Jesus tells three parables in Luke 15, all of which reveal the love of God the Father for the lost, unlike the religious leaders in Israel.  He searches for them like a lost coin, first parable, lost sheep, second, and lost son, third.  That states the correct view of God the Father and, therefore, also the view of every true believer toward the lost.

A certain man had two sons.

Many fathers are genuinely surprised to discover their children hate them.  They worked hard to pay the bills, bought the essentials, provided gifts, and paid tuition, and yet, after all their effort and willing contributions, their young adult hates them.

Sooner or later, they will demand the freedom to be themselves. If they resent the restrictions you placed on them year after year—refusing to allow them to make their own decisions, pursue their interests, and have the power to reject the sports or school subjects they had no interest in but you insisted they pursue—don’t be surprised if they hate you.

Part One

Today many millennial professing Christians have made themselves prey to superficial and self-help style preaching in postmodern evangelical churches.  They are not set in these churches by God, but they’ve searched them for agreement with a world of their own imagination. The look or imagery is the pastor on a dark stage in his “dress” t-shirt with a neon lettered “JESUS” in the background.  He’s using the Bible, actually in the casual, disarming verbiage of a vulgarized modern version.  It’s hard to tell where the text of scripture ends and the speaker’s commentary begin.  He’s not preaching the text, but pawning popular psychology under the subterfuge of scripture.  He lightly seasons his talk with sprinkles of biblical phrases, giving the impression of divine harmoniousness.

As an example of the type of sprinkle of biblical phrase, I return to 1 John 4:18 and the second half of that verse:  “He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”  If you read that out of its context, it sounds like the fear of someone is holding him back from love that would perfect him.  Fear is then an actual enemy.  “Made perfect” is what happens to him if he operates in the sphere of love.  The love is God’s unconditional love for him, that doesn’t require keeping any standards.  Since salvation is free, not based on performance, God keeps loving him when he’s drunk, fornicating, using foul language, dishonoring his parents, and watching naked sex on television.  The threat of punishment for violating standards is the real adversary, because it contradicts allowed freedom of unconditional love.  Jesus already paid for that sin, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Everything in the previous paragraph is wrong.  It’s in direct contradiction of the second half of 1 John 4:18.  It is the opposite of what God tells us in the verse.  Someone is afraid.  Who is it?  “He that feareth” is the person who is afraid of God’s future judgment.   He should be.  It is appropriate to be fearful of God’s future judgment.  What possible believer could or should be afraid of God’s judgment?  One who is not sure of His salvation.  The professing believer, one who says he is saved, is afraid because he is not living as a believer.  How is he not living as a believer?  He is not loving like a believer.  Love is a test of true salvation.  Without the evidence of biblical love, he has appropriate fear of future judgment from God, that is, eternal punishment in Hell.

The previous three words in 1 John 4:18 are “fear hath torment.”  “Torment” describes the fear.  “Torment” is punishment.  It is the befitting condition of a true believer, who is not obedient to God.  The disobedience to God is in not loving God and in not loving the brethren.  Not loving God or loving the brethren is not obeying the Word of God as it relates to God and the brethren (1 John 5:1-2).

The fear of future judgment of God, its effect of torment on the professing believer, is a helpful instrument from God to denote or detect the lack of conversion.  Here is a person who should take advantage of this absence of assurance of salvation in order to examine himself.  It is like physical pain to someone with an internal injury.  Something is wrong and the pain communicates that, so that he can do something about it.

A professing believer possesses fear because he “is not made perfect in love,” that is, he is not maturing in love for God and for brethren like a genuine believer necessarily will mature.  He is not conforming to the image of the love of Jesus Christ.  He is not growing in the love that Jesus had for the Father and for others.  The fear is the helpful result of the lack of a mandatory evidence of conversion:  the transforming love for God and others found only in a genuine Christian.  A professing believer with this pain of torment should make good use of this amazing, benevolent tool of God.

