BY WHAT STANDARD?
Some judge all Scripture based on their notions of love.
True disciples, however, judge all notions of love based on Scripture.
Otherwise, our notions of love become limited to our own subjective, internal sentimentalities …
Rather than God’s comprehensive, objective revelation.
FINDING FAITH
Those who give the most of themselves, often lost the most the most of themselves …
But found faith instead.
Ultimately, you can’t help people …
Who only want you for your help.
Eventually, you must let them go,
Because without real community …
You’re not helping, but enabling.
Because I love Christ, I’ve opened my home and my life to those abused by people who use Christ to exploit others.
Because I love Christ, I’ve ministered to people in jail and the woods with whom polite society won’t dirty their lives.
Because I love Christ, I’ve loved His “ekklesia” rather than the man-centered institution often called the “church” these days.
Because I love Christ, I’m still willing to exceed my comfort zones.
How about you?
Loving God is not enough,
Because without repentance,
It’s not God you love …
But your own concept of Him.
Being an adult means fully bearing the costs, and the consequences, of our own choices.
Unfortunately, many parents today don’t let that happen …
Then wonder why their “grown” kids are such failures at life.
Tragically, I frequently see this as I go into our local jail …
Mostly among twenty-something boys from middle class families.
Even more tragically, the parents and their churches often continue – out of guilt – to enable their immaturity even when they get out.
It never turns out well.
Do them a favor:
Let ’em fail!
Stop enabling them and let them begin to experience the full, unmitigated consequences of their choices …
Even if it means they go homeless and risk destitution until they begin making mature decisions and start to grow up.
Being allowed to become homeless and nearly destitute will be a great shock to them – and they may initially stumbled badly – but with time I’ve always seen it turn out to be the best thing for them.
For the first time, they learn to grow up and own their own future.
These are not theoretical musings, but how our churches over the years have helped guys from the jail who had no family but needed to grow up.
In the long run, tough love may be the best love you can give.
A Christian can’t truly love the LGBTQ community …
Without opposing the deceptions that trap them in sin and bondage.
Guys in jail often ask me how to find a good church when they get out.
I tell them that if they visit a couple of times on Sunday and no one ever invites them home to share friendship and a meal together, move on …
It’s just a meeting, not a church.
We are bound by the limits of our fallen nature, which makes us spiritually “dead in our trespasses and sin”.
We are not spiritually sick, but dead.
Free will, therefore, is a myth apart from God’s grace giving us the option to choose Him …
Because those who are spiritually dead have no choice in and of themselves.
Fundamentally, we have no human autonomy or ability to choose anything apart from what God has chosen to delegate and enable.
According to His sovereign will, however, He didn’t want puppets on a string …
So He gave Adam the option to choose sin and death – as He knew he would – by rejecting His rule.
Adam chose foolishly.
Christ, according to His eternal plan …
Then defeated sin and death through the Cross to give us the option to choose righteousness and life – as He wills – by submitting to His rule.
This is what makes God’s grace so amazing.
Choose wisely, therefore …
While you still have a choice.
The triune God of the Bible is perfectly one and complete in and of Himself.
Unlike Islam and various “Oneness” heresies, however, His complete internal unity also includes internal diversity.
That intrinsic diversity means He can internally relate, love and communicate …
And thus, as He chooses, do so externally as well.
Which explains the main difference between the true God of the Old and New Testaments …
And the detached, abstract and mute “God” of Islam.
You don’t reconcile with church “leaders” who use and abuse others …
Or who facilitate such evil by protecting abusers within the church.
You stop them, as commanded in 1 Tim. 5:19-21.
End of story.
Only if there’s true confession and public repentance …
Can another story begin.
Jesus is our Lord who loves us …
Not our lover.
Unfortunately, the words and mood of too many songs that pass for “worship” these days …
Seem to confuse this vital difference.
Selfless living …
Springs from an attitude of gratitude.
Christ’s incarnation, ascension and promised return affirm we were not created to ever be detached spirits …
But as His followers, we will always be physically embodied beings who exist in a material world.
That’s why mature disciples have hope for the future …
But remain well rounded and grounded in the present.
Progressive “Christians” …
Are neither.
Because you can’t love God …
And dismiss His Word.
Or love liberty …
And dismiss His rule.
I’ve yet to see God turn His face …
From those who love and trust Him.
Real grace doesn’t save us from conviction and repentance …
But loves us enough to take us there.
It’s hard to share Christ together …
If we don’t share life together.
God doesn’t define sin to condemn us …
But to warn us about what harms and destroys.
He does this because He loves us enough to want us to have abundant life.
When we reject that …
We condemn ourselves.
Sometimes …
Love says no.
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.
My prayer for the next generation is that you:
Reject the tyranny of “tolerance” without sound morals …
Affirm true liberty, which is the freedom to pursue virtue …
And embrace authentic love, which never forgets that only God’s truth can set us free.
Eating junk food …
Makes no more sense than consuming junk culture.
One corrupts our bodies …
The other our eternal souls.
Yet the answer to junk culture is not defeat, retreat and isolation.
Let’s learn to be immanent in a world God still loves …
While transcending its perils with what is eternally true, good and beautiful.
If faith and love never cause offense …
They’re not faith or love.
Handing out meals across some impersonal divide to “others” whom we deem “less fortunate” …
May have its place.
But not as a substitute …
For opening our homes and sharing meals and life together with “brothers” whom we honor and esteem above ourselves.
Maybe this is why the Kingdom of God advances more through open hospitality …
Than mere charity.
Plumbline Faith 