The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 6 – 1
Today’s churches, without exception, focus on a few external rituals, they bicker over the meaning of a few symbols and traditions, and try to “spread the gospel” and they think that’s all God expects from them. But here’s the truth: Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sitting in a gym two hours a week makes you fit. Christians think because they attend church a certain day, know a few facts about God, and help a few other random humans, they’ve made God happy. That it’s all God wants from them. And that is so, so, so, so far from what God wants from you. It is several orders of magnitude from what God expects from you.
So doctrines are not very important. Even true doctrines. They are facts, and facts are like tools – you don’t own a tool for its own sake; you buy a tool because you need it to build something. But how long would it take you to plant a garden, if you only used your shovel two sleepy hours a week? And yet that’s all the exercise most doctrines get… again, even if they’re true doctrines! But the purpose of doctrines is not to be known, as every Christian seems to think. The purpose of doctrine is to change you.
2 Corinthians 3:18 (GWV) As all of us reflect the Lord’s glory with faces that are not covered with veils, we are being changed into his image with ever-increasing glory. This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. So learning doctrines without using them to change yourself is like buying tools you don’t know how to use and stacking them in the back of the garage to gather dust. Sure, they’re fun to look at; sure, you love showing them off to your friends. But ultimately, having tools you don’t use is worse than having no tools at all.
And unfortunately, that’s all most churches know how to do – and all most Christians are willing to do, if that: Memorize trivial facts about God to feel better than other people, and then show off how much they know to get other men to praise them. As you learned in the first series, you are put here in God’s image to learn how to act like God, so that one day you can BE God. Knowing facts and doing a few good deeds will not accomplish that. Not if you lived to be 10,000 years old. What do you need? Hebrews 5:14.
Everything about you must change; everything about you must grow, and not a little bit – a lot. Everything you are must become like God, because right now very little about you is. And doctrines have value only as they help you do this.
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF GOD
Every church I’ve ever attended has a few dozen topics they rehearse over and over, week after week, time after time. Faith, brotherly love, forgiveness, salvation, thankfulness, reconciliation, mercy, a cheerful giver, you know the ones I mean. These are all the most basic doctrines, and no church ever moves beyond them, despite Paul’s clear command (Hebrews 5:11, 6:1). The common attitude in churches is “I’ll do whatever I have to do to get there”. Notice how much emphasis there is on do in that sentence? The Christians of the world tell God “I’ll DO whatever rituals You want, God. I’ll put in the time, whatever You ask, I don’t care what it takes as long as I get there.”
But Christianity is not something you do. It’s something you must become. Salvation is not about putting in time, finding the right rituals, the perfect prayer, the holiest church, the most selfless sacrifices. Salvation is about changing who you are. One piece at a time, line upon line and precept upon precept (Isaiah 28:10). The process of salvation is not about checking off a list of things like observances and rituals; not about obeying a list of do’s and don’ts. While there are rituals, and there are do’s and don’ts, they are almost trivial side issues to salvation.
God didn’t give us the law as the price we must pay for salvation. Everyone believes the doctrines, laws, and dogmas from (or sort-of-from) the Bible are the price God asks for salvation, and that isn’t true. Rituals don’t save you. And modern Christians are just as ritualistic as Moses was; going to church, taking the wafer, showing up on Christmas; praying, blessing people, giving to the poor; these are all external rituals any Christian would deem necessary to salvation!
And in the back of their mind, deep down, they all believe that if they can do enough of these things God will have to save them. And that’s not how it works at all. The law is not the price we pay to be with God. The law is the path we follow to be like God. The laws exist to show us what God would do; they’re there to point us in the direction we should walk; they exist to test us, to give us examples of how we should behave, or to remind us of what we should be like. But they are not salvation.
The external laws allow our beast to act more like God; the internal laws allow our spirit to speak more like God. But they don’t make us be more like God! Only the growth of our soul’s strength of character, of will, and of wisdom, will do that.
