BillHobbs.com is a frequently updated blog of original reporting and commentary by Bill Hobbs, a longtime Nashville journalist and media relations adviser. I am currently serving as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, a job I began on Oct. 29, 2007.
Here's your Sunday sermon for the week. I'll post a link to the audio when it becomes available. I look forward to hearing it - the Hobbs family stayed home Sunday as the two little ones had colds, Mom too, and Dad felt like he might be coming down with a cold of his own. Here's an excerpt from the pre-prepared text. Warning: No Hellfire and Damnation ahead...
Christians nowadays are too often willing to allow ourselves the luxury of dividing our experience of Christ into mutually exclusive categories of faith and obedience, believing and doing, claiming Christ as Savior and following him as Lord. I am rather sure that writers such as Paul, James, or Peter – and certainly our friend John – would find such distinctions meaningless.
On the one hand, all these biblical writers certainly affirmed that nobody could be saved by doing enough. Nobody can match the perfect commands of God with perfect obedience. Not one of us is without sin under law. There is no "merit system" in the Christian religion by which we balance our failures with good deeds that make up for them or tip the balance our way on the weighing scale of divine justice. The biblical argument for our lostness goes this way: the wages of sin is death, all of us are guilty of sin, anyone who denies he sins is both a liar and indicts God as a liar, and so . . . well, you can draw the conclusion even if you’ve never had a course in logic.
There is one and only one path to life. It has been blazed and marked for us by Jesus Christ – God among us to make atonement for sin and to effect a perfect reconciliation between God and humankind. No, Jesus himself is the path to God. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one can have access to God except through him. So the essential proclamation of the Christian faith is not "Do this!" but "Believe this!" And what we are called to believe is the gospel – the good news that heaven has borne the burden of our redemption in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. We are neither asked nor expected to find our own way to God but to receive salvation as heaven's free gift through faith in Christ alone.
On the other hand, it has been the fatal error of many attempts at Christian theology to equate faith in Christ alone with faith that stands alone. In his effort to keep his followers from mistaking and misapplying his teachings, John Calvin used to say, "It is faith alone that justifies, but the faith that justifies is never alone."
One line in that intro sticks out - There is no "merit system" in the Christian religion by which we balance our failures with good deeds that make up for them or tip the balance our way on the weighing scale of divine justice. On the other hand, there is Islam, in which charity is motivated by fear rather than faith - motivated by a desire to suppress the wrath of Allah.
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