Someone might wonder if he’s got the coronavirus.  Testing positive to an accurate Covid-19 test will help him to take suitable action.  He can know what to do next.  The test is a gift of helpful information.  He won’t die from the sniffles of a cold, but he could die from the sniffles of Covid-19.  He can go about to take the necessary remedy.

The self-help fraud preacher gives out a placebo test.  It tells the millennial he’s fine like he is.  The people with fear actually have the problem.  It’s a counterfeit message conformable to the spirit of this age.  Fear is the enemy.  Bathe in unconditional love.  Stop being afraid of the nasty transactional love that requires change. You’re fine eating, drinking, and being merry.  You have nothing to be afraid of.  All of that present, ongoing lust is not just permissible, but it’s the freedom that Christ died for.  He was suffering on that cross so you could live like you are in worldly lust.  That is a person made perfect in love.  Your fear is now gone because you are thinking about what Jesus did so that you could binge watch every season of Handmaid’s Tale and bar hop from one den of live entertainment to the next.

The millennial is testing false negative.  He thinks he’s fine and that’s what his “preacher” wants him to think.  The “preacher” wants a congregation with this false sense of security, not feeling at all the torment of possible damning unbelief.  That’s what his congregation needs, but he gives them instead a remedy for their pain.  They’re dying and they don’t know it, because they’ve been anesthetized to the necessary pangs of their lack of conversion.  Right now evangelicalism is teeming with these dulled from awful danger.

You can find a pretty horrific description of the pain and suffering of the coronavirus.  You can read the mounting deaths and see the graph of the steep upward curve of infections.  You can hear about the precipitous drop in employment and your retirement investment.  You could be afraid because of such information.  The Apostle John writes in 1 John 4:18:

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

You can apply 1 John 4:18 to the coronavirus, but not like most are doing it, who are using it right now.

Your parents hate your rock music, your alcohol, your immodest dress, your carnal or worldly entertainment, your love for the world system, your foul language, and your disobedience to scripture.  You might be afraid of that reality.  You read 1 John 4:18 and it takes away your fear of that.  You think you are relying on scripture to go ahead with your music, alcohol, immodest dress, carnal or worldly entertainment, love for the world system, your foul language, and your disobedience to scripture with fear of your parents’s judgment.  That is a terrible perversion of 1 John 4:18 and just the opposite of what it means.  You are twisting it or listening to others twist it.  Just because you can plug in “love” and “fear” into a statement doesn’t mean 1 John 4:18 applies to it.

“Perfect” is something that is “perfected.”  This relates to the doctrine of sanctification.  “Perfect” translates teleios, an adjective modifying “love,” and “made perfect” translates the verb teleiao, both related words.  The verb means “to bring to an end.”  The “end” is the purpose for God, which is represented by the actual end of your life, when you see God.  The previous verse (v. 17) says:

Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world.

When a true believer’s love is made perfect, it is made like Jesus’ love — His love for whom?  This is Jesus’ love for the Father, God, and for men.  This is loving God and your neighbor.  This is not God’s love for you.  This is your love for Him and others.  A true believer’s love will reach the purpose God has, which is a love conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.

True believers are as Jesus is in the world, loving like Jesus loves, so that they can have confidence or boldness as they look forward to the day of judgment.  Love made perfect is love that continues to abound through sanctification, which occurs to all saved people.  They have peace as they see this love growing in their lives.  This is obviously holy love.  It contradicts rock music, alcohol, immodest dress, carnal or worldly entertainment, love for the world system, foul language, and disobedience to scripture.  These are unsaved people.

The way 1 John 4:18 is being used by those corrupting scripture is that they’re covered by God, His “perfect” love for them, so that even though their love for God and others isn’t being perfected by God, they have their anxieties removed by just thinking about this unconditional love of God for them or just preaching the gospel to themselves.  They are becoming more and more worldly by thinking about how that God just covers for everything they are doing.  Jesus died for them and now they have His righteousness and are all set for the day of judgment. This is just the opposite of what John is writing.  The righteousness Jesus imputes to a believer results in the believer living a righteous life.  He doesn’t impute practical righteousness.  The believer has to live that.

