From
Galatians 2:1-5
“Freedom!”
H,
I guess
the point you are making is that human nature is the same. Yes, it is. Not in
the general sense of no room for individuality but in the specific sense of bad
heart and good heart. It is hard to describe it, but I know what you mean. There
is a part of all of us that would like to have some kind of rule or say over
others and there is, a good, part of us who is learning to let go of that sham
of control.
If you
put a person in control over others, at best he or she will have to learn the
crucial bit of not enslaving the submitting party. It is something you see in
others time and time again and if we are being honest, and we are, in ourselves.
It then shows why in the charismatic/Pentecostal tradition in which we grew up
there was a lot of this dangerous notion of the infallibility of a fallible
man. The pastor who could not be disputed and who, like Moses, went up the mountain
to get what God wants to say while we revel in our excesses below. We abdicate
our responsibility to seek and hear and know so we can be “free” only to become
enslaved by this man or woman who is nothing like Moses.
Yet,
our freedom is complete in Christ. It is hard won and can erase the stain of
the centuries if we let it. There is truly no separation between those who
believe and the person whom they have chosen to believe. There is the man who
came to bring closeness, there is the spirit ingrained in their living hearts
to teach them what is right and lead them to that living out and there is the
father who they truly come from and who cannot and will not abandon their
eternal date to meet Him. People who purport to lead must know that they are
only in God if they help people see this truth more and more. If they do not
they have become useless to both God and to the men and women they think they
serve.
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