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Jun 17 2013

Trust and Obey


I started studying the Bible when I was in my early twenties. I had been in Sunday school classes, Vacation Bible school, and  church services but had never had an appetite for learning about God and the Bible. My interest peaked when I started growing up and realizing the responsibilities of being an adult. I was married, struggling financially much of the time, the few prayers I prayed were seemingly not being answered, and I was searching for truth.

As I began to read long passages of Scripture, (even whole books of the Bible), and tried to understand what they really meant to me, I was shocked that at least some of what I had been taught was in my view not biblical. Later, after I entered Bible school for ministry training, I was also shocked that there were so many different views of what I considered to be important doctrines among the staff. It was there that I first was convinced that people of good will can have differing views of many things in the Bible and still work together for the greater good of Christ and the gospel. I learned that the gospel of Christ is truly of first importance, it is the watershed of Bible doctrine and everything else is somewhat less important.

So it was that my training was a mixture of ideas, opinions, and traditions all of which were supported by the Bible according to those who taught them. We were Southern Baptists, we were “free will” people, with many of us coming from the Free Will Baptist perspective. My parents fit that description. Both of my parents were shaped by Free Will Baptist preachers from the hills of Western North Carolina. In their understanding of God and salvation there we many, many more ways to lose your salvation than to find it.

By the time I was in my late 30’s my mother (who was blind) had been exposed to many, many hours of Bible teaching by a variety of teachers by way of radio. She was greatly influenced by J. Vernon McGee, and by her fairly new pastor, Rev. Kenneth Ridings, a great Bible man. My dad had been saved and was on fire for Jesus, and he too, had left some of the old teachings that he had learned in his earlier years. He had been baptized in his 20’s but it was pretty obvious to my mom and everyone who knew him that he really was born again much later in life. His passion was Jesus and telling others about him until he went to meet him in the late spring of 1993.

I was in my late 50’s when I first started to grapple with what some refer to as “the doctrines of grace”, known more widely as Calvinsim, and more narrowly as “monergism”. It was not that I was reading writers who embraced the TULIP of Calvin, it was quite the opposite. I was reading my Bible and started to see dozens of texts that I usually either ignored or believed as I had been covertly taught, “they don’t mean what they say”. The more I studied and read the Bible the more I saw! I came to the place where I had to deal with those obvious truths, many of which were the opposite of what I had believed for decades and taught myself.

It became clear to me that I was in a theological pickle, so to speak. I could not embrace the 5 points of Calvinism, at least the way I understood them. Neither could I any longer believe as some of my friends that election and predestination are “not true”. I was and am a member of great Church of Christ and trust me, “Reformed” or “Calvin” are ugly words in the minds of most Restoration people.

Somewhere around my yearly 60’s, (I’ll be 68 this month) it all started to come together. My mountain of a problem had been that I was trying to find out which doctrine was right. I thought I must believe either the doctrines of grace, or be a full blown Armenian. I knew for sure I was not a true blue “free will” guy and I couldn’t buy all that the Reformed guys were saying, so I was “between a rock and a hard place’, as the saying goes”.

I have said this many times before but I don’t believe people get it. My options as a Christian, as to the written revelation of God is not “either, or“! Christians are not given the liberty to pick and choose what parts of the Bible they will believe and live by. Our’s is to try, the very best we can, with God’s help, to believe and live by ALL of the scriptures. Of course we must use the wisdom God gives to understand it in context, we can’t ignore the widely accepted methods of biblical interpretation.

When dealing with complex and difficult differences in the Bible there is a better option than “either, or”. The far better option is “both, and“. If it is in the Bible it is true! I now have peace about what I was finding in Scripture because I just believe it! Does God bring men to himself and open their understanding and cause them to repent and trust Jesus? Yes! Is man required to repent, and does he have the freedom to say yes or to reject? Yes! The Bible emphatically teaches both, and both are true. So let’s just believe what God says and let him be God!

Today I stumbled across something that perhaps makes much more sense of this idea than I can convey myself. I quote from Justin Taylor’s blog…

What is compatibilistm?

D. A. Carson provides a good introduction when he argues that the following two propositions are both taught and exemplified in the Bible:

  1. God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in Scripture to reduce human responsibility.
  2. Human beings are responsible creatures—that is, they choose, they believe, they disobey, they respond, and there is moral significance in their choices; but human responsibility never functions in Scripture to diminish God’s sovereignty or to make God absolutely contingent.

