Pre-Christian Judgementalism – Part 6

It is not About Works…It’s About Restoration

Just because we are Christians it does not mean that we are obliged to say “yes” to each and every request that is made on us to do works. We must understand that God has a plan for every church and every believer. This means that it is perfectly possible that a pastor could be creating his own plans in order to substantiate his position in ministry. I believe a lot of time and effort is wasted by pastors and church members by just “playing church” rather than getting serious with God.

The kind of righteousness that God is seeking to bring to the awareness of His people is that of complete restoration. If the church had this type of righteousness to offer through its teachings, then believers would have complete confidence in their ability to be able to welcome broken, needy and sinful people to church, knowing that it was just a matter of time before they would be made whole again, right in the sight of God and free of the sin-miserable life that used to control them.

This means that a person’s Christian lifestyle would not be dictated by, and predicted by, their pre-Christian existence. It would mean that even people who had committed the most heinous crimes could come to the church, be taught the Gospel, and be gloriously set free to live a life of service unto God.

So far, the church-world lacks this kind of confidence when it comes to faith-for-righteousness. Instead of accepting righteousness as a free gift, they still try to earn it or prove it according to what they do or don’t do. Even if a person acts in a kind manner and performs a charitable act, it does not necessarily mean that are righteous. Just because someone acts friendly it does not mean that it is an expression of the goodness of their heart, they could be acting like that according with an ulterior motive or just to gain God’s approval.

If righteousness is according to our works and our conduct, then it becomes an exclusive kind of righteousness that will only be attainable, and maintainable, by a certain niche of society. Obviously, this niche of society will be those who have been fortunate enough to be raised by kind, caring and well-to-do parents.

The Lord Jesus Christ came to reconcile the world to Himself. The only requirement that Jesus places on mankind is that they accept Him as their Lord and Saviour. Nowhere in the Bible does God demand that a person is required to clean-up their life before they accept Christ.

Jesus accepted the thief on the cross into paradise, without the thief having to change his lifestyle and prove himself to God in any way - which was fortunate for the thief because he was hardly in a position to be bale to undo the wrong he had done through doing good unto others. The thief just asked Jesus to remember Him when He entered His kingdom. In other words, the thief acknowledged who Jesus was at that moment and accepted His righteousness as his own.

God never changes and His requirements of us, as believers in His Son, still have not changed. Jesus Christ accepts us as we are. God does not demand that we fix-up our bad habits and modify our behaviour as a requirement of righteousness. It is God who fixes-us-up and presents us spotless in His sight through Christ. Proper teaching on the subject of righteousness is vital in these last days if souls are going to be won in this great End Time harvest.

Pre-Christian Judgementalism – Part 5

Be Led By the Spirit

I think the major problem in the area of righteousness is a startling lack of sensitivity to the direction of the Holy Spirit. This is a believer’s true nakedness and hence the Adam-and-Eve-like tendency to want to hide from God and cover himself with something that he does rather than what God does. This lack of sensitivity leads to believers anxiously asking God what He wants them to do. This attitude assumes that the only thing a believer needs in order to please God, is a list of easy-to-understand instructions. Man needs a new nature to be able to do the will of God. Israel’s failure to obey the Law was evidence of that.

Being led by the Spirit necessitates a heart that is submitted to the will of God with nothing held back. It is only by receiving the love of God that we can be truly be led by the Spirit of God in order to do His will. God could tell a person to do something, but if he has fear, pride or a hidden agenda in his heart that opposes it - he is likely to shy away from such a request.

We all know that it is sin that blocks the love of God, but it is not so much what we do or don’t do which conflicts with God. Galatians 5:17 says, For the flesh lusts against the Spirit. The Greek word used for “lust” here means to desire and to long for. It is our desires more than our actions that conflict against the leading of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, Galatians 5:17 might read, For the flesh acts against the Spirit. Desires arise out of a person’s beliefs, which in turn, are established through their thoughts. It is the way we think and believe that gets in God’s way; this is what sin truly is. The wrong actions that a person commits to are the expressions of his wrong beliefs, thoughts and desires.

