Justification - Imputation of Christ's Righteousness

Justification is a legal declaration by God that we are righteous.  It involves God forgiving our sins and at the same time imputing the righteousness of Christ unto us. Imputation of Christ righteousness is illustrated in Romans  4:3 (KJV):

'For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.'

This is further explained by Paul in Romans 4:4-5 (KJV):

' 4  Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. :5  But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.'

Justification is a completed of work of God and it is instantaneous.Galatians 2:16 further adds:
 
 'Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.'

It means that justification is by the faith of Christ alone (not our effort in conjuring up faith). Justification is on the merit of His work on our behalf, and hence, our own work is disqualified.

Rejoice.

Guest Post: Is Hell the Center of our Faith?

My husband Andy and I had been living in the slums of North India for over a year by the time we returned to one of our sending churches for a visit. We met with the church staff to talk about what we were doing: learning language, listening to people’s stories, eating together, celebrating holidays, birthdays and weddings, and attending funerals.

A few days later, the pastor called us back for a second meeting with just a few staff members to “talk theology.” He asked us again about our work. We explained again how we had been counseling both victims and abusers in situations of domestic violence, advocating for our friends at crowded government hospitals, and helping families open bank accounts to save for medical care and education for their kids.

The pastor nodded his head, but he seemed to be waiting for us to get to the point. “What does Jesus have to do with all this?” he finally asked, furrowing his brow and fixing us with a concerned look.
His question caught us off guard. “Well, Jesus is in all of it,” we explained. His teachings about enemy love and forgiveness were the whole reason we believed that compassion could put an end to cycles of violence. It was his vision of the Kingdom of God which led us to protect vulnerable people from abuse, and to help everyone to see themselves and one another as people worthy of dignity and love.

The church staff looked uncomfortable and confused. “Are you there to preach the gospel, or to perform works of mercy?” one of them asked.
“We don’t see the message of Jesus and the love of Jesus as things that can be separated out from one another,” we replied. “In fact, when Jesus publically announces his mission for the first time, he quotes from Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’”

“But are you telling your neighbors about Jesus?” the pastor wanted to know.
“We’re having spiritual conversations with our neighbors all the time, hearing what they believe and explaining what we believe.” We described how we often prayed with our neighbors in situations of illness, conflict, or danger, and had even read part of the Sermon on the Mount with a neighbor.
That wasn’t what he meant. Were we leading them to pray the sinner’s prayer? They were Muslims, after all, so didn’t we believe that all of them were condemned to hell unless they made a “profession of faith” and “prayed to receive Jesus into their hearts”?

What does it mean to profess faith?” we asked. If people began to live like Jesus, practicing enemy love and forgiveness, caring for one another, and experiencing God’s unconditional love, was this not a profession that they believed the Good News of the Kingdom?
As for our neighbors’ eternal destinies, only God knows what is in the human heart, so we couldn’t know for sure who was “in” or “out,” but we had hope that God could draw our Muslim neighbors to Himself—even if they never took on the Christian label.

This ambiguity didn’t sit well with the pastor. His line of inquiry narrowed to a single question: “Five years from now, if everyone in your slum community were living like Gandhi, would you be happy with that?”
“If everyone was practicing nonviolence, sharing their resources with one another, forgiving their enemies, and seeking justice together as a community? Yeah, that would indicate some serious spiritual progress!” How many churches could claim to be living such Christ-like lives?

Our answer confirmed to the pastor that there was not enough money in the church’s budget for a ministry as “unfocused” as ours. One of the staff members looked at us apologetically and explained, “We understand that you need to focus on stuff like clean water in your context, because people are poor. But people in our congregation already have their basic needs met, so we need to focus on something else.”

It seemed that there in that affluent suburb, neither hell nor poverty were personal issues for most Christians—the majority of the people they knew believed in Jesus and were financially secure, so they were basically safe, in this life and the next. But our friends in the slum were experiencing hell on earth already. It was friendship with them which had led us to grapple with the mystery of how a loving God would ultimately reconcile justice with mercy.

The church staff, like many evangelical Christians, acted out of a belief that hell is the central problem for human beings, and that efforts to alleviate temporal suffering are a waste of time, or even a dangerous distraction from the Church’s mission of spiritual rescue through right belief.
This underlying understanding of salvation as rescue from the wrath of God—to put it bluntly, of Jesus saving us from God—leads to the idea that following Jesus is primarily about escaping punishment. Yet the New Testament tells us that perfect love casts out fear, and I believe the opposite is also true. I wonder whether a person can authentically respond to God in love as long as they are terrified that refusing Him will land them in hell.

Tragically, this hell-centered theology not only misunderstands or disregards much of Jesus’ life and teachings—it also prevents Christians from fighting for justice, working for peace, or caring for the vulnerable people on the margins of our society. Yet not only do the poor suffer when the Church remains aloof from their plight. Wealthy Christians themselves miss out on powerful relationships that could personally transform them, bringing them closer to Jesus and into deeper awareness of their own spiritual poverty and brokenness.

The wealthy and the poor need one another. We are called into community, and there is no way to follow Jesus without concerning ourselves with the well-being of our fellow human beings. I pray that together, we will choose to live into this kind of life-giving faith that is based in love and hope rather than fear and judgment.

Trudy Smith originally hails from Texas, but has recently made her home in Vancouver, BC with her Canadian husband, Andy. She blogs at trudydsmith.com and is currently writing a memoir about the two and a half years she lived in an Indian slum.

The Ultimate Criteria for Theology

Theology is thinking (logos) about God (theos). It is a good and necessary discipline, but only so long as it is centered on Christ. All of our speculation and debate about such things as God’s character, power, and glory must be done with our focus on Jesus Christ—more specifically, on the decisive act by which he reveals God and redeems humanity, his death on the cross.
The definitive thing to be said about God’s character is found here: God dies for sinners on a God-forsaken cross.

The definitive thing to be said about God’s power is found here: God allows himself to be crucified on a cross for sinners.  

The definitive thing to be said about God’s glory is found here: God dies a horrifying, God-forsaken death upon the cross.

God’s character, power and glory are decisively revealed on the cross. Though it is “foolishness” to the natural mind, the cross is the power and wisdom of God to all who believe (1 Cor 1:18f). If we entertain concepts of God’s character, power, and glory that are inconsistent with what is revealed here, our thoughts are outside of Jesus Christ. Every thought about God, every mental picture we entertain about God, every single emotion that is “raised up against the knowledge of God” must be taken “captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5).

The true God revealed in Jesus Christ is not at all what the natural mind would expect—it is “foolishness”—for our natural expectations are influenced by our experiences in a fallen world that is permeated with the foundational lie of the serpent. We create a god of our own designs by magnifying our own fallen conceptions of character, power, and glory. Consequently, sometimes God’s character, power, and glory are presented in ways that don’t even resemble Jesus Christ, even within the Christian tradition. For instance, we often project onto the screen of heaven a cosmic Caesar, controlling the world through coercive power and intimidation rather than accepting God’s definition of himself in the crucified Jesus Christ. Such mental chimeras may inspire fear, but they do not transform us to become outrageous lovers.

The only hope we have of getting out of this fallen condition and walking in the ecstatic love of the triune God is to resolve that God’s revelation in Christ is true, however much it may contradict our fallen, worldly expectations. When the deceptive veil over our mind is removed and we see the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ and when we fix our eyes on Jesus, we find a picture of God that could not possibly be more loving and beautiful. For here we find God going to the greatest extreme possible—suffering a God-forsaken, hellish death at the hands of the very creatures for whom he was dying! This is the greatest expression of love imaginable, and it alone reveals the truth about who the eternal, triune God is. God is this kind of love.

