"higher" standards are for weaker brethren

voicecrying

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Today's #STRask podcast discussed adding rules to biblical commands. Relevant clip is the 1st 17.5 minutes or so, with particular points relating to fundamentalism from around 13:00 to 17:24.

I've thought for a long time that the weaker brethren mentioned in the NT are those who have added a lot of rules. The STR podcast does a good job explaining why this is so and points out it leads to an absence of the gospel. Absence meaning the gospel is not an integral part of the preaching and living - I was part of a church where the gospel was usually tacked on at the end of messages to get people to pray a prayer, but the message was void of any connection to the gospel. That is an absence of the gospel for the believer and seems to go hand-in-hand with the extra rules.
 

Today's #STRask podcast discussed adding rules to biblical commands. Relevant clip is the 1st 17.5 minutes or so, with particular points relating to fundamentalism from around 13:00 to 17:24.

I've thought for a long time that the weaker brethren mentioned in the NT are those who have added a lot of rules. The STR podcast does a good job explaining why this is so and points out it leads to an absence of the gospel. Absence meaning the gospel is not an integral part of the preaching and living - I was part of a church where the gospel was usually tacked on at the end of messages to get people to pray a prayer, but the message was void of any connection to the gospel. That is an absence of the gospel for the believer and seems to go hand-in-hand with the extra rules.

I thought the really interesting observation that STR made was in stating that the motivation often for tacking on extra rules to (or in place of) real Biblical commands is so that the keeper of said rules can actually have something they can point to and say "I accomplished that", giving them a false sense of (self) righteousness, which of course as you noted is NOT the gospel. The gospel requires outward faith in the person and work of Christ, not some sort of self-help-pull-yourself-up-by-the-boostraps-moral-therapeutic-deism.
 
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