Counterfeit Conversion (5 of 6) — Winkie Pratney

Legal Obedience and Gospel Faith

Six different messages on counterfeit conversion or study, really, of conversion. And we have looked so far at what kind of ground? First kind of ground we looked at? Waste-out ground, and we said that represented what kind of faith?

A legal faith as opposed to? Gospel faith, characteristics of legal? Selfishness, and its parameters? Reward and punishment or threat and bribe. In contrast to that, gospel faith? Love and trust, and it requires a giving up of a self-centeredness.

And we are, if we are being morally ruled at all, we are in one of those two kingdoms. A kingdom of legal obedience, which says a bare minimum of morality, but is not the gospel. Or a true gospel submission.

We can consider two sons, identical twins in the same family. One, you'll see in that little study sheet I gave you, one who loves his dad and trusts him and does what his dad asks him to do, simply on that basis.

The other son who fears that he might be cut out of the dad's inheritance if he doesn't do what he says, and tries to butter up his dad, so make sure he'll stay in his good books. Now, both of them may do identical things.

They may live in the same house. They may carry out identical work programs, all this different thing. But there is a total difference in their attitudes, and God does not want the forced obedience of mere slaves.

He wants the love and the trust of sons and daughters. And that is the gospel. Second kind of soil we looked at, the rocky soil. And remember what happened with this? It sprung up and then the sun came out and withered away the plant.

We looked briefly at what the sun represented. Could you tell us biblically what those three or four things were? Yes. Temptation was one. Tribulation another. Affliction or persecution. Sometimes those words are used interchangeably in the New Testament, but that gives you the broad spectrum of the things.

What does the sun do to a normal healthy plant whose roots go down? Helps it grow. We then made a stab at guessing what these hard rocks may represent parabolically. What did we come up with? They're unyielded things.

Something down there that will not yield. Ground is yielding, but rock is not. And one of the major things, at least in this culture, is not bad things. Not deep down hidden bad things, but deep down hidden good things.

The hardest kind of things to break are good things. It is much easier, for instance, to resist the temptation of an enemy. If you're called to a mission field, for instance, and God gives you this call, and an enemy comes up and says, You go to the mission field, boy, and you watch out.

You know, I'm just a real threat on your life. You go. But what if a friend comes, somebody dear and close, and says, If you go to the mission field, you'll break my heart. That's a different story. A much more difficult thing to handle.

And there are many young people who would have obeyed God's call, but a good thing got in the way. A good career, a good relationship, a nice thing, a right, not a wrong. It got in the way of God. Now today, we look at probably the hairiest one of all of these things.

The Thorny Soil and Choked-Out Faith

And this is the third kind of soil. We've already looked at the birds, and the monolith monsters, or the day the earth caught fire. I suppose we could call the other one too. We want to look at the third one now, and we'll call this the day of the Triffids.

Triffids were a creation of John Wyndham. Some plants that landed on earth from Mars, or something. It's always coming from outer space. They never come from inner space. But here is the story. Can somebody read out that particular passage for us?

Just in Mark will do. Okay, it's a very simple statement. Some fell among thorns. So here's the seed. Is this ground capable of supporting healthy plant life? Yes, it is. I mean, you know, there's a lot of healthy plants there, but unfortunately, some are not nice.

So this plant goes in its roots. Instead of going outward, go down. That's a good sign. It doesn't shoot up as fast as the other one. The seed buried under there, and it's growing. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rocks down there.

The plant goes up, just like the previous one. It looks like it's going to be a good deal.

Unfortunately, it's a diet of triffids.

These triffids, of course, in Wyndham's thing, were plants that killed you. You know, they walk around, brr, brr, clicking, clicking, clicking, making funny noises. Well, here we have sort of the divine equivalent of that.

A plant that starts off well, but is choked out or killed by other plants that are planted right beside it. So here we have a garden that is the soil in which it's healthy, but there's been no care, there's been no weeding in this thing, and those weeds choke out what otherwise would be a great life, a great witness, a great ministry, or something, a great Christianity.

Now, we're going to look briefly at what the Scripture speaks about, these things and weeds, but can we take it a block at a time? I want to give you the problem first. We are basically looking at those five different things Benjamin Keech talked about, one of them being perhaps the failure to properly prepare the soil, or an analysis of the kind of reasons why some people don't make it.

