It Might Not What It Seems to You, But I'm A Saint! (Colossians 1:2)

“We are writing to God’s holy people in the city of Colosse, who are faithful brothers and sisters in Christ” (Colossians 1:2, NLT)

“To the saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are in Colosse” (Colossians 1:2, NKJV)

There are two things that I would like to point out here: 1) Saints… in Christ.” Saints or “God’s holy people” in Christ are those who have received Him and those whom He has received. To me, this is the description of ALL believers. Mind you, God does not choose us because we are saintly - but to make us saintly! To make us holy! “Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, he freed us from sin” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Although it might not what it seems to you, in Christ, you and I are saints. And no church denominational or religious institution or Vatican council can decide either anyone a saint (or not), for saintliness is God’s decision and declaration. Only by grace through faith. This is our position in Christ!

Now, if you and I, in Christ, are saints, then why are we sometime don’t act like that? Let me explain. If you read the entire letter or epistle to the Colossians, Paul warned the believers in Colosse to protect themselves against error and sin and to stir them to saintliness, for sainthood is a possession, a profession, and a practice. While we are still here on earth with human bodies, we are not going to be perfect. We are saints - and saints in the making. God is in the process of making us into perfection and holiness. A theological term for this is sanctification. 

The second thing is 2) “Faithful brethren in Christ.” It means those who have faith in Christ. No one can be faithful until he or she has faith. And faithfulness is continuous - always have faith in Him. By calling the believers as “saints and faithful,” Paul by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is saying that: Saving faith in Christ always sanctifies, and the sanctified ones (saints) want to be (continuously) saintly and faithful. There are people who profess to know Christ but never change. The proof that one really possesses God’s salvation is becoming more perfect, saintly, and faithful.

I hope my point is not confusing… probably there are grammar mistakes… But this is not a mistake: In Christ, I am a saint. Call me Saint Richard Angelus. Praise God!

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

So You Want to Be a Calvinist? John Calvin on the Concept of Justification

Up to about the year 1500, the term “justification” was widely understood to mean “to be made righteous.” This interpretation, which had its origins in the writings of St. Augustine (or Aurelius Augustinus. I recommend reading his autobiography, The Confessions. Awesome!), saw justification as both an event and a process. The Reformation, however, saw justification defined exclusively in forensic terms – that is, as an event, in which sinners are declared to be righteous before God. Justification is then followed by sanctification, a process in which believers are made righteous. In this passage, John Calvin provides a classic articulation of this forensic notion of justification.

“To be justified in God’s sight is to be reckoned as righteous in God’s judgement, and to be accepted on account of that righteousness… The person who is justified by faith is someone who, apart from the righteousness of works, has taken hold of the righteousness of Christ through faith, and having been clothed with it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner, but as a righteous person. Therefore justification is to be understood simply as the acceptance by which God receives us into his favour as righteous people. We say that it consists of the remission of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ…

There is no doubt that we obtain justification in the sight of God only by the intercession of the righteousness of Christ. This is equivalent to saying that believers are not righteous in themselves, but on account of the communication of the righteousness of Christ through imputation, something to be noted carefully… Our righteousness is not in us, but in Christ. We possess it only because we participate in Christ; in fact, with him, we possesses all his riches.”

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

References:

1) Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.xi.2, 23; in Johannis Calvini: Opera Selecta, ed. P. Barth and W. Niesel, vol. 4 (Munich: Kaiser, 1931), 182.25-183.10; 206.17-32.

2) The Christian Theology Reader, edited by Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Blackwell), pg. 234-235

Francois Turrettini on the Threefold Office of Christ (Prophet, Priest and King)

The writings of John Calvin, especially his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), established a pattern which would become widespread within the Reformed Christology. The significance of Christ was explored using the model of the “threefold office,” which depicted him as prophet, priest and king. As a prophet, Christ declared the will of God; as a priest, he made atonement for sins; and as king, he rules over his people. The noted seventeenth-century Genevan theologian Francois Turrettini, a major exponent of the Reformed tradition, here sets out this understanding more fully, in a text originally published in Latin in 1679:

“The office of [Jesus] Christ is nothing other than a mediation between God and humanity, which he was sent into the world by the Father and anointed by the Holy Spirit to carry out. It embraces all that Christ was required to achieve during his mission and calling in relation to an offended God and offending humanity (erga Deus offensum et homines offendentes), reconciling and uniting them to each other…

This mediatorial office of Christ is distributed among three functions, which are individual parts of it: the prophetic, priestly and kingly. Christ sustained these together rather than separately, something which he alone was able to do. For what would, in the case of other people, be divided on account of his supreme perfection. There could indeed be people who were both kings and priests (such as Melchizedek) or kings and prophets (such as David), or priests and prophets (as in the case of some high priests) – but there is no other who perfectly fulfilled all three. This was reserved for Christ alone, in that he was able to uphold the truth which is embodied in these types…

The threefold misery of humanity resulting from sin (that is, ignorance, guilt, and the oppression and bondage of sin) required this threefold office. Ignorance is healed through the prophetic office, guilt through the priestly, and the oppression and bondage of sin through the kingly. The prophetic light scatters the darkness of error; the merit of the priest removes guilt and obtains reconciliation for us; the power of the king takes away the bondage of sin and death. The prophet shows God to us; the priest leads us to God; and the king joins us together with God, and glorifies us with him. The prophet illuminates the mind by the spirit of enlightenment; the priest soothes the heart and conscious by the spirit of consolation; the king subdues rebellious inclinations by the spirit of sanctification.”

