#230-Grace? (And this is what we can do when we are in love with ourselves aka as if we keep on doing this, I would rather join the Black Panthers).

Appealing to grace when all you do is pray and go to church is almost as bad as a Nazi defending the Holocaust by pointing out how much the German economy had blossomed in the first decade of it's reign of power, and how low the unemployment rates were during that same period.

Okay, I jumped ahead of myself.

The thing I LOL at more than gnostic Pentecostals these days is when people rail on Acts 2:38 plan of salvation as works-based and thus heretical .

(cue awkward music):


These people who argue that being Apostolic Pentecostal is the same as not understanding the love of God (because, they say God's love isn't earned)....

These people who argue that salvation is found in faith and faith alone.

These people who have hijacked the very definition of love and manipulated it to simply meaning tolerance of others who we were told to not like by our parents in the past.

These people who happily point you to Romans 3-4 and Paul's exposition of faith via Abraham and the book of Galatians...

These people who end up talking about grace and love, fluffy clouds and Care Bears when they talk about their Christianity...

These people....

Psst...

Such corruption of grace and love is one of the most reviling theologies this side of the Enlightenment.

This very "grace" is talked about as "freeing" and tolerant is no grace at all.

Rather such grace treats the cross as an absolute debacle in which the message of Christianity is manipulated into a doctrine of "You may, but you don't have to because your saved because you once upon a time closed your eyes and apologized for what you did."

Now before I rant on, let me be clear...

Talking of God's grace as a thing to be sought is just as pathetic as someone seeking tongues to be saved. Grace, like tongues is not to be sought. It is to be received.

The point for the grace-monger who flaunts grace as the trump card to why a non-Apostolic Pentecostal Christianity is better than an Apostolic Pentecostal Christianity is inevitably a wicked system that allows for indifference and apathy in the name of Christ.

One who flaunts grace surely does not know grace.

The ones who know grace are the ones who are militantly acting in response to the Grace and love received at the cross.

This is why there are two kinds of liberal, ex-Apostolic Christianity...the ones whose sole selling point is the one that is purely reactionary who sell a Christianity based entirely in preaching that Christianity "is not that hard" and do so under the banner of grace in which the results is a pahetic indifference to the cross since it's all based on "belief."

And then there are the liberal ex-Apostolics who actually believe in grace and love and thus works faithfully to such an Event as God dying on the cross....these people know at their core that Christianity is no "selling point." They just work without disdain towards their past.

On Paul...

Paul's anger at circumcision is because it was authorizing a religion that based salvation in something other than that offered through death and resurrection of Christ. The thesis of Romans is not about how salvation is faith-based. No. He was simply saying initial salvation is not based on merit, but subsequently it's not based on a simple mental consent that at one point in time Jesus died and was raised again. (Note: I went off into a page and a half rant here in my notes about Paul and faith, with positive praise here for Paul Tillich, David K. Bernard and Pauline Pneumatology...except this has nothing to do about grace...but if you want to know what I was referencing, please find a copy of Bernard's paper on soteriology or read Paul Tillich's History of Christian Thought and it's discussion of reformation and Lutheran theology. Both say about the same thing, and both annihilate the deadlock of the faith/works debate with logical dedication to the work of the Spirit in the matter (without finding themselves in a Calvinist "predestination" argument))...


But my rant amounts to this: The entire thesis of Romans then leads us to Romans 8 where we are LED by the Spirit in Romans 8. Being "Led" means we are in the process of being saved and through the cross, the GAP is opened up in each one of us to FOLLOW what the Spirit wants us to do in each one of us.

This means, that as outlined in Acts 2:38, to come upon Salvation, there must be Action in response to the Event of the Crucifixion. The Situation is Urgent and we indeed are to Work in Response to His Love. Our salvation is dependent on our Action (poo-poo this point all you want, but I have never known a love that doesn't search endlessly to demonstrate a loving response to the One whom they Love from the One who loves them). We as christians are not the Kings of the World, but rather the Servants to the World, ministering to the poor and those who are alienated and lonely from the same world which they were birthed from.

Rant

Christianity demands action. Grace is not at the heart of Christianity. Grace is subsequent to the Cross.

For Grace-Mongers, conservatives are the excuse to do nothing since taking action outside of displaying the fruit of the Spirit is a "work." (This is similar to the fact that for some monstrous Apostolics, the existence of backsliders and liberals is an excuse to do nothing except "be holy.")

The difference between the grace-monger and the Gnostic Pentecostal I spoke of last week is that the gnostics think they are doing something in their prayer but excuse themselves from actually doing anything within our material world. The grace-mongers just simply admit they are doing nothing and say "yeah we should do more, but Love Wins and thus we don't have to do anything."

Grace-mongers aren't actually speaking of Christ's love when they flaunt grace and love. They are talking about tolerance. That's the dirty secret us liberals don't want to tell the conservatives. Love for us (or them) is too hard a concept, especially when it says we have to LOSE OUR LIFE AND CARRY OUR CROSS. Love then for them is just an excuse to escape it's absolute dedication past going to church. This "grace" love just tries making Christianity palatable and mushy. That is, "grace" love is is weightless. And thus, this "grace" love ceases to be Christianity at all. Rather Grace-mongers heist the divine command for faithfulness to the cross in revolutionary upheaval of the powers of the world and replace it with an easy, moralistic positive humanism to which "loss," "death," and "obedience" to fidelity to the cross is cast to the seas.

I'm not saying Apostolics are any better off, but at least they still revere Christian Love enough to admit they aren't doing a good enough job with it.

Give me the Apostolic who sees the Love for your neighbor as yourself as a nearly impossible command to be pursued and thus tries it anyways over the liberal who thinks love means "politeness" and tolerance of the person as they stand in their nature.

For the Grace-monger, Christianity simply means having faith that Christ died and resurrected and in response we "love" our neighbors by asking them how their day went and giving five dollars to a homeless man here and there and saying "Grace wins."


The grace-monger will freely quote the phrase "work out your own salvation" conveniently forgetting the words at the end of the verse "with fear and trembling."

Now the accusation is that i am now a legalist or something to the effect...very well....my entire point of this post is that Grace should be the cause of our Action which is a response to that loving grace. To point to grace as an excuse to do nothing entirely obliterates what God's grace was intended for: To be reconciled so we can reconcile others.

Just as if proclaiming the Truth or Christ means nothing unless such declarations are actively lived out through dedication to redeeming and emancipating our Neighbor from the chains of bondage, death, and sin, so too, is proclaiming the grace of God useless unless it is lived out in a vigilant, never ceasing love in action.

Anything less than love accompanying our Truth, Grace, and our relationship with Jesus is pure delusion and self-flattery.