| Old Dog Learning Slowly | | Date Created: Jan 10, 2006, 10:11 AM |
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I know some of you (not wishing to mention Graham by name) read my entries, like the one on Acts 19 below, and despair that I'll ever learn anything. Well, I wrote the following into a rough draft of a chapter of the new book (working title: How to Like Paul Again) and thought you might be encouraged by seeing it that your ministrations aren't entirely in vain.
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If you're anything like me, though, the first lesson we should learn from this letter [1 Corinthians] is that faith without works is dead. The Lutheranism I grew up with consistently maxed out on Galatians -- Faith Alone. But living as I do in the church of the 21st rather than the 16th century, I'm in little danger of seeing Christianity as purely a matter of works. My situation resembles Corinth more than Galatia. I don't need to be reminded to 'believe', I need to be reminded to act. I don't need the reminder to love the Lord, I need the reminder to do what he says. That, Jesus told us, was the mark -- no, the very definition -- of loving him (John 14:15). This letter should challenge me to live out my faith and professed commitment. If I have faith enough to move mountains, but don't work it out through love, then I'm nothing but one of those annoying chintzy transistorized music boxes playing two bars of a hymn in an ugly greeting card.
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I'm working on chapter 11 as a sample chapter to send off with the book proposal. Sounds like I'm making great progress, right? Except that there's only two sentences written so far in chapters 1-10, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna change them. And, of course, this is only the first rough draft of ch. 11, which will go through somewhere between five and ten rewrites. If the big Z want the book, it'll be at least a year / year and a half before you'll see it. |
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