ON PENANCE
There is no scriptural warrent for imposed-penance.
There is no way we can justify ourself before God. So called imposed-penance is against the core meaning of grace.
Salvation comes via faith in Christ alone, and not through some punishment or discipline imposed by the "church."
This idea of imposed-penance is evil to the core, as this film portrays.
Psalm 49:7-8 (MsgB)
Really! There's no such thing as self-rescue,
pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
[8] The cost of rescue is beyond our means,
and even then it doesn't guarantee
Isaiah 57:12 (MsgB)
I'll go over, detail by detail, all your 'righteous' attempts at religion,
and expose the absurdity of it all.
Ezekiel 33:12 (MsgB)
"There's more, son of man. Tell your people: 'A good person's good life won't save him when he decides to rebel, and a bad person's bad life won't prevent him from repenting of his rebellion. A good person who sins can't expect to live when he chooses to sin.
Psalm 49:7-8 (MsgB)
Really! There's no such thing as self-rescue,
pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
[8] The cost of rescue is beyond our means,
and even then it doesn't guarantee
Isaiah 43:26 (MsgB)
"So, make your case against me. Let's have this out.
Make your arguments. Prove you're in the right.
Isaiah 57:12 (MsgB)
I'll go over, detail by detail, all your 'righteous' attempts at religion,
and expose the absurdity of it all.
Isaiah 64:6 (MsgB)
We're all sin-infected, sin-contaminated.
Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.
We dry up like autumn leaves—
sin-dried, we're blown off by the wind.
Luke 18:9-14 (MsgB)
He told his next story to some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people: [10] "Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. [11] The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: 'Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. [12] I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.'
[13] "Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, 'God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.' "
[14] Jesus commented, "This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face, but if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself."
Romans 3:20-4:22 (MsgB)
Our involvement with God's revelation doesn't put us right with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else's sin.
[21] But in our time something new has been added. What Moses and the prophets witnessed to all those years has happened. [22] The God-setting-things-right that we read about has become Jesus-setting-things-right for us. And not only for us, but for everyone who believes in him. For there is no difference between us and them in this. [23] Since we've compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives
God wills for us, [24] God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we're in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.
[25] God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world of sin. Having faith in him sets us in the clear. God decided on this course of action in full view of the public—to set the world in the clear with himself through the sacrifice of Jesus, finally taking care of the sins he had so patiently endured. [26] This is not only clear, but it's now—this is current history! God sets things right. He also makes it possible for us to live in his rightness.
[27] So where does that leave our proud Jewish insider claims and counterclaims? Canceled? Yes, canceled. What we've learned is this: God does not respond to what we do; we respond to what God does. [28] We've finally figured it out. Our lives get in step with God and all others by letting him set the pace, not by proudly or anxiously trying to run the parade.
[29] And where does that leave our proud Jewish claim of having a corner on God? Also canceled. God is the God of outsider non-Jews as well as insider Jews. [30] How could it be otherwise since there is only one God? God sets right all who welcome his action and enter into it, both those who follow our religious system and those who have never heard of our religion.
[31] But by shifting our focus from what we do to what God does, don't we cancel out all our careful keeping of the rules and ways God commanded? Not at all. What happens, in fact, is that by putting that entire way of life in its proper place, we confirm it.
[4:1] So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? [2] If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. [3] What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."
[4] If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift. [5] But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.
[6] David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:
[7] Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off,
whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.
[8] Fortunate the person against
whom the Lord does not keep score.
[9] Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don't we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?
[10] Now think: Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That's right, before he was marked. [11] That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.
[12] And it means further that Abraham is father of all people who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the "outs" with God, as yet unidentified as God's, in an "uncircumcised" condition. It is precisely these people in this condition who are called "set right by God and with God"! Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just because of the ritual but because they were willing
to live in the risky faith-embrace of God's action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.
[13] That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. [14] If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into
an ironclad contract! That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal. [15] A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God's promise at that—you can't break it.
[16] This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that's reading the story backwards. He is our faith father.
[17] We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. [18]
When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"
[19] Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up. [20] He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, [21] sure that God would make good on what he had said. [22] That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to
set him right."
Galatians 2:16 (MsgB)
We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it—and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good.
Galatians 2:19 (MsgB)
What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man.
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