Dec | 09 | It’s coat hanger time!

FIGHT

It’s coat hanger time!

Philippians 2:12-16
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain. NKJV

I am a ‘Fundamentalist’ and I am an ‘Evangelical,’ and this double descriptive nomenclature cannot be pronounced today by many without the accompaniment at the very least of a sneering spitting. Sometimes I feel that two pieces of paper have been stuck to my back. The one piece between my shoulder blades says: “Ignorant and Simplistic Bible Believing Bigot” and one in the small of my back which says quite simply: “Kick me!”

I am neither a clever man nor a learned one. I am a poor literate and an observer of humanity and of Christians and the Christian church in particular and have noted, quite pragmatically, that our understanding (study) and experience of God (life), that is our practical day to day Theology can be seen through the four pains of a cloudy window labeled: Evangelical, Catholic, Liberal and Charismatic or as John Wesley purported: Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience. These four panes of my cloudy window are ‘Welsey’s Quadrilateral’, being not only prescriptive as to how our understanding and experience of God should be molded, but actually descriptive of how just about everyone arrives at their experience of understanding and experiencing God anyway!

Now then, the unwisely chosen double edged scalpel of ‘rightly dividing the Word of truth’ has always been mainly and mostly ‘tradition’ and ‘reason’ and I see tradition as not only encompassing the teaching of the early church fathers and the great reformers of the church, but also including even our own cultural history and influences like our family, and more importantly, those turbulent window pane splattering seeming ‘new traditions’ which are today putting more mud on that fourfold orifice of light than they do clear away the dust. In other words, ‘tradition’ is also that which is being talked of and proposed today. The seeming new trinity of traditions, (maybe we should use the words ‘latest’ or ‘resurgent,’ for is anything really new?) of homosexual ‘accepting’ Christianity, of conditionalism with respect to the eternality of hell and of universalism with respect to the ultimate salvation of all, have, like Drake’s fire ships, sailed into the anchored and sleepy armada of Evangelicalism under the pink pennants of post modernism and therapeutic Christianity and caused such a blaze among us that the window pane of Sola Scriptura, that primary prism of all the men of absolute, seems to be fractured with long and creeping spider cracks and ready to disintegrate and fall in pieces out of its hot, bubbling and paint peeled panel. These are troubling times. Haven’t they always been?

Might I suggest that if ‘experience’ is the horizontal plane of a coat hanger upon which I might hang the trouser of my suit and ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ are the two connected diagonal sides upon which I might slip my jacket, then that fourth plane, cork screwing out of the apex of my triangle, is the firm hook which hangs all my clothes in the wardrobe of God Most High, and that hook is Scripture, without which, all our clothes lay dirtied on the floor.

Tradition, reason and experience, though an integral part of all our hanging days, must come under and connect to the Scriptures; must be brought into shape by them, be held by them and have their trueness judged by them. There are three pre-requisites to counteracting error and one solution to the same: Time, talking, a table top and an open Bible. Friends, now is not the time for silent withdrawing, but rather, it is the time for talking, it is the time for disputing, it is the for the clash of foreheads, it is the time to put your big boys pants on and start contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints. It’s coat hanger time!



Listen:- Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. Jude 3 NKJV Pray: Father, open our hearts, open our minds, open our Bibles, open our mouths. Amen and let it be so.

Pray: -  Father, open our hearts, open our minds, open our Bibles, open our mouths. Amen and let it be so.

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