Kenneth Copeland: ‘These 3 Steps Give You Access to God’s Blessings’
God is the King of the universe.
Through Covenant, He puts in our hand His scepter of power. He backs us and says to us, “Everything I have is yours.” He gives us the right to exercise His authority and BLESSES us with the same BLESSING He originally gave to Adam. (See Genesis 1:28.)
God’s perfect plan for mankind was for that original BLESSING to continue uninterrupted. His perfect will would have been for Adam to never sin and to be an eternal man. But because He knew in advance that Adam would fall, God’s plan for mankind’s redemption was already in place.
From before the foundation of the world, Jesus was that Plan.
All the covenants we will study point to Him. He’s there in what God said after Adam and Eve broke relationship with their Creator. He’s the One God was talking about when He told the devil that Eve’s Seed “shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). All through the Old Covenant, every Old Testament sacrifice represented Jesus.
Like many believers, you may have thought of the Old Testament and the New Testament as two separate Covenants. But as you’re about to discover, the two are very connected. As it’s been said: The Old Covenant is the New concealed, while the New Covenant is the Old revealed.
Even in the life of Jesus, we see both of those Covenants. As Professor Stephens will show you, during His earthly ministry, one moment Jesus would step out and advance the cause of the New Covenant. The next moment He would reach back to fulfill a remaining detail of the Old Covenant. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets:” He told His followers, “I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17).
What you’re about to read will help you better understand what that means. You’ll get a clear picture, as we walk together through all the covenants in the Bible, of how intricately this string of agreements forged by God with mankind over thousands of years are intertwined. You’ll get a deeper revelation of these covenants, what they mean to your relationship with God, and how they impact our world.
Step One of the Three-Step Process
Before we dig into the covenants themselves, though, there are some basics you need to know. Getting them established in your thinking is important. They’ll help make the seeming complexity of the covenant process and elements make sense.
The process of entering into a covenant always involves three steps. To God, three is a significant number. Throughout Scripture, He often works with groupings of three, a number that conveys completeness. The Bible tells us for example:
There are three members of the Godhead—God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit—which makes the Trinity.
There are three facets of God’s existence throughout time—God who was, who is, and who is to come (Revelation 1:4).
God created us to be triune beings made up of spirit, soul and body.
This pattern of threes emerges repeatedly in all God-initiated covenants because it’s a reflection of His divine nature. It also signifies the fact that all three Persons of the Godhead are actively involved in His covenants. Each member of the Trinity plays a unique part in the process of fulfilling the Father’s plan to redeem mankind and restore us back to Himself.
The first step in the covenant process is the calling to covenant. God, the Father, takes this step by graciously inviting us to join ourselves to Him. Then, He in turn can join Himself to us, bringing all of who He is and all of what He has into our lives.
Nehemiah 9 tells us it was God who chose Abraham. It wasn’t Abraham who initiated their covenant relationship. God approached him first. He brought Abraham up from his homeland, and gave him a new identity. He even promised to give him all the land as far as his eyes could see (verses 7-8), an offer seemingly too good to be true.
God has essentially done the same for us as believers today. He has called us just as He called Abraham and made us an astounding offer. He’s offered us the opportunity to enter into a relationship with Him for all eternity. He’s promised to BLESS us and assured us, as Romans 8:28 says, that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
Do you see it? As believers we are “the called”! That means God has already taken the first step in the process of establishing Covenant with us. He has extended to us a personal invitation to join ourselves to Him.
Step Two: Entering Covenant
The second step in establishing a covenant is the actual entering into the covenant. This is where the terms of the covenant are agreed upon by both parties, and the agreement is executed or acted upon. In Hebrews 11:8 and 9, we see Abraham taking this step. We see that “by faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.”
Imagine how much trust it took for Abraham to say yes to God’s call without knowing where that call would take him. Imagine how much Faith it took for him to leave everything behind without having any idea of exactly what lay ahead.
That’s like what Gloria did when she said yes to marrying me. Talk about an offer that seemed too good to be true! My lightning-fast mind figured out quickly that I was getting the better end of that deal. So, I did everything I could to get her to the altar before she could change her mind.
