How can you tell if
your Christian courage nothing more than rash presumption?
How do you know that
your assurance of faith isn't just only a seared conscience?
How do you know that
the scriptures you read are being illumed by the Holy Spirit, our only teacher
and helper assigned from Christ, rather than the "ignis fatuus" of empty notions?
Could I unwittingly
be passing carelessness for trust?
Is my confidence is
nothing more than hardness of heart?
From “What is the Gospel,” by Greg Gilbert:
“At one point in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the hero of the story, Christian, finds himself talking with two sketchy fellows named Formalist and Hypocrisy. Like Christian himself, they insist, they are on their way to the Celestial City, and they’re quite certain they’ll make it because many in their country have gone this way before. Of course, the names give it away. Formalist and Hypocrisy aren’t going to make it to the city at all. The first time Christian sees the two men, they are tumbling over the wall that runs alongside the narrow path Christian is on. He of course recognizes that this is problematic, since he knows that the only legitimate way into the narrow path was through the Wicket Gate, which in the story symbolizes repentance and faith in the crucified Christ. Christian, never afraid to go straight to the point, presses the two men on the matter: “Why came you not in at the gate?” The men quickly explain that the people of their country think the gate is too far away, and so they decided long ago “to make a short-cut of it.” Besides, they argue,
If we make it onto the path, what’s it matter which way we got in? If we are in, we are in. You are on the path, and you came in at the gate; we are on the path, and we climbed over the wall. So how are you any better off than we are?
Christian warns the men that the Lord of the city has decreed that everyone who enters the Celestial City must enter the narrow path through the gate, and he shows them a scroll he was given there, which he must present at the gate of the city in order to gain entrance. “I imagine,” Christian says, “that you lack this, because you didn’t come in at the gate.” Bunyan’s point was to show that the only way to salvation is through the Wicket Gate—that is, through repentance and faith. It’s not enough to be navigating the path of the Christian life. If a person doesn’t come in through that gate, he is not truly a Christian.”
A must read!!
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