This is the ultimate criteria for all theology. Any other estimation of God will block not only our ability to think rightly about God, but also to love like God loves.

—Adapted from Repenting of Religion, pages 132-133  - Greg Boyd

The Call to a Cruciform Life

Jesus repeatedly taught that following him meant that one had to be willing to “pick up their cross daily and follow [him]” (Lk 9:23; 14:27). Picking up our cross is the centerpiece of following Jesus because this was the centerpiece of what Jesus was all about. The thematic centrality of the cross is also illustrated in Jesus’ teaching that to be considered a “child of your Father in heaven,” one has to be willing to refuse to retaliate and instead “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44-5, cf., 38; Lk 6:27-35), for this is precisely the example that Jesus set when he refused to use his power to defend himself, choosing instead to die for his enemies rather than to crush them (Mt 26:51-3).

Along the same line, the cross is the thematic center of all of Jesus’ teachings that speak of the need for people to lose their life in order to find it (Mt 10:39; 16:25) and that associate greatness with humility, innocence and serving others (e.g., Mt 16:11-4; 23:11-2; Lk 18:15-7). In addition, Jesus takes the common understanding of power and turns it on its head by associating it with a willingness to sacrificially serve others (e.g., Mt 20:20-8).

The cross was not merely something God did for us; it was also an example God calls disciples to follow. It is thus significant that after defining the kind of love that characterizes God by pointing us to Jesus’ death on the cross, John immediately goes on to add: “And we ought to lay down our lives for one another“ (1 Jn 3:16, emphasis added). This and a number of similar passages make it evident that God’s will is for the cruciform love that defines his own, eternal, triune nature to transform us and flow through us to others. 

In yesterday’s post, I briefly introduced Augustine’s subjective definition of love that enabled him, and multitudes of others that followed him, to claim that for God as well as God’s people, loving enemies does not necessarily rule out torturing and killing them. This definition is explicitly ruled out by the teachings of Jesus and Paul. Jesus commanded us not merely to love our enemies as an inner disposition, but to express this love by how we actually treat them. The love that Jesus teaches and models is both active and nonviolent.

We are specifically instructed to “bless,” “pray for,” “do good” to, “be merciful” toward, and to “lend to” our enemies “without expecting to get anything back” (Mt 5:44-45, Lk 6:28-29, 35). These are not inner dispositions: they are concrete behaviors! So too, we are taught to disobey the OT’s command to exact just retribution and to instead “not resist (antistemi) an evil doer” and to turn the other check when struck (Mt 5:38-9). These are obviously not merely instructions about how we should think or feel in response to enemies: they are instructions on how we are to actually behave in response to the hostile behavior of enemies!

The same holds true when Paul instructs us to “[b]less”—“not curse”—those who persecute us (Rom 12:14), and to never “repay evil for evil” (Rom 12:17). Specific behaviors are also implied when Paul instructs us to never “exact revenge” (12:19), but to instead “overcome evil with good” (12:21) by feeding enemies when they’re hungry and offering them something to drink when they are thirsty, for example (Rom 12:20). All of these passages expose the artificiality of Augustine’s fateful attempt to divorce the love we are commanded to live in from the commitment to non-violence that is entailed by this love.

There is not one exception clause to any of the NT’s instructions about loving enemies and, therefore, the refusal to resort to violence in response to them. To the contrary, the unqualified way Jesus speaks about enemies makes it clear that it includes every possible enemy who is threatening us for any possible reason. Moreover, far from allowing for “justified” exceptions, Jesus explicitly rules out any possible exceptions when he emphasized in as strong as terms as possible that his followers were to love indiscriminately—the way God loves and blesses the just and unjust by causing his sun to shine and his rain to fall on everyone, without any regard to whether the people we are called to love deserve it or not (Mt 5:45; Lk 6:35). The sun and rain do not pick and choose whom they will and will not fall on. Rather, the sun shines and the rain falls simply because it’s the sun’s nature to shine and it’s the nature of rain to fall.

- Greg Boyd

Since Grace is Free, YES … You CAN just go sin all you want

I hold to radical, outrageous, shocking, scandalous, limitless grace. I believe there is no other kind of grace.


But whenever I teach or write about this sort of grace, it is almost guaranteed that someone will object by saying, “So are you saying that we can just go sin all we want?”
They are referring, of course, to the statement in Romans 6:1 where a person objects to Paul’s teaching about grace in exactly the same way. And Paul’s answer, of course, is “God forbid!”

Can I sin all I want?

In the past, I have responded similarly as Paul. I say “No, of course not!” And then I go on to explain that just as obedience does nothing to help us earn or keep eternal life, sin does nothing to cause us to lose it or prove we never had it.

The reason God doesn’t want us to sin is because sin damages us.

(By the way, if you have a presentation of the Gospel which never gets the Romans 6:1 objection, then I submit to you that you are probably not teaching the same Gospel Paul was. If, after teaching about grace, no one says to you, “So are you saying I can just sin all i want?” then you probably have not taught grace. I call this question the Grace litmus test.
But this past week I was talking to someone about grace, and they objected with the grace litmus test, and I don’t know what happened, but I sighed out of exasperation and decided to give a different answer than the one I had always given before.
The man said to me, “So are you saying I can just go sin all I want?”
And I smiled and said, “Yep. If that’s what you want to do, go right ahead.”
I got the “Deer in the headlights” look back from him. I think he had heard rumors that my type of theology existed, but he had never met anyone who was so willing to give him a license to sin as I had just done.

So yes, in a way, grace is a license to sin.

He started getting huffy with me, and tried to show that my response to him was different than what Paul said in Romans 6:1, and how therefore my understanding of grace different from that of Paul and so on…
But the more he preached at me the more convinced I became of what I had said out of exasperation.

Grace allows you to sin all you want … if that’s really what you want

If you really understand grace, and if you really understand God, and if you really understand God’s love for you, and after understanding all this, you really want to go sin, then be my guest, go right ahead.

Although grace teaches us to deny ungodliness and worldly lust (Titus 2:12), grace also allows you to go sin all you want … if that is really what you want.
Let me put it another way.

If I told my daughters that I loved them completely, and that no matter what they did, I would always love them, forgive them, and be willing to die for them, and if, after I told them this, one of my daughters looked at me and said, “So I can just go stick my hand in the blender and you will still love me?” I would look at her a little strangely and say, “Well … yes … if that’s really want you want to do, go ahead. But know that if you do that, it’s going to be extremely painful. I will, of course, pull your hand out of the blender and rush you to the hospital to stop the bleeding and rescue what I can of your hand. But no matter what, I will still love you and cherish you as my daughter.”

This is what Paul means in Romans 6 when he responds with “God Forbid!” He is not saying, “No, you cannot!” but rather, “Why would you want to?”

You see, sin doesn’t stop God from loving us, nor does it stop God from doing everything He can to rescue us from the devastating and destructive consequences of sin. Sin definitely doesn’t prove that we were never His son or daughter to begin with.

No, sin hurts us. It cuts us. It ruins us. Sin destroys our relationships, our health, our finances, our marriages, our jobs, our longevity, our emotions, our psyche.

