One In Jesus

Spirit. We started these lessons with a couple of lessons on the Holy Spirit. It seems a good place to end as well.

In Galatians, after Paul tells us that only faith expressing itself through love matters and that the law is summed up in the command “Love your neighbor,” he tell us to bear the “fruit of the Spirit.”

Amazingly, we often talk about fruit of the Spirit as though the Spirit had nothing to do with it! We read the Bible. We interpret the Bible. We apply the lesson to ourselves. We bear fruit. It’s just a little boastful, you know. Continue reading →

Knowing God. A true understanding of grace helps us better understand God. In fact, we can only caricature God if we misunderstand grace. When we see God as he truly is — a being who loves us so much that he gave his Son for us so that we can live with him eternally — we can get over some awful, false understandings.

I truly believe that we often see God as the Great Test Giver — and we prepare our entire Christian lives to sit for the Great True-False Test in the Sky, thinking that our position on the “issues” will decide our eternal fate.

And we sometimes see God as a Great Puzzle Maker, who hid clues to our salvation in the silences of the scriptures, so that only the very clever among us could figure it out and so make it to heaven.

Both views are just as false as can be. God gave up his Son to a cruel death so that we could be saved. A being who does this isn’t trying to make it hard or tricky. He’s desperately trying to help us make it. And this realization changes everything. Continue reading →

[I’m reposting these for the benefit of our teachers. This is supplemental material in case last week’s outline doesn’t get you through two weeks. The last two are newly posted.]

Feeling forgiven. Obviously enough, the first important consequence of understanding grace better is to appreciate — to feel — the forgiveness God has given us.

Tragically, many of us go through life feeling unworthy, struggling to perhaps one day be good enough to merit God’s forgiveness. It’s a miserable existence. I’ve been there.

Others, however, unwilling to feel so miserable, convince themselves that they really do merit God’s forgiveness and so become arrogant. In the Churches of Christ, this arrogance typically shows itself as doctrinal perfectionism — that is, the idea that only those with perfect doctrine will go to heaven. Continue reading →