But I've never forgotten this. In New Zealand, in a church, an Orthodox fundamental evangelical church, a young lady came up to a deacon in the church who had just become a Christian. She'd been saved about two weeks.

And the deacon said to her, How is it with your soul? Or words to that effect. That's even how he talked. How is it with your soul? She said, Oh, it's so exciting. She said, I'm so happy I can hardly sleep.

And he said, Don't worry, you'll soon get over it. Now that has to be a double tragedy. Number one, that a man who's supposed to be a deacon, an elder in a church, should say a thing to a precious young child of God like that, and damp.

You know, if you had a choice between damping two enthusiastic people and trying to stir up two dead people, which one would you pick? It's easier to cool down a fanatic than revive a corpse, isn't it?

And I don't think our real problem today is cooling down fanaticism. That's, as Tozer talked about, that's like sort of trying to keep the inhabitants of a graveyard from making merry. You know, that just doesn't happen in a huge chunk of time.

Our problem is to get dead people to live, which is a much more difficult problem than cooling down somebody who should be a little quieter. But the second part of this tragedy is that all too often it should be true.

That you get over it. That in the words of Scripture, you lose your first love. That something happens to you, and you get choked out somewhere along the way. Now, it is no secret, one man wrote, that many Christians are about as effective for God as the Navy was for the United States fifteen minutes after Pearl Harbor.

And we're going to look just briefly at this first thing, at the signs, biblical signs, of what these weeds may be. Can you give me in order, first, in Jesus' explanation, Matthew 13, 22, Mark 4, 18, and Luke 8, 14, what he amplifies as the substance of this parable.

Can you give me, first of all, the first characteristic of this soil? They hear the word. And for a third time, we are not dealing with irreligious people. Next. Now, can you look at Luke 8, 14? There is an interesting little addition, that's one of the scariest little additions I've, additions, not e-ditions, additions, amplifications.

The way to, really, I think to get the full meat of anything that Jesus says in these parables is to do what, we call it interweave analysis. It's, you take the synoptic gospels and you can, instead of just putting them in parallel columns, you actually weave.

It's better to do it in Greek, but English is fine too. You take the different phrases and where there's a duplication of a phrase, like when the word and appears three times, you just drop one of them, or drop two of them, and keep the other and.

And you just keep them in chronological order and then you get a full detailed statement, which I think represents the whole thing of what Jesus said, which each gospel picks up from their own perspective and gives you most of it or sections of it.

And to read the whole thing gives you sometimes additional insight. Now Luke, who is, shows us Christ as man and with all his humanity and shows us him also as the the frailties of Christ, you see, the times he had to pray when he's thirsty.

And Luke's a teacher's gospel too and it amplifies a great deal of the inner life of Christ. Now he puts in one little two word phrase. Can you find that phrase? Just before the rest of it. He goes forth.

Now that is a very scary phrase. You know why it's a scary phrase? Because it's the same kind of phrase that's used for missions. Go out, go forth, go into. It's a sending phrase. I send you forth as lambs among wolves.

It's a ministry type of phrase. It's not one of just being there and stuff like that. It almost implies like this person is actually involved in some kind of work of ministry when this thing happens. And so I want to introduce you in this session to the third and maybe the scariest of all of these things.

And that is the person who not only starts and appears to grow well, but actually begins to duplicate or replicate or in some way have some kind of public ministry and then falls apart. And then gets choked out.

The Worries and Riches That Choke the Word

And then gets destroyed. So let's list now what the scripture represents these weeds as being. Can you give me a list of these things now? First, the worries or the cares of what? Of this world. Implying there's another one that you ought to care about.

And second, yeah, now, Matthew puts in and Mark puts in the what? The deceitfulness of riches.

So something that riches can do. What did we say.

Was the chief sign of the last days? Deception. Religious deception. So here is that word appearing again in context with economics. Now, does being poor make you godly? No, it does not. It's an old song.

I dreamt of the Great Judgement morning and it says, the poor man was there, the rich man was there, but his riches had melted and vanished away. The poor man was there with his burdens. His debts were too heavy to pay.

So it's not, we're not Marxists. It's not your economics that determine your future. But it is, there's a difference apparently between riches and wealth. The Bible says, if riches increase, do not set your heart upon them.

And it's the love of money that is the root of all evil. I'm going to give you some very tragic practical examples. I won't mention any names of people, but I think you could pretty much fill in the blanks for yourself in many, many circumstances of what happens in the Western world in this situation.

