Homosexuals, self-righteous must repent

Last Friday, Mr. Godbout reflected on the Ness Lake Bible Camp code of conduct and the situation involving 17-year-old Julianna Ferguson.

First of all, thank you, Mr. Godbout, for sharing some wonderful words of Jesus from the Gospels.

Self-righteousness is something that Jesus confronted time and again, and is something we are all prone to fall into.

Self-righteousness is about feeling morally superior, and Jesus makes it clear that nobody is morally superior.

We all fall short of God’s standards and can only come to him by humbly accepting his mercy; like the tax-collector prayed in Jesus’ parable, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13).

Yet at the same time Mr. Godbout shows a profound misunderstanding of Jesus’s teaching, and what it means to accept “both the words and the loving spirit of Christ into [our] heart.”

How did Christ show his “loving spirit?” Not only by teaching, but also by suffering and dying for the forgive- ness of sins. And forgiveness is received through faith and repentance. Jesus’s message began with these very words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

To repent means to turn away from sin, that is, to try to stop breaking the moral commands that God has given, in what you think, say and do.

What this means is that Jesus did not come to erase all moral standards. As he himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

If there are no standards no forgiveness is required; and this would make Jesus’ suffering and death meaningless.

Christians wrestle with what it means to live like Jesus in this world. We should be seriously afraid of self-righteousness. But at the same time we are called to uphold the moral standards that God has given.

And one of God’s standards is that we are to live sexually moral lives, that is, we are to engage in sexual relationships only within the framework of marriage between one man and one woman.

The message of the Gospel is not: “There are no more standards; live like you want to!”

The message of the Gospel is that when we break God’s standards (which we all do) we are able to repent and receive forgiveness in Jesus.

Although I don’t know the situation well enough to make a judgment about what is going on, I can at least say that I wrestle with the same things that Ness Lake Bible Camp wrestles with. We live in a culture that wants to create its own moral standards. In the face of this, Christians feel the need to continue to hold up God’s standards; otherwise repentance becomes meaningless and the Gospel disappears. Sometimes Christians do this in a bumbling and incompetent way. Hopefully we can avoid doing it in a self-righteous way. Pastor Tim Schouten

Prince George