The Love of the Father: His Draw on the Hearts of His Children to Atonement and Sonship
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 28 June 2026
Occasion. This Sunday’s essay elaborates on last Sunday’s discussion. Please refer to the original essay. In that essay, we took up the question of what kind of world we must live in for Jesus’ death two thousand years ago to affect my standing before God. (What is the nature and substance of the spiritual and physical realm? What are the laws that govern it? Why was such a system set up? Why did such a spiritual architecture require the Son of God to die for the sins of man to be in relationship with God the Father?) That essay was based on my conversation with Charlie earlier in the week.
It is not a conventional story. My understanding of the physical and spiritual world and of God’s relationship to it came through an altered-state vision in 1987. It radically changed my life. It came to me after a 10-year-plus deep dive into 40 cults, religions, and philosophies, and ultimately altered states. Last week’s fellowship discussion did not cover the essay or that question directly, but it is good background material for what we did discuss. The foundational substance of creation and the rules that govern the universe are important. It is upon this foundation that we postulate the moral code among men and our relationship to God.
My story: Over a 10-year period, from my mid-teens to mid-20s, the unanswered question about the fundamental nature of reality gradually led me to explore other religions and examine their perspectives to see whether the answers to these questions had been found in other spiritual traditions/paths/religions/esoteric knowledge. I was a fully committed believer in Jesus Christ as my Savior, and the truthfulness of the Biblical revelation at age 4. I remained deeply convinced of the Bible’s truth until I was introduced to other religions in my early teens. I remember the location and conversation where I heard my Mom talking with a friend. Her son had gone to college, studied world religions, and had left the Christian faith. That was all it took. The door had opened, and I had to find out what other religions believed. Earlier, as a young teen, I did the Ouija board at a Halloween party and was hooked. I read about ESP, channeling, and psychic phenomena (A Search for the Truth by Ruth Montgomery). In college, I joined Ekankar, a religion promising to teach astral projection and firsthand experience of the spiritual worlds. Soon, my sense of truth about the spiritual world had no anchor. I couldn’t explain why Christ’s death was necessary for salvation; in fact, I couldn’t see any logical sequence to it at all. I had nothing to rely on other than “believe this” as the testimony of my elders and peers. It was clear that I was missing something. This left me open to any spiritual teacher/guru that came along. After college, I started reading books about different spiritual paths: martial arts, Autobiography of a Yogi, and a Hindu book (Lords of Light). While still stationed at Pearl Harbor, an opportunity to attend a yoga class came up. I was placed on shore duty after a panic attack while preparing to go on a submarine cruise in Guam. I went to the Yoga class and immediately knew this was the path for me. The teacher was authoritative and confident in the path. The book they offered as an introduction to the spiritual path (How to Know God by Christopher Isherwood, the Sutras of Patanjali) promised direct experience of God and liberation from this world. I was entranced. After 3 months of attending the daily 3:30 AM, 2.5-hr meditation at the ashram, I precipitously switched spiritual allegiance. I joined their Sikh/Yogic sect without consulting my parents or any peer group. I didn’t have the courage to face them, knowing the disapproval I would face and fearing I wouldn’t be able to resist the pressure. I stayed for 6 years, till 1982, and then went to Naturopathic College, where I was introduced to altered states on a teacher’s recommendation, and the real ride began. 3 years of altered state seeking with a Friday night vision quest group yielded insight, but nothing held up; I ended in confusion. On the final trips, I saw a vision: a galaxy, stars, and a line between them, which lasted the entire trip and recurred on the next trip. I knew it meant something, and I believed it was a divine answer to my prayer, “Who is the True God and what is the nature of reality that justifies Jesus dying for our sins?” I asked, and received the answer. This ministry, the Conscious Point Physics theory, my 30 years of Christian counseling of marriages, personal growth, trauma, addiction… my 2003 Senate run with 50,000 votes in the primary on a radically Christian platform, and continuing 2024 and 2028 Presidential run; my faith in the Bible as a revelation from God, and the Truth of Jesus declaration came from that one vision and subsequent insights. God can use anything to bring us to Him. We are all different, but there is a path to every heart to connect to His.
