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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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| Thoughts on James 2:14-17 |
What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. - James 2:14-17 [ESV]
If one regards the teachings of Christ (as recorded by the authors of the New Testament) to be accurate and truthful (and I count myself in this group), then one is forced to conclude that whenever anyone is saved they are necessarily saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and that no other way of salvation exists.
It is not only possible, but all too common for people who call themselves Christians to agree entirely with the words I have used to summarize my own understanding - yet when you compare what they believe to what I believe concerning the gospel, you will find that we are far from one another in our understanding of what it meant.
Starting with the word faith. Do you remember the old School House Rocks cartoon vignettes that used to be played on Saturday mornings? I liked the Grammar ones the best, though I have a soft spot in my heart for the one where the bill becomes a law. In the vignette on conjunctions ("Conjunction Junction") - the conductor who is singing the song introduces the conjunction "or" with the words, "And then there's or: Oh or!" If you know the tune, and the part, I want you to inject that exact inflection into these words as you read them: And then there's faith. Ohhhhh faith. If you aren't familiar with School House Rocks, well, that's your loss. The one on pronouns is quite a hoot.
I have heard some whom I would regard as doctrinally astray, describe faith in terms of intellectual assent. They would define faith as having sufficient conviction that a thing is true. Thus faith, for the "easy believer" or "free gracer" is nothing more than an intellectual conviction.
Now, while I won't go so far as to defend someone who is so confused about what faith is that they reduce it to an intellectual conviction, I will say that I can understand why some of them (at least) want to define faith in such superficial terms - they think they are guarding the gospel of grace from a gospel of works.
Scripture everywhere teaches that the way to draw near to God is through contrition, ie., through surrender to God's rule. We cannot draw near to God except through our own humility. Unfortunately when we think of humiliation we don't tend to think of someone surrendering their will to another, rather we think of someone feeling grossly embarrassed about something. So also when we say "humble" we tend to think of being humble as simply having a very low opinion of our selves. But when the bible says humble it means willing to obey, and not that we have a low self image.
The word scripture uses most often to describe contrition and humility is couched in the context of man's rebellion against God. Until a person accepts God's authority to rule over their life, they are in a state of rebellion against God. When a person changes their disposition towards God, and moves from rebellion to contrition - the bible refers to this change of heart as repentance.
Thus the way of salvation that is given again an again in the scriptures is that sinners should repent (of their rebellion against God) and believe the good news concerning Jesus Christ.
Martin Luther entered the history books because by his day, the Catholic church had so corrupted both the way of salvation and again the way of sanctification, that grace became something not only could earn through meritorious conduct, but indeed something you needed to earn in order to offset various sins by which you were condemning yourself all over again.
Without delving too deeply into the Catholic system, it is enough to say that evangelicals reject entirely the notion of meritorious works. Yet some have fallen off the horse on the other side, in that they not only reject meritorious works, but reject the teaching that contrition (giving up your rebellion against God, recognizing His authority over you, and surrendering your will to God) is a necessary component of saving faith. They would argue that this contrition (or repentance) is a "work of merit" - and so reject the teachings of Christ and the Apostles that we are to repent and believe the gospel, and supplant that with a thinner, easier version, whereby we need not repent at all, we need only to believe.
This is an old error. A very old error, for we find James the brother of our Lord correcting it in the passage that makes the header of this post. There we have, by way of an example, the gist of what James is saying on the matter.
When James speaks of "works" he is speaking of those works of contrition that necessarily testify to the validity of our surrender to God. We could call them "works of repentance" - meaning works that flow from our having turned away from rebelling against God's rule.
Thus James is saying that there is a difference between the faith of someone who has surrendered control of their life to God, and someone who hasn't. He likens it to one who sees another in need but rather than supply their need gives them empty words ("Go in peace, be warmed and filled,"). Faith without surrender is just lip service - that's what James is saying.
His argument is that the faith that saves flows from contrition, and not rebellion. The man who refuses to surrender to God's rule, and at the same time imagines that God is going to save him because he has managed to convince himself that the gospel is true - is not only mistaken, he is worse off than the man who has never heard the gospel in the first place - for who, after having become convinced that the way is broad, wants to embark on the narrow? The broad way is better they say, and so having set their foot on the road of ruin, are happy to boldly stomp their way into every increasing ignorance and folly.
Instructing a person out of such an error is a work and a half - because the person has rejected the notion of repentance, and believes themselves to be able to hold onto Christ without every letting go of the world.
Faith that never gives evidence of contrition is not saving faith. I say this with only one caution - and that is the caution that Christ gave with regards to the angels being unable to discern by looking between immature faith and false faith (ie. between the tares and the wheat). The purpose of such instruction is not to make you a "fruit inspector" who goes around judging the validity of anyone's profession of faith. Rather the purpose of this post is to make a distinction between easy believism and genuine saving faith - and thereafter to apply that teaching to ourselves, comparing it to what we believe.Labels: doctrine, edification, faith, foppy faith., repentance |
posted by Daniel @
12:25 PM
2 comment(s)
 
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| About Being Wrong Or Right. |
While every Christian ought to strive to be correct in what they believe, there is never any excuse to be haughty in one's opinion, right or wrong.
