Ping
Amen! Once I really understood imputation it gave me great comfort because I was aware God demands perfect righteousness to be saved.
Below is a link to Whitefield’s sermon “The Lord Our Righteusness”
http://www.biblebb.com/files/whitefield/GW014.htm
How I wish FR wasn't a place of gotchas and sophistry and petty vindictiveness!
Crisis ministry is very much a matter of “resting.” The chaplain in a hospital (something I did for a year and a quarter, and would do again in a heart beat) is there to ... accompany. This is especially true in a short hospitalization— while the patient and family and friends are just coming to terms with the disorienting fact of the admission.
And so the chaplain discovers himself to be a Pelagian! If you do this deed, think this thought, believe this proposition, feel this feeling ... THEN you will be able to cope.
But of course, the REAL question — or rather the real Gospel, is that God has already coped. So the chaplain, in attentive inaction, bears witness to the absence of a need to DO anything — including the need to CHOOSE to rest in Christ.
So, my prayers focused more and more on resting, on allowing God to work ... even in my resistance to his working!
Lord: What shall I do when there is nothing for me to do?
He says: Abide in me.
I say, “Lord, do you have any idea how HARD it is JUST to abide.”
He says, “Very well, abide in my Love, which persists in your failure to abide.”
I say, “That, my Lord and my God, THAT I can do. But even here I cannot do it if you turn for one second away from me.”
He says, “I do not turn away.”
I say, “Very well, Lord. Like a terrified child I may writhe and scream, because my fears and sorrows are great. Do not thou turn from me, and all will be well.”
He says, “In me, all is very well, and in your bad dreams, I will be here to soothe and to rearrange your blanket.”
I say, “Lord, not for failure of love, but because I am an animal, I would sleep now.”
He says,”I slept in the stern, in the storm. I will sleep here with you, in your storms. In me all your wild waves are stilled.”
I say, “Zzzzzz.”
“Come to ME; for my yoke is easy...”
RESTED ASSURANCE !
Those who put their trust in their own righteousness, works, their own merits pride themselves in which God resists.
Those who pride themselves in their own merits, works, their own righteousness do spite of the spirit of grace and degrade, dishonor the blood of Christ and counted it as profane and common as the blood of bulls and goats.
Those who place their trust, hope, faith, salvation only in Jesus Christ are the sheep on the right hand, and those who place their trust in their own merits, their own works, their own righteousness and not in grace are the goats on the left hand.
Those who are saved by grace have already been made righteious, holy, sanctified by the ever lasting love of God through Jesus Christ.
As the book of Hebrews says, God said that he will not remember our sins and lawless deeds NO MORE, that is ? In Christ through his blood only.
Those who are not saved in Christ ? When they come and say ? “ Lord ! Lord ! .... “ he will say to them “ Depart from me, I never knew you , those workers of iniqulity “ for they have not been washed in the blood of Jesus Christ.
We are not married to the law, but married to another, JESUS CHRIST ! ...
Grace is higher than the law because , well ? The law giver was Grace him self, for Grace and Truth come by Jesus Christ.
When you have Grace ? You have Truth, Truth follows Grace.
We are dead to the law and married to another, GRACE !
Romans chapter 7 verse 4
4. Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that ye should be married to another, even to him that is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.