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*Do not love the world or anything in the world. If you love the world, love for the Father (God) is not in you.  For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful people, the lust of their eyes and their boasting about what they have and do—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2009 11:57:55 AM (GMT-5)

A Confession Which Leads the Inward Person to Humility

I am...

Yeah.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

And where sin abounds, grace much more abounds!

Grace bath time...

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2009 10:11:54 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/29/2009 12:04:15 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/29/2009 12:39:28 AM (GMT-5)

So...Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/29/2009 1:04:12 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 5/29/2009 2:07:17 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/29/2009 8:40:03 AM (GMT-5)

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'For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.  I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.  I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.  Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.  I will save you from all your uncleanness.

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Now the main point of what we are saying is this: We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven,  and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by a mere human being.

   Every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices, and so it was necessary for this one also to have something to offer.  If he were on earth, he would not be a priest, for there are already priests who offer the gifts prescribed by the law.  They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: "See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain."  But in fact the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, since the new covenant is established on better promises.

     For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.  But God found fault with the people and said...

"The days are coming, declares the Lord,
       when I will make a new covenant
       with the house of Israel
       and with the house of Judah.

    It will not be like the covenant
       I made with their ancestors
       when I took them by the hand
       to lead them out of Egypt,
       because they did not remain faithful to my covenant,
       and I turned away from them,
       declares the Lord.

    This is the covenant I will establish with the house of Israel
       after that time, declares the Lord.
       I will put my laws in their minds
       and write them on their hearts.
       I will be their God,
       and they will be my people.

    No longer will they teach their neighbors,
       or say to one another, 'Know the Lord,'
       because they will all know me,
       from the least of them to the greatest.

    For I will forgive their wickedness
       and will remember their sins no more."

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/29/2009 8:39:15 AM (GMT-5)

How contempt of himself can be produced in a man, and how useful it is

Furthermore the more a man recognises his own insignificance, the more he fully and the more clearly he becomes aware to the divine majesty, and the more a man is low in his own eyes for the sake of God, the truth and justice, the more precious he is in the eyes of God.

For this reason let us strive with the whole strength of our desire to consider ourselves the lowest of all and to consider ourselves unworthy of any favour. We should strive to be displeasing to ourselves and pleasing only to God, while regarded as low and unworthy of consideration by others. Above all not to be moved by difficulties, afflictions and insults, and not to be upset by those who inflict such things on us, or entertain evil thoughts against them or be indignant, but to believe steadfastly and with equanimity in all insults, slights, blows and dereliction that it is only appropriate.

For in truth he who is really penitent and grieving before God hates to be honoured and loved by all, and does not try to manipulate things so as to avoid being to some degree hated, neglected and despised right to the end, so that he can be truly humbled and sincerely cleave to God alone with a pure heart.

Indeed, for loving God alone and hating oneself more than anything, and desiring to be despised by others we do not require external work or physical strength, but rather physical solitude, the labour of the heart, and peace of mind so that, as it were, by labour of the heart and the disposition of the inmost mind, one may rise up, casting off from oneself lower and physical things, and so soar up, ascending to things heavenly and divine.

For indeed in so doing we changed into God, and this will especially take place when without judgement, condemnation or contempt of our neighbour, we choose rather to be considered as scum and a disgrace by everyone and to be despised as unclean filth by everyone than to experience all sorts of different delicacies or to be honoured and exalted by men, or enjoy all sorts of transitory physical forms of well-being and comfort. We should not desire any pleasure of this present, mortal and physical life but rather to mourn, bewail and lament our offences, faults and sins without ceasing, and to perfectly despise and annihilate ourselves, and from day to day to be considered more and more abject by others, while in all our insignificance we become worthless even in our own eyes, so that we can be pleasing to God alone, love him alone, and cleave to him alone. We should not wish to be concerned about anything except the Lord Jesus Christ himself who alone should reside in our affections, and we should not be concerned or anxious about anything except him on whose dominion and providence everything in general and individually depends.

