From the heart--two years ago - - good today

I have a deep concern- a heartache that at times is almost physical- for the future of my birthright denomination, the Church of the Nazarene. Call it the ravings and whining of an old man if you like, but what I feel is what I feel—I feel sometimes that my church has changed and left me somewhere.There is no way we could roll back the clock to a simpler time, with clear-cut lines of demarcation between the way Christians lived and believed and the “worldly people” who were as yet unsaved. Those lines in many instances were also culturally drawn, until the motivation for lifestyles could be blurred. All too often in the evangelical Christian community we looked at appearances: to be Christian was to do this and not to do that.Our understanding of holiness as an experience may have been at times naïve, or poorly presented. But there was at the heart of that experience a reality that called us to give up our center to God; to make unreserved covenant with a loving, holy Father. We were told something was ‘eradicated’ or that the body of sin, which was like a corpse tied to a criminal, was now removed, or that we needed to ‘die like a dog under the back porch.’ But in the sometimes crude descriptions or ‘holiness or hell’ sermons somehow we got the message that there was more to being fully saved than living in bondage to sin; we got the message that not only the guilt and penalty of sin was removed at Calvary, but provision has been made for the power of sin to be broken, and a life of commitment to God is possible.It is that commitment- that covenant that stands at the heart of what our denomination desperately needs. In all the celebration, and excitement and cultural awareness and ‘seeker sensitivity’ there is a note that needs to be sounded: we are being called to die to self, to forever abandon the selfish way, to respond to a proposition from a Lover who asks us to trust Him to be our all in all. The narrow way is not a celebration at first, but it is the only way.In our Nazarene hymnals (remember hymnals??) on page 484 is a modern-but-accurate ‘translation’ of a prayer John Wesley used . It begins “I am not my own but Yours…” It is very like vows we might use in a wedding ceremony-- a once for all promise to be true and faithful, mutually exchanged—a covenant! That is what holiness is- a mutual covenant with a loving God. When we are in covenant with God the battle becomes His battle- the work is His work- the praise is His.