The Great Divide

Here's something from Greg Ogden's Discipleship Essentials:

We must reaffirm that there is no distinction between embracing God's grace as a forgiven sinner and following Jesus as the primary shaping influence over our life.

There's something about that sentence that seems strangely out of tune with much that is being said in Christian circles these days.

In fact, the unspoken presumption behind much preaching and teaching seems to be something more like this:

"We must affirm the great distinction between embracing the grace of God as a forgiven sinner and living the victorious life that we all dream of and have been promised by God."

A great divide runs between these two points-of-view. They simply do not mix well. On one side, there will be a making much of God. On the other, a making much of ourselves. One need only ask oneself which side of this divide Jesus would have us stand on (check out the Beatitudes, if you need a clue).

Lately I've heard or had urged upon me supposedly uplifting quotations about how wonderful and capable we Christians are, and how we ought to think very highly of ourselves, because God does, etc. I think there's something to this, but the card is getting overplayed big-time. One fellow said, in fact, that the old saying about having less of me and more of God is all wrong, and in fact backwards. We should be praying, this fellow said, for the opposite: more of ourselves, less of God. Well, I heard the quote second-hand, and it does seem rather unbelievable that someone would say such a thing in church. I recall that Paul urged the Philippians to have the same mind in themselves that was in Christ Jesus; Paul then explained that the mind that was in Christ Jesus was such that He chose to set aside all the prerogatives of the Godhead to make himself less than a slave.

Well, perhaps something was lost in the transmission, and yet the reported words are not really out of sync with the gist of much that we hear from those "prophetic" types that like so much to court large audiences by telling people that they are on the verge of an incredible destiny or something. [I won't link to them, but they're not hard to find in the Christian mega-media.]

I gotta say, nobody does so much mischief to faith as these superstar "prophets." Mostly they're just silly, but they hold people in awe because of what they say about themselves (they hear long, long speeches from God just about every day, don't you know). They make much of themselves, and of their anointed hankies, their specially blessed water from the Jordon, or their "special new 'Be Revived' oil" (I kid you not) for anointing that special someone. [It's all for sale at their websites, if you want some.]

It really makes you wonder. What ever happened to the attitude represented in the old hymn:

My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus' blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
but wholly lean on Jesus' name.