Recently, I stumbled across this "gem":
The flesh is the old life, the natural life inherited from Adam, with its apparent resources of personality, of ancestry, of commitment, of dedication, and so forth. You can do all kinds of religious things in the flesh. [No argument with the last sentence at all.] The flesh can preach a sermon. The flesh can sing in the choir. The flesh can act as an usher. The flesh can lead people to Christ. [It CAN??? That's news to me: I thought it was the Holy Spirit who drew people to Christ!]...The flesh can go out and be very zealous in its witnessing and amass a terribly impressive list of people won to Christ, scalps to hang on a belt. [Well, yes, if that flesh has been mis-mentored by the heirs of Finney, I suppose so.] The flesh can do these things but it is absolutely nauseating in the eyes of God. It is merely religious activity. There is nothing wrong with what is being done, but what is terribly wrong is the power being relied upon to do it. That is legality.
Funny, that doesn't seem to be Paul's view. Note how in the face of those who "proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition rather than from pure motives," his astounding reaction is, "What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed..." That in itself would take the hyperspiritualist aback, but then, Paul adds "insult to injury" when he continues, "and in this I rejoice. Yes, and I will rejoice..." What?! Rejoice in a mendacious proclamation of the Gospel? Paul, misguided man, don't you realize that it's "absolutely nauseating in the eyes of God"? It's enough to render a hyperspiritualist apoplectic!
Indeed, it's so dire that:
That is why, in any Christian activity, you have to be careful that your inner reliance is on God, and not on you. Otherwise it comes out all wrong and makes all the difference between heaven and hell, life and death. [!!!!!] You can do exactly the same thing that someone else is doing, and, if you do it with a sense of reliance on anything other than the Spirit of God, what they do will bless people but what you do will curse them. It is the very same action, absolutely the same. What you do one moment, trusting in God's Spirit, will bless people and strengthen them and bless your own life and enrich and fulfill it, but the very next moment you can do exactly the same thing in the power of the flesh, and it will be damaging and destructive and hurtful to others and to you. That is why you need to recognize the subtlety of all this and to be aware that God looks not at the outward appearance, as man does, but at the inner heart. What is going on inside is all-important to God.
So now...it is part of our duty to constantly, morbidly milli-micro-introspect each and every one of our attempts at doing good works? Pray tell, good Sir, in the actual brass tacks outworking of your theory here, how would a Christian be able to tell the difference between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" reliance? Why is any such warning lacking in verses like, "exhorting each other to good works" and "let them apply themselves to good deeds" and "a people zealous for good works"?
Do you suppose that Paul ended each day self-flagellating himself as to whether each and every move he made in his work for God was truly, genuinely, incontrovertibly, indubitably, positively, absolutely 1000% surely wrought by God's Spirit and not by Paul's mere "flesh"? On the contrary, we read this: "striving with all the energy which He mightily inspires within me,"and "For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission," which is echoed in "For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" ["Pheh," sneers the hyper-spiritualist, "Necessity?! Prosaic, pedestrian, dry, bony, utilitarian, 'necessity'? How lethally legalistic!"] Do you anywhere find Paul agonizing thus, "Oh, woe is me, today I failed in 7 out of 10 counts of the works I did; only 30% of them issued from in reliance on Him, and the rest, miserable worm that I am, originated out of the putridness of my flesh!"
Of course those 2 paragraphs of yours look especially ironic in light of other comments in your essay:
It becomes legality when we make unwarranted demands upon others in an area not prohibited by Scripture...and you can [end up] be[ing] legalistic at this point.
Methinks that underlying all this hyperspirituality is the flesh, viz. "Just look at me! I am not as quotidien in my faith as JoeBlow over there! I strain and assay and bleach and filter everything I do for God to make sure it is free from even the slightest hideous taint of flesh-action! Ah, what a wonderfully pure fellow I am!"
Crypto-Catharism.
