses the different brothers and sisters. He uses the teaching of the Word of God. He uses the conscience of one brother and the admonition of another. He uses the calamities that come on the church all as a nursery to carry you.

He will carry you in his bosom and he will gently lead those who are with young and he will take he will take us all the way to heaven and so it's we we believe it's really important that when someone leaves the church we urge them to find another church do not separate from the church you know leaving and going and having church in your own house does not qualify. Go and join with the people of God. Join with a bigger family than your own. And so this is a mighty urging that we feel we need to maintain in the church. So that's our Church Covenant, and we enjoy reading it and reviewing it, and it's been a blessing to us.

It's helped us to keep focus in the church. I ran across something that I want to share with you. A song has been written that I want to play and it's a Church Covenant song and it's really neat and It's a little bit like our Church Covenant and it's online and you can get it. So here it goes. Brought by God the Holy Spirit, to trust Jesus Christ the Son.

We the church of God the Father, As His people join as one, having been our faith professing, baptized in the triune name, We in joy and holy earnest Do this covenant now proclaim We will work with love and patience for the Spirit's bond of peace. As we pray we will endeavor to see holiness increase, we will warn, exhort, and courage, as occasion may require. We will seek to love each other ever quick to reconcile. We will not forsake assembling nor neglect to serve in prayer. We will seek to teach the gospel to those God puts in our care.

We will bear each other's burdens And in sorrow share our tears We will celebrate God's blessings sharing in each other's cheer. We will strive to walk in newness, Free from worldly lust and sin, as proclaimed in our immersion, dead to sin and raised with him, We are presents, gifts and service to this church to now commit. We will keep her faith and practice to her discipline submit. To her disciplines of guilt. Should the Lord be pleased to move us, we will seek to quickly find an assembly of like doctrine with a covenant of like kind.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus with God's love upon us fall may the spirit's sweet communion be forever with us all with us all. Ah, isn't that beautiful? What a blessing. Aren't you glad, aren't you glad that the Lord Jesus has led the way to take us all with Him to make a covenant with His church that He would say, I will never leave you or forsake you. Would you follow Him in that?

Would you love the church of the Lord Jesus Christ with as much love as he can pour out in your heart. This is the importance of a church covenant, that we would find ourselves in linkage with him, that we would find ourselves like him and expressing the same kind of love and the same kind of mind to the church, his precious bride. Amen. Thank you for listening to this presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches. We invite you to visit our website at www.ncfic.org where you can keep up to date on what is new as well as find articles, videos, audio sermons and much more at no charge.

The N-C-F-I-C exists to proclaim the sufficiency of scripture for both church and family life.