64: New Covenant (Belief-Based Identity, Part 4)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Episode 64. Today we are looking at a new covenant identity.

Hello, Father.

[00:28] Marcus: Hello Daughter. The new covenant, it’s a good topic.

[00:30] Stephanie: A very good topic. We’re going to take a couple episodes and just unpack it. It’s going to be great. But first, an icebreaker. Would you rather go to an art museum or a history museum?

[00:45] Marcus: History, no question. Six days a week.

[00:50] Stephanie: Yeah, I would be the same. I enjoy art museums, but I would lean toward history museums. Any particular history that your mind jumps to?

[01:01] Marcus: I like anything related to the Bible. So I like the ancient Near East, Roman history, all those kinds of things. That’s my favorite, then I go from there.

[01:13] Stephanie: Hey, I am your daughter.

[01:15] Marcus: Yes, indeed.

[01:17] Stephanie: Yes. That is probably what I would do as well. Well, hey, before we get into the topic of the episode, I want to give a shout out to Deeper Walk’s School of Ministry. Dad, do you want to give a quick pitch for prayer ministry certification?

[01:30] Marcus: Yeah. So one of the core things we do at Deeper Walk is train people to do prayer ministry. A lot of my life’s been spent walking alongside people who needed freedom. And so they had spiritual warfare ministry that they needed or they had wounds in their heart that had been unattended. They needed somebody to pray with them to connect with God in those damaged places in their hearts. And so that’s what we train people to do. And what separates it is it’s not just information. If you just want the information you get that relatively cheaply at our website. But if you want to get trained in this and practice, then School of Ministry is for those people.

[02:08] Stephanie: Awesome. So if you want certification in the Deeper Walk Prayer Ministry, this is your opportunity. The application window for January’s cohort just opened today and it will close in December. But don’t wait until the last minute. If you’re interested, get your application in now because there is limited space. This cohort is going to run from January through December 2024 and there’ll be a summer break. So there is space for up to 20 people to learn and journey together in online classes and community. And if you’re interested in this and future cohorts check out the School of Ministry page at Deeper Walk’s website. It’s wonderful. We have so many wonderful people who have gone through it.

[02:52] Marcus: Most of the people who get into this course like staying together afterwards too. It’s like, I like all these new people I’ve connected to, this is great. So I think it’s a good investment.

[03:01] Stephanie: Yeah, it’s community building as well as content training. It’s great. Well, hey, we have been talking about belief based identity from the kingdom versus Kosmos perspective. Walking through the Kosmos, world, flesh, and devil designs on our identities. And now we are moving into the Kingdom, looking at the new covenant and how it informs how we understand not only our own identity, but God’s as well. So Father, let us start basic in the context of the scriptures, what is the new covenant?

[03:31] Marcus: Okay, so there’s an old covenant and a new covenant. In fact, it helps me to start this way. There was a promise covenant that was made to Abraham and then there was a law covenant that was made with Moses. And the promise was like an engagement where God says to Abraham, you’re going to have kids, they’re going to grow up someday. Metaphorically, they’ll become my wife. It’s like two fathers negotiating a betrothal as they did back in the ancient world. And then the law is the wedding covenant. And the wedding covenant basically was, okay, Israel, do you accept Yahweh to be your God, forsaking all others? And Israel said yes.

And God said, then out of all peoples on earth, you’ll be my chosen special treasured possession. The problem was Israel didn’t keep the covenant, right? They basically committed adultery on their honeymoon and kept committing adultery all the way to the end till they were sent into exile, at which time both Jeremiah and Ezekiel say a new covenant is needed. God is going to send a new covenant. And this covenant’s not going to be like the old covenant, it’s going to be a new one. So Jesus, when he died on the cross, he established the new covenant that replaced the old covenant. And this new covenant defines who are God’s people? Do you belong to God or not?

And so in today’s world the most common covenant is a wedding covenant. A wedding covenant defines your relationship in very specific terms and says you two are now one, so learn to act like it, right? That’s kind of the way that goes. And then you grow in your ability to live in oneness after that. But the covenant connects you together and defines your relationship. In the same way the new covenant says on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, you belong to God, you are in his family and this now defines who you are. Therefore, the new covenant is the foundation on which we build everything that goes on in our lives.

