So much so-called Christianity is like any other religion, just a matter of following various rituals. Your whole life can be taken up by this and you may have a sense of fulfillment in doing it, but I assure you it is a false sense. What fulfillment is there is being in chains when there is another master who can set you free. Jesus didn't die for His people only to have them chained up in doing stuff that brings no benefit. Read the book to the Galatians and you will find right back then people were being pushed in the direction of doing things to make them more acceptable. The Jewish Christians wanted the gentile christians in the province of Galatia to take on the Jewish law by being circumcised. Paul wrote specifically to say that this was totally wrong. He said that if the Galatians did this they would be required to keep the whole law of the old covenant and then Christ would be of no use to them. Just take that in. If we try in any way to earn our own salvation, we are on our own and Christ cannot help us. A friend of mine once put it like this:- One day the milkman said to Mrs Jones(this is a milkman in the days when they still delivered to your door)"Mrs Jones I have decided that you will never have to pay anything again for your milk bill, from now on it is all free." Mrs Jones can't quite get the hang of this, but she accepts her milk for two or three weeks. Then one day she rushes out to the milkman and says,"I had some clotted cream this week I think I ought to pay for that." "No, no Mrs Jones I told you it is all free forever." We behave like that trying to make up for our sins by doing something about it ourselves. We must accept that Jesus has paid for it all or we will find ourselves hopelessly trying to make amends when we don't have the ability to do it. Here is this glorious salvation and instead of embracing it we run from it, think we know better. That's how the problem started. God told Adam not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but he and Eve thought they knew better. We haven't progressed much have we.
First of all thanks to Fat Prophet for your interest. I see from your blog you are having trouble commenting. To get back to my assessed service. Criticism albeit constructive is harder for some to take than others. I felt a little crushed after my assessed service but then remembered I had recorded it on my dictaphone. I listened to it all through and although my assessors were quite right about me speaking a little quickly and rushing from item to item, I was actually very pleased with the content of my sermon and how I presented it. So I have decided to take heart. I highly recommend other trainees to record your services. You can hear your good points and your bad and there is no argument about it, it is all caught on the recorder.
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