Sin and Holiness

[Brad Mercer]

A Perspective Submitted for Your Consideration

Sin and Holiness are ultimately about relationship and identity. Holiness is finding our worth and identity in our relationship with Christ. No one else is adequate for that purpose. If we look to anyone or anything else as the foundational source of our identity or sense of self-worth, that alternative will prove inadequate. It then hurts to feel worthless, or to fear that we may be exposed as worthless. Relationship with God, within which we can see and learn to embrace his assessment of who we are and what we're worth, is the only adequate source of identity, and the supreme relationship for which we were born.

We are born with a tendency to look to inadequate sources of self-worth and identity. That is original sin. Every sinful deed then is either a search for worth in some inadequate source, or an effort to medicate the pain of feeling worthless. We have an affair or get drunk or jostle for position or tear down others either to feel valuable or to medicate the pain of not feeling valuable. When those efforts fail, it increases our shame and sense of worthlessness, so we try harder to medicate or to extract from someone or something a sense that we are valuable. We are resistant to appeals to abandon our sin because that appeal sounds like a call to abandon our search for worth, acknowledge our utter irremediable worthlessness, and remain forever in unbearable, raw, unmedicated pain. An appeal to simply abandon our search for worth is essentially an invitation to hell, not heaven. We love only because he first loved us. We abandon inadequate sources of worth, only when we embrace the ultimate source of worth – relationship with the God who is Love.

John Wesley wrote: "It were well you should be thoroughly sensible of this, -- 'the heaven of heavens is love.' There is nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else; if you look for anything but more love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way. And when you are asking others, 'Have you received this or that blessing?' if you mean anything but more love, you mean wrong; you are leading them out of the way, and putting them upon a false scent. Settle it then in your heart, that from the moment God has saved you from all sin, you are to aim at nothing more, but more of that love described in the thirteenth of the Corinthians. [1 Cor. 13] You can go no higher than this, till you are carried into Abraham's bosom."
Plain Account of Christian Perfection Section 25, Question 33

We start with the objective truth, found in I John 4:8 and 4:16 that “God is love.” We recognize that love has no value for us until it is recognized, received and experienced. If love means anything at all, it must mean something about value. If we say we love something, we mean it has value to us. Jesus says of us in Matthew 10:31: “don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to him than a whole flock of sparrows.” Being born in sin must at least in part mean to be born without the knowledge that God is love, and without the knowledge that we are innately valuable to him. We are isolated and disconnected and without the capacity to love and be loved – to live in intimate relationship as we were designed to live. We don’t and can’t love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, or our neighbor as ourselves. To fulfill the greatest commandment, and the second one that is like it, means to live in deep, pure, perfect love relationship with God and each other. We are born for relationship. It is our destiny. We have no other or higher purpose. As a church, we have no other purpose but to model those relationships in such a way as to draw people to Christ, who alone can restore them to those relationships which are the cry of their hearts. We are to spend our lives modeling and nurturing those restored relationships. In that context alone can we find holiness, healing and spiritual growth.

We grow spiritually, emotionally and relationally by surrendering all our doubt and fear in complete trust of the character of God toward us and by then consequently being drawn into ever closer relationship with him and each other. We grow by learning to recognize behind the sin in our lives the fundamental lies about God and ourselves that are expressed by that sin. We learn to recognize in those behaviors that we are looking to something besides Christ to give us a sense of worth and identity. We grow by learning in all the details of our emotions and relationships to let God's love replace our fear. In this way we “work out [our] own salvation” and are “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds.”

I believe it is possible to believe, to see, to know much more genuinely and deeply and consistently than we do, that God is love, that he loves us – me – not generically or in some special restricted God way that has nothing really to do with me, but really, in the normal dictionary sense of the word love, like a father loves a child, good or bad. I can grow in my ability to approach God with freedom and confidence because he likes me, sees present real value in me, enjoys me, feels affection for me, admires me, the way any decent parent does even a wayward child.

That growing confidence in the character of God and in his assessment of my worth will inevitably shape the way I relate to him, my eagerness to spend time with him, my capacity to feel in my reading of scripture his real love lavished on me personally. It will also inevitably cause me to become more and more like the one in whose love I revel. I will begin more and more to share his perspective not only of myself, but of the world around me. I will grow more and more from the role of the prodigal son or his older brother into the role of the father. We are to be imitators of God.

I will more and more see the worth of his other children through his eyes as I am coming to see my own – I will, in fact, come to love my neighbor as myself. I will come more and more to see with sympathetic and compassionate concern rather than judgmental and condemning “concern” the pain and the fear and the struggle and the failure and the bondage to lies of his other children, as he does. I will become more instinctively concerned with how to more effectively reflect to them who they really are, and who God really is – to strive for their well-being for their sake with the self-sacrificing love of the Father.

That process of consistently, deliberately choosing “more love” both as receiver and giver is, in fact, the “royal way”, the “heaven of heavens.” That is what we mean – or should mean – when we talk about spiritual formation or growth in grace, or spiritual growth or holiness or piety or any other similar phrase.

The post-modern, developed world in the 21st century is hungry for holiness. This message resonates with them. I have the testimonies that say so. I’ve seen them get saved, sanctified, abandon their sins, embrace scripture, embrace the Church of the Nazarene, embrace ministry responsibilities and embrace ongoing personal transformation. A thoroughgoing theology of love draws people into a real encounter with God and a lifetime of lived-out grace. I believe that God has raised us up for such a time as this.

Brad Mercer
www.newstart-frisco.com (http://www.newstart-frisco.com/)

[Paul Whitaker]

Your clarity of talking to us is amazing! Thanks so much.

[Brad Mercer]

Sorry. I was feeling silly in my cold-/cold-medicine-induced haze. Having lost the mental accuity to comprehend what Brad wrote, I should have simply left it for another day but chose instead to bring in the other question being discussed and suggest that he condense his thoughts into a simple yes/no answer to that question.

My apologies to both of you.

Marsha

PS: Maybe it would be better to delete this whole section of the thread, Hans. That would be fine with me.
Marsha,

I understood what you meant. I just read your post and smiled. ;-)

And my answer is yes.

[Hans Deventer]

My apologies to both of you.


Mine as well. I should not taken it as seriously as I did. Perhaps the reason is that I am preparing to preach next Sunday with this very topic in mind and I am still very much struggling regarding some aspects of what Brad wrote. I'm probably a bit tense on the subject.

Sorry.

[David van Beveren]

Brad,

Thank you so much for your explanation about sin and holiness.
It really helps me to deepen my awareness of Gods love and the consequence of being outside that love.
And I see more clearly our responsibility as a church to live the love of God, and to become a bunch of incarnated love of God.
This, however, we cannot learn from books, but only in the mutual relationships in church and individually in our relationship with God, i.e. in experiencing this love.

Hans,

Can you elaborate a little what you are struggling about?

[Hans Deventer]

Can you elaborate a little what you are struggling about?

Sure! I am not yet clear on the relation between love and pain, and I am still reading and trying to understand how the dynamic between accepting yourself, including your bad character traits, and God's grace that will change you will work in practice. For obviously wer are not meant to stay as we are.

Right now I am reading Brennan Manning's Abba's Child, that deals with the latter.

[Hans Deventer]

Interesting. Henri Nouwen's daily devotional for today says:

Our Spiritual Parents

Joy and sorrow are never separated. When our hearts rejoice at a spectacular view, we may miss our friends who cannot see it, and when we are overwhelmed with grief, we may discover what true friendship is all about. Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.

[Mark Metcalfe]

I will grow more and more from the role of the prodigal son or his older brother into the role of the father. We are to be imitators of God.www.newstart-frisco.com (http://www.newstart-frisco.com/)

Amen. I did not read this until after I attempted to clairfy my position
in "Does God love me just the way I am?" note, so it was nice to
see the correlative reference to the Prodigal Son story.

God is love, period. Relationship requires a response.
The author put it this way: "We recognize that love has
no value for us until it is recognized, received and experienced."
The Prodigal "realizes" God love when "he comes to himself"
and sees the mess he's gotten himself into. However, even
this is not yet enough. He must turn towards home. When
the father sees this, He will run to meet him more than half way!

Mark

[Brad Mercer]

Amen. I did not read this until after I attempted to clairfy my position
in "Does God love me just the way I am?" note, so it was nice to
see the correlative reference to the Prodigal Son story.

God is love, period. Relationship requires a response.
The author put it this way: "We recognize that love has
no value for us until it is recognized, received and experienced."
The Prodigal "realizes" God love when "he comes to himself"
and sees the mess he's gotten himself into. However, even
this is not yet enough. He must turn towards home. When
the father sees this, He will run to meet him more than half way!

Mark

Yes, but it's crucial to recognize that the son does return to the father precisely because he recognizes that there's something better in it for him than what he has. He doesn't receive something better as an arbitrary agreed upon exchange, but rather the being with the father is, innately, by any comparison or under any agreement, in any role, innately better for him than anything he can imagine having otherwise. In other words, it's precisely because he comes to see the father's love, and the provision that his father provides, and not because he sees some duty to do so, that he returns to the father. He doesn't need anyone to tell him how inadequate his sins are to meet his needs. He already knows that quite well. No one knows or feels more deeply or clearly than he does the pain and alienation and emptiness in his life. It's the older brother and not the father who thinks he needs to be reminded of that and beaten over the head with it. The father smells his stench with compassion rather than condemnation. The father sees the rags with compassion rather than condemnation. The father understands the hunger with compassion rather than condemnation. The father sees the sin as innately hurtful to someone he deeply cherishes, not as mere violations of his arbitrary rules, and therefore as threats to His own worth or position, and that therefore deserve to be punished in order to restore His own position of unrivaled sovereignty. It's not like being put in prison as an essentially arbitrary but clearly previously legislated punishment for robbery. It's more like the pain of being cold because you ignored your mother's warning and ran outside without a coat on. And if we never come back to mom for that coat, we die of exposure. Fingers feel like they're on fire and finally turn black and die. If we decide that the cold hurts after all, and come back to mom, she puts a coat and mittens on us and we get warm.

Analogies always break down at some point, but I think there's something true about sin and grace in there somewhere.

Brad

[Brad Mercer]

Sure! I am not yet clear on the relation between love and pain, and I am still reading and trying to understand how the dynamic between accepting yourself, including your bad character traits, and God's grace that will change you will work in practice.

