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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 Repentance. |
You are a pretty good Christian. You have given up many besetting sins, and have become morally superior to the person you were before you were a Christian. You love to read your bible, and you even pray daily.
But something is wrong.
You know that you are holding back. You know that you are not 100% for the Lord. You have given God everything that you have been willing to let go of, but there are things in your life that you are not willing to let go of.
Maybe you tell yourself that you are not able to be free from these things. Maybe you have tried to be free from them so many times, and failed every time to produce a lasting break, maybe this has convinced you that really, there is no cure for sin - you just have to put up with it, and fight it when you can, but not to get too down on yourself when you fail - besides, doesn't scripture tell us that we are all sinners anyway?
But whatever shallow platitudes you might try to comfort yourself with, fall upon deaf ears, because deep down you know they are bunk. You know that God expects more from you than you are giving him, and your failure to make the grade eats you alive.
That is a pretty complex place to be in, and I will explain why.
First, because you aren't as deceived as you would like to be. You know that you should be obedient to God, but you find yourself "unable to obey" when it counts. We may even identify who is calling the shots at this point - the old man - but where is the victory - how do we break through to the other side?
The Israelites that halted at the Jordon, and didn't want to take the promised land instruct us in this. The ones who don't enter into the promise fail to do so because they don't trust it. They don't believe. They hate where they are, but they think it is at least better than where God would bring them if they obeyed - and they believe that obeying God at this point would be worse than not obeying him.
To put it bluntly - they like their sin more than they want to obey God.
We can even shorten that to, "they like their sin".
The reason a person gets into the habit of "not repenting" is because deep down they don't really want to repent - that is, the "old man" refuses to repent. He ... cannot ... repent.
Think that through.
Your old man, in no way, can ever repent - he is irredeemable, and his song is going to be the same until the day you die - he does not want to repent.
Why do I tell you this. Because you need to -recognize- him. If Christ is in you, you will want to repent, but the old man will not want it. You have to separate yourself from, that is, set yourself apart from, the old man who refuses to repent. Identify yourself, not as the one who refuses to repent, but as the one who is at war with the one who refuses to repent. I do not use my words here carelessly - when a thing is "holy" it is separated unto God. You must be holy as your father is holy - separate yourself from the thing that refuses to repent - that ain't you Christian, that is the thing that is dwelling in your flesh, and you have been set free from it.
It isn't a mind game that you play - it is recognizing who is who. In you dwells a thing that remains no good, and this thing is alien to who you are in Christ, if indeed the Spirit of Christ dwells in you. If Christ dwells in you, you have all you need right now to overcome this old man - this thing that refuses to surrender to God.
Simply identify who is calling the shots, and stop obeying the thing that is killing you. The part of you that rejects this is condemned and powerless. It can lie to you, but that is all it can do. You -can- right now, repent, all you need to do is count on Christ's life in you - apprehend it in your thinking. Examine yourself - find the part that doesn't want to obey, and attack it with the sword of the word of God - the truth can set you free, if you are willing to take your sword out of its sheath and attack that thing that is killing you.
You see, you need to understand that what is killing you is alien to you, and not simply "you". You need to consider it and yourself as two separate things that are both vying for control of your mind, actions, and thoughts. This thing will tell you that you do not want to repent, that you love your sin, and that you will never be free. But the truth is that you are free already in Christ, that this thing is not you, nor is it your master any longer. You must regard it as a dead thing - a thing that is already defeated not because you need to play mind games - but because that is the truth. This thing has been dealt with. The reason you obey it is because you continue to set your mind on obeying it - you haven't separated yourself from it in your own understanding. You need to come out and be separate in your own thinking so that when you set your mind on the things of the Spirit, you understand what you are doing...
Do you get that?
You need to regard this thing as alien to who you are, so that when it makes you think that it is you who love sin you can answer that deceit with the truth - no, I hate sin - it is you, my old man - you! You condemned and alien thing! You love sin, and have deceived me, but the veil is lifted in Christ - the veil is lifted. I see you for what you are, and I will not have you rule over me! Lord Father, have you not put this thing beneath Christ's feet? Haven't you?!?? Is not Christ in me? Isn't He?!! Give me spiritual sight that I might see the chariots of Israel! I know this thing is not me, and I know that I am not it - and though it howls at me to obey it, I know I am the bond slave of Christ - Him will I obey!
