The rot in the church

To their credit the charismatics [charismatic  Christians, that is] hunger for the reality they know is not provided for in mere intellectual study of doctrine. But, alas, in seeking the things of the Spirit they ignore sound doctrine and go chasing after experiences which are usually explainable as psychological reaction. But I have sat in on this quarrel from another perspective recently: that of the anti charismatic brigade. They think that their intellectualism is not barren, well, they have to as it is all they have, that and just plain bullying, as they honour preachers who are bullies, who rant and scream, and woe betide any, like me, who point this out.

So what do we have? Heretical pagans like Bill Johnson and Todd Bentley, religious crazy, on one side and orthodox pharisees on the other, the John MacArthurs and Dave Wilkersons of the church those who can move to Hitlerian ranting in a matter of seconds and who think that such fanaticism is godly zeal and know not, nor care, whom it destroys; the rot in the church is not confined to one side (the other side, it always is, of any debate, as each side smugly supposes.

How can I blame any atheist who looks at us and says we are pathetic? Because we are. We don't believe our own Book and will not admit it. We water down the love of Christ and the life he offers us into the cheap bonhomie of a country club, and think this is as good as it gets. Thus we claim an abundant life that is obvious to any honest person we simply so not have

So we burble irrelevantly in a corner unless some of us think it right to go out and insult and bully unbelievers. Not all preachers are such villains,. mark you, but it is the villains who are honoured for in their ranting fury they have made a name for themselves

So the millenia old game continues; and the Name of God is despised all the more for we really are hypocrites and will not acknowledge it, so there is no solution to it

And for those poor fools like me who desperately have real need, there is nowhere to go but this Christ that they talk about but to not believe in

Yet those of us who do will be despised by the rest.

Especially for daring to suggest that the church is as foul as atheists say it is

 

Comments.

I have not rejected any comments sent to me.

In fact I have only received one comment which I duly posted, and I suspect I received it as the sender was registered, I think, with google plus

Another friend told me his comment was not approved.

And my point is this.

I received no such comment.

Has this happened to any other?

I do not know if there is a serious malfunction on this website  or not.

I know that my audience is tiny. and as such no one other than the two I know about  may have deemed it worth commenting on my blog posts.

This may be an old man's vanity, but if any have made a  comment and it has not appeared please message me at


strefanash@clear.net.nz


I doubt I know enough to fix such a problem but at least I will know for sure that  there is one

A promotional video

This morning I looked in the youtube message inbox, which I only infrequently do. I found a link to a video, so duly followed it.

It was a thirty second promotional video for the sender's channel. It was of course a Christian's channel, hence my interest in following the link.

I was not pleased.

It effectively dared me to subscribe and asked me "where else will you find information on . .? "  and then listed certain sins, some of which I myself am utterly defeated by and have been all the nearly thirty seven years of my Christian life.

It was clear to me that this man's question had a simple answer that exposed him as arrogant and presumptuous.

Where else?

The scriptures. The Holy Spirit.

And clearly not some man made ministry, self proclaimed preacher, teacher, or internet video channel

So I messaged the man and answered his presumably rhetorical question with the above  few words and said that such was why I would not be subscribing.

I then looked around his channel to see if my instinct has further confirmation. I believe I found it. The channel also that we had to FIGHT (capitalized) against our own natures and that there was no hope for us if we did not. The brashness of his manner in the promo vid indicates to me that the capitalization of FIGHT showed me all I needed to know. This was will of the flesh legalism, not resting in the real, as opposed to falsely invoked, grace of God to be led to repentance by the Holy Spirit in quietness and gentleness. And I knew, and I invoke decades of hard experience on this,  that the reason this person was not in total despair at his self imposed regime was because of his lack of sensitivity to the inward nature of sin.

The purpose of a teacher or "ministry"  is not to say "come to us"  but to encourage people the seek the Lord the Spirit  as described adequately in the scriptures.