Asking the question “So I can just go sin all I want?” simply shows that you do not fully understand the love of God, the grace of God, or even God Himself! It also reveals that you do not understand the devastating and destructive consequences of sin.
Asking the question, “So I can just go sin all I want?” reveals that you don’t understand how painful sin can be.


Asking the question “So I can just go sin all I want?” is like asking, “So I can take this knife and stab it into my leg?” … Yes, if that really what you want to do, go right ahead.

Choosing Freedom……

. . . and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed (John 8:32 & 36).

But though my wing is closely bound, My heart’s at liberty; For prison walls cannot control The flight, the freedom of my soul. – Madam Jeanne Guyon

Your life is a mess? Your days are filled with hassles and pressures? There are times when the pain is so intense physically or emotionally that you want to fall into a limp heap on the floor and yell uncle or disappear into the darkness of the closet and close the door? The circumstances cannot be changed. You’re in them and there’s no way out. The door is locked.

Let me give you a word of encouragement. What do we mean when we speak of the soul? Well, the word soul comes from the Greek word psyche, referring to the invisible part of you, your personality (your mind, your will, and your emotions). Your soul is the real you, the person who laughs and talks, yells at the ball game, cries at sad movies, and sorts out all the information that comes into your mind.

There are people who are physically handicapped, whose bodies don’t function as they should, but their soul functions—it’s like they’re in solitary confinement. There isn’t any vehicle through which they can relate to the outside world. Their defective body has imprisoned their soul because of its inability to receive messages from the soul or give messages to the soul. But the soul is all right—the real person.

Keeping that in mind, and realizing that the soul can be separated, so to speak, from the body, consider this verse: Our soul has escaped as a bird out of the snare of the trapper; The snare is broken and we have escaped (Psalm 124:7).

Do you see that though you may be mired in difficult or even tragic circumstances, your soul is capable of escape? Do you see that your ability to think and choose, regardless of your circumstances is free? Oh, you can’t always choose to walk away from those circumstances, but you can choose to not let them control your thoughts. Your soul is free to wander where it will. The physical limitations that have been imposed on you in this world cannot place limitations on your soul. You choose with your free will what you set your mind on. Of course, your emotions won’t fully understand. They don’t have that capacity. They merely react. They can’t think—they just feel.

Christ has set you free! Free from the tyranny of your flesh. God said it. That settles it.

- Preston Graham

Love and Violence

What does it mean to confess that “God is love” and that we are called to “live in love” (Eph. 5:2)? One of the more common ways of understanding God’s love has its roots in the teachings of Augustine. He adamantly affirmed that the revelation that “God is love” lies at heart of the Gospel and is foundational for Christian theology and ethics. This conviction is reflected in Augustine’s famous hermeneutical “rule of love,” which in essence stipulates that “scripture enjoins nothing but love.” Hence, every passage “should be studied with careful consideration until its interpretation can be connected with the realm of love,” by which Augustine means the building up of our love for God and neighbours.

However, Augustine defined love as an inner disposition that had no necessary behavioral implications. For example, speaking of Jesus’ command to never retaliate but to rather “turn the other cheek” (Mt 5:39), Augustine argued; “what is here required is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition.” Augustine thus argued that one could love one’s enemy while nevertheless treating them with “benevolent severity.” More specifically, for God as well as humans, loving enemies did not necessarily rule out torturing and killing them if one was justified in doing so. Augustine went so far as to use Jesus’ parable of the royal banquet in which servants are told to “compel” people to come (Lk 14:16-24) to justify the use of coercive force, and violence if necessary, to “compel” heretics like the Donatists and Manicheans to repent, all in the name of love. Tragically, Augustine’s unprecedented use of this parable provided the Christian tradition with a ready proof-text by which it justified such activity throughout the centuries that followed.

It is hard not to empathize with Augustine and other ecclesial leaders in the fourth and early fifth centuries as they faced the unenviable challenge of trying to reconcile the NT’s teaching on love and non-violence with the practical realities the church faced once it accepted the political power Constantine bestowed on it. Nevertheless, the NT doesn’t leave us in the dark as it concerns the definition of love. To the contrary, it goes beyond providing a definition: it points us to love’s supreme illustration. “This is how we know what love is,” John says, “Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” From this he concludes, “we ought to lay down our lives for one another“ (1 Jn 3:16, emphasis added). When John proclaims that “God is love,” this is the kind of love he is referring to. He is saying nothing less than that God is the kind of love that causes God to set aside his blessed state, to humble himself by becoming a human being, to offer himself up to be humiliated, tortured and crucified, to fully identify with our sin and our curse, and to therefore fully take upon himself the abandonment of God that we deserved—all for our sake while we were yet sinners and enemies of God (Rom 5:8-10)!

The depth of love one has for a beloved can be measured by the sacrifice the lover is willing to make for the beloved. In this light, consider the fact that on the cross, God went to the furthest extreme possible out of love for a race of people who could not have deserved it less. I say “furthest extreme possible” because on the cross, the all-holy God stooped to become our sin (2 Cor 5:21), and the God whose very essence is a perfect, eternal unity of love stooped to become our God-forsaken curse (Gal 3:13; Mt 27:46). In other words, on the cross, God entered into the nightmare of becoming his own antithesis out of love for us.

By definition, therefore, God could not have gone to a further extreme, could not have stooped further, and could not have sacrificed more, than he did on the cross. And it is the unsurpassable extremity to which God condescended for this undeserving race that reveals the unsurpassable perfection of the love that God eternally is, and therefore the love that God has for us. It is for this reason that I claim that the logic inherent in God’s self-revelation on the cross necessitates that we accept it as the unsurpassable revelation of God. We cannot understand the cross properly without understanding it in this way.


To borrow a phrase from Anselm’s ontological argument, we might say that the cross is that revelation beyond which none greater can be conceived. Hence, while everything Jesus said and did revealed God, the cross must be considered the quintessential expression of the character of the God who was revealed in everything Jesus said and did. Hence I submit that God’s self-sacrificial, loving nature is the thematic center of Jesus’ mission.

Removal Of Self-Centeredness Leads To Life

But {women} shall be preserved through the bearing of children. --I Timothy 2:15

Preserved literally means saved, and saved, as used in the New Testament, refers to being delivered from the self and its manifestations. The greatest hindrance to being delivered from the events that present themselves today is self and its propensity toward obsessing on what will never help it . . . which is its self. A mother has a unique experience in that she might be the most self-centered person in the world, but then in an instant when the doctor lays a baby in her arms, her self-centeredness gives way to focus on another through caring for the baby. Life and death for the baby is determined by the degree to which the mother moves away from being self-centered. I have asked many in ministry, and all seem to agree that women respond first to the Gospel. Why? If they are mothers, then self, the only hindrance to Christ, has been dealt a severe blow in childbirth. With self-life knocked from the paramount position, the women can more easily draw near to Jesus, finding Life and deliverance.

"But {women} shall be preserved through the bearing of children." The understanding to be derived is not that women who cannot or have not had children cannot be saved from self-centeredness. I personally have never given birth to a child, and yet I have every intention of being saved! The analogy is twofold. The birth of a child removes self-centeredness, and this birth happened in pain. The believer has a new birth, a new life that has dealt a fatal deathblow to self; because of this death he can have Life. This birth came through pain.Is the woman's pain in childbirth bad? Yes, but I cannot believe it is not worth it after observing the countenance of my wife as she held each of our newborns. Is the pain of events, disappointments, and relationships really bad when they lead to Life? No, nothing with such a result is ultimately bad. Children of God are faith people and the only people on the face of the planet that can say that. 