Pre-Christian Judgementalism – Part 4

Adam and Eve’s Nakedness

The trouble is we often see righteousness as something that we work towards rather than something that we have now. We assume that we have righteousness now, but we believe it is something that we receive in instalments, rather than all at once. With this approach, we never become righteous enough for God. Then, with only a partial confidence towards God and our right-standing with Him, we then seek to cover our sinfulness with something that we do.

This is what Adam did when he fell from grace and came to the realisation that his righteousness was in God and not in his own ability. Adam and Eve gained the knowledge of what was good and what was evil. This led to them coming to the realisation that they were naked. They then sought to cover their nakedness with fig leaves.

⁶ When the Woman saw that the tree looked like good eating and realized what she would get out of it - she'd know everything! - she took and ate the fruit and then gave some to her husband, and he ate.

⁷ Immediately the two of them did "see what's really going on" - saw themselves naked! They sewed fig leaves together as makeshift clothes for themselves.

⁸ When they heard the sound of God strolling in the garden in the evening breeze, the Man and his Wife hid in the trees of the garden, hid from God.

⁹ God called to the Man: "Where are you?"

¹⁰ He said, "I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid."

¹¹ God said, "Who told you you were naked? Did you eat from that tree I told you not to eat from?"

Genesis 3:6-11 msg

Adam and Eve’s nakedness was not so much due to their lack of clothing - it was due to the fact that they had forfeited their true covering which was holiness and purity. Without this covering, people still seek to cover their sinfulness from the sight of God.

The wonderful thing about righteousness by faith is that a person no longer feels naked and unacceptable in the sight of God. This means that they no longer have to find something else to cover their sinfulness, because they no longer live according to that old nature. When a person lacks the assurance that they have right standing with God, they do what Adam and Eve did and try to cover their nakedness with fig leaves by trying to cover their inadequacies with their own works.

The Galatian church also had the same idea when they sought to substantiate their right-standing with God through reverting back to following the law. This is an approach that we still see in the church today. Paul’s letter to the Galatians stands as a warning to believers today so that they do not fall into the same trap.

If believers have real confidence towards God through the knowledge and assurance of righteousness in His sight, they would not need to revert back to following a set of rules as a means of pleasing God and meriting His favour. This means that if God does not prompt a believer to commit to a certain obligation in the church by His love, then they will not feel pressured into doing something that they are not sure about.

It is difficult when the church makes an appeal for volunteers to do some charitable act. Such appeals play on the conscience and are often hard to resist without feeling guilty. Right standing with God gives a believer the power to say “no” to good things. We should say “yes” to God and the plans He has for us.

Pre-Christian Judgementalism – Part 3

Righteousness is a Gift

Righteousness is a gift; gifts ought to be accepted. If a gift has to be worked towards and merited according to good conduct, then it is not a gift, but it is a wage.

¹ So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things?

² If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story.

³ What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."

⁴ If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift.

⁵ But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it - you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked - well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.

⁶ David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:

⁷ Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.

⁸ Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score.

Romans 4:1-8 MSG

The strange thing about faith is that it loses its power once a timeframe has been placed on it. As soon as we deliberate a time-limit or delivery date on faith, we nullify its effects because we never believe that we have it now. Faith is always now; if faith is attributed to a future date then it no longer remains faith, it becomes hope.

Pre-Christian Judgementalism – Part 2

Right Living is the Result of Right Believing

Right living comes as a result of right believing. When we accept righteousness as a gift by faith, we no longer need to impose rules on ourselves; we no longer have to try to be good according to what we do or don’t do. The brand of righteousness that most people live out of is the righteousness that they had before they came to faith in Christ. They then make an effort of the will to fix-up a few bad habits that they can give the heave-ho without too much effort. They then expect other people to follow suit, in the belief that there are no sins that cannot be averted purely through an effort of the will. With this attitude towards righteousness, the method of instilling righteousness in other people seems to always be the intimidating practice of trying to shame people into not sinning by establishing taboos. Then, when people do go ahead and sin after being told not to, it is taken to be an act of ignorance and disobedience against the pastor. This approach simply does not work.

