Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: johnw@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu (John Warren) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Love vs. holiness (was Let's end...) Message-ID: Date: 29 Jul 90 17:47:26 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 31 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article harry@atmos.washington.edu (Harry Edmon) writes: > >We have the duty to preach both the "Good News" (Gospel) and the "Bad >News" (Law). After all, the Good News is not "Good" unless the Law is >properly understood, i.e. what we deserve for our sins. The Church >has a prophetic responsibility to call all to repentance, and if you >read the O.T. prophets, most of that message is Doom and Gloom. What >seperates us from those prophets is our sure knowledge of God's great >forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Well, we're not Jesus, but we are his body, and this is what he came to do: The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the opressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. As this was his first public appearance after his baptism, it seems reasonable to assume that this is a basic summary of what Jesus came to do. He says nothing about judgment; in fact, here he stops this quote of Isaiah right before the part about 'the day of vengeance.' We are Christ's body. It is therefore not our part to tell of the Bad News, any more than it was Christ's part to do so. Our message is of grace and peace, and as people come to know this grace and peace through their actions of faith (which are active believing in God's promises, supported by the confidence that his promises hold true), they come to know how far short of the mark they are. The Holy Spirit is the one to convict of sin, not John MacArthur, the Pope, or anyone else in the church.