Amazing that it is so simple to identify our problem: “self, the only hindrance to Christ.”

Amazing how difficult it seems for Christians to remove self from the paramount position, so that Life can be found, especially when every Christian possesses that Life.

Choose Life…lose self.  Not complicated at all.  Well, amen.

The Realm of Death Pt 1

These next 6 parts should be read again and again to get the depth of teaching from Greg Boyd

The Realm of Death

            God warned Adam and Eve that eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would bring death. The serpent denied this and claimed that the fruit of the forbidden tree would bring fullness of life. Believing the serpent rather than God, Adam and Eve violated the boundary between humans and their Creator and sought for more life. But in seeking to find life on their own, they lost it (cf. Matt. 10:39).

            Adam and Eve passed from the realm of life, which is relationship with God, into the realm of death, which is separation from God. They passed from the realm of innocence into the realm of judgment, where the knowledge of good and evil rather than love of God reigns supreme. In the words of Bonhoeffer,

            Man, knowing of good and evil, has . . . torn himself loose from life. . . . Man knows good and evil, against God, against his origin, godlessly and of his own choice, understanding himself according to his own contrary possibilities; and he is cut off from the unifying, reconciling life in God, and is delivered over to death. The secret which man has stolen from God is bringing about man’s downfall.

            The Genesis narrative describes what this realm of death looks like in the fate of Adam and Eve. When Adam and Eve abandoned their innocent union with God and were severed from their source, they hid from each other and from God, they deflected their responsibility before God, and they were cursed (while given hope) by God. These are three manifestations of the realm of death Adam and Eve, and all of us, have entered. We shall discuss these three manifestations in this order. This shall set the stage for a discussion in part 4 of how the body of Christ is to overcome these manifestations of death by manifesting life in Christ.

            

The Realm of Death Pt 2

Hiding and Performing

            

Relating through a Filter

  

            The first manifestation of the realm of judgment and death that Adam and Eve had entered was their shame and hiding. As they came under the lie of the Accuser, they not only accused God, they accused themselves and each other. As is always the case, the judgment they made about God entailed a judgment about themselves and everyone else. Hence, as soon as their eyes were “opened,” as soon as they saw the world through their knowledge of good and evil, they judged that their nakedness was not good and that they were guilty before God. The sound of the Lord walking in the “evening breeze” that had been so inviting when they were innocent was now threatening to them (Gen. 3:8). Before each other and before God, they were ashamed. They covered themselves and hid.

           This is the story of each and every one of us living in the flesh. We no longer innocently relate to God, ourselves, and each other directly in love. Instead, we relate through the filter of our sinfully acquired knowledge. In this fallen state, we can no longer be naked, open, and vulnerable before each other and before God. We cannot simply walk with God and enjoy his presence as the most relaxing and refreshing part of our day.

            Instead, we hide to conceal our emptiness and shame. The innocent and utterly free exchange of overflowing love that God desired humans to experience from him and for each other has been transformed into a strategy for protecting ourselves and for getting life by hiding and performing. We now relate to God, ourselves, and others through the evaluating filter of our knowledge of good and evil.

            Nothing in our relationships is direct or innocent; it is all filtered. Which is to say, nothing in our relationships is unconditional. Because we are severed from our source, we do not experience and overflow with the unconditional and unsurpassable worth of God. Instead, the worth we receive, experience, and give is conditioned by our stolen knowledge. We receive and ascribe worth on the condition that our knowledge of good and evil approves of it.

The Realm of Death Pt 3

Hiding

            Because the worth we receive in our fallen state is conditional, our strategies for getting life always require hiding and performing. We were created to receive, experience, and overflow with unconditional worth. It is impossible for us to feel truly fulfilled without this. Whatever momentary satisfaction we may experience in receiving worth conditionally, based on what we do, we are invariably left with a sense that something about us is defective. We experience shame.

            Since it is the very absence of unconditional worth that creates this shame, we can’t ever rid ourselves of it by any strategy for getting life. We can only hide it. We have to cover our nakedness.

            Why do we have to hide our shame? For the same reason we experience the shame. The lie that created our emptiness in the first place leads us to eat of the forbidden tree that now judges our emptiness as defective. Were we not living in our knowledge of good and evil, we would not critically assess ourselves in terms of what we are and are not supposed to be, and we would not experience any emptiness. We thus hide our shame from the very thing that creates the shame: our knowledge of good and evil.

            We try to hide our shame from ourselves, from each other, and from God. Because we view God and others through the filter of our knowledge of good and evil, we view them as judges from whom we must hide and before whom we must perform. Because we are empty, we are driven by a strategy to get worth, and this requires avoiding at all costs any judgment that suggests we lack worth. We thus have to hide from the world from which we are trying to get life.

            We might say that the world in which we place ourselves in the center as judge becomes a world full of threatening judges. We view everyone, and we assume everyone views us, with the critical eye of the knowledge of good and evil. Our lives of innocence have been replaced by lives of hiding.

The Realm of Death Pt 4

Performance

  

            We not only need a strategy for concealing our emptiness, we need a strategy for filling it. As judge, we perpetually try to get life from other judges—the very ones from whom we are hiding our emptiness. Our strategy for getting worth is performance—to display to others what we ourselves judge as “good” while we hide what we assume others will judge as “evil” in us. So we try to conceal our nakedness—who we really are—under a covering that hides all that we think is liable to judgment and that displays all that we think is viable as a source of approval.

           What particular covering we use, and thus what aspects of our self we hide, depends entirely on which false gods we seek to get life from as well as the particular strategy we adopt for getting this life. If, for example, the god to which we ascribe worth and from which we derive worth is a religious god, then we must display religious attitudes and behaviors and suppress everything about us that is not religious. If, on the other hand, the god to which we ascribe worth and from which we attempt to derive worth is a secular god of success (for example), then we must display success, and everything that might appear unsuccessful in our lives must be concealed.

            Something similar could be said of every conceivable god from which we might seek life, whether it be possessions, sexuality, ethics, reputation, pleasure, or security. Living out of our knowledge of good and evil, we display and strive to acquire all we judge as good. And we suppress and strive to avoid all that we judge to be evil. We perform and we hide.

            Living by performing and hiding, which is to say, relating to God, ourselves, and others through the filter of our knowledge of good and evil, is not life. The serpent lied. As God warned us, living in a perpetual attempt to get life is death. And it is our very attempt to get life on our own that prevents us from living, for it prevents us from receiving and giving God’s unconditional love, which is life itself. We simply cannot receive or give unconditional and unsurpassable love when we are performing before and hiding from the One from whom we are supposed to freely receive love as well as those to whom we are supposed to freely give love.

The Realm of Death Pt 5

Futility

  

            Because the realm of death is marked by a perpetual game of performing and hiding, it is also marked by futility. As we have seen, the vacuum we are trying to fill is God-shaped. We are created to experience unconditional and unsurpassable worth. Our innermost being longs for this love. But the worth we receive from our idols is neither unsurpassable nor unconditional. It is limited in depth and duration, and it is conditioned upon whatever we did to acquire it. For this reason, the limited worth we acquire never attaches to our innermost being, our spirit. Instead, it attaches to whatever we did to get it—our performance. It attaches to our doing, not to our being. It thus never satisfies our inner being, which was created to be filled with unconditional and unsurpassable worth.

