Dear Friends,

The Fall Semester at FIRE School of Ministry is well underway and we have been greatly encouraged to see how the Lord has been with us over the last few weeks! Our semester began with our annual 4 day fall retreat to Marion, NC that we call “Immersion.” This is a time where our students, faculty and staff come together with the deliberate purpose of encountering and experiencing the love and power of God. Our time there was very encouraging and refreshing in multiple ways. This time was also instrumental in developing relationships between our student body, faculty and staff, which is crucial since we have a group of first year students that have recently arrived here at FSM.

I wanted to update you on some recent, exciting changes that we have implemented here at the school. First of all, we have gone to a semester based system instead of a trimester format. This was done for multiple reasons including: allowing our students more time to earn necessary finances between semesters, having more time for international and domestic ministry trips, creating a more efficient administrative load, etc. The semester schedule was implemented this fall and the next group of students that we will take-in will be for our upcoming January 2012 Spring Semester. Please contact us via phone at: (704) 782-3555 or through our website at www.fire-school.org if you or someone you know is interested in attending FSM, so that we can begin to process everything required ASAP.

Next, we are really excited to announce that we have began to offer night classes at FSM and look to expand this program in the very near future. This semester Dr. Michael Brown is teaching on Tuesday nights from 7:00 – 9:15 PM on the subjects of “Revival” and “The Book of Jeremiah.” These classes are required by our full-time day students; however we have several other people that are attending the classes from other churches, as well as FIRE Church. Also, these classes are open to the public and we hope to be a blessing and resource to many people in the Concord/Charlotte, NC region in the days ahead. I encourage you to check our website at www.fire-school.org for regular updates regarding this new opportunity for learning and equipping.

As we proceed forward in the days ahead we are convinced that our multiple friends and partners around the world are extremely important to us! Therefore, we sincerely ask that you to keep us in continual prayer. Also, please consider becoming a part of what we call “The Gideon 300”. This is a group of 300 people that we are praying and believing for to support FIRE School of Ministry financially at $50.00 a month or more. This would help us tremendously in covering our operating budget and allow us to assist many more students who are challenged financially, but know that they are called to be trained, equipped and released by us into their destinies. Please make this a matter of prayer and if you would like to help us with any amount of money, give us a call at (704)782-3555 or go to our website at www.fire-school.org and click on the “Donate Now” section. This will allow you to designate your monthly or one-time gift. Thank you for your consideration and may the grace of our Lord Jesus be ever-increasing in your life!

All for Jesus,

Keith Collins
Director/FIRE School of Ministry
8410 Pit Stop Ct. Suite 160
Concord, NC 28027
PH: (704) 782-3555
Website: www.fire-school.org

How to Answer Those Who Ask

The Bible clearly teaches the
eternal punishment of the wicked. The interpretations provided in part 1 of
this series were designed to deepen you in your understanding of what Scripture
teaches. But when talking to a colleague, a quick, memorable response may be
more effective than a deep, complex, theological one. Here are a few tips on
how to give a terse response to those who challenge your belief in eternal
punishment.

1.Challenge:
“The Greek and Hebrew words do not mean
“forever.”

References: Dan 12:2: “Multitudes who sleep in
the dust of the earth shall awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame
and everlasting contempt.”

Mat 25:46: “Then they will go away to
eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Answer: Then what hope do we have that we will
enjoy eternal life? The same words that are used to express the length of
punishment for unbelievers also are used to refer to the length of our stay in
heaven. If hell is not eternal, then we have reason to fear. Perhaps after the
millennium unbelievers will enter the kingdom and believers will be shut out.
In Dan 12:2 and Mat 25:46 believers go to eternal life, while unbelievers go to
eternal punishment. Because these are parallel statements, whatever the words “olam” and “aion” mean, they mean the same for both sentences. The length of
punishment is just as long as the length of our stay with God in heaven. Now
how long you think that should be?

2. Challenge:
“The Bible teaches that all will be saved.”

Answer: If that is true, then it is the
greatest promise in all of Scripture. It would be one of the most wonderful
truths ever presented to mankind. So where is a clear statement anywhere in the
Bible that says people who go to hell will one day be released and brought to
heaven? How can such a wonderful, fear-releasing promise be so obscure in
Scripture. If this were true, it would be shouted on every page of the Bible.
Instead, we have the threat of punishment for all evildoers with no
qualification that it is only for a limited time.

3. Challenge:
“The Bible does not say that people will suffer eternal punishment for their
sins.”

Answer: That is what the serpent said to Eve:
“You shall not surely die.” He put doubt in her mind that the punishment would
be as severe as Adam said. Ask yourself which doctrine the devil would want you
to believe: that punishment is eternal, when in fact it is not, or that
punishment really is not so bad, when in fact it is? Which doctrine promotes
sin and disobedience, and which promotes obedience and righteousness? Though
you will want to deny it, the fact is, a lesser punishment makes it easier to
sin and lessens the urgency to repent.

