Living as a Covenant Community - Participants Guide

194 Pages. Previous owner's name label pasted on the title page. Otherwise this is a brand new book. On the day of the feast of unleavened bread, Jesus gathered with his disciples. They drank, ate, and shared stories. It seemed like a normal Passover meal, but at one point Jesus did something unexpected. He took bread, lifted it up, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to each disciple saying: "Take, eat: this is my body." As they sat there, probably perplexed and wondering what Jesus meant, he took a cup of wine, blessed it, and asked each disciple to drink from the cup; for this was his "blood of the covenant"(Matthew 26:26-28; Mark 14:22-24). With those simple words, God through Jesus continued the act of divine covenant making with the people of God, this time with Jesus' disciples. Every instance in the First Testament when God made a covenant it changed the lives of people, and this was no exception. Our God is in the covenant- making business, yet, most of us have not studied this foundational way in which God intercedes for us and interacts with us. We are inclined to speak of the Old and New Testaments, which can lead us to invalidate the commandments of the First Testament. In doing this, we may devalue our Jewish sisters and brothers because, in effect, we are saying that if the old covenants and the Old Testament have been replaced, then they are a people of no covenant and no testament. For this reason, reference to the First Testament (instead of the Old Testament) and the Second Testament (instead of the New Testament) is used in this book.…