SAVING KNOWLEDGE
The world believes that God wants worship; wants your sacrifices; your prayers of praise. But the reality is, God couldn’t care less about your fawning prattle. Does God get sick of religion in general? Amos 5:21-23, Isaiah 1:11-15. What does He want instead? Amos 5:24, Isaiah 1:16-19. Those verses show that God hates pomp and ceremony, traditions and formality. The world all thinks that if they can just find the right prayer, the right pattern of obedience, the right music, the right sacrifices to make, God will have to notice and save them.
But this is a very wrong way of looking at things. Because salvation is not a short checklist of “must-do” acts and “must-know” doctrines, and “must-believe” articles of faith you must confess. The job of a Christian is not to “get to heaven”. It’s to become the sort of person God couldn’t help but put in His Kingdom! (Acts 2:24). There is no list of things you must know; for your life is an unending chain of revelation, and each new piece of understanding must be compared to your previous understanding and your current actions, and then you must change accordingly.
Each new piece of understanding must be allowed to correct you, and change you, and this process will never stop. Each new piece of understanding is truly life-threatening, for at any point if you say “I’m good enough as I am now, this last piece doesn’t matter”, then that piece matters more than any other piece ever has. God doesn’t care which doctrines you believe in. Doctrines are there to help you act like Him, nothing more. Because of that, the right doctrines are very useful – because they point the way to God.
But keeping the doctrines won’t save you, it just makes it a little easier to see what you must be like to be saved. God doesn’t care how much you know. He cares how well you obey what you already know, and how eagerly you seek to know more. As long as God is convinced that you will continue diligently searching for knowledge indefinitely, and will gladly embrace any correction you find in that new knowledge… that’s all He needs (Genesis 22:12). Because Abraham had done this, God knew there was absolutely nothing Abraham wouldn’t do to obey the truth – and therefore, that Abraham was completely like God.
Not in doctrine, not in faith, certainly not in knowledge… but Abraham acted completely like God would have acted under those circumstances, and that was all that mattered. Knowledge and salvation are as connected as oil and automobiles. Sure, you need some oil to keep a car running – but to say you have oil, therefore you can make an automobile is idiotic. So is everyone who says they have the necessary knowledge for salvation. There is no such thing as saving knowledge, because the knowledge that is required for salvation…Is the very next thing God teaches you.
THE WAY
As I said, Salvation is the process of a changing everything about ourselves into the likeness of God. Our soul must judge impartially and fairly, like His soul does. Our spirit must bear true witness, as His spirit does. And our beast must be humbled, with a converted heart which actually wants the law of God, as His beast was. John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. You know how I always say that an entire lesson is summed up in one verse? Well, this verse sums up every word in series 4, 5, and all the words you’ll read in series 6.
…That is, it does if you actually understand it. But if you rip it out of the Bible, put it up on a church sign, and say “Oooh! Ahhh!” it means absolutely nothing. What does it ACTUALLY mean that Jesus is “the way”? You’ve no doubt heard many explanations that extol Jesus being “the Way”, and some of them might have even been right. But I guarantee that they were the most superficial lesson it is possible to glean from these words.
Do you walk on Him? Do you walk to Him? Do you walk like Him? What does it even mean? And if no one really understands what it means, why do they talk about it as if they do? What is a WAY? Think about it! What does it mean? Psalms 101:6. So a “way” is a path, a road you walk down. Here, most people stop thinking and just say “of course!! We just walk like Jesus!!” and, well, obviously that’s true, and it is one – extremely obvious and simplistic – layer of meaning.
But it does not convey the depth of meaning that’s here for those who are willing to “meditate in thy word” (Psalms 119:148). The world, being ruled by their beasts and, at best, their spirits, only understand the external application of these examples; but they’re meant to be understood internally, something only the soul can do. So using your soul, compare the idea of a “way” to Jesus’ own words in Matthew 7:13-14. There are multiple ways; multiple paths to walk down.
