I'm all the more convinced and convicted that we continue to advance the gospel truthfully and boldly. We wonder why the youths are not an energetic and passionate bunch, and may I know what you mean by that? They jump and shout during P&W? They enthusiastically join ministry and volunteer to plan events? While this would seem to be a good report but the heart of the matter is the heart.
A heart that burns for Christ, these works will follow. To say that we ought to do this for God and do that for God without a strong foundation in the true gospel is like a warrior that says he wants to fight and bring honour to the country but he's not trained in combat. By no means am I against serving or going out into the world to evangelise but what are the motives behind us serving, what is the message we are sending out? Are we preaching gospel or MANspel? HAHA i love that word.
And we wonder why our youths are like that...maybe they haven't been hearing the gospel but manspel. If we believe in anything apart from the gospel, can we say we are truely God worshippers and followers? No! You are following your own religion, "the heart is deceitful above all things" Jeremiah 17:9.
What saves? God or Man?
"For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son" John 3: 17-18
"For it is by grace you have been saved through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by works so that no one can boast" Ephesians 2:8-9
Who or what can cause an inward change? God or man?
Only the Word of God. It is God who "began a good work in you will carry to completion" MANspel is not spiritual and hence cannot save and cannot change the heart.
Does theology divide?
Eph 4:13-15 "until we all
reach unity in the faith and in the
knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the
fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and deceitfulness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead,
speaking the truth in love,
we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head,that is Christ"
This is so clear! The gospel unites! How can we ever think that knowing theology divides? The only 'divide' I see is between believers and unbelievers. If we say we hold true to the gospel surely we cannot say "oh this part of the is not true" or "it's only for those people in the past, no longer applicable today". Oh how I am guilty of that mistake! If we even say that it is no longer applicable TODAY, we are in fact saying that God changes but scriptures say that our God is the SAME today, yesterday and forevermore (Heb 13:8)! If we say that any part of the gospel is not true even if we don't say it straight out, by avoiding it we're just not facing up to the truth! What are you afraid of? That you might be shaken? Be shaken! Then when God grants you the understand, there'll be repentence and an amazement of his GRACE that He gave you the understanding and now you can worship the true and living God and not a god that is a figment of your creative imagination.
1 cor 12:14 "We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak not by words taught us in human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them for they are spiritually discerned"