Okay, here's been my observation of how it has worked in practice. I have three different examples that come instantly to mind. Two had no meaningful religious knowledge or experience at all. One had been to a Baptist Vacation Bible School as a kid, and had attended an Episcopal prep school in the Northeast, and in both places felt condemned and manipulated, so what little he knew of God, the Bible and church, he despised. One was an ex-marine, one was a child psychologist and one was a mid-level manager in a telecom company.

One was cheating on his wife when his family first came to our church. One was addicted to alcohol and cocaine and was living with a girl to whom he was not married when they first came to our church. They all looked fine on the outside, but were coming to a place where they were beginning to recognize an emptiness inside.

One says: "The first thing I remember about NewStart was the people, just the atmosphere." Another says: "When we walked out of the building after that first service, it took everything I had not to cry in front of my girlfriend." The third says: "The first time we went to NewStart I cornered Roland and fired away with questions. He consistently validated my questions, patiently answered them and gave me nothing to be angry with, which really hacked me off. It was hard to believe that he valued me and my girlfriend and wanted us to attend just because he wanted to be with us. We came back two more times and started building friendships and relationships. We continued to find that there were no judgments, gossip, favorites, just people and a place that wanted to love you. This was very hard to accept and still quite unbelievable. We kept looking for the catch. When are they going to slap us or ask for a financial statement. They’re just setting us up. We went cautiously into friendships, waiting, and it just never happened."

The guy who was cheating on his wife went to Roland, the pastor, on his own initiative when his affair blew up in his face and his marriage was in crisis. Another guy, similarly, called Roland when he and his girlfriend were fighting. The other guy just started attending the weekly men's Bible study. His response is representative of the others.

He was sitting around a table with the other guys at the men's Bible study. He said: "I wanted to tell them everything I had done and have them tell me that I would be okay. My overwhelming desire to have what I had seen in everyone at that church was so overwhelmingly stronger than everything else I had been taught by life. I remember looking down at the Bible someone had handed me and barely being able to read it through my tears. Roland asked if I would mind if the men gathered around me and laid hands on me and prayed for me. I cried no, but I was afraid I was too far gone to be saved. The minute they prayed for me, it was like all the weight in the world had been lifted off my shoulders. By the time I got up to leave I had absolutely no fear about myself or about life. I had an overwhelming confidence that I was going to be okay. I couldn’t stop crying."

Of their post-conversion life one says: "I see that I actually have a bigger heart now. Just the ability to express emotions and care makes all the difference in my family life, my professional life. My outlook on the world is just dramatically different. The cool thing is that I see such contrast between the life I lived before and the thoughts, emotions and life I live today. It’s just remarkable because there’s so many things I thought were hocus pocus and now its real and its making a difference in my life and in other people’s lives."

Another says: "I understand other people better now. I have gone from being one of the hurting to one of the healing. My relationships are better than they’ve ever been before in my life. I see things completely differently. I experience life differently, like colors and details. I’ve become more artistically creative again. I’m a new person. I’m young again. I don’t feel old and used up and empty anymore. I have hope for tomorrow. I take better care of myself. I’ve gained a level of self-respect I’ve never had before, even from being a marine. I’ve had prayers answered, miracles occurring. I used to have to put on a show of being complete when I wasn’t, and now it just comes natural. I have less trouble letting go of my own issues that I had difficulty with in the past. As I get closer to God, my own process of letting go of things almost becomes an automatic thing. Everyone sees it as such an impossible lifestyle to maintain, but it’s just the opposite. I am at peace with my soul, and with God. I’m connected."

The other one says: "In my practice as a professional counselor, all of my practice now is based on teaching the values of love, acceptance and respect, whether my clients are Christians or not. I’ll stop in the middle of a counseling session when I’m getting frustrated, and say a prayer to help me reach this person, and then they’ll come around. My parenting techniques have become much better. I can realize now when I’m making mistakes, where before it would just irritate me. I’m a better therapist, husband, parent – person."

In short, when we genuinely love, like, respect, accept someone deeply and fully and unconditionally, at some point, they test that assertion. They want to know that they can really be loved, but they believe if you really knew all about them you would reject them. So they start to open up to you about the pain and the shame in their lives, one level at a time, and gauge your reaction. They may not phrase it always as pain and shame, but that's what they're doing. Your response is then to acknowledge the painfulness of their pain, and even the shamefulness of their shame, and invite them to draw deeper into relationship with you and talk further with you about those things. You help them to recognize in those issues their own fears about being worthless and unlovable. You believe in them. You tell them that the terrible things they've done or had done to them aren't the measure of their worth or their capacity for love. As they begin to believe the genuineness and unconditionality of your love for them, you tell them that God loves them like you do, only better; he doesn't "love" them like their abusive earthly father or the other people who ought to have loved them but used and betrayed them. You present God as the supreme lover of their soul, who loved us while we were yet sinners, and who believes in them and sees beyond their sin to the person of infinite worth, made for intimate relationship, that they really are. Love at that level draws them to repentance and to a desire for holiness. They want to be able to love like they have been loved. They want to be like the people who have loved them. They want to be set free from everything in their life that prevents that. They want to know and be in intimate relationship with that God and the people who reflect that God to them.

They become holy. Then, of course, someone acting out of their own pain slights them or says something hurtful and they find themselves at a crossroads. The other person's remark, if it hurts a lot, hurts a lot because it confirms a lie that I find it easy to believe about myself. They hit one of my little tender spots where I'm afraid that I have this or that trait that makes me worthless. In that moment, I can choose to withdraw from that relationship in order to protect myself from that pain of having my worthlessness confirmed, or I can strike back to defend my worth by telling them it's not true and that they are the worthless one. Those are our typical responses. Holiness is able instead to see either that the other person innocently and unintentionally inflicted pain on me, and that it hurts so much because it accidentally exposes the fact that I've been getting my identity from something they have unknowingly threatened, or that they inflicted pain on me in response to some pain or fear in their own life. I can then actually relate to the other person's inner fear and pain with love, understanding and healing, instead of just responding to the outward behavior. In either case, I can go back to Christ as the ultimate source of my own worth and identity, embrace again the truth of the sufficiency of his love for me, and stay in relationship with that other person. In fact, as I recognize that I was getting my identity in that situation from something other than Christ, and I recognize where he was getting his identity, I get to let go of something in my own life that kept me from loving him as effectively as I really wanted to, and we both become better people, better Christians, and better friends.

People more often repent of sin and more often pursue holiness by this approach than by any other approach I've seen in the last 30 years.


Brad

[Hans Deventer]

Okay, here's been my observation of how it has worked in practice.

Thanks brother! Still digesting!

[Mark Doble]

A Perspective Submitted for Your Consideration

Sin and Holiness are ultimately about relationship and identity. Holiness is finding our worth and identity in our relationship with Christ. No one else is adequate for that purpose. If we look to anyone or anything else as the foundational source of our identity or sense of self-worth, that alternative will prove inadequate. It then hurts to feel worthless, or to fear that we may be exposed as worthless. Relationship with God, within which we can see and learn to embrace his assessment of who we are and what we're worth, is the only adequate source of identity, and the supreme relationship for which we were born.

We are born with a tendency to look to inadequate sources of self-worth and identity. That is original sin. Every sinful deed then is either a search for worth in some inadequate source, or an effort to medicate the pain of feeling worthless. We have an affair or get drunk or jostle for position or tear down others either to feel valuable or to medicate the pain of not feeling valuable. When those efforts fail, it increases our shame and sense of worthlessness, so we try harder to medicate or to extract from someone or something a sense that we are valuable. We are resistant to appeals to abandon our sin because that appeal sounds like a call to abandon our search for worth, acknowledge our utter irremediable worthlessness, and remain forever in unbearable, raw, unmedicated pain. An appeal to simply abandon our search for worth is essentially an invitation to hell, not heaven. We love only because he first loved us. We abandon inadequate sources of worth, only when we embrace the ultimate source of worth – relationship with the God who is Love.

John Wesley wrote: "It were well you should be thoroughly sensible of this, -- 'the heaven of heavens is love.' There is nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else; if you look for anything but more love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way. And when you are asking others, 'Have you received this or that blessing?' if you mean anything but more love, you mean wrong; you are leading them out of the way, and putting them upon a false scent. Settle it then in your heart, that from the moment God has saved you from all sin, you are to aim at nothing more, but more of that love described in the thirteenth of the Corinthians. [1 Cor. 13] You can go no higher than this, till you are carried into Abraham's bosom."
Plain Account of Christian Perfection Section 25, Question 33

We start with the objective truth, found in I John 4:8 and 4:16 that “God is love.” We recognize that love has no value for us until it is recognized, received and experienced. If love means anything at all, it must mean something about value. If we say we love something, we mean it has value to us. Jesus says of us in Matthew 10:31: “don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to him than a whole flock of sparrows.” Being born in sin must at least in part mean to be born without the knowledge that God is love, and without the knowledge that we are innately valuable to him. We are isolated and disconnected and without the capacity to love and be loved – to live in intimate relationship as we were designed to live. We don’t and can’t love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, or our neighbor as ourselves. To fulfill the greatest commandment, and the second one that is like it, means to live in deep, pure, perfect love relationship with God and each other. We are born for relationship. It is our destiny. We have no other or higher purpose. As a church, we have no other purpose but to model those relationships in such a way as to draw people to Christ, who alone can restore them to those relationships which are the cry of their hearts. We are to spend our lives modeling and nurturing those restored relationships. In that context alone can we find holiness, healing and spiritual growth.

We grow spiritually, emotionally and relationally by surrendering all our doubt and fear in complete trust of the character of God toward us and by then consequently being drawn into ever closer relationship with him and each other. We grow by learning to recognize behind the sin in our lives the fundamental lies about God and ourselves that are expressed by that sin. We learn to recognize in those behaviors that we are looking to something besides Christ to give us a sense of worth and identity. We grow by learning in all the details of our emotions and relationships to let God's love replace our fear. In this way we “work out [our] own salvation” and are “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds.”

I believe it is possible to believe, to see, to know much more genuinely and deeply and consistently than we do, that God is love, that he loves us – me – not generically or in some special restricted God way that has nothing really to do with me, but really, in the normal dictionary sense of the word love, like a father loves a child, good or bad. I can grow in my ability to approach God with freedom and confidence because he likes me, sees present real value in me, enjoys me, feels affection for me, admires me, the way any decent parent does even a wayward child.