Last week’s essay documents my conception of the structure of the spiritual world: A God from whose mind the entire manifest world arises – a world composed of consciousness at the smallest particulate level. Love is the nature of the God upon whose consciousness the universe rests. Therefore, He made free creatures who could love or refuse Him. His law and definition of goodness defined evil. He created humans with an innate desire for the satisfaction of animal pleasure, which is good when applied according to His patterns, and evil when the animal drives seduce him into excess, deficiency, or wrong application. He gave man the freedom to choose his animal nature (and the associated evil). The entire universe is formed from the substance of His mind. We are in/a part of/ His universe, His body. “For in him we live, and move, and have our being…” (Acts 17:28). We are sinners/choose evil of our free will. His purity cannot abide evil in His mind/being. God’s nature requires the elimination of every speck of evil in His body. Man is inside the body of God; he is impure, he has been judged, and death/elimination/separation from the body of God is his sentence. It is not optional; it is the nature of God. Man, as a sinful being, and sin/evil/impurity/unGodliness cannot live within the body/mind/existence/being of God. The problem is that God desires companionship, relationship, as this was the purpose of man’s creation. As the One, the only existent consciousness, with a nature of love, that love cannot be satisfied without the experience of the other to receive and give back love freely. Therefore, He devised a plan to exercise the wrath/death/purification of His being that His nature/existence required. The plan was prepared from before the beginning. He created the Son, who is a full image of Himself, the exact same as He, only with a separate perspective (looking at the Father, with the identity of the Son). The Father gave the Son the authority to create all the Conscious Points from/by/of His mind, and to give life to men whose spirit was created in the image of the Father and Son. The Son incarnated was sinless and was killed without cause, having been judged by earthly authorities who were operating under the power of their egos and tempted by Satan. When Jesus was being crucified, God the Father expressed His judgment on the Son, condemning the sin that was performed by the creatures which He had created. Christ did not pass the death delivered toward sinful man to the individuals, but received the penalty of the violation in his body/mind/spirit. Thus, He has paid the price of our sin, and is willing to offer us the full pardon, having already paid the price. Thus, this is a loophole in the construction of the universe. A fully holy God is capable of hosting evil within Himself, in the hope that there will be those who will choose to accept His offer of purification and grow into the likeness of Christ and be fully mature sons.
The questions the group explored in our meeting were the purpose of the cross, the mechanism of its purification, and the way the Father draws men to Him through Christ.
I. Purpose and mechanism of the atonement
When I laid out the question, Leonard heard me ask about the purpose and plan behind the sacrifice. He was saying there has to be a plan for life and purpose associated with the sacrificial death, or that Christ’s death means nothing. That is true, and it is one half of the question. The other half of the question was how He did it. I wanted to know the cause-and-effect sequence of “how the cross affected the spiritual structure of the universe” when I embarked on my spiritual pilgrimage to find truth. This question is a restatement of Charlie’s request for a mathematical proof of the atonement. So, the question concerns how Christ’s death is applied to my life/my account, so that I move from being under wrath to standing clean/pure/sinless before the Father, which is the only state in which it is possible to be in His presence?
That is the question this essay answers. The answer is both a ledger and a relationship. To understand that question, we must first settle what kind of beings we are.
II. Are we made within God, or coexistent with Him?
My theory of creation and existence rests on this foundation: God is everything, and we are an aspect of God experiencing God. There is nothing we can experience that is not part/aspect of God. We are not independent beings standing alongside Him, but points of awareness within/of Him. We are aspects of the one divine being. We are self-aware and made, for a time, to forget that we are inside the whole. That forgetting is not a flaw; it is the very thing that makes free will possible. A point of view that knows itself to be God could not genuinely choose to love another besides God (which is a primary criterion of love, the gift of oneself given freely, when there are viable options). Only a point of view that has been allowed to feel separate can freely choose for Him or against Him. So God compartmentalizes His own awareness. He minimizes the scope of our awareness as spiritual beings within Him. Thus, we are created to be of His nature, and within His being, and aware of a limited portion of his totality. It is this separation that allows relationship, as relationship is definitionally impossible without an “other” to be in relationship with. Thus, he has created the ability to be separate from others by partitioning awareness. It is obvious how such partitioning can be done in the material/physical universe, with the limitations of the senses and time- and space-based perception. But there is probably another realm, maybe an extension of this one, where the composition of individual souls in the spirit realm also feel and believe themselves to be fundamentally and inherently separate. Regardless of the realm, heaven or earth, there is God alone, and from that arose first the Son, whom the Father brought forth; and there is everything else, which the Son made — and all of it is within God. The self-aware entities within the body of God are not the entirety of God. Any part that declared, or believed, like Shirley McLain on the beach saying, “I am God,” is mistaking a piece for the whole. This is the mistake of believing that because we are part of the whole, we are the whole. We are (in some way) a part of God, but we are not God. This is the perspective of a human misperceiving himself as God (the Shirley McLain fallacy).
