Paul's Passing Thoughts

“You must be born again.” That’s the gospel. The new birth is an act of God; we can’t birth ourselves. However, we can ask for the free gift. If freewill offerings in the Old Testament were really freewill, and they clearly were, there is freewill.  

The new birth is a miracle performed by God through the Holy Spirit that transforms the believer into a literal new creature with ALL THINGS being new. Christ, the first man to combine holiness with humanity, established the new birth through his death and resurrection and was the first fruits of many brethren. That is, literal brethren. The new birth is not just a declaration; it is a literal birth in which the literal seed of God is implanted within the believer. We are literally forever children of God and Christ is our literal brother. One cannot be unborn, and we will never die again. The old us dies with Christ, and the new us is resurrected with him.

The new birth changes our relationship to the law. We are no longer under the law’s condemnation.  This is the Spirit’s two uses of the law; to convict the world of sin and the judgement to come, and to sanctify, or continually set God’s children apart from the world. We are no longer under law, but under grace. Stated another way, we are under love and not law. The word, “sin” in the Bible must be qualified in context. Where there is no law (under the condemnation of the law), there is no sin. Believers do not sin, they fail to love. And they do not fail to love because they are still enslaved to sin and the law that empowers sin, but they fail to love as they should because of the flesh’s weakness. We fail to love because of weakness, not enslavement to sin. While our soul is presently saved, redemption is the regeneration of the body that is future.

Salvation is a one-time final act that justifies the believer. A new birth has occurred. Sanctification is the growth of the believer and is mutually exclusive from justification. The two are separate, and any soteriology that conflates the two in any way is a false gospel. Any soteriology that conflates justification and sanctification is a salvation process while the so-called believer is alive, which makes it a works salvation by default. We are justified (always past tense in the Bible) because we are saved. We are saved by the new birth, which is a one-time and final act by God through the Spirit. Sanctification is a process in which we learn to “say no to sin” because we are no longer enslaved to sin and are able to do so. To any degree that justification is not final, we are to that degree under law, and to that degree unregenerate.

Furthermore, our failure to love has nothing to do with condemnation or the law but can bring family chastisement from a loving father. And remember, the Bible states that love fulfills the law.

Worship is not confined to a place or time. The believer’s whole life, and every detail, is an act of worship. That is because our bodies are temples, and we are the holy priests of those temples. The priesthood of believers is not a mere declaration, we are holy priests as a state of being. We are justified as a state of being. We are righteous as a state of being.

This is why we meet in homes…that’s what literal family members do. Home fellowships are a statement concerning the true gospel.

paul