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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 Living Dead... |
"For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." - Philippians 1:21 [NASB]
You're walking along in that part of downtown where there are a lot of street people begging. You feel justified in not giving a lot to these because you really don't know whether giving them money would do more damage than good. It is one thing to give to one who is in need, and quite another to give to a man who is unwilling to work (c.f. 2 Thessalonians 3:10). But it does happen that you will find, from time to time, someone who is in genuine need, and my presumption is that when you encounter such a one, you willingly give the change in your pocket up to help this one along.
My question to you is why do you stop there? Why, is it that when you see a legitimate need, and are even provoked within you to give something, you do as little as is humanly possible?
The question is actually a rhetorical one. I plan to tell you why you do that, and hope that in doing so you are edified.
Let's ask our selves that tired old cliche, "What would Jesus do?". But, let's not ask that question intending for the answer to become the motivational squeeze that forces our hand to act. That would be using our understanding to "guilt" us into activity. That would be using guilt as a motivation - or worse, fear of spiritual repercussion as a motivator. We don't want to ask that question in order to provide some motivation, we want to ask that question as a diagnostic, so that we can see the gulf between ourselves and Christ. If Christ would do more than we are willing to do, that tells us something.
You see, the reason we would do as little as possible is because our old man is dead in trespasses and sin. It is the old man who sees the situation, and has no love within him for someone else. The old man can be motivated by guilt and fear to a level of civic virtue, but there is nothing spiritual in a virtue that is born of guilt and/or fear.
I should explain what I mean by civic virtue. Anytime a person does something that outwardly is perceived as a charitable or good work - that person is performing a civic virtue. Whenever a Muslim gives money to the poor, the external act is indeed a civic virtue, but the Muslim is not performing this seemingly virtuous act in response to a prompting by God's spirit. From the Christian perspective, we reason that the Muslim is simply responding to guilt or fear of repercussion. The Muslim would disagree, but I am speaking from the perspective of a Christian. Now, what I say of the Muslim is true of any world religion, Buddhism, secular moralism, atheism, Hinduism, etc., and unless a person is acting in Christ, it is true of the Christian who performs a civic virtue also.
When the moral wherewithal to help the needy descends upon me, it is always coupled to a carnal indifference, and my default reaction to this tension is to satisfy them both. Give to the needy satisfying the moral imperative, and give as little as possible, satisfying the carnal indifference. You do that too.
That is why at the moment the moral imperative comes, we ought to consider how far Jesus would go to help this person. Would Jesus dig into his pocket, set consciously push past the bigger bills, to find the smaller coins, and then hand them over, and move on? Would Jesus give all the money in his pocket and then move on? Would Jesus stop and talk to the person? How far would He go?
Now, why is it that "we" don't want to go that far? Because the "we" in that question is what the bible calls the old man. It is the old man that has no interest in the things of Christ. It is the old man that we obey by default. But that old man is twice dead and we need to reckon on both deaths if we are going to live as Christ lived.
Here is what I mean by twice dead. The old man is dead in his tresspasses and sin. What the old man desires is what death itself desires. The old man is a dead man, and the desires of the old man are the desires of death. Death, here means that which is void of life. Everything that the old man desires translates into that which has no life in it. The old man lives in, and thrives in death - that is, he thrives in all things in from which life is absent. The desire of the old man is to flee anything even remotely connected to life. This isn't meant to be some ethereal, metaphysical, and therefore vague and unfathomable thing I am saying. I am speaking in plain and literal English. I do not use metaphors here, I mean exactly this - the old man is not dead in some figurative sense - but is the well of death that flees from life in all that it desires. It has no desire for life - it hates life, and Jesus is Life.
That's the first dead. The second dead in what I meant by "twice dead" is the fact that the "old man" of every genuine believer was crucified with Christ. Our old man died on Calvary. The death of the old man on Calvary freed every believer from our bondage to sin, and through sin, our bondage to the death that the old man was "living" to produce. This may well be difficult to understand for some, so it is enough (for now) to understand this second "dead" as meaning that the desire of the old man to flee life, is no longer binding on you.
When you come to the beggar then, and the old man desires one thing, and the Spirit another, we are called to obey the one by reckoning on the death of the other. That is the way to fully obey the Spirit is not to compromise with the flesh, but to consider how Christ wrought the death of the old man on Calvary - consider that the thing which wants us to be indifferent is actually a dead man walking - a thing that flees from life, and has always and ever been at work to produce and maintain an absense of life in us - it is a murderous thing bent on our eternal destruction, a thing whose only desire is death, a desire that Christ Himself gave his life to free you from the power of.
You have heard it said, "Make war against sin" - don't take that to mean make war against individual sins as they come up - it means make war against giving into the desires of the living dead within you. Don't feed it by obeying it's desires, but reckon it dead - identify what it desires, and do more than simply turn away from them - for the sake of our Lord, turn to Christ, and obey the desires of the Spirit instead.
