By Grace

If you want to understand what it is to be a Christian or believer in Christ, and want to understand how it is that sin is overcome and salvation is given from sin and death, the best answers can be found in the book of Romans.  I believe the Holy Spirit led Paul to write an extensive explanation with detailed examples and explanations for those of us who ponder this question from every angle.  The answers are explained simply, but our desire to re-state them often gets us into areas of misunderstanding.  Read the book of Romans as a Christian or as someone wanting to understand following Christ.  I have recently had to book read to me online so I could listen and ponder it. What a Blessing!  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1&version=NIV

How do we become righteous before God?  We do not become righteous before God by obeying his commandments and earning righteousness.  It is by God's decision to offer us the choice to depend upon Him.  God's decision to do so is called GRACE and our choice to depend upon Him is called FAITH.  To depend upon God is to give Him Glory and to be fully assured that what God has promised, He is able to perform.

For centuries mankind has struggled with the choice to depend upon God in Faith and receive his gift of Grace.  From the first man and woman we began to reject God's offer of togetherness with Him.  Our spiritual and physical lives have been affected by this choice.  We live in a world that has rejected togetherness with God in return for our selfish desires to make our own decisions toward worldly, temporary pleasures and accomplishments.  The Bible is a way of understanding how we have found ourselves in the situation we have today.

God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and other parts of the Law to show mankind how difficult it is to depend upon our own actions to be righteous... in fact it is not difficult, it is impossible.  All of us fall short of perfection.

God then sent Jesus, the Savior, to prepare a path whereby we could fulfill the requirement of righteousness, once again, not by our own accomplishment, but by by choosing to accept God's offer of grace and by depending on him through faith.  Jesus was born to a virgin woman, and as a human, and took upon the task of perfectly fulfilling of the law, which none of us could do.  He was at the same time God among us in spirit, to offer grace and guidance toward a reconciliation from sinfulness in spirit.  Jesus maintained completion of the law perfectly and then took the death penalty that we deserved because we could not keep the law.  God offered grace to us again and credited us with being righteous by our faith or dependence on the promises of God through Jesus who is God's perfect, sinless man and God's Holy Son in spirit.  We praise Him and keep his commandments because of that gift, not in order to earn it.  


Ephesians 2:1-10

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Is God a Fundamentalist?

We have all probably heard negative connotations of the term Fundamentalist as it refers to Christians.  This terms in the common culture has become a buzzword for someone who is hard to work with or even dangerous because their strict beliefs cause them to act in ways that do not mesh easily with the lifestyles of others.  Fundamentalists are often seen as legalistic and unwilling to even try to understand the viewpoint of someone else.  It is definitely a term whose definition itself is very much up for debate.  So to ask the question in the title of this post, we first have to have a definition to work with.  As many do, we go to the Webster Dictionary.

Fundamentalism - a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching, the beliefs of this movement : adherence to such beliefs. The second definition is: a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles.

Since this is not a complete and thorough examination of a topic, but a blog post, I'll keep it simple and let this become a conversation starter.  I'll skip any examination of the "movement in 20th Century Protestantism" and simply say the topic of whether the literally interpreted Bible is fundamental to the Christian life started long before the 1900s.   The topic of "literally interpreted" is also one that has many shades of understanding. The other topic that has been debated is the nature of the Bible itself and whether it is a collection of philosophical and declarative writings of men or whether it is a collection of writings that came from the mind of God himself written down by men under his influence.

When it all boils down to it, the debate of fundamentalism is a debate over the Bible.  So what is my understanding?  I would base my understanding on the physical and spiritual aspects of my search for truth that I believe we all should be on in this life.  

Is the Bible reliable?  Has it changed over the years? Why has the specific collection of books been preserved and others not included?  Does the Bible have a cohesive message that does not contradict itself?

Do the spiritual promises in the Bible hold true in our life experience?  As you can see, the questions are endless and there is a constant battle to not be prejudiced toward the physical experience of life over the spiritual experience of life.  There are answers to these questions, however, in spiritual and physical resources.  

Some of the best research on the consistency of the Bible over the centuries comes from Josh McDowell. He was a skeptic who set out to disprove the reliability of the Bible to his Christian friends and has spent a lifetime gathering evidence which shows the uniqueness of the Bible is the areas of circulation, translation, surviving persecution and surviving manuscripts.  These are scientific studies not opinion papers.

The question of the spiritual reliability of the Bible is the area that we can all spend our lifetimes realizing.  Study of the Bible is in one way an intellectual endeavor, but in the spiritual realm it is an opportunity to encounter God himself.  By adopting the teachings of the Bible into our lives, we step into God's plan.  Then you can experience for yourself the interaction with God that has captured the lives of people for centuries.

My experience has been this:  The Bible is the word of God, meaning God caused men to capture and record exactly what he wanted to be passed along to people in future years.  The spiritual promises in the Bible, in my personal experience have been proven over and over to be true.  To experience the spiritual nature of the Bible, you must give yourself to living this life of obedience and seeking God, interact with God through prayer, and reach the point of receiving the Good News or gospel which changes your standing in the spiritual world, allowing God to become the one who has ownership and spiritual authority over your life.  At that point, and not before, your ability to experience the spiritual life described in the Bible becomes very evident and clear.  Now I am spiritually in God's Kingdom, but physically in the world which rejects God.  This provides a constant struggle and opportunity to rely on God spiritually until my physical existence is passed. Then more of the promise in the Bible is realized, the physical struggle is over and the spiritual existence begins.  But the final promise is yet to come.  The Bible that has revealed to me God's promises over my lifetime tells me that at a future point, the physical world that rejects God will be destroyed completely, and that a new physical world will be created again with those who are spiritually aligned by faith in God to live in a non-divided world where physical and spiritual existence will be centered on God as it was when God first created the world.  

This is where I am on my search for truth.  I understand and try to follow the Bible in a logical and faithful way, not applying ridiculous standards of verbal legalism, but believing what is clearly stated as fact.  I believe the Bible and in that way, I believe God and I both are fundamentalists.