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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| The Heart of Unrepentance.. |
At the core of the unpenitent heart is this one thought - "I will not have you to rule over me!"
Consider the believer who comes to know that looking at pornography feeds his lust and is a wicked offense against God. He sees this because [1] his conscience is informed by the word of God, and [2] because the indwelling Holy Spirit convicts him of sin. Notwithstanding, since he was addicted to porn prior to his salvation, the addiction continues after his salvation - only he feels very, very, bad about it.
Now let us say that this man one day, driven by remorse over his sin, determines that he will no longer look at porn, and from that day on he removes everything in his life that would trigger the temptation - the computer is cleaned of all bad images, the internet is either disconnected or he puts his computer into a public room in the house and makes sure that he is never alone there - he even begins to guard his own thoughts so that whenever a lustful though enters his mind he forces himself to think of something else until the temptation goes away.
Many would say that this man has repented.
He has certainly put himself on morally higher ground. He has recognized his sin, and responded to it by producing in himself morally superior habits. Some understand repentance as being an entirely practical exercise - you simply stop your bad habits, and replace them with better habits and voila! you have repented.
But in Acts 20:21 we read that Paul preached "repentance towards God".
I point out that phrase because it helps us to make a distinction between turning to God and suppressing a sinful habit. A man can suppress a sinful habit without ever turning to God in doing so. He can be motivated by a desire not to offend God, and begin a regimented attack on all the sin in his life, and do so without ever surrendering to God. In fact, he does that -get this now- instead of surrendering to God. He is willing to give up some sin for a season, but he is not willing to surrender Himself to God.
There is no victory over sin in a heart that obeys that spirit of rebellion (small "s") that scripture calls the "old man".
It is entirely possible and I suspect even common for Christians to deal with sin not according to the gospel of grace, that is, not by surrendering themselves to God, but rather by staunching the outward expression of sin as much as is humanly possible without surrendering to God.
Don't think for one second that doing what is right equates to repentance. Repentance produces what is right, but doing what is right does not produce repentance. I have used this illustration before, but it fits here. The young girl who is told to sit and defiantly refuses until threatened then begrudgingly plops herself down in a show of outward obedience betrays her heart when in open rebellion she remarks - "I may be sitting on my bottom, but I am standing in my heart!" - that "heart" illustrates what obedience without surrender looks like - it is not repentance, it is a rebellious servility that was coerced by fear of retribution.
The believer who puts away the porn because way down deep inside he is secretly afraid that by viewing porn he is proving that he was never saved in the first place - and so in order to be free from the fear of damnation he puts aways sin, but does so without really surrendering himself to God - this one hasn't repented, he is doing penance because deep down he is convinced that doing so will appease God. He is catastrophically wrong.
Any "righteousness" that springs from a heart that is motivated to appease God in order to secure for themselves God's favor or pardon - such a "righteousness" is not righteous at all, it is in fact unclean. Such a righteousness is polluted by the flesh, it is counterfeit, an external facade - it is, in biblical terms "=the= world religion" it is Babylon, it is attempting to be like God (righteous) without surrendering to God. It is in no way harmonious with the gospel of grace, but has at its core a concealed, "dressed up as righteousness" rebellion against God.
I repeat - genuine surrender produces genuine repentance and not vice versa. The problem with sin is not the sin, it is the self that is unwilling to surrender to God. The sin is just the outflowing of that rebellion. The real culprit is the old man - and that is why Christ took the old man to the cross with Him - to render him powerless - a reality that while true immediately of every believer, is only experienced when the believer is surrendered, that is, when the believer is "in Christ".
When scripture instructs the believer to walk by the Spirit as the means by which we overcome the lusts of the flesh it isn't some empty slogan - it is life from death. You can battle with sin until the cows come home and you will never get on top of it if you don't surrender yourself to God.
If you are a genuine Christian you know what genuine surrender looks like because that is how you became a Christian - you surrendered yourself to God.
But if you find that sin is your master, then know this: at some point you stopped surrendering - and it was at that point that sin got a foot hold in you again.
What are you to do? Stop trying to perfect yourself in the flesh Christian! Do it spiritually, do it the way you received Christ - by surrendering to him the whole of you. Surrender again, surrender continually - give your very life and all that is in it to God - a living sacrifice - stop cherishing that secret rebellion in your heart! it is killing you, do you understand this? It is killing you, killing your time, killing your inheritance, killing you!
The part of you that wants to rebel was (past tense) crucified in Christ in order that you may now (present tense) no longer obey it. It will call the same old shots, tempt the same old temptations, but only when you are not surrendered to God will these be any problem for you. Being in Christ is being surrendered. Being in the Spirit is being surrendered. Being surrendered is being willing in every moment to do what God asks because God asks. It is the opposite of rebellion - a slippery thing to describe, but easy enough to know, for we know it both by its absence, and by a conscience that knows it is utterly right with God.
I am convinced of these things. Are you?
If these things seem strange to you, talk them out with someone who has been in Christ for a long time - study scripture, see if these things are so. It is not noble to accept these things because some guy on the internet wrote them. Nor is it noble to reject these things because some guy on the internet says they are so. What -is- noble is to examine scripture and see if what I am saying is found there or not. We need to understand repentance if we are going to avoid wasting days, weeks, and years pretending to repent but never overcoming sin's power in our life.Labels: holiness, Instruction, repentance, sanctification, sin, Theology, union with christ, victory |
posted by Daniel @
9:54 AM
15 comment(s)
 
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| The Gap. |
 As a young man in high school, when the guys would get together and kid around, we used to imitate talking like Elvis for laughs, I can still hear my friends trying to master the art of saying, "I'll ah, I'll have a big 'ole cheese bugga, and ken ya put a whole lotta mayo on that darlin'?" We cracked ourselves up thinking we were so clever and funny.
