Behaviorism Believe-ism.


The behaviorism of different religious sects, “Behave right (by abiding by the religion's particular code of conduct), or you are damned,” buries the gospel of grace under layer after layer of religious doctrinal hair-splitting, theological nit-picking and performance measuring by the rule and regulation code as to a person’s spirituality.

To promote that as the gospel is a misrepresentation of the truth. It’s nothing less than devil inspired, man-made philosophical religious deception. It holds out salvation like some performance attained ideal that is reached only through a lifetime of unquantifiable good deeds. It is a soul-sapping, spiritual-sapping lie against the truth of the grace salvation message of Jesus Christ.

Jesus did not sacrifice His life for “new and better” brand of religion. He brought the gospel, which is not good news only for sinners, but for believers also, of whom all sin as well.

For the sake of Christ, God has thrown away all the score cards plus the measuring sticks for scoring against, all the extra curricular activity records and detention notes yet, we would rather feel like we have been...or through discipline and devotion have become...the right and proper sort of person upon whom God views as spiritual.

The self-righteous attitude claims "we are "good 'Christians', and we don’t want to be lumped in with a bunch of duped losers who do nothing more than put their trust in the Christ we have worked so hard for so long to imitate and obey. (We thank you, O God, that we are not like the rest of people...we go to “church”, we pay our tithes, we read our bible and pray for an hour a day, we dress right, act right, talk right, we even smile right on times.)
It is time to drop the nonsense about how the Grace message means “just go out and sin all we want since we’re already forgiven.” Nobody who trusts God wants to sin. When you trust God to love you and forgive you, you want to be like Jesus; you don’t want to sin. But when we do sin, in spite of the fact that we don’t want to, we have an advocate with the Father, 1 John 2:1-2 tells us (and he tells us that so we won’t sin, not so that we can or will.)

It’s like Paul said Titus: “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.... It’s "grace" that teaches us to say no to ungodliness. It’s 'grace" that makes us eager to do what is right. Knowing we’re already forgiven and accepted does not lead us into the devil’s workshop, but into deeper fellowship with our Lord and Savior.

The gospel really is that simple. It really is good news.

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