Bumping this discussion to the top. I, too, would be curious to hear an update. I'm guessing there have been unavoidable delays on this, but would appreciate word when the recordings become available!
Regards,
CThomas
How You Know You're Saved
Re: How You Know You're Saved
If you say the "sinner's prayer" while you are taking "14 steps to your better life now" are you saved twice?
Re: How You Know You're Saved
Sorry for the delay, guys. The lectures exist as mp3 files, but I have been distracted by many trips (and catching up on duties at home between trips), so that getting them posted has not taken the priority that it should have. I have to mail disks to Ireland and Oregon. I will see if I can get that done today.
Re: How You Know You're Saved
No rush, of course. Although I do have a more than passing interest in finding out whether or not I'm saved. [humor emoticon]
CThomas
CThomas
Re: How You Know You're Saved
(edited)
Last edited by Paidion on Wed Jun 17, 2009 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
Paidion
Man judges a person by his past deeds, and administers penalties for his wrongdoing. God judges a person by his present character, and disciplines him that he may become righteous.
Avatar shows me at 75 years old. I am now 83.
Man judges a person by his past deeds, and administers penalties for his wrongdoing. God judges a person by his present character, and disciplines him that he may become righteous.
Avatar shows me at 75 years old. I am now 83.
Re: How You Know You're Saved
Paidion,
You wrote:
Your (or MacDonald's) statement could be understood in several ways.
You wrote:
What do you think "free from his sins means? Sin has become optional for the man? He never again sins? He occasionally sins but doesn't want to? Since James said "we all stumble in many ways", is anyone safe? Or are we safe by being in Christ, altough imperfect?As George MacDonald put it, "No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins."
Your (or MacDonald's) statement could be understood in several ways.
Re: How You Know You're Saved
When we read George MacDonald's statement in context, we find that there is no ambiguity (bolding for emphasis is mine):
The one cure for any organism is to be set right, to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is the only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health is at the root of man's being. His rightness is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. The wrong, the evil that is in a man; he must be set free from it. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature, the wrongness in him, the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
To save a man from his sins, is to say to him, "Rise up and walk. Be at liberty in your essential being. Be free as the son of God is free." To do this for us, and for the people of every age, Jesus was born. I believe that the increasing outcry against existence is a sign of growth of society toward a sense of needing regeneration. When misery drives a man to call out to the source of his life, the answer will come in his conscience coming alive. In all probability, this little taste of the promised deliverance will not be what the man wants. He will want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, unless he is delivered from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that leads to liberty. There can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.
It is true that Jesus came, in delivering us from our sins, to deliver us also from the painful consequences of our sins. But these consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of the Perfect One. When that law if broken, the cause -- sin. At least the pain tends toward the healing of the breach. The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while those sins remained. That would be to throw the medicine out the window while the man still lies sick! That would be to come directly against the very laws of existence! Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have (consistently with their low condition) constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. This idea (this miserable fancy rather) has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered. Such men are unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining Him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving outright; not really believing Him to be God our Saviour, but a God bound (either by His own nature or by a law above Him and compulsory upon him) to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin. Many such teachers have taught their fellows that Jesus came to take upon Himself our punishment and to save us from hell. They have represented a result of Christ's mission as the object of His mission. The object of Christ's mission was to save us from sin. One of the results is to be saved from hell. The true man does not desire the result except as a consequent on the gain of the object. The mission of Jesus was from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our sins --- to cure our sin-sick condition. He came to work along with out punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins. A man to whom his sins are a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as if he were in hell, will soon have forgotten that he ever had any other hell to think about than that of his sinful condition. For to him, his sins are hell. He would be willing to go to the other hell to be free of them. If he were free of them, hell itself would be endurable to him. For hell is God's and not the devil's. Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell except by being saved from his sins, from the evil within him. If hell is necessary to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father. "Salvation from hell" is the concept of those for whom hell rather than evil, is the terror. But even if some poor soul seeks the Father because of dread of hell, he will be heard by the Father in his terror, and will be taught by Him to seek the greater gift --- freedom from his sins. In the greater gift, he will also receive the lesser --- escape from hell.
There is another important misconception in the words of these corrupters of the gospel message. They threaten us with punishment because of the sins we have committed. Yet the substance of their message is of forgiveness, not vengeance; deliverance, not woes to come. Not for anything he has committed do they threaten a man with the outer darkness. Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned; not for the worst of them does he need to fear remaining unforgiven. The sin in which he dwells, the sin of which he will not come out. That sin is the sole ruin of a man. His present live sins, those sins pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, but to which he clings instead, the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it --- these are the sins for which he is even now condemned. It is true that the memory of the wrongs we have done is (or will become ) very bitter. But condemnation is not for those. If that in our character which made those sins possible were abolished, remorse would lose its worse bitterness in the hope of future amends. "This is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."