That growing confidence in the character of God and in his assessment of my worth will inevitably shape the way I relate to him, my eagerness to spend time with him, my capacity to feel in my reading of scripture his real love lavished on me personally. It will also inevitably cause me to become more and more like the one in whose love I revel. I will begin more and more to share his perspective not only of myself, but of the world around me. I will grow more and more from the role of the prodigal son or his older brother into the role of the father. We are to be imitators of God.

I will more and more see the worth of his other children through his eyes as I am coming to see my own – I will, in fact, come to love my neighbor as myself. I will come more and more to see with sympathetic and compassionate concern rather than judgmental and condemning “concern” the pain and the fear and the struggle and the failure and the bondage to lies of his other children, as he does. I will become more instinctively concerned with how to more effectively reflect to them who they really are, and who God really is – to strive for their well-being for their sake with the self-sacrificing love of the Father.

That process of consistently, deliberately choosing “more love” both as receiver and giver is, in fact, the “royal way”, the “heaven of heavens.” That is what we mean – or should mean – when we talk about spiritual formation or growth in grace, or spiritual growth or holiness or piety or any other similar phrase.

The post-modern, developed world in the 21st century is hungry for holiness. This message resonates with them. I have the testimonies that say so. I’ve seen them get saved, sanctified, abandon their sins, embrace scripture, embrace the Church of the Nazarene, embrace ministry responsibilities and embrace ongoing personal transformation. A thoroughgoing theology of love draws people into a real encounter with God and a lifetime of lived-out grace. I believe that God has raised us up for such a time as this.

Brad Mercer
www.newstart-frisco.com (http://www.newstart-frisco.com/)




Brad,
Well said. I couldn't have preached it any better myself.

[Ed Sherman]

"All you need is Love, Love is all you need" - The Beatles.

[Hans Deventer]

"All you need is Love, Love is all you need" - The Beatles.

Beatles said "all you need is love" and then they broke up - Larry Norman

[Nelson Bradford]

Every day I do things that disgust God and would send me to hell, were it not for His grace.

And that someone was a born-again believer.

Question: How would you, Brad, repond to that statement?

I was quiet - does stillness mean consent?

Cuz I'm not sure - yet - I agree.

-neb

ps - Isn't God good?!

[Shawn Flynn]

Every day I do things that disgust God and would send me to hell, were it not for His grace.

And that someone was a born-again believer.

Question: How would you, Brad, repond to that statement?

I was quiet - does stillness mean consent?

Cuz I'm not sure - yet - I agree.

-neb

ps - Isn't God good?!
This is the Calvanists view, as we all know. We have someone in my church who battles with this and questions the need for satification. Anyway, this is how I have explained this situation.

When you are saved, all past sins are covered by the blood of Christ and your name is written in the Book of Life. When you sin (back slide) your salvation comes into question and your name may be removed from the book. Of course we have a mediator through Christ, but our salvation is subject to the judgement of God. I mean God can do what he wants...He's God! My point is that the only sure way to heaven is to be sinless, otherwise your subject to God's judgement.

Now, this is where sanctification comes in. As I said before, when you get saved you, your past sins are covered, but you still retain your carnel nature. Although we are saved, we still may WANT to look at porn, smoke, drink, have tendencies to cuss, etc... But with sanctification, we give ourselves to God and let Him take control. ANd since He can't even look upon sin, He changes our desires and rids us of sinful tendencies.

Now, I do believe in instantaneous entire sanctification, but I believe in most cases it's a gradual progression towards holiness. The closer we are to God, the less we are like our old sinful selves.

God does call us to be a holy people. Infact, I believe it is in Hebrews where it says that no one will see the Lord without holiness.

The one thing that just doesn't jive with me with Calavinism is this idea that if you sin after being "saved" then you weren't really saved at all in the first place. I've been there; when I thought I was saved and I sinned, I still thought I was saved, but I screwed up. So, when will I know that I'm really saved? But that is another thread.

Sorry this wasn't as eloquent as Brad's explaination, but it makes sense to me.

[Paul Whitaker]

We have friends who left our church because they want to believe that our names are written in the Book of Life in Blood - rather than pencil or ink.

If we 'fall' after we are sanctified our names can be taken off the roll in the "Book of Life"? So our names are still re-written in pencil after we repent?

These are not flippant questions. We are having dinner with the couple mentioned above - this evening.

[Marsha Lynn]

I don't think that Brad is around much right now. While we wait for his more excellent response, I have a comment or two.

Every day I do things that disgust God and would send me to hell, were it not for His grace.

I consider myself to be much more Wesleyan than Calvinistic in my thinking and also a "born-again believer" and yet will partially agree with this statement.

Here's my view:

I have a relationship with the God of the universe. He has accepted me. He has forgiven my sins. He loves me. I love him. I strive with my entire being to please him, not because I need to earn his favor but because I love him and treasure our relationship and want to please him.

Yet, I fall far short in many areas. Self derails me from loving God and others as I should. I live well while others starve. I carelessly throw food away while babies cry pitifully for just a morsel of nutrition. Those babies are beyond the reach of my sight and hearing, but closer to home I walk past spiritually starving people without stopping to offer them anything. I look with disapproval on people whom God loves because I don't look deep enough to see his image reflected in their eyes. And I do these things every day! God sees my shortcomings and chooses to love me and remain in relationship with me anyway. He's helping me grow to be more like him all the time, but I'm not even close to being able to make heaven on the basis of merit alone.

Where I would differ from the statement you quote is that I don't believe that God looks on my shortcomings with disgust. I believe that he is a God of compassion.

PS 103:13 As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;

PS 103:14 for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.

Yes, I fall short. I wish I were more socially responsible, more compassionate, less self-centered. When measured against the absolutes of the law, I am indeed disgusting. But God looks on me with compassion and realizes that I am only dust and still invites me into relationship with him, even while I am still imperfect. And as I commit my entire being to him, he changes me in amazing ways.

If sin is rebellion against God, I certainly wouldn't say that I sin every day. I have chosen a life of submission to his will. However, I could never claim to merit the favor of a holy God. I don't see anyplace in scripture that would support such a claim.

An illustration: I mailed the last of my annual library reports this afternoon. Whew! This has been hanging over my head since January 1. One of the last sticky spots was a deficiency revealed in an audit by the state board of accounts a year ago. I needed to prove I had fixed all the four or five problems highlighted by the auditor. I have now officially responded to every complaint. Does that mean everything is perfect at the library? Absolutely not. When I read the requirements in the official accounting manual I see that the auditor could have easily made a list of dozens of deficiencies rather than just a few. I assume she noticed more than she mentioned and chose to address those she saw as most important. We are much closer to conforming with the standards for public libraries than we were when I was appointed as library director six years ago but still have far to go. Some of the changes have been prompted by state officials, some I have made on my own as I've become more familiar with the requirements. I will continue to work toward compliance with state laws as I continue to study the accounting manual and gain better understanding of the requirements.

In the meantime the state board of accounts is being gracious toward us, not because we're perfect but because we're responsive to their corrections and really trying to get things in order. They realize that it takes time to write policies and implement new procedures, that all the desired changes are not going to happen overnight.

That's how I see my relationship with God. I'm not totally in conformance with his law, but neither am I in rebellion. I continually seek to better understand the values of the Kingdom and to incorporate them into my life. And He blesses me and walks with me as I make my journey onward.

Does that make sense?

Marsha

[Micky Moore]

This is my first time here, so I hope I do this right.
I am glad to see Marsha that your post includes Psalms 103:13. Most people don't want to use the word fear when it comes to God. Proverbs 1:7 says
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools
despise wisdom and instruction." Today's messages seem to want to go from sin, to grace, leaving out important things in between. Things like wrath, judgment, hell, righteousness, repentance, then grace. You also used the word Law. Psalm 19:7 says "The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul:." Telling a sinner that Jesus died on the cross for their sins is foolishness to them, why? 1 Cor. 1:18 says "For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness;." 1Cor. 2:14 says, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:
for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them,
because they are spiritually discerned." A person compares theirself to others, not to the perfect Law of the Lord, so they think there are a lot of people worse than them. By using God's Law, they can see that they have sinned against God not against man. Paul said he had not know sin but by the Law. Paul also said the Law showed him that sin was exceedingly sinful.
I believe that one on one, or from the pulpit, a message must contain law, sin, wrath, judgment, hell, righteousness, repentance, then grace. A person must see that they are lost before they will want to be saved. Bringing a person to Christ for life enhancement reasons, love, joy, peace, fulfillment, and lasting happiness, makes stony ground hears that soon fall away at a 80 to 90 percent rate. Jesus said he came to save sinners, not to make them happy. Peace and joy are fruits of salvation, but as Paul said, it is because we know our names are written down in the Book of Life, not because we are going to be happy in this life. Do you think the world would see the "wonderful plan in the lives" of the people below?
Philip: Crucified, Phrygia, AD 54
Matthew: Beheaded, Ethiopia, AD 60
Barnabas: Burned to death, Cyprus, AD 64
Mark: Dragged to death, Alexandria, AD 64
James (the Less): Clubbed to death, Jerusalem, AD 66
Paul: Beheaded, Rome, AD 66
Peter: Crucified, Rome, AD 69
Andrew: Crucified, Achaia, AD 70
Thomas: Speared to death, Calamina, AD 70
Luke: Hanged, Athens, AD 93
I signed up here mostly because there is a message that I think all Christians should here. It is called "Hell's Best Kept Secret" by Ray Comfort. This message and many other useful things can be found at:
http://www.livingwaters.com/
I struggled with my spiritual life for over 25 years before I heard this message. Not only did it change my understanding of why Jesus came, but it made the Bible make more sense. The Ten Commandments were always just good moral rules to live by, how wrong I was. I could list many things that the New Testament says the Law is used for, but I wish Christian would listen to the above message one time. To many, it takes awhile to soak in. To some like Kirk Camreon, star of Growing Pains and Left Behind movies, and myself, it was life changing instantly.
When you look at something and say “What Would Jesus Do,” you can come up with several answers. But if you look at something and get into the Word and say “What Did Jesus Do,” there is only one answer. So follow the Way of the Master, and do what He did. Use the Law of Lord to convert the soul, it is perfect.
Well I am just going on and on, sorry!
Galatians 3:24
God Bless,
Micky

[Micky Moore]