And a third one, yeah, the desires, King James had a good old strong word, the lusts of other things. That strong desire, that epithermia, the word epithermia, the strong desire, is not a bad word in itself.

Some people think, you know, that it's the strength of a feeling that makes something right or wrong, but it isn't. If you had a strong desire for money, does that mean you're wrong? Not necessarily. Let's say, you know, there were a hundred thousand people starving to death and you needed a million dollars to feed them and to take care of them straight away.

You could have an intense desire for money and I'd be wrong. Not the intensity of desire. If you hadn't eaten for 48 days and you had an intense desire for food, that's different from gluttony. Okay? So, George McDonald said a neat thing about things, and you might like to write this down because it's the simplest, most profound thing I've ever heard on our relationship to the material world.

He said, if it be things that slay you, if it be things that slay you, that kill you, that put you to death, if it be things that slay you, what matter things you have? What matter things you have or things you have not?

In other words, you can be poor or you can be rich and still be slain by things. Be poor and wanting things, be rich and having things, and things are your problem. The love of things, the desire for things, the rulership of things.

And there is an end to this. One says, it chokes the word and he becomes unfruitful. Another one says, it chokes the word and it becomes unfruitful. And the last one, Luke again adds an extra little thing, brings forth no fruit to maturity or to perfection.

So there's no fruit nipped in the bud, is what we would say colloquially. Now, I want to read to you now some more clips. Some of you have read this book. If not, it's well worth reading. You don't have to read the last chapter if you like.

I don't read it very often. But the analysis is great. I don't know where the solution is as profound as it could be. But the analysis is accurate. This is Walter Chantry's little book, Today's Gospel, Authentic or Synthetic.

The Crisis of Evangelical Conversion

And here's a pastor with his heart in the right place who is concerned about what is happening in evangelical Christianity today. And what interests me is this, that this call for cleaning up the Christian church is coming from all sides of the Christian church.

It's coming from the Calvinist side. It's coming from the Armenians. It's coming from the mystics. It's coming from the Reformers. It's coming from every side of the Christian church. And it's saying, we have departed from the content of the gospel.

We are not preaching what we should be preaching. And what's interesting, though the answers of the Reformers go, we need to return to the days of Calvin and Luther, you know. And they go, yay. And all the Armenians go, what about John Wesley and those guys?

You know, don't leave them. So there's that still going on, but the analysis is the same. They all say, this is a problem. This is what needs to be done. So I want to read you a couple of little bits here from Chantry.

He first talks about how the church is astir with questions about evangelism and hope for revival. Never have there been more missionaries. Never have there been more evangelistic campaigns. Never more Christians starting to do personal evangelism.

Never such enormous conferences to examine seriously the cause and cure of lameness in the gospel ministry. Then he mentions thousands of people of 100 nations all met for evangelism conferences and yet, after all this analysis, evaluating, praying and hoping, missions are not in great store being revitalized and sinners not turning to Christ in great numbers.

And we have to take this with a pinch of salt, because we're talking about the Western world and the average evangelical fundamental church in this nation. There are some exceptions, thank God. And then he goes on and he says this.

The central issue of the way of salvation, large segments of Protestantism are engrossed in neo-traditionalism. We have inherited a system of evangelistic preaching which is unbiblical. Nor is this tradition very ancient.

Our messages and manner of preaching the gospel cannot be traced back to the Reformers and their creeds. They are much more recent innovations. They have clearly arisen from superficial exegesis and a careless mixture of 20th century reason with God's revelation.

Products of modern evangelism are often sad examples of Christianity. They make a profession of faith and then continue to live like the world. Decisions for Christ mean very little. Only a small proportion of those who make decisions evidence the grace of God and a transformed life.

All this related to the use of a message in evangelism that is unbiblical. The truth necessary for life has been hidden in a smokescreen of human inventions. On the shallow ground of man's logic large numbers have been led to assume they have a right to everlasting life and have been given an assurance which does not belong to them.

Evangelicals are swelling the ranks of the deluded with a perverted gospel. And then he goes on talking about those who read these pages and he says, Could you be misleading souls and misdirecting the labor of other Christians?

Have you closely examined your message and methods in the light of God's word? Pastors, this is no idle question. Have you not wondered about those converts who are as carnal as ever? What about those who have decided for Christ and you can't tell what they've decided?

