I just saw a preacher quote on Facebook:
“Salvation is not a reward for the righteous; it is a gift for the guilty.”
Adrian Rogers
My response was this: “Is there no reward, then, for the righteous?”
And I’m sure someone will pipe up: “Ah, but the Bible says that no one is righteous!” And they will think that that settles the matter.
But I will ask what we should make of the hundreds of Bible references to righteous people.
And that’s typically where the conversation stops, for the guy’s got himself a one-liner understanding of a 31,102-verse Bible, and is not interested in the least in understanding the whole of it.
And so, he has written righteousness out of his view, as if it were simply an impossibility—as if it were but the outlandish notion of arrogant people, and not the teaching and the very expectation of God himself.
And therein lies the great dilemma of our times, by which the great religion is split into a million cherry-picked versions, each set apart from that practically-insane idea of learning, understanding, and following the whole counsel of the scriptures as the Way, Truth, and Life.