So from now on it should not be your aim to seek enjoyment but to truly mourn with all your heart. For that reason, if you do not mourn, mourn for that, while if you do mourn, mourn especially that you have brought the cause of your pain on yourself by your own great offences and infinite sins. For just as a condemned man on receiving his sentence does not concern himself about the seating of the spectators, so he who laments and is genuinely mourning is not interested in pleasures, resentment, fame or wrongs or things of that sort. And just as townsfolk and contemned criminals have different accommodation, the state and position of those who are mourning and have committed offences deserving punishment ought to be completely different from those who are innocent and under no obligation. Otherwise there would be no difference between the guilty and the innocent in matters of punishment and reward, The result would be great dereliction of duty, and evil behaviour would have more freedom than goodness.

So everything must be renounced, everything despised, everything rejected and avoided, so that we can lay a firm foundation of penitent grieving. Then, loving Jesus Christ in reality, yearning for him, and holding him in one's heart, in reality experiencing pain for one's sins and faults, in reality seeking to know the coming Kingdom, while with true faith bearing in mind the reality of the torments and eternal judgement, and firmly and fully taking up the recollection and fear of one's own death, we should be aware of nothing else, and not care or be worried about anything else. For that reason, he who hurries towards the blessed state of impassibility and towards God should reckon himself to have experienced great loss every day that he is not insulted and despised. Impassibility after all is freedom from vices and passions and purity of heart and the adornment of all virtues. So consider yourself as already dead since there is no doubt that you have got to die. And as a final thought let this be the test for you of whether any thought, word or action of yours is of God, whether you are made more humble because of it, more inward and more recollected and established in God. If you find it is otherwise in yourself, you should be suspicious about it, whether it be not according to God, unacceptable to you and not to your benefit.

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 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple.  And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple."

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/29/2009 8:36:20 AM (GMT-5)

Fixed now...

D: Basically, I just recognize this in myself. I am not "without sin", and God allows me to be truthful about that with myself and others (empowering confession). I don't see how a believer admitting one's tendency towards nothingness (sin) is a bad thing.

Tom: Yeah. I don’t have any beef with that.

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Oh wait. This one IS for me. Sorry.

Tom: God's grace is a necessary but not sufficient cause of our coming to God. We're free to say 'no'. But unless God is first present in grace, there's nothing for us to say 'yes' to either. It's always the case that a person, however deprived, is able ON SOME LEVEL to respond freely to God. Something. Some small step. That's all grace and love expect of the fallen, that they do WHAT THEY CAN at that moment in those circumstances. God offers SOME WAY out, however tiny a step that may be. But all this grounds is the possibility of Godward becoming. We can say no.

D: Where did I ever disagree with the bolded part?

Tom: Yeah, I didn’t think you did disagree with it, which I guess is why I don’t see Asher’s real disagreement with you.

D: I believe there is a bi-polar ASSYMMETRICAL relational unity between God's Grace and human faith in the life of the Christian, where human faith has its own relatively independent existence grounded in God's Grace such that it has the opportunity to refuse to fully receive the very Grace that allows said faith to exist at all.

Tom: It’s asymmetrical in that we derive our life, personhood, and being from recognizing our dependence upon God and appropriating grace FROM God whereas nothing of the sort is true of God (he doesn’t derive his life, personhood, or being from us). That’s asymmetrical. Right.

There are other (different) ways I think the relationship IS symmetrical (i.e., mutual, reciprocal), but that’s a different subject.

D: It is not in our own autonomous power to do good or want God. Bondage of the Will, right?

