Personal Covenants (Part II) | Behold Your God Podcast

Personal Covenants and Spiritual Renewal in Wales

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson and I'll be joined with my good friend and pastor Dr. John Snyder, author of the Behold Your God study series and pastor of Christ Church New Albany in just a little while.

As I mentioned at the end of last week's episode, we'd started to record a supporter appreciation podcast on the subject of personal covenants, dealing with a personal covenant that that John wrote back in the late 90s.

It was so good and I felt it was so good that I've asked if we could just use it as this week's podcast. So this is part two in personal covenants. Welcome back to our supporter appreciation podcast for the Behold Your God podcast.

I'm Matthew Robinson and I'm still here with Dr. John Snyder. We mentioned in our podcast this week personal covenants. There are others that we have access to from history, not just William Grimshaw, but two that I think of are Jonathan Edwards resolutions, which are famous and intense.

Yeah, a little daunting. Yeah, as almost.

All Edwards can be. Yeah, I think the Bible could be a summary of his rather.

Than the other way. So definitely look at those. Take a look at those if you're not familiar with them, Edwards resolutions. And then Robert Murray McShane did some resolutions, some personal covenanting as well.

A Burden for God's Glory in Wales

Yeah. So, but instead of talking about those, I want to take a few minutes to ask John about a personal covenant that I know he made that led in many ways to the beginning of the church, which, you know, indirectly led to the work that we've done together over the last seven years, which, so this is kind of a ground zero turning point for you.

The Lord had brought you to some sort of crises in your own life and it drove you to a season of really seeking his face. Yeah. And so tell us about that.

Yeah. Well, we've mentioned before that my family and I, we went to Wales in 1996 for me to work on the PhD on the 18th century, the influence of the Puritans on the first generation of the 18th century leaders in the Great Awakening there.

So that included a lot of Welshmen. So we actually lived in the city of Cardiff and we went to a very, very helpful church there, the Heath Evangelical Church, which is still there and still a very faithful work and met many friends that are still our friends.

But while I was there, I really spent all my time in a pile of books. So studying the 17th century Puritans, studying the 18th century evangelical revival leaders. But while I was doing that, before we arrived on Britain's shores, I realized that spiritually I had become very cold.

I had been in seminary for the last year of my master's degree, was only sleeping about four or five hours a night. We, Misty and I had a little, we had one child and then Catherine came along right toward the end of that.

So it was a pretty stressful time. No money, no sleep, and I didn't handle it well. My quiet times were becoming non-existent. Our marriage was pretty stressful. So when we went to the UK, I was really concerned.

I did not want to go study the theme of revival and come back home after three years with as heart as cold as it was when I arrived. And so I just really made a kind of a commitment before the Lord that regardless of whether I got a PhD or not, I was going to meet with the Lord and walk with the Lord while we were in Britain.

And so I remember one morning being at the school, and it was an old kind of manor house. It was kind of quaint and, you know, for an American it was very romantic. So we're in this big old building, and I would go out into the to the grounds early in the morning, first day we were there, first morning.

And so I open up my Bible, and I've got a meeting coming up with my academic advisor at, say, 10 in the morning. So I'm out there at about 730 with my Bible, out in these kind of English-looking gardens, you know, and praying.

And I'm so excited about being in the UK, and I got to hurry up and get to work on my PhD, because that's why I'm here. And so I was sitting out in these gardens all by myself, and I was reading the book of John.

And I started to read, and nothing was happening, so to speak, you know what I mean? Like, you know, I'm just reading through the words, and my mind is a thousand miles away. And so I say, okay, basically in my heart I say this, well, God, you're not helping here, and so I'm busy.

I got stuff to do. I'm gonna go ahead and run back in and meet my academic advisor. So I close up my Bible and walk back to the school. And about halfway back to the school, I thought, John, you're doing it again.

You know, you are running away from the board, and you're getting busy for God. What use is that? So I stopped in my tracks, and I said, okay, God. And so I walked back out to the garden. I sat down. I said, I'm not leaving here.

I'm not meeting that academic advisor. I'm not doing anything until my heart is right before you, until we do business together. And so I opened my Bible back up, and immediately, after I humbled myself, the Lord, you know, in such a wonderful way, aided that quiet time, and you know, met with me.