If church leaders had a proper understanding concerning righteousness, they would see that people cannot stop themselves from sinning without a proper understanding on the subject. Instead of accepting what the Bible says about righteousness by faith, they simply continue as if they are still living according to the Old Testament. The New Testament is a new and better covenant, but it will only work according to your belief. Most people seem to believe that the New Testament just provides a means by which a believers past sins have been forgiven. This is indeed a wonderful promise, but it is still not enough to set people free from their sin.

Thankfully, there is so much more to the Blood of Jesus Christ to him who knows and believes. If church leaders only preach on the subject of forgiveness of past sins, then continue to badger people to conduct their lives in a certain way, the implied meaning is that it is up to believers to impose control over their own lives – what they do and what they don’t do. Again, this continues the idealistic misconception of man possessing a super-willpower that is capable of living a holy life of its own accord.

The Security of a Christian Leader

I believe what is required to empower the church to live victorious lives free from sin and the affliction it brings, is for leaders to emerge from the wreckage of sin-dominated lives. You can tell if a pastor has lived a squeaky-clean pre-Christian life according to his teaching and the demands he places on the congregation.

I have found that many ministers are people who have received a decent upbringing in a Christian family, without any major hiccups. Undoubtedly, such people will have probably done things in their youth that they would feel ashamed of doing now, but on the whole, they are able to live good decent adult lives. It is this experiential righteousness that will give a person the confidence to become a minister.

There seems to be a stigma attached to church leaders having done shameful things in the past. The reason seems to be that the trust people place on a minister is all down to his conduct and lifestyle, both pre and post Christ. It would seem inconceivable to many Christians for an ex-convict to become a pastor of a church (although, it does actually happen).

If a pastor knew the struggles that a person has with addictive sins, he would seek a better means of preaching on the subject of righteousness. As it stands, many pastors remain closed on the subject.

Without proper knowledge on the subject, sin-ruled believers remain ashamed of their past, not because they don’t believe they have been forgiven for past transgressions, but because they fear that they will just keep on making the same mistakes again and again. This leads to a Christian life of endlessly sinning and repenting, never quite having the confident assurance they should have towards God. This way of life can lead to a believer even doubting his own salvation. Clearly, something more is required.

The kind of righteousness by faith that we ought to be seeking to establish is the kind of righteousness that the New Testament so clearly promises. If the Bible says that a believer is made righteous through confession of Christ and acceptance of His righteousness, then we should believe and accept it.

Pre-Christian Judgementalism – Part 1

There are all sorts of problems that we face in the church due to the confusion over righteousness. One of the problems is that we tend to judge people according to their pre-Christian lifestyle. If we really knew what it was to be taken out of darkness and into the light by faith in Jesus Christ, then we would see the potential of righteousness in other people, no matter how they conduct their lives. The church has been robbed of the amazing power of righteousness by faith in Christ to restore, heal and renew a person’s life and character. Instead, we often only see the kind of righteousness that we saw in the Old Testament, which demands righteousness from the bankrupt, fallen nature of man.

Right-living will never come to people as the result of fiery provocation and intimidation, together with a re-iteration of what constitutes right and wrong behaviour. People need to be taught more about the life-transforming power of the Blood of Christ to completely change a person’s life: the way they think, feel and behave.

The church’s inability to deliver a comprehensive and life-changing message on righteousness has turned Christianity into nothing more than a moral code. This moral code demands a sanctified life from believers without properly empowering them. Such preaching will always seek to control and make demands that a person believes he could or should be able to make. This leaves believers living in a kind of dream-world whereby they try to convince themselves that they have what it takes to please God.