4. Challenge:
“Are you really sure punishment is eternal? Isn’t it possible that you are
misinterpreting the Bible?”

Answer: Let’s say for the sake of argument that
it is possible that I am wrong. Do you also admit that it is possible that you
are wrong? If so, then let us consider the consequences of our being wrong. If
I am wrong, no big deal. I still go to heaven when I die. But what if you are
wrong? Is it really worth risking your eternal fate on the wager that your
interpretation of these verses is correct?

5. Challenge:
A God of love would never send anyone to hell for eternity over sins committed
over 60 or 70 years.

Answer: The fact that our lives are only 60 or
70 years long is itself the consequence of sin. Adam and Eve were supposed to
live forever, but their eternity was cut short by their sin. Whether something
eternally bad is given to someone or something eternally good is taken away,
the result is the same: the punishment is eternal. Adam’s sin and the death it
brought proves that one act of sin does indeed carry eternal consequences. How
much more will repeated acts of sin over the course of an entire lifetime
warrant an eternal penalty?

6. Challenge:
If you had the power to save someone’s life wouldn’t you do it, even if they
resisted you? If God does not save everyone, it must be either because he does
not love everyone or because he does not have the power to save everyone.

Answer: On the surface this sounds like a
reasonable argument. But this presentation of it does not tell the whole story.
God does love everyone, but he also is seeking to be loved in return. If God
were to automatically save everyone regardless of our own response to him, or
cause us to love him apart from our free will, then God would have our presence,
but he would not have us. Unless we love him in return, we will not enjoy
heaven and God will not be able to enjoy us. We will eventually turn from him
and seek a better life. What makes heaven eternally blissful is that God loves
us and we love him. Our time on earth is designed to draw us to the God of love,
respond to his love and love him in return. Unfortunately, for us to freely
love him, it is necessarily possible to freely choose not to love him. This
results in two classes of people, one eternally rewarded and the other
eternally condemned.

Conclusion

We do not have
the power to change what other people believe, and even if we did, it would not
be right to use it. Everyone is free to believe what they will. But we, as
Christians and representatives of Jesus Christ, do have a responsibility to
tell people the truth, and we can do it in a way that causes people to think.
For this reason, you may have a far greater influence on people than you
realize, for they will refute you in person, but when they are alone and have
time to think, they may come to agree with you. If so, you will have snatched
them from the fire. Only on that Great Day of Judgment will we know how much
impact we have had on those God has put in our path of influence.

I want to address a cancerous error that has festered in the body of Christ for too long. It is a misconception that has resulted in defeated, sinful living; a mindset that blocks the power of God’s grace from fully immersing the believer. It is a lie from hell that has been strikingly successful in keeping struggling Christians in a position of defeat, despite the fact that we have already been declared the victors. What is this error to which I refer? It is the error of thinking that it is normal for Christians to continue to sin, knowingly and intentionally, after they have been converted.

I want to make myself clear before I dismantle this erroneous thinking. I am not claiming that Christians are supposed to become sinlessly perfect upon conversion or even after a period of maturing as believers. I think we all know that we have blind spots in our lives where we unwittingly do things that God regards as sinful. We all have places of limited maturity where we sin and do not realize what we did until after it is over. We all say and do things occasionally that we later regret and repent of. I am not referring here to those kinds of sins, but only to intentional sins. I am talking about things we say or do that we know are wrong before we do them, yet we do them anyway.

These are the types of sins referred to in Hebrews 10:26: “if we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left.” All sin is wrong, but deliberate decisions to continue to sin is in a special category of wrongness. For the text to say, “no sacrifice for sins is left” suggests that the sacrifice of Jesus was sufficient to stop deliberate sins from continuing, so to continue sinning deliberately is to reject the sacrifice of Jesus. We who have accepted his sacrifice should not deliberately continue to sin.

John gives more insight on this. He says, “no one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning because he is born of God” (1 Jn 3:9). Before we were born of God we continued in sin. We repeated the same sins over and over. Now that we are born of God we can no longer do that. When we commit a sin, it is the exception, not the rule. That is why, earlier in the same epistle, John tells us that he is writing “so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense –Jesus Christ the Righteous One (1 Jn 2:1).