They're not godly like the Savior they profess nor zealous for his cause. They do not study the word and do not mind if they're absent when it is preached. Consequently you know they give no evidence of true conversion.

Have you considered the possibility they were never evangelized at all? And then goes into a number of areas like repentance and preaching the law of God to shut people up to conviction of sin and a number of these well documented you can go back in the stream of the Christian church ever since evangelism has been preached right back to the Old Testament say types of how to preach it's all in there.

For instance let me give you just a little simple visual example. I have here a cheetah's bible I mean that's not what it's called. It's called a Zondervan-marked reference and I like this thing because it's got a nice concordance in the back and stuff.

But it's already pre-marked. That impresses people no end when you open it up and there's all these lovely colored scribbles all over the thing and that's been pre-marked for you. It was done by a guy called G. Gilchrist Lawson who put out the little personal workers New Testament with a red letter thing what he did is he did a whole bible kind of a product of his life's work in which he took the major themes of the bible, broke them all down according to the weight that was given to them in scripture and he explains his method somewhere here if I can find it look at this about once every eight years.

No I can't find it, it's in here somewhere. Out of a total of 31 ,102 verses in the bible imagine counting them 7 ,670 verses or nearly one verse in four concern the theme of salvation. This includes over 1 ,900 verses on the necessity of holy living 2 ,531 verses on the temporal punishment of the wicked.

What happens right here and now not future see 413 verses on the future punishment of the wicked 575 verses which shows God's love for the sinner and 182 verses which show God is no respecter of persons out of 23 ,145 verses in the Old Testament 4 ,736 have some bearing on man's need of salvation or the way of salvation and 2 ,934 verses out of a total of 7 ,957 in the New Testament also concerning the salvation of mankind.

So what I want to do is just show you a couple of little blocks of stuff here. The first one is a subject which is very popular today and is well preached on and that is that faith is central to conversion.

Now around my fingers there are all the verses in the bible on faith is the condition of conversion. Alright? By faith we are saved. I've got my two fingers around them. How many of you have ever heard a sermon on faith?

Put your hands up. I'd imagine most of you have. I'm going to turn the page here and I want to show you the bible verses on repentance. There's at least twice as many verses on repentance. But what is this one down here?

What is this with a page and over the page? Holy living should follow conversion. That's what it's about. There is more space given to this than almost any other theme concerning salvation. Now let me ask you a question.

I wonder if you can guess what this question is. What do you think we're preaching today in balance? We talk about balance. This isn't balance. This is tremendous emphasis on one side of the thing. And I think we ought to get from even a cursory glance at this block of stuff, that God expects people who follow him to be like him.

And if they're not, there's a real problem either in their understanding or in their actual meeting him. And that, I think, is that what Dave Wilkerson's recently called a revival of holiness. There is a cry going out across the country for return to ordinary Christianity.

Not super spiritual Christianity, just ordinary Christianity. Our Christianity is subnormal. We have become subcultures of the original Christians. We are no... To us, advanced heavy duty Christianity is not even kindergarten stuff.

We are so low, we have to reach up to touch bottom. Now, you could pick this up from any writer. I've got a stack of different people through the past. Here is A. W. Towson. What it means to accept Christ, he says.

A few things, fortunately only a few are matters of life and death, such as a compass for a sea voyage, or a guide for a journey across the desert. To ignore these vital things is not to gamble or take a chance.

It is to commit suicide. Here it is either be right or be dead. To the question, what must I do to be saved? We must learn the correct answer. To fail here is not to gamble with our souls. It is to guarantee eternal banishment from the face of God.

Here we must be right or be finally lost. Being spiritually lazy, we naturally tend to gravitate towards the easiest way of settling our religious questions. Hence, the formula, accept Christ, has become a panacea of universal application, and I believe it has been fatal to many.

Trouble is the whole accept Christ attitude is likely to be wrong. It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to him. It makes him stand hat in hand awaiting our verdict on him, instead of kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting his verdict on us.

It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulsive mind or emotions painlessly at no cost, lost to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life. I must be frank in my feeling that a notable heresy has come into being in evangelical circles.

The widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need him as Savior, and that we have a right to postpone our obedience to him as Lord as long as we want to. And then he goes on.

That's Posen. And we could pick up the same theme from people like Catherine Booth. Here's Catherine Booth's Popular Christianity. Another modern representation of Christ is that of a substitutionary Savior, not in a sense of atonement, but in the way of obedience.