Now take it a step further to connect this to what we’ve been talking about with attachment. In a wedding, what I’m doing is forming a relational attachment with this person. What the covenant does is it defines it and  confirms it. In the same way, I form an attachment with Jesus Christ by faith that connects us relationally and I want to grow relationally. But what the covenant does is it confirms that relationship and it defines that relationship. And that’s why it’s so important. We need to understand how the new covenant has defined our relationship with God, and in the process, it will define things about us and things about God. That makes it really fundamental to all of discipleship.

[06:27] Stephanie: Yeah. Part of this goal is reconciliation of human and God together, restoring that relationship. You have said, and I just want to read this, I love it. You said, “Sin is not the point, it is the obstacle. Obedience is not the goal, it is the fruit.” Do you want to unpack that thought?

[06:46] Marcus: Yeah. A lot of people feel like they have a gospel of sin basically, and that  God is so mad at us because of our sin that Christ had to die. That’s just how bad our sin is. And that’s about as far as the gospel goes. They don’t seem to understand that God loves us so much that he wants to be with us. The obstacle keeping that from happening is sin. So God had to deal with sin in order to get what he wanted, which was reconciliation. A relational reconciliation that we could be together with Him without that obstacle between us anymore.

So the gospel is really about relationships and it deals with sin to make that relationship possible. Also, some people have the idea that you have to perform or be a good enough person in order to be saved. But the whole point of the gospel is that nobody can be good enough. Our obedience can’t get us into a relationship with God. You can’t earn it. So what the gospel teaches is that the relationship is a free gift, forgiveness is a free gift, and righteousness is the natural fruit. Then the obedience that we live out is the natural result of being in relationship with God.

[07:58] Stephanie: Huzzah! I want to dwell more on God’s identity and what the new covenant shines a light on, from that perspective. And not just, oh, this is who I am in Christ, but who is Christ?

[08:17] Marcus: So there’s two keywords that are used over and over again in the New Testament about God related to the gospel. One is mercy, the other is grace. And it says, out of his great mercy he did this. What does that mean? He looked at us in our predicament, he had pity on us. He said, these people are in a hopeless situation. I will have mercy on them and I will do something about it. So we weren’t like knocking on heaven’s doors saying, we are in a desperate position, please rescue us, because we were happily ignorant of our plight.

And God just had mercy on us and said, I’m going to do something about this, I want to take care of it. So he initiated everything. He put a plan in place, he sent his son. He did everything himself to make this available to us out of his great mercy. The other thing that we’re told about God is his grace. And there’s two kinds of grace. There is a grace that is earned and there is a grace that is not earned. But this isn’t even talking about that. This is talking about the graciousness of God.

And it’s this idea that what kind of God is he? He is the sort of God who not only looks at us with mercy and with compassion, but he does something about it. And what he does is so far above and beyond what would be expected. You look at God and say, he has a lavish grace, he has a remarkable grace.

[09:46] Stephanie: Why don’t you go ahead, you just said there are like three graces.

[09:52] Marcus: You’re right. Let’s start with the grace you earn. So you’ve had people say, you should forgive that person. Well, they don’t deserve it and there’s truth to that. But we don’t forgive people because they deserve it. We forgive people for our own sake so that we can be free from the bondage that we’re in. But there is a sense in which sometimes I extend grace to you in order to breed loyalty in you. There’s sort of a give and take to it.

And the same thing with blessing. It might be easier to think of grace as a blessing in this sense. There are blessings that come because of obedience and there are blessings that come because a righteous generation passes on a blessing to future generations. That’s more of the earned blessing, if you will. But then there is this unearned grace. There is this unearned blessing where God gives it to you as a free gift. So salvation falls into that category of this is a free gift that is given by God.

