Factionalism is a danger, but factionalism is not the same as having a following.

Many people are quick to bring up Paul’s warning in 1 Corinthians about those who said “I follow Paul” or “I follow Apollos.”

1 Corinthians 1:10-17

10 I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. 11 For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. 12 What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. (ESV)

1 Corinthians 3:4-9

4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?

5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building. (ESV)

But Paul is rebuking the church for divisions (1:10) and quarreling (1:11), not for having teachers. Being drawn to a certain preacher does not by itself mean you are committing the sin of factionalism. If you think your favorite teacher is the only one worth listening to, if you are passionate about following him rather than following Christ, if you get into pointless arguments for the sake of defending your teacher, then you are making the mistake Paul warned about.

In spite of all the legitimate warnings against “hero” worship, I want to raise a point of support for holy emulation which includes realistic admiration. Hero worship means admiring someone for unholy reasons and seeing all he does as admirable (whether it’s sin or not). Holy emulation, on the other hand, sees evidences of God’s grace, and admires them for Christ’s sake, and wants to learn from them and grow in them.

This theme is strong in the New Testament.

• “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
• “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us” (Philippians 3:17).
• “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:9).
• “And you became imitators of us and of the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 1:6).
• “[Do] not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (Hebrews 6:12).
• “You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness” (2 Timothy 3:10).
• “Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Timothy 3:14).
• “Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity” (Titus 2:7).

The old Puritan Thomas Brooks comments on holy emulation in The Secret Key to Heaven:

Bad men are wonderfully in love with bad examples…. Oh, that we were as much in love with the examples of good men as others are in love with the examples of bad men. Shall we love to look upon the pictures of our friends; and shall we not love to look upon the pious examples of those that are the lively and lovely picture of Christ? The pious examples of others should be the mirrors by which we should dress ourselves. He is the best and wisest Christian…that imitates those Christians that are most imminent in grace…. It is noble to live by the examples of the most eminent saints.

It is right and risky to aim at being worthy of emulation. It is more foundationally right to aim at being helpful. It is essential in both that we be amazed that we are forgiven through Christ, and that we serve rather than seek to be served. This does not answer all my personal questions about this topic, but it is a start.

Many people and groups seem to be confused about Hell. Some say, “There’s no need to really worry about what awaits you or the others after death.” My response would be that I pity you. I am humbled and in awe of God all the more because I understand what he saved me from. He didn’t save me from a reincarnated earth or a simple cessation of existence. Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior through His blood, and God’s unending grace and mercy, saved me from a place of “outer darkness” (Matthew 25:30), “weeping” (Matthew 8:12), “wailing” (Matthew 13:42), “gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:50), “flame” (Luke 16:24), “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), “fiery furnace” (Matthew 13:42), separation from the righteous (Matthew 25:46), and “torment” (Luke 16:23). Do I just randomly believe these things? Were the words spoken only by mere men? No. The examples I used are straight from the teaching of Jesus, the Son of God, and our savior. He taught about Hell, Gehenna, and Hades. All are the same place of eternal torment. I’ve heard some folks try to argue that Jesus never taught about hell being eternal torment or even a bad place at all. This is a false teaching, and the Word must be brought to bare against it.

Jude 1:16

16 These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires; they are loud-mouthed boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage. (ESV)

(Read on …)

Sin is bad. I know I sound like a preschooler explaining sin, but so many people seem to miss the mark on sin that I felt I should get back to the basics. This post is not about sin per-say, but about how we sin in responding to sin. As a sinner, I know I’ve fallen short, but I also know that sometimes I sin when I’m responding to my sin and trying to repent of my sin. I will provide a very short, and nowhere near complete, list of some common sinful responses to sin. Not only will this help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls in responding to your own sin, but will also help you recognize brothers and sisters in Christ who are using the same tactics to dodge their own sin. We can’t love our fellow Christians if we are unwilling to help them in love. (I will discuss Biblical discipline and shepherding in another post.)