This Christ is held up as embodying in himself the sum and substance of the sinner's salvation, needing only to be believed in. That is accepted by the mind as the atoning sacrifice, entrusted in a securing for the sinner all the benefits involved in his death, without respect to any inward change in the sinner himself.

This Christ is held up as a justification and protection in sin, not a deliverer from sin. In other words, men are taught Christ obeyed the law for them, but he is placed as obedience in the stead of, or as substitution of the sinner's own obedience or sanctification, which is an effect like saying, though you may be untrue, Christ is your truth.

Though you may be unclean, Christ is your chastity. Though you may be dishonest, Christ is your honesty. Though you may be insincere, Christ is your sincerity. The Christ of God never undertook to perform any such offices for his people, but he did undertake to make them new creatures, and thus to enable them to perform this.

He never undertook to be true instead of me, but to make me true to the very core of my soul. He never undertook to make me pass for pure, either to God or to men, but to enable me to be pure. He never undertook to make me pass for honest or sincere, but to renew me in the spirit of my mind so I could not help but be both as the result of the operation of his Holy Spirit in me.

He never undertook to love God instead of my doing so with all my heart and mind and soul and strength, but he came on purpose to empower and inspire me to do this. The idea of a substitutionary Christ, accepted as an outward covering instead of the power of an endless life, is a cheat of the devil and has been the ruin of thousands of souls.

I fear this view of Christ, so persistently preached in the present day, encourages thousands to live in a false hope while they're living in sin. Now, somebody asked, you know, a question about eternal security, and one of our question and answer things.

Eternal Security and the Lordship of Christ

I believe in eternal security. I do not believe in carnal security. And a person living a life unlike Jesus, and no heart's desire to be like him, is still saved. Saved from what? Certainly not from sin.

And that's what Jesus came to do that nobody else can do. He's the only one who can deliver from sin. We could go through chunks of this stuff, and you can go to the Puritan writers, or the pilgrims, or the mystics, or the evangelicals, or the reformers, or the modern evangelical fundamentalists have made a jump in the last 50, 60, 80 years.

There's been a decay from that original preaching of, we'll call it, no saviourhood without lordship. You know what they preach behind the Iron Curtain? No saviourhood without lordship. They never heard of a division of a thing.

You get saved, that's it. Jesus is your boss. Before the Kremlin was, now Jesus is. That's it. And some of the third world countries, in Africa, Latin America, they said, well, you've made Jesus your saviour.

Have you made Him your lord? They wouldn't know what in a fact you were talking about. You see, you know, it's not what Jesus does, it's who He is. It's like me saying, I accept my wife as my personal dishwasher.

It's who He is, not what He does. That's secondary to who He is. And He is first and foremost. He's Lord 747 times in the New Testament. And wherever that phrase, saviour, lord and saviour, it's always in that order.

Lord and saviour. It's never flipped. Lord and Christ. Lord and saviour. Not vice versa. All right, now, let's look now at one of the hairiest of all of these things. I'm going to ask this question. Is it possible to be a Christian, a real Christian, and not surrender to Jesus your heart and life, as your master?

In other words, is it possible to come to Jesus and get salvation off Him without having Him? You know what I mean? Do something for me. Get me saved, but I don't want to obey you. Not yet. I'll do that when I get to be a missionary.

I join YWAM or last days and get advanced. Then I might make you Lord one day. So what we got here, then, is a division between Lord up here in lights, see, flashing fluorescents, and down here, Saviour.

This is kind of the bottom story. You can put a U-R. I do, because I'm English, but you can put a L-R if you want to. That always looks weird to me, so I'm just going to put U in it. All right? Now, if you make a separation between Lord and Saviour, then you're going to have some funny people, and this is the way they look.

They're Christians, but they're hookers, still, because they haven't given that area to the Lordship of Christ yet. They're Christians, but they're still addicts. They're Christians, but they're still you fill in the blanks.

They're Christians, but they're still demon-possessed. They're Christians, but they're still fill in the blanks. You can put all kinds of things in between this, and you need to put it in to explain an anomaly of a person who is a Christian, but still living exactly like their non-Christian neighbors.

And what you put in there just depends on whatever's in in the particular year you speak at. You see? You could put discipleship in here, you could put baptism of the Spirit, you could put deliverance, you can put you know, fill in the blanks, whatever.

And on our there is a sense in which we must go. Right? I mean, how many of you have gone in the last year? Or last hour? Or the last... Now, let me give you a little distinction here that has been of value to me.

