Ordo salutis and effort
- Election
- Effectual Calling
- Regeneration
- Conversion: Faith & Repentance (involves effort - 'knowledge')
- Justification
- Adoption
- Sanctification (involves effort - 'being')
- Glorification
11.23.2005
About Me
- Name: c.t.
Five solas, doctrines of grace, covenant of redemption (Covenant Theology is not the servant of infant baptism), Traditional Text, King James Version only; doing the two great commandments of Christ at the practical level (i.e. actually doing them); and recovering by degree the full image of God. This is the foundation I stand on and build upon.
Index:
ESSENTIAL I ~ II ~ III ~ IV ~ V ~ VI ~ VII ~ VIII ~ IX ~ X ~ XI ~ XII ~ XIII ~ XIV ~ XV ~ XVI ~ XVII ~ XVIII ~ XIX ~ XX ~ XXI ~ XXII ~ XXIII ~ XXIV ~ XXV ~ XXVI ~ XXVII ~ XXVIII ~ XXIX ~ XXX ~ XXXI ~ XXXII ~ XXXIII ~ XXXIV ~ XXXV ~ XXXVI ~ XXXVII ~ XXXVIII ~ XXXIX ~ XL ~ XLI ~ XLII ~ XLIII ~ XLIV ~ XLV ~ XLVI ~ XLVII ~ XLVIII ~ XLIX ~ L ~ LI ~ LII ~ LIII ~ LIV ~ LV ~ LVI ~ LVII ~ LVIII ~ LIX ~ LX ~ LXI ~ LXII ~ LXIII ~ LXIV ~ LXV ~ LXVI ~ LXVII ~ LXVIII ~ LXIX ~ LXX ~ LXXI ~ LXXII
STICK DRAWINGS & DIAGRAMS 1 (Note on 1) ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5
--Fuse the Word of God into Memory, Will, and Understanding Prayer and Fasting -- (of --) Acute Warring of the Holy Spirit with the carnal spirit -- (storms struggled through; extending limits to glorify God by doing it when it's most difficult) |
SOME BOOKS READ COMPLETE
SINCE STARTING THIS BLOG:
(Short Essay On My Reading History)
The practical, experimental level of the faith (the Puritans called it experimental Calvinism) is for those ready to leave off laying the foundation over and over and begin building the house (see Calvin's commentary on Hebrews 6:1).
Psalms 27:11 Teach me thy way, O LORD, and lead me in a plain path...
"God examineth with trials, the devil examineth with temptations, the world examineth with persecutions."
- Henry Smith
"The word of God . . . is the light to our paths, the key of the kingdom of heaven, our comfort in affliction, our shield and sword against Satan, the school of all wisdom, the glass wherein we behold God's face, the testimony of his favour, and the only food and nourishment of our souls."
- Geneva translators, 10 April 1560
"When the heart is cast indeed into the mould of the doctrine that the mind embraceth - when the evidence and necessity of the truth abides in us - when not the sense of the words only is in our heads, but the sense of the thing abides in our hearts - when we have communion with God in the doctrine we contend for - then shall we be garrisoned by the grace of God against all the assaults of men."
- John Owen
"Where the Puritans excelled was at bringing this high view of God
down to the level of ordinary life. One Puritan woman - the wife of a
soldier in Cromwell's army - defined Christianity as
'that universal habit of grace which is wrought in a soul by the
regenerating Spirit of God, whereby the whole creature is designed up
into the Divine will and love, and all its actions designed to the
obedience and glory of its Maker.'
By defining the Christian faith in this way, she was making a
connection between the doctrines of grace and daily experience."
- the Doctrines of Grace,
Boice/Ryken
"Previously, men had looked to the Church for all the trustworthy knowledge of God obtainable, and as well for all the communications of grace accessible. Calvin taught them that neither function has been committed to the Church, but God the Holy Spirit has retained both in His own hands and confers both knowledge of God and communion with God on whom He will."
