This conversation continues, and I’m hoping you can wrap your head around this.
It’s not a question of what God does behind the scenes in Heaven. We cannot possibly know about that until we are there with Him. What really matters is whether we can build a foundation of expectations that accord with what He has revealed. He does work and does keep His promises, but it’s not always visible to our human eyes until later.
Your theology doesn’t mean a damned thing against what God actually does. It’s a question of what we have seen and held with our hands interpreted by the Presence of His Holy Spirit in our hearts.
We have seen this: The way believers act leads me to rely on individual divine election. For that matter, my own personal experience with God cannot be explained any other way. When God moves, human resistance is fruitless and people eventually surrender. I’ve never seen it otherwise. It’s not about issues of what those people believe, but about how they act, how they are driven. I insist that you can tell when God is moving and the results are never in doubt.
Thus, the doctrine of Divine Election, bare bones as outlined in the Bible, is an accurate predictor of how people respond to the moving of the Holy Spirit. It’s not necessary for me to formulate any logical implications, but I know what I’ve seen. I simply trust God for things I cannot do.
Yes, it is quite possible to manipulate people into some sort of religious confession and goad them into complying with a set of expectations presented to them as the Word of God. I’ve done it under the pressure of bad leadership. And it always turns out poorly. It’s not so bad when they fall away under testing, but when they harden in their own logical system and never trust in the move of the Holy Spirit, it’s really tragic. That’s how we get so many leaders who live for the institutions and their iron-clad rules.
It doesn’t help that American history is loaded with people who insist their own emotional feelings are a move of the Holy Spirit. We could talk about a doctrine of identifying His hand prints, but you can find thousands of examples of such things and many of them are mutually exclusive. Everyone wants some kind of leverage to move the world.
I don’t want that. All I’m doing is explaining how I operate in my own faith community, the domain God has entrusted to me. With Kiln of the Soul, we will act as if certain things are so according to God’s work in our lives. Nobody dictates; we share and discuss.
We will act as if individual divine election is true. We won’t act as if people can be persuaded by human argument. We will “pretend”, if you will, that only God can change a human heart, that nobody can change themselves. We deny Decision Theology.
Instead, we find peace in trusting the Lord to move His people. We find peace in waiting for folks to respond in God’s good time, and in their own way under His convictions in their hearts. That internal sense of peace is by far the best indicator that we are walking where He wants us. We don’t trust what our own reason and logic can build, never mind that of another; we cannot live on someone else’s sense of peace.
We don’t find peace with Christ in the institutions. It doesn’t matter how much blood, sweat and tears anyone else has poured into those institutions. At the end of the day, they remain human constructs, and nothing man produces is eternal. We know that the past 2000 years of church history is a long, sad tale of trying to shut down the Hebraic outlook of the first disciples. We can see in their writings that they departed from the intellectual background of Jesus and the Apostles. It’s plain as day to anyone who examines the records. Historic institutions have not preserved the gospel message of Jesus the Messiah.
Again, we deny that eternal truth can be codified in any human language. We deny the myth of “propositional truth”. All we can do is point out areas of exploration for hearts that have been changed from above.
We hold forth the invitation to submission to Christ. We advise people that our fleshly nature is a burden to be borne through life, but is not really us. We must deny the flesh in order to be free from slavery to the Enemy. Everything else will take care of itself.
