Rev Aaron Long: Right Believing, right living
Faith Column
Right believing will lead to right living, right living will lead to right believing. This is and has always been the view of the church throughout the ages. Problem is both concepts are short in amount within the modern church. If we wish to restore the church, if we wish to transform our world we are going to have to get back to these first principles.
What is right believing and right living though, what does this mean? Ultimately it is the basic principle of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. True Christian belief is rooted in the person of Jesus Christ, the Second person of the Holy Trinity, as we learn about in the infallible and inspired bible. If you deny the Trinity, if you deny the inspired and infallible nature of the bible you have no right or ability to truly call yourself a Christian because you deny the gospel in denying these two facts.
Right living, orthopraxy is based off of understanding the commandments and will of God in the infallible and inspired bible. It is holding a biblical morality, biblical understanding of sexuality, of biblical concepts of finances and everything else. It giving to the poor and helping the helpless. It is striving to build a Christian community, a Christian culture.
Right believing leads to a proper understanding of the Christian faith, it leads to an acceptance of the bible as the ultimate guide for our life as well as the foundation of what we are to believe. Right living leads to a transformation of our life, always pointing us back to the bible and increasing our faith and correcting our beliefs.
Now, what is the problem with the modern church with this concept? Its threefold:
1. We have progressive churches that want to enforce a form of orthopraxy while ignoring orthodoxy. They will teach that what you believe doesn’t matter, the bible is an archaic document with no bearing on the modern world at all, you can think about Jesus whatever way you want, you can deny eternal hell, you can redefine sin in completely unbiblical motifs but, you must give to the poor and do all the social justice possible, orthopraxy without orthodoxy is heresy.
2. We have conservative churches that are tight as a tick when it comes to biblical infallibility and the historic creedal faith. They believe all of the right things about the bible, the Trinity, the nature of Christ and His coming judgment, but, they will ignore orthopraxy. They will condemn the homeless, refuse to help anyone else. They will look down their noses at anyone they think is lesser than they and adopt the unbiblical concept of race (the bible doesn’t teach race, it traches saved and unsaved as the dividing line). They accept orthodoxy and reject orthopraxy, they also are heretics.
3. The third category is the absolute worst of all three and unfortunately represents the majority of most profession so called “Christians” today. They reject both orthodoxy and orthopraxy. They believe whatever they want and reject whole swaths of the historic faith. They pick and choose out of the bible what they accept. They refuse to be kind to the stranger or the less fortunate and waste all of their money on the wicked pleasures of the flesh rather than the Christ commanded love of the less fortunate. They are hedonistic, selfish, and self-obsessed. They define worship by their standards rather than the biblical patterns or the historic liturgies. They reject the creeds. They aren’t just heretics, they ultimately are idolators and satanists no matter what they might claim otherwise.
We, as Christian must fight to restore Christianity. We must hold the bible as inspired and infallible. We must believe every word of the ecumenical creeds. We must hold to the Trinity, eternal punishment for sin, original sin and every single doctrine of the faith. V We must require attendance in the visible Church, the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. But at the same time we must also love the poor, lift up the downfallen, support the despondent, and love their neighbor as themselves. They must truly be Christian and reject either the right or the left hand path that leads nowhere but to hell.