1. We minimize our sin. We like to say, “Oh well, at least I didn’t kill someone like that other person.” We like to make it seem that as long as there is someone else out there sinning worse than we are that we are fine and get ourselves out of our guilty feelings.
2. We legitimize our sin. We believe our sin is different from anyone else’s. We may even try to say that since God, in His gracious nature, used it for His grace and purposes, that it was good that we sinned in that way. This is a despicable lie to us, and a horrible affront to the grace of God. We are trying to use His grace to justify our sin as a good thing, not the evil it truly is.
3. We shift the blame. This is the oldest response to sin in the book. Literally. Adam and Eve did this right off the bat. Eve blamed Satan and Adam blamed Eve and God since he made her. We can see how well that excuse worked in Genesis 3.
4. We rationalize our sin. We try to rationalize some extenuating circumstances usually by wearing down listeners by speaking profusely. Trying to convince the listener with their perspectives, motives, and the conditions surrounding their sin. We try to convince others to sympathize with us so as to compel them to excuse our sin.
5. We distract from our sin. We try to backpedal with the someone misunderstood us, or we were just joking, or the person who brought it up was just being mean and jealous excuses.
6. We partially confess our sin. In pride, we only tell part of our sin when we should simply, clearly, honestly, and completely tell all that we have done. Remember, God knows what you have done, don’t act dishonestly with the one from whom your grace flows.
7. We limit the regret of our sin. This is what Paul refers to as “worldly grief” (2 Cor 7:10). We don’t truly put our sin to death, we only regret the consequences, or effects, of it not the actual sin.

This should give you a bit to chew on. We are to love sinners. To be able to love sinners we absolutely must take their sin seriously, the same way God does. If we don’t we rob ourselves, and every other sinner, the divine dignity which God grants to us as His image bearers. This may be best summed up by Plantinga, “We ought to pay evildoers, including ourselves, of the ‘intolerable compliment’ of taking them seriously as moral agents, of holding them accountable for their wrongdoing. This is a mark of our respect for their dignity and weight as human beings.” Sin is a corruption of us, we were not meant for it. To allow ourselves or other sinners to respond to our sin by sinning further is unloving and even cruel towards us and God.

The temptation is to look for elements of human sovereignty in our deliverance, to theorize ways to hold God responsible for our mistakes, and to hope that there might not be some degree of truth in Satan’s claim that man can be “as God” (Genesis 3:5). We have to mature in the faith and become familiar with Scripture before we begin to overcome this temptation in our lives.

Ephesians 2:8-9

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (ESV)

I have a confession to make.

“My name is Melody, and I have in the past and continue to struggle with worshiping idols.”

Wow. That really makes me sound like a horrible person. I realize, though, that apart from Christ, I am a horrible person.
Totally self-centered, prideful, hateful, rude, spiteful. Without Jesus, I would not be worth anything, and would not be worthy to
enter into a relationship with The Most High God. It takes recognizing this to begin to allow God to change my heart.

I was recently reading the Bible and my husband and I were discussing the Word, as we often do together. We came upon Exodus 32.
This particular story stuck out to me as a clear reminder of how some of us behave concerning idol worship.

Exodus 32:1-6

32:1 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” 6 And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. (ESV)

When the people saw how long it was taking Moses to come back down the mountain, they gathered around Aaron. “Up,” they said, “Up, make us gods who shall x go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”

(Read on …)

Many of us growing up often heard or sang the children’s song “O Be Careful”

O be careful little mouth what you say
O be careful little mouth what you say
There’s a Father up above
And He’s looking down in love
So, be careful little mouth what you say

You may thing it’s a cute way to remind kids to be nice to others, and without discounting that I’ll also focus on what Jesus says:

[bibleblock]Matthew 12:36-37[/bibleblock]

Does this mean all we have to is speak nicely and God will judge us as justified and righteous?  No, quite the opposite in fact.  Stepping back to verse 34 Jesus says, “… out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”  This is addressing that the words that you speak are indicative of what you truly believe and hold in your heart, and if your heart is on God, then your words should be honoring, glorifying, and pointing to Him.

So, as long as we keep our mouths shut, we’ll be fine? While this is a good idea and a very wise idea (Proverbs 13:3), the words that come out are not the only thing to think on.

(Read on …)