Growth in Grace, Wisdom, and Obedience

It has to do with an electronics analogy. There are two kinds of circuits in electronics. One's called digital, one's called analog. An analog circuit is a little bit like a dimmer on a light. If you're looking at it on a graph, it would go up slowly like that.

It's like a light dimmer or volume control on a radio, like this. See, it's that little bit at a time, like this, see? Digital, though, on a scope would look like that. It's either on or it's off. It's up, it's down.

Nothing in between, it's just like that. Like a light switch. It's not sort of part on and part off. And it's off, see? Just like that. Now, these are computer type circuits and these are linear sound type circuits and stuff like that.

Alright? Now, growth in Christian things is growth in grace, response, obedience to God's grace. That's one thing. And then growth also in wisdom. In our learning. Let's change this one to a bag. Alright?

Those are two things. Growth in response to God as He gives us His royal commands and then learning what that thing is. Now, here is what the Christian life looks like then. One of these components, these two things, to be loving and to be wise is essential what it means to be holy.

God is light, God is love.

Two essential elements of a holy life. Wisdom and love. Those two things. And out of all of those things flows all of God's actions. His mercy, His judgment, all of those things flow from His holiness.

His wisdom and His love. Implemented by His power. Now, growth in the Christian life then is growth in two different things. But this is the way it happens. Growth in wisdom. That's called line on line, precept on precept.

That's the way God teaches you. He gives you one little thing and then the next little thing and the next little thing. He doesn't just go and dump everything on you. He gives you line on line. See? Takes you like a little kid and gives you one thing and then the next thing.

But obedience is digital. Obedience is yes or no, it is not, maybe. And what we have done in our day is made not only learning analog but obedience analog. So a person is a little bit more obedient than they were yesterday.

Which is like being sort of God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all except. And that is, what that does is it cuts out the absolutes in the Christian life. See? Mario Mello calls it we are ish, it's ish-ness.

We praise ish, we worship ish, we obey ish. You say to a person are you serving the Lord? Well, more or less-ish. What does that mean? If I say to a girl, are you pregnant? Well, more or less-ish. What does that mean?

She's either is or she's not. You married? Well, kind of more or less. Those are two biblical illustrations of conversion. Birth and marriage. And there, you know yes or no. It's not a sort of maybe. And we made it a maybe.

And that's one of the most dangerous things you can do. And we're not trying to hold up some kind of legal standard here. I'm just trying to hold up some standard at all. If we're going to preach the gospel and hold a standard up, you're going to hold your Mickey Mouse one up or his?

We're going to say look, this is as good as I've ever got, so why don't you try and be like this? Then we're back on that last ground. Compare ourselves with ourselves. I would rather hold a standard up that I can't make, that God tells me is His standard, than to hold up a standard I can easily do and make that.

It's an embarrassing thing to stand before God and say, well, I passed on my standards. You see what I'm talking about? If we don't have a matter of fact, Victor Frankl said that we need something bigger than ourselves to give ourselves to to be healthy.

You're not mentally healthy if you don't have something bigger than yourself to give yourself to. That's why a person will work for a firm, they'll retire him at 60 years old, give him a gold watch, and he goes home and he's dead in two weeks.

Because he lost his gold. He had nothing left to give himself to. So he just lay down and died. Now, if we have an infinite God, and we do, and we're finite beings, and we are, and He says you be holy for I am holy, or be perfect even as your Heavenly Father is perfect, then where are you going to come to the end of that?

When are you going to have time to be laid back and mellow? When will you arrive? Listen, who saved the Apostle Paul? Did he do a good job? Did he have the proper counseling? I would imagine so. Would you not?

To be saved by Christ Himself? Do you think the Apostle Paul knew Jesus?

Would you think? It doesn't.

Take more than three brain cells to say, well, yes, he probably did. Then why in the world does Paul at the end of his life say that I might know him? Because he understood.

This. We sin against God when we make.

Obedience analog. And tell people you can obey a little bit more than you did before. You obey or you disobey. We reject what God says. We're not partially obedient. The myth of partial obedience has eaten out the heart of the church.

Jonah and the Myth of Partial Obedience

The myth of partial obedience. Here's God. He speaks to Jonah. Arise and go to Nineveh. So Jonah does something. He arises. Dynamite. And he goes to Tarshish. He would have said, well, I did most of what you said.