My Comment at Martuneac's "Salvation" Post

(On August 7, 2008 I left a comment on Lou Martuneac's blog, linked above in the title of my post. This is in no way an affront to Lou or even concerning him specifically, at all; I remain the same as recently described in approach. I notice many people making practice of transcribing their comments to others, into official blog posts. I have sown much my ideas out there in the blogdom and I thought I might extropically give it a shot.)

I have a thought, again, about the substance of Lou's point #3. He referred to a problem for which I have an idea of how to deal with:

3) The most vocal advocates of a position like LS & the Crosslessgospel are not impossible to recover, but often their conscience has been seared to the point where they will not hear truth. They build walls around their extra-biblical presuppositions and will not allow for anything from the Bible or reasoning to chip away at their position.

I love the example 2 cor. 3 gives on how we ought to write the scriptures upon our listeners. It says our goal is not to write on stone which is nonliving but upon tablets of human hearts. In the twenty-first century, we don't actually write upon rocks, or even so much upon paper. We write upon portals of two-dimensional graphical interfaces; still -- this can kill rather than give life as we are intending to do.

When we are writing only upon the internet the children of God turn their face away from the glory of scripture, because the veil that comes by reading the law is set in front of them. Their minds are made dull because they do not put in perspective the Spirit to mediate, to reveal, and the Spirit is the source of all understanding. We must first bring them to a place of freedom by the Spirit, just as Peter did in Acts 15 when they were still in the discussion phase with heresy. He said:

"So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us, and made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they.” acts 15:8-10

The Word of God is always a burden to any man who is not walking at that moment in the Spirit; it becomes a ministry of condemnation, furthering all of us from unity in Christ. But evangelicals should know well enough how to find and walk in the Spirit, so, let's get them there by what we say and what we revel in. We purify our discussions with one another when we are talking while publicly trusting in Jesus (they and we are purified in our hearts by faith).

Even though unburdening the Lordship person is your goal, when you start your conversation with such language as:

"Yeah but you must do...."

"Okay but you need to know..."

Then you are, unfortunately, acting as a Judiazer, even if the content of your message is the opposite. For this reason, when for instance Lou shares the [LS-correcting] message of "the results of salvation must NEVER be made the requirement FOR salvation," be sure to precede it by acknowledging the freedom we have from being considered inadequate, because of the cross.

I see how ironic it is, that they are more-or-less the Judiazers, yet they don't realize it, and when we try and show it to them, we too are accustomed to treating them in a Judiazing manner, troubling their consciences by the rejection of the boldness we have to come before God by good faith, not by accomplishments. However we can come before God by faith. And He can endure both theirs and our misperceptions. We, like He, must endure fellowship with the church yet patiently correct their errors.

They aren't worthy of fellowship with us just only if they believe everything we do. That's essentially promoting the very kind of error in calvinism (needing to endure to the end in order to be saved, and never really having a sense of having done enough, for security). Here is what Lou wrote of Lordship in the "Barter" thread's comments:

"Lordship’s Gospel is a promise to perform in exchange for the promise of eternal life."

When we give them a laundry list without acknowledging the Spirit we are asking them to perform, in exchange for the privilege of acceptance. We're saying that their mediator, Jesus Christ, isn't sufficient to make them clean. They aren't going to get the message we share because our message is not accompanied by an appeal to the Spirit.

"Freedom" doesn't mean that the Lordship message is irrelevant or tolerable. But when we have reminded them of the freedom that comes by the Spirit, then we are leading them to remember the very things we are trying to correct in their theology. In that freedom, there is still room for a correction or two. In Acts they conclude their message of freedom to the churches this way:

"For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well." acts 15:28-29

Using this model, we are still free to give the Lordship bunch one or two important things to be working on -- just a couple of ideals in this particular age.

There may be a time where certain members of the lordship group need to be treated like heretics. But so long as the conversation is honest even if heated, we need to be careful to show them how to see our message, which is that we are indeed saved and sanctified through faith.

Looking forward to your reaction, Michele