WHAT SAY YOU

I read an article by J.C. Ryle on sanctification and afterward read a readers (anonymous) comments about the article.

WHAT SAY YOU?

I read J. C. Ryle's comments on sanctification and agree with a lot of what he said. But he seems to struggle at the same place that most Christians do who are trying to find a way to put us under grace, and yet, demand works of us. He starts out by making the point that "unless we are sanctified, we shall not be saved". Then he defines "Sanctified as that inward spiritual work which the Lord Jesus Christ works in a man by the Holy Ghost , when He calls him to be a true believer."

So, in the first place, he is claiming that sanctification has to be part of salvation, because without it we are not truly saved. Then he makes the point that this sanctification is a work performed by Jesus Christ in a man. Up until this point he is speaking as a man who understands, and agrees with, the concept of the grace of God.

The fact that sanctification, as you call it, or spiritual growth, as I call it, is part of God's plan for us after salvation cannot be denied. What can be debated is how this growth comes about. Is it the Fruit of the Spirit, or is it the works of man to try to keep himself saved? Galatians 3:1-3 O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you? This only would I learn of you, received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?

Then when he starts out defining "Sanctification", he ties it right back into the fact that our salvation depends on the outward results of our sanctification. In doing this he is bringing Christians right back under bondage and guilt. If I have to show evidence of my sanctification in order to be saved, then how much evidence is enough? What if I fail like David did, does that mean I am condemned because I produced a work of the flesh? What if I struggle like Paul did in Romans 7:14-25? Paul would fail brother Ryle's test where he argues that a saved man cannot sin. Our Christian lives are a struggle between the our carnal selves and our spiritual selves.

Now, it is true that our spiritual selves cannot sin, but our carnal selves sure can. A man that denies that is just not being truthful with himself. 1John 1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. The trouble with trying to put the responsibility back on us for our sanctification is that you immediately put us back under bondage and take away all the assurance that God gives us... including the assurance that He will grow us spiritually! Galatians 5:1 Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherein Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Philippians 1:6 Being confidant of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you, will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.

There are many more verses that deal with our freedom from bondage as well as God's responsibility for producing fruit through true believers. This doesn't mean that fruit won't happen, it will, because our faith is in God, not in ourselves. That's why Paul, when he was listing all his accomplishments was quick to add: " Yet not I, but Christ."

The danger in trying to bring that back to human responsibility, is that you get all kinds of flesh going around pretending to be holy, instead of the truth, which is that sinful human beings are slowly changed by God over our lifetimes. First, He changes us from the inside where a human cannot witness, and then these changes start resulting in outer fruit, which can be seen by others.

I have been a Christian for 28 years now. I agree that we can make ourselves more available to God by reading His word often, praying without ceasing, fellowshipping with Christian brothers and abiding in Him in every way we discover we can. If we do this, I believe we can grow faster because we are not resisting His work on our behalf. But, having been a Christian that started very slowly, and didn't make myself available to God in many areas of my life... I can testify to you that He did not stop working in me. I do believe He had to use more chastisement on me than on many, but He never abandoned me. In the early years of my Christian experience, brother Ryle would have accused me of not having salvation because he would not have been able to see any significant fruit in me. In fact, he would have seen a lot of the works of my flesh.

Now, years later, after a lot of suffering and chastisement, he would say that he can see some evidence of Christ in my life. I think it is a lack of faith in God when we demand quick results out of a young Christian. God works slowly, and we have a lifetime of bad habits for Him to clean up. In our efforts to try to motivate a young Christian to do what only God can do, we demoralize him and put him right back under works.

I could say so much more about this, but I have to go. I have been privileged by God to be teaching His word to some Indian tribes high in the mountains down here in Mexico. I go every other week for four days. Please let me hear your thoughts on this matter.

In the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

Click here to read J. C. Ryle's article on SANCTIFICATION

Nothing Between?

Studying this morning on Romans 12:2 and came across this wonderful convicting song. Check out the lyrics of the song by Charles A. Tindley written in 1905.

The story goes that Tindley, whose many musical compositions includes hymns such as “We’ll Understand it Better By and By” and “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” was working on a sermon when a gust of wind blew some papers over the sermon he was writing. He reportedly thought to himself “let nothing between” which led to the theme of the hymn.

Like the gust of wind, the cares of this life are constantly attempting to blow things in the way of our connection with Christ and our duty to His service. Before we know it, we are not spending time studying the Word, or we are neglecting to serve others - growing cold can happen so easily - let nothing come between you and the saviour.

Here are the lyrics:

Nothing between my soul and my Savior,
Naught of this world’s delusive dream;
I have renounced all sinful pleasure;
Jesus is mine, there’s nothing between.

Refrain:
Nothing between my soul and my Savior,
So that His blessed face may be seen;
Nothing preventing the least of His favor;
Keep the way clear! Let nothing between.