Carson right argues that “We tend to use one to diminish the other; we tend to emphasize one at the expense of the other. But responsible reading of the Scripture prohibits such reductionism.”

“Hundreds of passages,” he suggests, “could be explored to demonstrate that the Bible assumes both that God is sovereign and that people are responsible for their actions. As hard as it is for many people in the Western world to come to terms with both truths at the same time, it takes a great deal of interpretative ingenuity to argue that the Bible does not support them.”

I agree! I was mowing my lawn today as I thought about these things and it dawned on me that most of us believe as Carson does to some degree. We hold that a sinner is required to repent and that he has the God given free will to choose to follow Jesus, to come to faith and be baptized. All very true. But, why do we pray for him to come to God? If we don’t on some level believe that God can move a man toward repentance and faith, why pray? If we ask God to change the person’s will are we not admitting that God can change it?

I believe that almost all of us who are Christians would agree that we would not be believers today except for the work of God in our lives. When Jesus said to those rough cut fishermen and others who would be his inner circle, “Follow me”, could they have refused? Yes. But it’s a big deal to me that they didn’t.

Royce Ogle

 

May 28 2013

When you pray…


5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.” (Matthew 6:5)

They say confession is good for the soul.

I fight against this temptation but fail far too often. The temptation is when asked to pray in public I tend to give as much attention to the human listeners as the One I am supposedly praying to.

I try to follow these simple guidelines when praying in public.

Keep it short

This past weekend my friend Willie Robertson of Duck Dynasty give the prayer before the NASCAR race in Charlotte. It was the shortest  such prayer I have ever heard. It was to the point, asked what needed to be asked and he was done.

Don’t teach a lesson or preach a sermon

Praying is not telling  everything you know about the Bible and God. Prayer is asking God for what you want and need. And, it seems to me that most of the time it is unnecessary to tell God a bunch of stuff as if He might not know or has forgotten.

Don’t pray to be heard of men

It would be OK if men could give you what you are supposed to be asking for, but they can’t. If you hear someone say “That was such a beautiful prayer”, be alert. Prayers are not intended to be beautiful, they are intended to ask God for what you need or want.

Always be thankful

It is clear to me that in the Bible, thanksgiving usually accompanied prayer. Prayer is asking, giving thanks is not prayer. The Scriptures speak of prayer and thanksgiving in the same verse. I have tried to remember to either give thanks before I ask or after every time I come to him.

Remember. Only those who pray get their prayers answered.

I am firmly convinced from my study of prayer in the Bible that most everyone who prays on a regular basis can expect many specific answers to their prayers. We should teach our children to pray and expect answers. Answers to our prayers should be normal, not abnormal

Royce Ogle
Monroe, LA

 

Apr 10 2013

Some thoughts about the suicide of Pastor Rick Warren’s son


Suicide is a terrible thing, it ends a life and brings untold grief to the ones who love the deceased most. There is no question in my mind, that in most cases, suicide is a sinful act. I say “in most cases” because of the possibility that some who have committed suicide were so mentally unbalanced that they were incapable of rational thought. I think far more suicides would fit this category than we might think. I am no psychologist but but I do know that self preservation is a human’s strongest instinct.

I am no stranger to suicide, my first cousin, a young mother and devoted wife, took her own life and seemed rational to some degree, having carefully planned the act, leaving a well thought out note to her husband and infant son. I have had numerous friends who took their own lives. I have mourned with grieving family’s who had many, many questions and few answers, the most pressing with no answer. Why?

After hearing of Rick and Kay Warren’s loss, and reading some of the most hateful tweets and posts, some supposedly from Christians, my emotions have ranged from pity to intense anger, to sadness, to confusion, and finally to forgiveness. I remember Jesus’ words from the cross, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing“. if or not people know how gross and ugly their actions are concerning this good family and their departed son, my only option is to forgive. And so, going against my every instinct, I am by faith granting personal forgiveness to those who have sinned terribly by what they have said and continue to say.

Back to Jesus. Yes, suicide is an awful sin (in most cases…). Can if be forgiven? Yes, it has been forgiven. Many serious disciples believe that since the one who takes his or her own life is not able to confess the sin and repent it is not forgiven so the person is therefore lost.

