:minimalist

Friday, October 29, 2004

 

Interesting message @ fellowship tonight. Interesting/deep enough to talk about here, anyway. So, this guy was talking about personal spiritual growth. He basically talked about two things - the essence of and motivation behind spiritual growth.

The essence of spiritual growth consists of two things - faith and obedience. They're not independent of each other, though. He talked about people who say "Oh, I have faith, but I'm having trouble obeying" and essentially said that was crap because faith without obedience isn't faith (in the same way that James says faith without works is dead). Our faith is manifested through our obedience to Christ. Which really convicted me. Yeah.

His message on motivation... he talked about how the Old Testament has 600+ laws, but the New Testament has something on the order of 2,000 instructions from Jesus, Paul, etc. He said something really interesting about the "western church" having a problem with the connection between salvation and eternity in Christ... basically, people think "Okay, I've got my salvation, now I'll just wait until I die and in the meantime, do whatever I want here on earth." But the danger in that, he said, is that you don't have assurance of your salvation unless there's fruit in your life. So if there's no growth, you can't be assured of salvation. He touched very briefly on the whole thing about perseverance of the saints... for awhile, I was confused and thinking about whether or not he was saying that you could lose your salvation if you weren't growing. I'm still not positive what his perspective on that was, but the basic message is still there - as followers of Christ, we need to demonstrate that we are really in a relationship with Him. No dead faith.

Yeah.

bananna 10:17 PM  |