{"id":8518,"date":"2018-07-20T14:08:46","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T18:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=8518"},"modified":"2018-07-20T16:11:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T20:11:26","slug":"living-his-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=8518","title":{"rendered":"Living His will"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Gerencser has up a nice post about living His will<\/a>; mercifully, it almost always turns out that what He wants is identical to what the believer wants. As I never tire of saying, most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians.<\/p>\n

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I was a part of the Christian church for fifty years, and I was an Evangelical pastor for twenty-five of those years. I know a good bit about submitting oneself to the will of God, and I watched countless Evangelicals suss out God\u2019s will for their lives. I found that in almost every circumstance, God\u2019s will coincided with what people wanted to do. Christians love to gussy up their decisions with spiritual sounding statements such as; yielding to Christ, following in his footsteps, etc., but no matter how the picture is painted, one fact remains: God\u2019s will and human desire are one and the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s good to hear a former pastor acknowledge that, even if it has always been incandescently obvious to those of us who don’t belong to the club.<\/p>\n

Gerencser takes up something else I’ve discussed often through the years — that, taken seriously, Christianity demands no less than self-annihilation.<\/p>\n

Throughout the New Testament, Paul reminds Christians of the importance of dying to self; of crucifying the flesh; of giving oneself totally, completely, and without reservation to God. Christians are commanded to give themselves as living sacrifices to God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or, abandon self-interest and self-direction because your self<\/b><\/i> is putrid, guilty, depraved, no damn good.<\/p>\n

Think carefully, and you’ll realize you’ve never in your life gone to church without hearing some variation of that; it is Christianity’s only truly indispensable claim. After all, if you don’t believe that you’re no damn good and need salvation, then Christianity has nothing on offer but the opportunity to spend Sunday mornings with, generally, mild, insecure, and uninteresting people who all believe that they’re b-b-b-bad to the bone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Gerencser has up a nice post about living His will; mercifully, it almost always turns out that what He wants is identical to what the believer wants. As I never tire of saying, most people have too much sense … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8518"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8518"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8525,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8518\/revisions\/8525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}