Christians become brainwashed into thinking that Christianity is simply an ideal standard that can never be attained or maintained and yet it is accepted because everyone agrees that its demands ought to be met as much as possible. This means that believers will never be completely righteous, as the Bible says we are, but that we can be as righteous as we possibly can. Even if we are as righteous as we can be in our own effort, it is still never enough to meet God’s requirements.

There are many people, including politically correct politicians, who seek to unify all religions based on common moral values. This approach is seen as being good, noble and unifying – but it will never work because no other religion than Christianity looks to faith in the Blood of Jesus as being the only way to God.

A Contrast of Two States

Have you noticed that there are usually only two antithetical states of being contrasted in the Bible? The Bible contrasts God and devil, light and dark, righteousness and sin, good and evil. The Bible does not even attempt to deal with subtle shades of light and dark. The Bible does not attempt to subdivide states of being into grades – that is just something that mankind tries to do because it cannot attain complete righteousness through its efforts. This approach has become so acceptable, that we do not even give it a second thought, even though it is not in accordance with the Bible. We are not meant to attain complete righteousness by our own effort, which is why Jesus Christ died for us, so that we could accept His righteousness. Righteousness is a state of being just like sin is a state of being.

Committing Sin vs. Working out Salvation

The Bible uses both a verb form for sin and a noun form for sin. By far the greatest occurrence in the New Testament is the noun form: the verb form hardly every appears. We sometimes see the use of the noun form used together with a verb form, such as “commit sin” in James 2:9.

The word “commit” here is Greek word ergazomai (G2038) which appears a total of 36 times in the King James Version of the Bible. It is translated as work 11 times, worketh 7 times, wrought 7 times, working 4 times, do 2 times, commit 1 time, labour 1 time, minister 1 time, trade 1 time and traded 1 time.

This interested me because I wondered to myself if there was a connection between these Greek words for “commit” and “work out” as in “work out your own salvation” in Philippians 2:12.

The Greek word katergazomai (G2716) appears a total of 23 times in the King James Version of the Bible. It is translated as worketh 7 times, wrought 6 times, do 3 times, done 2 times, working 2 times, causeth 1 time, perform 1 time and work 1 time.

There is indeed a connection according to Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionary:

From G2596 and G2038; to work fully, that is, accomplish; by implication to finish, fashion: - cause, do (deed), perform, work (out).

So this Greek word which means “to work fully” is derived from ergazomai (G2038) which means “to work” and kata (G2596) which is a very commonly used preposition in the Bible which means, according to Thayer’s Greek Definitions: down from, through out, according to, toward, along. I would say that the most apt fitting for this word in relation to Phillipians 2:12 is work toward salvation.

The Greek words used for salvation as in Philippians 2:12 and sin in James 2:9 – are both nouns. According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary a noun is:

a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things (common noun), or to name a particular one of these (proper noun).

We can therefore conclude that sin and salvation are both states of being (noun) rather than something that one does (verb). The Bible often uses a verb together with a noun as in “commit sin”. When a person “commits sin” they are working sin; they are giving expression to the sin nature. This is different to just simply perform an action. When a person works out their own salvation they are giving expression to the new nature that abides in them.

In the Greek, the verb form of salvation, “to save”, is sozo (G4982). According to Thayer’s Greek Definitions this word does not just mean to rescue from danger or destruction: it also means to save a suffering one (from perishing), i.e. one suffering from disease, to make well, heal, restore to health.

The Greek word sozo (G4982) is used in the Bible in relation to healing: for instance, in Luke 17:19 when Jesus healed the lepers, He said, "Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well." The New King James Version uses the word “well”, whereas in the King James Version the word “whole” is used.

In Mark 5:23 a man begs Jesus, “My little daughter lies at the point of death. Come and lay Your hands on her, that she may be healed, and she will live.” The Greek word sozo (G4982) is translated “healed” in this verse.

Salvation is all about protection, restoration and completeness. So when a person works out, or works fully, their salvation – they are giving expression to, and working towards the completion of, their protection, restoration and wholeness.