And so that really was the beginning of the three very happy years. But during those years, reading the Puritans and 18th century men was not the most significant spiritual influence. Really, the church was even better than that.

But on top of all that, I was reading through the Gospels. I wanted to get to know Christ better. So it took me three years to get through the Gospel of John. And there was a period toward the end, for about six months, where there was an increasing sense of weight on my heart, a concern about God's glory in my life, looking at this struggle in my own soul, the sluggish response to God, my lack of Christ-likeness, my coldness, and yearning to see God honored in me, but also in the churches, thinking about what God might have me do when we came back home.

A Six-Month Burden Leading to Psalm 81

Now this, during the six months, it was just like this increasingly heavy weight where I couldn't avoid it. And so I started, I started just getting up to go to the, you know, to the library to study, and I would just do a detour.

I would just take my backpack and my Bible and a notebook, and I would just head off to the nearest park or the nearest patch of woods. There was a place called Forest Vower in Welsh. That's the Great Forest.

And I would just walk out there. It was probably, you weren't supposed to get off the path, but being an American, I didn't pay attention to that. So I jumped over the fence. I go off, and I went to this lonely spot many times where nobody could hear me.

I was just out in the woods, and I was pleading with the Lord. And I remember some of those prayer times lasting two or three hours. I have not had many prayer times like that, where you just lost sense of time.

And it was so obvious that God was helping you wrestle with Him, that God was giving you the prayers to pray. If you think of Jacob and the angel, it was like God was saying to you, lay your hand here.

Grab hold of this. Now don't let me go. For my honor's sake, don't let me go. And I was able to plead with the Lord in those times in such an unusual way, really unlike anything I'd done before and rarely since.

But that was 1998. And so I, those things were coming at the end of this process of just an increasing burden to see God glorified. Now in the May, in May of 1998, my family and I, we came back home for a short visit.

We didn't get to go home very often. So we were home. We went and visited my wife's family. And then we were visiting my family in Ohio. And so while I was there, this weight was just increasing. And I remember that there was a time that I had to go over to Wheaton, Illinois to visit Mr. Roberts because I needed to do some research in his library.

He had a lot of good resources. So I wanted to use that time wisely. So I show up over there and I did research. And while I was there, I talked to him about this increasing weight because I was afraid, all right, this may sound strange to people, but I was very, I was afraid of me.

Before I was a Christian, but I was in the ministry. So I was a lost, self-deceived hypocrite who was preaching. I wanted to use God. I wanted to use the God of those biographies I had been reading or had been read to me as a child.

I wanted to use that God to make John Snyder great. So I was afraid that this yearning in my heart to see God glorified, what if it was just that same old, same whitewashed self-centeredness? So I remember sitting down with Mr. Roberts and just pouring out my heart to him and him giving me some very simple advice, just a few sentences, but basically saying to me, John, this is not the enemy tempting you to use God to be great.

It's the Lord. And so the only adequate response is to respond wholeheartedly to this. Give yourself to this and don't give God any rest until there is some conclusion to this process. So I was driving back home.

It was about a six-hour drive from where he lived to where my parents lived. So I was driving back home and three things happened that brought an end to this six-month process and really led to a crisis.

One of them was I was listening to the radio, and this was public radio, and I heard an announcement. The public radio news announcer was just ecstatic, just so proud of a group of people in Texas, I believe.

And it was a church, and I think it was a Congregationalist church. I forget which city. But here was the gist of it. Back in 1998, a group of homosexual high school students wanted to have their own prom because they didn't feel comfortable at the regular school prom.

So they went to the principal and said, we want to have a homosexual prom. And the principal said, I'm wholeheartedly in support of your decision, but if we do that in our community, the heat that I would take, we can't do it.

So you can have it, but you can't have it on school property. Interesting, 20 years later, to hear that kind of response. So the Congregationalist church heard about this, and they said, look, we are an open, loving, embracing people, and we think that Jesus would want us to have the homosexual prom at our church.

And the radio announcer was just so proud of them, and I was so brokenhearted that everyone that listened to that station was being given a false view of Jesus' love, a love that just embraces whatever I want, which really would be a very cruel version of Christ.

So I was bothered, and so I told you, I was increasingly weighed down by the sense of this question, is God not going to do more for His name? What about in our day? I mean, I've been reading history, but what about today?

