Christian Concepts

Bringing your Potential to Light

Archives for September 2023

A Correct Theology Is Life Changing

A Correct Theology Is Life-Changing

by 1 Comment

Reading time: 4 minutes

Given that life can often be challenging, a robust theology is one of the easiest ways to save yourself from unnecessary heartache.

Imagine going on a journey and coming to a fork in the road. Should you go left or right? The two paths might appear to go in the same basic direction, but over time they diverge. If you make a wrong choice early on in life, it can take years to backtrack and go the right way.

If you read the Bible the wrong way, you can end up seeing only what you want to see or what you think it says, instead of what it actually says. The Bible is the only source of truth that describes the reality of creation. But, it is also authored by God so that only with the help of His Spirit, can we understand what it says.

Correct Theology Requires Accurate Interpretation

Developing a theology means conducting a review of the Bible’s main teachings about God and life.

The Bible’s words of truth must be interpreted. The challenge with any written word is determining what the original author meant. Words are simply labels for concepts and meanings. What you call something matters very little. But the meaning we feel and understand in our hearts, our heads, or our spirits — that is everything. As you might see, this is why communication can be so prone to misunderstanding. Words can mean totally different ideas to different people.

Each person has a distinct identity (or personality). Each person also has their own unique experiences. The combination of unique experiences and the interpretation of those experiences creates diversity. Diversity can increase the potential for rich experiences, but as it does, it can just as easily increase the potential for gross misunderstanding. When you are trying to communicate with others, pay attention to how your experiences shape your understanding. Be patient with the time it takes to synchronize your inner meanings with someone else’s perspectives.

Correct Theology Leads To Confident Living

A correct theology keeps your mind in sync with your creator. Confident living doesn’t mean perfect living without mistakes or difficulties. But it does mean peaceful living because God is in control. Knowing the truth and walking in it is confident living. God handles the errors. God makes the corrections as needed to keep us on the right path.

The LORD directs the steps of the godly.
He delights in every detail of their lives.
Though they stumble, they will never fall,
for the LORD holds them by the hand.

Psalm 37:23-24 NLT

How to Develop a Correct Theology

Read the Bible and ask the Holy Spirit to help you interpret. If you go to the source, you will have the best opportunity to understand the truth. However, it’s also possible to be blinded by particularly negative life experiences. These experiences can inject false beliefs and motivations into our lives. They cloud the truth, making it difficult to see clearly.

The Christian journey is not meant to be traveled alone. God gives us other people with various and diverse gifts of the Spirit to help the community of all believers to thrive. I believe it’s important to develop convictions about the major teaching of the Bible in areas like the following:

  • God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. My study of the Bible has led me to conclude that God’s sovereignty has greater significance than man’s free will. God, as creator, can change man so that man’s will is in line with God’s heart. But man, without God’s complete help, cannot overcome sin. Yes, man has free will, but only within the system of life that God has created. It is an illusion to think that man can have complete free will apart from God. God holds creation together by His power (Colossians 1:16-17).
  • Are believers eternally secure in their salvation, or can they lose it (and potentially gain it back again)? See my other posts for my views on why believers have eternal security, even though they must still persevere in their faith.
  • Does a non-believer use faith to believe in God? Or does God initiate regeneration, giving people the faith to believe? See 1 Peter 1:3-5 below which shows that “God caused us to be born again” and it is “by God’s power we are being guarded through faith for a salvation.”

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

1 Peter 1:3-5 ESV

I found 40 Questions About Salvation by Matthew Barrett to be instrumental in explaining the theology of the Bible with regard to salvation. When you study the Bible to develop correct theology, I guarantee it will be life-changing.

Learn more about interpreting the Bible.
Learn more about eternal security.
Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

Jesus Will Never Reject His Children

Jesus Will Never Reject His Children

by 2 Comments

Reading time: 4 minutes

How would it change your life if you knew that Jesus would never reject a believer like you? Life is hard with many difficult situations to endure (death, pain, suffering). God asks us to believe He is perfect love despite sometimes allowing terrible circumstances. Real faith is required to look beyond life’s negative events and see God’s love.

