Episode 1 - The Burning Question

I’ve been a Christian for over 50 years. Half a century. And for the vast majority of that time I have struggled with my faith. I’m convinced that, if we were to be totally honest, many Christians would say the same thing. I believe that at the root of this struggle is one burning question: If I am saved, if I’ve truly been born again and am a new creation in Christ, why don’t I FEEL like it and why don’t I ACT like it? For most of my life, there’s been a disconnect between what I wanted to believe about my salvation and what I actually experienced on a day-to-day basis. I have always sincerely wanted to live an overcoming Christian life, but I found myself stuck in Romans 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” For decades I read Galatians 2:20 where Paul said, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” yet I had absolutely no clue what he was actually talking about. I grew up believing Christianity was about living a changed life, never realizing the Christian experience actually requires an exchanged life. I think it would be helpful at this point in the introductory episode of this study series to talk a little about what I call the “fringe Pentecostal” tradition I grew up in and how it influenced my spiritual viewpoint for decades. Without getting too deep into the weeds, I can say that my religious upbringing was dominated by four driving forces: emotion, performance, guilt, and fear. My assessment of my spiritual condition depended entirely on how I felt and how I was performing. Everything I did, said, and thought was focused on what I believed I had to do to make God happy and convince myself and those around me that I was still saved. But since my feelings and my performance fluctuated wildly, I spent most of my life feeling guilty because I wasn’t measuring up to our standard of “holiness.” Then, of course, since I was almost constantly weighed down by condemnation, I lived in a near-constant state of fear of what God was going to do to me because I was such a failure as a Christian. In my religious world, there were no such things as assurance of salvation or God’s unconditional love. On the contrary, within the tiny bubble of my religious experience, we looked down on other “so-called Christians” who emphasized God’s love and grace. We even had a label for it: “easy-believism.” We prided ourselves on being part of the chosen few who understood that salvation was something you had to fight for, every minute of every day. Heaven was only for those who had earned their way into it, and you wouldn’t know if you had made it until you died. Looking back now, I realize that we were held captive to a religious system just as oppressive as the Old Testament Law. Every sin had to be atoned for, not with an animal sacrifice, but by what we called “repentance”—anguished weeping and wailing down at the altar every Sunday night until we “prayed through.” Exhausted, we could finally go home with our consciences temporarily soothed over, still nervously hoping it was enough to last us until the next Sunday when we would do it all over again. Not once in my formative years do I recall hearing about being justified by the blood of Jesus. As far as I knew, the only thing that could “justify” me was my own efforts to do all the right things, or, to be more accurate, my desperate striving to not do the wrong things. And of course, that meant I never considered myself justified before God, because I never stopped sinning and I never did all the right things a “good” Christian should do! If that sounds like a miserable way to live, that’s because it is—and I don’t want anyone else to go through life trying to carry that kind of burden. My goal in leading this Bible study is to speak to those who have never truly experienced the freedom we have in Christ, and who are tired of living a works-based, guilt-ridden, fear-controlled life. Our study will draw heavily from the book The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee, which is available as a free PDF download here. I highly recommend that you take the time to read it in conjunction with this teaching series. The Normal Christian Life 783KB ∙ PDF file Download We’ll begin our journey by focusing on what Watchman Nee calls “Our Dual Problem: Sins and Sin.” We will explore the importance of both the Blood of Jesus and the Cross of Jesus as they relate to our initial justification before God and our ongoing sanctification into spiritual maturity. We’ll begin next time with an episode entitled, TWO PROBLEMS, ONE GOSPEL. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Grace and peace be unto you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wordonthemountain.substack.com