So then the modern ideological doctrine is to claim you are all the way there...but now just leaning how to act like it. Exactly what the Pharisees did...act it out. A fool's philosophy IOW.
Act it out like the Pharisees. Looking to their 'works of righteousness' save them. Thinking that they were 'giving demonstrations of righteousness' to others, as if that mattered.
Definitely, if you are thinking that your outside being cleaned makes you right with God, that is indeed foolishness! Because the outside Cannot be clean without first cleaning the inside. No matter the whitewash, the dead man's bones are still dead inside.
And no amount of acting as if you are alive in Christ can make it so. Either you have been born of God or you have not been.
As far as being "all the way there", all the way where? All the way reborn? Can someone be "stuck in the spiritual birth canal"? That seems like foolishness also.
All the way sanctified? That's a lifetime process.
All the way saved?
But my doctrine is that those who are born again are all the way God's child, born to live in Christ. All the way. And that God has given all we need. And being God's spirit children, in Christ we share Jesus' eternal life. We just need to stop listening to the voices that bring doubt, and trust Jesus for His life in us, and find that we live in Him.
But IN Christ IS perfection in the Spirit as a gift...no need to TRY or play act. Otherwise people are to just do all they can within themselves with some help from God. But that sounds too humble. Pride wants more.
Pride does indeed want many things, and is Never satisfied!
Agreed, that in Christ, we don't need to expend effort to live righteously, we simply trust Him. And His life floods through us.
Humility is to just give yourselve over into the care of God, in full trust in Him, knowing that there is nothing I can do to convince Him to love me more than He does, to forgive me more than He has, to give some reason of worth or value within myself, aside from the fact that He created me.
Yes, I think it's human nature, the carnal nature of man, that wants to be part of the solution, to be "worth saving", even above others. But that's simply looking to ourselves, which is not of faith, true faith. It's only by a true faith in Christ that we will stand in grace.
Much love!