Really? If all the atonement of Jesus did for me was to position me where I am on a day by day bargaining with God about my many sins i am in deep trouble. As I said, this is exactly what many serious Christians believe. Have you thought this through? What if tomorrow afternoon you are killed in a car crash? Did you formally deal with God about every single sin of that day? The answer is NO! You can’t even track all you have thought, or said, or failed to do. As long as you and I live in bodies of flesh we will be to some degree sinful. Is there an answer to this dilemma? Yes!

The atonement of Jesus Christ covers all sin(s), past, present, and future. If not he wasted his life. But he did not waste his life! In Romans 4 the Apostle Paul quotes David in the Psalms, 

just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:

7 “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
    and whose sins are covered;
8 blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”

You ask, “Royce, surely you don’t believe God is not counting your sins against you, do you?” That is precisely what I believe. If not there is no way I could ever be justified by God. I’m too sinful. Oh, by the way, you are too.

Consider these words:

giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. 13 He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:12-14)

 

He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high (Hebrews 1:3)

 

For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. 25 Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own,26 for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. 27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. (Hebrews 9:24-28)

 

But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,13 waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. 14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. (Hebrews 10:12)

 

But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,13 waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. 14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. (Hebrews 10:12-14)

 

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (! Peter 2:24)

 

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

 

Today is April 10, 2013. How many sins had you committed 1,980 years ago? That is about how long it’s been since Jesus offered his holy life, fulfilling all of God’s righteous requirements for you, by giving his body as a sacrifice for your many sins. How man had you committed in the year 33 AD?

Are you getting picture? An atonement that only covered “past sins” is not much of an atonement! Honestly, my experience is that often I can’t even live up to my own frail standards much less God’s standard which demands 100% perfection.

You see, I have been declared “righteous” (not guilty) on the bases of the life and death of Jesus, not because of my goodness. And, so it is with you if you are in Christ. Here is the deal, a life given for a life, your life, Rick Warren’s son’s life.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

 

If all God had done for us through the sacrificial death of Jesus was to forgive our past sins we would be in trouble. Before the sun went down on the next day we would be lost all over again because God’s demand is a complete holy life. Jesus’ life was that complete holy life, for you and me.

There is a mountain of Bible passages that support these facts. And, I expect there are scores that you suppose cancels these out. Well, I’ll tell you what, you try to reconcile your life with God on a daily, or even hourly basis if you want but I am satisfied with the once for all reconciliation of Jesus precious blood.

God hates sin! God hates suicide! God has done something about it. He judged it all in the person and work of Jesus our great high priest who made one offering for all people for all time. Are you in? I am all in. if not I have no hope of ever getting of my grave or seeing Jesus face to face. I have tried desperately and I find that I am not good enough to be approved by God. By the way friend, you aren’t either. 

I expect Rick Warren’s son to be in heaven along with the tens of millions of former offenders who appropriated the atonement of Jesus for their sins.

I am asking the God of all comfort to be near the Warren family and all those who loved their son. May they know the peace of God that only comes because of peace with God.

Royce Ogle
Monroe, LA

 

Feb 4 2013

Same Blog, New Look


A few of my readers had problems reading the white on black text, and I discovered that some of the older stuff in the dusty archives did not translate at all to the black theme. So, black is out.

An online friend advised me of the difficulty of finding archived posts. Hopefully I fixed that. Posts can now be found using a search widget, a category cloud, and by dated archives.

Writing has been a joy to me since I was a high school kid. I write principally for my own therapy. A few years ago my friend John Dobbs  suggested that I might enjoy blogging. I took his suggestion seriously and now many, many posts later I am so glad for the suggestion.

I have been both honored and humbled that things I have written have been helpful to so many people. I have received messages from readers from several countries saying they were encouraged, enlightened, were helped to understand a passage of Scripture, or in some way blessed by my humble efforts at the keyboard. I have heard from people who used something I posted for a communion meditation, churches have posted several posts in their weekly bulletins or monthly newsletters, and many people have written to me saying they were using something they found here in a sermon or Bible class. I am in awe at what God has done!

In 2012 there were days when I had over 20,000 views. Some days there are as few as 200. I am continually amazed that people from literally all around the planet manage to find little insignificant me and read what I write. My sincere thanks to those of you who have read my posts and a hearty welcome to new readers.

Royce Ogle
Monroe, LA