According to New Calvinist Jean Larroux, This is What Christians Are:
This is who you are:
And this is the song that you sing:
I was searching for something I could not describe
So I stared at the sun till the tears filled my eyes
Well I thought I was empty so I paid the cost
But now that I’m found I miss being lost
I opened my heart and I let Jesus in
With the promise that I would be free of my sins
But I only felt guilty that he died on the cross
Now that I’m found I miss being lost
I don’t wanna suffer and I don’t wanna die
I want the clouds parted in an endless, blue sky
But someone up there has a different plan
Now that I’m saved I wish I was damned
The New Calvinist Takeover of Southwood Presbyterian Church, Part 22: Movies, Songs, Stories, and Denial of the New Birth
“Hence, because we are supposedly just as wicked as we were before the salvation that is completely outside of us, we can only dance with Jesus or Clem Snide…. dancing to the desire for damnation and an escape from being saved. I am incredulous that intelligent people who name the name of Christ allow this man to stand behind the sacred desk under their roof of worship.”
On January 8, JL3 continued his series on “Scandalous Obedience.” I look forward to the privilege of critiquing tomorrow’s message as well. Is that the one where a visitor is going to come and lie about how mission works flow from the unfinished work of justification? I’m not sure.
Regarding the January 8 message on Romans 6:15-23, the text is not exegeted. The message is a constant string of movies, stories, songs, and one TV show from beginning to end. And biblical concepts are reframed to produce desired outcomes. For example, “obedience” which is rarely, if ever used with a modifier in the Scriptures, is now “Scandalous Obedience.” What’s that? That’s obedience that flows from contemplating “grace” and is supposedly soooooooo much more radical than what the Bible would tell us to do subjectively via pesky imperatives. Like the sultans of New Covenant Theology constantly say: “You just can’t leap from the command to obedience.” If you let obedience be a “mere natural flow” from learning about grace in the Scriptures—your obedience will be a “Crazy Love” directly from the heart of Jesus and not the “dead letters of the law.”
No, no, we can’t have such leaping. As JL3 states in this message, obedience “flows” from focusing on “grace,” and, don’t miss this: JL3 is not called to “give you exact marching orders” in regard to what your “love” (radical obedience) “looks like.” We can only watch to see what happens after we use the Scriptures to “hear the voice of Jesus,” and “connect to His heart.” Jesus’ straightforward approach in the Sermon on the Mount of hearing the word, learning the word, and applying the word is replaced with, “hearing the voice of Jesus,” “connecting to Jesus’ heart,” and as pontificated constantly throughout the message; obedience is reframed as “dancing with Jesus.”
JL3 makes it clear in this message—there are only two kinds of dancing that Southwood parishioners can do: dancing with Jesus (his version of biblical obedience), or dancing according to who we really are as Christians. He uses the lyrics from the following song to illustrate who we are as Christians:
I was searching for something I could not describe
So I stared at the sun till the tears filled my eyes
Well I thought I was empty so I paid the cost
But now that I’m found I miss being lost
I opened my heart and I let Jesus in
With the promise that I would be free of my sins
But I only felt guilty that he died on the cross
Now that I’m found I miss being lost
I don’t wanna suffer and I don’t wanna die
I want the clouds parted in an endless, blue sky
But someone up there has a different plan
Now that I’m saved I wish I was damned
JL3 makes it clear after citing these lyrics from the song Jews for Jesus Blues by Clem Snide that this is the theology that we Christians dance to. He also said that his stories cited in this same message are further evidence of “how twisted and sick our hearts are.” Hence, because we are supposedly just as wicked as we were before the salvation that is completely outside of us, we can only dance with Jesus or Clem Snide. And how do we dance with Jesus? According to JL3: “Grace is the name on your dance card.” In other words, obedience by grace alone. The only other alternative is dancing to the tune of who we really are with the name of Clem Snide on our dance card—dancing to the desire for damnation and an escape from being saved. I am incredulous that intelligent people who name the name of Christ allow this man to stand behind the sacred desk under their roof of worship.
In an unbelievably lame attempt to manipulate the congregation, JL3 defends what he is teaching in this “sermon”; supposedly from the text, as NOT being legalism! It is clear that he thinks this congregation is all but completely brain-dead, or sees himself as intellectually superior, or both.
In the same way that he did in the first message, JL3 preys on the normative experience of most Christians in our American culture: attempting to do the right thing the wrong way, ie., stupid obedience verses intelligent obedience. JL3, in this message and many others, often refers to the Christian experience of continually falling into the same patterns of sin. Ie., stupid obedience. Of course, JL3’s ungodly teachings foster this experience further, and then enables him to use it as a citation for proof to further his evil agenda.
Not surprisingly, JL3 closed with another story. I am not going to rehearse the story, but it is a typical New Calvinist motif:
Oh well, we are all vile sinners saved by grace. You mean you won’t forgive your Christian wife for plotting to have you murdered for insurance money? Oh my! You must not understand grace and how much you have been forgiven. If you did, you would say, “I’m glad my wife tried to have me murdered; it reminds me that I would do the same thing if there was a life insurance policy on her.” No wonder you expect your elders to be perfect and object to us teaching antinomianism!