           Acquiring worth from our self-created idols is like eating a large meal and having every morsel get stuck in our teeth. The meal might taste good, but it won’t nourish us, let alone fill us up. For none of it will reach our stomach. So too we may feast upon the worth our religious or secular idols temporarily give us, but none of it reaches and satisfies our innermost being. It attaches to what we do, not to who we are. It wasn’t given to us for free and thus doesn’t feed our inner being. Once the distraction of the good taste is gone—the best our idols can give us is a nice distraction—we are left with our emptiness once again.

            This is why the hunger that gnaws at our hearts as we live in Adam never fully goes away and why we cannot simply decide to stop feeding ourselves from the idols of this world. Regardless of how successfully we acquire life from our performance, we are simply never satisfied. We are separated from our true source of life, and our spirit continues to starve. So long as our spirit is starving, we cannot help but try to feed it. Yet so long as we persist in the lie that we can satisfy it on our own—if only we can do more, acquire more, perform more good, hide more evil, and so forth—we will continue to starve. We’re caught in a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle of futility.

            The billionaire who continues to work fourteen hours a day to earn more and the religious ascetic who continues to punish his body to get closer to God reveal one and the same disease.

            Only when we yield to God’s Spirit and resolve that Jesus Christ uncovers the true God and true humanity, only to the extent that we crucify the old self and live in faith, and only when we stop eating from the forbidden tree do we begin to experience the fullness of life and love God created us and saved us to have. Only then can we begin to experience freedom from our addiction to idols. Only then is the self-perpetuating cycle of futility broken. Only when our sense of worth, self-esteem, purpose, and life is rooted by faith in who God truly is and who we truly are as revealed in Jesus Christ can we personally experience and overflow with the unsurpassable love that the triune God is.

The Realm of Death Pt 6

Blaming

            The second manifestation of the realm of death into which Adam and Eve entered followed closely on the heels of the first. Indeed, it is really just a variation of the first manifestation.

            When our judgment against God turns into a judgment about ourselves, producing shame, we engage in another judgment, this time against others or against God. This is simply another way that we hide. We blame others. When Adam told the Lord that he was hiding because he was naked and afraid, the Lord asked, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Gen. 3:10–11). Rather than taking responsibility for his action, confessing his sin, and repenting, Adam attempted to protect himself by blaming God and Eve for his actions. He said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12, emphasis added). When the Lord turned to Eve, she essentially did the same thing: “The serpent tricked me, and I ate” (Gen. 3:13).

            This is a manifestation of our stolen knowledge. We employ our knowledge of good and evil in service to ourselves. The statements of Adam and Eve were technically true, but they were intended to conceal rather than reveal. The humans, we see, have begun to take on the craftiness of the serpent. The one who is the Accuser (Rev. 12:10) has made them into crafty accusers. They have lost their innocence. Adam and Eve speak truth, but they speak it to deflect truth—the truth that they are altogether guilty. In deflecting guilt, they accuse. In our fallen state, we point out dust particles in others’ eyes in order to deflect attention away from the tree trunks in our own eyes (Matt. 7:3).

            The knowledge of good and evil is also at work in the fact that throughout their dialogue with God, Adam and Eve clearly persisted in the judgment that God was untrustworthy. They continued to embrace the serpent’s deceptive depiction of God. As a result, they were afraid of him and were not honest with him. If Adam and Eve could have realized that the serpent lied to them, confessed their sin, and returned to their simple confidence that God was good, there would undoubtedly have been consequences to be suffered, but God would have granted them his mercy.

            As it happened, Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, had placed themselves in the center of the garden, and thus were filtering everything through their self-centered and self-serving knowledge of good and evil. So, instead of returning to trust and vulnerable honesty, they acted out of their own self-interest and continued to judge God rather than humbly letting God be the judge. Hence, they tried to protect themselves by blaming others.

           

Instead of trusting in God to love them and defend them in their sin, Adam and Eve became their own defense attorneys. They trusted their own knowledge of good and evil to protect them rather than trusting God. They trusted their own ability to justify themselves rather than trusting God. Like Job and his friends, they were willing to accuse God and others to escape condemnation themselves (Job 40:8).

            We learn how mistaken Adam and Eve were in taking this judgmental stance when we look at the cross. Here we see what God looks like as our defense attorney, our “advocate” (1 John 2:1–2). To restore union with us, God himself bears the guilt and punishment of our crime. Christ pleads the case of sinners, as it were, before the justice of the Father. In doing this, Christ breaks the Enemy’s deception about who God is and reveals himself to be the God of unsurpassable love and mercy. In other words, God is an unsurpassably loving and effective defense attorney. God ascribes infinite worth to us even when we don’t deserve it.

            But we can never experience this mercy so long as we rely on our own knowledge of good and evil. If we live off the fruit of this stolen knowledge, our lives have to be derived from our estimation of ourselves, which is itself dependent on whatever worth we can suck from people, things, and our deluded conceptions of God. To feed our emptiness, which the knowledge of good and evil itself created, we must rely on our knowledge of good and evil and seek to justify ourselves. We must therefore hide by rationalizing ourselves and blaming others. We judge others harshly in order to judge ourselves with approval.

            This is the opposite of love. We simply cannot ascribe unsurpassable worth to those we judge, any more than we can derive unsurpassable worth from God when we judge him as out to get us. Like a computer virus, the Accuser’s introduction of accusation in the scheme of things quickly infects everything. It filters and therefore blocks our receiving, experiencing, and giving God’s infinite love. It replaces this love with judgment against God, ourselves, and others.

The Inner Voice of Love Pt 3

Presence

"Do not despair, thinking that you cannot change yourself after so many years. Simply enter into the presence of Jesus as you are and ask him to give you a fearless heart where he can be with you. You cannot make yourself different. Jesus came to give you a new heart, a new spirit, a new mind, and a new body. Let him transform you by his love and so enable you to receive his affection in your whole being."

I'm gleaning much from Henri Nouwen's The Inner Voice of Love these days. Outside of Jesus' presence there is often fear and frustration and the knowledge that we cannot change ourselves. The gift of his presence changes all that, for the presence of Love casts out all fear.

How does the promise of Jesus' presence speak encouragement into your life today? 

The Inner Voice of Love Pt 2

Your unique calling

"You have to start trusting your unique vocation and allow it to grow deeper and stronger in you so it can blossom in your community. Look at Rembrandt and van Gogh. They trusted their vocations and did not allow anyone to lead them astray. With true Dutch stubborness, they followed their vocations from the moment they recognised them. They didn't bend over backwards to please their friends or enemies. Both ended their lives in poverty, but both left humanity with gifts that could heal the minds and hearts of many generations of people. Think of these two men and trust that you too have a unique vocation that is worth claiming and living out faithfully."

Henri Nouwen's reflection spurs me on to press into my unique calling with the confidence that God has uniquely gifted me and called me to a purpose which is beyond myself.

How are you doing at recognising, claiming and following your unique vocation? Are there negative voices with which you need to reckon in order to be free to follow God's calling? Do you have wise and encouraging voices speaking into your life and spurring you on to faithfully forge the path which is uniquely yours?

The Inner Voice of Love Pt 1

The Inner Voice of Love

Daily reflections on Nouwen's book

The Inner Voice of Love was Henri Nouwen's 'secret journal' which he wrote as he moved through a deep personal crisis. He writes, "What once seemed such a curse has become a blessing. All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love."

