More on holiness

One of the trickiest things, when considering holiness, is pondering the balance between what we do and what we are. It's perilously easy to watch a genuine desire for holiness become a large chunk of prideful self-rightousness. Conversely, it's also too easy to become discouraged in the pursuit of holiness and tend to make 'resting on grace' an excuse for spiritual indolence.

That's a hard tightrope to traverse, I think. Over the past few years, I have, on far too many issues, fallen into the 'do' error when it comes to holiness. It's hollow, of course, because the temptation (rarely resisted) is to think that by doing things a certain way, I am fulfilling my calling to holiness.

There is a very odd thing about legalism. It's almost identical to worldliness, it just has a fish sticker on it. When you're worldly, your mind is consumed by temporal things. You spend far too much time thinking about clothes, and money, and success.

Legalism doesn't actually get rid of any of those things. It just replaces them with another set of obsessions, this time with a 'respectable' air about them.

But of course, in veering away from those temptations to think we are holy because we wear polo-neck jumpers and pray every day for 11 hours straight, it's also too easy to land smack dab in the ditch of "Well, I haven't read the bible in about two months, actually, and I've been relying exclusively on three word arrow-prayers, but hey, I know God loves me"

While it is certainly true that we are loved children of the Most High God - that is because of something He did that is beyond the full scope of our frail comprehension: the Cross. How can we treat it like it was nothing? How can we casually tot up those sins that He cried out under the weight of?

One of the most beautiful things about love is that it is such a powerful reciprocal thing. Given freely, it requires no response, and yet only the hardest heart would refuse to give a response.

Essentially, that's the pole that helps us balance on that narrow way of holiness. We need to remember that our pursuit of holiness is a response to love - it is neither an absorption in rules and 'doing', nor a casual, passive lazy spirituality, reclining on who we 'are': the Redeemed, yet without living in the reality of that.

As Christians, we are loved. Let us be holy, also.

A nasty shock.

Just been listening to a sermon series on hell from my old church. It causes me more than a little pain to hear the new pastor of that church presenting eternal conscious torment, universalism and annihilationism all as equal and valid 'options' for a Christian to believe.

The first sermon was full of jokes and puns about 'burning issues' and I really have been crying to hear such things so lightly treated. As it happens, he quite clearly came out in favour of annihiliationism, and for a significant portion of the talk, it was like listening to one of Jehovah's Witnesses speaking.

I feel sick, to be honest. When I was younger, I never even considered that you could be brought to tears by apostasy, but I know the truth of it in this past year, all too bitterly. It actually hurts.

Further: I listened to the Q&A further along in the series, and the problem leapt out at me. When asked what the purpose of hell was, the pastor first tried to dismiss it and say it was only a 'problem' to be answered if you believed in eternal punishment, which he didn't.

When pressed to explain, he made a speculative comment that there would be some element of 'reconciliation' before the annihiliation, wherein the person would be confronted and made to acknowledge the damage they had done to this person and that person.

Which, of course, makes the error very clear - sin as simply the things we do other other people, as simply horizontal. No understanding that when we sin, it is primarily against God. He also dismissed any concept of God's justice being an important biblical concept - he said the focus of scripture was Jesus.

How's that for a bizarre either/or? God's justice or Jesus? Chipped potatoes or french fries?

Essentially, the repeated refrain (and not just from the new pastor, but from elders and leaders whom I had such respect for) was "What I know of God" and "The God I know wouldn't do that". Hell is for the devil and his angels, He wouldn't send humanity there. Well, why? Why would it be any more loving of God to send the devil and his angels to hell, but just to annihilate evil humans?

Once you're in the realms of what 'feels' right from a human perspective, everything is just a house of cards, really. What. Does. The. Bible. Teach? Because this is not some smorgasbord of pick and choose and we all have our own little views. Only one of those three 'options' is right, and each one of those has massive consequences for the preaching of the gospel.

Argh, I'm crying again.

Rob Bell and NOOMA.

I know some of my readers are in churches that use NOOMA videos, and know that I have reservations about Rob Bell and his teaching. I recommend this three-part review on them. It's very fair, gives credit where credit is due, but also flags up clearly the problematic areas of Bell's teachings.

If you're part of a small group that uses them, you may want to be aware of some of those issues for any discussion that may follow.

The more things change...

I read this quotation from JC Ryle last night, and found it striking enough to want to put it on the blog. 100+ years later, and it's still an accurate description of the hostile winds that buffet the church.

There is a general tendency to free thought and free inquiry in these latter days: many like to prove their independence of judgement, by believing novelties.

There is a wide-spread desire to appear charitable and liberal-minded: many seem half ashamed of saying that anybody can be in the wrong.

There is a quantity of half-truth taught by the modern false teachers: they are incessantly using Scriptural terms and phrases in an unscriptural sense.

There is a morbid craving in the public mind for a more sensuous, ceremonial, sensational, showy worship: men are impatient of inward, invisible heart-work.

There is a silly readiness in every direction to believe everybody who talks cleverly, lovingly, and earnestly, and to a determination to forget that Satan is 'Often transformed into and angel of light' (2 Cor. 2:14)

There is a wide-spread 'gullibility' among professing Christians: every heretic who tells his story plausibly is sure to be believed, and everybody who doubts him is called a persecutor and a narrow-minded man.

All these things are peculiar symptoms of our times. I defy any observing man to deny them. They tend to make the assaults of false doctrine in our day particularly dangerous. They make it more than ever needful to cry aloud 'be not carried about!'(Heb. 13:9)

Does anyone ask me, What is the best safeguard against false doctrine? - I answer in one word, 'The Bible: the Bible regularly read, regularly prayed over, regularly studied.' We must go back to the old prescription of our Master: 'Search the Scriptures.'(John 5:39)

-JC Ryle, from the paper 'Divers and Strange Doctrines', found in Warnings to the churches.

FYI

Please visit this website, for some useful information about the work a member of my church is doing in Zambia. Bernard is very much part of Eden's most diligent work of intercession - please add him and the work in Zambia to yours.

Black becomes white, and who are you to argue?

I was sent a link to the latest news about my government's distasteful discussion of whether or not disabled people are worthy of life. It's the usual morally illiterate nonsense I have come to expect from those for whom the killing of children has become one of a number of 'options'. You can read it for yourself here.

One of the Peers of the realm saying that the disabled are 'grossly abnormal' (and therefore candidates for murder) is a woman called Jenny Tonge, who once said that, were she Palestinian, she would consider becoming a human bomb.

How interesting and macabre then, that the news today should include this story of wicked people using the disabled as human bombs.

Baroness Tonge considers the human bomb a legitimate weapon, and she considers the disabled to be untermensch, so, on what basis would someone with that worldview condemn this horrendously evil act?

Ideas have consequences.

H/T: DJP