Could the New Testament Be Wrong?

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR 1 John 5:18–20 (NIV) We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. CONSIDER In the May 20 entry of Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest, he wrote, Many of us prefer to stay at the threshold of the Christian life instead of going on to construct a soul in accordance with the new life God has put within. We fail because we are ignorant of the way we are made, we put things down to the devil instead of our own undisciplined natures. Think what we can be when we are roused! It’s taken me more than a hundred pages to say what Chambers said in a short paragraph. The New Testament teaches us what it means to “construct a soul in accordance with the new life God has put within.” This captures the very essence of discipleship, as noted earlier: the retrofitting of a human being with eternal life. We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them. “We fail because we are ignorant of the way we are made.” IMHO (in my humble opinion), the people of God are arrested in development; as Chambers put it, stuck at the “threshold of the Christian life,” between the first half of the gospel and the second half. We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin. The text is plain. Do we really believe it? We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners. Sin is the cancer. Sinning is the symptom. Jesus defeated sin on the cross. Therefore, though we continue to be sinners, we are no longer destined to sin. Many push back at this point with this question: “So are you saying we can be sinless?” No, that’s not what I am saying. I am saying—as I believe the Bible is saying—sin has lost its power. Why do we continue to empower it? We must move beyond the threshold of the Christian life and begin constructing a soul, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the new life God has put within. It comes down to one of two possibilities: (1) either the New Testament is wrong, or (2) we aren’t getting it. Which possibility are you landing on? PRAY Lord Jesus, thank you for not giving up on us. Thank you for your patience with us as we have thought we were in the house only to find we have been lingering at the door. I’m ready to move on from milk to meat, from my own meager and measured religion to mature faith. Come, Holy Spirit, and take me by the hand and lead me. I pray in your name, Jesus. Amen.