Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
"Exercise your spirit, brother!" is a push to shout and jump and wave. But where does this shouting and waving come from? The Bible says, "Exercise yourself to Godliness" but does that mean jump up and down and shout repetitively? I think such interpretation is error.
"Don't think - drink!" Remember that one? Unthinking, reflexive action was how the error got disseminated widely.
"Exercise yourself unto Godliness" really means what James meant - Godliness (true religion) is to visit widows and orphans and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. God so loved us that he sent His only begotten Son to save us. This son was holy, as the Father is holy.
The Son then said that we his disciples are to obey his commands, just as he obeyed the Father's commands. So we're likewise sent as emissaries to the unlovely, the unloved, the unlovable (in our eyes). That's what James meant by "visit widows and orphans". To love them, in this context, is to show some actual blessing. Healing, comfort, encouragement, food, clothes, shelter, something. Pay attention to them, listen to them.
And the second part is to keep unspotted from the world, like Jesus did. That is "exercise yourself unto Godliness". Not jump up and down and shout. And notice where the jumping and shouting got us: 1) We were told to ignore obvious sin in church leadership; 2) We were told to despise the poor, the widows and orphans. "Don't waste your time" was the word at FTTA. Get good building material instead.
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I'm bringing this forward here, as it points to how the creation of an erroneous thought - "Exercise your spirit in God's economy" became widespread. The thought was that we no longer cared for right and wrong, because nobody's without sin [ignoring Jesus!], and instead we should simply "enjoy NT grace on the proper ground" by shouting, calling, yelling, crying, screaming, declaring, fist-pumping, pray-reading.
The Bible does say, "Cry out and shout, O inhabitants of Zion". Opening our mouths is part of salvation. But it's nowhere held as the "God's economy" of Paul's epistles.
But the pray-reading, calling, shouting, crying, screaming, yelling, groaning all were used to suppress the critical thought which might at some point set off alarms. Why is the Apostle of the Age violating basic Christian principles, set down in the epistle to Titus for every local church elder? "Don't think, brother!! Just Drink!! Exercise your spirit!!" See how it works? The doctrine has its own dissemination kernel. Don't think, just yell loudly, repeatedly, and be "one" with leadership. (As Ray Graver told Bill Mallon, "Here, we do what we're told". That's a non-mystical way to put it.)
And the fact that the LSM-affiliated cryers, screamers, yellers, shouters in Mainland China went from a stated membership of several tens of millions in the mid-90s (per WL, from the podium) to a stated membership of zero ten years later (per Chris Wilde, to the press) shows where all the noisemaking took them. If LSM, unbalanced as it is, couldn't control the Shouters, how bad must it have gotten in the People's Republic?
Getting people excited by yelling is the doctrine, and it very neatly contains the means of aiding dissemination of the doctrine itself (what WL called "propagation"). But ultimately we don't see transformation as a result of widespread and longstanding adherence to these teachings. This corroborates what we see from the NT text, that it isn't God's economy.