Let me tell you, the only thing that is stopping you from being like Christ is your own habitual willingness to compromise your obedience - your willingness to obey the death that lives on in you. If that thing and its desires find no purchase in you - let me tell you, you will not be the same person. You will be as the Apostle Paul described - crucified with Christ.
Knowing this puts you one step closer to acting on it. But you cannot act on it in your own strength. First you must be convinced from scripture that this is how is is supposed to be - then you must learn that you yourself need grace to act, and that grace comes from the throne of Christ. You cannot enter into this without deep, prayerful repentence.
Your days are numbered, so don't put it off for too long.Labels: repentance, Romans, sanctification, The Sinfulness Of Sin |
posted by Daniel @
9:52 AM
7 comment(s)
 
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| Once More On The Sinfulness Of Sin. (part one) |
Not many of us think of ourselves as essentially evil. We typically think of ourselves as good, regardless of where we actually are on the spectrum. Those of us with biblical instruction (whether partial or complete) often know that in times past we committed acts that scripture describes as evil (lying, deceiving, stealing, etc. etc.), but because we try to keep ourselves from lapsing into these again, recognizing that they are evil, we tend to think of ourselves as having once been evil, but now we are on the path to being good, of not essentially good already.
To set this thought proper in our thinking, I am talking about how we honestly think of ourselves deep down. We don't typically think of ourselves as "evil" - we think of ourselves as good people who (sometimes) do bad things. We reserve the category of evil for those people who commit cold-blooded murder, rape, kidnapping, and the like. We think of evil in terms of how upsetting to harmonious balance of our life a thing is. Did a many lie to his wife about how many cookies he ate after lunch? Big deal, right? I mean, that isn't going to upset the cosmic balance, so that's not evil. No, I mean, if the man killed someone for fun, we all understand that that's evil because we weight the consequences. Who cares that the man had a few too many cookies after lunch, but let him deprive a man of his life and we see clearly that something 'evil' has been done.
In fact, we tend to reserve the idea of evil for those things whose consequences are sorely felt, and everything is we consider simply as "bad" - I mean, we quote the ideal, that we should never lie or steal, but even as we do, we only mean we shouldn't lie about anything important, and we shouldn't steal anything that will be missed.
Many of us were brought up to live "good" lives, and by good we simply mean we were brought up having been trained not to harm others in any significant we, as much as we can help it. Thus the average person regards himself or herself, as basically a "good" person because they do what they can to avoid hurting other people.
From this perspective many who regard themselves as basically good people, do not flinch from crimes that don't hurt individuals. They believe it is wrong to steal a starving man's bread, but shoplifting an iPod - hey, no one gets hurt, and really, they are so over priced, maybe stealing one will send a message to the company to stop ripping off people. You would be surprised how many criminals regard their crimes as morally neutral - yes, I stole, or I didn't tell the whole truth, but I wasn't hurting anyone, or I did it for some justifiable reason.
I could walk the whole gambit here and show that from the most seemingly innocent person to the most seemingly wicked person - almost all of these share the notion that whatever they do has nothing to do with their moral core. Because they regard their own moral core as being basically good, if they do something that they would be ashamed of, they then think of it as a moral lapse or some perhaps a justifiable situational choice, even if they can recognize that what they have done is shameful - they may well present it to their own conscience as though they really had no choice in the matter, because they paint themselves as victims or justified, or whatever they have to paint themselves because they [1] presume themselves to be good, [2] these things must therefore be exceptions.
The Lord has blessed me for many years now. I have had a desire to know Him, and to obey Him. Yet even for all the Lord has done for me, I find that sometimes I still operate from the ivory tower, as it were. I forget sometimes that I am not basically good - but entirely evil.
A sow wallows in the mire because it is a sow. It isn't that it becomes a sow by wallowing in the mire, rather no matter how you clean it up, it will always return to the mire to wallow because that is it's nature. In the same way a sinner returns to sin because he is a sinner.
Christ died to save His people from their sin - but a Christian remains a sinner until the day he dies. If he lapses back into sin it is because he is still, and has never ceased to be, a sinner.
It is a weird relationship, I think. You see, the Christian is a sinner whom Christ personally released from sin's bondage.
I don't mean ropes and incarceration, I mean slavery. The man who sins is the slave of sin. The Christian is a sinner who was previously a slave to sin but now has been set free from sin's bondage. That doesn't mean that he isn't a sinner anymore, it doesn't mean that all his sinful desires disappear - it means that the Holy Spirit has come to indwell him, and in doing so has provided a real means out of every single temptation. It means that the Christian now is being influenced by the Holy Spirit, who begins to convict that sinner (Christian though he is) that his sins are sinful, and offensive to God. Conviction means being made to believe a thing truly is wrong. It is more than just being made aware that some rule is being broken - the law can do that much. It is an intellectual exercise to assent to the breaking of a law, but it is the work of the Holy Spirit to [1]convince a sinner that he has sinned against God, and [2] produce a desire in that sinner to please God.
More on this later. This is just part one.Labels: The Sinfulness Of Sin |
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posted by Daniel @
7:11 AM
2 comment(s)
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