This post is courtesy of our friend Larry Hughes in Kentucky. It is actually a comment he made in our discussion of Mormonism.
He touched upon something that I have oft noticed myself, the similarities in many Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Lutherans, and others with respect to the desire to prove their metal.
Fasten your seatbelts:
Those zealous for working their way to heaven are always good outward workers. The great irony here is that what many think is “fruit” is witness for their perdition.
Numbering, and measuring “fruit” is ALWAYS, without fail, a sign of law and self salvation no matter what “grace” words attend it. This is why “sanctification” as a process is false rather than “getting use to your justification”. That’s what Jesus meant when He said good fruit ONLY comes from the good tree (he/she who is getting use to his/her justification) and thorn trees cannot “make good fruit”.
When Luther was asked if Jesus was coming tomorrow what he would do he replied, “I’d go plant a tree”, that’s faith breathing and living. But to works salvation, whether overt or hidden, that seems to be “no fruit”. When a Christian man or woman eats, sleeps, stands still, does his/her job, is a wife, is a husband, is a child, is etc…he/she exhibits true fruits of the faith (that is no fear of punishment nor hope of reward – false faith). But yet when a zealous man or woman works in the church yard all the time he/she exhibits unbelief, but they will call it “fruit of faith”.
Luther points out that he who actually tries to do the law and performs sanctification as a growth by his/her self appointed works actually despises and hates God’s holy Law. But he who does not, and RESTS firmly in Christ alone with no self appointed works or sanctification = growth in holiness, such that “nothing is left TO DO”, actually loves God’s holy Law and is drawn INTO the love of neighbor and bears his/her cross. So “getting used to one’s justification”, IS the one actually being sanctified.
What drives their “evangelism” is a zeal for themselves and their salvation and their sanctification, which is all of the devil. This is the “form of godliness that denies the power therein”.
What drives true evangelism of the evangel, is NOTHING less than the stunning hilarity of the evangel itself. It is SUCH Good News it cannot BE contained. The Law or man’s laws have NOTHING to do with driving the Gospel, it is as Paul says the “power” the “dynamite” entirely in and of itself OF God. This is the power therein that paradoxically does not look like ‘godliness’ any more than Christ looked like God being crucified as an apparently helpless, impotent man bleeding on the Cross at the hands of mere men.
– Larry Hughes
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Did Larry nail it? Or is he a little off? How can we seperate our desire to produce good fruit from spilling over into ‘works righteousness’?
Filed under: Doing, Theology of the Cross | 87 Comments »
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