According to the Bible, there is only one God, and the Father and Son truly are both all of God. I base this theology on the opening verses of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” John 1:1-3. The Word was with God and was God. This is not a Shirley McLain fallacy. The Son is the same as the Father, “I and my Father are one.” John 10:30. The distinction between Father and Son is one of perspective. The Son has the perspective of obedience to the will of the Father. The Son has a different role, a different function. It seems that the role is to shield the Father from evil, isolating it within His being so that the Father can remain pure and unexposed to the evil that is necessarily existent in a universe where men behave like animals and are called to act like gods in His image. This is why the Son was the creator of everything that was made. It is because of this role that He is able to shield the evils of humanity from the purity and wrath-against-impurity of the Father. After the crucifixion and the acceptance of that substitutionary sacrifice, it is possible for sinful man to be cleansed and for man to be in relation to the Father. The key step is the cleansing of the man by acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice.
Leonard challenged my theology to see whether it holds. In his understanding, we are not created out of God at all; we are coexistent with Him — eternal intelligences, of the same cloth, never made and never beginning. The distinction is that the Father has simply progressed far ahead of us and now helps us climb toward where He is.
This conception of God is very different from my ontology. If Leonard is right, my argument collapses entirely. In my conception, our very existence is borrowed from/based upon God’s being. In Leonard’s conception, our existence is our own and eternal, standing beside Christ’s existence. I do not hold his view. I think John 1 gives a sequence: the Father first, then the Son, then all things made through the Son. I think it is important to record Leonard’s perspective, as we are in the Fellowship doing a very strong study of comparative religions, and Leonard’s conception is a true distinction that is significant enough to call it a different religion rather than simply a doctrinal distinction within a religion. When Leonard heard me say “we are God experiencing God,” he suggested I meant little-g gods, a perspective he held that men were a crowd of separate, independent deities. I do not hold that view. I do not hold that we are little gods standing apart from God in a substantive way. We are gods in the Biblical sense of being created in His image, and Christ being the light of men. When I say we are gods, I mean we are aspects/entities within God. I believe we are aspects of God Himself, and He is experiencing Himself from countless interior vantage points, each created with ego boundaries. We, as entities within His whole, have forgotten our origin, and we are fully partitioned in our sense of being separate from God, to the point of not believing He exists. In general, man does not recognize his/your/their/our source. We are made in His image (Genesis 1:27) — and we are made of Him and within Him. He is the foundation upon which the entire construction of my worldview stands.
III. The partition: how the One became Two
The fundamental problem of the generation of a universe is how nothing becomes something. That is, where did God come from? How was He made? If He was not caused, and existed forever, how did His existence as an eternal being arise? These are fundamental problems which cannot be answered, and I make no attempt to do so. My project/theory/belif is only that the entirety of all creation is consistent with His existence, and His existence as the source of all.
The second problem is how the One/the Singularity/God the Father becomes two (Father and Son). According to Leonard, the Mormon framing of God’s origin is essentially that God arose from nothing (or existed forever). Christ is a little g god, as are we. He is teaching us to mature. I don’t think that in the Mormon doctrine, according to Leonard, that we (humans) were created by Christ/the Word, although I might be wrong on this. I think Leonard’s statement is essential that we are all gods, learning from God, as massively multiplied eternal gods. (I will look forward to correction, and adjust accordingly if I have misunderstood Leonard’s conception.)
In my interpretation of the Bible (John 1), the Father/God Almighty is the timeless/eternal/self-created God. This is the problem of the first generation of reality: “Why and how is there anything in the universe?” The second problem is, “What is the foundational method by which God satisfied the problem of relationship and the creation of substance?” In short, how did a God who is inherently utterly alone become a God who is in relationship, rather than staying eternally alone surrounded by nothingness?
I do not think the Son arose from the Father merely becoming self-aware. I think it was by a more generative process. As a postulate, the Father may have been able to partition His own point of view by visualizing/imagining Himself looking back at Himself. In this way He was the “other.” He was able to do this so completely that, even while remaining one, He could be the Father, look at the Son, and identify Himself as the Father. Likewise, the Son could look at the Father and see Him as other, and identify as the Son. This was a foundational aspect of the realization I had in my 1987 vision. In that vision/revelation I saw, rightly or wrongly, God the Father looking back at Himself from the perspective of the Son, and seeing the Son looking back at Him (the Father). That perspective is what gives meaning to the answer God gave to Moses when asked His name, and He said, “I AM THAT I AM.” Exodus 3:14. Each side beholds the other, and each says I am THAT I am, both of them are the same One; they are both the whole, and hence why Jesus said, ” The Father and I are one.” That separation of consciousness into parts is what I call the partitioning of awareness, which produces the experience of the other within a unity. This process of partitioning of awareness is the foundation of relationship itself. The one became two. Because there were two, it was now possible to meet each other’s needs. This satisfies a fundamental aspect of love. With an “other,” there is now the possibility of someone to love and be loved by.