This is my first time here, so I hope I do this right.
I am glad to see Marsha that your post includes Psalms 103:13. Most people don't want to use the word fear when it comes to God. Proverbs 1:7 says
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools
despise wisdom and instruction." Today's messages seem to want to go from sin, to grace, leaving out important things in between. Things like wrath, judgment, hell, righteousness, repentance, then grace. You also used the word Law. Psalm 19:7 says "The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul:." Telling a sinner that Jesus died on the cross for their sins is foolishness to them, why? 1 Cor. 1:18 says "For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness;." 1Cor. 2:14 says, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:
for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them,
because they are spiritually discerned." A person compares theirself to others, not to the perfect Law of the Lord, so they think there are a lot of people worse than them. By using God's Law, they can see that they have sinned against God not against man. Paul said he had not know sin but by the Law. Paul also said the Law showed him that sin was exceedingly sinful.
I believe that one on one, or from the pulpit, a message must contain law, sin, wrath, judgment, hell, righteousness, repentance, then grace. A person must see that they are lost before they will want to be saved. Bringing a person to Christ for life enhancement reasons, love, joy, peace, fulfillment, and lasting happiness, makes stony ground hears that soon fall away at a 80 to 90 percent rate. Jesus said he came to save sinners, not to make them happy. Sinners must be told about God's wrath on judgment day, and how to be righteous on that day. Peace and joy are fruits of salvation, but as Paul said, it is because we know our names are written down in the Book of Life, not because we are going to be happy in this life. Do you think the world would see the "wonderful plan in the lives" of the people below?
Philip: Crucified, Phrygia, AD 54
Matthew: Beheaded, Ethiopia, AD 60
Barnabas: Burned to death, Cyprus, AD 64
Mark: Dragged to death, Alexandria, AD 64
James (the Less): Clubbed to death, Jerusalem, AD 66
Paul: Beheaded, Rome, AD 66
Peter: Crucified, Rome, AD 69
Andrew: Crucified, Achaia, AD 70
Thomas: Speared to death, Calamina, AD 70
Luke: Hanged, Athens, AD 93
I signed up here mostly because there is a message that I think all Christians should here. It is called "Hell's Best Kept Secret" by Ray Comfort. This message and many other useful things can be found at:
http://www.livingwaters.com/
I struggled with my spiritual life for over 25 years before I heard this message. Not only did it change my understanding of why Jesus came, but it made the Bible make more sense. The Ten Commandments were always just good moral rules to live by, how wrong I was. I could list many things that the New Testament says the Law is used for, but I wish Christian would listen to the above message one time. To many, it takes awhile to soak in. To some like Kirk Camreon, star of Growing Pains and Left Behind movies, and myself, it was life changing instantly.
When you look at something and say “What Would Jesus Do,” you can come up with several answers. But if you look at something and get into the Word and say “What Did Jesus Do,” there is only one answer. So follow the Way of the Master, and do what He did. Use the Law of Lord to convert the soul, it is perfect.
Well I am just going on and on, sorry!
Galatians 3:24
God Bless,
Micky

[Larry Parsons]

Paul,
Like one old holiness camp meeting preacher once said.
Backsliding is hard to do and it not done over night. God will
do everyting he can to keep his children in the fold.
I may be wrong' Im talking about new christain who came
out of the world of sins with alot of sinful habits.
we all know habit are hard to break.
Let say a persons like that get save and soon as leave the
church building and he sins does God take his name off the
book of Life. I don't think so, God is merciful That man is still
a baby in Christ and until he is standing and not crawing with
Christ he will do thing that will displease God.Yet he is still a
Christain.Do I believe a Christain can lose his or her salvation..
yes but it not easy...LP

[Micky Moore]

Larry,
They said this reply was to me, Micky, Paul was Saul.
I won't argue the point you made because only God know the heart, and I think that is what is important.
Acts chapter five tell of a man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira. I am afraid in our world today we would consider what they did a little white lie. God saw what they did as sin, and demanded their lives instantly.
Philippians 4:8
Micky

[Shawn Flynn]

I agree, our God is a god of compassion, but I can't forget He is just too.

Wesley wrote this opening statement in his sermon concerning backsliders.

Presumption is one grand snare of the devil, in which many of the children of men are taken. They so presume upon the mercy of God as utterly to forget his justice. Although he has expressly declared, "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord," yet they flatter themselves, that in the end God will be better than his word. They imagine they may live and die in their sins, and nevertheless "escape the damnation of hell."

Something that made me think.

[Brad Mercer]

Every day I do things that disgust God and would send me to hell, were it not for His grace.

And that someone was a born-again believer.

Question: How would you, Brad, repond to that statement?

-neb

Nelson,

I think my original post that started this thread is probably my best answer. How I would respond to your friend in that actual conversation depends on who said it and in what context. I suspect that your friend is more deeply convinced of the disgust than of the grace. I suspect that I understand grace a little differently from your friend, but my answer to him would depend on his attention span, his own theological background, the conversational context in which he made his statement, and the life context behind his statement, like how much disgust he feels for himself, and how much disgust he senses from the people to whom he looks for affirmation, like his parents.

I think God's grace means God responding to me based on his assessment of my innate worth, on his love for me, rather than on what I've done, good or bad. I think "were it not for his grace" means the same as "were it not for his love." That makes your friend's statement seem to say something close to: "I continually disgust God but He loves me." That statement probably makes perfect sense to most Christians, but I don't think it would make a lick of sense if we changed the persons in the sentence. I don't think it would make perfect sense to my wife or kids if I said "My wife continually disgusts me but I love her." I think "I continually disgust my father, but he loves me" is a sentence that I've never heard spoken by anyone but young women who were victims of childhood sexual abuse. I don't think a statement like that about an earthly father would really sound reasonable to anyone but an abuse victim.

When my children sin, what I feel includes alarm, fear (which sometimes expresses itself as anger), compassion, concern, disapppointment, but not disgust. What I continually, daily, feel for my children, even at their most wayward, is a desire to see them living lives of love, and their sins are always, always, always, contrary to love. That's what makes them sins.

Jesus insisted that his crucifiers didn't really understand what they were doing, and still wanted them to experience his love for them and his assessment of them, when he said "forgive them; they don't know what they're doing." He wasn't just being polite; he really meant it. When Jesus saw the rich young ruler, "Jesus beholding him loved him," even though money was, and remained, his God. Jesus saw who the young man really was, who he was made to be, who he could be, who he was just on the cusp of allowing God to help him become, all that he was almost persuaded to let a loving Father give him. Instead, he walked away; he chose death over life, because he didn't understand or believe. But what Jesus felt seems mostly to have been compassion for the wonderful young man who deserved a better God than the God of wealth, which would surely prove inadequate in the end, and leave him alienated and alone and empty. Even in cleansing the temple it attributes zeal to him, but not anger. It says in one account "he taught them".

I don't really think I do things every day that are contrary to love, but when I do, I think those things make it harder for me to recognize and believe God's love for me, harder for me to be in loving relationship with him, harder for me to know him or to want to be known by him. If I continually, daily live separated from His love, I'm doomed to live out of fear, pain and alienation. In that state I can't know or experience or believe or reflect his love. I can't receive or benefit from his grace. I think that breaks his heart, for my sake, as it would any parent who sees his child self-destructing when he knows that beneath that child's fear and anger and bitterness and alienation and destructiveness is the confused, doubting, wounded heart that was once, and was meant to be, and may be again, tender and open and trusting and loving and joyful and eager.

If you read through this and the first post in the thread carefully, I think you'll find adequate acknowledgment of the sinfulness of sin, and the price of sin, and adequate acknowledgment of judgment and hell.

But I don't think God is continually disgusted. I think he is continually broken-hearted. I think any loving heart in a sinful world feels a lot of broken-heartedness. I think that's why the writers of the Gospel ultimately decided to note that "Jesus wept", but not that he laughed or was angry.

There is more love in God's hatred of sin than your friend probably suspects -- certainly more love than disgust.

At least, that's my take on it, and my answer to the question you asked me.

I'm pretty sure your friend's eyes would have glazed over long before I got to the end of that answer, though. I love NazNet!
:fav18
Brad

[Bob Evans]

Brad

I agree with the spirit of your post but there is a small part of me that makes me wonder if some things are just wrong and we shouldn't do them rather than a search for worth in some inadequate source, or an effort to medicate the pain of feeling worthless.

[Brad Mercer]

Brad

I agree with the spirit of your post but there is a small part of me that makes me wonder if some things are just wrong and we shouldn't do them rather than a search for worth in some inadequate source, or an effort to medicate the pain of feeling worthless.

Bob,

Maybe, but I can't think of one that I've seen in practice, in real life. And if it's "just" wrong, I can't think of anything that could mean except that God makes up arbitrary rules and really does turn out to be mainly a legalistic judge after all, instead of a Father wooing us into relationship.

Brad

[Gina Stevenson]

Bob,

Maybe, but I can't think of one that I've seen in practice, in real life. And if it's "just" wrong, I can't think of anything that could mean except that God makes up arbitrary rules and really does turn out to be mainly a legalistic judge after all, instead of a Father wooing us into relationship.

Brad

Yes, I completely agree with the merciful and relational side of God you portray so well, Brad, so not disagreeing there. But re the underlined portion above ... well, God did "make up arbitrary rules" ... ten of them, if I correctly (tic) recall. Yes, those "ten arbitrary rules" do seem to be aimed towards enhancing those relationships, of which you speak ... both between God and mankind and mankind with each other. ;)

[Gina Stevenson]

Interesting. Henri Nouwen's daily devotional for today says:
Our Spiritual Parents

Joy and sorrow are never separated. When our hearts rejoice at a spectacular view, we may miss our friends who cannot see it, and when we are overwhelmed with grief, we may discover what true friendship is all about. Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.

'Know exactly what he means here (underlined portion above). It seems it was a long time after Danny was gone, and something finally would make me smile, even laugh, and the tho't would cross my mind as to how I'd like to "tell Danny about this ... or that" ... quickly followed by the tho't of how I could not ... which does them give a little stab of sorrow in the midst of something that makes one smile/laugh.

[Shawn Flynn]

Bob,
God makes up arbitrary rules and really does turn out to be mainly a legalistic judge after all, instead of a Father wooing us into relationship.

Brad,

I do not see why God can't do both. I see the Holy Spirit constantly wooing us, both sinner and believer, which he'll do till we are calmed home.

But then God promised He would be like a shepherd, separating the sheep from the goats. Paul talked about this justice in his second letter to the church in Thessalonica (I know you now this, but just for everyone else) saying, "He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus."

Obviously, there are rules we must obey.