The Solid Place

In The Inner Voice of Love Henri Nouwen writes, "You have to trust the place that is solid, the place where you can say yes to God's love even when you do not feel it. Right now you feel nothing except emptiness and the lack of strength to choose. But keep saying, 'God loves me, and God's love is enough'. You have to choose the solid place over and over again and return to it after every failure."

For Nouwen the commitment to choose to the solid place came from the necessity of inner anguish. Anguish which resulted from crying to others to meet his needs for affection, attention and consolation. The Inner Voice of Love is his 'secret journal', his daily 'thoughts to self' as he journeyed toward recovery just 8 years before he died. God worked through Nouwen's brokenness to shape a profound ministry which continues 15 years after his death.

I'm incredibly grateful for Nouwen's willingness to share authentically about his journey. I need to trust the solid place daily. And I see a great need for this same movement of trust in my circle of influence.

'God loves me, and God's love is enough.' What do we do when we know that in our head but it hasn't sunk into our heart?

Choose it. Over and over again affirm that God loves you. Eventually you will begin to experience it. Don't be disheartened by your failures to live it out. Instead keep returning to your choice to believe that what God says is true.

As you do this, God will faithfully show you his love. He will also strengthen you so that, over time, it will become more natural to experience what you choose to believe. 'God loves me and God's love is enough.' 

The Issue of Identity

Bob George Writes............ 

Being made into a new creation is like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Originally an earthbound crawling creature, a caterpillar weaves a cocoon and is totally immersed in it. Then a marvelous process takes place, called metamorphosis. Finally a totally new creature—a butterfly—emerges. Once ground-bound, the butterfly can now soar above the earth. It now can view life from the sky downward. In the same way, as a new creature in Christ you must begin to see yourself as God sees you.

If you were to see a butterfly, it would never occur to you to say, "Hey, everybody! Come look at this good-looking converted worm!" Why not? After all, it was a worm. And it was "converted." No, now it is a new creature, and you don't think of it in terms of what it was. You see it as it is now—a butterfly.

In exactly the same way, God sees you as His new creature in Christ. Although you might not always act like a good butterfly—you might land on things you shouldn't, or forget you are a butterfly and crawl around with your old worm buddies—the truth of the matter is, you are never going to be a worm again!

This is why the usual New Testament word for a person in Christ is saint, meaning "holy one." Paul, for example, addressed nearly all his letters to the "saints." Yet all the time I hear Christians referring to themselves as "just an old sinner saved by grace." No! That's like calling a butterfly a converted worm. We were sinners and we were saved by grace, but the Word of God calls us saints from the moment we become identified with Christ.

Some people ask, "But I still commit sins. Doesn't that make me a sinner?"

I answer, "It depends on whether your identity is determined by your behaviour—what you -do—or by who you are in God's eyes." Do you see how we have continued to do as Christians what the world does by determining a person's identity based on his behaviour? The only way to get free of this is to do what Paul wrote in Colossians 3:1-3:

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.   

A Better Way to Pray

The things the Lord has revealed to me about prayer since then have totally changed my life, and I’m now seeing miraculous results. If you aren’t getting the results you know the Lord wants you to have, maybe it’s time to consider a better way to pray. I’m not saying that anyone who doesn’t pray as I do is “of the devil.” I wasn’t “of the devil” in the way I used to pray. I loved God with all my heart, and the Lord loved me. But the results weren’t there.

First, we need to recognize that God isn’t angry at mankind anymore. He is no longer imputing or holding our sins against us.

“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:19).

We are NOW reconciled to God through Jesus. That means we are in harmony and are friendly with God right now. He isn’t mad; He’s not even in a bad mood. The war between God and man is over. That’s what the angels proclaimed at the birth of Jesus.

Luke 2:14 says,

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

These angels weren’t saying that peace would reign on earth and that wars between people would cease. That certainly hasn’t happened. They were proclaiming the end of war between God and man. Jesus paid a price that was infinitely greater than the sins of the whole human race.

God’s wrath and justice have been satisfied. Jesus changed everything. God isn’t angry. His mercy extends to all people. He loves the world, not just the church, but the whole world. He paid for all sin.

The Scriptures say in 1 John 2:2,

“And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”

In the Old Testament, God’s judgment was poured out on both individuals and nations. In the New Testament, God’s judgment was poured out on Jesus. That is the nearly-too-good-to-be-true news of the Gospel. We no longer get what we deserve; we get what Jesus paid the price for, if we will only believe.

Before I understood this, I would say, “If God doesn’t judge America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.” Now I say, “If God judges America, He will have to apologize to Jesus.” Understanding what Jesus did completely changes our perspective.

Second, Jesus is now the Mediator. A mediator is one who seeks to reconcile, or make peace between, two opposing parties. In the Old Testament, man had not yet been reconciled to God through Jesus. The people needed a mediator, someone to intercede with God on their behalf. That is where we find people like Abraham and Moses pleading with God.

In Genesis 18:23-25, Abraham interceded with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah:

“Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

In fact, Abraham actually negotiated with God until He agreed not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of ten righteous people. But there weren’t ten righteous people in the whole city, and only some of Lot’s family survived. A similar account is recorded in Exodus 32:9-12 and 14. Here God was furious with the people, and Moses interceded for them:

“The LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation. And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people…And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.”

Moses actually told God, “Repent!” What nerve! What’s more amazing is that God repented. From these and other stories in the Old Testament, modern-day “intercessors” believe we, too, must stand in the gap, or mediate, between God and man. Just as I did decades ago, they believe we must plead with God to save the lost, to withhold His wrath from those He is ready to judge, and to be merciful to those whose needs He is unwilling to meet because of their unworthiness.

That couldn’t be further from the truth, but it is what’s being taught in many churches today. It ignores the fact that Jesus is now seated at the right hand of the Father (Heb. 10:12), ever making intercession for us (Heb. 7:25). If Moses or Abraham could persuade God, don’t you think Jesus could do at least as well?

In 1 Timothy 2:5, we read,

“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

In the New Covenant, Jesus is the ONLY mediator needed to stand between God the Father and mankind. Sin is no longer a problem with God; it’s been atoned for, and we are now the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. That is how God sees us. If we understand that, it will change the way we pray.

It was appropriate for Abraham and Moses to pray as they did because God’s wrath had not yet been appeased through Jesus. Today, under the New Covenant, if people try to mediate in that way, they are actually antichrist—against Christ. They are saying that Jesus was not enough and are not esteeming what Christ has done. When Jesus became our Mediator, He put all other mediators out of business—forever. I know these words are strong, but they are the truth.

Satan is behind much of the wrong teaching on “prayer.” Consider how crafty his plan is and the fruit it produces. He has convinced believers to stay in their closets, taking the place of Jesus in intercession. They spend hours pleading with God to turn from His wrath, to pour out His Spirit, and to meet the needs of the people.

Meanwhile, families, co-workers, and neighbours are going to hell and dying from disease. The Bible doesn’t say that salvation comes through intercession, but by the foolishness of preaching (1 Cor. 1:21). And we are not told to pray for the sick, but to heal the sick (Matt. 10:8) by commanding healing into their broken bodies.

We have been deceived into believing prayer is all about persuading God to release His power. We believe He can save, heal, and deliver but that He is waiting on us to shape up and earn it. The truth is, we don’t deserve it, and we will never be good enough. Because of Jesus, all that God has is ours. That’s good news. We no longer need to beg or plead; we need to exercise the authority He has given us and receive His blessings.

