Remember When You Asked Jesus Into Your Heart? ...The Fifth Time?

Why is it that we go through our Christian lives trying to justify the thing that is not from ourselves, the saving Grace of God? People are lost and desperate, then these well-meaning little preachers, for the sake of this "easy salvation", let them just get off on a prayer. We "trust" in the promises of God but in the same time neglecting the costs of the Gospel itself. We have forgotten that it is not an "easy salvation" that we proclaim, but a "so great a salvation!" It is not for us to cut, bend, twist and manipulate for ease of delivery, but it is a message that must be fully preached. The message is not ours, it is God's. We don't have any right whatsoever to do otherwise. Ah, it is a very sad truth, that we as Christians, have lost sight of what it means when Paul said: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth..." (Rom 1:16-17)

Michael Horton

I remember when I used to ask Jesus into my heart as a child over and over again. Each time I intended to make absolutely sure that I was saved. Why do we do that? Why is it in some churches that we see the same people walking down the aisle week after week? Perhaps it is because we are looking to something we can do, or have done, to secure the kind of assurance we need. But we can't trust our feelings or our abilities of either will or effort, so we're left with having to trust in the ability of God, 'who is able to keep you from falling' (Jude 24).

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"This Personal Jesus thing..." Yeah, "God is no longer a problem for us."

In the words of Ingrid Schlueter of SliceOfLaodicea.com "This is what American evangelicalism has become." We think that the Emerging Church Movement is something that came about with out any relation whatsoever to the current evangelical movement. That somehow it is something that occurred because the world has infiltrated the church. But it must be realized that the ECM didn't come over night. The movement was brought upon by the Evangelical movement itself.

--- e.g. This Personal Jesus Jesus thing.

Michael Horton : HT

In the American Religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God’s difference from us-in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence, and holiness. God is my buddy or my inmost experience, or the power-source for living my best life now. God is not strange (i.e., holy)-and is certainly not a judge. He does not evoke fear, awe, or a sense of terrifying and disorienting beauty. Furthermore, all the focus on making atonement through a bloody sacrifice seems crude and unspiritual to Gnostics when, after all, the point of salvation is to escape the physical realm. All of this is too “Jewish,” according to Gnostics from Marcion to Schleiermacher to the “Re-Imagining Conference” of mainline Protestant leaders (especially radical feminists) who explicitly appealed to Gnosticism in their screeds against “men hanging on crosses with blood dripping and all that gory stuff.” The god of Gnosticism is not the one before whom Isaiah said, “Woe to me, for I am undone!” or Peter said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” To borrow a nice phrase from William Placher, it represents “the domestication of transcendence.” God is no longer a problem for us.

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