I don't think I have ever met anyone who held onto some opinion they knew to be wrong. I have known many who have expressed uncertainty about something they are persuaded, that is they feel they haven't got a full grasp of it, and admit to some conviction about the direction their persuasion leans, but wouldn't feel comfortable dogmatically with their own position - but that is far from holding a known "wrong" conviction.
To be sure, my presumption is that all Christians are sincere, but not all Christians have equal discernment. I presume that just as I have found error in other well meaning and sincere brothers and sisters in the Lord, so too I anticipate that however closely I study the word of God, and however highly I exalt the truth above my own opinion and agenda - yet I anticipate that I too must have blind spots, and therefore I strive to remain humble and teachable in spite of my convictions.
My hope of course is that whether I am right or wrong, I remain open and willing to listen, and that I remain polite and reasonable. The truth is best adorned I think by a willingness to be tested, and a willingness to lead those who are teachable into it. This willingness to listen and be taught is not just some shrewd tool we pull out so that our arguments are always given from a forced and disingenuous social high ground - for such high ground is a hollow facade, and at best deceitfully patronizing if it is not sincere. No, it is always better to assume that in every encounter God has given the other as much light as you have received or more, and that there is room in every discussion to be instructed - and to come to such instruction humbly.
I am of course less than perfect in following this prescription myself, but it is the path I strive to keep my feet on.
I have found however, that the default way the world deals with a conviction that it is right about a thing, is to adopt a patronizing stance against those who don't get it, as though their ignorance were willful and obstinate. They assume the role of a schoolmaster and the moment their own opinion is assailed, they become politely venomous, or worse, shrill and self righteous. We have all seen it happen. Two polite Christians find they disagree, and within a few exchanges, the person of Christ is being defended by two carnal combatants tearing each other to shreds to the applause of the enemy.
I have read just today a remark on another blog about how such and such a blog is so sour because the people who post and comment on that blog are always ranting about how right they are, and how wrong everyone is who disagrees with them, and suggesting that any humility that is found there is necessarily false.
That saddens me. Not because it is so poisonous, but because there is room for everyone to do some self examination when it comes to such things. Would that we would adorn Christ with the utmost vigor in our intramural discussions.Labels: Advice, edification, how to be a Christian |
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posted by Daniel @
11:50 AM
12 comment(s)
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"Please Grant Me Patience!"
and other toothless prayers... |
 This morning I decided to lay in bed when I ought to have gotten up.
You see, my morning begins early - I try to read the bible for at least an hour, spend at least a half an hour in prayer, but prefer to spend an hour or so, try to get in 45 minutes on the treadmill, all before 6:30 a.m. when I wake up my two older children to teach them biblical Greek for an hour. If I forgotten to prepare the day's Greek lesson the night before (or if I was just too busy), I try and squeeze in a half hour to write the lesson and print it out somewhere before 6:30 a.m.. Then I give the kids some instructions about what to do when after I leave, and butta-bing butta boom, I hop in the shower, get dressed and ride my bike the ten miles to my work and start my work day around 8:45.
There is not a lot of room for sleeping in with my schedule, so that whenever I do it is indicative of the flesh.
So as I lay there in bed, willing myself to stay there, I was suddenly struck with the most absurd intrusion into my thoughts. Being wide awake, and attempting to give both my exhaustion and my wandering mind the time they needed to lull me back into the arms of my former slumber, I suddenly daydreamed for no apparent reason, an image of one of the office plants falling over. It is a big palm tree plant that is up on a window ledge. So utterly foreign was this daydream to my thoughts, that I said to myself - where did that come from?? I mean, I could care less about the flora in our office, and imagining them toppling over for no reason just didn't make any sense. My mind doesn't wander in that way. So, I began to ask myself what that could possibly represent, if it was in fact representative of anything. How did King Solomon say it? - and if a tree falls to the south or the north, In the place where the tree falls, there it shall lie. In the light of that kind of thinking, I began to see myself as that toppled office plant - laying there and staying there. There is no path to spiritual inertness, the moment you stop walking in the Spirit - that is, submitting yourself to God - in that very moment you are in the flesh and it begins to produce death in you just as surely as a fallen tree rots.
So I got out of bed, I didn't finish off the "extra hour of sleep" I had planned for myself, but I also didn't have all the time to do what I normally do in the morning. To make matters worse, I hadn't put together today's Greek lesson for the kids. So I dragged myself to the computer first thing, and opened our text to see what sort of lesson I should prepare - and today is the day they are scheduled to learn about putting all those fancy noun cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative of the second declension) together in a sentence with all those fancy (present, active indicative) verbs they have been learning for the past 14 weeks.