There really is a better way to pray. I am not saying it’s the only way, but it is working for me. I have only touched on this subject in this letter, so I encourage you to order my book, A Better Way to Pray. 

- Andrew Womack

Faith is A Rest

The gospel declares God’s grace comes to us through faith. So if you wanted to undermine the gospel, there are two ways you could do it:

1. attack grace – put price tags on it or obscure it by referring to grace as a “doctrine”

2. attack faith – either make it a work or diminish it, belittle it

I usually talk about grace but today I want to talk about faith because grace without faith is worthless:

For we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith. (Heb 4:2)

The gospel is true whether you believe it or not but it won’t benefit you unless you believe it. For instance, if you don’t believe Jesus has forgiven you, you won’t walk in his forgiveness. And if you don’t believe that in Christ you are already holy and acceptable, you will feel pressure to make yourself holy and acceptable.

Faith does not compel God to forgive us or sanctify us. Faith doesn’t make God do anything. Rather, faith is a positive response to what God has done. Faith is acknowledging every good thing that is already ours in Christ (2 Pet 1:3).

Faith doesn’t make things real that weren’t real to begin with, but faith makes them real to you. For instance, if you battle with guilt and condemnation, you don’t need Jesus to come and take away your sin. You need to believe he already did. Jesus is the cure for guilt, but until you believe it, you won’t be cured.

Faith is a noun

Why am I saying this? Because there is a teaching going around that says, “Everyone is saved whether they believe it or not.” Never mind that the apostles preached, “Believe and be saved” (Acts 16:31, Rom 10:9). Suddenly, encouraging people to “repent and believe the good news,” as Jesus did, is politically incorrect. It’s discrimination. It’s putting barrier gates in front of the kingdom.

Perhaps you’ve heard this: “Believing is a work and grace and works don’t mix.” What a strange thing to say. It’s like saying “grace and faith don’t mix” or “grace comes through unbelief.” I wouldn’t waste your time with this but I’m hearing this a lot. Maybe you are too. So how do we respond? What does the Bible say?

Now we who have believed enter that rest…. (Heb 4:3)

Faith is not work, faith is a rest. Faith is a noun, not a verb. Faith is a persuasion that God is who he says he is, has done what he said he’s done, and will do what he has promised to do. Consider Abraham, who…

…did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. (Rom 4:20-21)

Faith is being fully persuaded. When you are fully persuaded, you can rest. The issue is settled. Your mind is made up and your heart is at ease.

We are creatures of persuasion. We are designed to operate from our convictions. Either you will be convinced that Jesus is true or you won’t be. If you’re not convinced, you will waver and stagger in indecision but don’t panic, for the Holy Spirit will be right there to convince you about Jesus so you can be persuaded and enter his rest. This is what the Holy Spirit does – he points us to the Prince of Peace so that we may find peace for our weary souls.

Unbelief is a work

When you have seen the beauty of Jesus, faith comes easily. Unbelief is the harder choice. To fold your arms and lock your jaw as the goodness of God assails you from every direction requires real commitment.

Unbelief is not passive ignorance. Unbelief is hardening your heart to the manifest goodness of God. Unbelief is cursing that which God has blessed and hating that which he loves. Unbelief is resisting the Holy Spirit and clinging to worthless idols (Acts 7:51, 14:15, 19:9).

I am not talking about people who haven’t heard the gospel. I’m talking about those who encountered the love and grace of God and have rejected it. Instead of opening the door to the One who knocks (easy), they’ve locked it, pushed the chairs and table up against it, and shuttered the windows (hard). Instead of reclining at the table of his abundance (easy), they’re scrounging for food in the pig pen (hard).

Look at how unbelief is described in the New Testament and you will find plenty of verbs or action words. Unbelief is rejecting Jesus (John 3:36) and denying the Lord (Jude 1:4). It’s thrusting away the word of God and judging yourself unworthy of life (Acts 13:46). It’s suppressing the truth (Rom 1:18) and delighting in wickedness (2 Th 2:12). It’s turning away (Heb 12:25), going astray (2 Pet 2:15), and trampling the Son of God underfoot (Heb 10:29).

And how does Jesus describe unbelievers? As evildoers and workers of iniquity (Mat 7:23).

Do you see? It takes hard work to succeed as an unbeliever. You need to apply yourself with religious dedication. It’s a life-time commitment with no days off. You cannot afford to drop your guard even for a moment or Jesus might sneak up and hug you. If faith is a rest, unbelief is restlessness:

And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. (Heb 3:18-19, KJV)

Faith is a gift

There are two ways to get this faith-thing wrong. Tell people they must work to prove their faith or tell them they need no faith at all. The first is the message of graceless religion, the second is the message of faithless universalism. In contrast to both, the gospel declares you need faith and God will provide it. Indeed, the good news of Jesus comes wrapped in faith (Rom 10:17). Unwrap the gift of grace and you are left with faith lying all over the place.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Mat 11:29-30)

In a world of heavy burdens, Grace comes offering rest. Unbelief says, “Leave me alone, I’m busy.” But faith responds, “Rest, you say? I’ll have some of that, thank you very much!”

For anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest (Heb 4:10-11)

- Paul Ellis

The Covenants Compared

Grace Has No - BUT

A man I work with recently asked if I had received an email from another coworker. I told him no, I had not. He said this, “I’m not calling you a liar, but …”

I cut him off and said, “Yes, you are! You cannot say you are not calling me a liar, and then proceed to challenge the truthfulness of what I just said. The word ‘but’ negates everything that came before it.” I offered to let him view my email account just so he could see that I was not lying. He declined and left my office.

The word “but” is an amazing word. We use it all the time to say contradictory things.
In fact, almost any time you hear someone say “I’m not ________, but …” you can almost guarantee that whatever follows the “but” will be the exact opposite of what preceded it.

The phrase “I’m not a racist, but …” will always be followed with a racist statement.

The phrase “I don’t hate gays, but …” will always be followed with a homophobic statement.

The phrase “I know God loves everybody, but …” will always be followed by a statement that maybe God doesn’t love everybody.

The phrase “I hope this doesn’t come across as heartless, but … ” will always be followed by a statement that is heartless.

One phrase I hear a lot from people is this one:

“I believe in grace, but …”

Such a statement will always be followed by a statement which shows the person does not believe the first thing about grace.

Grace has no but!

Pastors and Christian Bible teachers are notorious for giving confusing messages about grace. We preach that God loves people unconditionally, that Jesus will never leave us or forsake us, that we can come to God just as we are, and that nothing can separate us from God’s love. This is well and good.
Then we often follow up this teaching with the impression that maybe there are conditions to God’s infinite love, that maybe Jesus will forsake us, and that God doesn’t want us exactly as we are, and that there are some things that will separate us from the love of God.
I call this adding “buts” to grace.
This occurs whenever we say something like,

“Grace is free, but…”
“God forgives all our sins, but…”
“God loves you unconditionally, but…”
“God will never leave you nor forsake you, but…”
“Eternal life is by faith alone, but…”

You see?
These “buts” completely negate whatever came before it.

So stop adding buts to your theology.

Grace has no but, and neither does love, mercy, and forgiveness.

Those who add buts to grace do not know God or His grace. There are no conditions or limits to grace. Grace is infinite and free. Period.

- Jeremy Myers

Two Quotes

Here are two quotes from Richard Rohr, from his book "Everything Belongs:"

“Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river. …the river is flowing; we are in it. The river is God’s providential love – so do not be afraid.”