Nothing between, like worldly pleasure;
Habits of life, though harmless they seem,
Must not my heart from Him ever sever;
He is my all, there’s nothing between.

Nothing between, like pride or station;
Self or friends shall not intervene;
Though it may cost me much tribulation,
I am resolved, there’s nothing between.

Nothing between, e’en many hard trials,
Though the whole world against me convene;
Watching with prayer and much self-denial,
I’ll triumph at last, there’s nothing between.

Powerful words! They just don’t write them like they used to. Oh, that nothing would come between us and our Lord. Here is a video of an arrangement of this song combined with “I Surrender All”. May this be our theme today.

A Template of Christ-Likeness

Romans 12:1-21

1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. 3 I'm speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it's important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him. 4-6 In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we're talking about is Christ's body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn't amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ's body, let's just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren't. 6-8 If you preach, just preach God's Message, nothing else; if you help, just help, don't take over; if you teach, stick to your teaching; if you give encouraging guidance, be careful that you don't get bossy; if you're put in charge, don't manipulate; if you're called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don't let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them. Keep a smile on your face. 9-10 Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle. 11-13 Don't burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don't quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality. 14-16 Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they're happy; share tears when they're down. Get along with each other; don't be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don't be the great somebody. 17-19 Don't hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you've got it in you, get along with everybody. Don't insist on getting even; that's not for you to do. "I'll do the judging," says God. "I'll take care of it." 20-21 Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he's thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don't let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.

The Message

Joel Osteen, it's just the Truth - Paul Washer

The sin of wasting life!

Psalm 90:12 "So teach us to number our days aright--that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

What is it to number our days?

One way is to keep a careful record of them. That is a mathematical numbering. Some people keep diaries and put down everything they do--where they go, what they see, whom they meet, the books they read. But mere adding of days is not the numbering that was in the thought of the Psalmist.

There are days in some lives--that add nothing to life's treasures, and that leave nothing in the world which will make it better or richer. There are people who live year after year--and might as well never have lived at all! Simply adding days--is not living! If that is all you are going to do with the new year--you will only pile up an added burden of guilt.

Why do people not think of the sin of wasting life?

If you saw a man standing by the sea--and flinging diamonds into the water--you would say he was insane. Yet some of us are standing by the sea--and flinging the diamond days, one by one, into its dark floods! Mere eating and sleeping, and reading the papers, and going about the streets, and putting in the time--is not living!

Another way of numbering our days, is illustrated by the story of a prisoner who when he entered his cell, put a mark on the wall for each of the days he would be incarcerated. Then each evening he would rub off one of these marks--he had one day less to stay in prison.

Some people seem to live much in this way. Each evening--they have on day less to live. Another day is gone, with its opportunities, its privileges, its responsibilities and its tasks--gone beyond recall.

Now, if the day has been filled with duty and love and service--its page written all over with pure, white thoughts and records of gentle deeds--then it is well; its passing need not be mourned over. But merely to have to rub it off at the setting of the sun, leaving in it nothing but a story of idleness, uselessness, selfishness, and lost opportunities, is a sad numbering!

What is the true way of numbering our days? The prayer tells us, "So teach us to number our days aright--that we may gain a heart of wisdom." That is, we are so to live--that we shall get some new wisdom out of each day to carry on with us.

Life's lessons cannot all be learned from books. The lessons may be set down in books--but it is only in actual living--that we can really learn them.

For example, patience. You may learn all about patience from a sermon, from a teacher, or from a book, or even from the Bible. But that will not make you patient. You can get the patience--only by long practice of the lesson, in life's experiences.

Or take gentleness. You can read in a few paragraphs what gentleness is, how it lives. But that will not make you gentle.

Take thoughtfulness. You can learn in a short lesson what it is and how beautiful it is. But you will not be thoughtful, the moment you have learned the definition. It will probably take you several years--to get the beautiful lesson learned.

"So teach us to number our days aright--that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

(J. R. Miller, "Numbering our Days", 1912)

Why does God ... ? Why doesn't He ... ? (continued)

(e) God is faithful ... God is the God of the Covenant. Though He is independent and absolute, eternal, mighty, righteous and holy, nevertheless He has condescended to make a covenant with men ... It was this covenant that entitled Israel to turn to God and say, 'My God, mine Holy One'. [Habakkuk] remembers that God has said, 'I will be their God and they shall be my people.' For those saintly men, the prophets, and all who had spiritual understanding in Israel, this fact was more significant than anything else. While believing in the eternal attributes of God they might have been chilled by the thought that such a God might be far away in the heavens and oblivious to their need. But what linked Him to them was the knowledge that He was a faithful, covenant-keeping God. God had given His word and He would never break it ... Whatever the Chaldean army might do it could never exterminate Israel, because God had given certain promises to Israel which He could never break ...

