Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Letting Go The Right Way
Justin Taylor recounts a book introduction by J.I Packer that is a powerful argument against some aspects of Pentecostalism:
Secondly, I agree that our created nature was to have a self and it is that self that God chooses to perfect, not subsume. There is a difference between reliance and sublimation.
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Whether what I thought I heard was what was really being said may be left an open question, but it seemed to me that what I was being told was this. There are two sorts of Christians, first-class and second-class, ‘spiritual’ and ‘carnal’ (a distinction drawn from the King James rendering of 1 Cor. 3:1-3). The former know sustained peace and joy, constant inner confidence, and regular victory over temptation and sin, in a way that the latter do not. Those who hope to be of use to God must become ‘spiritual’ in the stated sense. As a lonely, nervy, adolescent introvert whose new-found assurance had not changed his temperament overnight, I had to conclude that I was not ‘spiritual’ yet. But I wanted to be useful to God. So what was I to do?
‘Let go, and let God’
There is a secret, I was told, of rising from carnality to spirituality, a secret mirrored in the maxim: Let go, and let God.
[...]
What I seemed to be hearing, however, was a call to deny personal self, so that I could be taken over by Jesus Christ in such a way that my present experience of thinking and willing would become something different, an experience of Christ himself living in me, animating me, and doing the thinking and willing for me.
[...]
At that time I did not know that Harry Ironside, sometime pastor of Moody Memorial Church, Chicago, once drove himself into a full-scale mental breakdown through trying to get into the higher life as I was trying to get into it; and I would not have dared to conclude, as I have concluded since, that this higher life as described is a will-o’-the-wisp, an unreality that no one has ever laid hold of at all, and that those who testify to their experience in these terms really, if unwittingly, distort what has happened to them.Now, I am not prepared to go so far as to declare all experiences of this sort as distorted, but I agree whole-heartedly that thy are "will-o’-the-wisp," they are not ours to control, they are God's. When WE attempt to replicate that which can only come from God, then we are not in fact relinquishing any control at all.
Secondly, I agree that our created nature was to have a self and it is that self that God chooses to perfect, not subsume. There is a difference between reliance and sublimation.
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