Throw the Theological Baby Out with the Bath Water
And, sometimes, you have to throw the baby out with the bath water. If it is necessary to toss a wrongfully believing person out of the Church in order to get their incorrect theology out of the Church, it is righteous to do so. Just don’t leave them there. Preach the gospel to them. The correct gospel. The Truth. Because it is objective, and even if it hurts someone’s feelings, people get things wrong. I wish I’d had the guts to tell someone I loved that their theology was faulty. I didn’t do it. I bear that weight every day now that they are beyond my reach. Don’t let that be you. Because that faulty theology is not just harmful to them but also to Jephthah’s daughter, the innocent one who doesn’t know that they person to they trusted their life with has sacrificed both their earthly and eternal life at the altar of an idol.
This Kind Only Comes Out by Prayer
The point Jesus is making is that we, as people, cannot do the work in others all the time. In fact, we don’t ever really do that work. We plant the seed of the gospel, water it, and harvest it when it’s grown, but it is God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6, Matthew 9:38). This kind of rebellion only ceases by our own desire for it to cease; it only goes away by our willingness to let God make us decrease. It only goes away by obedience.
No, They’re Not Removing Bible Verses
This, then, is a perfect example of the error of transcriptionist 17 I mentioned earlier. Someone noticed that Mark 9 and Matthew 17 contain the same story, but Mark had words that Matthew didn’t. So, either in an attempt to connect the two passages for personal remembrance or to fix a supposed error, a transcriptionist of Matthew copied the words of Mark 9:29 at Matthew 17:21. When modern translators discovered this was not in an older copy of Matthew, they footnoted it because it is in Mark 9.
Keep Your Convictions to Yourself
But the neat thing about the Bible, about God, and about His commands is that they’re not different for the old or new believer; He does not qualify or restrict His ordinances based on how long you’ve been reborn—with the exception that you can only be obedient to the extent of your knowledge (James 4:17). So the call for the immature believer remains the same: don’t set a stumbling block in front of another Christian and be an example for all in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity.
Appeal to God on Behalf of His Glory and Love
If you have ever found yourself, even subtly and silently, pleading to God to heal someone because of “insert thing they did” or to provide something for you because of “insert thing you’ve done/believed,” then you’ve fallen prey to the same fallacy Abraham did: presuming God answers prayers because of human righteousness.
Nearness to God Comes Not in Feeling but in Spirit and Truth
Here we finally have something tangible. No human heart can conceive it; the unsaved cannot comprehend it. Our deceptive inner selves are confused and baffled; our hearts are deceived because only the Spirit of God can search out His depths and speak them to us spiritually. Spirit begets Truth, and so we know we are near. But we cannot rely on a voice speaking in our mind for our minds are yet untransformed by renewal (Romans 12:2). So the psalmists are helpful again here: “How I love your instruction! It is my meditation all day long. Your command makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is always with me” (Psalm 119:97-98).
How Does Forgiving Someone Actually Work?
As I’ve worked through these thoughts over the last two months in lieu of writing this, I’ve had to challenge myself to actually forgive: I make the same challenge to any who read this: consider whether your forgiveness hurts. If it doesn’t, I’d argue there was no swallowing pain but rather a vomiting of it at your offender. And if it does hurt? Congratulations! You’re doing it right.
In His Garden — I am Published Again
I hope this poem provokes in you imagery of the Israelites wandering and Jesus fasting in the wilderness paired with the growth, life, and preparation that God works even when there is nothing but dust and dry bones and despair. Furthermore, I hope you can see the story of my growth that is not yet finished and that it draws you all even deeper into the Father's love.
The Church Must Not Abide Any False Teachings
So I have two cautions: One, be aware of what you’re putting into your heart and mind. Whether that be song, word, preaching, or evangelism, be constantly aware of what you’re learning and ensure you cast out the things that aren’t proven true by Scripture. Two, don’t be afraid to speak out against the actions of a mouth or body because if they’re acting wrongly, something inside is still believing wrongly. And it is far better to be judged by a person than by the holy, righteous, perfect, all-powerful and all-knowing God of the universe. Let your rebuke come with love if you notice an evil action, but rebuke that the soul of the person might be saved.
Being Poor in Spirit Does Not Come by Works
That said, I now want to say it clearly: we are already poor in spirit, but we are sometimes incapable of living as though we were. Pride will puff us up and cause us to believe, as we once did, that we are capable of doing all that is necessary for salvation on our own, adding works into the faith given to us by Jesus.
