Kenneth Copeland Devotional 11 March 2024 – A Covenant of Love
Topic: A Covenant of Love
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son. – John 3:16
For God so loved the world that He gave…and He gave…and He gave.
That is the message the Bible brings us from beginning to end. It sounds simple enough. Yet few of us really comprehend it.
We can understand the idea of a God of power. We can understand a God who desires to be served. But an Almighty God who loves us so much that He desires, above all, to give to us? That can be hard to believe.
For thousands of years, God has been working to drop the revelation of His love into the hearts of men. He’s made loving promises of blessing and protection. But He’s always faced that same obstacle—human beings who just couldn’t bring themselves to believe those promises were true.
The story of Abram is a perfect example. He wasn’t accustomed to the idea of a God who gives. After all, he’d grown up as a worshiper of the moon, and the moon had certainly never seemed interested in doing anything for him. Then he encountered El Shaddai, the greatest Being of all. The one Almighty God. And the first thing this El Shaddai wanted to do was give to him.
God’s promises so astounded Abram that he couldn’t believe them. “Lord,” he asked, “how can I know I’m really going to receive these things?” (See Genesis 15:8.)
Do you know how God answered him? By cutting a blood covenant with him. That covenant settled forever any question Abram could ever have about God’s love and loyalty. Once blood had been shed, he knew God meant what He said.
God did the same thing for you. He cut a blood covenant with you. And He sacrificed His own Son to do it. Jesus’ broken body and shed blood have become the eternal proof of God’s love for you. Through Communion, He’s urged you to remember them again and again so that when your faith in His promises begins to waver, you “might have a strong consolation” (Hebrews 6:18).
Get a revelation of God’s love for you by meditating on the covenant He’s made with you. Get out the bread and the cup. Go before the Lord with them and take Communion. Think about the body and blood of Jesus that enables you to be a blood-covenant member of the family of Almighty God. Let them settle forever the question of God’s love for you. You’ll never again have to doubt His promises once you believe in His love.
Scripture Reading: Genesis 15
1 After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:
2 But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit[c] my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”
4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring[d] be.”
6 Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
7 He also said to him, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.”
8 But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?”
9 So the Lord said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.”
10 Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. 11 Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
12 As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13 Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15 You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
17 When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi[e] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”
This message was written by Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, the leader of the Kenneth Copeland Ministries that specializes in teaching principles of bible faith – prayer, healing, salvation and other biblical topics.