Some are wide and easy, and some are narrow and treacherous and it is easy to miss it, and get lost down some other path! Proverbs 4:25-27. How are we meant to avoid those other paths? Proverbs 4:18 sure,” you’re thinking, “Jesus is lighting the path for us! We are to walk like He walked!” And… well, yes, but that’s not all this is saying! Because if you look closer, He is telling US to PONDER THE PATH of our feet! (Jeremiah 6:16).
We are supposed to be LOOKING DOWN at the road we walk, and not turning to the right or the left! Why am I making such a big deal of that, you ask? Proverbs 8:20. Any road, path, or trail you will ever walk has forks in the road. And at each fork, you must make a choice… a judgment! If you leave this up to the beast, the beast will always choose the path that goes to food, to rest, to his herd (Jeremiah 5:7-9). The job of a rider (the soul) is to turn the horse down the correct path; at each fork in the road, the rider must give a nudge or a shift of balance to tell the beast which direction is the right path.
Jesus IS the way not merely because we are supposed to act like Him, but because He is the only one who made perfect judgments walking down this path! So what you don’t learn when you stop at “walk as He walked”, is that His soul was the perfect judge! Jesus is the way because His soul always chose the right path and enforced His judgments on His body and spirit. If we want our soul to be restored in the resurrection, we must follow Him in the paths of righteousness (Psalms 23:3).
He IS the way because He made this path! (Psalms 25:4-5). He blazed this trail! Because of all men who have ever lived, only His soul’s judgments were capable of keeping Him on the straight and narrow path, and so if we want to enter into life, we should convert our soul to be like His, so we can make those same judgments (Psalms 143:8). Thus, being like Him literally is the way to life. Not in the shallow way you thought you understood before, but in the much more meaningful sense that having a soul capable of judging as His judged is the only way to find life!
THE TRUTH
By focusing on the superficial, the world misses not only the obvious connection to Jesus’ perfect soul, but also the obvious-in-hindsight connection to the three facets of our mind… that if Jesus meant His soul when He said “the Way”, then the Truth must be His spirit, and the Life must be His heart! But how is He the truth? This is the sort of thing that makes Christians look stupid to the rest of the world. “Truth” is an abstract concept. I can’t BE “truth” any more than I can BE justice. I can teach justice, I can practice justice, but I cannot BE justice.
Neither can I be the color magenta. I can be colored magenta, but I cannot BE magenta! I also cannot be Kilogram. Does it make sense to say “I am the Kilogram”? (Not “I weigh a kilogram”, or “I am like a kilogram” …just “I AM the kilogram”.) Of course not. It’s absurd. I also cannot be Rap, Communism, Cloud, or Palmolive. I cannot be Neutrality, War, or Daisy. These are things, ideas, or groups that no conceivable person can BE. A person can be like those things, or one of those things, but it is irrational to claim to BE truth!
And yet it is precisely because it is mystical and irrational that Christianity loves it; for anything that sounds holy and special and mysterious allows them to believe whatever they want. And yet… Jesus did say it, and therefore it is true. But what did He mean? It’s much easier than you might think to make a real, solid answer out of this if you just try, instead of pretending you understand it and mounting it on a billboard! As always, break it down to the symbols and ask yourself “what is truth?”
Jesus was asked this by Pilate (John 18:38), but He didn’t bother to answer because that same night He had already given the answer to His disciples! John 17:17. This tells us that God’s word, the Father’s word, is Truth. What is that… or rather, who is that? John 1:14. This tells us that The Word of the Father was Jesus; you might be tempted to think this IS the answer, but if you look closely it’s not an answer at all, it’s simply rephrasing the question; is it really any more helpful to say “Jesus IS the Word” than “Jesus IS the Truth”?
Most Christians settle for answers like this, which are no better than the original question – if as good. For it’s clearly no easier for Jesus to be an abstract concept like the “Word” than it is to be the “Truth”. For a real answer, read 1 John 5:6. See the difference? Speaking of Jesus it says that HIS SPIRIT bears witness because that spirit IS TRUTH! How is that any better, you might ask? Because it means that His spirit had a perfect record of right and wrong! Because what His spirit contained WAS truth! (John 16:13).