There are good things that happen to us that God gives to us as a blessing, sort of as a reward for good behavior, if you will. But that isn’t everything. And where we get in trouble is if all of your ideas of God’s blessing is to obey and you’ll be blessed, if that is your only theology, you will inevitably end up in legalism. Because now you’re going to feel like God owes you.

[11:20] Stephanie: It’s very transactional.

[11:22] Marcus: Very transactional, yes. And so there are things like that. Just like you and I have a grace based relationship. That doesn’t mean that if you don’t do something good, you don’t get something special thing now and then. Like, well done, you really did a good job. Let’s celebrate that. There’s blessings that come your way because of obedience or performance, but there’s also blessings that are yours just because of being part of the family. And it’s the same way, we could apply that to a whole lot of different relationships.

[11:53] Stephanie: Thank you for pausing on that. I’m sure someday we will do a whole series on grace and unpack more, but I just wanted to make sure we paused and people aren’t like, wait, three graces?

[12:04] Marcus: Any word has what’s called a semantic range. And one of the mistakes that we make in exegesis is forcing a word to mean exactly the same thing every time it shows up. It’s a mistake and you’ve got to look at the context sometimes to know which version of the word is in mind in a particular passage.

[12:25] Stephanie: One of my favorite versions of that is the word bank. Like, there’s a river bank or there’s a bank where you keep your money. And maybe poetically, those can be given the same nuance, but you don’t usually think, oh, yes, this bank means that bank.

[12:40] Marcus: Yeah. When you say, hey, let’s go on a date. I want to go sit on the bank of the river. It’s like, wait, there’s not a bank by the river. So clearly context tells you what you mean by that word. It’s the same thing with a lot of words in the Bible. And again, one of the exegetical mistakes people make is forcing words to have the same meaning regardless of context. And we have to be careful when we do that even with words like grace.

[13:03] Stephanie: Cool. Are there any scriptures for understanding God’s identity in this context or any more you want to unpack there? I know this question is way more complicated than it sounds.

[13:18] Marcus: Well, if you go back into the Old Testament, in the Hebrew we read about Psalm 89, which is a covenant Psalm where it says, “Give thanks to Lord, for he is good.”  His hesed endures forever. And we’re told that over and again. Here two words are paired together, and it’s this word hesed and the word emeth. Now, hesed can be translated as love or loving kindness. But it’s this idea of attachment love that says, because we belong to Him, he loves us because of that. And then emeth is usually translated as faithfulness, but I actually prefer the translation of integrity or truthfulness.

And it’s the idea that God’s character is that he loves us and that he is trustworthy because he is a person of integrity. The best definition I’ve heard of integrity is that your words and your deeds match, right? You don’t say one thing and do another. Your words and your deeds line up.

And so God because of his integrity is faithful and trustworthy. God because he’s loving and wants what’s best for us, the result is that God is good. And so that means I can trust God and I can trust his love for me, and know that the plans that he’s putting together for me are for my good and not for my evil. And it takes us to therefore if God is for me, who can be against me? And let’s push into and rest in that love.

[14:57] Stephanie: That’s beautiful. Thank you. All right, let’s start looking at more of tying us and our identity back into how we interact with God, and his identity. Starting with the idea of the role we play that we are image bearers of God.

[15:16] Marcus: So before you ever get to the new covenant there is an identity that God gives and every human has being before the new covenant even comes into play. And that’s the identity that we get via Adam of being image bearers. In Genesis chapter five, verse one, it would have probably helped me if I looked this up and had it right in front of me. So a little rustling of the pages here. I am looking for Genesis 5:1, here it is. So it says this is the Toledoth of Adam’s family line. This is the written account of Adam’s family line. I’m in the NIV and it says, “When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them, and he named them Adam, or he named them mankind when they were created.”

Notice a couple of things there: the likeness of God, the image of God, male and female, they were blessed. They’re all collectively called Adam. So now we get to verse three, and he’s just introduced us to the likeness of God, the image of God. And it says, “When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image, and named him Seth”. Now, the wording there is not accidental. We’re just told we’re made in the likeness of God. In Genesis 1 we’re told we’re made in the image of God. And now for the first time, we’re given something to compare that to. What does it look like to be in the likeness and image of God? Well, he’s saying it’s just like Adam having Seth, a father to a Son. This is a likeness and an image is passed down.