Tom: I don’t think that’s what Luther had in mind. I mean, being ‘dependent’ upon God’s grace isn’t a ‘bondage’. It’s no less true of Adam prior to falling into sin than it is afterwards that humans have no autonomous power to do good or want God (if that means the power to do good independently of God's providing grace and empowerment; we were never intended to act THIS independently of God, nor can we). Nobody’s positing that sort of autonomy. All we’re positing is that we are always able—by God’s grace—to choose on SOME level and move toward God. You agree, I know. But then why call this a “bondage of the will”? That's what's meant by prevenient grace. What Luther argued is that humans are not ‘capable of choosing’ in the sense I just described. The ‘bondage of the will’ for Luther isn’t the sheer dependence of creatureliness upon God’s grace (true both before and after the Fall); for him that bondage is what the will BECOMES because of the Fall—strictly speaking, unable on any level to move toward God unless God determine that will in it’s movement. For Luther, if God were to leave us libertarianly free to choose, nobody would EVER choose God. See? THAT is the will’s bondage for Luther. But you can’t affirm this bondage and be a libertarian. See that? For us, being libertarian entails an ever-present enabling (not determining) grace that’s offered to all sentient beings.

Unless I’m wrong on Luther in this regard, you can’t affirm his version of the bondage of the will. For you and me, the will is (a) always able on some level to move toward God in undetermined fashion (contra Luther), and (b) always dependent upon the offer of grace upon which it’s able to determine itself freely. But for us this ‘offer’ is universal as well as unconditional. It wasn’t for Luther. It was something offered to some and not to others. We don't affirm total deprativity. That's why we don't view the will as being in "bondage" in Luther's sense.

Maybe that’s getting off subject.

D: It's BY GRACE the pre-exists any desire on our part for goodness or salvation, right?

Tom: Right.

D: The Holy Spirit brings about the conviction that even moves us to WANT to want God.

Tom: Depends on what you mean by “moves.” See? That can mean God determines a person “to want” God.

D: Without that Spirit's operation, our wills fall back into their nothingness-prone tendencies of self-idolization and creatureliness.

Tom: I can agree IF we’re both using “operation” to mean to same thing, i.e., something compatible with our being able to responsibly determine our own ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to that grace.

I think your beef is more with Asher, but I’m still not sure what his point is either.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 5/29/2009 9:09:04 AM (GMT-5)

I'd just say this: Without God's drawing, we'd never escape the suction of our black-hole-like self-referential vortices of inordinate self-regard and we'd never seek to ground ourselves in God...because of the  pervasive, permeating influence of the enemies: the "flesh", the "world", and the "DEVIL."

Greg had BETTER agree with that!

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*Contrition before God and the need for not depending upon our piety and our strength:

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/29/2009 10:56:28 AM (GMT-5)

Tom: For Luther, if God were to leave us libertarianly free to choose, nobody would EVER choose God.

D: Given Satan's existence and influence, wouldn't you agree with that?

Tom: My goodness no! YOU accepted the Christ libertarianly. So did I. In fact, EVERYBODY who accepts Christ does so libertarianly, i.e., “left libertarianly free to choose.” What are you thinking? How can it be the case that if left libertarianly free to choose no one would ever choose Christ if everybody who chooses Christ does so libertarianly? Dude, you're thinking being “left libertarianly free to choose” means “being left without divine grace to respond to.” But where did I say we could will ourselves, unaided by God, free of Satan's hold on us?

I'm freaking out here. It's like you're a new Calvinist come to town. Dude, what gives?

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D: Hence:—If we believe that Satan is the prince of this world, ever ensnaring and fighting against the kingdom of Christ with all his powers; and that he does not let go his captives without being forced by the Divine Power of the Spirit; it is manifest, that there can be no such thing as—"Free-will!"

Tom: All the worse for Luther. That’s what I’m saying. He’s wrong to deny free-will, wrong about determinism, wrong about monergism, wrong about the effects of sin. But, on the other hand, the exercise of the will I’m suggesting we do have is not some imagined polar opposite of Luther, i.e., the power to will ourselves, unaided by God, free of Satan’s hold on us. I’m saying that we play our part, a necessary part, free and undetermined by God, in bringing it about that Satan lets us go. God kicks Satan’s butt, but we have to ask God. And God will not determine our asking, though he does empower us to ask him, and there’s nothing Satan can do to prevent that exchange between God and the human heart. However in possession of a rational mind Satan may be, he cannot prevent God from inviting us nor us from saying ‘yes’.

