How we Christians must think?
Anyway? Some say that God gave Christians the freedom to think anything anyway.
So, is Christian thinking a kind of like a freedom of thoughts in modern democracy?
They say, "No. It is because the Holy Spirit has been given to us and is indwelling in us." And they rationalize anything which is not warranted even remotely in the Scripture. Anything they can think of is Christian to them.
Can Christian think that God does not have a power to bring about the eternal life or everlasting love to satisfy us?
Most Christians would not deny, but may not be sure, either, what that means to them or to others.
Can Christian think that God realizes perfect justice in His appointed time for the best of Christians?
Most Christians would not deny, but may not be sure, either, how long they can wait for Him to do so. In fact, many sins of ours are caused by our unbelief; when we sin, we are actually denying that He can be trustworthy in terms of bringing vengeance to those who sin against us, so we "choose" to sin - we try to use our human power to avenge our enemies.
Those two examples both tell us how sinners sin. Sinners are suffering from the Resource Deficit problem. They do not receive the Recourse that can be given only by and through the Creator.
They do not understand that the Gospel is for God to command us to be loved by God more than anything else. They refuse to hear that all about Christianity is fulfilled in the Gospel which is NOT what they think as morality, but the utmost injustice that the perfectly sinless God alone must suffer from all other sinners' sins against Himself.
They say such a teaching is too drastic and extreme and too shocking to ordinary Christians. -- I am so sorry that being Christian means dying to my flesh, who I used to be, and be raised by God with Jesus to live for the first time. There is no other way to become a Christian.
-- Any righteous behaviors, any right theologies, any great moral works, or any good family and ministries, etc., just CANNOT guarantee our salvation unless we die to them, to be raised by God to be united with Christ's righteousness. Yes, we must die to those all those conscious of praise-worthy accomplishments, or self-righteous praises, or self-glories at all, to "the praise to His glorious grace" (Eph 1) or "to gaze up the beauty of Christ's grace" to "be transformed from glory to glory" (2 Cor 3:18).
-- But we are so easily flattered about ourselves. The church fellowship hall is filled with flattering "because Christians love each other and minister to one another."
Don't take me wrong. I believe that the Scripture tells us to be very very forgiving to such sins. Most explicitly, in 1 Cor 8 and Rom 14, we are even commanded to fake ourselves as if we would agree with those who have obviously wrong views of God's grace, "for the sake of the unity and unifying growth of the body of Christ. (This is very important to church planing ministries, but I will talk about this later.) What Paul calls "The weaker in faith" cannot fathom the extent and magnitude of what God's grace covers. That is why they must work so hard in something else except trusting and gazing upon God, to be assured.
"Whatever does not come from faith is sin" (the end of Rom 14).
"None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living" (Rom 14:7-9).
We cannot be righteous more than the size of our faith.
The more we savor the heart of Christ, the more faith we are given. The more we trust in Him and expect from Him, the more we taste and enjoy Him in who He is and what He is doing.
"The chief end of man is to enjoy God and glorify Himself forever."
God's ultimate command which sums up all His commands is "Be loved by Me more than by anything else." The Giver gets the glory.
The Giver of all good things gets the glory that does not deserve anything else. God, who is self-existent and self-defining God without any help by any other forces at all, who can create all things from nothing,
To explain this another way, let me borrow from C S Lewis that you may have already read.
Our sin is not that we do not do enough to suppress our pursuit for happiness (as moralists would "think"). But in God's eyes, our sin is thought of the opposite. (But many self-professed Christians does not "think" they should care how accurately they should understand the Bible, while our attentiveness to what God says to us alone matters to Him). is that we do not peruse our happiness enough.
If a certain statistics is correct that 70% of all self-professed Christians in the US "think" that the chief end of Christianity is morality, then they could probably never imagine that God is wanting us to peruse all His inheritance.
We are sick without cure if we try to cure us by ourselves or by others.
God is like a perfect doctor who gives us a perfect prescription drug, the only effective drug. But we refused to take it for many reasons.
We doubt that we are really sick when it seems that we can manipulate all our surrounding situations.
Even when we feel exhausted, we doubt that God can work for us.
Even if we know God can work for us, we doubt if He likes us, the sinner.
All those doubts are due to the indigestion of the Gospel.
Though the Gospel is simple, it is not simplistic. It is the deepest and highest fact in the entire universe in the depth in our heart.