Susan and Isak both contributed their perspectives. Susan wanted to make sure that my model contained both separateness and real, individualized personalities for the Son and the Father. She wanted the spirit of both Father and Son to be distinct enough to have their own consciousness and free will. She wanted a conception in which the Son could, in principle, have chosen otherwise and has freely chosen obedience to the Father. I agree that such must be the case. I freely acknowledge that the specifics of how this distinction was implemented are a mystery that I can only explain qualitatively. My only real clue is to suggest that the distinction, however real, arose out of a oneness rather than alongside it.
Isak offered the image of one point becoming two by the two “time-sharing the awareness of I,” and each side selects only the slices of the awareness of the assigned/chosen identity. The time slice of awareness switches so fast that both perceive the experience of “I” continuously. Susan offered the analogy of the rainbow: each of us carries some real portion of the one white light; none of us is the whole of it. Both of these analogies suggest that the experiences of two separate persons could arise from a single source. Having established that two can arise from literal oneness, the more practical consideration is how we, in the human experience, may also participate in that oneness of harmony of the Father and Son. This is the oneness of Father and Son that the Biblical interpretation commonly refers to. Paul alludes to this goal, this end, when he says that oneness is the end goal of life in Christ: “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).
And notice that the partition and the multitude are the same act at two scales. The Father holding Himself as an “other” is the first forgetting — the first One choosing an identity, for the sake of allowing relationship, and to regard the relationship between two. The making of every soul is that same move repeated without number: God permitting points within Himself to forget the whole, so that each feels itself a separate “I.” This is why we can be of the same essence/substance/origin as the Father and Son, and yet be so blind to it that we act like animals, never suspecting that we are aspects of the very source we are violating. Forgetting is what buys the freedom of free will. We do not see clearly the consequence of choosing to act out the nature of the Father vs. acting on the attraction of the animal desires.
The result of this blindness, the inability to see that we are a cell in the body of the great oneness of God, allows us to have a real sense of self/ego and free will. We can honestly feel free to act independently of God’s will when we do not see the oneness of all and the certain consequence of violating the nature of the One. Knowing the true nature of God and the structure of the universe validates the Oneness as factual reality. The feeling and knowing of the Holy Spirit’s pull on the heart validates the necessity of following God’s way. When we are convinced by these signs, teachers and knowledge, and by the leading of the heart, we can rend the veil of the illusion of separateness. We can choose to follow the way and Law of God and be drawn back into conscious harmony with Him. We can freely choose, with open eyes, to act in harmony with the very nature of reality and do so as a service to God, as a sacrifice.
When we have accepted the actual oneness of God, Christ, man, and all of creation as the fundamental underlying model of reality, we can understand the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice. The barrier of the mystery of “why was it necessary for Christ to die for our sins” is lowered. Knowledge and understanding of the necessity of Christ’s death and suffering for our sins allow us to believe by knowledge and faith. We can study and decide whether the model is plausibly true, if the spiritual implications follow logically, and most importantly, whether we are willing to sacrifice indulging our animal lusts. With this sequential cause-and-effect explanation, it is easier for man to accept the repair that Christ offers as operationally effective and see the necessity of the repair of the rupture created by our sin. With a logical-mechanical model of reality, we can see the implications of accepting Christ’s sacrifice for salvation. With understanding of the construction of the universe, we can see the costs and benefits, and understand the justice and necessity of the plan as it was implemented. With knowledge of the fundamental nature of the universe, we can see that reconciling the relationship broken by sin requires Christ’s sacrifice. Logic and understanding make the decision comprehensible, and the choice to accept Christ’s atonement is both attractive and costly, requiring us to submit to God’s law and way rather than continuing in pandering to our lusts.
IV. The mechanism I was missing: the Father draws us through the Son
Now to the heart of it. I had built my account of salvation as a mutual drawing. Christ pulls, and I respond; He calls, and I answer; and step by step I am drawn closer and made like Him as I accept His invitation. I described it as His pulling on my will until His will, felt inside me, became the option I chose. Susan’s insight deepened by noting that it is God who is pulling us through Christ.