So I just drove back and prayed the whole way, God, are you not going to do something for Your name? What about our country? On top of that, a family member had just gotten pregnant, and it was out of wedlock, and she wasn't a Christian at the time.

She thought she was, and this God was very gracious, and as He was with me in college being a fake, He was very gracious to this family member and led her to Christ eventually through the whole crisis of, now I have a daughter that I have to love and raise, and I don't have a husband, and what, you know, but my father was a pastor in a very small town in eastern Ohio, and I knew I had just received word.

She just said to me, look, I'm about to tell mom and dad about this, and so, you know, I'm just letting you know ahead of time, it's about the bombs about to be dropped in the family. So another thing I would say to God, God, but here's a little town, so here's the big radio dishonor done to Christ, and here's a little town, and the enemy will use this to mock Christ.

Aren't you going to do anything for your name? Then the third thing happened. These were all very, very close together. I called a friend in the States, a very godly older lady who had been like a mom to Misty and me spiritually, and so I called and said, hey, we're in the States, just wanted to call and say, hey, you know, this was before the cell phones and free, you could not call for free from Britain, so I just had a conversation with her, and I was rattling on about the Great Awakening and the Puritans, and I was just so excited, and she interrupted me, and she said, John, John, that's fine, but that was, what, 1700s?

That's 200 years ago, John. I don't think God could ever do it again, and it just crushed me because this was a very serious Christian, and I thought, why did you just say that to me? So I kind of hung up the phone, and so six months of an increased burden and extraordinary times of seeking the Lord, fasting and praying, and then these three things, one after the next, and I would say to the Lord when I hung up the phone with that dear Christian, God, even your own people, are you going to do something for your name in your church?

A Private Day of Fasting and the Answer from Psalm 81

Well, that week, my dad had planned a family getaway, all right, so that everybody's going to go to a big theme park, and of course, I was required to go. Now, I didn't always want to go on family getaways, but we had two little children, and our son was quite a handful at that time, all right, so this was like a five-year-old and a four-year-old, and the son in particular, he was kind of like having a whole gang to watch after, so my dad made it very clear, like, you're going because you're taking care of John David, and like, and my wife, you're going because you're watching John David, and like, yeah, I'm going, but after these things, we were all crammed into one house for, you know, for a few weeks, and I just needed some time alone with the Lord, so I said to the family a very unpopular announcement, I'm not going to the theme park with you guys, okay, I need to meet with the Lord, and they all looked at me like, yeah, right, you need to meet with the Lord, you just don't want to take care of John David at the theme park, so they were a bit grumpy with me, but they, you know, they allowed me to stay home.

When they left, I got a notebook, and my Bible, and a pen, and I went up into the attic of the house, and I opened my Bible to Psalm 81, and I fully intended, I had all day, they would be gone all day, I fully intended to have a day of fasting and prayer, you know, I intended that it was going to be one of those six, or seven, or eight hour kind of things, where at the end, maybe God, maybe God would give me an answer to my question, so I opened Psalm 81, and I was reading where God calls His people to Him, and there's like a court scene, and He says to them, you know, He says to them, you're not to have any foreign gods among you, I the Lord am your God, verse 10, He says, I brought you out of the land of Egypt, open your mouth wide, and I will fill it, but He says to them, but my people would not listen to me, and they filled up on their idols, I would have given you the finest of wheat, I would have given you honey, but you filled up your lives with garbage, and He gives a whole series of promises I would have, if only you would have turned your empty, hungry soul to me, and I thought at that time, that's me, I am, at the end of six months, I am so hungry, and I see the need for God's honor in me, and in America, so I just started to pray, and it was one of those unique occasions, you know, really, I don't know if I've ever had one like this since, but certainly it would be very rare, where it was very clear, it was as if the Lord took that scripture, and applied it to John Snyder in such a very personal way, that it would not have been more, I would not have felt it was more suited to John Snyder, if God had spoken it with an audible voice, that this is for you, for today, this is, all of this has been leading to this, open your mouth, and trust me, well, I had other things in my life, I had other little idols that I loved, I had other things that I thought would make me happy, even as a Christian, and so, I really did come to a crisis, God, will you be everything you say you are, and by the grace of God, I was able to say, He will.