Jesus’ judgments were only as good as the information His soul was given. If His conscience gave Him bad information, the soul would come to the wrong conclusion even with the best of intentions! But read Psalms 119:105. It was His Word, His conscience, His spirit, which shined the light on the soul’s PATH!
Our spirits are prejudiced for or against most ideas before we even hear them. Our spirits are full of false sins like eating sheep’s heads, but allows real sins like saying “Merry Christmas”; it forbids us from judging someone, yet encourages us to lie to spare people’s feelings. Our spirit is not truth, because it doesn’t have an accurate copy of the full statutes of God’s law on file. And because it is not broken, it arrogantly assumes it has the right answer before it even hears the other side!
So knowing His spirit couldn’t be trusted, His soul demanded facts from it; His soul educated it in the law; forced it to be an objective observer of truth; challenged it, again and again, until it was able to see what it looks at, and say what it means. It was His perfect spirit that recorded TRUTH, in every sense; and it was those TRUE WORDS which gave Jesus’ soul the necessary information to choose the correct WAY to walk! It gave His soul what it needed to judge righteously! And because of that, His spirit literally was Truth, because it contained only Truth; every single Word it could ever say, therefore, would be Truth!
JESUS’ BEAST
Our beast is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9). It will give absolutely anything, and do absolutely anything, to get what it wants – and what it wants more than anything else, is to save its own life (Job 2:4). Job suffered the loss of his children and all his possessions with a certain amount of objectivity; and Satan said – perhaps correctly – that Job was willing to sacrifice all of them for his own life, their skin for his. Because he knew, of all people, that a man will give up EVERYTHING he has to save his own life.
That is, a man ruled by his beast will. But what of a man ruled by the soul? No matter how good your soul, your beast will think it is better qualified to preserve your life than you are. It requires not only ruling your heart, but reasoning with it; persuading it; convincing it, and ultimately showing it that life is better even for it when you are in charge. If you lead well, it will learn that your choices, your judgments, are good for it. It will learn that you are better able to find good pastures, better able to defend it, and better able to guide it than it can guide itself. And as proof of that, we have the record of Jesus’ beast, written in first person, in Psalms 23.
Go ahead and read it now. This is a song sung by Jesus’ beast. The speaker actually describes himself as a beast, because his Lord is his shepherd which makes him a sheep, and therefore… a beast! Remember, the “Lord” in the OT IS Jesus. So if the Lord is my shepherd, then clearly, “I” am Jesus’ beast! And think about it… what human cares about lying down in green pastures, beside still waters? What human is comforted by someone else having a rod and staff? So then this whole song is, in effect, a love song from a beast to its soul; to Jesus’ soul!
But this song is not from Jesus’ childhood; this is a grown up Jesus, one who has convinced His beast that with a soul like His, “I shall not want”. That no matter how dark the path looks, nor how close His enemies lurk, His soul can figure this out and keep them safe! This beast has realized that His soul can be trusted, and He need “fear no evil”! This beast has LEARNED faith! This is a beast who has learned to trust His lord! Because He is absolutely convinced that His Lord “regardeth the life of His beast” (Proverbs 12:10). Is yours?
THE LIFE
Read 2 Samuel 12:1-3. Here was a beast with such a close relationship with its soul that it dwelt with him in his own house. A beast who ate his table, and was like one of his own children. Jesus didn’t have a hundred beasts to rule, or a thousand, just the one; but that one mattered to Him. He cared for the life of His beast and the beast trusted and loved Him in return – trusted Him enough to die for Him (Philippians 2:8). Because that is the greatest challenge of all, the ultimate mastery over the beast; to ask it to die for no other reason than because you said so (Isaiah 53:4-5).