- B. B. Warfield (from his essay Calvin as a Theologian)
A plain path puritan. That means the faith that is pure, bold, and practical. Five solas. Doctrines of Grace. Covenant of Redemption. Experimental Calvinism. No clericalism, ritualism, formalism, or moralism. The devil's nightmare.
CHOOSE YOUR BOOKS, CONQUER THEM, POSSESS THEM IN ESSENCE:
Holy Bible, AV1611
Iliad & Odyssey - Homer
On War - von Clausewitz
Wealth of Nations - Smith
Fourth Way - Ouspensky
Lives - Plutarch
History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
"The fearful are in the forlorn of those that march for hell; the violent and valiant are they which take heaven by force: cowards never won heaven. Say not that thou hast royal blood running in thy veins, and art begotten of God, except thou canst prove thy pedigree by this heroic spirit, to dare to be holy despite men and devils."
- William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour
"As among all the doctrines of the gospel, there is none opposed with more violence and subtlety than that concerning our regeneration by the immediate, powerful, effectual operation of the Holy Spirit of grace; so there is not scarce anything more despised or scorned by many in the world than that any should profess that there hath been such a work of God upon themselves, or on any occasion declare aught of the way and manner whereby it was wrought... yea, the enmity of Cain against Abel was but a branch of this proud and perverse inclination."
- John Owen, A Discourse Concerning The Holy Spirit
The antithesis of vanity is: faith. The antithesis of worldly pride is: repentance. The antithesis of self-will is: descent-of-the-dove God's will.
3 Comments:
Faith and repentance require 'knowledge' and effort to learn that knowledge because you have to know what you are have faith IN and what you are to repent OF.
This doesn't just happen by itself. You have to go to the source, the Bible, and to the Holy Spirit Himself for illumination, and to teachers who have that gift from the Holy Spirit and hence are on-the-mark doctrinally.
Effort on 'being' is effort that provokes your limits and extends your limits -- in all parts of your being: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual.
The metaphor of a glass and water gets at it. The glass is your current level of being, the water is your current level of understanding and volitional ability to glorify God. The glass can only hold so much water. To increase your capacity for understanding and for being able to glorify God you have to increase the size of the glass. You can't just pour more water into the same glass. It overflows and you stay at the same level.
Effort on 'being' is effort to increase the size of the glass. It is not effort with knowledge or more or different knowledge. That's empty when the glass stays the same size. It is effort on being. On increasing being.
The two great commandments (love God and love your neighbor as yourself) seen and done at the practical level are the core of effort to increase being. I mean the foundation. The center-of-gravity. The anchor. The standard for your efforts.
They don't describe in an obvious way the efforts themselves, but they do once you understand the efforts themselves.
Prayer and fasting correspond to the two great commandments.
Fearing only God vs. fearing man corresponds as well.
Your forerunner, your model, that which you are to emulate is Jesus Himself.
Describing practical level effort is difficult because you really have to come into knoledge of it on your own, but I just want to state that that is the effort involved in the effort on 'being' regarding sanctification.
The efforts are all listed and depicted in the Word of God though...
As you can see, looking at the ordo salutis in terms of where effort is required, mainstream Christians - the ones who DO get to the point of being able to learn the knowledge that is biblical doctrine - just then stop there. From that point they throw bones, so to speak, to effort on being by mouthing trite moralising observations and accusations and confessions.
And they eventually get the biblical doctrine all warped (inevitably) because they don't make any efforts on being (practice, practical efforts) and the doctrine just stagnates and slowly and inevitably becomes mishapen and poisoned.
One way this happens to the most doctrinally on-the-mark types is: the extent they allow the world to take over all meaning of Christianity under the guise of 'family' and 'children' and all the back-slapping shallowness of typical man-fearing environments.
They can't see this encroachment of the world into God's domain, and they don't have the courage or understanding to oppose it. Who among them can even begin to formulate the thought that Christianity is not about 'family' and being a good, correct-thinking, upstanding, hail, well-met, back-slapping member of the community? Of course (they say) that is what Christianity is all about! You'd have to be 'strange' to not accept that... Some kind of 'stranger' type... A stranger in this world... Who wants to be that?
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