Susan’s first insight: it is not Christ who draws us first — it is the Father. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44). Before we ever sincerely turn, the Father is already drawing. We already carry the light of Christ. “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (John 1:9). The drawing is the Father’s act, reaching us through the Son.
Susan’s second insight: This is the mechanism that completes the cross essay I wrote for this week. That essay answered the legal half of the relationship resolution. The commit is a violation within God’s own being; His purity must discharge its wrath against it to the point of death. This is where salvation lives. Christ was made sin for us and God executed His required/automatic/necessary death-dealing wrath against our sin. Christ took the death we deserved. Whoever is hidden in Him is shielded from God’s wrath, as Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock. “And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by.” (Exodus 33:22). Being in Christ is the covering; God’s wrath is executed against sin to purify His being/body of impurity, and the ledger is cleared. The wall separating God and man falls. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8)
But clearing the wall is not yet a changed heart. That is what the second half of Susan’s insight provides. What the cleared wall opens is reconnection to the Father’s love. When we accept Christ and pass from under wrath to peace with the Father, even while we are still far from perfect, that relationship with the Father is itself the new heart. The empty place in us, the one we kept trying to fill with everything else, is filled by the Father’s love. It is being loved like that that allows us to love back. “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The change of heart is not a separate gift added on after pardon; the change of heart is the restored relationship. So the full mechanism has two faces of one act: the cross shields us in Christ from the wrath that purity must spend on sin, and through the door that opens, the Father’s love draws us — and the love is the power that turns us.
This is what I had left out of the essay. Susan’s insight describes departing from sin as something we cannot accomplish by our own power. To follow sin is to follow the animal instincts, which we do even when we know better. When we witness to and recommend resisting sin as God’s requirement for relationship, the person we are witnessing to hears the old covenant: keep the rules and live. That is true, but it is not the whole truth. The difference between the old and new covenant is that it is “by the power of Christ” that we are drawn. The power of Christ is the reconnection with the Father’s love through the Son. We are not able to do any of it. We cannot pay the debt of our sin, and we cannot change our hearts to be like Him. If we only speak of obedience, we have preached law, not the grace and transformation of the gospel.
V. Justification, then sanctification — and how to picture the pull
This is the cause-and-effect mechanism, and it has the two movements Susan named.
- First, justification: in a single moment, even the prostitute who sold herself the night before can say I choose You, Christ, and right there peace is made with the Father — not because she is yet changed, but because the Son’s righteousness is reckoned to her and the relationship is opened. The thief on the cross had minutes, and heard, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
- Then, sanctification: the long road that follows, in which the Lord “leadeth me in the paths of righteousness” (Psalm 23:3), failing and obeying and failing and obeying, until the changed heart is worked all the way through and we are at last presented to the Father without blemish.
I had not considered that the briefly expressed, but momentarily sincere sinner’s prayer would be effective for salvation. It did not seem that a single moment at a Billy Graham altar was sufficient dedication to be a salvation transaction. But according to the testimonies Susan relayed, the key may be genuine acceptance, even for a moment. And, as per Susan’s testimony stories, perhaps the bar is even lower. Perhaps even skeptical acceptance may be enough.
Salvation and justification are synonyms. They are both aspects of a right/pure relationship with the Father. These two names are two aspects of the same state of relationship once established with the Son. The gate, the initiation, the determinant of the opening of that relationship, is the sincere acceptance of the gift of Jesus’ death on the cross as atonement for my sins. I think for this saving/justifying relationship to be adequate, there must be a threshold degree of desire and voluntary action that is sufficient to open the relationship and receive the gift of salvation/justification of my soul. But as we saw, it is the Father’s love that is the draw that produces our desire.
Sanctification is the ongoing process of maturation and purification, of becoming like the Son. The Son is the perfect pattern of the God-man, and acting as He acts creates harmony between God and man. It is the process of living daily with Jesus Christ as Lord (master, pattern of emulation, lawgiver and standard of perfect relationship). It is through listening to and following the voice of conscience (the Holy Spirit guiding us and speaking to our hearts) that we develop the habits of character, which imprint the soul, lay up treasure in heaven, and establish us as sons in mature relationship. “For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.” (Romans 8:19)
It is through feeding on (daily reading) the Word, the Bible, the words of law, prophecy, wisdom, and developing understanding that we know His way. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27). The transformation process that the open relationship makes possible provides us with that standard of identification of Him, and the transformation that occurs because of it. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” (Psalm 119:11).
