These posts on choices and education rather than mandates and rules are excellent.
I posted this article on NFCF before it died...
http://thetruthisoutthere.forumsplac...essage752.html
Quote:
Is There Any Power To Transform In Standards?
If one lives every standard preached...
If the sleeves are down to there...
If the neck is up to there...
If the hair is just so...
If every standard is followed...
Has there been a tranformation of the mind?
Has there been a renewing of the mind?
I just see it as so much more effective and true to the mission to teach people to know and seek the Spirit of Christ.
To seek out what modesty is and live it.
To understand that to live according to God's wisdom returns peace, love, joy and all of these things.
If we seek, learn to love, hunger for & desire to live the very Spirit and nature of our God it would seem that every Godly "standard" would manifest itself because of that search and we will have then truly tranformed the heart.
The parable talks about the sower & the seed. There is no seed sowing in laying out standards. Nothing is planted, watered and allowed to grow.
Laying out standards is akin to just simply coming in and popping full grown plants out of the 5 gallon containers and planting them where there was no plant or a wild one there before.
The time invested in cleaning out the rubble, cultivating the soil and planting a seed is what creates relationship and love for one another. It also gives a true test of the soil.
If you bring in a 5 gallon container and pop the plant out and plant it in the soil then the plant will last for a while because you brought soil from another place with you. But... if the soil is not good enough to sustain life then the plant will eventually die... and we call them a backslider and cut the plant down.
I see no inate ability to transform the heart in the laying out of standards for people to obey.
I see no true measure of the soil (heart) in the laying out of standards for people to obey.
I see no investment of working out the rubble from the soil and help it to become able to sustain life in the laying out of standards for people to obey.
To learn, love, know and follow the Spirit and nature of our God... That accomplishes all of these things.
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But the reason people have trouble teaching basic concepts of holiness and letting the people work out their own salvation with fear and trembling is because of their fear that someone else will not come to the same conclusion they do.
If someone were given the freedom to search these things out for their own and came to a different conclusion than had been desired then they would find that totally unacceptable.
So... for fear of anyone coming to a conlusion different than their own... they mandate.
Whatever is not of faith... is sin.
Choices not bonds. Big difference 
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