Jesus’ beast went to an unjust death like an ignorant lamb to the slaughter, even though it knew what it was doing, and why! Even though it was no dumb lamb! (Isaiah 53:6-7). It died when it didn’t deserve it, when it wasn’t fair, and when it didn’t even have to, for it knew His soul could simply ask the angels for help! (Matthew 26:53). In John 13:1, the day before Jesus’ sacrifice, there’s an odd phrase “having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end”. Now clearly, the obvious meaning of these words is the disciples; they were, in a sense “His own”. But remember: true on every level.
If that was an external meaning of these words, there surely is an internal meaning as well, for there always is. And here, it simply means that Jesus loved His own heart and spirit! He was proud of them, and justly proud of His, and their, accomplishments! And He loved them unto the end of His life, because it was His beast who suffered the next day – for a soul cannot be harmed by whips or thorns, and men are not able to kill a soul! (Matthew 10:28). So it was not Jesus’ soul who suffered these particular things, it was His beast that suffered and bled for us! And it made this ultimate sacrifice because Jesus’ soul had been such a good soul that it had earned absolute trust.
His beast gave up His life because it had faith that God would “restore His soul” (Psalms 23:3), and that not only would the beast get “goodness and mercy… all the days of my life”, but also that, like the lamb of Nathan’s parable, its heart would “dwell in the house of the Lord for ever”. And that is the ultimate test for all of us. If you can not merely command, but convince, your heart into going willingly and cheerfully to the slaughter simply because you said so, you will have proven there is nothing your soul cannot do. Nothing and no one your soul cannot rule, cannot convince, cannot overcome.
Jesus convinced the most selfish creature in the universe of the goodness of the unselfish way of God. He persuaded a beast to die that most of us can’t even make pay attention, stay awake, or stop eating. And being able to persuade a beast who loves its own life above all else to walk willingly, with eyes wide open to its own death so that unborn strangers might live… that was the great accomplishment that brought us life. Without it, there is no life, for any of us, so it is no stretch then to say that Jesus’ beast is the Life of all flesh.
WAY, TRUTH, AND LIFE
Now you see how much truth is really contained in these few words. Jesus does not merely have life. He does not merely represent the perfect life. Jesus actually IS the Life because the willing death of Jesus’ beast gave life to the world! The continued existence, both now and in the resurrection, of all life is only possible because of the death of His own body. Thus His body quite literally IS LIFE (John 6:51). Likewise, Jesus does not merely have truth. He doesn’t merely know or understand truth. His spirit IS truth, because it is the only once-human spirit in the universe that can be trusted to keep a perfect record of all it sees, and all it hears – and repeat it back faithfully.
We all learn the Truth, the only trustworthy, fully objective truth in the universe, through our contact with His spirit. Through the Words that He left us in the Bible; and through the witnesses of the things He made (Job 12:7-11). Thus He quite literally IS truth, for everything His spirit recorded, every statute His spirit made, every conclusion His spirit drew was objective Truth (John 14:17), and nothing else in the universe is! And finally, Jesus does not merely know the way; we are not simply meant to imitate or follow Him on the way.
He IS the Way to life “and few there be that find it”. Because without His soul conquering His heart and converting His spirit and showing us how, there would be no Truth and Life for us. Without that Truth and Life He brought to us, there would be no WAY for us to find life! (Hebrews 10:19-20). Thus He is the Way, because without Him blazing the trail, there would BE no way! And now that there IS such a way, it is our duty to judge as He judged; to see and hear and speak as He saw and heard and spoke; and to offer our bodies as living sacrifices.
We need His soul to lead us in righteousness, and make our paths straight before us; we need His spirit to be a lamp to our feet, and we even need His beast to show us how a proper beast ought to act – and how a proper soul ought to rule them both. And yes, “He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked” (1 John 2:6). But as you see now… it’s so much deeper than that. Because that is strictly an external understanding… and this, like all things, primarily applies internally.
Jesus was the perfect judge, the perfect witness, and the perfect servant. The perfect soul, the perfect spirit, the perfect beast. And He said this so that we can be too. That just as He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, so shall we be. Psalms 103:1 (YLT) …Bless, O my soul, Jehovah, And all my inward parts – His Holy Name. Because when ALL of your inward parts bless His name, you will be the way, truth, and life.