It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, from which we need to be delivered. If a man will not strive against this badness, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being (no essential part of it, thank God!) ---this is that from which He came to deliver us --- not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore.As this possibility departs, and we confess to those we have wronged, the power over us of our evil deeds will depart also, and so shall we be saved from them. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction ---- these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, that is, the deeds we do, because they not only produce these loathsome characteristics, but they make us just as loathsome. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins. These sins, the essential opposites of faith and love, these sins that dwell in us and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but at the same time begin to die. We are then on the Lord's side, and He begins to deliver us from them.
Extracted from George MacDonald's The Hope of the Gospel, chapter 1: Salvation from Sin
The one cure for any organism is to be set right, to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is the only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health is at the root of man's being. His rightness is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. The wrong, the evil that is in a man; he must be set free from it. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature, the wrongness in him, the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
To save a man from his sins, is to say to him, "Rise up and walk. Be at liberty in your essential being. Be free as the son of God is free." To do this for us, and for the people of every age, Jesus was born. I believe that the increasing outcry against existence is a sign of growth of society toward a sense of needing regeneration. When misery drives a man to call out to the source of his life, the answer will come in his conscience coming alive. In all probability, this little taste of the promised deliverance will not be what the man wants. He will want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, unless he is delivered from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that leads to liberty. There can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.
It is true that Jesus came, in delivering us from our sins, to deliver us also from the painful consequences of our sins. But these consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of the Perfect One. When that law if broken, the cause -- sin. At least the pain tends toward the healing of the breach. The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while those sins remained. That would be to throw the medicine out the window while the man still lies sick! That would be to come directly against the very laws of existence! Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have (consistently with their low condition) constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. This idea (this miserable fancy rather) has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered. Such men are unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining Him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving outright; not really believing Him to be God our Saviour, but a God bound (either by His own nature or by a law above Him and compulsory upon him) to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin. Many such teachers have taught their fellows that Jesus came to take upon Himself our punishment and to save us from hell. They have represented a result of Christ's mission as the object of His mission. The object of Christ's mission was to save us from sin. One of the results is to be saved from hell. The true man does not desire the result except as a consequent on the gain of the object. The mission of Jesus was from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our sins --- to cure our sin-sick condition. He came to work along with out punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins. A man to whom his sins are a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as if he were in hell, will soon have forgotten that he ever had any other hell to think about than that of his sinful condition. For to him, his sins are hell. He would be willing to go to the other hell to be free of them. If he were free of them, hell itself would be endurable to him. For hell is God's and not the devil's. Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell except by being saved from his sins, from the evil within him. If hell is necessary to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father. "Salvation from hell" is the concept of those for whom hell rather than evil, is the terror. But even if some poor soul seeks the Father because of dread of hell, he will be heard by the Father in his terror, and will be taught by Him to seek the greater gift --- freedom from his sins. In the greater gift, he will also receive the lesser --- escape from hell.
There is another important misconception in the words of these corrupters of the gospel message. They threaten us with punishment because of the sins we have committed. Yet the substance of their message is of forgiveness, not vengeance; deliverance, not woes to come. Not for anything he has committed do they threaten a man with the outer darkness. Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned; not for the worst of them does he need to fear remaining unforgiven. The sin in which he dwells, the sin of which he will not come out. That sin is the sole ruin of a man. His present live sins, those sins pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, but to which he clings instead, the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it --- these are the sins for which he is even now condemned. It is true that the memory of the wrongs we have done is (or will become ) very bitter. But condemnation is not for those. If that in our character which made those sins possible were abolished, remorse would lose its worse bitterness in the hope of future amends. "This is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."
It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, from which we need to be delivered. If a man will not strive against this badness, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being (no essential part of it, thank God!) ---this is that from which He came to deliver us --- not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore.As this possibility departs, and we confess to those we have wronged, the power over us of our evil deeds will depart also, and so shall we be saved from them. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction ---- these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, that is, the deeds we do, because they not only produce these loathsome characteristics, but they make us just as loathsome. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins. These sins, the essential opposites of faith and love, these sins that dwell in us and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but at the same time begin to die. We are then on the Lord's side, and He begins to deliver us from them.