Thus, the process of coming close to Him, developing character and maturity in Christ, and full relationship with the Father includes the sequence: the Father draws, through the Son; I feel the pull and answer; He draws again, I answer again; and call by call, answer by answer, I am brought closer, not by my own engine but by His. “Draw me, we will run after thee” (Song of Solomon 1:4).
VI. The seed, the soil, and the honest ask
This reframes what we are actually asking of a person when we witness to them, and it sends us back to the parable of the sower. If there is ever a genuine moment of a sincere desire to make Jesus Lord, to be cleansed of sin, to enter relationship with the Father — then a real seed has been planted. But a seed is only a beginning; it is not a harvest. Some of it falls on the path and is snatched away; some on rocky ground and withers when affliction comes; some among thorns and is choked by the cares and riches of the world; and some on good soil, where it bears thirty, sixty, a hundredfold (Matthew 13:3-23). The sinner’s prayer is a seed of exactly that kind.
Susan, who regularly listens to podcast testimonies of people who have come to faith, has heard more than one of them report being changed even by a prayer prayed without sincerity. The evidence seems to be that Christ honors any real movement toward Him — however small, however halting. It appears that He continues to speak to the heart/conscience/inner voice, drawing those who have called on Him. The work of the Holy Spirit appears to begin on the heart when we express any level of openness to accepting Jesus as Savior.
As I have said, salvation (justification – being clean before God) is the beginning. It does not remove the necessity that follows. The seed that has been planted must be tended for it to grow. The growth is sanctification: becoming habitually pure, which is the development of Christ’s character. “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope:” (Romans 5:1-4)
I believe developing the habits and character of sanctification lays up treasure in heaven. I think the parable of the talents may refer to the work of developing our character in Matthew 25:14–30, where Jesus tells of a master who entrusts his servants with 5, 2, and 1 talents. I think it may be that those who do not develop their character on earth will have little authority in heaven. “If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?” (Luke 16:11) This may also connect with the parable of the minas, “…because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities.” (Luke 19:17) There is the implication that the kingdom of Heaven has authority and faithful service corresponds to ruleship/control of some type.
This may segue with the verses regarding being salted with fire. “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” (1 Corinthians 3:11-15). “Every one shall be salted with fire” (Mark 9:49). This may correspond to a man’s works and character. The reward will probably be for the righteous works and righteous character. And this reward may be in terms of ability and authority. The key concerns in these warnings are “he shall suffer loss,” and “everyone will be salted with fire.” This means that everyone will suffer loss. I believe that loss will be to the extent that we have not developed Godly character and our works are unrighteous. This is the process of sanctification. The deathbed confession is good, but it does not leave time to lay up treasure in heaven.
So the honest invitation to faith is not “Say these words, and you are done.” It is: “Come, take the first real step — and then learn the ways of righteousness by reading the Word; meditate on those works to sensitize your heart to the ways and character of Christ; listening to the Holy Spirit in each moment to guide in each situation; prayer for relationship with God, alignment with His will, transformation into his image, petition for our needs, warfare against eavil, worship and awe in his presence, partnership in His establishing the Kingdom and pure church, and cleansing from the sin and error of this world; repent and mourn for our errors; and settling the score in all relationship, loving neighbor as self, leave no debts unpaid; and ask for God’s love to flow through you, His love be your love, and draw others to Him.” The sinner’s prayer opens a relationship; it does not complete the maturation of character or accomplish the works we are called to do in building His Kingdom (purity of governance in His way of the city, state, nation), bringing harmony to His church (community peace, cooperation in accomplishment, creating a beautiful environment), enjoying His life lived through you (loving self, using your gifts to make life better), and bringing the full joy He desires to experience as you relate to others (sevice, loving neighbor).
Susan’s story of people who made an insincere confession of faith is evidence that God is willing to take even the smallest gesture of invitation as an opening/authorization to enter a person’s heart. This is basically a restatement of the rules of freedom, space, and authority over substance. He enters with the level of permission granted. He spoke to the hearts of those who had asked that He speak to them. I’ve heard it said, “God is a gentleman.” “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20). The subjective experience of those who ask Jesus to be their savior reported feeling the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. It appears they felt the draw toward maturity in Christ after that initial gesture.