JL3 also closed with yet another either/or prism: either grace, or guilt. This goes along with New Calvinist tenet of the total depravity of the saints . We should reject guilt; grace is the answer. This is indicative of the severe danger this doctrine poses for Christians. The Bible continually presents guilt as a valuable tool in sanctification and a motivator to take objective action as a result. The cure for guilt is corrective action and a biblically trained mind, not “preaching the gospel to ourselves until we understand grace enough to vanquish guilt.” Dangerously, many New Calvinists teach that guilt is proof of a lack of understanding in regard to grace. Supposedly, if we truly understand the depths of God’s grace and the power of His forgiveness, we should never feel guilty. Guilt is a result of “living by lists,” etc. I cannot even begin to articulate how dangerous this teaching is.
This is my prayer: “Oh God, deliver the church from this evil anti-word (Romans 6:19) doctrine.”
paul
The New Calvinist Takeover of Southwood Presbyterian Church, Part 21: Let’s Pretend; JL3 Believes in Obedience
Sure he does. “Scandalous obedience” that is. Put your hand on your spiritual wallet. JL3 is not about to settle for the customary obedience of the forefathers, the New Calvinists have something better: high octane obedience because Jesus obeys for us. Throughout the message I suffered through this morning preached on January 1 at Southwood, JL3 frames obedience as something that we watch ourselves do as spectators, and “dancing with Jesus.” Why is obedience “scandalous”? Isn’t that an oxymoron in the way of John Piper’s “Christian Hedonism”? I can answer that, and don’t miss the crux of the matter: it’s “scandalous” because it is obedience apart from the law. That’s the rub. Hence, JL3 reminds us throughout the message that scandalous obedience is “BECAUSE of scandalous grace, not the BALANCE of the two.” Straw man alert. Christians don’t attempt to balance obedience with grace—that’s impossible, grace (used in context of justification) is a finished work and separate from obedience in sanctification.
The message is the same old New Calvinist manifesto throughout. Instead of following the text, JL3 set up an interpretive prism from which he exegetes the text (Romans 6:1-14). Through the use of compelling stories and spiritual sounding platitudes, the prism is either prison or Jesus, sin or Jesus, and either scandalous obedience that comes from scandalous grace or non-scandalous obedience that DOES NOT come from scandalous grace. If one listens very carefully, the prism JL3 sets up makes prison, sin, and liberty synonymous with law, and in contrast to Jesus/grace. In other words, though subtle, he sets up a distinct dichotomy between Christ and the law.
In fact, he completes the sermon with a story about a girl who turned her back on the faith because she wasn’t willing to accept radical, scandalous obedience that flows from scandalous grace which might have called her to do things she wasn’t willing to do. Instead, she wanted an obedience that she could control, ie., a list of rules that is a balance to scandalous grace. JL3’s point to this story is clear: living by “checking off the boxes” of a to-do list rather than letting scandalous obedience flow from scandalous grace in sanctification will cost you your very soul. Supposedly, when this girl realized this, for the first time in her life she understood the gospel well enough to reject it. This part of the message was definitely fear factor 101 and indicative of what I am constantly complaining about—the cultish techniques employed by New Calvinists to control people. Bottom line: you either become a New Calvinist, or you are going to hell.
In his introduction, he touts this new series on scandalous obedience as being for the purpose of seeing “what it looks like to respond to the grace of God.” His opening prayer asked that we would see more of Jesus’ holiness in the Bible (while insinuating that we have none), and more of Jesus’ holiness in ourselves and others, resulting in us being “shaped” by Jesus. In both of his introductory stories about two men who sought to be put back in prison, JL3 states that Christians are just like these two men, we “share a human nature that loves sin.” This is nothing more than the New Calvinist doctrine of the objective gospel completely outside of us. God’s grace is not internalized in the believer via the new birth (therefore, we are barley any different from the unregenerate), and all of God’s holiness remains outside of us. When we contemplate the objective gospel outside of us, it results in manifestations of sanctification that have already been secured for us in the atonement, especially obedience to the law. Moreover, JL3 used the stories in his sermon to inform the congregation of what they are asking, fearing, loving, and what they should say amen to. It’s downright creepy.
Another tenet of New Calvinism that was in this message, though very subtle, was the New Covenant Theology concept of the higher law of love which supposedly replaced the written law of God since Christ (supposedly) came to abolish it. Supposedly, since we are free from the law, we are free to love. According to my notes, at one point, JL3 asked the congregation, “Southwood, are you free to love?” Again, according to my notes, JL3 states, “A true Christian is not in bondage to his liberty, but is free to love his brother.” Liberty from what? The law. JL3 plainly states that at the end of the message and uses Romans 6:14 for a proof text. Basically, this advocates a subjective standard of love based on results of contemplating the works of Christ/gospel, which includes the fulfillment of the law for us in sanctification. Specific imperatives in the Bible are indicative of what Christ fulfilled for us as part of the atonement and should invoke thanksgiving, not a list of rules to obey. As Francis Chan said in Crazy Love, “When you are loving, it is impossible to sin.”
JL3 asked repeatedly during the message: “Is the resurrection showing up in your life?” The obvious implication was that there is only one way that resurrection power will start “showing up” in our lives, “Gospel preaching.” Throughout the message JL3 insulted the intelligence of the congregation by implying that all of what he taught in this message was proof that he is a big obedience guy. But who’s obedience? Certainly not ours. And by what standard? Certainly not the law. Like all New Calvinists, JL3 interprets Romans 6:14 in context of sanctification to make this point, but that verse is clearly referring to those who are under the dominion of sin and will be judged by the law. The New Calvinist lie that we are sanctified by justification will not stand.
Paul
Paul's Passing Thoughts 
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