A bit of what I have learned in 40 years of being a Pastor

What I have noted about Christian doctrine in forty years of Ministry.

Any doctrine of the Christian faith can be twisted, perverted, or misused to be made an excuse for evil.

a. The doctrine of grace can be misused into an excuse for sinning to incredible limits.
b. The doctrine of God’s incredible love for us, we His creation, can be sentimentalized into an excuse for ignoring any of His laws.
c. The doctrine of the life to come can be used as an excuse for running away from life and responsibilities in this world.
d. There is no doctrine quite so easy to pervert as that of the freedom that God has given to us.

This is the big one.

Those who lived in New Testament times were not excluded from twisting and misusing the truth of the Freedom we are given in the Christian faith.

a. Paul tells the Galatians that they must not use the liberty as opportunity for the flesh to do as it wills ( Galatians 5:13
b. Peter writes that those who promise others liberty, are themselves the slaves of corruption (2Peter 2:19)
c. Non believers of that era saw that perfect freedom is the product of perfect obedience.
1. Seneca wrote: “No one is free who is the slave of his body”.
2. Cicero wrote: “We are the servants of the laws that we may be able to be free.”
3. Plutarch proclaimed that every bad man is a slave.

Christian freedom is always conditioned by Christian responsibility.
Christian responsibility is always conditioned by Christian love.
Christian love is the reflection of God’s love which has been shown to us when we became a believer.
Therefore our awesome gift of liberty in the acts of our lives is summed up in Augustine’s phase:” “Love God, and do what you like.

The Christian is free because as a child of God we are the slave of God, which works out to be that we are then truly free, because we are free to do what we ought to do as Christian love points the way.