Jeremy Hoff - A clarification of my sight!
Image of preaching Jeremy Hoff.
Yes, it is true that Jesus fully paid for all the sins of the world. Nevertheless, there are certain criteria that must be met for this payment can be attributed to the individual. Firstly, one must confess and ask forgiveness for past and present sin, the Holy Spirit will bring to a person's consciousness when it first comes to Christ. Secondly, one must subordinate his will to God with regard to these areas of past sins, and sincerely decide to live differently from that point onwards. This is true repentance, and if someone tells you that you can be saved by a faith that does not include true repentance, they try to sell you a false gospel.
In Luke 24:47 we see that Jesus, just before His ascension, indicating that repentance is a condition for salvation: "... and in his name to repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached to all nations; beginning at Jerusalem. "In the Norwegian translations coming this less evident, but here are the words His four popular English Bible translations:
NIV ... and That repentance for forgiveness of sins ...
NAS ... and repentance for the forgiveness of sins ...
NLT ... There is forgiveness of sins for all WHO repent ...
NHEB ... and That repentance leading to forgiveness of sins ...
And the apostle Peter's instruction when it comes to forgiveness of sins, are as follows:
Acts 2:38 (BS2011), "Peter replied, Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, each one of you, that ye may receive forgiveness of sins, and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost."
Repentance was the core message that John the Baptist was preaching, Jesus began his ministry by preaching it, and Jesus' disciples preached it definitely. Once we have truly repented, we experience to have our sins washed away by the blood of Jesus. It's something we feel clearly in our soul, and this experience is so powerful that the normal human reaction is to cry before God. Up to this point of regret, after the payment has already been made for all the sins of every human being in the world, they have not received God's forgiveness. We must first repent, and a persistent repentance must also be a lifelong discipline for every believer who truly walk in the light.
Under the new covenant there is nothing that specifically provide atonement for knowingly and willfully sin:
Hebrews 10: 26-27 (NB88 / 07): "For if we sin willfully after we have learned the truth, then it is no longer back any sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries. "
This terrible feeling is something we experience when we have deliberately committed a serious sin after we have come to Christ. We feel a strong need to repent, and we cry out to God to restore our fellowship with Him, because we experience in our souls that our connection to God has been broken. But as soon as we decide to repent and walk in the light, we find that God is very faithful in restoring us:
1 John 1: 6-9: "If we say we have fellowship with him but walk in darkness, we lie and do not follow the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. "
The assumption here that we as believers should be able to continue to receive forgiveness of sins, that we must walk in the light. If we sin willfully, so is not the sin covered by the grace of the New Covenant, and we will not be forgiven until we return to light. Until we have confessed and repented of this sin, we have not been forgiven by God. Every child of God knows an urge to ask him for forgiveness when they have sinned, because they know that they really need to be forgiven!
Does that mean they have lost their salvation until they have repented of the specific sin that they have committed? Not necessarily. Whether their sin involves a degree of separation from God that is sufficient to cause spiritual death, depending on the particular sin nature. One of the most common fallacies that prevents believer in having a proper understanding of this, it is erroneous notion that all sins are equal.
1 John 5: 16-17 (NB88 / 07): "If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life - that is, those who sin, but not to death. There is a sin unto death, it is not about the saying that he should pray. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not unto death. "
If a believer dies with unsettled mortal sin in their lives, they will even be required to pay for the sin by entering the second death on Judgment Day. That's at least what I think. A large-theological debate about what sin that leads to death really is, but I'm not too concerned about it. In John 17: 3, we see that eternal life is to have fellowship with God. We should all have a perception in our mind whether we really have fellowship with God or not, and it should be clear to us about our sin has separated us from Him. We do not have to be perfect in order to preserve our salvation, but we need to be free from sins that exclude us from the source of life. We can never earn our salvation by good works, but if we intentionally live in a sin that leads to death, we disqualify ourselves away from Christ's righteousness, which is imputed to us by faith. Faith without works is dead, and so is a person who has faith but not holiness!
Here is how I understand the section of 1 John 'letter which I just quoted, showing us that not all sins are equal. If I see a brother commit a sin that has not prevented him from (life) God, I pray for him, and God will answer my prayer. However, if this brother commits a sin which intercepts him from communion with God, then I pray for him until I'm blue in the face, and my prayer will not restore him. This brother is even bound to repent of his sins. (After all, the eternal life defined in the New Testament as having fellowship with God, is not it?)
Let me just read an unfortunate quote that I came across from Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: "One of the Bible's greatest truths is that Christ died to take away all our sins - not just some of them, but all of them, past, present and future. This is why you should not fear that you're going to lose your salvation every time you commit a sin. If that were the case, you and I would lose our salvation every day - because we sin every day. "
Clearly qualities whatsoever this statement to distinguish between sin that leads to death, and sin not leading to death. I wonder what Bible these reader!
The popular notion that all of one's past, present and future sins are forgiven in advance at the moment of coming to faith in Christ is simply nonsense. The theological conclusion (as far as I can see) is derived from a Calvinist understanding of predestination, which more or less learns that, if future sins were forgiven in salvation moment, never really got saved to begin with. But let us for a moment look at these words of Jesus in Revelation:
Revelation 3: 5 (BS1930): "He who overcomes will thus be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot his name out of the book of life, and I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels."
If Jesus crossing out the names of believers who do not succeed in overcoming, it means that their names were really there to begin with, but no longer.
The entire Calvinist-Armenian theological debate is something real nonsense. This debate about whether salvation is decided according to God's predetermined selection or as a result of a person's voluntary decision to accept Christ, set these as fully valid pages of the Gospel against each other, as if they were going to have to be mutually exclusive and contradictory sight. Both views are found in Scripture, and therefore both must be true. This futile debate exemplifies the human mind's limitations compared to fully understand God through theology. A humble man can however take advantage of both of these truths by simply choosing to believe that both aspects are valid!
