Longstanding hurts, disappointments and emotional wounds can become so ingrained into our sense of identity …
That they begin to define us.
When that happens, we often aren’t willing to transparently expose and turn them over to Jesus …
But tightly hold onto them like a child clinging to a security blanket.
Instead of finding liberation and wholeness through new life in Christ …
We then become our past.
Healthy civilizations and societies are a Christian virtue …
Promoted by those who heed Christ’s Lordship in all spheres of life and human endeavor.
Using civil government to compel personal faith and piety, however, is a Christian vice …
Promoted by those who don’t understand Christ’s different jurisdictional limitations for particular spheres of life and human endeavor.
True disciples surrender their biases and sensibilities to God and His written Word.
Both libertine existentialists and self-righteous legalists, however, surrender God and His written Word to their biases and sensibilities …
Thereby elevating themselves above God Himself and His plenary authority of Scripture.
It will be a terrible scene when those who preached cheap grace …
Finally stand before God’s holiness.
But a time of rejoicing for those who proclaimed His true grace …
Thereby leading many to repentance, obedience and redemption before that fateful day.
When you finally start feeling gratitude for your scars …
Is about when wisdom begins.
Narcissistic leaders know how to make you feel needed and affirmed.
It’s how they control and use others to feed their own need for attention and validation.
But their charm comes at great peril, because ultimately they will consume you to advance their own self-serving agendas.
Don’t be co-dependent, no matter how gifted they seem.
God created you – and His Church – for better.
Those who want a Jesus who wants what they want …
Inevitably fall away.
Those who surrender their wants to what He wants …
Endure.
It’s liberating to learn that God did not create us to be like someone else …
But instead gives us different personalities and motivations that match our differing spiritual gifts.
We experience His pleasure as we learn to uniquely use and enjoy those gifts as He intended …
In our lives, families, fellowships and communities.
Initial failure …
Is often the key to success.
Unless Jesus is your King …
He’s not your Savior.
Law reveals,
Grace enables,
Faith secures.
There are no hierarchical titles in the original language of the New Testament regarding God’s people and the church.
Instead, there are only straightforward descriptive words for different functions using the everyday language of ordinary folk …
And bad English translations which imply otherwise today.
When our view of God reflects our own sensibilities …
He’s not really God, but an idol of our own creation.
Those needing a title to be a leader and influential …
Are neither.
Unless the mandate to be Christ’s ekklesia (His participatory assembly that represents and advances His Kingship within the local community where we live) is fully working …
None of His other mandates (like the Great Commission and discipleship) will also fully work.
Someone else’s problem may not always require our intervention …
But when it does, we should earn the right to do so.
In the New Testament, Jesus commands His disciples to be individual peacemakers who turn their cheeks against minor personal offences …
And civil magistrates to be government peacemakers who use the sword to protect others from true evil.
Those who see this as a contradiction or confuse those distinctions …
Lack an authentic Biblical worldview.
There are no autonomous facts …
Because no fact, standing alone, innately interprets itself.
All facts, as we perceive them from our finite perspectives, only find definition and meaning in a broader interpretive framework.
If you stop to consider this, however, it becomes clear that the only interpretive framework able to communicate reliable meaning …
Is the external revelation of an omniscient and omnipotent God who created all things from nothing.
That means He alone is able to know everything about anything, since nothing exists apart from His comprehensive knowledge and authority …
And, unlike us, there is nothing He doesn’t know which might contradict what He claims He does know.
Without Him and His resulting external written Word, where He authoritatively defines us and His creation …
We and our “facts” are confined to us and our own subjective limitations, with no basis for reliable truth claims.
Because of this, postmodern existential ideologies – which reject all transcendent interpretive frameworks and external revelation – have no basis for claiming to know the truth, or understand the meaning, of anything.
Ironically, even some Christians naively fall prey to postmodern existential absurdity by making the authoritative propositional claim …
That there can be no authoritative propositional claims.
Instead, they make the further absurd external claim that the standard for all meaning lies within them …
As they then insist on the right to define Christ and everything else through their own, limited, self-referential perceptions.
How frustrating it must be when even the meanings of their absurdities depend on the very God-given foundations of truth and knowledge which they reject.
Be wary of those who peddle the latest theological fads.
Often they prey on spiritually wounded or naive people with the temptation of “deeper” life, new “revelation,” or some other trans-Biblical agenda …
Rather than the health and assurance of simple faith as taught in Scripture.
Here are two tests that typically weed out these merchants of deception:
1. Are they part of an actual, functional local fellowship in their own home town, where they are transparent and accountable to a community of fellow believers – among whom their ideas have been demonstrably working and showing good fruit over time?
2. Do they openly affirm and submit to God’s plenary authority of Scripture as His authentic written Word in all matters of faith, life and doctrine?
If they fail either criteria, you likely are dealing with a wolf …
Rather than one who legitimately comes in the name of the Lord.
The problem with routinely owning other people’s problems …
Is that eventually, they’re more than willing to let you.
Is it any surprise that those who deny God’s plenary authority of Scripture as His written Word …
Never seem able to demonstrate the power of His authority to a waiting World?
“Christian” narcissists reject the justice of God’s wrath …
While claiming the mercy of His grace.
Which also makes them delusional …
As they’re left with an imaginary pick-and-choose Jesus of their own creation.
The authentic God of Scripture, however, condemns the idolatry of those who seek to remake Him in their own image.
Is it any wonder, then, that they are persistently plagued – often despite a public persona to the contrary – with private insecurities, angst and doubt …
While concurrently unable to form, sustain or be part of a viable, functional local church?
But that never seems to stop them from spreading their false gospel, rooted in existential idolatry, with an outer confidence …
Which belies their true inner turmoil and history of church failures.
When it comes to their fraud, be discerning …
Not deceived.
New doctrine formed in reaction to bad doctrine …
Is almost always bad doctrine.
This includes the currently faddish, but reactionary, new doctrine …
That the best way to avoid bad doctrine is to have no doctrine.
All love, we burn up.
All truth, we dry up.
Have both, we grow up.
May our walk with the Lord and each other be ever rooted in both truth and love.
Apart from an immanent Creator of all who defines transcendent truth, reality and morality …
We are left with absurdity, because otherwise there is no basis to make any claims to the contrary.
Plumbline Faith 