Fortunately, God gives us His Holy Spirit, enabling us to see God by faith. He makes profound promises about His relationship with us. If you are a believer, uncertainty and rejection die with your belief in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Certainty and acceptance are possible as faith sees the reality of God’s kingdom in the present moment, even though it isn’t fully realized, yet.

Never Rejected, No, Never

Jesus explains the kind of salvation he offers in John 10.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.

John 10:27-29 ESV

In the clause “and they shall never perish” John uses the double negative with the aorist subjunctive, which is a very emphatic way of declaring that something will not happen in the future. Jesus is categorically excluding the slightest chance of an apostasy by his sheep. A literal translation would be something like, “They shall not, repeat, shall not ever perish in the slightest.”

Christian Theology, M. J. Erickson, Baker Book House, 1985, pg. 992

This kind of assurance is truly Good News. The Gospel, without such security, would be a different gospel than the Bible teaches. Can you imagine believing you will be in heaven today, but tomorrow fearing God’s eternal wrath believing you have been ejected from God’s family? Then with repentence the next day believing you will be in heaven? Then rejected again when you sin? The Bible says this is impossible because Jesus’s death was sufficient for all time (past, present, future). If it lacks the power to keep a person saved, Jesus would need to die all over again (Hebrews 6:4-6). Thankfully, God is all-powerful rendering such worries unwarranted.

Never Rejected, But Doubting

Even with such direct statements of eternal security, believers must contend with the spiritual forces of fear and doubt. God would have us strengthen our trust in Him against these principalities and powers.

What might cause someone to doubt their salvation? It’s typically a sin. It’s hard to face when we do something cruel to someone else. The guilt can cause us to believe God will reject us. Jesus’s sacrifice means there is no longer condemnation for believers. Such forgiveness can seem to be too generous to believe, but that is the Good News of the Gospel! When this wonderful generosity is accepted with humility, it creates a heart response of gratefulness rather than a desire to sin more (Romans 5:20–6:3).

What about when someone sins against us? We might learn (come to believe) that we are not worth being saved. Present-day experiences can trigger memories of events that were intensely harmful. Following are some situations that might dig up the past:

  • Being lied to
  • Being ignored
  • Being interrupted
  • Waiting (uncertainty)
  • Being teased
  • Being criticized
  • Invasion of personal space

What do these have in common? They all can communicate insignificance (some directly and some more subtly):

  • Being lied to -> can’t trust or be trusted
  • Being ignored -> not worth the time or engagement
  • Being interrupted -> voice is not important or worth hearing
  • Waiting (uncertainty) -> don’t deserve good things
  • Being teased -> inferior
  • Being criticized -> defective
  • Invasion of personal space -> don’t have a valuable self that is worth protecting

These will likely cause everyone some distress, but people who have experienced abuse might recall the deep distress of older abuse. Some people have become resilient enough to overcome negative experiences. The difference has to do with a person’s self-image. The weaker the self-image, the easier it is to allow negative spiritual forces to overwhelm with falsehood, intensifying the pain to crushing levels.

The combination of (1) significant past negative treatment (2) current triggering negative treatment, and (3) preying spiritual forces can be enough to cause people to question their status before God.

But as we have seen, Jesus is emphatic that believers are securely His. The song Love Still Bids You Welcome captures this well. Even though we sin, God holds onto us with a grip that does not slip. Anyone who has tasted God’s goodness would never want to let go of God, but even so, because of our weakness, we must rely on God’s strength.

He will not cast you out. Whoever enters in will forever dwell with Him. God cannot reject a believer; he or she is a child of God forever.

Learn more about God’s goodness amidst tragedy.
Listen to the song sung at CCF.
Where to purchase (not a commission link)
Image by Jeff Kingma from Pixabay