The fear is taken away from a believer by his love being perfected.  God’s love doesn’t need to be perfected.  He’s already perfect.  A person without his love being perfected should be afraid.  He should have massive anxiety.  He should be very very afraid.  He’s going to Hell.

Love that is perfected is what casts out fear.  Why?  People who are loving God and loving others actually are saved.  They are saved people.  People who love the world (1 John 2:15-17), the love of the Father is not in them, so they do not possess perfected love.  They have every reason to be afraid.  If they are not afraid, it’s because they are telling themselves this lie that everything is covered for them because of Jesus’ perfect love for them.  They are not covered by Jesus love, because they are not saved.  People who are saved will have their love perfected by God.

What about the fear of the coronavirus?

Lauren Daigle, a “CCM pop star” thinks of the perfect love of Jesus and that takes away her anxiety.  The “perfect love” isn’t Jesus’ love for her.  The “perfect love” of 1 John 4:18 should be her love that is perfected by her keeping the Word of God.  She is not perfecting her love by giving out a twisted interpretation of scripture.  Others are not perfecting their love by retweeting her post to encourage others to get the same false interpretation.  It doesn’t mean what she says it means.  Look at a few verses later in 1 John 5:1-2:

1 Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him. 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.

Whoever loves God also loves “him that is begotten of him,” that is, believers (this would include believing parents).  How do you know that you love children of God, that is, have love that is being perfected?  It is when you love God and keep his commandments.  Binge watching Game of Thrones, drinking alcohol, listening to rock music with foul language, and using foul language are actually all breaking God’s commandments and, therefore, not loving the children of God.  This is a person who does not love God and should fear the day of judgment.  He should fear the coronavirus.  If he dies in this state, he will be sent to Hell. He is an unbeliever.  The twisting of scripture is like 2 Peter 3:16:

[The] unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.

Philip Paul Bliss was a revivalist hymn writer in the mid 19th century, who in 1875 penned among others the well-known, “Hallelujah, What a Savior!”, the first line of which reads:

Man of Sorrows! what a name for the Son of God, who came ruined sinners to reclaim.

“Man of sorrows” originates from Isaiah 53:3 in the King James Version, which says:

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

I wouldn’t argue against those who say Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is the greatest passage in the entire Bible.  That text is the account of the future saving confession of a repentant Israel.  Six hundred years before Christ, Isaiah prophesies of an event at least two thousands years after Christ.  In Romans 11:26, Paul predicts, “All Israel shall be saved.”  Zechariah 12:10 makes the the same prophecy:

I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son.

This moment we know is during the time of tribulation on earth, a period described in the book of Revelation (6-16), when large numbers of the twelve tribes of Israel will be saved (Revelation 7).  Before all of that is said, Isaiah 53 prophesies it.  Isaiah 52-53 is a prophecy of a people repenting for something they had done, which itself would not occur for another 600 years.

What we see described in Isaiah 52-53 is a mournful confession of Israel, where they finally, disconsolately, and fully admit they had not received their Messiah.  It should serve as the pattern henceforth for any saving confession.  An important part of it is the Jews’ explanation of why they did not acknowledge Jesus Christ.  They are not saying there were legitimate reasons.  They are saying their “reasons” were monumentally faulty.  They bewail them. They agonized over their sinful pride, their fatuousness, and their thick incomprehension.  Isaiah 53:3 is part of that admission and a model of poverty of spirit and true mourning after sin.  They are really, truly sorry for what they did and repentant over it.

One of Israel’s future admissions was that they rejected their Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, because he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”  Their imagined Messiah was not “a man of sorrows,” hence their rejection of the real One.  They didn’t want a sorrowful Messiah.  Instead, they would anticipate and desire an upbeat, victorious, and supremely confident Messiah.  He would have a skip to his step and look as though he owned the world and was on the very top of it with everyone else beneath Him.  Israel saw herself in that same category, their Messiah mirroring what they thought of themselves.  In their minds, this was the one they deserved.

