I want to make sure people are deciphering the implications of being a Christian and the actual substance of what saves a person.
When I say things like "falling in love with Christ" isn't what saves you, I am not somehow suggesting that this "falling in love" is absent in a Christian's life. No, all I am saying is that that feeling by itself has no saving quality. In fact, I believe that "falling in love with Christ" is something very real that happens to every new Christan. However, to reiterate my point, stating something like that as what saves a person is innacurate, rather "falling in love with Christ" is a result of coming to have faith in Christ's atoning death and His resurrection from the dead.
This feeling vs. faith is something that is discussed pretty heavily in Moreland's Love Your God with All Your Mind. Feelings are great, yes, but they are driven by what? Yes, your emotions. Emotions, as you will find out in a detailed study of the Bible, are really products of our soul.
Our souls are currently in an unsaved state as you can deduce from 1 Peter 1:8-9: "Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, receiving the end of your faith--the salvation of your souls.
We obviously have not reached the end of our faith--that'll come when Christ finally returns to take us home and we see Christ completely for who He is and are ourselves conformed utterly into His glorious image. So knowing that our souls are still very much under the influence of our sin nature, we don't want to rely solely on them to discover truth; rather we want to rely on our spirits.
1 Corinthians 2:10-16 explain that we have access in some way to the very Spirit of God. Similary Acts 1:5 says that we are "baptized with the Holy Spirit." Examples of this "imersion" into Christ and the joining of our spirit to God's can be seen in Romans 6, Romans 8 and Ephesians 1. These passages also explain that affirmation between God and ourselves about salvation is through our spirit (Romans 8:16).
So I guess the point is to put your faith in something more solid than wavering emotions. Christ said that we are to "worship in spirit and in truth," if you're just worshipping with emotions, you can never really be sure of their authenticity.
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2 comments:
I agree completely about faith being more than just emotions. Modern day Christians have lost any standing among thinking non-Christians because they cannot explain what they believe. Even those that can usually can't give reasons for why they believe what they believe.
It seems like we're trying to skate through life on an emotional high, and because the rest of the world can't see the basis for it, Christianity in general seems blind and foolish to them.
We definitely do need to take the time to reason out our faith if we want to fulfill our responsibility to share the Gospel with others. Good post.
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