Discipleship and New Birth - Is order important?

General Christian Theology
PeterG
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Re: Discipleship and New Birth - Is order important?

Post by PeterG »

Ernie wrote:
PeterG wrote:On the other hand, I believe it is crucial to give Jesus Christ Himself, as Creator, Savior, and Lord, the utmost prominence, regardless of the chronological order in which we present the components of our message. The spiritual experiences and ways of living taught in the New Testament are meaningless—damaging, even—apart from Him.
I think I mostly agree. However I believe that all good comes from God, and so if the Gentiles do something that corresponds with Jesus' teachings, I think it is to their advantage. I've been interacting with a lot of secular Chinese the last year. Their are things they do and think that is much closer to the New Testament than the deeds and thoughts of my Evangelical neighbors. I think God is blessing them for this.

Also, what does apart from Him mean?
Does it mean "apart from acknowledging the source of the teachings?" If so, then you are saying that these things are meaningless-damaging to my Chinese friends.
Thanks for these comments. I should have more carefully placed my own remarks in context. It certainly is always better to do good than not to do good, and I also think there are blessings associated with obeying God even unwittingly or incompletely. But, apart from Jesus, no good works can solve our basic spiritual problem of sinfulness. They will not bring salvation (by which I mean something more than "fire insurance"/going to heaven instead of hell). They will be of no value during an eternity separated from God. In this absolute, eternal sense good works are meaningless.

About my use of the word "damaging"... Many times I've seen people enter Anabaptism from the outside full of zeal for truth and righteousness. They are determined to more faithfully follow Jesus. But again and again I've seen them live as though—I'm not sure what to call it, spiritual life maybe, or grace—is either irrelevant to Christian living or found in faithful actions in and of themselves, as if the Vine were incidental to the branches' fruit-bearing. I'm afraid that we Anabaptists have only encouraged them in this thinking, and that many of these people (which once, and maybe still, includes me) have ended up worse off than they began.
Ernie wrote:Does it mean "apart from having Jesus Spirit dwelling within a believer"? Some Evangelicals would believe this. They believe that anything done prior to Jesus spirit taking up residence in a believer is "filthy rags" and so it is useless to teach the sermon on the mount until a person has the Spirit of God living within.
If they really believed that, they would talk less about abortion, sexual morality, etc. and more about Jesus. :-|

To be clear, I firmly believe that the teachings of Jesus and the apostles about right and wrong are a good and necessary part of the Christian message, and that it would be wrong to withhold them until our hearers have reached some kind of spiritual milepost. (After all, I'm the one who doesn't understand some people's prickly equation of repeating the New Testament's teachings on violence with political activism.)
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Ernie
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Re: Discipleship and New Birth - Is order important?

Post by Ernie »

PeterG wrote:Thanks for these comments. I should have more carefully placed my own remarks in context. It certainly is always better to do good than not to do good, and I also think there are blessings associated with obeying God even unwittingly or incompletely. But, apart from Jesus, no good works can solve our basic spiritual problem of sinfulness.
So this applies to our children as well as to the lost and unchurched, right?
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The old woodcutter spoke again. “It is impossible to talk with you. You always draw conclusions. Life is so vast, yet you judge all of life with one page or one word. You see only a fragment. Unless you know the whole story, how can you judge?"
PeterG
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Re: Discipleship and New Birth - Is order important?

Post by PeterG »

Yes.
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