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D: Again:—If we believe that original sin has so destroyed us, that even in the godly who are led by the Spirit, it causes the utmost molestation by striving against that which is good; it is manifest, that there can be nothing left in a man devoid of the Spirit, which can turn itself towards good, but which must turn towards evil! 

Tom: You’re not following me. Nobody’s claiming that human beings don’t need God or that we can, unaided by God, will our way free of Satan and into heaven. So I’m not saying that “devoid of the Spirit we can turn ourselves towards the good.” I’m saying there is no such thing in all creation that is devoid of God’s Spirit. That’s the illusion. God is everywhere present and he empowers (not determines) us to say a ‘yes’ to God, and that ‘yes’ then becomes part of God’s ‘no’ to Satan that you’re talking about, which actually sets us free. Salvation is a work of synergy. We’re not monergists. Luther was a monergist. Luther was wrong.

D: Forget the exhaustive definite foreknowledge part. I won't grant that. But I WILL grant Satan being the "ruler of this current age" and the pervasiveness of sin/nothingness in our enculturation and genetic heritage. (I'm no Pelagian)

Tom: You don’t have to be a Pelagian. But you’re not a monergist when it comes to salvation either.

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D: Wouldn't you grant all this?

Tom: No (as I try to explain above).

D: Wouldn't GREG (of all people) grant this?

Tom: Not at all. Greg’s not a monergist when it comes to salvation. You know that. And that’s all that needs to be the case for us to part with Luther (who WAS a monergist) and his view of the bondage of the will. If the will is bound in the sense Luther said, then monergism is our only hope. God must determine our choice, manipulate (however kindly) our will. But if we are libertarianly free to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ TO GOD’S GRACIOUS INVITATION…then the will cannot be in the bondage that Luther supposed it was.

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D: I'd just say this: Without God's drawing, we'd never escape…

Tom: Of course yes. God has to draw, woo, convict, speak to, work in, invite, arrange, coax, influence, shout at…all of that…all that relentless grace. Yes to it all. Apart from THAT, nobody would come to God. Absolutely. But nobody is apart from that. NOR CAN THEY BE.

What Luther says is that if we were libertarianly free AND ALSO wooed, coaxed, drawn, loved, invited, convicted, etc., it would STILL be the case that nobody would say ‘yes’ to God. Nobody can respond positively and libertarianly (at the same time) to God’s invitation. THAT is Luther’s bondage of the will.

So, I’m agreeing on the absolute necessity of divine grace, offering empowerment and freedom to us. That’s a necessary but not sufficient cause of our salvation. You agreed to this. Thus, you disagree with Luther. You’re not a monergist, for YOU believe that the free/libertarian exercise of the human will is ALSO a necessary but not sufficient cause of our salvation. TOGETHER (synergy) we are saved: God invites us; God FIRST says “Come!”, and THAT invitation is itself the empowering presence of the Spirit in the human heart which opens space for us to reply, “Yes.” God only empowers our reply by holding outstretched the invitation. His invitation is our power to respond. But he does not determine our response. Of course our response isn’t possible without the invitation. No “response” is possible without a prior “invitation.” But the invitation doesn’t determine or guaranteed a particular response. We’re synergists. We can say ‘no’. And it must be us who says ‘yes’. Not an uninvited ‘yes’ that’s shouted into the silence, unaided by God, and which summons God to attend to us. My God, no. It’s a ‘yes’ which is ALWAYS a response to God’s prior “Yes, come!”

D: I'll ask this, Tom...Do you believe that the human believer's will is, ON ITS OWN, sufficient in strength to withstand the flesh, world, and the devil's influences to turn said believer's will from God?

Tom: Do you still need to ask me that?

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 5/29/2009 1:20:31 PM (GMT-5)