I want to encourage everyone to give serious consideration to this matter of covenants within the church.
Please don't feel the need to post.
I agree wholeheartedly with the Bible as being our guide, standard and rule by which we apply all things. Therefore, if you have a covenant shouldn't everything in the covenant be easily substantiated from the Bible?
Should we just say I pledge to live by the Bible? The Bible is a large book with much information in it. Some of which isn't very applicable to today—have you read Leviticus lately?
There must a reason why godly preachers of the past and elders of the church drafted and articulated the most important things into paragraphs that could be easily digested and comprehended.
Some of the godliest men in the world have written and pledged to live within the framework of a covenant.
I don't sense any leadership from the Lord just to continue to keep our covenant buried in a pdf file. Pray for me.
Greg Wills writes,
When persons joined a Baptist church, they subscribed to its covenant, which summarized Christ's commission to the churches. In it they declared that they intended together to be church of Christ: "We do voluntarily and jointly separate ourselves from the world, and give ourselves unto the Lord, hold ourselves henceforth his, and no longer our own. We do also voluntarily and mutually give ourselves one to another; and receive one another in the Lord, meaning hereby to become one body, joint to exist and act by bonds and rules of the gospel, each esteeming himself henceforth a member of a spiritual body, accountable to it, subject to its control" (Polity: A Collection of Historic Baptist Documents p. 23).
Why should I assume that in the 18th century it was important but isn't important in the 21st century?
Fundamentalist of the past must have thought it was important.