[Bob Evans]

Brad

My responce is the same as Gina's. I don't disagree with your post but where do the commandments fit that formula?

[Gina Stevenson]

When my children sin, what I feel includes alarm, fear (which sometimes expresses itself as anger), compassion, concern, disapppointment, but not disgust.

Possibly, if someone's heard a parent, or someone important in their life, tell them enough for it to sink in really deep, things like: "You're disgusting!!" or "You make me sick!!" and so forth, they could very conceivably believe the same about God ... since parents are, in a "perfect world," to portray God's character to their children.

[Micky Moore]

Shawn,
I don't know what you believe, but I use to think that the sheep were those in the church and the goats were those in the world. After listening to the message "True and False Conversions" at www.livingwaters.com, I now believe that they are both in the church. The Church are the sheep, and the false converts are in the church and are the goats, Revelation 3: 16. Some parables that Jesus told that speak of true and false conversions are: The Wheat and Tares (true and false), the good fish and bad fish (true and false) the Foolish Virgins and the Wise (true and false), and the Sheep and Goats (true and false). Jesus said to His disciples when they questioned Him about the Parable of the Sower, "Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all parables?" (Mark 4:13). In other words, the Parable of the Sower is the key to unlocking the mysteries of all the other parables.

Hebrews 9:27
Micky

[Brad Mercer]

Yes, I completely agree with the merciful and relational side of God you portray so well, Brad, so not disagreeing there. But re the underlined portion above ... well, God did "make up arbitrary rules" ... ten of them, if I correctly (tic) recall. Yes, those "ten arbitrary rules" do seem to be aimed towards enhancing those relationships, of which you speak ... both between God and mankind and mankind with each other. ;)

Okay, first, I didn't say God has a merciful and relational side. I said God is love. Not "God is loving"; "God is love." It's not one quality counterbalanced with others. It is his one, sole, defining, essential, core essence. Every other trait of God is an expression of that one, not a countervailing or limiting trait held in tension against that one.

Second, if the ten commandments are aimed toward enhancing those relationships, then they aren't arbitrary, are they? The first four commandments are practical expressions of the primary commandment to love God and the remaining six are practical expressions of the second and similar commandment to love our neighbor. The ten commandments are simply what loving relationship actually does and what it looks like.

As to justice, the punishment isn't arbitrarily connected to the crime; the innate consequence of rejecting love is to experience the opposite. The crime is the punishment.

By the way, if anyone wants to jump in on my side of this conversation (with no "buts") I'd be happy for the company. I'm not going to have time to maintain my position single-handedly.
:rolleyes:

Brad

[Edith K. Thurmond]

Shawn,
I don't know what you believe, but I use to think that the sheep were those in the church and the goats were those in the world. After listening to the message "True and False Conversions" at www.livingwaters.com (http://www.livingwaters.com), I now believe that they are both in the church. The Church are the sheep, and the false converts are in the church and are the goats, Revelation 3: 16. Some parables that Jesus told that speak of true and false conversions are: The Wheat and Tares (true and false), the good fish and bad fish (true and false) the Foolish Virgins and the Wise (true and false), and the Sheep and Goats (true and false). Jesus said to His disciples when they questioned Him about the Parable of the Sower, "Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all parables?" (Mark 4:13). In other words, the Parable of the Sower is the key to unlocking the mysteries of all the other parables.

Hebrews 9:27
Micky

http://www.naznet.com/community/showthread.php?t=2016

This thread talks about wheat and tares. If you have not seen it, perhaps you might have some comment to make there.

Blessings,

[Shawn Flynn]

Shawn,
I don't know what you believe, but I use to think that the sheep were those in the church and the goats were those in the world. After listening to the message "True and False Conversions" at www.livingwaters.com, I now believe that they are both in the church. The Church are the sheep, and the false converts are in the church and are the goats, Revelation 3: 16. Some parables that Jesus told that speak of true and false conversions are: The Wheat and Tares (true and false), the good fish and bad fish (true and false) the Foolish Virgins and the Wise (true and false), and the Sheep and Goats (true and false). Jesus said to His disciples when they questioned Him about the Parable of the Sower, "Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all parables?" (Mark 4:13). In other words, the Parable of the Sower is the key to unlocking the mysteries of all the other parables.

Hebrews 9:27
Micky


Micky,

I don't want this thread to become too tangental, so I will make this short. I am right there with you...ie the lukewarm church.

[Hans Deventer]

By the way, if anyone wants to jump in on my side of this conversation (with no "buts") I'd be happy for the company. I'm not going to have time to maintain my position single-handedly.
:rolleyes:

Brad

Dear brother, I'm sorry for not paying attention all that much. You know I totally agree with what you are saying here. Either God has two faces and He ultimately can't be trusted, or He really is love and His justice, anger, revenge, commandments and judgement cannot be understood but as part of this love.

I've often thought that the sentence "God is love" perhaps says more of love than of God. Love can express itself in sometimes unexpected ways. But a God, who so loved the world that He sent His only son, willingly to suffer and die for us, his enemies, has a right to define love.

[Sirito Räkers]

A Perspective Submitted for Your Consideration

We are born with a tendency to look to inadequate sources of self-worth and identity. That is original sin. Every sinful deed then is either a search for worth in some inadequate source, or an effort to medicate the pain of feeling worthless.
We love only because he first loved us. We abandon inadequate sources of worth, only when we embrace the ultimate source of worth – relationship with the God who is Love.

Dear Brad,

this might be a rather late reaction, but that's because I'm new on this site.

As a pelgrim on the road... looking for my purpose in the whole, that God holds for me, I found this an appealing piece of 'light' :basic03 you wrote; a real eye-opener. Especially the sentences I quoted from you. Thanks a lot!

Kind regards,
Sirito Räkers

[Sirito Räkers]

The beauty of your soul becomes visible with the sunrise of your smile!

[Brad Mercer]

Dear Brad,

this might be a rather late reaction, but that's because I'm new on this site.

As a pelgrim on the road... looking for my purpose in the whole, that God holds for me, I found this an appealing piece of 'light' :basic03 you wrote; a real eye-opener. Especially the sentences I quoted from you. Thanks a lot!

Kind regards,
Sirito Räkers
Sirito,

It's good to see you posting on NazNet. I'm happy to "meet" you! David, the pastor of the Nazarene church there in Nijmegen, is a good man. I have great confidence in him as someone learning to faithfully embrace and reflect the true character of God. I'm glad you've had the chance to meet him. I wish I had been able to spend more time with David when I was in the Netherlands last year.

Thank you for your encouraging response to my post. I'm glad it makes sense to you. We have a psychologist in our church here in Texas who first came to us in much the same spirit in which you have visited the Nijmegen Nazarene church. He eventually came to actually adjust his approach to counselling to reflect what we are all as "pilgrims" learning together about ourselves and God. He found it actually made a difference in the lives of the people with whom he was working.

Brad

[Archie Hoffpauir]

"If love means anything at all, it must mean something about value. If we say we love something, we mean it has value to us." That is a definition of "love" that works for me (how often do I, do others, talk about love without really knowing what it means). It works for "loving God"...or worshipping God ("attributing worth to God for what He, by nature, is" David Mains). Dare I say, in this forum, it works for "loving myself"...recognizing the worth that is attributed to me by my Creator, and Redeemer? Can that be part of the catharsis, paradigm shift, spiritual transformation at the point of "conversion" or "regeneration"...suddenly coming to the overwhelming sense that God "loves" me...considers me "worthy"? Then I "love" my neighbor...attribute worth to him, viewing him (as best I can, as the Lord enables me) from God's perspective. Then..."loving" somebody, or Somebody...compells me to take action, to pursue that person's (Person's) bests interest, highest good, ultimate purpose. Love God..."keep His commandments"...succinctly, "love God...your neighbor as yourself." Love yourself..."keep His commandments"...which are "not grievous"...that is, not strictures, but instructions to help us enjoy the fullest measure of His love. And love your neighbor (spouse, children, friends, enemies, etc.)...do to them and for them what is in their best interests (in God's scheme of things), as best as you are able to perceive it, pursue it, perform it. Works for me. Archie

[Sirito Räkers]

If love means.....
and if I understand the message of your writing than I'm a lot further!:basic03

What I'm saying: I need to study your writing a couple of times more to grasp the full depth of what ir means.

Until so far and from what I understand (due to languagebarriere and difficult use of language... at least to me) it tells me that love has to do with being worthy. It's the central principle of Gods relationship with man .... nit only for me.

hmmm I'll study on your words some more!

Thanx!
Sirito

[Roland Hearn]

I can see that this thread was left sometime ago and it may be inappropriate for me to bring it back to the top of the board but I think this is the most important issue that the church will wrestle with in the 21st century. I of course agree with everything Brad has said, even though I haven't read everything that Brad has said in this thread. We have spent so much time together where we have done nothing but debate and argue about how to express what we mean by "love", "holiness", "sin" and "self worth" that I doubt there is room left for us to disagree on anything but whether heaven will feature more sporting events or political rallies. We deliberately go looking for semantics to argue over because we both thrive on debate - by the way you can't win a verbal joust with Brad the best you can do is survive. Brad has the most incredible mind for hearing or reading what is communicated and responding accurately to it. I have not met anyone quite as well equipped. That aside let me say this-
As long as the church struggles to adequately find ways of expressing the laws of God it will fail. The Law of God should be our only focus. The Law of God is “Love.” We will constantly hear statements that in order to grow or mature as Christians we need guidelines and that is the role of laws and rules but that is in fact, in my opinion, a fallacy. I once heard love described as a waterway and that the law provides the banks, without them all you have is a swamp. That is a good mental imagery and communicates quite effectively but it isn’t accurate. Our problem is a genuine failure to fully understand or experience love. The key to the holiness movement is the understanding that God in fact fills our hearts with love. We have called that “entire sanctification,” “the higher way”, “Christian perfection,” even, although inaccurately, “the second blessing”. I say “inaccurately” because of what has been communicated by that phrase not what the original intention of the phrase was meant to communicate. We understand by those phrases a relationship with God that is so profound in its quality and its impact as to raise us to a level of life that Paul describes by the phrase “heavenly places.” The fact is that Love, the Holy Spirit, indwelling our hearts does indeed transform us. Our desire to apply rules is a reflection of our lacking confidence in that process and seeing life in terms of static moments rather than dynamic processes. If we were truly to be the church creating environments of genuine love then our dysfunctions, failures, mistakes and sins would have no need for rules because the community itself gathers around at such times in deep understanding and affirmation allowing us to work through where such behaviours are coming from and finding forgiveness and healing from our Creator and Father. This isn’t a “pie in the sky” concept it is the reality of transformational grace. We are so afraid of “failing God” in the moments we miss the dynamic of life. I would suggest that more people are lost to the church because they get caught up in that sense of failure then ever would be if could adequately express the truth of Philippians 1:6.