I mention this so that when I say that there is in many of us a "whole lotta" difference between what we intellectually agree to be true and what we put into practice.
Consider the following quote from Walter Marshall, first published in 1692:Consider these things well, and you may easily perceive that our spirits are not in a fit frame for the doing of them, while we apprehend ourselves under the curse and wrath of God, or while we are under prevailing suspicions that God will prove an enemy to us at last. What Marshall is saying here is that you can't really love God if you always hold onto the secret suspicion that God is really your enemy. The context (and you can go and read the whole book at the link) is that until a believer is convinced in a practical way that they are in fact reconciled to God, they will be unable to accept the truth that God loves them in any practical way.
I think the best path for discipleship is to identify the most common obstacles to (genuine) Christian growth, and deal with them first. But often new believers are either left to their own devices (worse case scenario), or given a brief and systematic overview of the core Christian beliefs and encouraged to study the bible and pray (a little better), or thoroughly indoctrinated into both the core beliefs of the Christian faith and a variety of denominationally appropriate theological dogma (magnificent, but still putting the cart before the horse).
You see, you can be a believer, and have your head filled with all the right interpretations of all the various doctrinal stances your theological persuasion allows - and all the while be hopelessly in bondage to sin because in spite of all your "learning" - you didn't believe some of the very first things you were supposed to learn. There is a "Gap" between what you know to be true intellectually, and what you see happening in your faith.
You know, for example, that God loves you. If someone asks you, you have the right answer - "Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so" - only deep down, you suspect that every time you failed to be perfect, God stopped loving you. Oh, it was your <whispering> deep, dark secret, </whispering> but you imagined that this doubt was either normative, or more likely, that your faith was somehow flawed, and that if you could just obey more genuinely it would go away. But it never did.
You see, the gap? They are trying to generate God's love by their genuine obedience. Oh it looks crazy when we drag it out into the light and look at it, but that is what can happen.
You see, unbelief is spiritual cancer, it grows over time and gets worse - and unless it is identified for what it is, a person may well wonder why they seem to be getting worse in their faith rather than better, why they seem farther away from God now, than ever before. The problem goes back to the basics:
=If= you are in Christ, you are acceptable to God right now, and no sin that you can ever commit will change that. You cannot make God love you by your "genuine obedience" - God's love cannot be purchased - it is freely given, and if you are in Christ, it is already yours.
You are reconciled - the gap between you and God has been filled entirely because you are in Christ. God loves you right now, and so long as you continue to imagine that God's love is conditioned upon your obedience, you will never be able to believe that God loves you. And though you must become a fool to understand this, since it goes against all our logic - THAT must come first. First you trust God's love, and when you do THEN obedience flows naturally out of you.
Brother, sister, are you convinced intellectually that God loves you? Do you find that secretly you aren't loving God? It is because you are wrongly prefacing God's love upon your obedience - and as long as your conscience refuses to trust in a perfect and completed reconciliation - you will never be released from the guilt of your sin, and until you are released thus, you will not be free to love God from your heart. Your mind may well agree that loving God is proper, but your heart won't be convinced.
So if this was written for you, let the Spirit witness that to you, and do something about it. Crack open your bible while it is still today and settle for yourself whether God prefaces his love towards you on your good works. Learn that God's love is real, and stop giving into unbelief. It is true that you are not worthy of this profound love that God has exercised towards you - but it is high time you excusing your guilty conscience as a pious thing - when your conscience is trained not by truth but by suspicion, it is an evil conscience - you must train it again with the truth, for such will set you free.Labels: encouragement, helpful, Instruction, love, Theology |
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posted by Daniel @
8:51 AM
5 comment(s)
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| Last First, First Last. |
 1"For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. 3And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, 4and to them he said, 'You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.' 5So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. 6And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, 'Why do you stand here idle all day?' 7They said to him, 'Because no one has hired us.' He said to them, 'You go into the vineyard too.' 8And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, 'Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.' 9And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. 10Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. 11And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, 12saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.' 13But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? 14Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. 15Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?' 16So the last will be first, and the first last." - Matthew 20:1-16 [ESV]
Okay, if you just skipped over the bible verses, first of all shame on you, second of all, go back and read them all - and even pray before you do - that is God's word friend, and you do well to read it with some reverence and discernment.
Okay, now we are ready, unless of course, you skimmed over God's word, or forgot to pray as you were reading it - then this is just entertainment, so don't blame me if you don't get anything out of it.
Okay... now we are ready for sure.
I am going to explain what this parable means, and I am only going to do it once, so pay attention. The parable is talking about the various dispensations, and how it doesn't matter which dispensation you are in - the oldest whereby you had the least light, toiled the most in your own strength to serve the Lord, and have the longest history - all the way to the era of the Messiah, the eleventh hour - where you have the coming era of the Christian who will, from the Jewish perspective be the Johnny-come-lately-to-the-party people. The Jew who had only the Mosaic covenant will not fare better than the Gentile who has come in the eleventh hour, hasn't had to bear the heat of the day (as it were), but has come last to the work - he shall receive the same reward as the Jew - in fact the reward is the same in each dispensation no matter where a believer falls - the first, the middle, the last - all receive the same reward.
And God is not evil for giving the OT Jew the same reward as he gives the NT saint, the OT Jew who had to toil in his own strength to keep the law, is not going to finish with more than the NT saint who has a new heart and is empowered by God unto obedience through the indwelling Holy Spirit is not going to fare worse simply because he didn't have to toil as hard as the OT Jew. God is right and just to give the same reward because that was the agreement.
Yes, the parable teaches many other things - but I think this is the primary teaching.
Discuss.Labels: Instruction, Interpretation, Theology |
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posted by Daniel @
9:25 AM
20 comment(s)
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