Anything else is the lineaments of a cult

For seeking men will only have them lay Law on you, which is the royal road to death given that the carnal mind can neither preach Law nor use it correctly.

I don't know if this person will reply to my message. I am not even sure he got it  for the computer paused for a long time while sending it and it may have failed to be delivered.

No matter.

I did learn something

 

The Twin Poles of Error 2: "Law" and "Grace"

When it comes to the Law of God, and by this I mean the moral core of the thing, not the sacrificial ordinances which were fulfilled at Calvary, nor the acted parables for holiness, such as not mixing fabrics in one's dress, nor the food laws, when it comes to the Law as summarised in the Ten Commandments and then in Two Greatest commandments there are, it seems to me, two and only two responses that the carnal minds of us carnal Christians can make.

The first is to deny the law outright, to claim it has been abolished. This is not true for Jesus said the Law will never pass away. Those who deny the Law call this grace, but it is nothing of the kind. This is the heresy of the easy believist and is not even faith

The second is to try by force of will to keep the Law, to become legalists, thus feeling obliged to try by force of will to obey the commandments which the Bible clearly says are utterly impossible. This  those legalists,  so endeavouring,  call obedience to God, but this too is nothing of the kind. However neither is it Law for the Love of God and neighbour is lost in the preoccupation   with detail that is the heresy which is legalism.

The thing is both sides will cling to their understandings and resort to brutal name calling to any who dare contradict them, who may have learned the hard way that neither of these two are proper responses to the Law of God and that grace is something else.

So easy believists live like pagans and legalists  are dead set on showing that the Christian faith is everything the atheists think it is, namely a mind control death cult.

And no one really cares that the name of God is being blasphemed among the nations by the fact that we are one of the two errors I mention here. Moreover we are blind to the fact that if we are not one of the two it is because we have been led to repent of being one of the two and can testify to the living Grace of Christ which led to this.

I see that the greatest enemies of the gospel are in fact within the House of God and often the delusion is so powerful that not even the Holy Spirit will be heeded, and this to the perdition of those who flatly refuse the still small voice who still says "Come to Me you who are heavy laden [ either with Law for the legalist or  with  the common cares of life  for the easy believist]  and I will give you rest."

Alas, how we have fallen, how we have defiled the Oracles of God, and how we sanctimoniously deny that we even have; and how stubbornly we cling to our defilement  of these as if the muck of this ( the defilement of the Oracles, not the Oracles themselves) is all the spiritual food we can ever know.

Ontological Soup

One of my metaphorical fancies, for the making of an albeit serious point, mark you well, is to liken all of reality to a soup; and then to compare the differing cosmologies and ontologies to the differing consistencies of soup.

To clarify, an ontology is merely a view as to what exists and what not. Some people's ontology, for example, allows for such entities as spirits and others not

The thinnest of all these soups, IMO, is atheist materialism. It is just matter ( the basic stock) with a little salt thrown in. It is clear, but without nourishment.

To make my point I go to the extreme other end of the spectrum where entities are multiplied excessively, giving the soup the consistency of wet concrete and the digestibility (ie rational coherence) of the same. I speak of extreme pentecostal religion. There is the stock; there are personalities; there is God; there are morals.

So far so good, a good healthy nourishing meal. But then they multiply entities beyond all reason. words become reified essences that have "power" not because of their meaning but by intrinsic supernatural endowment. Curses float round in the ether also sharing such reified essence. And they attach themselves to family lines like they do in bad horror movies. Faith also shares this reified existence, for some say it s a substance, indeed even the substance reality is made of. But some of these people have seen the atmosphere infested thick with billions of demons, one for every sin that every person has ever been temped with and also the source for every evil thought and doubt that any person comes up with - the classic "devil made me do it" excuse. Some also hold that demons infest amulets and books. Where all these unemployed demons hung out when the population of the earth was about 100 million and printing was non existent is a question they never considered. So demons are summoned where none exist and the wild imagination of the undisciplined thinker is taken to be divine revelation.

