NO DISTORTIONS FOR YOU
03/09/24 10:02
‘There are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!’ Gal 1.7.8 NIV.
We can be unwittingly promoting a gospel that is ‘no gospel at all’ in the illusion that we are helping God. We may not be promoting Jesus’ Kingdom of Life just because we are a worker in a Christian denomination. I spent many years myself as an advocate of a distorted gospel in the illusion that I was helping Christ. But in such situations, we are not helping Christ. We are obscuring Him with a variation of Christianity that is a rendering of the knowledge of good and evil with a Christian gloss.
Gregory Boyd is spot on when he writes, “To a large degree we have preached our own version of the knowledge of good and evil as though it were the message of salvation. We need to confess that we have sinned in the gravest fashion by frequently loving our version of truth and ethics more than people, and even God himself’ (1 John 4:20).” (1)
There is new liberty and life in finding that we are wrong about something. It invites the possibility of a new start and a new way of fruitfulness as ourselves and as members of church and community. The re-start of the Self in the mode of Christ our life marks the beginning of us as a person whose soul is being healed and whose person is becoming an agent of Christ’s spirit and life.
Douglas Campbell writes, “God’s unveiling of himself through Jesus frequently reveals something wrong with us that we did not know about at the time. This misguided sin may even be intertwined with our previous piety to a degree that we previously found impossible to distinguish.
The very thing we were doing for God can turn out to be something that we are doing ourselves against God thereby resisting God and in the name of God! But only in the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ does this become evident, accentuating why it is so important both to begin with this revelation and to cleave to it through thick and thin. Our previous conceptions about God and God’s will might need to be significantly corrected, as Paul’s were.” (2)
Any snippet of misguided gospel truth can hamper our growth into fullness in Christ. Sure we are saved by grace, but grace is a path to increased knowledge of our belonging in Christ and His power to form us into sons/daughters in His image. When Paul uses the words Christ who is our life he denotes the fact that Christ is for us and more to the point that is often lost, He becomes our life, which is to say He transforms the self from worker to daughter/son. Thus we become cheerful life-givers rather than passive of morbid practitioners of non-life. How can you not be a channel of spirit and life when the Resurrection in person has incarnated your being?
(1) Gregory A. Boyd, Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God.
(2) Campbell, Douglas; DePue, Jon. Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (p. 31). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
We can be unwittingly promoting a gospel that is ‘no gospel at all’ in the illusion that we are helping God. We may not be promoting Jesus’ Kingdom of Life just because we are a worker in a Christian denomination. I spent many years myself as an advocate of a distorted gospel in the illusion that I was helping Christ. But in such situations, we are not helping Christ. We are obscuring Him with a variation of Christianity that is a rendering of the knowledge of good and evil with a Christian gloss.
Gregory Boyd is spot on when he writes, “To a large degree we have preached our own version of the knowledge of good and evil as though it were the message of salvation. We need to confess that we have sinned in the gravest fashion by frequently loving our version of truth and ethics more than people, and even God himself’ (1 John 4:20).” (1)
There is new liberty and life in finding that we are wrong about something. It invites the possibility of a new start and a new way of fruitfulness as ourselves and as members of church and community. The re-start of the Self in the mode of Christ our life marks the beginning of us as a person whose soul is being healed and whose person is becoming an agent of Christ’s spirit and life.
Douglas Campbell writes, “God’s unveiling of himself through Jesus frequently reveals something wrong with us that we did not know about at the time. This misguided sin may even be intertwined with our previous piety to a degree that we previously found impossible to distinguish.
The very thing we were doing for God can turn out to be something that we are doing ourselves against God thereby resisting God and in the name of God! But only in the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ does this become evident, accentuating why it is so important both to begin with this revelation and to cleave to it through thick and thin. Our previous conceptions about God and God’s will might need to be significantly corrected, as Paul’s were.” (2)
Any snippet of misguided gospel truth can hamper our growth into fullness in Christ. Sure we are saved by grace, but grace is a path to increased knowledge of our belonging in Christ and His power to form us into sons/daughters in His image. When Paul uses the words Christ who is our life he denotes the fact that Christ is for us and more to the point that is often lost, He becomes our life, which is to say He transforms the self from worker to daughter/son. Thus we become cheerful life-givers rather than passive of morbid practitioners of non-life. How can you not be a channel of spirit and life when the Resurrection in person has incarnated your being?
(1) Gregory A. Boyd, Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God.
(2) Campbell, Douglas; DePue, Jon. Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (p. 31). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