Extracted from George MacDonald's The Hope of the Gospel, chapter 1: Salvation from Sin
Paidion
Man judges a person by his past deeds, and administers penalties for his wrongdoing. God judges a person by his present character, and disciplines him that he may become righteous.
Avatar shows me at 75 years old. I am now 83.
Man judges a person by his past deeds, and administers penalties for his wrongdoing. God judges a person by his present character, and disciplines him that he may become righteous.
Avatar shows me at 75 years old. I am now 83.
Re: How You Know You're Saved
Paidion,
Thanks for your reply! But I had no idea what MacDonald thought it means to be free from sins, and thus saved, until the last three sentences:
Romans 8:13 (New American Standard Bible)
13. for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Is that what you mean, and Macdonald meant? Progressive sanctification?
Thanks, and blessings, Homer
Thanks for your reply! But I had no idea what MacDonald thought it means to be free from sins, and thus saved, until the last three sentences:
I think he means:These sins, the essential opposites of faith and love, these sins that dwell in us and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but at the same time begin to die. We are then on the Lord's side, and He begins to deliver us from them.
Romans 8:13 (New American Standard Bible)
13. for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Is that what you mean, and Macdonald meant? Progressive sanctification?
Thanks, and blessings, Homer
Re: How You Know You're Saved
Thank you for your response, Homer.
I'm not sure why some want to call it "sanctification" (not necessarily you, Homer) and thereby place it in a separate category from "salvation". In that way of thinking, we are saved from hell, but sanctified from our personal sins. As George MacDonald saw it, salvation from personal sinning is the only kind of salvation which Christ provided.
But it doesn't matter what appelation is given to this process of sin being eliminated from our lives by the enabling grace of God, made possible by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Paul said that He who began a good work in you will continue the process of completing it until the day of Jesus Christ when it will, in fact, be completed. However, if we are not coöperating with the enabling grace of God to effect this process, in other words, if we are not staying on the narrow path which leads to life, we are not going to be instantly and magically changed into the image of Christ at His coming because of Christ's "substitutionary work" on the cross. Notice that MacDonald denies this concept of Christ taking our punishment for us so that we can get off scott free. (I can get away with using "scott" in this way because of my own Scotch ancestry). MacDonald believed, and I believe, that the purpose of Christ's death was not to cover our sin, but to save us from sin (that is, to deliver us from our own "live" sins, the present sins which we practice, and of which we refuse to let go. If we won't repent and turn from these sins in this life, we'll have to deal with them in the next. As George MacDonald wrote, "The Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds to his sins. He also wrote, "Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from corruption and death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell except by being saved from his sins, from the evil that is in him. If hell is necessary to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father."
I'm not sure why some want to call it "sanctification" (not necessarily you, Homer) and thereby place it in a separate category from "salvation". In that way of thinking, we are saved from hell, but sanctified from our personal sins. As George MacDonald saw it, salvation from personal sinning is the only kind of salvation which Christ provided.
But it doesn't matter what appelation is given to this process of sin being eliminated from our lives by the enabling grace of God, made possible by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Paul said that He who began a good work in you will continue the process of completing it until the day of Jesus Christ when it will, in fact, be completed. However, if we are not coöperating with the enabling grace of God to effect this process, in other words, if we are not staying on the narrow path which leads to life, we are not going to be instantly and magically changed into the image of Christ at His coming because of Christ's "substitutionary work" on the cross. Notice that MacDonald denies this concept of Christ taking our punishment for us so that we can get off scott free. (I can get away with using "scott" in this way because of my own Scotch ancestry). MacDonald believed, and I believe, that the purpose of Christ's death was not to cover our sin, but to save us from sin (that is, to deliver us from our own "live" sins, the present sins which we practice, and of which we refuse to let go. If we won't repent and turn from these sins in this life, we'll have to deal with them in the next. As George MacDonald wrote, "The Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds to his sins. He also wrote, "Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from corruption and death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell except by being saved from his sins, from the evil that is in him. If hell is necessary to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father."
Paidion
Man judges a person by his past deeds, and administers penalties for his wrongdoing. God judges a person by his present character, and disciplines him that he may become righteous.
Avatar shows me at 75 years old. I am now 83.
Man judges a person by his past deeds, and administers penalties for his wrongdoing. God judges a person by his present character, and disciplines him that he may become righteous.
Avatar shows me at 75 years old. I am now 83.
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darinhouston
- Posts: 3114
- Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2008 7:45 am
Re: How You Know You're Saved
I obviously haven't heard it yet, but was thinking it might make a good multi-session study series for a small group at our church. Anyone interested in helping me put together some study/thought/discussion questions based on the lectures when they're posted?