Now, that took about 40 minutes, not four hours, or eight hours, and it was so clear, that God had brought me to that passage, and God had applied that passage, and God had heard my prayer, God, I turn my mouth towards you, now do something for your namesake in my life, and if you would, through me.

It was so clear, that He had answered that prayer with the affirmative, that to continue to pray, would have been an insult, it would have been, it would have been a farce, like, well, that was too quick, you know, maybe I should do eight hours of fasting, and praying, and it was, God had already answered, so I realized, that to stay on my face any longer, and plead any more, it was like saying, it was as if pretending, that God had not answered, so I just thanked the Lord, got a notebook, and a pen, and I wrote down the words of what became, really the only covenant I've ever written, between the Lord and me, and I don't want to read the covenant, because it's too personal, really, and when I read this, when I think about this, and when I, when I review this covenant periodically, there are a couple of things that always rise up.

One is, I am very encouraged to remember the kindnesses of the Lord, which I feel, that whole six-month period of increasing weight, that, that awareness of God's dishonor being done, even His own people saying, you know, revival stories are, those are basically just historic fiction, they're not going to happen again, and God's answering my prayer from Psalm 81, I feel that that really was what prepared me to be able to pastor in New Albany, and for whatever the Lord has been able to do through my very imperfect service, so when I, when I review this, I'm very encouraged.

Second, I'm very, I'm motivated, I think, John, look at those words you wrote in 1998, 20 years ago now, take those seriously, don't forget those, but I would say also there's always a sense of shame.

One reason I would never read this out to anybody is because I have so distinctly failed, and as we talked about in our podcast, I don't think that that means God doesn't love me anymore, and I'm not brokenhearted because I think, oh, now I don't get to be a Christian, now God won't let me be a pastor, God won't bless me, none of that, it's that I think He has been so perfectly faithful, and I have been so unfaithful, and when I read the covenant, I almost want to burn it really, because I just think, I'm so ashamed at my meager response to the flood of mercy that just rolls over me every morning, and there is a response because I'm a believer, I am a new, I am a child of God, and so there is a response, but as with every believer, you know, we look at our lives and we think, there's like this Niagara Falls of mercy, and there's this tiny little spray, you know, that gets shot back up.

My response is so insignificant compared to His investment that, you know, you don't even really want to mention it, but I will read the opening statement. May 30th, 1998, I wrote this, here is a solemn covenant between the living God, who condescends to keep His gracious covenant with redeemed sinners, through our mediator Jesus Christ, with God and John Snyder, who has no right to make a covenant with his God, except that it reflects those privileges and responsibilities for both parties, as seen in the scriptures, and who has no innate power to keep covenant with God, but what is found in the sufficiency of the Lord Jesus, and so I have tried to review the pages that follow, and having done our podcast on personal covenants, it's reminded me of that, and so I intend.

To review it in coming days. One thing that comes to mind through the podcast that we just finished, and through hearing that story again, I remember, do you remember the prayer meeting that you and I attended in 2015 at Richard Owen Roberts' house?

There was a conference that he was having there, and we went up to it, and there were some of us gathered to pray, and someone asked him, someone was was burdened for revival, and was genuinely troubled over the dishonor that, you know, comes upon the name of the Lord, and those who take His name, and in the world, and I remember something that he said, you must not be afraid, if you're going to pray that God will do a great work for His namesake, you have to remember that God is more zealous for His namesake than you could ever be, and you must not be afraid to say, yes Lord, when He tells you that you will be part of the means that He uses to bring about the answer to that prayer.

You know, you mentioned that there can be just a human sinful desire for greatness, and desire for recognition, and a desire to, you know, take your place among the the greats in the, you know, the halls of Christian history, and that kind of attitude must be, you know, recognized for what it is, and when we say it out loud, it's humiliating, and we want to repent of it, and say, no, I would never think of myself that way, but God works in the earth through His church, and so when we are burdened for the Lord's glory, it's not the enemy who has burdened us for Christ's glory, and when we go to Him burdened, we can't think that, well, He's busy, you know, running the world, and He's forgotten about His glory, and we're the ones who've remembered it, and so we have to go to Him, and remind Him of His glory, and He's gonna somehow turn to us, and say, I'm not worried about that.

