Can Anyone in the Flesh Please God?

QUESTION: Paul says in Rom. 8:9, "They that are in the flesh cannot please God." Since all who live on the earth are in the flesh, is it not impossible for any living man to please God?

ANSWER: The word flesh has both a good and a bad meaning. In this text flesh means the domination of evil inclinations. No man who is thus dominated can please God. But when the evil propensities are controlled by the regenerating Holy Spirit, God is pleased. Every man in the world may please God by repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. The flesh may not only be controlled but be crucified.

— from Steele's Answers p. 52.

The Natural Man

QUESTION: In 1 Cor. 4:12 Paul speaks of the natural man. What are his characteristics? Our preachers says he is regenerate.

"But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Corinthians 2:14 KJV.)

ANSWER: He is not spiritual but wholly animal. He has a sensuous nature with its subjection to appetite and passion. In Jude 19 he is "sensual," "earthly" and "devilish." If a man is known by the company he keeps, the natural man must be a bad fellow in great need of regeneration and entire sanctification. Except in 1 Cor. 15:44 "natural" Greek "physical" is in the New Testament always used in a bad sense. The preacher is a blind guide. We fear that both he and his hearers will fall into a ditch hard to get out of.

— from Steele's Answers pp. 51, 52.

The Dancing Choir

QUESTION: What is the duty of a Methodist Episcopal pastor towards a choir who dance, play cards, attend theaters, and some drink beer?

ANSWER: The book of Discipline places the choir under the control of the pastor, who may if he wishes have a committee of which he is chairman, or he may have the sole direction. Let him discreetly use his power to weed out improper persons.

— from Steele's Answers p. 51.

The Error of Antinomianism

Theological errors move in cycles, some times of very long periods. They resemble those comets of unknown orbits which occasionally dash into our solar system; but they are not as harmless. Often they leave moral ruin in their track. Since all Christian truth is practical, and aims at the moral transformation of men, all negations of that truth are deleterious; they not only obscure the truth and obstruct its purifying effect, but they positively corrupt and destroy souls.

This is specially true of errors which release men from obligation to the law of God. After St. Paul had demonstrated the impossibility of justification by works compensative for sin, and had established the doctrine of justification through faith in Christ which works by love and purifies the heart, there started up a class of teachers who drew from Paul's teachings the fallacious inference that the law of God is abolished in the case of the believer, who is henceforth delivered from its authority as the rule of life.

Give Us a Spiritual Protestantism!

There are multitudes of nominal Christians who confidently assert that it is the highest presumption and folly to expect, in modern times, that full dispensation of the Spirit concerning which so many excellent things are spoken in the Scriptures. They brand as a fanatic the man who proclaims to a slumbering Church the presence of the Holy Ghost, ready to raise the spiritually dead, and to transfigure the spiritually living.

Punishment for Sin vs. Sin's Natural Consequences

QUESTION: (a) Explain the difference between the punishment of sin and it's natural consequences. (b) May not Matt. 25:46 and Rev. 22:11 be a statement of the same thing from different standpoints?

Matthew 25:46: "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment:but the righteous into life eternal." (KJV)

Revelation 22:11: "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still:and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still:and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still." (KJV)

ANSWER: (a) Punishment relates only to the guilt of sin. Forgiveness removes the liability to punishment. It does not remove regret for sin in time nor in eternity. In this sense sin casts a shadow into heaven itself. In other words you cannot forgive the sin which God has forgiven. Nor does God, who forgives a sinner in middle life, restore the blessings lost in his wasted youth, such as education, and intellectual power and possibly physical health lost by sins against his body. The prodigal son was received by his Father, but the money lost by riotous living was not restored in the form of a second division of the paternal estate. Then again others suffer in consequence of one man's sin whose forgiveness does not arrest these evil consequences, such as the poverty of the drunkard's wife and children. His reformation and conversion to Christ does not restore the farm which has gone down his throat and lodged in the till of the saloon. I speak with deliberation and reverence when I say that God cannot forgive the natural consequences of sin, because he cannot change the past. To do so would falsify history. He is a God of truth. He can no more change the past than he can change the multiplication table. (b) There is a sense in which sin is its own punishment, as virtue is its own reward. Yet as this reward differs from that which God will bestow in heaven, so this punishment must differ from that which he will inflict in hell. What this final reward is, and final punishment, has not yet been revealed. It awaits the Day of Judgement. Hence in preaching it may not be best to make this distinction between natural consequences and penalty. There is a poem relating to an impenitent sinner, the last verse of every stanza ending thus:

"To be left alone with memory

Is hell enough for me."

