The Next Step After Cornerstone Salvation Doctrine

I know it's posed a difficulty for Christians, but there's a wall of separation. Not between an abstract idea and the state, such as that famous part of American law, but between the Church and the whole World. You can't be friends with the World, because that's being God's enemy. And so salvation doctrine makes a wall of separation between the Church and the World. That's what holiness means.

He makes us holy. Don't try to resist Him. You'll be just like the axe-murdering Christian who has to harden his heart against God in order to continue in his sin, knowing that he's unrepentant as he willfully and continuously works against his Master as an axe murderer. He's still a Christian, so long as he believes those four facts about what Christ did and ha verbally confessed that Jesus is The Master (1 Corinthians 15:1-8; Romans 10:9-14a), and so long as he believes that what Christ did is effective to justify him in the face of God's judgement. But he still loses a lot by continuing in his obvious sin. So don't go around thinking that a lie to a child to save her feelings after a great tragedy is a small sin. It's in the same group of things that the sin of the axe-murdering Christian is in, because all sin is such that Jesus' blood is necessary to cover and put it into remission. And all sin is covered by His blood. That's foundational, but dealing with a Christian like that is part of the next steps which rest on our Master, The Cornerstone, Jesus Christ. Don't think that you can get away with not being holy. It's what God wants you to be - separate from the World. You cannot be friends with the World. There's a wall of separation between Church and World.

After we have the firm foundation of salvation doctrine in Christ, we move on to the next things which rely on that foundation. Let me ask you this. Do you know the names of everybody in your congregation? Well, why not? We're supposed to be helping each other. We tell each other our sins. We can't do that with the World. Christ has separated out His whole Church from the World, and we individual Christians are Christ's Church. An abstract idea is not Christ's Church - we are! That's why whether we are inside the building on Sunday or outside of it, we can tell each other our sins. But we can't tell the World our sins in hopes of the same response which we get from our siblings in Christ. If you go to a psychologist, at least make sure he's a Christian and not living in unrepentant sin (do you know your sibling?). According to the biblical standard, make sure. Ask. Know who you're dealing with as you pour out your heart, because we are separated from the World - we know that - but we also cannot be around unrepentant Christians after they're warned, unless they repent. These are parts of the next things.

We tell each other our sins. And we warn each other to stop sinning. We help each other. There are specific ways to help each other for specific sins. No, we don't need to be licensed by the state to help each other with our sins. We might need the World's approved licensing to be a professional psychologist or official counselor, but we don't need to be a psychologist; we don't need to be a professional counselor to help each other with sin. We have the ability to help each other, and, as simple as that fact seems to be, we have been driven away from doing so by both subtle and overt means.

Each and every one of us has a job assigned by God based on who He has made us to be. We each have the gifts of the Holy Spirit to use in our work. One member of Christ's Body is an eye and one is a foot, and we use those gifts to help each other in every aspect of life, including the internal things. We tell each other our sins, and we gently and wisely help each other with them, both in general statements and with intricate skill, depending on our gift-backed work in our Master's Church. There might even be a third who uses his Christian skill in the matter.

We cannot expect the World to be saved by being helped in their souls. Or a different way of saying it is that the World can't get saved through Sanctification. Only Christians can be sanctified. The World can help their own souls somewhat, but Worldlings cannot keep from their sin like Christ's justified ones can. The Worldling can help his own soul somewhat as he follows bits of truth in his life, because God makes His sun to shine on the justified as well as the unjustified. He gives His rain on the Earth to all of us, even the wicked while they live on His Earth in the present moment. When they practice good things, right and true things, they are helped, because God isn't a respecter of persons, and His good gifts provide benefits for everyone. But as you help them in more mundane ways of feeding the poor and coaching them out of bad habits, do not keep from telling them the gospel also! If they are bereft of hearing the real gospel (you don't want to be the agent of this), they might accidentally see the help of their soul to be the salvation that they've heard Christians talking about. After all, it would seem so to them, because that's what paganism thinks when they try to be good in their own eyes in order to save themselves from trouble on the Earth. Get it? It really is a deeply troublesome cause of confusion, so we have to tell them the dividing line outright. If they don't like it, they can leave our help. We can never use the help, itself, to bring them to Christ, but we can tell them what our Master did for us and the effect of His great saving work which will be applied to all who believe and confess in accordance with God's Word. It's possible and it's sadly probable that we've been mixing with God's enemies and giving them the wrong idea about the most important thing there is, the most important thing that we can tell them. We can't be their buddy. We only invite the seeker into the Church congregation if we have a real expectation that he will believe and confess Christ immediately or never come back, because the congregations of our Master's Church are bands of separated Christians. Our church service cannot compel them. Only the truth can compel them. And so it goes that our real understanding of the sharp and hardened dividing line between Church and World leads to conclusions about how we interact with the World.

After these things, we have a firm basis to assume that random, unknown individuals inside the congregation are simply unknown to us as individuals, but Christians nonetheless. Now that we know how to interact with siblings and Worldlings in various ways, protecting our meeting grounds from our Master's enemies becomes commonplace. New people are met at the door and asked whether they line up with the simple, objective, complete test of salvation doctrine! Our congregation becomes spiritually safe. We all love God here in this place. Even if we don't all know each other's names, we still have a sense of each other. We can go up to the Christian we don't know and tell him our sins. We can judge wither he can help us with our sins as we discern that he's in a place of having enough faith to be gentle and wise in helping us. It would hurt the other Christian to be forced to try, if he isn't clear enough, himself, to really help, so we don't ask that one, yet. We all work together as a single unit. We can't do that with Worldlings hanging out. As it stands in most congregations, we cannot openly assume that everybody in the building is a Christian. It's very terrible and sad. Allowing people who are not justified by Christ to roam around our separated meeting grounds is a practice that has seeped into our consciousness; it's insidious, and it's blasphemous, and it's wrong in both a fundamental sense and a practical sense every day.

So you see how salvation doctrine, once established, works out to these other things concerning Christian behavior with each other. And they line up with what the New Testament has been saying a lot over and over, that we should be holy and love each other in defined and useful ways.