I see society today the same in their envisioning of the person to follow, their leader, and their Jesus.  He is nice.  He is positive.  He offers admiring glances.  He gives only thumbs up.

Israel thought of herself as to be appreciated. Their Messiah would come and approve of them.  They were looking for a Messiah, who would be glad about them, not be sad when He saw them close up.  They were not looking for a doleful Messiah.  They wanted One Who came to endorse them and fight the Romans.  He wouldn’t be angry with his enemies long, because He would do away with them so quickly.

What I’m writing relates to feelings.  I’m saying having the right feelings are important.  When Jesus first entered the temple as an adult in John 2, the disciples saw his zeal in cleansing it in a violent act against Israel, and they were reminded of the Psalm 69 prophecy of the future Messiah.  The feeling of Jesus cued Andrew toward his reception of Him, reinforcing that this was Jesus.  Others ascertained these as inappropriate.  Those feelings meant they did not want Him as theirs.

The Jesus people want to accept is a party style Jesus, who smiles and smiles, emoji-like, with likes and hearts and kisses, acceptance and approval.  Why was Jesus sorrowful?  He was someplace in complete contradiction to His nature.  Nowhere in scripture does Jesus laugh.  The sins all around weighed on Him, not just their hostility to His righteousness, but His compassion for those bound in them and His knowledge of their future consequence.   The sin brought present ruination and eternal damnation.  The Lord Jesus knew this to the furthest extent.

Israel confessed they rejected their Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, because He was the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.   They would have none of Him.  When they make this confession, they understand.  He didn’t die for sins He committed.  He died for theirs.  He was sorrowful over theirs.  He grieved over theirs.

Still today no one wants any sorrow over a sinful condition, no grieving over any wrong attitude or anything they’ve done.  Only celebration.  Only fun.  Only approval of the drunkenness, fornication, disobedience to parents, worldliness, and despicable dead apathy.   The man of sorrows continues to be rejected.

When Jesus said, repeating Old Testament law (Ex 21:24), eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth (Matt 5:48), some might call that overdoing or extreme.  They mock scripture.  In fact, God was modifying the typical overreaction to personal wrong.  If someone takes an eye, you don’t get to take a head. The response must be just, equal.  Taking the head instead of the eye might be what you want to do when you look in the mirror and see with your remaining eye that the other one is gone.  This speaks of proportion that is built into the perfection of God’s law.

Some hate the law of God unless it benefits themselves.  They don’t want it as it applies to their keeping it.  It serves as their own Gumby® toy to twist into what they want God’s law to be.  Millennials don’t often walk about quoting with warm embrace, honor thy father and thy mother.  Many of them hate that law and refuse to keep it.

Proportion is a scriptural principle.  God’s law brings proportion.  With proportion, what’s important, what’s of greatest value, is what gets the most accolades, mentions, time, energy, and love.  Giving in the Bible is proportional.  God wants the firstfruits, the first ten percent, of what we earn.

A reason that God does not want to be represented by images, either drawn, painted, or sculpted, is their lack of proportion to His majesty.  God can’t be contained in human devices.  God is greater than any of these things, so He designates the only means of revealing Himself:  Jesus Christ Himself in the flesh, symbols His has ordained like the Old Testament system of worship, and the Word of God.

99% plus of social media elevates the superficial to important and what or who is the greatest in value to almost nothing.  It is the worst kind of lie, as it fools people in a more effective manner than someone just saying that God or His Word are insignificant.  In the latter, at least God gets a mention.

The Lord Jesus communicates proportion in Matthew 12:41-42:

The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.  The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.

There is Jonah, Solomon, and then Jesus.  Nineveh repents at Jonah’s preaching.  The queen of Sheba repents at Solomon’s preaching.  First century Jews in Israel reject the greater, Jesus.  The judgment is proportional to the greatness of the Spokesman and His Message.