Yet I cannot believe that such expressions as "the wrath of God," "the Day of Judgment," and "eternal judgment" are rhetorical figures for the natural consequences of sin. In that case the final sentence of the Judge would be superfluous. The assertion that the moral law automatically inflicts penalty on transgressors is a doctrine which strongly leans toward the denial of the existence of a personal moral Governor. I lay no foundation for pantheism.

— from Steele's Answers pp. 49-51.

Operas and Sunday Pleasure Riding

QUESTION: What should be done with a Sunday school superintendent whose example it would not be safe to follow in the matter of operas and Sunday pleasure riding?

ANSWER: Kindly labor with him. If he will not reform, you may persuade him to resign.

— from Steele's Answers p. 49

A Damaged Reciever

QUESTION: How would you treat a truly converted and wholly consecrated man who has so long been seeking purity of heart as to become a painfully chronic seeker? It should be noted that he is not in a perfect physical condition.

ANSWER: The last fact noted may be the cause of this difficulty. In reference to chronic cases of lack of assurance, Wesley says: "I believe this is usually owing either to disorder of body, or ignorance of the gospel promises." I have seen a case of despair because of ill health. At Clifton Springs Sanitarium my attention was directed to a Christian woman in total spiritual darkness and great distress of mind because she had no communion with her Saviour [as] in former years. Said I to her: "Why are you here?" "Because," she replied, "the plastering fell from the ceiling of my schoolroom where I was teaching and struck my head."I then told her that her Savior was still speaking to her, but that her telephone receiver was damaged by the concussion and that restored health would bring back her lost communion with the skies. Years afterwards she assured me that this was her experience. Such cases are to be treated with great tenderness and sympathy. It is comforting to know that "God knoweth our frame."

— from Steele's Answers pp. 48, 49.

Do We Experience God?

The subtle suggestion is sometimes presented that this whole matter of Christian experience is all illusory — a phenomenon of our own minds under the influence of causes wholly within itself. The thoughtful believer is sometimes annoyed by the thought that God has nothing to do with inward religious emotions — that what seems to come from without, and to move so marvelously within the soul, assuring of pardon and cleansing from sin, really arises from the hidden depths of our mysterious nature while intently contemplating religious ideas, and that there is no manifestation of God at all as an objective existence.

To this we have two answers.

We Trust. God Works.

Guest blog by Hannah Whithall Smith (1832-1911):

There is a certain work to be accomplished. We are to be delivered from the power of sin, and are to be made perfect in every good work to do the will of God. ‘Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord,’ we are to be actually ‘changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.’ We are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. 

A real work is to be wrought in us and upon us. Besetting sins are to be conquered. Evil habits are to be overcome. Wrong dispositions and feelings are to be rooted out, and holy tempers and emotions are to be begotten. A positive transformation is to take place. So at least the Bible teaches. 

Now somebody must do this. Either we must do it for ourselves, or another must do it for us. We have most of us tried to do it for ourselves at first, and have grievously failed; then we discover from the Scriptures and from our own experience that it is a work we are utterly unable to do for ourselves, but that the Lord Jesus Christ has come on purpose to do it, and that He will do it for all who put themselves wholly into His hand, and trust Him to do it. 

Now under these circumstances, what is the part of the believer, and what is the part of the Lord? Plainly the believer can do nothing but trust; while the Lord, in whom he trusts, actually does the work intrusted to Him. Trusting and doing are certainly contrastive things, and often contradictory; but are they contradictory in this case? Manifestly not, because it is two different parties that are concerned.

— edited from: The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life Chapter 1.