There are a lot of folks in this world who try to live the Christian life out of their own strength, according to their own wisdom, as it seems reasonable to them; and there are a lot of churches that cater to such folks, and operate on such principles. That, I think, is part of the reason for the modern desire for legalism that Jared Wilson has written so much about. The problem is, that just doesn’t work; you can’t live a life that is in any meaningful way Christian from the same perspective and the same set of assumptions from which the world operates. You just can’t do it. Following Christ in this life has to begin with the renewing of our minds, with a radical shift in perspective and assumptions, because it’s only from that new perspective that we can even see what the Christian life really is, let alone that it makes any sense at all.

From the world’s perspective, life is all about us; from the perspective of faith, it’s all about God. From a human perspective, the life of faith makes no sense, because we can’t control how God will take care of us; from the perspective of faith, we can see that he will always give us what is best for us, and always in time. And a human perspective on how to live the Christian life breaks down, because it understands neither the depth of our sin nor the goodness of God, into either legalism or lawlessness. The perspective of faith helps us to see just how bad our sin is, and just how thoroughly it permeates our lives—and just how great a gift our salvation is, and how wonderful the grace of God is, and how much better God is than anything this world has to offer; it inspires us to gratitude for that gift and the desire to please God, and to know God, and that is what drives the kind of life that pleases him. Indeed, only that can produce the kind of life that pleases him, because what he wants most of all is for us to seek him.

(Adapted from “The View from Saturday”)

Ray Ortlund put up a wonderful post recently considering the question, “How come a stereotype of the church today is one of a ‘holier than thou’ mentality?” He offers some thoughts on the matter (which are well worth your time to read—it’s not a long post), then closes with this:

I know this. We Christians will see more repentance in our city when our city sees more repentance in us. And we can be honest about our failings, because it isn’t our performance that makes us okay. It’s Christ’s performance for us. That’s the gospel. It’s so freeing.

Amen. That’s the thing about the gospel: it sets us free from the need to be good enough, and thus from the need to convince others (and ourselves) that we already are good enough. You’ll never know how heavy a burden that is until you lay it down. I think that often, one of the biggest things that holds us back from repentance is the unwillingness to acknowledge to others that we are in fact sinners, because that would mean admitting that we aren’t good enough; it’s a wonderfully freeing thing to be able to lay that aside and just repent.

Jared Wilson, writing about an encounter between Craig Gross (of XXXChurch.com) and some colleagues, some of the Westboro Baptist Church crew (of “God Hates Fags” fame), and the American Idol tour (the WBC folks had come to protest Adam Lambert; Gross and his friends were counter-protesting), asks a penetrating question: “What Happens When You Love Haters?” On the evidence, the answer is, “Not what you’d expect.” Hate breeds more hate—but love can breed hate, too.

If you followed some of the Twitter brouhaha, you could see many Adam Lambert fans and supporters of gay rights causes cursing out Craig, telling him that God hated him, and saying plenty of things that make the Westboro crew sound downright genteel. They didn’t know he didn’t agree with the Westboro people; they just saw his proximity and saw him loving them. That was enough. They got confused and thought Craig was with Westboro.

Which says something really profound about a ministry of love. If you love everyone, no matter their brokenness and no matter their sin—prodigal or pharisaical—you’re gonna get slammed by both sides.

Jared Wilson makes a very important point—one on which I’ve been intending to comment for several days—on the decision by the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a seriously misnamed denomination) to allow self-affirmed practicing homosexuals to be ordained as pastors:

When concerned folks raise voices of protest and warning, when they say adamantly “This isn’t right,” they are accused of singling out the sin of homosexuality for special treatment, laser-focusing in on the homosexual as a sinner above all sinners, worse than the rest of us.

But I actually think it’s sort of the other way around. It is the proponents of gay clergy who single out homosexuality. It is they who are pressing us to respond to this issue. Nobody is pushing for resolutions on the allowance of adulterous clergy, of gossipy clergy, of alcoholic clergy, of p()rn-addicted clergy, or what-have-you.

It is not those who protest who are singling out this sin. It is the proponents of the sin as normative—or at least, passable—who are singling it out. . . .

And it isn’t those who believe the Bible when it says homosexual behavior is a sin that are being divisive; it is those who are introducing the idea that it isn’t. If you push a decision on something that innovates on the Bible’s testimony, you’re creating the division. But, sure, many of us will oblige in parting ways with you. If pressed—as when votes like this go the way they did—we will cooperate in division.

Read his whole post, because he has more to say beyond what I’m highlighting here, reflecting on the nature and origin of the historic creeds (and, I would argue, the confessions as well); I want to focus, though, on this point, because it’s an important one to understand. The division over the issue of homosexual behavior is the creation of those who want to change the church, and it has been created deliberately to accomplish that purpose; for them to blame that division and the fighting that goes with it on those who disagree with them, as if we should have just surrendered as soon as they made their first demand, is wildly unjust.

It’s interesting, if you hang around in mainline circles, you’re bound to hear folks on the left complaining that “they” (meaning the biblically orthodox) want to take “our” church away from “us.” Which would make sense if the church had taught for 2000 years that homosexual sex is just fine with God, and the view that it isn’t was the innovation. But that’s not how it is; it is, in fact, the exact backwards of the truth (as Mike Callahan might say). If anyone is trying to “take the church away” from anybody, it would be those who are trying to change the established teaching of the church going all the way back through the history of Israel to the writing of the book of Genesis.

Now, I do not say that the singling-out of homogenital contact as a particularly awful sin is the creation of the contemporary Left; that singling-out is itself a sin, and there’s no question that it didn’t originate in the years following Stonewall. But then, that’s not unique to homosexual activity, either; as G. K. Chesterton rightly protested in one of his Father Brown stories, the church has always tended to have fashionable sins, for which it makes excuses, and unfashionable ones, on which it comes down with excessive and graceless force; what they are changes with the times, but the tendency rolls on unabated. I do believe, though, that the way in which the Left has pursued its agenda on this point has served to exacerbate this problem among many on the Right, as counter-reaction pushes those unwilling to surrender biblical orthodoxy toward viewing homosexual activity as uniquely awful, and thus uniquely to be despised; and that does no one any good.