One In Jesus

Accept one another

(Rom 15:7)  Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.

Paul discussion of how to live as Christ’s congregation culminates in one of the most important commands in the New Testament.

The “then” (”wherefore” in the KJV) says this is the conclusion from what has gone before. We’ve studied already Paul’s teachings on grace in chapter 5. The whole book is about grace, actually, and here’s the end of it all. We need to take extra care to get this verse right! Continue reading →

Ethics

We considered the boundaries of Christianity. We now consider the “rules.” And there are rules.

Now, rather than approaching the scriptures asking our own questions, we need to let the scriptures tell us both the questions and the answers. You see, sometimes what we think is important isn’t important to the New Testament writers at all.

Take Romans — a very long book written to a church that Paul had never visited. You’d think if there ever was a great occasion for Paul to lay out the “marks of the church” to make sure the church in Rome would be a “faithful” congregation of the brotherhood, this would be it. And Paul, indeed, writes chapters and chapters on how to live as a congregation of God’s people — but says hardly anything about how to conduct a worship service or how to organize. He doesn’t even lay out a whole bunch of rules, as we think of rules. Continue reading →

Grace

Another critical mistake of 20th Century Church of Christ teaching is the false assumption that we receive more grace at baptism than is available to us afterwards. I’m sure many churches have members who’ve committed some horrible sin who can’t feel forgiven unless they are re-baptized. We’ve taught that God gives utterly complete forgiveness at baptism (he does) but that afterwards forgiveness depends on how well and how often we repent, confess, and pray for forgiveness — and even then that forgiveness isn’t given to those who don’t truly repent by eliminating that sin from their lives.

Thus, we argue, that those in the independent Christian Churches are damned because they’ve not repented of their use of the instrument — even if they commit their error utterly unaware that they are in error. Of course, the same logic would leads us to conclude that we aren’t forgiven of our lust unless we’ve stopped lusting entirely — and even more so, because we know that lust is a sin. Continue reading →