That is a comforting thought: God continues to work on the soul that gives Him an opening. But there is another point about discipleship and maturation that has civilization-level implications. I believe we have seen it play out after the Billy Graham era, the Jesus Movement of the 60’s, and Campus Crusade for Christ-type evangelism. A great deal of effort is placed on salvation. I know they have prayer counselors and make referrals to churches for discipleship at the large evangelism rallies. But I think there is a large gap between the practicalities of discipleship. I don’t think any ministry teaches that, but there is an easy assumption that a moment of salvation is the major part of the work. The emotional moment of surrender at a Billy Graham-style revival is a start, but it is not the same as growing into a mature, world-changing, Christ-representing Christian. The initiatory commitment does not, by itself, produce the transformation that yields character and fruit. And I believe Christendom was lulled, across the years of the great stadium revivals, into imagining that a profession of faith secured from everyone would be enough to change the world. It was not. The plain fact is that most of the people who walked into the stadium walked out with the same habits and character they brought in. Somewhere the impression settled in that saying the sinner’s prayer was what it meant to be a Christian. That step is necessary — but a very large piece was missing, and the newly converted soul who has just confessed Jesus as Lord needs to be told plainly that there is far more ahead. That confession is only the first step on a long, hard road of trial, endurance, and the slow building of character.
This confusion (or mis-emphasis) has to be countered openly. The Christian culture needs to be warned and counseled to reframe the invitation to salvation as an initiation only. Salvation is supremely important; it must not be underemphasized, but it must be put in proper perspective. Your life will not suddenly change. (Having said that, you might experience a miracle; many people do. The first miracle is a kind of first fruit, a promise of what is to come with maturity. After that you will probably have to work very hard for every inch of transformation.). It is very easy for the eager evangelist, the new believer, to sell salvation. It’s flashy and exciting; it’s being saved from death and separation from the Father. Salvation is a very good thing; it’s what Jesus died for. The entire arc of Biblical history was the record of God preparing for the Messiah, in code so that Satan would not thwart it, and it would still be recognized by those who were looking. God went through the entire trouble of the incarnation, the arc of history, so that you and I could claim the gift that God wants us to have so that He can be in an intimate love relationship with us – living through us and in us. But it’s only a start.
The problem is that when people emphasize salvation, and people who call themselves Christians have not been regenerated, the watching culture, everyone outside the Christian subculture, sees people who act like everyone else acts, and they say, “Why would I be part of a group of people that say “do x, and don’t do y,” and when you look at them they don’t do x, and do do y?” That is an extremely poor witness for the power of God in transforming lives. And they are right. The problem is that such people who said the sinner’s prayer and didn’t do the work of sanctification are not even trying to access the transformative power of God. They are just acting according to their animal lusts, and calling themselves Christians, bringing dishonor to the name of Christ, and squarely acting out the role of “hypocrite.”
In summary, the “say this prayer, now you are saved, now you are a new man in Christ” message gets heard as though the decisive work were finished at the altar. The mature Christian, by contrast, is the person who has followed that moment of acceptance with years of study and discipline. He has been tried by loss and pain. He has failed to be what Scripture prescribed, and he wanted, and he has humbled himself, mourned his failure, confessed to those he has wronged, and repented to God for the pain inflicted on HIm — God, as resident in the heart of every man lived/experience the sin committed, (“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight…” Psalm 51:4). And finally, did I make it right? Did I square the deal/pay the debt/remunerate for the cost of the violation? When we are humble to that extent, of no reputation, living only to serve the God that lives in and through us, we are truly “Christ-in-us/Christians. This is sanctification. It happens through repeated trials, failures, and renewals. In the process we become new men, reborn in Christ. This transformation takes time. It requires committing to the discipline of transforming the old man.
Everything turns on keeping the distinction clear between salvation (justification with God) — and sanctification (the long maturation into Christ’s likeness). Without that distinction, people can focus on saving their own soul from hell and think that is all there is. Others see changes in themselves, and grow enthusiastic about evangelism and the saving of souls. Both are good, but neither personal salvation nor preaching salvation is enough. The real work of everyday life is the harder work of overcoming the animal nature and becoming like Him. Salvation is the first step on a long road; sanctification is the deep, transformative work where life is lived every day, all day, for a whole life. If we blur the two, then Christianity will appear to the world like a psychological fix by people who are unrealistic about life and expect their lives to get better by praying/having faith for miraculous changes. Miracles are good/wonderful and do happen, but most of the time we have to take out the garbage and pick up the kids after soccer practice.