When someone talks about himself, herself, entertainment, television, sports, a house, a car, hobbies, music, recreation, trips, or just jokes with rare to no mention of Jesus Christ, that isn’t someone who loves Jesus Christ.  Proportion communicates this reality, loud and clear.  The Lord Jesus brings this truth in His warning to the Pharisees in Matthew 23:17, 19:

Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold? . . . . Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?

The gold and the animal brought to the temple and altar became greater than the temple and altar itself.  The temporal worldly things take on an unproportional significance in relations to God.  Proportion says the church is no longer about worship of God, but about self-help, about good feelings, about success, and about looking good and fitting into the world.  Proportion communicates through the sheer number of mentions, enthusiasm, excitement, and superlatives for what is meaningless, banal, and even profane in comparison to the paucity, near silence, and dullness of expression for the greatness, goodness, wonder, beauty of the holiness of God.

To expose missing or lack of right proportion, sometimes extreme forms of exposure of this wrong are required.  Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal for them to see that there was nothing beautiful or reverent about the religion of Baal.  When a friend or loved one loves something that is not lovely, sometimes the most helpful thing to do for him or her is to expose his or her beloved or revered thing to ridicule. God does this to and for Israel in Isaiah 44:9-20 (click to read).

The psalmist writes in Psalm 48:1:

Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of his holiness.

Movements even by definition have what we might call a “shelf life.”  Movements come and go.  The church isn’t a movement.  The question then remains, were the underlying principles of the movement true or right?  Fundamentalism started as a response to and stand against pervading institutional liberalism.  The attack on scripture and its authority first met by biblical defense led to a necessary practice of separation.  Thus began regular controversies over the grounds of separation.  Sermons were preached, conferences were held, new associations were organized, and books were written that attempted to draw lines and set boundaries for the protection and the propagation of the truth.  The ones constituted by fundamentalism were not scriptural.  They chose arbitrary lines that constantly shifted one way or another, so that when someone did separate, it often seemed just political.

Who feels sorry for former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, for what he did with Monica Lewinsky?  Not feel sorry for her, but for him?  I think all of you know he was actually a victim.  Did you know that?  In a recent interview, Bill Clinton was asked “why he took such a risk with his family, his marriage and his country.”  Clinton answered:

Because there, whatever life – not just me. Everybody’s life has pressures and disappointments, terrors, fears of whatever. . . . Things I did to manage my anxieties for years.

The real culprits, you can see, for the ruination of Monica Lewsinky, the devastation of her person, were those putting pressure on Bill Clinton.  He says he has a different way of managing it now, twenty years later.  It also might be that his physical desires have diminished with age.  That happens, as many know.  In other words, he hasn’t learned new management skills, even as he isn’t taking responsibility for all that he did.

People should understand that according to him Monica was a kind of therapy.  She was medicinal.  She was the tonic Clinton needed.  He was self-medicating.  He couldn’t get a doctor’s prescription.  If there is no doctor who will write one, then someone, like Clinton, must self. medicate.  Write out your own prescription.  One Monica Lewinsky, please.  One this girl or that girl and the next girl.  This was his cure for his mental health.

What about Monica Lewinsky?  What prescription does she need for what she caught from President Clinton?  And what will they need, those who provide her a prescription as a form of self-medication, for what complications they received?

Harry Truman said the buck stopped at his desk.  What is the buck?  The buck is poker term.  A buckhorn knife was used in American frontier days to mark the man whose turn it was to deal the cards.  If he didn’t want to deal, he could pass the buckhorn knife to someone else, which meant the person where the buck stopped would deal the cards.  Committing adultery isn’t self-medicating.  Saying it’s self-medication is a form of passing the buck, one that today receives sympathy from other millennials.  They “like” it.  They legitimize the so-called cause.  Like the excuse that the prophet Ezekiel wrote, ‘my parents ate grapes, so my teeth are crooked.’