And what that tells me is that all of us were created to be in relationship with God. We are created to be family. We were created to be his children. So we’ve already seen that male and female are in his image. It could have been talking about the birth of Adam’s daughter, but in this case it’s talking about his son. And the likeness means Eve didn’t give birth to a giraffe, Eve gave birth to a human.

Now, some people have taken this too far and said, oh, we’re divine. To be made in the image of God doesn’t mean we’re little “gods” running around. But it means that we are children of God. Therefore we are, in a unique way, designed and created for a relationship with God. So the way that I explain this a lot is that God is the sun and we’re the moon. And we are just dark rocks floating through space until we come into relationship to the sun. And then the brilliance of the sun reflects off of us and we ourselves become glorious.  We don’t obtain our full meaning and purpose in life until we’re in that relationship. Part of what the image of God says, is that we are created to reflect God’s glory. We are designed to be in a relationship with Him. God designed us uniquely to bear his image and that’s why giraffes don’t run the world.

[18:14] Stephanie: This is great, keep talking. Do you want to talk about our hearts and God’s image?

[18:23] Marcus: God created each of us with a unique identity and the covenant gives everybody the same identity. Covenant means that all who are in the covenant have this same identity. But when you start talking about being in the image of God and you talk about the heart that he uniquely gave you, and what it means to be you in a unique sort of way.

That tends to come out in what Thrive Today Life Model calls Heart Values. And so heart values are the things that really make your heart come alive. And one of the ways that you can kind of check to see what is my heart value, what am I really passionate about, can be done in a positive and a negative way. In a positive way, it’s  what really makes you excited, what really brings your heart to life when you are able to participate in that. And the negative side of it is what really makes your heart hurt when you see it happening and what do you want to do about it.

So for example, staying with the hurt part of it. If you see somebody in pain some people are going to go, oh, I want to give them a hug. It says their heart value is mercy. What I really want to do is comfort them directly and immediately, and make them feel better. Some people are going to go, I want to bring somebody to justice for hurting this person. Their heart value is more justice. Somebody else is going to say we need to fix the system that makes this stuff happen.

And their heart value is leadership. They want to change the way this whole thing works. And so our heart values are shown in the way that we respond to those things that get us upset. This is what I would like to do about this. And obviously we might want to do all three, right? But there is one of them that really when you start thinking man, if I could do that, it would bring such life to me and life to other people. And that is how you kind of know what your heart values are.

[20:21] Stephanie: That’s awesome. Thank you. Well, for the sake of getting to this next part while we have time, I want us to give an overview of what we’re about to go into for the next several episodes. We’re going to be digging deeper into your acrostic PACT and how that informs our kingdom identity. So would you give an overview of that relationship to the new Covenant?

[20:50] Marcus: How do I put this? In trying to define what the new covenant is, the biggest challenge we have is there’s no one passage that says, here is the new covenant. We can do that with the old covenant to some extent. There are 600 some commandments and you collect those commandments and you put them together and you say, here’s the old covenant. And then you can get a list of blessings and you get a list of curses. You say, if you obey these 613 commandments you’ll get these blessings, and if you don’t, you’ll get these curses.

And it’s all very straightforward. But how do you do that with the new covenant? A long time ago, I saw Dr. Neil Anderson’s list of all the things that are true about us in Christ from the New Testament. And it occurred to me that each one of those “In Christ” statements is a term of the new covenant. So every time in the New Testament you read in Christ, this is true of us that you are God’s child. In Christ, this is true of you. You could read it also under the new covenant that this is true of you. Under the new covenant, this is true of you. So anytime you have an “In Christ” statement, you have a new covenant statement being made. So starting there, there’s a lot of them.

