When Tara and I attended the 2009 University of the Nations Workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland, we were presented the Jubilee Covenant. It is a covenant with God. The leaders of YWAM believed they heard from God to sign this covenant in celebration of the 50 years of YWAM’s existence.
Here is the covenant:
I recognize that as YWAM celebrates fifty years of ministry, God’s Spirit is at work in amazing ways around the world.
I eagerly want to do my part to make sure that “the flame goes forward” and thus help fulfill God’s dream that every individual might hear and that all nations might be impacted by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I consider it a great privilege to be alive and called “for such a time as this” – and therefore, by God’s grace, I commit myself:
1. To love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself (Mark 12:30-31);
2. To seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness above every concern for my own life and future (Matthew 6:25-34);
3. To serve others for no greater reason than my love for God (John 21:15-17);
4. To take up my cross and follow Jesus wherever He leads me (Mark 8:34-35);
5. To do everything I can possibly do through the power of the Holy Spirit at work in me to fulfill the Great Commission in this generation (Mark 16:15).
For such a time as this, I covenant before God – together with my brothers and sisters – to make these my priorities until “the earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” Habakkuk 2:14.
These aren’t small promises. When I think that I have covenanted with God to do everything possible to fulfill the Great Commission in this generation and to go wherever He leads me, I am shaken to the core of my being with the gravity of that promise. I also realize that these promises are nothing less than Scripture that God commands of all believers, and it humbles me that I have lived most of my previous 38 years knowing those commands but doing little in fact to follow them wholeheartedly.
Because of that humbling reality I plead to God to give me the strength, wisdom and love to pursue these promises passionately until my last breath, until that time when I meet with Him on the other side of this life. I now often ask myself, whenever I am in a meeting or undertaking a task, whether this truly fulfills my covenant to the Lord. Am I doing everything I can possibly do in this meeting through the power of the Holy Spirit working in me to fulfill the Great Commission in this generation?
May this covenant be the matrix by which I live my life!