Right and Sound or Righteous and Spiritual

Friends,

I find the latest series "sound doctrine/false doctrine" on my friend's blog very interesting. I encourage you to go read "Who Told You That." As a follow up to my posts..."the Struggle for Righteousness" and "Positively Church," I offer the following. What many brethren have said is "false doctrine" is, most of the time, disagreement over matters of opinion and other minutiae. Rather than try to sort out all of the minutiae and sacrifice love of the brethren over it, we should be more intent in relationship to our principle definitions, as my good brother points out. It underscores, definitively, the struggle we have to find the right focus for our faith and godliness. We cannot throw stones over matters that just do not matter, that is, "don't sweat the small stuff," and most of it is just that -- small stuff. If there are matters of serious import that need to be sorted out, they should be done so lovingly, and the list is probably much smaller than we think. But, the point is -- we cannot dismiss doctrine from Christian living.

I believe that the concept of “soundness,” as in "sound doctrine," like “denominationalism” for example, is a matter of perspective, perception and semantics. I believe that it, likewise, serves as an idol for self-righteousness, as do so many other “issues" that take our focus off of the source of our righteousness — Jesus Christ. Once again, “soundness” puts us in the driver’s seat, in relationship to determining righteousness and, therefore, on shaky spiritual ground…once again, it makes us judges. As we spoke about in our Bible class this evening, it is amazing how judgmental we, in general, appear to be when we begin to consider our thinking and our language. We need to be able to make observations without becoming judges with wrong motives and hearts. This is difficult, to say the least. But, if we are going to experience the Spirit's fruit, we must resist the temptation to sit continually in judgement. Satan so well tempts us to think that being right in our thinking has to be equated with being right with God. This is precisely what the Pharisees and Scribes thought...and it still misses the point now as it did then. We need to focus much more on humbling ourselves before our Father — in short...looking up, instead of looking around. If we love all men and leave the rest with the Lord, we will be the better for it.
Blessings,

Don