[Hans Deventer]

I can see that this thread was left sometime ago and it may be inappropriate for me to bring it back to the top of the board

No, it is not. Actually, the very reason for the change of software on NazNet was in order to avoid old but important threads to be pushed down the board. What you are doing is exactly what this software was chosen for: be able to get old threads back on top again and not lose them out of sight. To keep discussions alive, so to speak!

[Roland Hearn]

Well that is a relief you know how much I would hate to create a stir :basic07

[Ronald McClincey]

In reading this explantion of sin and holiness we need to all remember that it is only when we go through sufferring and remorse or repentance from the sins that we as born again believers choose to commit can a right and loving relatiosnhip with our God continue to grow. Sometimes we forget that yes God is love but we also may forget that He loves us so deeply He does not like to share that love and when we sin we are putting somthing in His place-idols that we try to fill that old hole int he heart that only He can fill. Somtimes He just moves in our lives and says "enough" sit on the bench of life because of life awhile and think about our relationship. These days I keep saying to Him "dadd" can I sit in your a little while. I am on that bench at the moment and boy am I learning

Blessings to all
ron

[Brad Mercer]

Ron,

First, welcome to NazNet. I hope you find joy and comfort and friends here, along with the occasional spiritual or intellectual challenge, as I have found.

Second, I think I agree with you. I think sin ultimately will always prove painful and inadequate to fill that hole in our hearts. I think a lot of our pain comes precisely from having things taken from us, or being threatened with the loss of those things, when we have been, unwittingly perhaps, using them to try to fill that hole in our hearts. You mentioned in another post a little of your current circumstances. My circumstances are not the same as yours, but they have the same effect of leaving me feeling sidelined and deprived of some of those things that gave me my sense of worth -- that I was unwittingly using to fill that God-shaped hole.

As you so wisely suggest, we have the choice in such circumstances of allowing ourselves to suffer that pain, recognize where it comes from, and out of the resulting remorse allow ourselves to recognize what God wants to do next in our lives, what deeper work he has still to do to give us a securer peace and a more unshakable joy, to find more completely and consistently our identity in him alone. I'm convinced that you're right. It is precisely in the middle of painful circumstances, honestly felt and acknowledged, that God grows us.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13

Love,
Brad

In reading this explantion of sin and holiness we need to all remember that it is only when we go through sufferring and remorse or repentance from the sins that we as born again believers choose to commit can a right and loving relatiosnhip with our God continue to grow. Sometimes we forget that yes God is love but we also may forget that He loves us so deeply He does not like to share that love and when we sin we are putting somthing in His place-idols that we try to fill that old hole int he heart that only He can fill. Somtimes He just moves in our lives and says "enough" sit on the bench of life because of life awhile and think about our relationship. These days I keep saying to Him "dadd" can I sit in your a little while. I am on that bench at the moment and boy am I learning

Blessings to all
ron

[Roland Hearn]

I don't think that there is anything inconsistent with what you have said here Ron with the main concepts of the post. There is definitely a price to pay for attempting to fill the void in our lives with things other than Christ Himself. I understand what you are saying when you say "He just moves in our lives and says "enough" sit on the bench of life". I think that what happens is that when we are looking to something other than Him to meet our needs life will always lead us to that feeling of being marginalized and lonely. There is no way of changing that effectively until we get to the place of deeply analyzing the things we are using as "idols" and tear them down. As we do that I think we discover God's arms open wide and the embrace of His love and grace sufficient to fill that void.

[Ronald McClincey]

Hey guys as I ponder this issue of Holiness and Sin I think of what it is like when the Lord enters our life in a real way and has had enough. I just finished a book by Richard Roberts called Repentance -the first word of the gospel. My heart was broken and humbled but that is another story for another time. Mr Roberts talks about God giving us what he calls a meaure of sin. Wondered what your thoughts on that are and what it might mean to you in realtion to Holiness or santification. The thought that just crossed my mind is as my lovely daughter says when she was a teenager we would her just enough rope to hang herself. Like to her your thoughts and ideas on Mr. roberts concept of a measure of sin.

Blessings to all of you
ron

[Roland Hearn]

Without fully knowing the context in which he "talks about God giving us what he calls a meaure of sin" it would be difficult to reply completely adequately but my first reaction is to say I struggle with the concept. I think you hit the nail on the head when in a previous post you talked about sin in terms of idolatry. Sin is at its core an issue of relationship not activity. By putting something in the place of God we have rejected Him - that is sin. If one understands sin in terms of relationship it is difficult to understand how God could be both wooing us to Himself and pushing us farther a way. To make God responsible to any degree for our sin by suggesting he "gives us a measure" would be to make justice an impossible concept.
Still I may not have adequately understood what was being said originally.

[Ronald McClincey]

Roland,

Here are my thoughts. God will only tolerate sin in our lives so long-measure of sin- and then He will step back and say ok brother or sister it is my way or the highway and have a good life but without me. Just remember that our God is loving and kind and mercuiful but He also requires us to be disciplined and obedient to Him. As a born again beleiver we make the chooses and know better or should and so when the measure starts to get full I have this picture in my head of God saying, up in heaven , ring the bell Ron is about full and it time to empty his cup one way other -just my take. The book I mentioned is truly eye opening on this subject and I hightly recommend if you are a reader. Blessings and peace to you my brother in christ

Ron

[Brad Mercer]

Roland,

Here are my thoughts. God will only tolerate sin in our lives so long-measure of sin- and then He will step back and say ok brother or sister it is my way or the highway and have a good life but without me. Just remember that our God is loving and kind and mercuiful but He also requires us to be disciplined and obedient to Him....

I can't imagine what the point would be where God decides we have sinned too much to remain within the scope of his redemptive efforts. Surely if there were such a person it would have been the prodigal son or St. Paul or the people who crucified Christ, to whom he said: "forgive them". What do we do with such a concept in practice? It seems to me that we find ourselves looking at someone and saying: "No point in trying to draw that person to God, he's past the point of no return." I suspect that most often the person we'll think is past the point of no return is ourselves, which will lead us to dealing with our own sin the way Judas did, instead of the way Peter did. I think the whole "70 times 7" teaching is precisely to dispel that notion.

And I think our self-discipline and obedience, if it has any real value, is merely our loving response to his love. I don't think it's a "but" that can be held up in dynamic tension against his love.

I think we can take all our overwhelming shame to him and be confident that he will never tell us it's too late, but will always run to us and hug us to himself, even while we're wrapped in filthy, smelly rags, just as he did with the prodigal.

In the words of Brennan Manning: "You are the Beloved."

Love,
Brad

[Ronald McClincey]

Brad,

Look at like this- If poof you are God and he has granted you grace and you just keeping sinning despite repeated warnings by him to you how long are you going to go letting him? er the measure of sin- He will tloerate our sin only so long before takes action in our lives becasue He does love us so much . He may say enough is enough- you have free will you deceide who you want to follow me or your self and in the process take a hands off approach to us. He may back off and allow us to feel what it can be like without His guidance and protection - jus to show -Job. This is what I believe that Richard Roberts is trying to get across with His idea of a mesure of sin.

ron

[Brad Mercer]

I haven't read the book to which you're referring, so I'm only responding to what I understand you to be saying, and I may be misunderstanding that.

My view is that grace is not defined as the toleration of sin, but more as actively wooing a beloved. Our sin is that we don't love him -- or even ourselves or others -- as we are designed to do. He woos us, he seeks to draw us into loving relationship with him, because he finds us lovable, and because he is loving, and because he is love. It seems to me that sin is not something he tolerates for a while and then stops tolerating. It seems to me that he is never for a moment satisfied to see us living outside of love. When we live outside of love, when we don't recognize that we are worth more than many sparrows to him, when I don't recognize that I -- and y'all -- are fearfully and wonderfully made, my loveless, lonely, grasping, vainly searching, self-medicating life is innately a life of pain. To some degree even in the best of times, our temporal sources of worth are inadequate and sooner or later they prove horribly inadequate. Similarly, the things we do to medicate the pain of feeling unloved and unloving and unlovable will always prove inadequate. Outside an intimate love relationship with him, everything we do to get what only he can provide just adds to our shame and our pain.

I think that pain and shame is the innate effect of looking to my idols for identity and of medicating my pain at finding those idols inadequate to the task. I think that pain and shame exists regardless of God's continuing wooing, as long as I don't relent and make him Lord of "all the kingdoms of my heart." I don't think that pain and shame and sense of isolation are the effect of God withdrawing his prevenient grace or ceasing to draw me to himself.

Brad

Brad,

Look at like this- If poof you are God and he has granted you grace and you just keeping sinning despite repeated warnings by him to you how long are you going to go letting him? er the measure of sin- He will tloerate our sin only so long before takes action in our lives becasue He does love us so much . He may say enough is enough- you have free will you deceide who you want to follow me or your self and in the process take a hands off approach to us. He may back off and allow us to feel what it can be like without His guidance and protection - jus to show -Job. This is what I believe that Richard Roberts is trying to get across with His idea of a mesure of sin.

ron

[Ronald McClincey]

brad,

I think we are saying the same thing however in order to fully understand how I beleve God looks at sin remeber that He will not be in it's presence and therefore when His children disobey Him part of that Grace may involve discipline by Him, that is the heart of the idea of a measure of sin, at least I think so. Part of the Grace of God requires us to accept it and be willing to do all connected to it, or accept . As a child think of how your parents had to discipline you. Look at how much of the word deals with repentrance. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on Roberts book after reading it. Another book you might enjoy is called Breaking the Enemies Grip by Eddie Smith-Talk later.

Blessings Your bother in the Lord
Ron

[Marsha Lynn]

Brad, thank you for your responses here. I think that this type of thinking revolutionizes our relationship with God. We're neither so good as we think we need to be in order for him to love us, nor so much in danger of being rejected by him as a result of our shortcomings as we fear.

Of course, that means that the reprobates around us are in a similar state -- not so perfect in God's sight as some of them seem to think they are nor so much worse than us as some of them look to us. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," and God's love reaches out to all. Rather than dividing the world into saints and sinners, perhaps we're much better off counting all as pilgrims at various stages on a journey.