You see, repentance begins the moment I recognize that the part of me that wants to disobey, the part that hates God - that thing is foreign to who I am in Christ - If I obey it I am walking in the flesh, but if I regard it as a dead thing, and its lusts and desires as foreign to me, and if in doing so I instead turn myself to the life of Christ that is in me, and willingly obey that whom I am not enslaved to in the flesh - but enslaved to in my spirit - then I set my mind not on the flesh, but on the spirit, and in doing so I am freed from the lusts of the flesh.
Do this and live.Labels: deceit, sanctification, sin, victory |
posted by Daniel @
2:16 PM
55 comment(s)
 
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| "I don't like Guns!" |
 I was baptized as an infant. All my siblings were baptized as infants, well, all except for my youngest brother, he wasn't baptized, but probably because my parents simply didn't get around to it. Part of the whole infant baptism ritual in our catholic circle involved the pseudo-solemn enlistment of a "god-parent". The idea as was understood by my family, was that if my parents died it was that persons responsibility to bring me up and presumably, to do so with some sort of religious instruction.
To give you an appreciation for how solemn this responsibility was, my uncle Marinus for the first few years of my childhood, used to buy me presents on my birthday, because he was my "godfather." Except, he wasn't actually my godfather, he was my older sisters godfather, my God parents were my uncle Lucien and Aunt Joyce. Of course, none of these people knew the Lord - but that is presently beside the point - the point was that my uncle used to buy me presents on my birthday under the presumption that he was my godparent when in fact he was actually my sisters godparent.
Perhaps there was some stigma attached to being the godparent of the oldest girl, as opposed to the oldest boy, or perhaps my uncle was embarrassed to learn that he had been mistake for the first six years of my life - whatever the case, I recall with sorrow that eventually my parents explained that I was not his godson, but rather that my sister was his goddaughter. He was not pleased with that, and the gifts stopped there, my sister never got any. That must have been a raw deal for her, but at the time I think I took it pretty hard too.
Anyway, one of the gifts my uncle brought was this toy rifle. Now, I was about five or so, and a toy rifle was perhaps the coolest thing in the world. Up until that time, I had to use sticks and whatnot and pretend that they were firearms, but this toy rifle was far more rifle-like than any of my sticks.
You see, like most boys who don't have toy rifles, I had to fabricate my own out of driftwood and whatnot. If a piece of wood was a good rifle-like length, and had a good branch coming out about where the trigger would be - and perhaps had another where the stock should be - that was considered a very fine gun in our play time. Not that we ran about the house with such things - but as we spent a lot of time outdoors in the summer in the country - such sticks were manifold, and having many cousins to play with, we quickly learned to find the best rifle sticks around. Whatever stick you found, you had to peel the bark off of it, for that nice, smooth, rifle-like finish on both the barrel and the stock. These were things that every child understood.
So when I received the toy rifle, it was so awesome, I could have lost control of my bladder. But then my mom went and spoiled everything. After my uncle had left, and I was in the living room playing with my new toy - killing everything imaginable, my parents got into a row about the toy gun. That was when I found out that uncle Marinus wasn't even my God parent, and that is when I found out that my mom was certain that if I played with the gun I would grow up to kill people for real. She didn't want me playing with guns, she hated the idea of having it in the house.
Now it was about this time that I was experimenting in the living room. You see, the gun was pretty solid, and I got to wondering if I could use it as a bridge between the two arms of our arm chair. So I set it up and began a sophisticated tight-rope walk across it, only to have it crack in half under my weight. It was broken beyond repair, even I knew that.
My heart was grieved, but being an industrious child, I turned this to my advantage, for I came and showed the gun to my parents, and declared words that I knew full well my mom would be delighted in hearing - even if doing so was entirely a put on show. So I went up to my mother and I told her that I broke the gun on purpose because I saw how it offended her, and that I neither wanted to offend her or to like a thing that she hated. I too, (or so I pretended) hated guns. Never had a mother been so proud of a child's deceitful lie, nor so gullible. She swallowed the hook, line, sinker, and even the rod and the dock.
Never doubt that a child is a master deceiver, or that your child will not say and do things that are entirely false just because they know that doing so will make you think more highly of them - they eat that stuff up for breakfast.
I was thinking about that toy gun this morning for some reason.Labels: deceit, memories |
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posted by Daniel @
9:34 AM
12 comment(s)
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