John wants us to know that sin, even intentional sin, will occasionally happen, and when it does, we still have forgiveness. There is no room for condemnation in the body of Christ, and I certainly do not want anyone reading this article to feel any condemnation. Condemnation is from the devil and it is for the devil. It is not for believers. But we should feel conviction when we sin, and conviction leads to repentance. When this occurs, the sins that are confessed should not be repeated. That is, after all, what repentance means. For this reason, a believer cannot continue to sin. He will feel conviction, confess his sin, and repent. That stops the chain of continuation in sin. The practice of walking in God’s light, confessing any sins that the light exposes, and being not only forgiven, but also cleansed of that sin (1 Jn 1:7-9), should be a regular habit of every believer.

The victory over sin brought by the death of Jesus is clearly articulated in Romans 6. Paul says that when we repented we were baptized into the death of Christ (v. 3). Because a death has occurred, Paul can say, “Our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we no longer should be slaves to sin” (v. 6). Paul understands our entrance into Christianity as a death experience, literally being co-crucified with Jesus. This is not just an analogy, but a real death has occurred in the spiritual realm. Because of this death we no longer are slaves to sin. The word for “done away with” means to render ineffective, or more strongly, to abolish. This means that the power of sin has been broken off the believer through death. That is why Paul can go on to say, “Anyone who has died has been freed from sin” (v. 7). This refers to all believers.

If sin no longer has power over us, then we are free to live a life of holiness. That is why Paul tells us, “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires” (v. 12). Paul would not say this if it were not possible. In fact, he not only thinks it is possible to live a victorious life; he claims it is already true. All we need to do is, “count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (v. 11). One commentator famously summarized Paul’s words here with the phrase, “become what you are.” According to Paul, we are already victorious. We already have victory over sin, because its power over us has been broken. We are already freed from sin’s grip because when we were saved, our old, enslaved self died and our new life in Christ is a life free from sin. We just need to apprehend what God has already done for us and that new life will become reality for us. The blood of Jesus is sufficient. Everything we need to live a life that is pleasing to God has already been given to us. It is now left for us to take hold of that grace and permit God to work it out in our lives.

Excuses allow sin to continue

Considering that Paul so pointedly tells us in Romans 6 that believers have everything they need to live a victorious life, it should come as a surprise to think that anyone would interpret Romans 7 to mean that believers do not live a victorious life. But that is exactly what many people do. When they read the words, “What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (v. 15), they think Paul is talking about himself as a mature Christian, and that he is describing the normal Christian life. How insane! Trust me when I tell you that the Apostle Paul would never refer to himself as a believer with the words, “I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin” (v. 14). How impossible it would be for the same man to tell us the power of sin has been broken and then one chapter later tell us we are slaves to sin.

In Romans 6, Paul says, “you used to be slaves to sin” (v. 17) but “you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (v. 18). Unless Paul is schizophrenic and directly contradicts himself, the person he is describing in chapter 7 is not the same person he describes in chapter 6. In chapter 6 we know the person is a believer who has been baptized into the death of Christ. Therefore, the person who struggles with sin in chapter 7 cannot be a believer, whether that person is Paul or anyone else.

In fact, Romans 7 describes a person who is under the law. In case you never noticed, the word “law” appears 23 times in this chapter. Paul describes what the believer has died to (see v. 4), not what he lives in. But when this passage gets misinterpreted to refer to the normal Christian life, it justifies sins of all kinds in the believer’s life and blocks the grace of God from setting you free from sin, because you don’t believe God has provided for that. Until we firmly believe that God can and will free us from all sin, we will never be free. Remember, we have to apprehend this grace. We have to “count” ourselves dead to sin. That is an act of the mind, not the body. We must first win the victory in our minds before it is won in the members of our body. And the only way we can win this battle in our minds is to stop making excuses for our sins.

Only those who are living a life of moral defeat and are fighting a losing battle against sin can claim that Romans 7 portrays the normal Christian life. Those who interpret it this way betray their own lives of moral futility, for if they were living in victory, their own lifestyles would disprove their interpretation of Romans 7. We should not interpret Scripture according to our experience, but according to truth.

One might argue: “Well, Romans 7 is normal Christianity, and Romans 6 is still possible for the believer, just not required.” This kind of reasoning is unbiblical. Jesus died so that we could be set free from our sins. Jesus did not give his life for options or accessories that we may choose to add to our Christian ensemble. He died for things that are necessary. He died for the essentials, and the clear testimony of Scripture is that holy, sin-free living is an essential: “without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Heb 12:14b).

It is time for Christians to stop making excuses for the continuing sins that are in their lives and take ownership of the low level of life they are currently experiencing. Jesus did not come short in any way of providing “everything we need for life and godliness” (2 Pet 1:3). If we are going to begin to walk in victory, we first have to admit that the sins we still struggle with are nobody’s fault but ours, and the reason we are not living in greater victory is because we have chosen not to apprehend the grace of God that “teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age” (Titus 2:12).

