Love, Prayer, and Forgiveness: When Basics Become Heresies

Love, Prayer, and Forgiveness:

When Basics Become Heresies

Michael C. Snow

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2004, 2012 by Michael C. Snow

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Print edition ISBN 1-594676-64-X

Xulon Press

Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations are taken from the New King James Version of the Bible. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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To

My sons

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Will we have the courage to draw a line, and to do it publicly, between those who take a full view of Scripture and those who have been infiltrated theologically and culturally? If we do not have the courage, we will cut the ground out from under the feet of our children, and we will destroy any hope of being the redeeming salt and light of our dying culture.

Francis A. Schaeffer

The Great Evangelical Disaster

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One. Love and Obedience

Chapter Two. Prayer and Exhortation

Chapter Three. Forgiveness and Repentance

Chapter Four. Sin and Silence

Chapter Five. Holiness and Revival

Notes

Introduction

Josiah, king of Judah, desired to do what was right in the sight of the LORD (2 Kings 22). And in the pursuit of doing right, he had to face a neglected portion of Scripture which Hilkiah discovered in the Temple while workmen repaired the long-neglected damage. A scribe brought the dusty scroll to Josiah and read it to him. Now it happened, when the King heard the words of the Book of the Law, that he tore his clothes.

Contrast that scene with the turmoil of our age. In 1995, Judge Roy Moore refused to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom and Alabama’s governor supported this display of courage. But, in many states, the ACLU has continued to attack public displays of the Ten Commandments. (And the attacks on Judge Moore have continued into this century). Sometimes in today’s events, God’s law still makes the national news; yet, few Christians know the Ten Commandments in any order or form.

Today’s churches are the keepers of another law—Murphy’s Law. The first law we recognize but do not really know; the second lies in the shadows but plainly does its work day to day. It persistently sidetracks today’s church. Unlike public displays, we might find it inscribed on a plaque that is for sale in some by-the-wayside souvenir shop. But, in the local church, though not written, it is programmed into its very life.

Murphy’s Law simply states, If anything can go wrong, it will.

We usually think of its application in relation to mechanical things whether cars or computers. I was first warned about Murphy’s Law as a student naval aviator. Anyone who drives an automobile for many years will know the truth of this law. And those of us whose livelihood depends upon farm machinery that ranges in age from twenty years to over half of a century are well schooled in Murphy’s Law and its corollaries.

One of those corollaries is this: If Anything Can Be Hooked Up Backwards, It Will Be.

Just as this will put an end to our fruitful labor until things are put right in the mechanical field, so, also, in the spiritual arena. This corollary runs rampant throughout today’s churches with little acknowledgement. Even in the Church, as there were in the midst of God’s people Israel, there are those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness…(Isa. 5:20).

Charles Colson declares that our culture it at the point where there is no truth and no principles worth defending.[1]The day is upon us in which the anything goes philosophy of our society breezes through our churches. Tolerance is our watchword; pluralism our gatekeeper. Political correctness seeks to weed out any claim to truth. An epidemic of confusion sweeps over us.

The body infected by Murphy’s corollary stands starkly before us. Let us just look at the fancy footwork which Christians of all stripes use to justify blatant sins, whether it be the liberals who are legitimizing abortion and sodomy or the evangelicals who are winking at divorce and adultery. "Among adults who have been married, born again Christians and non-Christians have essentially the same probability of divorce"(emphasis added)—this finding of Barna Research topped their list of the most controversial statistics at the beginning of this century. {A recent study, with more restrictive definitions, found that devout Christians have 35% fewer divorces than the general populace. As one commentator noted, this is no cause to pat ourselves on the back.}Christians actually got angry at the messenger instead of asking, Why? George Barna states that the anger reflects the difficulty we sometimes have in changing our predispositions and coming to grips with a world that is rapidly changing and does not conform to the rules we believed were firmly entrenched.[3]

As the powerful wind of the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times—remember this word!) blows us along a new path, we take basic Christian essentials like love, prayer, and forgiveness and hook them up backwards. We hack them from their roots in the Bible and turn them into heresies.

How did we get here? Quite simply, we have forgotten the whole counsel of God.

In my lifetime, I have been blessed to learn under several noted Christian teachers. The one lesson, which has made the most difference, is centered on the word and. D. Elton Trueblood called this the holy conjunction. He emphasized this in key areas like Christ’s humanity and divinity; roots and fruits; the inner life of devotion and the outer life of service.

From the beginning of the Church, there were always those who failed in the struggle to hold these key essentials together. We see this in John’s first epistle. The church to which he wrote had divided. Under the strong influence of the spirit of the times, some Christians rejected the idea that the Messiah came in flesh and blood. They saw the world through dualistic lenses: In its essence, matter (e.g. flesh; that which is created) was evil; spirit was good.

One such contemporary of John’s was Cerinthus, who distinguished between Jesus, the man of flesh and blood, and the Christ, the spiritual being who, he claimed, descended upon Jesus at his baptism and departed before the crucifixion. Cerinthus’ dualistic view did not allow suffering for spiritual beings.

Against this sort of view, John wrote, By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God (1 John 4:2).

On the other side of the coin, there have always been those who viewed Jesus as only a man—maybe he was a wonderful prophet, or a great teacher, but still he was only a man. (And this heretical view is proclaimed in some pulpits today by popular authors.)

Either view gives us heresy. But with all its varied colors of polity, modes of baptism, and so forth, the Church through the ages has maintained that Jesus was fully God and fully man. Only in accepting the paradox that Christ Jesus was both human and divine do we continue in the biblical view.

The danger of heresy extends its sway beyond what we believe about Jesus into the arena where we listen to his teaching. When Jesus was asked which was the foremost commandment, he replied, You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

…And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’(Matt. 22:37, 39).

Again, we have the holy conjunction—and. To claim to love God but to not love our neighbor, or to try to get around Jesus description of a neighbor as illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan, is to enter into a sort of heresy.

First John states it thus: "He who says, ‘I know him’ and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him…

He who says he is in the light {divine}, and hates his brother {flesh}, is in the darkness until now (2:4, 9). (Keep in mind the dualistic view of those like Cerinthus.)

Love of God and love of neighbor make up the whole counsel of God, so that Jesus said, On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 22:40).

We need to keep alert, here, and heed a warning: while and holds together different aspects within Christian teaching, we need to beware that it can become the unholy conjunction when we try to combine Christian and non-Christian worldviews. C. S. Lewis illustrated this through the mouth of his diabolical character, Screwtape. In Letter XXV to his underling demon, Screwtape advises Wormwood about his strategy which he has devised against Christians:

What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call Christianity And. You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians, let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies.[2]

No matter how sublime or ridiculous the combination is, Christianity And something outside of itself sows the seeds of its own destruction. It is the yoking together of incompatible worldviews. As disciples, we need trained eyes to distinguish between these irreconcilable views, to recognize the genuine and detect the mirage, to discern the biblical claims and expose the counterfeit. (Today, one excellent ministry, which is equipping Christians to expose the counterfeit and present the truth, is that of Charles Colson. His BreakPoint program is broadcast Monday through Friday on Christian radio.) Christianity cannot be combined with secular fads or with false religions and at the same time remain true to God’s revelation.

God’s chosen people, Israel, illustrated this time after time. They decided that they wanted Yahweh And. The and encompassed the pagan deities of their neighbors. Look at the first chapter of Isaiah: God describes his children, his chosen people, as evildoers…corrupters who have forsaken the LORD (Yahweh) (v. 4).

Yes, they were still bringing a multitude of sacrifices (v. 11) to their LORD. They still regularly came to the Temple (v. 12) and observed all their religious holidays