Why are you bothering me about that? No, He's infinitely more zealous and jealous for His glory in the earth than we could ever be, and so whatever we feel of that, He feels that infinitely. He is that infinitely more than we are in zeal, and if we feel that, then we can't, we have to be willing to say, yes, Lord, in whatever situation that He puts us in, where we participate in the bringing about of the answer to that prayer, and so, I mean, obviously, I think about the work of the church here that is, and I don't know how to say this the right way, but has been so significant in the lives of so many who have been a part of the work.

You know, I don't want to over-inflate or give the impression that we are self-congratulatory or something like that, but in the lives of the people who are here, you know, the membership will tell you that the Lord has used this work for glory in their lives and in the lives that touch their lives, and like leaven through the lump, that works its way out organically, and then through the work that we've been able to do, you know, through the Behold Your God study and then that sort of spinning off into Media Grazie and the various projects that we're working on now, so, you know, those are very real sort of personal applications that I take from the things that you.

Bring up. Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, you and I talk about this a lot because every time the Lord opens up another opportunity for Media Grazie to do something, and if I get to be invited to be a part of that aspect, you know, we generally have to have a cup of coffee together where you tell me that I'm not allowed to, you know, go hide in the corner, and I know you have to give yourself that same speech.

I mean, we are very small. This is a very small church, and Media Grazie is a very small thing, and you and I are very insignificant, small threads, but we are threads by the work of a king. We are threads that are being woven into a tapestry, that the picture on the tapestry is the glory of the Triune God, and so we do have to say to ourselves, we are nothing special, but we have no right to say to the king, we're nothing special, so we're not going to, we're just going to go hide in the corner until Jesus comes and rescues us from this rotten old world.

That would be a very arrogant response, just as arrogant as coming to God saying, God, now that I'm a Christian, I want you to make me great, because I deserve to be great. Yeah, put me in, coach. Yeah, I'm ready to do it.

Yeah, so both of those are arrogance, so just come to Him aware of who we are in Him, aware of the privilege of just waking up and being able to have a brain and a heart that we can turn toward Him and say, I'm yours, and I set myself apart as a living sacrifice, and then to be shocked by His magnificence that He would say to us, okay, so today's a podcast, and we think, no, no, no, not a podcast, because we have to get on camera, you know, we have to talk to people, everyone will see how stupid we are, and then you look at the king, and you say, yes, Lord, okay, today's a podcast, and we get to talk about you.

I remember when the Behold Your God, the first Behold Your God study was presented, and you and I were talking about it. I thought, even before that was presented, the opportunity to speak on the radio at AFA, it was only because someone else quit last second.

Somebody canceled. Yeah, somebody canceled on them, and they said, well, look, we got nobody else. John, would you come? And I thought, no, I'm just the pastor of a small church. I don't do radio. I would freeze, and I almost said that, and then immediately, I felt so rebuked within my heart, which I believe was from the Lord.

What right do you have to say, I'm a servant, but I'm like a union worker, you only do this kind of service. I don't do that service. I'm not radio man. I'm a little tiny church pastor man. Well, I'm not even good enough to be a small church pastor, so I had to say to the king, if you sent this phone call to me, I have no right to say no, so I'll go, and amazingly, that was what the Lord used to give us an opportunity to do Behold Your God, and then you an opportunity to head a ministry called Media Gratia, and for us to continue to work together, and for you to begin to work what much more widely than just, you know, with me, and so it is astonishing to see the ripple effect of God's work in us.

The Tapestry of Providence and the Chief End of Man

Yeah, yeah, I.

Just to remember, I mean, that's such a beautiful image, and it's just true that we are threads in this great tapestry, and you know, sometimes when you look at the back of the tapestry, we know that illustration, you know, if you look at the back of that throw rug in your, in your living room or whatever, it looks like a jumbled mess of, and you don't know what that is, but on that great day when we see the tapestry from God's side, we will rejoice when we stand on that sea of glass and sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb.

We will rejoice at how God wove threads together in His great providence for His glory, and He will do it, and you know, brother, it's just remembering that we were created for this. What is the chief end of man?

It is to glorify God in whatever way He chooses, and in the process to enjoy Him now and forever. Yeah. We're just doing what we were created to do. That's a, that's an amazing thought. The King's children certainly live a King's life.

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