new church life: september/october 2017
while acknowledging that all we do
comes from His power, His wisdom
and His love.
Notice this explanation of the
path to salvation is not a matter of
just doing enough of the right things
and avoiding too many bad things.
It certainly includes us attending
to what we do and do not do, but it
goes deeper. It does not involve a
human authority, such as an ordained
clergyman, defining with precision
the do’s and don’ts or any concept of
keeping track of which good deed
outweighs which bad deed.
The New Church path to salvation
certainly involves faith. It involves a deep and fundamental faith that the
Lord Jesus Christ is the one God of heaven and earth, and is our Savior and
Redeemer. But it also involves a trust that those who try to live according to
what He has taught us in His Word will be led to heaven.
Salvation occurs within a person’s sincere effort to worship and serve the
Lord through obeying Him and serving one’s neighbor. It occurs through
conscious efforts to recognize sin within oneself and conscious efforts to
change the thoughts, words and actions that lead to that sin. Simply stated
from this perspective, a person is born again through a process of internal
change made possible by regular and sincere efforts to love and obey the Lord
and to wisely love the people around us.
The inner meaning of the story of Ishmael mocking Isaac reflects a part
of this process. Ishmael represents a person’s natural adult reasoning ability
based on limited and faulty human ideas and concepts. A person can have the
best parents in the world, can have attended church every Sunday of his or her
life, can have been taught throughout childhood and the teen years what is
true and good, false and evil, and still arrive at full adult life with a reasoning
faculty that is deeply flawed.
This flawed reasoning faculty stands in the way of heavenly life. It can be
deeply disguised because the individual may know the facts and basic ideas
that he or she should believe, and may be able to speak articulately about them,
and especially may be able to apply these rules to other people’s lives, but will
inevitably be short-sighted or even blind in seeing their personal application.
The Lord would fundamentally transform this merely natural rational faculty.
This transformation is so great that it is referred to as being a new and entirely
different rational faculty as described in our second lesson.
Simply stated, a
person is born again
through a process of
internal change made
possible by regular
and sincere efforts to
love and obey the Lord
and to wisely love the
people around us.
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