Posted on 02/05/2015 4:43:45 PM PST by Idaho_Cowboy
I had lunch with a young man yesterday. He is a math and science teacher, and a very intense and focused Christian. He came to lunch with an agenda. First, he wanted to confess to being very angry with me when he first started reading my books and hearing me preach. This young man said, laughing, that I would be shocked by some of the things he wrote in the margins of my books. Second, now that he was no longer angry, he wanted to ask some clarifying biblical and theological questions.
I’m often asked, “Okay, I get this grace thing, but where do you draw the line?”
My standard answer is that you don’t; and when you do, it’s no longer grace. Grace covers white lies, murder and porn. It’s an umbrella that invites gays, lesbians, adulterers, liars and thieves. It’s for the pretenders of goodness and obedience. It covers the arrogant, the fat, the angry and the failures. It’s for everybody who is unqualified.
And then I will often ask, “Why do you want to draw a line?”
The drawing of the line is more often than not an effort to attain power, manipulate, affirm one’s own righteousness and keep out the spiritual cretins from the “family.” Drawing a line is the stuff of which religious institutions are made. I find myself getting quite irritated when people do that. (I know that’s self-righteousness too…and I repent. Grace covers the self-righteous…even those who, like me, are self-righteous about the self-righteous.)…
…There is (and you know it’s true) a mushy kind of grace sort of like what Reno attributes to political liberalism. It’s a “let’s join hands and sing Kumbaya around the campfire. You’re okay and I’m okay…so just keep singing because the singing is the important thing.”…
(Excerpt) Read more at keylife.org ...
The key to salvation is repentance - changing one’s life, and not abiding in the old ways but putting on Christ Jesus. We Catholics have it a lot more abundantly than do evangelicals and protestants who are missing the fullness of the sacraments. Which simply means we have more responsibility to change so as to give the example the Lord asks of us.
It is about Grace. Christ stood between an adulteress and the Pharisees who were going to stone her but the part that too often is forgotten is that she was told to “go and sin no more”. Grace isn’t a license its an activity in which we are freed from a debt of sin that we could never repay. It doesn’t make our sins right nor good nor acceptable but it gives us a way back from the dead for we were effectively buried in our sin. The following verse speaks to this very thing.
Romans 6:13
“Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.”
“The key to salvation is repentance - changing one’s life, and not abiding in the old ways but putting on Christ Jesus.”
Wow. You couldn’t have said the opposite of the Gospel more accurately.
“We Catholics have it a lot more abundantly than do evangelicals and protestants who are missing the fullness of the sacraments.”
There are no sacraments, so your point is false. The Bible does command us to baptize believers and keep the Lord’s supper in memory of Him.
“Which simply means we have more responsibility to change so as to give the example the Lord asks of us.”
Or you could start with God’s revealed Word and learn what grace is...
LOL, your Grace is better than their Grace? But of course - that's why you're going to heaven, and they're going to hell. Right?
It's okay though, because they think the same of you.
Personally, I'm going to follow the global warming climate change entrepreneurial model, and start a Grace Credit Bank. That way if I invest in both Catholic and Protestant Grace Credits, I've got them both covered. Even better, I can sell my excess Grace Credits on the open market, and then reinvest the profits into my own Grace accounts.
Because really, at the end of the day, the bottom line take home is that God is an accountant, and when you die it's like an audit, and He sits down with a Bible concordance and finds line-items of specific biblical failure on your part that exceeds your Grace Credit account holdings. And then Bam - hell forever, scumbag.
Thanks for posting.
all very nice but also very non-biblical
“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”
God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. GRACE.
That's the same as saying "the key to salvation is what we do to earn it." But that contradicts the scripture, as Augustine explains for me:
“For who makes thee to differ, and what has thou that thou hast not received?” (1 Cor. iv. 7). Our merits therefore do not cause us to differ, but grace. For if it be merit, it is a debt; and if it be a debt, it is not gratuitous; and if it be not gratuitous, it is not grace. (Augustine, Sermon 293)
The true answer is: the key to salvation is the grace of God, which not only saves us who are unworthy, but even makes the unwilling willing, and works in us both to will and to do of God's good pleasure.
I heard him preach at Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church in the mid-80’s. He was great.
Sacraments — they are the answer.
All the grace comes from God. Why are you questioning?
Could you define grace for me ?
Works
LOL, I'm not questioning.
I'm observing.
There were many years that I had no concept of the word grace. It was as if my mind had rejected the notion that God still loved me after being so disgusting and its definition was blocked.
Paul’s discussion on grace is really remarkable, especially the part where he talks about sinning more to receive more grace. That is a brain twister. Love the letter to the Romans, including 2:1
“Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.”
Ever notice that when there is someone who gets on your nerves because of a quirk, when you are honest about it, you do the same thing?
Great post.
God is doing the work — not us.
The term for “gay” is homosexual.
Well said, Maelstrom.
“Sacraments — they are the answer.”
Then why are they not in Scripture as “sacraments?”
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