Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Damnable Heresy
"and if I were to run off the road and say a curse word before smashing into a tree and dying, I know that I would go to hell."
Those words were spoken by a man in my church recently. He had gone before the church to admit his sin, which was unruly rage. I always find these parts of service to be cringe producing for many reasons. The main one is that the person usually segues into admonishing the rest of us for being sinful and not getting up before the the church to air their dirty laundry as well.
Not that anyone is really airing anything. The guy never really admitted to anything other than getting really really mad at times. OK, anger is an emotion, Christ got angry, where's the sin? Maybe the sin is the "look at me, ain't I pure!" mentality of some Christians, but that's for another post...maybe.
But back to the opening statement. I did laugh at this when I heard it. I thought, "didn't these kinds of arguments get settled at vacation bible school when we were like 10?" Guess not. When our pastor noticed that a few us couldn't help but snicker at the man's statement he flew off into a rage, excoriating nominalism in all it's forms and ending with the statement:" ...and to believe that you can go out and sin as you will because the blood of Jesus will protect you is a damnable heresy".
Maybe this is so, but I also believe that his blood is not so weak that I will spend eternity in the outer darkness because of some curse words a moment before death. Good grief, the whole incident was so idiotic it was surreal. What if I crashed a died while avoiding a child that ran out in the road, do I still go to hell for cursing? What if I thought the curse word but had not the time to speak it, am I still damned?
What a bunch of silly navel gazing.
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Those words were spoken by a man in my church recently. He had gone before the church to admit his sin, which was unruly rage. I always find these parts of service to be cringe producing for many reasons. The main one is that the person usually segues into admonishing the rest of us for being sinful and not getting up before the the church to air their dirty laundry as well.
Not that anyone is really airing anything. The guy never really admitted to anything other than getting really really mad at times. OK, anger is an emotion, Christ got angry, where's the sin? Maybe the sin is the "look at me, ain't I pure!" mentality of some Christians, but that's for another post...maybe.
But back to the opening statement. I did laugh at this when I heard it. I thought, "didn't these kinds of arguments get settled at vacation bible school when we were like 10?" Guess not. When our pastor noticed that a few us couldn't help but snicker at the man's statement he flew off into a rage, excoriating nominalism in all it's forms and ending with the statement:" ...and to believe that you can go out and sin as you will because the blood of Jesus will protect you is a damnable heresy".
Maybe this is so, but I also believe that his blood is not so weak that I will spend eternity in the outer darkness because of some curse words a moment before death. Good grief, the whole incident was so idiotic it was surreal. What if I crashed a died while avoiding a child that ran out in the road, do I still go to hell for cursing? What if I thought the curse word but had not the time to speak it, am I still damned?
What a bunch of silly navel gazing.