Again, if the sinner’s prayer is the focus, there will be people in whom the seed takes and grows, but the good soil was one of four types, and the other three. As we discussed, we need to help people become good soil, and that is hard work for both the teacher and the disciple. Often both will grow in the process of tending the soil. If we don’t tend to the discipleship part, the body of Christ will appear impotent, as people continue in their old ways, appearing morally indistinguishable from the surrounding culture. A campaign that offers Christ as the solution while emphasizing only salvation will fail. Sanctification — becoming like Him — is the single greatest tool we have for cultural restoration, because when men actually love their neighbor as themselves, prosperity and peace follow in their wake. There are no shortcuts. We must be a holy people (not just individuals, but all of humanity) who expect holiness as the heart of the culture; where that expectation is absent, no lasting change comes, to the individual or to the society.
So when we isolate the question to, “Can a superficial commitment and a bare request for forgiveness really touch the soul and shape one’s experience in eternity?” The testimonies Susan has gathered show that, for some people, that initiatory gesture of acceptance and submission was indeed enough to crack the hard shell of ego and cultural capture. But I remain adamant that a strong, overt distinction must be drawn between that first gesture and what it means to be a real, mature, effective, Christ-power-manifesting Christian. It is telling that neither Susan nor I would say the sinner’s prayer as adults until we had been persuaded of its truth. We both came to the same surrender, the same heartfelt/all-in commitment, but by different routes. The results were identical; we are both working toward sanctification. Each of us wanted to understand the mechanics first. I came through science and metaphysics; Susan came through being called, responding, and God gradually changing her heart. The end result is the same: both of us continue the daily labor of seeking understanding, being open to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and spending time each day in the Word, becoming familiar with His voice and hearing His words rise. The process never ends. The goal is to run the race, love His law, and not turn against Him or bring His name disgrace. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7)
And that is exactly why testimony matters so much in this work. It illustrates the need to be convinced of the truth of His Way, for without understanding there is no passion, no commitment, and no real belief in the efficacy or the reality of the way of Christ. Testimony models the life of Christ and shows how the journey begins, and our lives illustrate where it leads. Human beings infer meaning most naturally through stories — a story is life in condensed form, and it resonates with the way we actually learn, by watching how life responds to various forces in various situations. So testimony is essential to bringing souls into the Kingdom. There is no single formula for how God will draw them, because the drawing is individual – we are all different; we all respond to different symbols, gestures, models. What we can do is tell our stories, illustrate the principles of life with Scripture to show the ideal, be the best example of who God wants us to be, truly care about those with whom we share the good news, and disciple them in maturation. The love of the brethren is the real witness. We are to be Christ’s hands and God’s heart extended. We are the vehicle that the Father uses to draw His sheep to Him. His love coming through us is the real draw.
Closing
The Sunday discussion was initially focused on how a death two thousand years ago could be effective in accounting for sin/cancelling my debt by accepting the sacrifice of the Son, and thus restoring relationship with the Father. But that discussion was already written in last week’s essay. Instead, the discussion centered on the transformation of the living human heart. After the discussion, my conception has enlarged. I now see that process as the iterative process of God calling me through Christ. It is my duty/job/role to seek, find, and, by action, habit, and character, move, step by step, a little closer to His character and way.
Susan’s insight about the Father drawing man through the Son provided new insight into the source of the pull which draws a man toward God/Sanctification. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” (John 6:44). This insight aligns with my perspective: the Son bears the wrath of our sin, as required, because God keeps a perfect account of evil and exercises His destructive/death-dealing, cleansing from His body, wrath against every sin. The clearing of the books of sin is the foundation of the establishment. Christ is the way to the Father. “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6). Through that opened door, the Father’s love speaks to us through the still small voice, the voice of conscience/the Holy Spirit. That is the missing relationship that we all feel, and nothing is secure until we have that lock on eternity. Thus, God calls us through Christ. If we accept Christ as Savior, we have opened the door to the source of all force, the Father who draws us. He calls, and we answer. The path between salvation and sanctification is long, perhaps lifelong, but that is our goal: to appear before Him without blemish.
So the mechanism is this: the Father draws through the Son; the cross removes what kept us out; the Father’s reconnected love is the power that draws the heart; it is our part to answer the pull. “We love him, because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19. That is how it works. That is what kind of world we live in. We live in a world built of the substance/of the essence of the God whose nature is love. The cost of establishing a relationship after it was broken by sin was the perfect accounting of cleansing His world of sin, which requires the death of sin. It was the giving of His own Son/Himself to die, and delivering the death blow to His Son, who was made sin for us. By accepting that credit for sin established by Jesus Christ, our account is clean. This opens the door to us, as clean spirits. The cross is the door back to Himself. He stands on the other side of it, drawing us to Him.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38