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

References:

1) Institutio theologiae elencticae, topic 14, q. 5; in Institutio theologiae elenticae, 3 vols (Rome: Trajecti, 1734), vol. 2, pp. 424-427.

2) The Christian Theology Reader, edited by Alister E. McGrath (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1995), pp. 153-154.

God Loves the Homosexual

I have braved a few real-life conversations with homosexual friends. I distinctly remember how I felt on each occasion. Queasy mostly. Knowing that Christians often have a head start in the race of bigotry, I had no desire to win us any additional medals. In each conversation, my Christian affiliation betrayed me. Hence, my homosexual friends gestured knowingly at the back pocket of my soul where I had temporarily stuffed the fact that homosexuality does not fit with my faith.

On one rare occasion, I even initiated the conversation… only because my friend hoped our Christian group would embrace his homosexuality and faith and perhaps join him in championing homosexuality as a non-sin.

Fearing he might be emotionally stir-fried in group, I offered a gentler “CliffsNotes” of the responses he might encounter. This forced me to disclose the contents of my back pocket. To pull out, unfold, and display the wrinkles and stains on my evolving take on homosexuality and faith. There were dozens of tangible traits I cherished about my friend, and I told him so. But – in a voice trembling with nervousness and compassion – I confessed I was afraid my friendship might seem insincere if I couldn’t affirm what he held to be the central part of his identity: his sexuality.

“As far as I can tell,” I gulped, “the Bible only introduces one kind of sexual union, and that is between a man and a woman. So, I have to believe this is the course that leads to the fullest life – the life the Creator intended for us.”

When I spit out these defining sentences, I worried all my friend could hear was Blah-Blah-Christian-Blah-Blah. But he stared back at me kindly, so I continued, thankful there were no microphones or flashbulbs as I struggled forward in my statement about homosexuality.

“I want you to know I believe God loves every person deeply and equally. That includes the homosexual. It would be dishonest for me to pretend I agree with or understand the path you believe is right, but I accept that you are free to choose your own life course. That is not because I’m especially charitable or generous, but because God is.”

I think the conversation changed me more than my friend, because it forced me to acknowledge parts of God’s will I sometimes overlooked. To accept that God doesn’t want me to do things even he does not choose to do – to control or hijack someone else’s freedom. I am not asked to impersonate the Holy Spirit but to live a life that gives of God’s fluorescence. And I resolve to remember that God often allows us to learn just as much as we travel our chosen paths as we would have if we had walked only his lighted portions.

But wait, we protest, that is like saying that God allows learning even when we go the wrong way. But wait, we continue, now that we think about it, that sounds a whole lot like grace.

Sarah Raymond Cunningham

Author, Dear Church: Letters from a Disillusioned Generation

Quote from Unchristian by David Kinnaman and Fermi Project (Baker Books, 2007) pg. 113-114

As for me, Richard, I believes that God loves the homosexual

Yet, I also believes that God in the Bible disapproved homosexual relationship

But wait, God’s grace is big enough for homosexuality… it just take time to change

Jesus can do the impossible. He is able.

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

The Most Difficult is the Easiest

In his classic book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes,

“Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, the lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the long run.

Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.

It is like that here. The terrible thing, the most impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to (Jesus) Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good.’ We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way – centered on money or pleasure or ambition – and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper that the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

Indeed, the most difficult (giving and surrender our life to Jesus) is the easiest.

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.

C.S. Lewis on New Life

The butterfly is the symbol of resurrection and new life in Christ

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away; behold, the new has come”

(2 Corinthians 5:17, ESV. Read chapter 5 and 6 for the text context)

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) or famously known simply as C.S. Lewis is one of my favourite writer. He was one of the intellectual giants of the 20^th century and arguably the most influential writer of his day (probably even now). Here on the subject of new life he wrote in Mere Christianity:

“In the long run God is no one but Himself and what He does is like nothing else. You could hardly expect it to be.

What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us.

Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work – the bit we could not have done for ourselves – has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race.

If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man (that is Jesus Christ) in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man. He will do it in us and for us. Remember what I said about ‘good infection’. One of our own race has this new life; if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him.

Of course, you can express this in all sorts of different ways. You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true.”

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.