Jeffrey Epstein could claim he was self-medicating with little girls he human trafficked.  Do you think he should get sympathy?  Why are we selective?  This is science, right?  I understand, Monica Lewinsky was a consenting adult, a young adult woman, albeit several decades younger than the President.  I contend she was the victim.  Young men prey on young women, feeling desperate for male attention, and those young men both defraud the young women and their parents.  Scripture says this.  However, she too should be ashamed of herself for being with a man who defrauds her and her parents.

A young man, who commits fornication, defrauds his future wife, if he ever does marry.  The woman may settle for being the twentieth special person or “crush” in his life, one in which he has developed for himself and these women he’s used, a pattern of divorce.  He says its just managing his anxieties.  No licensed doctor would or should allow this prescription.  This young man is not a doctor either, but he still self-medicates.  Actually, he uses women to gratify his lust.  Self-medication is an excuse to pass the buck.

In the dictionary, self-medication means:

the act or process of medicating oneself especially without the advice of a physician

Actual self-medication is with the advice of a physician, or using over-the-counter analgesics or allergy products.  That, is truly self-medicating.  The other is an excuse, unrepentant blame-shifting.

Self-medicators very often gravitate to other ones, like Lot moving himself and his family near Sodom.  Today it might be like moving to Las Vegas, Nashville, Hollywood, or New York City, near a lot of other “self-medicators.”  That’s the attraction.   Godly people, like Abraham, are not attracted to those places, not to live.  A missionary might go there, like Paul, because he sees it in need of saving. Self-medicators see one big pharmacy though.

No one manages his pressures and disappointments, terrors, fears of whatever — trauma, love apparently not received from parents, very often a lie.  Love from whomever though is a black hole to self pour medication.  It’s not even love.  It’s approval they want.  They want to continue as a drop dead drunk and keep getting acceptance.  No human being can provide enough love to fulfill another human being, shaped by expectation of acceptance and approval.  Fornication, drugs, and alcohol separate someone from the experience of God’s blessing.  They don’t provide any medication for the sin-sick soul.  It’s only Jesus Christ.  As Paul wrote, “Ye are complete in Him.”  Jesus Christ, however, is not good enough for the self-medicator, hence his continued prescriptions.

If you are self-medicating, stop.  Stop making excuses.  Leave other self-medicators.  Stay away from centers of self-medication:  whole cities, bars, clubs, churches that tolerate self-medication.  Stop trying to manage your anxieties.  If you have an advocate with the Father, sin not.  Your fornication and drunkenness is sin.

Above all, reject self-medication as a terminology.  It’s a lie.  You aren’t self-medicating.  You aren’t managing your anxieties.  You are sinning and it’s your fault.  You aren’t being hindered by dark memories of childhood trauma.  You are sinning against God, which sends you into a dark abyss from which there is no relief without repentance.  The excuse of self-medication is just more sinning, because it’s a lie.  It’s no way back to God the Father.

When someone repents, he doesn’t blame his sin on someone else.  I’m not saying that he can’t consider what he thinks helped move things the wrong way, but in the end, it was his fault.  When someone stops sinning, which is part of repentance, he isn’t going to talk about stopping because it helped himself.  He talks about God, how he offended God, well, like David does in Psalm 51 and 32.  When he sins, he’s not a victim.  No one made him do it.  He did it because he wanted to do it, and especially if he is a believer, he has power not to sin, so when he sins, he chose to sin and he sinned.

If you are a drunk, practice regular drunkenness, it wasn’t “trauma” from childhood, which itself could be a lie, and it wasn’t because you had a harder life due to circumstances.  It wasn’t because you were stressed by school or work and alcohol could help you block it out.  No, you chose to drink and then you got drunk, when God commands in Proverbs 23, don’t even look at alcohol, reinforced by many other passages.  1 Corinthians 6:9-10 say that the drunkard will not inherit the kingdom of God.

