Teaching on Calling on the Name of the Lord

[OBW]

Originally Posted by Evangelical

Corporate repentance might be good occasionally but I think the time and place for repentance is a personal one and occurs during the "examine yourself" stage before the Lord's Table.

Yes, one could do this. But the whole emphasis on confession is then left to, at most, a brief comment before the Table meeting, if at all. The idea of making confession a more pronounced part of regular worship is quite relevant when you realize that even without a Table meeting, we are supposedly coming to worship God yet seldom see that we are ourselves in the way.

Originally Posted by Evangelical

Arminianism and those who believe we can lose salvation typically focus on repentance for blessing. They typically see repentance as a cause of blessing.

I have no idea about that. Oddly, my early years were with an Arminian group yet we never had any kind of corporate repentance.

Originally Posted by Evangelical

Generally speaking, Christian groups with Calvinistic tendencies such as the LR often see repentance as an outcome of blessing not as a cause. They are careful to ensure that repentance is a "gift" and does not become a "work" - it is something that God does in us. So I think it is OK if there is no repentance because blessing and acceptance comes before repentance (like the prodigal son).

And it is here that I have found that the scripture is significantly at odds with the LRC theology. The gift of eternal life has been given. After that we do work. Grace remains a component, but it is not simply giving us gifts, but teaching us to obey (see Titus, I believe it is). Lee's "economy" teaching is that everything remains on a grace basis, meaning we do nothing until we have the gift/grace/dispensing to just do it. I find that to be backward when compared to what Christ himself said in the gospels.

For example, we want to abide (understood as wait on something) until we have what it takes to act. But Jesus said that those who obey will get the Father and the Son to abide with them. And the metaphor of vine and branches is never one of waiting on anything. It is one of constant action because there is connection. If you are connected, you act.

I agree that there is a tendency for many Calvinistic groups to turn everything into a "no works zone" and expect that it will fall on them because they cannot do works.

But when does one repent to a spouse for something? Do you expect that you will have some special time together and from that will come a blessing and then you will have what it takes to repent/apologize? If so, then I would expect very few times when there was anything actually special. More like a lot of "leave me alone," "just go away," etc.

And this is why I so often refer back to the experiences I had and observed in the LRC as false. We worked ourselves into faux spiritual highs, but nothing truly spiritual came out of it. No righteousness. No repentance. No corporate confession. That is because if you think that you had a spiritually high time prior to your repentance, you were deluded. That was a lot of bootstrapping and cheerleading to get the emotions raised.

And since I cannot recall any true confession in the LRC, I doubt that the experiences were very real. More likely worked-up.

And we talked about "no works." What a joke.