Will believers intentionally sin after getting saved? Probably. We do not become sinlessly perfect when we repent. Nor am I suggesting that this happens at any time in this life. Just to be sure that I am not misinterpreted, I repeat: I am not referring to accidental sins, mistakes, human error, or sins of ignorance. I am referring only to intentional sins: those things that we know are sin before we decide to do it, but we do it anyway. No one is perfect and “we all stumble in many ways” (Jas 3:2). And if we do sin intentionally, we have forgiveness from “Jesus Christ the Righteous One” who “speaks to the Father in our defense” (1 Jn 2:1). So there is no reason to feel condemned if you have repented of the sins you have already committed. That forgiveness is full and forever.

But at the same time, when we sin we cannot claim that we had no choice. We cannot argue that because no one is perfect this was bound to happen. We cannot pass the blame on to someone or something other than ourselves. Either the blood of Jesus was sufficient for us not to have committed that sin, or it wasn’t. If we sin, it is because we chose to sin, not because the power of temptation was too great or the devil was too strong. It is not even because we are too weak. If we are weak it is not because God has failed to make us strong enough. It is because we have not fed ourselves on God’s word and strengthened ourselves in the Holy Spirit’s presence. Besides, God has given us a promise that he will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear (1 Cor 10:13b). Even weak Christians have this protection from God. And any believer, however strong or weak, always has the presence of the grace of God to keep us from sinning. If you do not want to give in to sin, you can call on God at any time and he will “provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Cor 10:13c).

Take a stand

Let us take a stand against sin and make a firm decision not to make any more excuses for the sins we willfully commit. Will you agree with me that you will not make any more excuses, that you will walk out daily the principle of walking in the light and confessing your sins to God, that you will seek out God’s grace and find the way out of every temptation, that you will indeed count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord? The grace of God is with you, and you have everything you need to be successful, including the prayers of the saints and the intercession of Jesus, the Righteous One. Let us all help each other run our race and live out the victorious life that Paul tells us is ours already.

With the above scripture being a platform and foundation, I trust that the following words will encourage and challenge all of us to embrace the meaning and necessity of true humility.

The modern American church in many ways has embraced an ideology that is counterproductive to her purpose and identity on the earth. The truth is that in much of our so-called advancement and desire to become “relevant” to pop (modern) culture, we in turn have embraced a self-sufficient, self-reliant mindset and model that is based more on human logic and soulish manipulation, than it is on the power of the gospel and horror of the Cross of Calvary. The fact is that with all of our progression, advancements, technology, media outlets, giftings, abilities, political persuasions, trendy religous expressions, etc., isn’t it ironic that the more we acquire and do as the church in the natural, in essence the weaker and less effective we become with regard to reaching a darkening, sin laden world around us, (that in many ways we now reflect and project as the church).

Our only viable hope is to “SEE JESUS AS HE IN FACT IS” in the midst of His church. The church that He died to purchase with the shedding of His own blood. The church that is betrothed to Him by an eternal covenant. Sadly, many only want a fraction of this Jesus of scripture, while in turn rejecting His glory, His holiness, His cross, His blood, His call to discipleship, His consuming nature, His refining fire, His call to intimacy, His hatred of sin, His encompassing love, etc. In light of this, there has been a trivializing of the Lord and sacred things that has invaded the church in recent years. The result has been the promotion of spiritual sideshows that have a sprinkling of Jesus in them so that we can still classify what we do as “ministry”. However, much of what takes place is void of God’s presence, His awesomeness, His holy fire, etc. The peril is that in the bastian of our audacious religous zeal (void of humility), we have become like Laodicea! Revelation 3:17 says, Because you say, “I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked.” In light of this condition and our spiritual dullness, we as the American church must turn our eyes towards JESUS once again!

When we behold Him as others have in past generations, who have experienced His divine assistance and visitation, then and only then will we embrace “true humility”, which is foundational to our existence and expression. The divine illumination of Jesus in our midst will polarize the irony of the Kingdom of God. The irony that says, the deeper we grow in the knowledge of the Lord, the more we see ourselves as less. Instead of us being more exalted by the increase of our understanding of God, we in fact realize how frail and weak we are compared to His glory and power. Matthew 5:3 which states, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God”, becomes the air that we breathe as we are shattered into unconcious humility. A humility that seeks no trophies, no recognition of man or approval from the fraternal systems of man-centered religion. This humility is based on a deep resevoir of intimacy with Jesus, which demands contrition and brokeness. However it also releases the heart of worship and freedom from self is experienced, which alone qualifies us to do the “works of Jesus” in our generation.

May the eternal purposes of the Lord consume the American church in this hour, however it has to happen!!!

All For Jesus,

Keith Collins
Generation Impact Ministries

Visit Keith’s Blog Passionate Ponderings

Visit Keith’s Website Generation Impact Ministries