But the text has an error in it: it reads: εὐαγγέλιον κύριου διδάσκει. and says that εὐαγγέλιον. is in the nominative case, but then goes on to translate it as "He teaches the gospel of the Lord" - now first of all, I don't see any definite articles in the original Greek, and if εὐαγγέλιον. is supposed to be the in nominative that makes "a gospel" the subject of the sentence (note the underlined indefinite article?). It seemed to me that the translation should have read: "A gospel of a lord teaches." But if εὐαγγέλιον was in the accusative case, as I would have expected it to be, we would presume a subject pronoun from the verb ("He teaches") and the gospel the be the thing that is being taught, as opposed to the thing that is teaching - rendering the clause: "He teaches a gospel of a Lord.". Either way - the text was off. The only problem was I was thinking that I must be wrong - perhaps there was some little known quirky Greek grammatical rule that I wasn't aware of? So as I began to prepare the lesson, I quickly did a web search to see if there were some rule I was unaware of, but I came up empty. Then I tried my various Greek textbooks - nothing. In fact, everything seemed to be to suggest that the text was simply wrong. So in a final act of desperation, I do an errata search on this textbook and shazam! That was the problem - text book error. By the time I got the lesson prepared, it was a 7:15 a.m., I hadn't had any time in the word, or in prayer, and I was already 45 minutes out on my teaching schedule.
I woke the kids, and explained how dreadfully behind the ball we were, we skipped the Greek verse memorization, and the conjugation exercises, and the declension exercises because I knew they could do that without me, and we dove headlong into translating clauses that involved a nominative, a genitive, a verb and an accusative.
Well, my six year old was having some difficulty, but my nine year old picked it up and understood what had to be done. I kept glancing at the clock, and when my little one continued to show confusion, I began to lose my patience with my six year old. Why do you think we spent so much time memorizing the genitive forms? Why do you think we bothered with the learning the nominatives, and the accusatives? That wasn't just trivial information kids - it was so that when we got here you would be able to put a sentence together! You have no one to blame for your confusion but yourself, and frankly, you need to think long and hard about whether you are willing to put in the effort to continue in Greek with us!
You see, my plan was never to teach my six year old Greek. My eldest son is nine, and I thought he was ready, but when we began my six year old daughter was so upset that she wasn't invited she began to try and study Greek by herself (our lessons were taped to the wall). My wife finally persuaded me to let her try, and so I did, and she absolutely loved it - though it meant an half hour or more extra work for me - yet I was willing to accommodate her because her interest was genuine. She is only just beginning to read in English, so she has struggled along through the whole process - but she has such a never-give-up attitude that I have come to be so very thankful for her joining us in this endeavor.
Nevertheless, this morning, as my frustration at being off my schedule began to show itself in my demeanor and language, I had to stop and remind myself that the only reason I am suffering frustration, the only reason I am lacking patience is because I am presently walking in the flesh. Somewhere along the way I stopped walking in the light, and the moment I did I was in the flesh, and the flesh was producing death in me just as it always does.
I had to sit put myself before the Lord, confess that I was not surrendered in my heart, ask for grace and forgiveness, put my faith in Christ that this thing in me that rose up was in fact on the cross with Christ, and thereby powerless to control me - and then I had to sit down with the kids - late as I was, and explain that they were both excellent students, and that the reason they (well my younger one at least) was having trouble understanding was because I was poorly prepared and had shortchanged their time by my own laziness, and then I tried to put the blame on them for not being good students. I explained that my actions were shameful, and that I was sorry for them - but I also explained that the sin in side of me would continue to make me like that and worse if I didn't trust Christ to deal with it. I asked them to forgive me and to learn from my mistake. I praised them for their patience with me, and then set them back to work.
What is relevant to this post is not so much what I did do, but what I did not do.
I didn't stop and pray, "Dear Lord, please give me patience!"
You see, patience is a fruit that flows naturally out of a surrendered walk in the Holy Spirit - we don't produce it, but it is impossible for a person surrendered to Christ to be impatient. Think about it - if I am honestly surrendered to God - genuinely willing to accept anything from His hand that He deems is appropriate - genuinely willing to receive as much and no more - you cannot at the same time be impatient, if you are, you are not surrendered, that is, you are not "in the Spirit." That is why scripture calls patience a fruit of the Spirit.
Asking God to give you patience in a moment where patience is needed is not simply missing the boat - it is asking amiss that you may spend a thing on your lusts. Asking for patience so that we can use it as a tool to quench the dictates of our flesh and in doing so satisfy our own nagging guilt is not godly, it is selfish. God isn't concerned about making your walk in the flesh comfy - He wants you to appropriate your death in Christ! So praying for patience is like begging God to let you keep going in the flesh - aloof from the very salvation from sin that Christ died to give you. It is my firm conviction that God is not going to enable your neglect in this matter.
So the next time you are tempted to pray for patience, or joy, or peace, or anything else that comes instantly, substantially and perfectly to those, and only those who surrender themselves to God, why not instead try something that has some biblical "teeth" - try humbling yourself under God's mighty hand and see if you don't receive grace - and life more abundantly for that matter.Labels: edification, encouragement, homeschool, prayer |
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posted by Daniel @
10:50 AM
12 comment(s)
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