Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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8. Therefore, perhaps it would be useful to summarize the key principles in play, the "big rocks," as it were. What are the core principles of holiness that we have uncovered in our journey so far?
- Holiness for us as humans is belonging to God, which both makes us holy/purifies us of our past sins and also necessitates that we be free from sin going forward.
- The essence of sin is a choice that is contrary to the love of God and our neighbor, although we can unintentionally wrong others as well. However, this latter is not the focus of the New Testament.
- God promises us that the Holy Spirit can empower us to live victoriously over every temptation we face. We can consistently rise above temptation by God's grace. This is a promise from the very moment we receive the Spirit when we are joined to Christ.
- Since Adam, humanity has been under the power of Sin. However, the Holy Spirit delivers us from Sin's grip on us. If we find ourselves losing to Sin, the antidote is the power of the Spirit through a relationship with God.
- We are filled with the Spirit when we appropriate the atonement of Christ and become part of the people of God. But we can and must be filled with the Spirit continuously as believers. This is not just when we face particular tasks, but it is an ongoing need. To rise above Sin, we must be in an ongoing relationship with the Holy Spirit.
- Many Christians testify to an experience when they became a "fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ." They experience this moment as a crisis experience when, after fully surrendering their lives to Christ to the fullest degree they knew how, they sensed the filling of God's Spirit in their lives.
- If our relationship with Christ wanes, sin may creep back into our lives. For this reason, we may have to have such a crisis experience more than once on our journey.
The way these details play out in our individual stories may vary somewhat, but the goal is the same for all of us. God wants us to give him our full allegiance and devotion. He wants us to love him and our neighbors fully. He stands ready to make it happen. He wants to fill us to the full with his presence in our hearts and lives.
9. Although at times Paul used dualistic language of flesh and Spirit to present these truths, other parts of Scripture speak of the heart as the center of our moral being. We should take all of these images as pictures and metaphors. It seems obvious to us today that our skin doesn't make decisions, nor do our hearts. These were possibly already metaphors for them too.
A modern picture might see us as a combination of intellect, emotion, and will. We know today that our brain is the organ that primarily facilitates these functions. [3] Different parts of the brain play more central roles in these functions, but all are ultimately involved. Nevertheless, the division of our psychology into intellect, emotion, and will can be helpful.
Our intellects are of course involved in all our moral decisions. And our decisions shape our minds and thinking. Our thinking involves patterns and habits, like paths that we create walking through a field over and over again. Sanctification involves the creation of new paths, new patterns of thinking. Sanctification involves "the renewal of our minds" (Rom. 12:2).
However, mistakes in our ideas are not in themselves morally good or bad. They are correct or incorrect, but in themselves they do not indicate a lack of holiness or purity. Impure thoughts have to do with what we are thinking about rather than our beliefs themselves. Certainly, our sanctification will affect our ideas on some level.
One of the strengths of the Wesleyan tradition is to realize that getting our ideas straight does not stand at the heart of sanctification. Modern psychological study has confirmed what was there in the Bible all along. Our actions flow from a deeper part of our being than intellectual ideas, although sometimes deeper motivations are disguised as ideas.
Studies show that our ideas are more often "fronts" for deeper emotions, drives, and desires -- often without us even knowing it. Jesus (unsurprisingly) was correct when he said that our moral identity flows from our hearts, not our minds (Mark 7:21). Similarly, Romans 12:2 is not talking about ideas but the renewing of our attitudes -- as is seen in the examples Paul plays out in the next three chapters.
If our lives and relationships change, our ideas will change. But it seldom really works the other way around. Ideas are weak motivators in themselves. It is only when they are "fronts" for much deeper impulses and drives that they become immensely powerful.
10. Similarly, emotions in themselves are neither good nor bad. They just are. It is what we do with them that is the moral element. For example, I can feed my anger. That is a choice. But anger in itself is not a sin (Eph. 4:26).
Our body's biochemistry has an obvious effect on how we are feeling. If a person struggles with blood sugar, they might feel sad or angry when their blood sugar is out of balance. These are challenges their body chemistry may present to them. Many of us will know the idea of someone being "hangry" because they need to eat. These feelings are neither good nor bad morally, although they can cause us to face moral choices.
11. But the moral center of a person is his or her will. Despite how we feel, what choices do we make? Despite the desires we have pushing us in various directions -- often different directions at the same time -- what will we choose? Even when we have bad ideas that conflict with the love of others, will we act in love when it comes to making the choice. We are assuming the power of the Holy Spirit to make the right choice.
