I always enjoy K.W. Leslies blogs, and although I don’t always agree with his scriptural interpretations or interpolations, but I found his latest entry too good not to pass along.

I love this song!

The “Official” music video version can be found here, but unfortunately embedding is disabled for the official version, so you’ll have to click on the link and watch it at Youtube.

 I want to clarify my stance a bit on my last post (actually what I have in mind and am trying to get to is going to be in a post coming up). In my last post “How Many Committed Christians Are In North America”, I ended with a question of percentages. The low-end percentage number that I had was 3% of the population of North America as being “Committed Christians”, and the high end is the 76% figure from Wikepedia.

I had to edit the post a number of times and almost deleted it later in the morning, because I was afraid that I was coming across as being judgmental or even too (oh, no!) fundamentalist. I try very hard not to ascertain who is and who is not a “genuine Christian.” As I mentioned in the post, only Jesus Christ knows who does and who does not belong to Him.

In playing a “percentages game” such as the one in the last post, I feel that there are two slippery slopes to avoid.                                                                                                                                                 

The first slippery slope is the one of limiting God’s Kingdom to only those who we think are “doing Christianity right,” whatever “right” is in our own theological worldview. The damage comes when we start to limit God’s grace from those who really need it the most and we can become Pharisaical in our own walk with the LORD. As in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, that is a sin that I seek constantly to avoid.

For those who haven’t followed my blog or perhaps aren’t familiar with my background, I have to state that I grew up with an extreme case of this first slippery slope in the form of Armstrongism. In this cult, it was maintained by the Worldwide Church of God and Herbert W. Armstrong that we were the only “Real Christians” on the planet. With a total Church membership at their heyday of roughly 150,000 “co-workers”, that meant that the percentage of “Real Christians” by the “church” definition in North America was only about .0005% (maybe less, since Armstrong maintained that only a portion of the “Church” was to be saved and the rest were Laodiceans).

The second slippery slope is the one that leads to various forms of Universalism. Although there have been many times that I have wished that universalism were true, it simply isn’t. In order to accept universalism, you must inevitably eliminate large portions of scripture, including the words of Jesus Himself.

Additionally, although I would love to see everyone eventually make it to Heaven, there are many that I read about on a regular basis that I’m quite sure won’t make it. Dr. Jim West’s “Total Depravity” posts on his blog occasionally get on my nerves, but I have to admit that most of the “Charles Mansons” of the world won’t be saved (although I feel pretty confident that Jeffrey Dahmer was genuinely saved before he was murdered in prison).

The point is this; Jesus was pretty clear when He stated in Matthew 7:13-14 “…the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” So the question that I have right now is not how wide the gate, nor how narrow the path but rather how “many” is many and how “few” is few? (not saying that it is not important to consider the narrowness of the path, however that is not the point of this post)

“Few” is obviously less than 50%, but how much less?

When I mention the two slippery slopes it is because I want to avoid both of them. In all actuality I am still in a reconstruction phase of my own Christian worldview. Growing up with the .0005% number left some spirituals scars that I still haven’t fully recovered from, however I don’t want to lean to far into liberalism and dilute the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I have friends on both ends of the spectrum and see the dangers of leaning either too far right or left. What I want to be able to do is have as close to an accurate understanding of Christ’s Gospel and of His Church as possible.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I actually am leading up to another post with these two posts. In my post (the one that I am leading up to) I want to explore 1 John 5:19 “We know that we are of God, and the whole world is under the sway of the evil one.” (HCSB) A very close friend of mine whose life quite often parallels mine, and me have been discussing this verse (and a few other related ones) over the course of the last week or so. I often remind him that we live in “Enemy-occupied territory” and that “our citizenship is in Heaven” (Philippians 3:20). So, in a day or so, I will be writing a post entitled “Living in Enemy-Occupied Territory” and building a bit on these two posts as well as the aforementioned verses.

In my post yesterday about being as a little child coming to Jesus for salvation, I mentioned that I had a few more thoughts on the subject before moving on. After ruminating about it a little more, I’ve decided that those thoughts are actually not that significant for the discussion at hand. Additionally, I’m going to wait until after I finish this series before I delve into the idea of “spiritual child abuse”, although I definitely have some thoughts on that subject, primarily related to 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 and some related passages.

The only thing that I want to add to the concept of coming to Jesus with the sincerity of a little child is a passage that I once stumbled upon from the 8th century Sufi poet Rabi’a Al-’Adawiyya

O my Lord,
if I worship you from fear of hell, burn me in hell.
If I worship you from hope of Paradise, bar me from its gates.
But if I worship you for yourself alone, grant me then the beauty of your Face