I'm not sure how the author to whom Ron refers can say that God will not be in the presence of sin. At least I assume that it comes from that author since I haven't seen it in the Bible. Wasn't it God who confronted Cain in his sin? And Saul? And David, a man after God's own heart? And the other Saul? It looks to me like he comes right into the presence of sin and communicates graciously with sinners. First, he suggested that Saul quit "kicking about the pricks" and then he immediately told him about the plans he had for him. Did Saul quit being a sinner in between that first flash of light on the road to Damascus and the revelation of God's glorious future for him? I'd say God was right there in the presence of sin and extending grace to a confused young man before he halfway merited that grace.

Along a slightly different line, have you ever wondered how much of God's "punishment" of the nation of Israel was the result of direct divine activity versus how much of it was a natural consequence of a nation who no longer turned in unison to God when threatened by outside forces? If only they had continued to turn to God, He would have protected them from their enemies. They didn't and thus didn't have the unity and courage they needed in order to defend themselves. I'm not sure God ever has to punish us for sin. Is it possible that the natural and unavoidable consequences of sin are completely sufficient as punishment in and of themselves? Do we fear that some people manage to live reckless lives without negative results? Do we truly believe that God rewards those who earnestly seek him? Was Israel an object lesson for that truth? If so, then God can draw near sinners and continue to woo them to him with no concern for properly punishing them for their sins. Is it because we insist on God punishing people for their wrongdoing that we doubt his love?

Just thinking.

Marsha


My view is that grace is not defined as the toleration of sin, but more as actively wooing a beloved. Our sin is that we don't love him -- or even ourselves or others -- as we are designed to do. He woos us, he seeks to draw us into loving relationship with him, because he finds us lovable, and because he is loving, and because he is love. It seems to me that sin is not something he tolerates for a while and then stops tolerating. It seems to me that he is never for a moment satisfied to see us living outside of love. When we live outside of love, when we don't recognize that we are worth more than many sparrows to him, when I don't recognize that I -- and y'all -- are fearfully and wonderfully made, my loveless, lonely, grasping, vainly searching, self-medicating life is innately a life of pain. To some degree even in the best of times, our temporal sources of worth are inadequate and sooner or later they prove horribly inadequate. Similarly, the things we do to medicate the pain of feeling unloved and unloving and unlovable will always prove inadequate. Outside an intimate love relationship with him, everything we do to get what only he can provide just adds to our shame and our pain.

I think that pain and shame is the innate effect of looking to my idols for identity and of medicating my pain at finding those idols inadequate to the task. I think that pain and shame exists regardless of God's continuing wooing, as long as I don't relent and make him Lord of "all the kingdoms of my heart." I don't think that pain and shame and sense of isolation are the effect of God withdrawing his prevenient grace or ceasing to draw me to himself.

Brad

[Roland Hearn]

It is fairly clear when you read scripture that there comes a point where the judgement of God impacts the sinner's life. It isn’t difficult for us in our sin, failure and fear dominated world to recognize that a Holy God must respond to sin in ultimate ways for the two ideas are mutually exclusive. With the sense of our selves distorted from birth by sin there is an almost eager willingness on our parts to embrace the idea of God’s judgement. If we can see clear examples of God getting to the point of having had enough and striking out at wrong doers the world becomes a simpler place for us, all I have to do is avoid the level of sin that would cause His ultimate wrath. I can do that first of all by repentance and secondly by faithfulness and in the end it is up to me to clearly discern the will and path of God and to walk in it. The concept of God being love as a total expression of all He is seems to challenge that idea to some degree. We need the idea of God’s justice to balance out His mercy. Therefore the pages of scripture clearly demonstrate the justice of God. We are able to modify our ideas of His love by His activities of justice and we clearly want to know where the point is that we don’t want to cross that would put us on the wrong side of His justice. We spend a great deal of time therefore working out the best ways to keep the rules. It was a favourite activity of the Pharisees and it seems in many ways it is human nature.
The problem is this, scripture is not a finished revelation as it begins the journey through human history. Man’s understanding of God is being shaped as he interacts with God and that understanding us being unveiled on the pages of scripture. God’s revelation of Himself to humanity isn’t complete, certainly from the perspective of our ability to grasp it, until we see Jesus walk the earth, hang on the cross and ultimately walk from the tomb. The rest of scripture and church history is simply the application of that revelation. However everything we need to understand about God is revealed in Christ. This Jesus refuses to act in revenge, he refuses to come down from the cross, even when angry he doesn’t injure anyone, he extends grace to the unlovely and healing to the broken. This Jesus is God. When we seek to understand God, grace and justice it becomes important to work backwards, and forwards, from Jesus. I’ve got to admit I don’t fully understand all that is said about God’s justice in the pages reflecting His wrath but I think Marsha you are very close to the truth. It is more about the natural consequences of sin than it is about the raging activity of an angry God. I don’t believe we reach a point where God removes grace from us, I do think we can reject Him so much we mitigate the activity of grace in our lives. God’s discipline in my life is far more about the activity of His grace in my mind nagging away at my doubts and fears with words that remind me of His love when circumstances say something different about me than He does. As late as this past week I made a new resolve to listen to what He is saying to me and break down my walls that want to hold on to my distorted sense of self. I think I have been disciplined by God in the middle of difficult circumstances because finally I am starting to accept at a new level that my circumstances don’t say anything to me about me.
I’m not sure that the image of parental discipline, as reflective of the discipline of God, is always an effective one in the way we use it. I know my love for my children and my desire to discipline and shape their lives, and I have used physical punishment in the process. I also know that many times my decisions about their discipline have been mixed with my own fears and inadequacies and I haven’t been completely fair. I thank God that He is not limited in the same way. I have found that the most affective discipline measure I have has been to talk deeply with my children about why they were doing things, what they were feeling when they did it and what their activities reflected about their thoughts of themselves. Without exception that process has yielded far better long term results than any corporal punishment I ever inflicted on my children. I think I got better as a parent as I went along. I don’t think I physically punished any of my children after they reached the age of five or six. I clearly remember the last time I used physical punishment on any of my children. I had a show down with my five year old strong willed youngest child. I don’t remember the issue but she defied me to such a point I think I smacked her little bottom four or five times. I remember walking away from that encounter recognizing that, while her will needed to be shaped and disciplined, a lot of what I just did was because I was angry with her defiance. If that kind of discipline is an image of what God is like we are all in a lot of trouble. When I am the type of parent that I deeply want to be I am wading through my children’s anger, defiance and selfishness to get to the core of their struggle and help them understand how their activities reflect some deeper need. It is such a cool thing after each of those episodes when they apologize or take what ever remedial action is necessary and to witness the incredible change that takes place over the next couple of hours or days as they reflect healthy resolution, feeling good about themselves and feeling like the world is not against them. They are sweeter, more loving, more giving, more open children invariably after one of those discipline sessions then they ever could be doing it another way. I think that is how God disciplines us. I have an almost 17 year old daughter that is 10 years in front of where I was emotionally at that age. I have a 15 year old, tomorrow, 6'4" son who is sweet and malleable and a deep thinker, I have a 12 year old son that is as loving as a boy could ever be and an almost 11 year old, strong willed daughter that is the apple of my eye who delights to sit on my lap at nights for hours and just be close. I’m a better parent than I was when I started out but I am not even close to where God as my ABBA daddy is. I, however, now understand a little more clearly that his discipline has much more to do with wooing love than physical punishment or even the withdrawal of privileges. He loves me and gave Himself for me.

[Hans Deventer]

In the morning, we read Henri Nouwen's Daily Meditation. This one was today's, I think it fits the discussion.


Jesus was broken on the cross. He lived his suffering and death not as an evil to avoid at all costs, but as a mission to embrace. We too are broken. We live with broken bodies, broken hearts, broken minds or broken spirits. We suffer from broken relationships.

How can we live our brokenness? Jesus invites us to embrace our brokenness as he embraced the cross and live it as part of our mission. He asks us not to reject our brokenness as a curse from God that reminds us of our sinfulness but to accept it and put it under God's blessing for our purification and sanctification. Thus our brokenness can become a gateway to new life.

[Roland Hearn]

When Brad and I were getting ready to begin NewStart we would talk to people about our desire to bring people to brokeness and we would get the comment, "Don't you mean brokeness and healing," it was always with a little smile that we would say, "No just brokeness." The philosophy being that until we are at the place of embracing our brokeness we never really find healing. Ultimately when we started the church we had to modify the way we presented the idea because people don't really like the idea of the open endedness of brokenness. The fact is, however, it really isn't the church's role to adminster healing it is our responsibility to make it easy for the broken to gather together before "the fount of grace," and receive the healing from His brokenness. It is a very powerful concept to be broken together.

[Brad Mercer]

I was actually just thinking about that today. Even though NewStart-Frisco is less than 10 years old, because we have our second pastor and there's always a certain amount of turnover as people move in and out of the area, we're essentially in our second generation of leadership. I was thinking about that and wondering to myself, of all the things we planted, of all the primary and secondary concepts we discussed, of all the principles and strategies, what is the one key, core, fundamental thing I'd want them to remember? What's the single thing they have to hang onto if they want to keep seeing the results they've gotten used to seeing -- transformed lives, both in conversions and in the spiritual growth of established Christians?

The answer I came up with in this one person conversation in my head was brokenness. I -- and every other individual "I" in the leadership team of this local church -- have to stay honest and vulnerable with myself about myself. And I have to find a few other people that I can then be honest with about myself, as well. I have to keep letting God show me when I begin to get my sense of worth, positively or negatively, from something besides him. I have to keep letting him show me what he wants to do further in my life, to allow me to more deeply, consistently and genuinely live a life of perfect love; to more clearly reflect his character to those around me; to be more deeply engaged in real, deep, intimate relationship with others. Every bit of healing, every bit of genuine forgiveness, every bit of real spiritual growth, every really close, good friendship, comes from that single trait. Brennan Manning says that too often in the church we only pretend to be sinners and so we can only pretend to be forgiven. If St. Paul can say "not that I have already attained all this, or already been made perfect, but I press on", if Jesus himself could sweat blood and say "let this cup pass from me" and "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me", then it has to be okay for a "mature" Christian to say "I'm hurting", "I'm struggling with something", "I overreacted to that", and so forth.

