Covenant Life Church

Throughout the Bible, God talks a lot about peace, and it makes sense. He identifies Himself as a God of peace, and Jesus is called the Prince of Peace. The Bible also talks about worry and anxiety a lot because they are the enemies of peace. God loves us, and He wants us to walk in peace.

During our last series, we talked about the replacement doctrine, which means that we have to replace our negative activities with positive ones, and this is exactly what we see in Philippians 4:6. This week, we’re starting a new series that explores the connection between prayer and peace.

Over the past six weeks, we’ve been in the “Prescription for the Promise” Series, exploring the three, two-word imperatives that the Lord gave us in a prophetic word a few months ago: Get Healthy, Get Strong and Get Ready. There were great promises contained in that prophecy, but it was clear that they were contingent upon us carrying out the commands — or prescriptions — God provided. We spent a couple of weeks talking about how to get healthy, the last four weeks learning how to get strong, and we’re ending the series with what it means to get ready.

Let’s assume that we are all healthy or getting healthy, and we are learning to walk and live in the love of Christ, which is the source of spiritual strength. We could look in the Bible and follow scriptural principles for these first two commands, but the command to get ready leads to many questions. Get ready for what? How can you study when you don’t know what’s on the test? How can you be ready when you don’t know what’s coming? This week, we’re going to look at three things we can do to get ready for any time or place God may lead us.

We’ve been in a series called “Prescription for the Promise,” in which we’ve been talking about getting healthy and getting strong. This week, we’re continuing to focus on what it means to Get Strong. The central idea is to get strong in the Lord’s power, and we’ve explored many aspects of spiritual strength — all of them important, valid and backed up by multiple scriptures.

In Ephesians 3:19, Paul writes about experiencing the love of Christ, so we can be “made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.” Throughout this potion of our series, we have learned that growing in God’s power is what gives us strength, and the Bible tells us that kind of strength only happens when we experience the love of Christ.

Covenant Life received a prophetic word a few months ago, in which the Lord told us to do three thingsL Get Healthy, Get Strong and Get Ready. We have been referring to these as prescriptions that we need to fill in order to see the promises that God said were coming, and we’ve been looking at each one throughout our current series, “Prescription for the Promise.” We have to actually do what He tells us to do if we expect to receive what He said He wanted for us.

This week, we’re continuing to explore what it means to Get Strong. We already learned that spiritual strength has to be endued, which means that we have to surrender and allow God to wrap us in His strength. We also learned that spiritual strength has to be renewed; humans are weak and prone to leaking, so we have to be refilled. To “be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power,” we must learn how to stop poking holes in the supernatural buckets of our lives.

This week, we are continuing our series called “Prescription for the Promise.” The Lord spoke a word to Covenant Life a few months ago that included some wonderful promises He has in store for us, but it also includes three things that we need to do. The fulfillment of the promises is contingent upon our willingness to do the three prescriptions He gave us: Get Healthy, Get Strong and Get Ready.

This week is the second part of our focus on “Get Strong.” As we started to discuss last week, strength and courage are often seen together in the Bible. To encourage means to put courage in, but you have to take something out before you can put in something new. Perhaps, the reason some of us have not gotten stronger in the Lord is because we’re trying to add strength, but we haven’t removed the fear first.

This week, we’re continuing our series called “Prescription for the Promise,” exploring the prophetic word about our church that the Lord gave to Pastor John a few months ago. Within this prophecy, there are three kinds of statements. There are descriptions that tell us what’s happening and predictions about things to come in the future, but there are also three commands we must do to see the promise be fulfilled.

We’ve already talked about the first prescription: get healthy. Now, as we shift our focus to the second prescription, we’re going to see what the Bible says about getting strong. Ephesians 6 tells us to be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power, and in John 15, Jesus says that we’re unable to do anything without Him. Together, we’ll discover ways to improve our union with God, which is crucial for spiritual strength.

Last week, we began a brand new series called “Prescription for the Promise,” which seeks to unpack three commands within the prophecy that God spoke to and about Covenant Life a few months ago. He said that we need to get healthy, get strong and get ready. By doing these things, we will be prepared for the promises that He also spoke to us: victory, growth, freedom and repentance.

With Get Healthy: Part 1, we talked about the first two steps in the process. First, we need to ask God for an honest evaluation about the areas in which we’re not healthy. Then, we have to be humble enough to accept the evidence and admit that we may have work to do. This week, we’re continuing the conversation about how we can be physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually healthy.

A few weeks ago, Pastor John released a prophetic word for Covenant Life. Part of that message is descriptive; it describes the breaking and shaking of strongholds many people in our church are experiencing right now. Some of it is predictive; it predicts that the result of the sharking and breaking will be resolution, freedom, repentance, victory, revival and growth.

Another part of the word is prescriptive. It is prescribing a course of action that we should take. This comes in the form of three commands that will hasten the fulfillment of the promises: get healthy get strong, get ready. This week, we’re talking about the first imperative and exploring its biblical foundation. No matter who you are what God has planned for you, you need to be healthy, strong and ready to walk into it.

Over the past three weeks, we’ve been talking a lot about sounds and how we often hear the rumblings of God doing things in our lives before we see those changes come to pass. As powerful as sounds are, though, I don’t think we realize that what we see has a significant impact on our lives. In fact, it’s more about how we see than it is about what what see.

So much of life is about perspective, and the impulses deep inside of us tend to color how we interact with and see the world. If the way we respond to the things that happen to us is determined by the thoughts and tendencies we have, it’s worth some analysis. This week, we’re learning how we can properly guard our hearts and ensure that our default reactions to the inconveniences of life are more in line with the Word of God.

When you grow up in the church, one of the common themes that gets drilled into your brain is that faith and facts are in opposition to each other. We are taught that the “what is” of facts and the “what shall be” of faith are somehow diametrically opposed to each other, but what happens when the facts surrounding your life actually lead you to a step of faith? Could it be that facts and faith can work together to lead you to a future that pleases God and blesses you?

There are a lot of man-made traditions and false conclusions that people have passed off as sound doctrine. Following Jesus is a faith walk, and The Bible is clear that it is impossible to please God without faith. However, it doesn’t mean that we completely ignore the evidence around us. We’ve been in a series called “Sounds From Heaven,” talking about the ways God speaks to us, and this week, we’re exploring the possibility that He may be speaking to you through the circumstances of your life right now.