If you fornicated, you did that, not because you were looking for acceptance or approval you didn’t get from your parents.  That kind of Freudian psychobabble rebels against biblical teaching.  The cause looks instead like evil concupiscence, inordinate affections, defrauding your parents, not abstaining from fleshly lust in the way of music, entertainment, and naked pictures.  If you are going to watch all of Game of Thrones with rapt attention, it’s no wonder you objectify women and treat them like orifices to satisfy your lust.  If you are going to listen to music that celebrates fornication and treats it like a permissible alternative, it’s no wonder you would both drink and fornicate.  Saying it was those things, instead of not making a covenant with your eyes (Job 31:1), then you are not taking responsibility and you are not on your way to repentance.  You will not find fulfillment or completeness in Christ.

What I’m writing about is the difference between the faux or no repentance of King Saul and the true repentance of King David.  Both sinned.  Saul blamed other people.  Adam blamed Eve.  Eve blamed the serpent.  Cain blamed his brother Abel.

The blame doesn’t stop there.  Especially today, the sinner blames theology.  He didn’t receive unconditional love.  He did, but love is not cheap.  It isn’t grace that is an occasion for the flesh.  It isn’t grace that sins so that grace will abound.  It doesn’t say, I have an advocate with the Father, so I can keep sinning and that’s actually walking in the light.  No, it is walking in the darkness.

A slew of new books bring artificial comfort, faux comfort, to the sinner.  It’s the Jesus Plus Nothing, Scandalous Grace group, the antinomians.  I wrote this is a few months ago.

Someone “sleeps with someone.”  [He] didn’t use either the word fornication or adultery.  The next morning that person who just slept with someone needs to be thinking that he is exactly the same before God as he was before he fornicated (my word).  That’s how this fornicator, according to [him], needs to look at the grace of God.  This is why it is “scandalous.”  Instead, someone should ask if this is a person who has never been converted, and if he professes faith, how this even squares with the grace of God, rather than giving credit to “scandalous grace.”  With that illustration, I understood the attraction of this particular view of grace, which again, isn’t new.  This is also what Peter describes in 2 Peter 2 (v. 19):

While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.

He promises liberty to those who are servants of corruption and they are brought into bondage with this teaching.  In Peter’s description, it is the way to apostasy.

This is rampant in the Southern Baptist Convention and varied related forms of new evangelicalism.  It violates or contradicts so many different passages of scripture and doesn’t have a single verse to stand upon.  It conflicts with true repentance that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 7:9-11:

9 Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing.  10 For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. 11 For behold this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort, what carefulness it wrought in you, yea, what clearing of yourselves, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, yea, what vehement desire, yea, what zeal, yea, what revenge! In all things ye have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter.

What’s missing?  To start, the excuses and blame and even self-pity doesn’t even say, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry for getting drunk.  I’m sorry for using women and sometimes against the will of either set of parents, acting like a free agent.  I’m sorry for dishonoring and disobeying my parents in an ungrateful, rebellious way, and blaming it on them.  God warned against this in Ezekiel 18:20:

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.

Most often, “I’m sorry” isn’t even heard, even if it is sorrow that isn’t even repentance.  However, there is a godly sorrow that works “repentance to salvation.”  What is it like?  It isn’t crying over not receiving the necessary love or an environment without stress.  What about the unconditional love of Jesus Christ?  Isn’t that enough?  Unrepentant sin doesn’t get comfort from Jesus Christ.  Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish (Luke 13:3, 5).

The sorrow from the unrepentant often is self-pity, feeling sorry for himself.  He’s not sorry for sinning.  He doesn’t show remorse for offending God.  He feels sorry that his circumstances weren’t more to his favor.  He didn’t like how he was treated.  When he sinned, his correction was too harsh.  He was loved greatly, but it still didn’t go far enough, because it didn’t accept or approve of his sin.  It expected obedience, which means it was “transactional.”  He would still have sinned, because he’s not sorry over sin, just sorry for himself.