Why God Performs Acts of Grace in This Life
1 Corinthians 13 tells us that what remains is faith, hope, and love. Take everything else in this world away, and these three subsist. And it is only here that they can exist at all because it is only here that we could ever grow to comprehend a lack of faith, hope, and love. It is only in the bitterness that we can come to understand the true sweetness of God. The angels know God’s status as set apart, holy. They know His timelessness. We alone know, can comprehend, and can receive grace and mercy by faith, hope, and love. We alone can repent. We alone can be brought near. And we alone are recipients of the heart of the one true God. Do you want to know why suffering exists? Because only by suffering can we grasp the magnitude of grace.
When Our Faith is Not Enough but Jesus’s is Plenty
The thing about faith is that if we had our own to rely on, we’d have none. We’d have no desserts, and that would be plenty just. Yet God is righteous and just, and, as Hannah prayed, a person does not prevail by his own strength but by God’s, which is credited to us in faith and righteousness as it was to Abraham.
To Fast or Not to Fast? That is Not the Question
The effort, as I’ve said, is not merely to deny ourselves, for our bodies are temples, not the “flesh” that the Scriptures say we are to deny. It’s not about hurting or inconveniencing ourselves in order to look good. In fact, when we fast, the Bible is clear no one should know (Matthew 6:16-18). It is also not about what we are giving up. The things we are giving up are vehicles to clear space for us to seek God.
Stop Looking for the Perfect Spouse. They Don’t Exist.
What it really comes down to is stop expecting people to be perfect. They will always fail. Always. As you’re looking for a spouse, don’t settle for someone evil, but don’t expect them to be perfect either. Throw away your expectations and trust God to give you someone who will help refine you. Throw away your expectations and work on letting God refine you as you are now. We get marriage incredibly wrong; it’s not just for your enjoyment, it’s to make you a better believer, a more faithful child. So stop throwing away perfectly good men and women because they don’t meet your absurd expectations of perfection; your golden calf is doing you no good at all. And until you let God take that down, you’ll always be disappointed by the person He brings you to marry.
Fear Not, Your Soul is Not Tied to That Person You Kissed
My point is that, knowing this, it’s easier to believe that you’re permanently tied to a person in a way you can’t touch/influence than it is to do the work of detaching yourself from someone who did not choose to love you. It’s easier to believe your soul is attached to someone who made you happy than it is to believe that, eventually, you’ll be able to move on to love and be loved again. It’s easier to live in a fantasy, a knight’s tale, than it is to believe life doesn’t work out like the princess stories all the time, and sometimes you have to grieve and move on.
Delighting in the Lord when Little Feels Delightful
Lo and behold, God answered not only that prayer but also an unspoken one I had been throwing up in my declaration of wrestling with Him as Jacob. On Friday, my faith was dead, but on Sunday, I was reborn just a little bit stronger as I first attended a sermon preached by my aforementioned good friend (his first). His message? The blessings of Jacob on his children, of course. The wrestler himself, after having been blessed, got to give out blessings of his own.
When God Prepared a Way for Foreigners Centuries in Advance
He used not only the prophecies of Micah and Isaiah but also the Babylon’s pagan conquests and the pagan astrology of the wise men to draw them hundreds of miles from their home to tiny Bethlehem and tiny Jesus who would eventually open up the way for them to forgo their pagan ways and come to the Way, the Truth, and the Life. God used Israel’s wickedness and disobedience to make not His people His people (Hosea 2:23) by captivity in Babylon, which not only drew His people back to Him at the time but also opened up the way for even Gentiles to show the love of Christ after the resurrection.
Standing Firm in Contentment When God Feels Gone
Dwell on the good, honorable, true, just, pure, and lovely nature of the Father. Don’t trust your feelings; trust your Savior. Psalm 23 is a great place to start. Repeat it to yourself until your feelings bend to the truth of God. Know that He is good even when you can’t feel Him, because He can’t help but work all things out for His glory and your good.
What if I am not Poor in Spirit?
Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is given to the poor in spirit, but what about those rich in spirit? Well, it’s a bit of a longer path to get to where we need to go. For the rich in spirit, it is as difficult to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The first step is humility, and from there, we can trudge the path through the Beatitudes.