“It’s Not a List of Do’s and Don’ts”
Protestant orthodoxy wreaks havoc in the lives of believers. It produces confusion, fear, and lack of assurance of salvation. The screen captures below represent the confusion of one such Facebook user, who’s single-perspective on the law produces the very same “loveless” christianity that she bemoans.
Notice in her post, it’s not our love but “Jesus’ love through us”. It’s a list of rules and regulations that no one can follow. She claims she wants to “emulate” the love of Jesus in her life, but that is impossible to do when your orthodoxy takes away the very means of doing so (anomia).
This same person had posted just a few hours earlier that she was “feeling like a screw-up”, and that she prayed to God to show her that He loved her. How sad is that! But this is what protestantism does! Of course she’s going to feel like a screw-up, because she feels like she is constantly under condemnation. When you make perfect law-keeping the standard for righteousness, how else can you expect to feel when you fail to keep the law? Of course you would feel like God doesn’t love you because you’re a screw up.
But then protestantism turns around and teaches us that, don’t worry, we’re all just totally depraved screw-ups. We’re just sinners saved by grace. As if that’s supposed to make everything perfectly acceptable.
Andy
Paul's Passing Thoughts 
I have yet to meet a Protestant (Calvinist/Reformed, etc.) person who is fairly happy in general and who is 100% sure of his/her salvation (or even 51%). The number of commands they pluck from the New Testament (because of their theological viewpoint) is staggering; it’s no wonder they buckle under the bondage they put themselves under, and it’s no wonder every sister/brother-in-Calvin tries to be more humble, more lowly, more broken, more stricken, more tested than the next.
Andy, your verses are great, and Janine’s entry immediately reminded me of Matthew 5:16, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Of course we do these good things because we’re born-again (New Birth), but Jesus is clear: The glory is His, no debate there, but we are doing these things because of Him in our lives now, because of our love for Him, and because we are now being indwelled by the Holy Spirit. Jesus is not doing these things; we are not His puppets.
It comes back, I’m sure, to the New Birth, and I’m not standing here and pointing a condemning finger at Janine, not at all (my best friend is in the same rocky boat). But she has to ask herself if the “Jesus” she had encountered at her New Birth was in fact the biblical Jesus and not a counterfeit one based on the writings of dead heretics (and some not quite dead yet). The Biblical Jesus sets free, gives peace, gives 100% assurance of salvation. I hope she finds Him, so that she can be set free from the deadly and life-choking shackles of Protestantism; so that she no longer has to feel like a lowly worm, a wretched sinner, a broken vessel, an inflicted and tortured soul, punished to the point of death, etc., but so that that she can live without condemnation regarding the law (as you’ve explained).
Janine, dear soul, it’s not too late to find the Biblical Jesus. He is waiting, I promise.
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Yes, her confusion is obvious as illustrated by her continued waffling between doing good (“don’t drop all sense of morals and don’t witness”) and “faith alone” works (letting Jesus shine through). You can tell she is struggling with how to do that. This is the tightrope that the majority of christians walk every day. Their struggle is real, but it is a struggle of their own choosing because they have accepted the lie of protestant orthodoxy that keeps them prisoners and slaves to it.
My heart grieves for Janine. I can only pray that she will accept the comment I left on her post as one of encouragement and exhortation and not one of further condemnation. Her religion condemns her enough!
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Andy, precisely, and no one can walk that tightrope for too long. Sooner or later you fall off the thing. My heart grieves for her too and for those who are in the same rocky boat, many of whom are unaware of who the true helmsman of the boat is.
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Right, the new birth makes “do’s and don’ts” love, but if your soteriology makes the new birth a mere imputation of somebody else’s love the law is do’s and don’ts because you are still under law. You are not a born again child of God still in the weakness of mortality, but virtually unchanged in regard to your state of being. This is the conclusive point of the passages cited by Andy.
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