Poor in spirit, broken and contrite heart, whatever you call it, I think we have to stay open and honest and real with our pain, fear and failure if we want the good stuff to be real.

Love,
Brad

When Brad and I were getting ready to begin NewStart we would talk to people about our desire to bring people to brokeness and we would get the comment, "Don't you mean brokeness and healing," it was always with a little smile that we would say, "No just brokeness." The philosophy being that until we are at the place of embracing our brokeness we never really find healing. Ultimately when we started the church we had to modify the way we presented the idea because people don't really like the idea of the open endedness of brokenness. The fact is, however, it really isn't the church's role to adminster healing it is our responsibility to make it easy for the broken to gather together before "the fount of grace," and receive the healing from His brokenness. It is a very powerful concept to be broken together.

[Roland Hearn]

I have a fairly extensive thought line about this issue but let me just say this and see if it takes us anywhere:
Vulnerability is the key to revival. Vulnerability is allowing our spirit (our heart if you will) to be exposed to God and to others. When we allow people (and the Holy Spirit) to see us deeply: our hopes, dreams, victories, failures, fears and sins, we invite them to a place where they can hurt us deeply but in that place we also find fellowship so deep and sublime that we are able to say, "this is what I was creted for." Vulnerability is the key to my relationship to Christ, it is the key to marriage, it is the key to parenting and it is the key to the church being effective.
Vulnerability is what the 50 days in the upper room between Christ's resurrection and Pentecost was all about.

[Gina Stevenson]

If St. Paul can say "not that I have already attained all this, or already been made perfect, but I press on", if Jesus himself could sweat blood and say "let this cup pass from me" and "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me", then it has to be okay for a "mature" Christian to say "I'm hurting", "I'm struggling with something", "I overreacted to that", and so forth.

Poor in spirit, broken and contrite heart, whatever you call it, I think we have to stay open and honest and real with our pain, fear and failure if we want the good stuff to be real.

Interesting conversation in your mind, Brad ... 'twas good to interact with that brain for a day when we were there on the way from AZ to MI, too, a few years ago [tho' you never should've let that juice age sufficiently to be thrown out ... needed to drink it! ;)]

Yes, this idea of being "real" is definitely key ... those who are real have been appreciated; not being real has been a turn-off ... and sometimes even a rebuke comes from those not wanting to be real, aimed at those who are being real at the time .................

Thanks, Brad, for a good reminder to all to not be afraid to be "real."

[Meghan Schoonover]

subbing

[Hans Deventer]

subbing

? According to www.dictionary.com,

subbing = n : working as a substitute for someone who is ill or on leave of absence [syn: substituting]

So what do you mean?

[Meghan Schoonover]

Oh, sorry! It means I want to subscribe to the thread. I have nothing interesting to say, (yet? ha ha), so you just make a post so you'll get all the responses to the thread...

[Marsha Lynn]

Hi, Meghan. It's fine to do it that way, but you can also subscribe to a thread without posting by choosing "subscribe to this thread" from the "thread tools" menu (right from center, just above the thread display window).

Welcome to NazNet, by the way.

Marsha


Oh, sorry! It means I want to subscribe to the thread. I have nothing interesting to say, (yet? ha ha), so you just make a post so you'll get all the responses to the thread...

[Meghan Schoonover]

Ohhh, found it! Thanks. :) And thanks for the welcome, I'm enjoying it here very much.

[Jurie Malan]

It seems to me that we all agree on God’s love for sinner and saint alike – but that that the effects of sin on a relationship with God, is what needs to be considered. I am concerned about presenting God love, acceptance and forgiveness without the need for repentance, acceptance, and yes, obedience on our side.


=== This is an automatically generated message ===

This is my first post. My Welcome thread is here. Please post all my welcome messages there.

=== This is an automatically generated message ===

[Hans Deventer]

It seems to me that we all agree on God’s love for sinner and saint alike – but that that the effects of sin on a relationship with God, is what needs to be considered. I am concerned about presenting God love, acceptance and forgiveness without the need for repentance, acceptance, and yes, obedience on our side.

Jurie, welcome to NazNet!

Can you please help me out a bit what you mean? I may not be understanding you correctly. I don't think anyone would say we do not need to repent in answer to God's grace. However, God's grace and love come first and don't actually change whether we repent or not.

You see, I'm always concerned about presenting God's love as somehow being conditional.

[Jurie Malan]

Brokenness is indeed a powerful concept, but I am not sure I can agree that the body of Christ should not actively introduce the sinner to repentance and salvation. Without that, we may treat the symptoms but not the core issue. Many secular organizations will show great results by acceptance and rationalization of problems, but the church is called to offer God’s love redemption and victory over sin.

[Hans Deventer]

Brokenness is indeed a powerful concept, but I am not sure I can agree that the body of Christ should not actively introduce the sinner to repentance and salvation. Without that, we may treat the symptoms but not the core issue. Many secular organizations will show great results by acceptance and rationalization of problems, but the church is called to offer God’s love redemption and victory over sin.

Sure! Perhaps you can point out who would be denying that? I certainly never meant to do that.

[Jurie Malan]

Thank you for your welcome Hans

I agree that God's love is unconditional, but holiness is not... Holiness has God's love at the core but is conditional to our repentance and acceptance of God's forgiveness.

So my attempt here, is to support previous posts that are pointing our responibility out - again, not to earn God's love, but to enter in a holy relationship with him.

[Hans Deventer]

Jurie,

I'm reading a book in which I found the following quote

Repent and believe the gospel, Jesus says. Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come, Lord Jesus. (Frederick Buechner The Clown In The Belfry, 171)

And of course we as Wesleyans all know the following:

It were well you should be thoroughly sensible of this-"the heaven of heavens is love." There is nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else; if you look for anything but more love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way. And when you are asking others, "Have you received this or that blessing?" If you mean anything but more love, you mean wrong; you are leading them out of the way, and putting them upon a false scent. Settle it then in your heart, that from the moment God has saved you from all sin, you are to aim at nothing more, than more of that love described in the thirteenth of the Corinthians. You can go no higher than this, til you are carried into Abraham's bosom. (John Wesley, Works XI, 430)

If that is what you mean with holiness, I agree.

[Jurie Malan]

Yes Hans, we still seem to be on the same page. I say “seem”, since I want to clarify your source’s concept of turn around. In Wesley’s sermon on the Repentance of believers he relates repentance as:
“Indeed when we first know this; when we first find the redemption in the blood of Jesus; when the love of God is first shed abroad in our hearts, and his kingdom set up therein; it is natural to suppose that we are no longer sinners, that all our sins are not only covered but destroyed.”

Wesley then continues to deal with the issue of the death of the carnal nature.

There seems to be a tendency to define a “love only holiness” that does not to deal with redemption through the blood of Jesus – even the phrase “blood of Jesus” seems to be branded out of bounds.

[Hans Deventer]

There seems to be a tendency to define a “love only holiness” that does not to deal with redemption through the blood of Jesus – even the phrase “blood of Jesus” seems to be branded out of bounds.

I think this is a reaction to an substancial view of holiness, as opposed to a relational view of holiness.
And to a view of the atonement that sees Jesus' death on the cross as some legal transaction.

Understanding God as love, I am learning these recent years, goes so much deeper than some shallow "God loves me anyway so ....." kind of thinking. It cuts right down to the very essence of who we are, how we define ourselves, what we build our self worth on. The fact is, we are nothing apart from His love.

It also has to do with the definition of sin. Sin, essentially, is missing the mark. And that mark, that goal is living in relationship with God as the sole source of our identity en being. So sin is seeking that identity in anything else but God. We are to become, like John, one who knows nothing about himself but that he is "the disciple that Jesus loved".

That is redemption, holiness, sanctification, dealing with sin. All of it.

[Jurie Malan]

Do you then agree that you do not agree with Weslean teachings of repentance, redemption and sin?

[Hans Deventer]

Do you then agree that you do not agree with Weslean teachings of repentance, redemption and sin?

No, I believe this essentially IS the Wesleyan teaching of repentance, redemption and sin.

[Jurie Malan]

We could re-visit Wesley's position on redemtion through the blood of Jsesus only, or we could discuss the Weslean position of sin being a rebelion against God vs. the Calvinistic position as missing the mark, but I think more pertinent is the question to you: "Can a person be in a relationship with Christ without acknowledging his/her sin and asking for forgiveness?"

[Brad Mercer]

I think more pertinent is the question to you: "Can a person be in a relationship with Christ without acknowledging his/her sin and asking for forgiveness?"

Jurie!

Welcome to NazNet! Jurie and his family have begun attending NewStart lately. They are new to the Frisco, Texas area, but not new to the Church of the Nazarene. He's been in our men's Bible study and always has clear, penetrating insights. And they have the added interest factor that they're from South Africa!

Okay, intro's and welcomes aside, you're absolutely right, of course, on the necessity of repentance and the recognition of the need for forgiveness in order to genuinely embrace God's love and live in intimate relationship with him.

I don't think anyone on NazNet, and no one I've ever met in the Church of the Nazarene, would have any hesitancy at all in insisting with you that there can be no relationship with God outside the regeneration, justification and adoption that follow genuine repentance and the plea for forgiveness.

I don't think, however, that most Nazarene churches today are actually seeing that happen very often. So the question I see being discussed here is not: "does the sinner need to repent" but rather: "how can we as the church do a better job of actually facilitating that repentance".

I think the most common approach in the church to drawing people to repentance, and one that in my experience has seemed to be increasingly ineffective at actually producing new Christians in my part of the world in recent decades, comes from one or more of the following assumptions about the sinner:

The sinner doesn't believe he's done anything wrong and has no need of repentance. He's not really unhappy with his sin and his sinfulness. He's never going to repent unless we explicitly demand it and insist on it as an obligation.

An alternative set of assumptions is this: The sinner knows he's done wrong. Beneath the mask he wears, he feels a deep sense of shame. He already believes at some level that he deserves to be rejected and abandoned, perhaps even punished. At some level, his fear is already that hell is real but heaven is not. He tries to earn "salvation" of some sort by good works, or by making a lot of money, or he just medicates the pain of knowing that he's ultimately damned by taking drugs or pursuing sex or whatever.

If the first set of assumptions is right about the great mass of humanity in our culture, and we act on those assumptions, then we should spend a great deal of time in our sermons, Sunday School lessons, etc., explaining to people that they're sinners, that their sins are sinful, and urging them to the painful, humbling act of repentance and asking forgiveness. If this set of assumptions is right, and we're doing our part well, we should the