The prophet now proceeds to bring his problem into the context of those absolute and eternal principles ... He reaches his answer to this question about the Chaldeans by reasoning like this: 'God must be raising them up for Israel's benefit: of this I can be absolutely certain. It is not that the Chaldeans have taken the law into their own hands; it is not that God is incapable of restraining them. These things are impossible in view of my propositions. God is just using them for His own purposes ... and He is carrying out those purposes. I do not understand it fully, but I am quite sure that we are not going to be exterminated ... although ... there are apparently going to be very few of us left, and we are going to be carried into captivity. But a remnant will remain, because the Almighty is still God, and He is using the Chaldeans to do something within the purpose of the covenant. God ... is not being defeated ... He is doing this and doing it for His own grand end and object.'

From Fear to Faith, pp. 31-2

Why does God ... ? Why doesn't He ... ?

Habakkuk 1:11-13 They sweep past like the wind and are gone. But they are deeply guilty, for their own strength is their god." 12 O LORD my God, my Holy One, You who are eternal—surely You do not plan to wipe us out? O LORD, our Rock, You have sent these Babylonians to correct us, to punish us for our many sins. 13 But You are pure and cannot stand the sight of evil. Will You wink at their treachery? Should You be silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they? (NLT)

from the Works of Martyn Lloyd-Jones

By Let us follow [Habbakuk] as he applies this method* to the two major problems that troubled him ...

(a) God is eternal. After stating his difficulty the prophet declares, 'Art thou not from everlasting?' (1:12). You see, he is laying down a proposition. He is forgetting for a moment the immediate problem, and asking himself what it was he was sure of about God ... He had just said (1:11) that the Chaldeans, flushed with success, imputed their power to their god; and ... he began to think, 'Their god — what is their god? Just something they have made themselves (cf. Isaiah 46). God ... the everlasting God ... is not like the gods whom men worship ... He is God from eternity to eternity ... He has preceded history; He has created history. His throne is above the world and outside time. He reigns in eternity, the everlasting God.'

(b) God is self-existent ... the eternal I AM ... The name 'I AM that I AM' means, 'I am the Absolute, the self-existent One'. Here is a second vital principle. God is not in any sense dependent upon anything that happens in the world ... Not only is He not dependent upon the world, but He need never have created it had He not willed to do so. The tremendous truth concerning the Trinity is that an eternally self-existent life resides in the Godhead — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here again is wonderful reassurance ... The problem begins to fade.

(c) God is holy ... utterly, absolutely righteous and holy, 'a consuming fire'. 'God is light and in him is no darkness at all.' And the moment you consider Scriptures like that you are forced to ask, 'Can the Lord of the earth do that which is unrighteous?' Such a thing is unthinkable.

(d) God is almighty ... The God who created the whole world out of nothing, who said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, has absolute power; He has illimitable might. He is 'The Rock'.

(continued on March 4)

*December 20, pp. 25-28.

From Fear to Faith, pp. 28-30

World, Christians Have Same Behavior Patterns

Quoting James Montgomery Boice . . .

"Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world." This sentence in Romans 12:2 has two key words: "world," which is actually "age" (aion, meaning, "this present age" in contrast to "the age to come"); and "do not conform," which is a compound having at its root the word "scheme." So the verse means, "Do not let the age in which you live force you into its scheme of thinking and behaving." The idea is that the world has its ways of thinking and doing things and is exerting pressure on Christians to conform to it. But instead of being conformed to the world, Christians are to be changed from within to be increasingly like Jesus Christ. The chief problem with the evangelical church is that we have been increasingly conformed to this world's patterns and that, if we are to see a new reformation, we will have to break away from these patterns and seek to recover the authentic biblical gospel, learning again to think and act in God's way.

The first phrase of Romans 12:2 is a warning against worldliness, of course. But as soon as we use the word 'worldly' we have to make clear what real worldliness is. When I was growing up in a fundamentalist church I was taught that worldliness was such pursuits as smoking, drinking, dancing, and playing cards. A Christian girl might say, "I don't smoke, and I don't chew, and I don't go with boys who do." But that is not what Romans 12:2 is about. To think of worldliness only in those terms is to trivialize what is a far more serious and far more subtle problem.

The clue to what is in view here is that in the next phrase Paul urges, as an alternative to being "conformed" to this world, being "transformed by the renewing of your mind." This means that he is concerned about a way of thinking rather than merely a way of behaving, though right behavior will follow naturally if our thinking is set straight. The worldliness we are to break away from and repudiate is the world's "worldview," what the Germans call Weltanschauung, a comprehensive, systematic way of looking at all things. We are to break out of the world's categories of thinking and allow our minds to be molded by the Word of God instead.

In our day Christians have not done this very well, and that is the reason why they are so often "worldly" in the other senses too. In fact, it is a sad commentary on our churches, verified by numerous polls, that Christians in general have nearly the same thoughts, values, and behavior patterns as the world around them."

From: Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace?