Original YT playout date: 27 December 2008
Duration: 24:31
Bob Vieira joins me this evening and I open the mike to him to say whatever he likes to the viewers of this channel. We kick off with a little recounting of the story of the Elephant Man before launching on a ful discussion of the Gospel of salvation by faith. As the Pope has made discussion of homosexuality topical again with his recent comparison to the rainforests, we also discuss what is the chance for a homosexual to be a true believer.
Feel free to join in the debate by adding your comments below. Remember this is a discussion of theological principals and not an attempt to type-cast any individual or make them feel personally got at. Therefore lets try to keep the below comments free of personal remarks, but to focus on substantive arguments. Continue reading “The Gospel and Continuing Sin”→
Because through fall and redemption man achieves a oneness and intimacy with God that no angel ever had. As Jesus put it “he who is forgiven much, loves much”.
In the main people disbelieve because they choose to disbelieve, because they love something else, usually a sin, more than God and wish to continue in the rebellion against God, and the biggest rebellion against God is to disacknowledge Him entirely by unbelief.
Why did God make Satan or angels capable of falling? A precursor probably to human redemption. Angels are from the beginning supposed to minister to the heirs of salvation. Human believers will judge angels. If Satan was made fallible, it was also for our good.
When it says “all things work together for good to them that love God, to those that are called according to his promises” I take it literally.
Even what Satan determines for our ill becomes good, just as Joseph said to his brothers that they intended him harm, but God intended it for good.
Do you think I should share these explanations with a broader public on HTV?
In repentance, we define sin as a failure. This is a change of mind and heart (a ‘metanoia’ as repentance is in Greek) because before our repentance we would not have acknowledged our sins as failures before God. The same thoughts and activities would have been a normal part of our day and would not have bothered us.
Let us now take an instance of such failure, such as getting annoyed and saying a filthy word, because something bad has happened and before we could control ourselves out came the word. An unrepentant person will regard that as perfectly justifiable although in order to show breeding if they are in company they may show some embarrassment at it, or try not to do it, but if they were alone an unrepentant person wouldn’t give it a second thought.
A penitent person, a believer, even if he was alone and nobody heard his cuss word, will know that in that moment he failed.
There are now two opposite and equally wrong things the believer can then do with this failure.
The first is to bagatellize it and not earnestly strive to do better the next time, to make out that it was no sin and nothing to be upset about. This is a wrong approach and to use grace to justify poor discipleship is decried in scripture. However, there are those who think they have no sin any more as Christians precisely because they have unfortunately taught themselves to ignore these slip-ups, and forget that a mere cuss-word like that would be enough to damn someone for eternity even if they had no other sin, even if they only thought it and managed not even to say it, but it was there in their heads, tarnishing their holiness.
The second error is to get into such despair over the failure to be perfect when God has said “be ye perfect, as I am perfect” that they begin to doubt their salvation over it. They need to remember that Jesus warned the believers that the flesh is weak and that Paul warned us that we could not do as well as we wanted to. The flesh, or the world, or the devil may have provoked the sin of the cuss word, but it is mainly the whisperings of the devil in our ears that because we did that sin, and are not as good as we should be, that we are not God’s own and might as well give up.
Between these opposites is the correct attitude of acknowledging the sin and admitting it was a sin to God, asking for His forgiveness, knowing that it is given that very instant as promised, expressing gratitude to God for the forgiveness Jesus earned and granted for us, and getting back on the programme with more care to avoid that sin in the future, as we know that God wants better for us and from us than that.
