Blog on the Lillypad
Friday, December 05, 2003
 | Another Fundamentalist Preacher has Fallen |
This man is repentant---anyway, he became repentant when directly confronted. He has stepped down from his ministry, confessed his sin before his church, asked forgiveness of those he has wronged, and appears to be undergoing discipling. I'm sorry (and surprised) at his fall (and no, it was not adultery), but in it there is some welcome sight of a man who truly is repentant and is not trying to hold onto his office and justify himself as so many have done with bravado and arrogance.
Yet, there it is again: the Untouchables are touched by their own frailty and sin. How often at BJU did I hear about PRINCIPLES! Oh, if you live by these principles, young people, your life will be right with God. Oh what crap. (BTW, I did hear a lot of sound doctrine at BJU.) The principles of Christian living had taken over while I was there. As though making a decision to do the right thing has ever, EVER worked for depraved sinners. Give us a new set of rules and we'll just find new ways to break some of them and get around others.
How the chapel platform was elevated, and how much it was praised when I was there. Yet how many men who have stood there are now out of the ministry, ruined by sin; and some have ruined others. And now, many of the people who have pushed principles are fallen into the incredible, bigoted ignorance of the KJVO movement, or outright sin has claimed them in their own strength. Their women didn't wear slacks and their men had short hair. Their young people didn't go to movies, and nobody drank beer. Yet they still fell. They even read their Bibles regularly and were in church three times a week. What principle saves us from what we are? What principle undoes our thinking and our very hearts?
The only principle is grace. Granted, the roadmap of the wisdom of Scripture is excellent and beyond excellent. It shows us that the thinking of man has never changed. It shows us redemption has never faltered. It demonstrates the thinking of God to us as He reasons with us. It gives us the blueprint for happiness. But David himself, though he praised God for the excellence and perfection of the Law, only two or three verses later also mourned because his heart harbored sins that even he didn't recognize or know about himself. By the end of Psalm 19, he has exalted the witness of the stars and the perfection of God's law as perfect testaments of God's righteousness, yet still he turns and pleads with God to hold him back from what he is, because even these two great witnesses cannot do that for him. Only God sustains us in the midst of what we are.
What will I do if God forsakes me for a moment? Or what will I say when I see Him face to face, if He expects me to have lived by the principles that so many of these preachers have laid down for me? My hope in the judgement day is the same hope I have today---that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and has atoned for me and purchased for me a position of favor with God. That Christ has committed Himself to work in me and through me to begin a glorious transformation, giving me tastes of heaven here on earth to sustain me in this struggle and battle until I go to be with Him and all my sin is no more.
That's it. That's all we have. And that's everything. Christ is the victory over sin. Nothing else will keep us.