Dr. Anderson’s listed about over 30 of them I think, of all these “In Christ” statements in the New Testament. So as I like to do, I tried to organize those into buckets that we can collect a bunch of these in that would summarize where all of this is going in this list. And that led me to that there’s justification, there’s adoption, there’s citizenship, and there’s sanctification. And I thought well, those are hard words to remember. What if we’d call justification pardon? Adoption can stay the same. Citizenship can stay the same.

What if we take sanctification and make it the title saint, like I am a saint? Because over 80 times it uses sanctification or saint to describe the Christian in the New Testament. So I’m like, well, that kind of sums it up. That gives us four buckets. So the first one, pardon is all of the words related to our justification. It’s all the legal kind of courtroom terms related to our salvation. Our adoption is pretty straightforward. Our citizenship is not of the world anymore but now of the kingdom of Heaven. And that we’re now called Saints, it’s a new title. So pardon, adoption, citizenship, title, and you get PACT. So PACT is an attempt to create four buckets that summarize all of these “In Christ” statements that are made about us in the New Testament.

[23:25] Stephanie: Yay. And we are going to take an episode on each one of those and it’s going to be great. So I’m going to pause now and pull a note from one of our listeners. This was submitted back during our one year anniversary celebration and it’s so sweet. So this person says, “Congratulations on the one year anniversary of On the Trail. I’ve listened to every one of your podcasts. I look forward to Mondays when a new podcast is released. Thank you for your time and care in presenting this amazing material. I love the joyful and close family dynamics displayed in your podcasts. You model so much as you talk together. Thank you. My husband and I will be at the family gathering in October. We can’t wait to meet you. You are all so precious.”

And to that I say, “Huzzah!” Are you surprised? I’m so excited for this conference too. And honestly, we’re recording this enough in advance that there might not actually be space for new people to sign up because it’s filling up fast. So if you were hoping to come to this conference run to the website and see if there’s any space left. Otherwise there will be some online options.

[24:35] Marcus: Yes, we are planning to have some online options because it looks like we’re going to fill up here maybe even before the month of September starts.

[24:41] Stephanie: I know it’s going fast, I’m so excited. We’re going to have so many people together and it’s a wonderful time. Dad’s going to be presenting for the first time on his upcoming book Breakthrough. And yeah, anyway, excited about that and thank you so much for your notes. And I also just want to say if you want to submit a question for us or a testimony, or even an icebreaker, I have put a little button that leads to a mailbox in my Monday emails and you can also find it on Instagram.

[25:14] Marcus: It’s easy. Just look for the word behold. Just look for the word behold in the email and you will find the email.

[25:20] Stephanie: I can be melodramatic, okay. Behold the mailbox! I did say that in my emails, so yes. All right, any closing thoughts for this episode Father?

[25:31] Marcus: I just remember the first time I saw that and you said, “Could you proofread this email?” I’m like, behold the mailbox, okay, let’s do that.

[25:40] Stephanie: It makes me smile.

[25:42] Marcus: It does. It was pretty funny. Closing thoughts. This is a topic that you can dive into and turn pretty academic. One of the reasons that we want to take this pause and really look at identity is that the wounds of life have taught us a false identity about ourselves. When we think about our heart values words come to mind like disappointment, failure, and God must be disappointed with me. I have words that come up as worthless. Part of the reason we take the time to pause on this is that the world and the devil and our flesh are relentless in trying to rob us of our identity.

And they’re relentless about trying to keep us from seeing ourselves the way that God wants us to see ourselves. And the reason that’s so important is that when I see myself accurately, it facilitates that relationship. Because I begin to see myself as someone God wants to be with. And that’s really the bottom line and why we are doing all this. You could sum it all up and say, we don’t need all these podcasts. God wants to be with you. That’s really what we’re trying to say. He wants to be in a relationship with you.

[26:58] Stephanie: Yay. That is a wonderful comfort. A wonderful comfort. Well, thank you. And thank you all for joining us On the Trail. Today Deeper Walk exists to make heart focused discipleship the norm for Christians everywhere. If you’d like to support this cause, you can become a Deeper Walk Trailblazer with your monthly donation of $25 or more. And if you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the On The Trail podcast. Leave a review and share with your friends.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next weekend.