In the beginning, man was created with one great purpose, to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. This is the chief goal of Covenant Presbyterian Church. There is only one living and true God, who eternally self-exists as the Holy Trinity, one God in three Persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He has revealed himself to man through creation and through his word, the Bible. God’s fullest and final revelation of himself to man came in Christ Jesus, who is fully God and fully man. At Covenant, this is the God we proclaim and the God we seek to love and serve with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
The second goal of Covenant Presbyterian Church is to love our neighbors as ourselves. This goal is not separate from the first but flows out of it. The most loving thing we can do for our neighbors is to tell them about Christ Jesus and his gospel, and the best way we can tell others about Jesus is by taking them to the Bible, where every page already points to Jesus! And as we point others to Jesus through the Bible, the lives we lead must be consistent with the words we speak. We must show others the very character of Jesus in our words, actions, and attitudes by displaying the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Only when we do all these things for God’s glory, and not for our own benefit, are we truly loving our neighbors.
Those two goals shape everything we do at Covenant Presbyterian Church – worship, prayer, preaching, teaching, specific ministries, social gatherings, and even administrative work.
If our goals sound unachievable, that is because they are! We confess that we fail many times, as a congregation and as individuals, and even our very best efforts will never earn God’s favor. But the impossibility of achieving our goals does not remove our responsibility to work toward them. God has called us, his Church, to labor in faith and obedience to his word, and he has promised to reward those who do so. The only reason God is pleased with anything we do at Covenant is because of his grace, his undeserved favor shown toward us in Christ Jesus and applied to us by the Holy Spirit.
And so, rather than relying on our own strength, we rejoice and rest in his all-sufficient grace! We persevere in faith, believing each day is an opportunity to glorify God and to enjoy him. We forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, who is our only hope in life and death.