This view of moral choice is set out well by James 1:13-15. "Stop saying when you are tempted that 'I am being tempted by God.' For God is not tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. Each person is tempted when he or she is carried away and enticed by his or her own desire. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it has grown up brings forth death."
From these verses, it is clear that temptation is not sin. Indeed, even the desire to do the wrong thing in itself is not sin (although it is sin to feed it and not work toward eliminating it). Sin takes place at the moment of choice to act on that sin, first in our minds and then in action. Sin in its most significant sense is an intentional choice contrary to what we know to be the right choice.
12. So, what is a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ? First, it is of course someone who has a relationship with Christ and is "in" Christ. It is not about merely knowing theology about Christ or merely having orthodox beliefs. There are plenty of people with orthodox beliefs who don't know Christ. Jesus mentions them in Matthew 7:21-23. It is not focused on having "all knowledge" or understanding all "mysteries" (1 Cor. 13:2). It is not focused on having great spiritual gifts like prophecy or tongues-speaking or a faith that moves mountains (13:1-2).
It is about knowing Christ and being found in him (Phil. 3:9-10). It is about having the Spirit of Christ within us (Rom. 8:9-11). It is for our fleshly selves to be crucified and for Christ now to live through us (Gal. 2:20). It is to begin the journey back to the Garden of Eden and the restoration of our original humanity. It is the beginning of the restoration of the image of God in us.
I have not mentioned the restoration of the image of God in us to this point. It is somewhat abstract but, yes, we are restored more and more to God's likeness (Col. 3:10). We become more and more like Christ -- who loved not only his friends but his enemies as well.
We can begin to walk again with God in the Garden like Adam and Eve did in the cool of the day. We become friends of Christ (John 15:15). We dine with him as friend with friend (Rev. 3:20).
In the Bible, the image of God has three principal connotations. In Genesis 1:27, it is primarily about the place of humanity in relation to the creation, often called the "political" image. However, in the New Testament it has much more to do with the honor and dignity humanity has as a reflection of God. We are not to curse others because our neighbor is created in God's likeness (Jas. 3:9).
Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24 seem to connect our "new self" as a believer to being holy, which we might call the "moral" image. This aspect of God's image relates directly to our moral living, and as usual Paul pictures it as something that happens with our conversion. Only 2 Corinthians 3:18 pictures this transformation into the image of Christ as something that takes place in multiple stages.
13. From a practical perspective, being a fully devoted follower of Christ is a matter of our choices and the accumulation of our choices that becomes our character. In our choices, a fully devoted follower of Christ is someone who lives by the principles of Colossians 3:17 and 1 Corinthians 10:31.
"So everything, whatever you do in word or deed, do all things in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Col. 3:17).
"Therefore, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all things to the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31).
Paul's instructions are to surrender all our decisions to the Lord. He commands us to make every choice a choice for God. We can only do this by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our part is to co-operate with God's will, to surrender our every decision -- and every outcome -- to God. We live day to day out of faithful allegiance to Christ (Rom. 14:23). We choose to enter into his rest every day that is called today (Heb. 3:13).
14. How do we get to this point of relationship? As we have said repeatedly, it will usually involve a crisis moment of surrender. There are exceptions. There are those rare people who have a moment of realization that they have reached a new level of relationship with God without hardly noticing when it took place.
In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Wesley mentions that it is sometimes imperceivable. He writes, "But in some this change was not instantaneous. They did not perceive the instant when it was wrought. It is often difficult to perceive the instant when a man dies; yet there is an instant in which life ceases. And if ever sin ceases, there must be a last moment of its existence, and a first moment of our deliverance from it." [4] He is arguing that there must have been a moment when we became a fully devoted follower of Christ, even if we are not fully aware of it.
No matter. It is not worth squabbling over such things. The key is that all believers must either come to such a point of full surrender, or their spiritual life will turn toward decline. And if we do not turn around at some point in that decline, we will inevitably fall away (Heb. 6:4-8)...
[3] At least on the surface, our brains appear to be the place where these functions take place. We can hypothesize that the soul circumvenes in some way on our physical brain. However, at least on the surface, it does not seem needed to account for any function -- there is no gap for which the existence of the soul accounts. It is thus a matter of blind faith if one believes it is important to be literal. Some Christians see even the soul as another picture rather than a literal entity. Cf. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic, 2008). They account for resurrection as God's creation of a new body (perhaps starting with the remains of our previous one). Some have even suggested that God creates a temporary body to account for an intermediate state between death and resurrection. This debate is not really essential for our topic.
[4] John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, 12.11.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story
1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)
2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)
3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)
4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)
4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)
