Here's something for you to read and, hopefully, thereby better yourself in your knowledge of Scripture and it's application to you and your life.
This is John Chrysostom's Homily on 1 Timothy 2:8-10, which I found to be a blessing this morning, so please click on the link and be blessed!
http://www.third-core.org/temp/1ti2_8_10.htm
I found this most interesting at 1:30 in the morning, having been asleep for a while, but then awakening, I found a strong urge for me to dig into the Word with ferocity. I thank God that He has so treated me this early morning and pray that He would continue to do so for alway.
Love the Bretheren. <>< In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, love.
Can there be found a better philosophy by which a Christian should live in relation to his brothers?
About Me
- polemic turtle
- turtle believes his Bible, loves His God, and is being divinely conformed unto the image of God's Son, though if one were to think in terms of Romans 9, turtle would confess that he is a very stubborn and brittle piece of clay. thankfully, the Potter works omnipotently for turtle's good and shows him mercy and grace every day.
4 comments:
">>Love the Bretheren. <>< In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, love.<<"
This is a tidy package, to be sure, but the line between essentials and nonessentials is a rather elusive one. Love, however, is indeed the best medicine for 'covering the multitude of sins' commited in trying to draw that line.
Richard Sibbes said, "The best men are severe to themselves, tender over others." Strive to be one of the best men.
Hebrews 13:1
Wow, what a good quote! I don't know if there is a modest way to say this, so let me be frank and do you try to not think any better of me just because I'm saying what I'm to soon say.
I don't trust myself to make the right choice. I've proven 'ore and 'ore how I can not promise anything to myself or God and fulfil it consistently. I hate it, but it's just me in my strongest weakness. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
The essential thing, I think, is told in this verse: 1Jo 2:22 Who is the liar, except the one denying, saying that Jesus is not the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one denying the Father and the Son.
1Jo 2:23 Everyone denying the Son does not have the Father. The one confessing the Son also has the Father.
I think that essential Christianity to acknowledge that God is fully God, Jesus is fully God, and that Jesus was indeed the messiah promised to God's elect and, therefore, must be followed out of a heart full of gratitude toward God and compassion toward the other elect, who, like everybody else, are totally depraved and therefore should be accepted with a "grain of (grace)".
Perhaps I'm wrong, but that is at the very least the philisophical foundation to "essential Christianity" as I see it. I shall probably wish very much to edit this post later.
To begin the discussion with those particulars is a good start (I might add a few more doctrinal particulars); but how soon we add too much to the list! ....before you know it, we're dying (rather, killing each other) for things that ought to fall in the realm of nonessentials.
You are wise to distrust yourself--we all should. The rules you make for your own life will rarely fit the life of another, however fastidiously you are interpreting Scripture. I do not insinuate that right and wrong are relative--only that sometimes Scripture leaves room for liberty; and we must never be more strict than Scripture.
It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1
The main issue I have trouble with, oh doctor ;-), is trying to understand 1 Peter 1:16 as some apparently do( or don't ). I certainly don't know everything about the Puritans, but I have heard much about them that is to be admired and emulated! They were the men who produced men like David Brainard! Why shouldn't we all want to live according to their philosophy, I ask, perhaps because of my own incomplete knowledge of their ways? Is there any standard too high? Certainly there is that which is too high for us to bear, but it'd be a long time before we'd reach that if we travel at a "steady" rate from the depths where we currently reside. Oh, what low standards I have! Oh, how much lower they were! Why don't my peers see? Alas, I fear for their lives that they will lead without a clearly defined line of separation from the worlds of secular this and secular that. Godless men tend to be un-worthy of our attention, yet we rivet to the ones that partook in politics, warfare, and entertainment before we even glance at the Godly men that the world wishes to forget! Alas, alas.. Will it be this way forever? Has it always been this way? Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? I think I begin to understand this. :-(
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