While deliberate and willful sin is not something that there is atonement statistics cover under the new covenant, it does not mean that Jesus will not show compassion towards us if we fall into sin. If we fall into sin, those of us who truly belong to Christ and who choose to walk in the light as he is in the light, have an advocate with the Father.
1 John 2: 1 (BS2011): "My children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. But if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. "
I do not know how it is with you, but I want Jesus to be my spokesman. I would not want him to be ashamed of me understand his Father because I denied him the way I lived on. If I with all my heart trying to become a true disciple of Jesus, I am sure I will be transformed and be conformed to his image, by the grace of God sanctifying work. And, as it says in 1 John 4:17, this is how we can have confidence before God on Judgment Day, "For as Christ is, so are we in this world." And I must therefore conclude that if my life is not reflect true discipleship, it gives me no reason to expect that Jesus on that day to say about me: "This guy here, he's with me."
The truth is that Jesus is not bound by a single theological rule that we had to try to impose him, because we want a sense of eternal security.
1 Peter 1:17 "You call upon God as Father, who without partiality judges each according to his deeds; then you must also live in fear the time you are still here as strangers. "
In Revelation we read that Jesus has the keys of death and Hades. God has said that he will have mercy on whom he mercy of, and be merciful to the person he has compassion on. It's that simple. What concerns me, I want to be one of those Jesus finds worthy of his defense. If Jesus' attitude towards the seven churches which are addressed in Revelation is any indication of how things are with God's universal church of our time, so it really looks like the vast majority of so-called believers will not be found worthy!
The biblical reality is that we come to a saving faith by grace, but we utterly set will be judged according to our works. And the only way that I fail to understand this is if our salvation is the product of faith and works, which cooperate to produce a life that is acceptable to Jesus.
James 2: 22,24: "You see that faith worked with his works, and by works was faith made perfect. ... You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. "
This is the result of a life as a disciple, as we just formed with his image. But we must really be serious in our quest for this, because we are warned that many are called but few are chosen. And that only the believer who overcomes, and endure to the end will be saved. We must all sit down and calculate the cost before we start building.
There will certainly be many believers who come to Jesus on that day, and say, "But, Lord, my pastors told me that if I just believe in my heart and confess with my mouth that you are Lord, and I will be saved! And just look at all the wonderful things that have happened throughout my service! "And perhaps Jesus will answer them," Have you not read that even the demons believe and tremble? They think, but they are not saints, their will is not subject to the Father. And have you not read, that not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord! shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does the will of my Father? I never said that I would judge you by your faith, which has led to so many miracles. I judge you by your deeds! You had an indifferent attitude toward sin, and I recognize you do not like my disciple! Away from me, you evildoers! '
My friends, I do not want to be a person using my intellect to create a selvbedragersk theological imagination, to give myself a false sense of eternal security. I want the truth, because my eternal destiny is too important for me that I can keep on building this kind of thought Castle. And I hope that the same applies to anyone who is going to read this. I realize that what I preach opposes what the vast majority of evangelicals in this country think, but it does not bother me at all. If the prevailing accepted theology has anything to do with the tragic spiritual condition that we find ourselves in - where the church in large is accepting to those who practice all kinds of abominable sins - so I consider my departure from current popular theology as something positive.
In simple terms, I want to warn everyone that when we begin to preach true discipleship, then every religious spirit come out of hiding, and these theological Pharisees will scrutinize every aspect of what we have to say, just as they did with Jesus. If they can find something to complain about, then they'll throw the baby out with the bathwater, because they can not withstand the strong preaching of Jesus, who could say, "If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out! It is better for you to be blind than to burn in hell! "
However, I would also like to say I would be very surprised if all my views were 100% correct. How arrogant would not it be? However, I believe that I have a big enough part right, because I simply have the courage to believe what I read in the Bible, instead of reading into it what I want to believe.
I would like to conclude with a word to you theological Pharisees - vipers. Here is their basic problem: Instead of just choosing to believe everything that is written in the Bible, do you feel a need to get it all to fit into an all neat and small system of logical paradigms, as you can understand intellectually and thus control. You are so arrogant that you think you can condense the infinite God down to a logical system that fully understood by their limited minds (theo-logy). The inevitable result is that you end up with a selective understanding of truth, which filters out everything that does not match the video their particular theological interpretation. I suspect that the underlying motive for their intellectualism is a need to control God in their minds, so that you can convince yourself that you really own eternal security (this concern seems to be the core of most theological debates). You put then appears to have an indifferent attitude toward sin, which will likely cause you to be condemned. When someone like me threatens their comfortable fantasy (although I have not done anything in order to restart a debate), responds you by trying to convince all the other Pharisees with their intellectual arguments. I recommend that you take a different approach, by humbly choose to accept what you read in the Bible, instead of reading into it what you want to be true.
For everyone else, I will come with a request to see my next teaching, where I will share the keys that the Lord has shown me to live a victorious life. It is not a life of drudgery under the law to produce fruit, but it is a new and living way! It is a victorious life of rest, where we can live in true freedom from sin's power! So I would just urge you not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but to receive the good which the Lord has entrusted to me. I also got a lot of those that I strongly disagree with.
Related links:
http://the-heavenly-blog.janchristensen.net/2015/09/no-1037-10-questions-to-jeremy-hoff.html
http://the-heavenly-blog.janchristensen.net/2015/11/no-1073-vebjrn-selbekk-jeremy-hoff-is.html
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