There is not a way forward to the person who keeps making excuses for his sin.  He needs sorrow after a godly sort, which looks first like “carefulness.”  He’s careful, which means he doesn’t hang out at bars with his “friends” and make constant mentions of alcohol.  He is careful to remove himself from all of the ways he is sinning. This is Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 10, that he that thinks he stands, he needs to take heed lest he fall.  He stays away from it, because it dishonors God, it causes others to stumble, it is a bad testimony for Jesus Christ, and it will cause him to sin.

Godly sorrow, actual sorrow, wants to be “clear.”  It wants space between the last time he sinned in this manner, and you know someone has repented, when he stops the activity.

Godly sorrow, actual sorrow, is indignant about sin.  That’s a no-go for the one, who still wants to sin.  He isn’t angry about sin.  He’s angry about the judgment of sin.  He’s angry if he is judged as a sinner.  He is sorry that others don’t accept his sin, which he think isn’t unconditional love.  No, true love rejoices not in iniquity.  Be angry and sin not.  This is not angry with preaching, which works not the righteousness of God, but angry at yourself because you’ve displeased God.

Paul uses other terms to indicate true repentance, true godly sorrow, but these are a start for someone who is serious.  David was God’s choice, not because he was sinlessly perfect, but because, when he sinned, he didn’t blame it on other people.  He turned back to God in a way after God’s own heart.  Saul, on the other hand, expounded his own wisdom, really a vain philosophy or psychology in the realm of science falsely so-called.  When David sinned, he repented and God welcomed Him, so that David could say, that when he awoke, he would be satisfied in God’s presence (Psalm 17:15).  He wrote in Psalm 32:1:

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

The blessing of forgiveness far outweighs the cheap imitation of excuses and blame.

Audio 2014 Session at Word of Truth Conference, Love Versus Sentimentalism


Earlier Posts One and Two


“Childish” is an adjective.  It’s not usually applied to children, but adults.  What is it when an adult is childish?  It’s when the adult is selfish.  The adult is behaving in a selfish manner.  He’s being self-centered, self-interested, or self-obsessed.  On the other hand, when someone behaves in a mature manner, being unselfish is most characteristic of that person.  He’s not focused on his own needs, but on the needs of others.  A mature person puts others ahead of himself, or even better, God ahead of himself.

As a child matures, he becomes more loving.  A common word in the nursery is “mine” and children fighting or crying over not getting their way.   Discipline, as seen in Proverbs, is required to drive selfishness or self-will out of a child.  If a child is coddled and given too much, he won’t mature as he ought, and so he’ll still be living for himself, deciding for himself, and talking about himself.  When he doesn’t get his way, he’ll still be complaining, whining, pouting, or becoming angry in some fashion over himself.  Selfish anger is sinful anger.  It’s seen in childish adults, who want their way, but are either not getting their way or their own way isn’t being accepted.

Selfish children and adults don’t recognize or acknowledge when something good is done for them.  They mainly focus on what they don’t get or what they didn’t get.  They aren’t talking about how they can help other people or how thankful they are for what others have done for them, but about what they want, what they’re going to do for themselves, how someone didn’t treat them like they wanted, or blaming their own problems or sin on others.

Children don’t love their parents.  They can’t love.  They are too immature to love their parents.  1 John 4:16 says,

God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

Until God dwells in them, love doesn’t dwell in them.  Parents, who have God dwelling in them, love their children.  How do they love their children?  John writes in 1 John 5:2,

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.

5 And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: 6 For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. 7 If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?

Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. 

[M]any children in particular communities were made to believe that Jesus’ love, or just love in general, comes at the cost of having to earn an ever elusive reception or acceptance of their abusers. The beauty of Christianity is that someone can’t earn Jesus’ love — it’s unconditional.

The content of this post is now available in the study of:

1.) Evan Roberts

2.) The Welsh Revival of 1904-1905

3.) Jessie Penn-Lewis

on the faithsaves.net website. Please click on the people above to view the study.  On the FaithSaves website the PDF files may be easiest to read.

You are also encouraged to learn more about Keswick theology and its errors, as well as the Biblical doctrine of salvation, at the soteriology page at Faithsaves.