Underground Exiles

I recently interviewed with a church on the South Carolina coast, and the conversation with the gentleman I would have been working with left me a little upset.

On a good day, at most I’m a four and a half point Calvinist.  Other days, I’m maybe a three-point or at most four-point Calvinist.   I still just can’t figure out where I fall on the Limited Atonement question, so I often oscillate back and forth.  I didn’t become a Calvinist by just jumping on a bandwagon; I arrived here after throwing myself against the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Romans for about 2 years.  For reasons of biblical faithfulness, I hold to a Reformed theology.

The gentleman I would have been working for on the coast is an all-out Arminian.  These two teams of Calvinist and Arminian have been holding different theological positions for several hundred years - the argument between them ain’t new by any stretch.

So as I sat and talked to this man, he was the most hostile person to Reformed theology that I’ve ever met.  I was actually taken aback at the amount of venom he spoke with; to be honest, I was shocked, since I’m not that angry about folks holding to Arminian theology.  I believe since I arrived at being a Calvinist by a lot of theological reflection, then obviously an Arminian must have as well.  I think that stands to reason.

At any rate, our conversation got me thinking down a particular vein: why can’t we get along?  I’m convinced that there are good, biblical reasons to be Arminian in your theology.  I don’t think that the Arminian position says anything the Bible doesn’t say, I just don’t think it says everything the Bible does.  Nevertheless, it’s not heresy; this is an in-family debate.  I can’t think of a single Calvinist I know personally that would berate or browbeat someone of a Wesleyan Arminian theology.  Why is it then that Calvinists have the reputation of being bullies, when it’s the Arminians I know that are hostile?  I just don’t understand it.

There are only three questions I have to have answered to be able to work with someone:

1. Do you love Jesus?
2. Do you love the Bible?
3. Do you desire to see people reached with the gospel?

As long as the answer to all three questions is yes, I can work with you, no matter what you believe about election and predestination.  As long as we both love the Bible, we can disagree, and still have a place to go back to to settle our disagreements, since we both hold Scripture to be the final authority.

Has anbody else experienced this?

This post is really a final thought about, and extension of, my sermon series on the distinction between the Law and the Gospel. As I tried to articulate to the college crowd at H²0 over the last 6 weeks, the Law is what God demands; the Gospel is what God provides. Articulating this distinction is essential to understanding and living life in Christ.

The more I’ve mulled over the topic in my head, even after the series has been completed, the more I realize that I could have preached in that series for the rest of 2008 and not come close to exhausting all that the Bible has to say on this particular topic.

For the most part, I use the word gospel nearly interchangeably with the word grace. I do this because Paul repeatedly speaks of the gospel of God’s grace, with grace being the focal point of the gospel. When the Law demands, the Gospel provides, and what is provided by the gospel is grace! Grace which is unmerited and totally free, and grace and freedom is at the absolute heart of who God is.

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More likely than not, this post is going to get me in trouble with the elders in charge of H20, as well as an ex-girlfriend, and various other groups of people.

I was recently told that if I would just be a little more meek, my sermons would go down easier. A couple of weeks before that, I was given practically the same advice.

I was raised Southern Baptist, with this image of

“gentle Jesus, meek and mild,”

to quote the old hymn by Charles Wesley. Then I grew up and read the New Testament for myself, and it seemed like Jesus really enjoyed screwing with religious people.

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Here’s God’s providential timing for you:

Last night I posted about really needing an empowering work of grace in my life. I feel like my struggle with anger and arrogance is sin; there’s no other way to put it.

This evening when I got home from the job, I had a delivery waiting for me. Unbeknown to me, a buddy had ordered a copy of The Mortification of Sin by John Owen for me. At the moment I’m struggling, a friend that has no clue what I’m dealing with sends me a book about murdering my sin.

Then I’m trying to stay up to date on the other blogs I like by way of my feedreader, and I found this post, by Dr. John Piper.

I’m beginning to suspect that God is trying to get my attention.

I really would appreciate ya’ll praying about this, because I think it’s important.

It’s come to my attention, again, that my passion comes across as anger. I freely admit that for the majority of my life I’ve been a pretty angry guy. I’ve been described more than once as being emotionally closed off; personally, I’d disagree, not because it isn’t accurate, but because it doesn’t even scratch the surface.

There is one emotion, and just one, that I can tap at will. It’s anger. I freely confess that I’ve been an angry, angry guy for the majority of my life. It’s extraordinarily hard for me to contact any emotion other than pure, unadulterated rage. Because of this, I bleed anger, even when I’m not angry.

Five years in the US Army didn’t make any of it better, it just makes it worse. It added an arrogance to my personality that isn’t winsome or appealing at all. Now, what you get when you talk to me, despite a lot of work on my part, is angry arrogance.

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