"Everything belongs; God uses everything. There are no dead ends. There is no wasted energy. Everything is recycled. Sin history and salvation history are two sides of one coin. When you "get" forgiveness, you get it. We use the phrase "falling in love." I think forgiveness is almost the same thing. It's a mystery we fall into: the mystery is God. God forgives all things for being imperfect, broken and poor. The people who know God well- the mystics, the hermits, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is a lover who receives and forgives everything."

Richard Rohr 

The Center

            Because of the cross, we are now free to abide (take up permanent residence) in God and God in us (John 15:4–10; Rom. 8:9–10; Col. 3:3; 1 John 2:27–28; 4:13–16). When we live in God and God lives in us, we live in love, for God is love (1 John 4:7–12). This is what it means to live in Christ. Instead of living in a lie about God and ourselves, we live in the trust that God’s life toward us is God’s life toward Christ, and our life toward God is Christ’s life toward God. And we must aspire toward living here. It is not enough to understand abiding in Christ intellectually as a fact; we must yield continually to it in order to know it experientially and transformationally. We are to live in faith and live in love (Eph. 5:2).

            We are called to live in love and in Christ because this is our true home. It is the garden in which God always wanted us to live. Union with Christ is to be the center around which everything else in our lives revolves and the center out of which everything we do flows. We live in this place when, because of our faith in who God is and who we are (uncovered in Christ), we relinquish every echo of living off of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We honor the prohibition in the middle of the garden (Gen. 2:9; 3:3) and are given access to the provision. As we do this, as we live in our true source center, we begin to experience the unsurpassable worth God ascribes to himself, to ourselves, and to all others. We experientially participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

            The goal of the Christian life is to increasingly let go of the alien and illusory world “in Adam” and to live in this center, our true home, “in Christ.” As we live out of this center, we see past all the external appearances—things that our judgment normally latches on to—and we ascribe unsurpassable worth to people before God. In this place, ambiguity is no longer a reality to be resisted. Rather, it is something to be embraced, for it frees us to do the one thing we are created to do: love without judgment.

            To live in this place is to live in the purpose for which God created the world. It is to live right now in the eternal, abundant life that Christ came to give us (John 10:10; 11:25–26). It is to begin to live right now in the ecstatic dance that shall never end. It is to finally live as God intended us to live. It is to cease living in the endless judgments of the knowledge of good and evil and to begin living in the simplicity and freedom of the will of God.

Greg Boyd - "Repenting from Religion"

Why Prayer Matters

Two questions about prayer:

• What possible difference can prayer make to an all-good and all-powerful God?
• Why would an all-wise God leverage so much of his will being done on earth on whether or not his people talk to him?

These questions began to be resolved for me when I began to think about prayer in light of God’s purpose for creation. God created humans to be his viceroys on the earth. We were placed here to administrate God’s loving providence “on earth as it is in heaven.” Out of the fullness of life we get from our relationship with God, we were to reflect God’s loving character and purpose to each other, the animals and the earth. He gave us “say-so” over this domain, with the goal that we would, in love, choose to align our “say-so” with his “say-so” so that his loving “say-so” would reign on the earth through us. We were thus to be co-laborers with God and co-rulers with Christ (2 Tim. 2:12; Rev. 5:10, 20:6), ensuring that the earth would be the domain of God’s reign—the Kingdom of God.
We all know we have “say-so” on a physical level. Our ideas, words and bodily activity impact others and affects what comes to pass, for better or for worse. The Bible’s teaching on prayer reveals that this isn’t our only, or even our primary, “say-so.” We also have a “say-so” to impact God and to affect what comes to pass on a spiritual level, and this “say-so” is activated when we communicate with God.

In this light, it’s really no more difficult to understand why God would to some extent leverage his will being done “on earth as it is in heaven” on prayer than it is to understand why God would to some extent leverage anything on our choice to use our physical ‘say-so” in various ways. If God wants a world that is capable of sharing in and reflecting his love, he must populate it with free agents who have their own “say-so”—and to this extent the accomplishing of his “say-so” on earth must depend on how we freely choose to use our “say-so.”

Nor do I any longer find it hard to understand why God leverages so much on whether or not his people use their spiritual “say-so” in ways that align themselves with his will. Think about it. Everything about God’s purpose for creation is centered on our choosing to enter into a loving relationship with him. Relationships are all about communication. We relate to others only as we communicate ourselves in a variety of ways to them and they communicate themselves to us. Relationships and communication are two sides of the same coin.

If the central goal of creation is a relationship with God that empowers humans to be God’s viceroys on the earth, it makes sense that God would design the world such that communicating with him would be a central means by which we carry out our viceroy duties. While it violates the common sense of our carnal minds to trust in prayer, if you think about the matter in terms of God’s purpose for creation, it makes sense that the most important exercise of our “say-so” would be bound up with our communication with God.

God thus restricts much of what he can do on whether or not his people communicate with him. He structures reality in such a way that a great deal of what comes to pass revolves around, and hinges upon, our communicating with him.

The following analogy may not work for everybody, but it helps me sometimes to think of power in terms of “units of say-so.” God is all-powerful, which means he owns all the “say-so” there is. But when he decided to populate the creation with free agents, he gave each human various units of “say-so.” (He also gave angels “say-so,” but let’s keep it simple and just focus on humans for the moment.) We each have a certain amount of power to affect what comes to pass by our choices.
Now, because God’s central goal in creation was to invite people to enter into and cultivate a relationship with him, and because relationships are all about communication, God also set aside a vast reservoir of “say-so” that is accessed only by communicating with him. Because of how central this objective is for God, he covenanted with himself to release this “say-so” only if his people pray. There is thus a vast array of possible things that God would like to do but which he will not do—indeed, given his covenant with himself, that he cannot do—unless his people align their hearts with his in prayer. Of course he has the sheer power to do whatever he wants. But given the kind of world he created, there are things he cannot do unless his people align their hearts with him in prayer.

This is an analogy that helps me understand all the “if – then” statements attached to prayer in the Bible. It explains the incredible urgency Jesus and the rest of the Bible attaches to prayer. As John Wesley, Watchmen Nee, and many others have argued, to a significant degree, God genuinely needs his people to pray to accomplish his will on earth as it is in heaven.

The Lingering Old Self

            Of course, as Paul recognized throughout his epistles, we still struggle with “the old self.” The habits of our mind and body, programmed as they are by the pattern of the world (Rom. 12:2), continue in force. They have been crucified with Christ—they are in fact “old”—yet we play an important role in recognizing this and thus in discarding them. Growth in the Christian life is primarily a matter of “put[ting] away [our] former way of life, [our] old self” and “be[ing] renewed in the spirit of [our] minds . . . [clothing ourselves] with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:22–24). But this discipline is predicated on knowing who we already are in Christ. It is because of who we already are that we have the assurance of what we shall eventually become.

            As we put off the old self and put on the new, as we come to see ourselves as we really are (in Christ) and no longer as we once were in the lie of the old self, we increasingly conform to the image of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:29; Col. 3:9–10). When we yield to the Holy Spirit within us and are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2), Christ is increasingly “formed in” us (Gal. 4:19; cf. Eph. 4:7–9).⁵ We progressively see ourselves as we are in Jesus and thus increasingly look and act like Jesus. And this is how the world comes to know the reality of Jesus Christ and through him the reality of the triune God. They see him in us and experience him through us.

- Greg Boyd   "Repenting from Religion"