It took a lot of trust for her to marry me. She had to be willing to leave what was familiar to her and step out into a territory she was destined to inherit which, at the time, was nothing more than all my debts. I know for a fact she was in the dark about where her destiny with me was going to take her, because I didn’t have a clue myself.
Yet, even so, she headed out with me into the great unknown.
She started a new life with me based only on a promise—a promise I made to her in our wedding vows the day we were married. She took the second step in the covenant process, committed to love and joined herself to me.
That’s what Abraham did. When he acted on God’s promise in Faith, he entered into covenant. He accepted God’s invitation and joined himself to Him.
Hundreds of years later when God gave the people of Israel the opportunity to enter into a covenant relationship with Him, He added to this second step. He required the Israelites to agree verbally with His covenant conditions. He had them declare out loud together all the BLESSINGS and the curses of the Law. Like the reading and signing of a contractual agreement, this formalized their agreement to enter covenant with Him (Deuteronomy 27-30:19).
“But Brother Copeland,” you might say, “How does what Abraham and the people of Israel did in the Old Testament apply to us today? God hasn’t called us to go to a physical place called the Promised Land or asked us to declare out loud all the requirements of the Old Covenant Law. So, how do we take the second step of entering into Covenant with God?”
We do it by believing on God’s Son, Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, and receiving Him by Faith as our Savior and LORD!
As Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” (John 14:6). In other words, He told us, “The only way you can enter into Covenant with the Father is through Me. Yes, He has called and invited you, but I’m your way in!”
Jesus did for us what we couldn’t. He did what mankind had tried and failed to do for thousands of years. By living a sinless life and perfectly keeping God’s law, He fulfilled all God’s Covenant requirements. Then He became the ultimate Covenant sacrifice, paid the price for the sin of all mankind forever, and shed His blood to ratify a second Covenant, a New Covenant.
The New Covenant cannot be broken. It is between the eternal, Almighty God, and the resurrected, glorified man, Jesus Christ— and we get in on it by Faith in Him. One of the articles of this precious Covenant is recorded in 1 John 1:9: It says that when we sin, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
That means we can’t mess up this Covenant! As The BOOK says, “Jesus Christ [is] the same yesterday, and today, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). Because He is always the same, so is His Covenant with God, therefore ours is, too.
Step Three: Keeping Covenant
The third and final step of the covenant process is keeping or maintaining the agreement. A covenant relationship, like any relationship—whether it’s in a marriage, in parenting, business or simply a friendship—requires maintenance. Relationships need nurturing. For them to remain healthy and vital, you can’t just forget about them. You must remember and attend to them.
Jesus spoke about this to His disciples just before He left them to go to the cross. During their last Passover meal together, He took the bread, “and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24-25).
When Jesus instructed His disciples to do this “in remembrance of Me,” He was pointing back to what their Hebrew forefathers had done for thousands of years. When they ate the Passover meal, they remembered how God had delivered them from the bondage of Egypt (Exodus 13:3; Deuteronomy 4:9). This remembering kept their minds focused on their covenant with Him.
This is why Jesus established under the New Covenant what we today call “Communion.” By telling us to eat and drink the Covenant meal, He provided us with a simple action step we can take to remind us that we’re in Covenant with God through Him. He gave us a powerful way to release our Faith in that Covenant. A way to nurture our connection with Him and keep it not only intact but healthy, active, strong, thriving—alive!
Right after that last Covenant meal Jesus shared with His disciples, He also told them about another way He was going to help them remember and maintain their connection with Him. He was going to send them the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to help with this third Covenant step. He said:
If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you…. he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you (John 14:15-17, 26).
Notice a major role of the Holy Spirit is to help us remember our Covenant and keep our relationship with our heavenly Father dynamic. He also helps us by empowering us to be faithful to the conditions of the Covenant agreement and to obtain its benefits.
But as we will see, under the New Covenant, this doesn’t involve following an overwhelming list of rules and regulations, as was required under the First Covenant.
No, as born-again believers, our focus is to be on the One who went before us and fulfilled for us the terms of the Covenant. We take step three by giving attention to Jesus, to His Love for us, and to our place in Him. And we do that with the ever-present help— and continual prompting—of the Holy Spirit.