And the soup gets thicker and thicker

So that which exists, this soup, is thick with unnecessary entities, all invoked by bible verses misused to the extent of ignoring those passages that give prosaic explanations of such things as doubt and fear.

Such thick, dense and stinking slop I could not digest, rationally or even emotionally.
It made me sick, and when I finally crawled out from the cheap joint where they served this  they cursed me

It has taken me years for this nonsense to be expelled from the relevant orifice.

I cannot live on salt and water but it turns out the Bible describes a reality that is more rational than the crazed claims of the charismaniacs

The Question

The commandments make it clear that certain things must be done or be produced in our lives.

If, for example, we never forgive anyone who sinned against us what will be our fate

Easy believism is not an option  for faith is a relationship not merely assent to a proposition, therefore a relationship where God does not act is out of the question and ignoring the commandments as if they were irrelevant is easy believism

The question is this:

Does this mean that we do it invoking His help?

Or does He does it invoking only our consent as the occasion requires.

I believe I know the answer.

Do you?

 

The Most Perfect Picture

The most perfect picture of the love of God the Father I have ever known, short of direct divine revelation, came from an incident in my childhood, a kindness from my own father which I never forgot  even though I was and am  still slow to draw the meaning from it as applies to the love of God.

I was about 10 years old, so this was in or near 1968. The family was going out, though I cannot remember where, but that is not the point of this remembrance. I had taken some childish fit of sulks and would not come with them.

So I was sitting on the sofa in the kitchen/diner (I can picture it now, more than 45 years later) crying, as small boys do, and Mum Dad and my brother (there were only the four of us) were outside.

What did my father do?

He always was very good with small children. He delighted in them and they loved him.

He came in, spoke softly and gently to me, wiped the tears from my eyes and persuaded me to change my mind and come with them on the outing.

Though I have not yet grasped in my heart of hearts the acted parable that  this was  or at least could be seen to be,  it became clear  at least on a cerebral level, years after I was  converted,  that this is how the grace of God works.

If church teaching were true and my father were acting as the churches preach God's grace, he would either have left me in the empty house (there were no home alone laws then), shouted at me to "make the act of will" to get out there, come in and dragged me out or even beaten me.

But he did none of these.

He came in and comforted a distressed small boy and by personal persuasion had me change my mind and consent to come with him.

The problem with the standard teaching of grace is that it leads men to make the decision then grace, viewed as some kind of abstract power or energy, will enable the person to act.

But this skirts the fact that the will of man is the problem, not the solution. We cannot make ourselves genuinely and heartily willing by what C S Lewis condemned as maistry, but when we are told that God will not make our decisions for us, the way it is framed leaves us with no other choice.

The grace of God is not a power we get after we have chosen, it is the direct, personal and above all relational intervention whereby he persuades us to repent, that is where He persuades us to choose and that  in one on one counsel. For He is among other things Wonderful Counsellor, as said Isaiah the Prophet.

In taking my issues to the Lord the Spirit of Christ in prayer, which  for me ceased  some thirty years ago to be the typical church sanctioned recitation of a formulaic shopping list aimed at the ceiling, I have seen that He has been all kindness, patience and gentleness in His dealing with me.

I repent, that is to say change my mind,  as He persuades me to do so in one on one conversation, which conversation has been going on for more than thirty years now. As this is gentle personal persuasion it does not   violate my freedom of will. He is not tinkering with a mechanism,  neither from a distance or even up close, He is  interacting with a person, a child. But if he did not intervene in this fashion I would be bereft, lumbered with impulses which, if I am responsible for them, and scripture is most plain that I am,  are the true set of my will  and which, in the sense that the church preaches this matter, He has not raised a finger to help.

No, I am not denying grace. I am saying it is something else entirely.

It is personal one on one relationship and when we are in it He is all kindness and patience.

Just like my now late father at least in this instance, who never was a Christian.

My only regret is that he died before I remembered to thank him for this, the Most Perfect Picture.