Anyway? Some say that God gave Christians the freedom to think anything anyway.
So, is Christian thinking a kind of like a freedom of thoughts in modern democracy?
They say, "No. It is because the Holy Spirit has been given to us and is indwelling in us." And they rationalize anything which is not warranted even remotely in the Scripture. Anything they can think of is Christian to them.
Can Christian think that God does not have a power to bring about the eternal life or everlasting love to satisfy us?
Most Christians would not deny, but may not be sure, either, what that means to them or to others.
Can Christian think that God realizes perfect justice in His appointed time for the best of Christians?
Most Christians would not deny, but may not be sure, either, how long they can wait for Him to do so. In fact, many sins of ours are caused by our unbelief; when we sin, we are actually denying that He can be trustworthy in terms of bringing vengeance to those who sin against us, so we "choose" to sin - we try to use our human power to avenge our enemies.
Those two examples both tell us how sinners sin. Sinners are suffering from the Resource Deficit problem. They do not receive the Recourse that can be given only by and through the Creator.
They do not understand that the Gospel is for God to command us to be loved by God more than anything else. They refuse to hear that all about Christianity is fulfilled in the Gospel which is NOT what they think as morality, but the utmost injustice that the perfectly sinless God alone must suffer from all other sinners' sins against Himself.
They say such a teaching is too drastic and extreme and too shocking to ordinary Christians. -- I am so sorry that being Christian means dying to my flesh, who I used to be, and be raised by God with Jesus to live for the first time. There is no other way to become a Christian.
-- Any righteous behaviors, any right theologies, any great moral works, or any good family and ministries, etc., just CANNOT guarantee our salvation unless we die to them, to be raised by God to be united with Christ's righteousness. Yes, we must die to those all those conscious of praise-worthy accomplishments, or self-righteous praises, or self-glories at all, to "the praise to His glorious grace" (Eph 1) or "to gaze up the beauty of Christ's grace" to "be transformed from glory to glory" (2 Cor 3:18).
-- But we are so easily flattered about ourselves. The church fellowship hall is filled with flattering "because Christians love each other and minister to one another."
Don't take me wrong. I believe that the Scripture tells us to be very very forgiving to such sins. Most explicitly, in 1 Cor 8 and Rom 14, we are even commanded to fake ourselves as if we would agree with those who have obviously wrong views of God's grace, "for the sake of the unity and unifying growth of the body of Christ. (This is very important to church planing ministries, but I will talk about this later.) What Paul calls "The weaker in faith" cannot fathom the extent and magnitude of what God's grace covers. That is why they must work so hard in something else except trusting and gazing upon God, to be assured.
"Whatever does not come from faith is sin" (the end of Rom 14).
"None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living" (Rom 14:7-9).
We cannot be righteous more than the size of our faith.
The more we savor the heart of Christ, the more faith we are given. The more we trust in Him and expect from Him, the more we taste and enjoy Him in who He is and what He is doing.
"The chief end of man is to enjoy God and glorify Himself forever."
God's ultimate command which sums up all His commands is "Be loved by Me more than by anything else." The Giver gets the glory.
The Giver of all good things gets the glory that does not deserve anything else. God, who is self-existent and self-defining God without any help by any other forces at all, who can create all things from nothing,
To explain this another way, let me borrow from C S Lewis that you may have already read.
Our sin is not that we do not do enough to suppress our pursuit for happiness (as moralists would "think"). But in God's eyes, our sin is thought of the opposite. (But many self-professed Christians does not "think" they should care how accurately they should understand the Bible, while our attentiveness to what God says to us alone matters to Him). is that we do not peruse our happiness enough.
If a certain statistics is correct that 70% of all self-professed Christians in the US "think" that the chief end of Christianity is morality, then they could probably never imagine that God is wanting us to peruse all His inheritance.
We are sick without cure if we try to cure us by ourselves or by others.
God is like a perfect doctor who gives us a perfect prescription drug, the only effective drug. But we refused to take it for many reasons.
We doubt that we are really sick when it seems that we can manipulate all our surrounding situations.
Even when we feel exhausted, we doubt that God can work for us.
Even if we know God can work for us, we doubt if He likes us, the sinner.
All those doubts are due to the indigestion of the Gospel.
Though the Gospel is simple, it is not simplistic. It is the deepest and highest fact in the entire universe in the depth in our heart.