THE WRONG PATH, THE LIE, AND THE DEATH
Because Jesus is the way, truth, and life, because He perfected His soul, spirit, and heart, He is qualified to judge those who don’t measure up to His stature. Until He did that, there was an argument that His expectations were unreasonable, and impossible (Job 4:17-19). But the statement that He was the way, truth, and life, was an acknowledgement that He had arrived. That He was ready. That, unlike Paul, He had attained, and there was no longer a need to “press on for the high mark” (Philippians 3:12-14).
Because now He had proven once and for all that He has asked nothing of us that He hasn’t already done. With that in mind, read John 16:7-13. The prince of this world is, of course, Satan; which literally means “the adversary”. But our greatest adversary is not an angelic devil, it is within – our own heart. So Jesus’ first accomplishment was to reprove the world for their JUDGMENTS, because their souls are respecters of persons, and always favor their hearts or their own spirits in judgment! Which is why they can’t find the straight and narrow WAY!
And He reproves the world “of righteousness”, because their RIGHTEOUSNESS is wrong (Romans 10:1-3). Their conscience is poorly educated, and their spirit is ill-equipped to be a lamp to their soul, incapable of helping it choose the right WAY even if it wanted to! Which is why they are not capable of knowing TRUTH! (John 3:19-20). And finally, He reproves the world of sin, because it did not BELIEVE Him! Because their beast was not willing to submit itself to Jesus’ soul, much less their own, He condemns it because it will only keep sinning!
Thus this condemnation is an indictment against all those who are not yet the WAY, TRUTH, and LIFE! And He said this then, on His last night on Earth, because He was finally qualified to condemn them because He DID make His beast submit willingly to its forthcoming martyrdom! And He was qualified to say this now, because He HAD made His conscience a perfect mirror of the law of God, and a lamp for His soul! And His soul HAD ALWAYS made righteous judgments based on that same mirror because He LOVED righteousness more than His fellows (Hebrews 1:9).
Jesus was the way – the perfect example of how to judge righteous judgment. And Jesus was the truth – the perfect conscience, the perfectly objective witness for His soul. But Jesus was the life because He convinced His beast to be obedient even unto death – and in so doing, showed us ALL how to find life (1 Thessalonians 5:23). That is why all beasts of the heavens and the Earth – the human beasts, the beasts of the evil angels (dragons) – will honor Him, because He has conquered His own beast (Isaiah 43:19-21) and is now qualified to rule all other beasts!
And if we are to rule with Him, we must walk the same path He walked. Like Him, we must learn that the only way to rule the universe is to be the servant of everyone in it. Like Him, we must convince an arrogant, bullheaded spirit that the only way to always be right is to admit that it knows nothing. We must convince a selfish beast that the only way to get everything it wants is to give up everything it has.We must convince them both that the only way to overcome fear, is to fear God. And finally, we must convince our heart that the only way to live forever is to die. If we can do these things, we can do quite literally… anything.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Of course, this was all said in a single verse; besides the one I built this lesson around: Psalms 86:11 Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name. This is all that matters. Rituals and observances, laws and statutes, these are tangential to the greater picture. Prayers, sermons, church, brethren, good deeds; none of that really matters like everyone thinks it does. If God can trust your soul to make objective judgments; trust your spirit to record truth without bias; and trust your heart to die at the soul’s command… Then whatever you don’t know, God can be absolutely certain He can teach you (Genesis 22:12).
If God can know just those things about you, the rest of the work can be done another day, in another life. That’s why what you know, what you do, what you believe today are meaningless. What matters is that He can be sure that YOU are the way, the truth, and the life, as He was. To be sure, it will be impossible for Him to know these things about you without you learning some true things, and doing some good things, and believing some right things. In fact, it will require you to learn, do, and believe a lot.
This is not meant to imply that the bar is lowered, in any way, from what I’ve said over these lessons. This is merely meant to explain that which particular doctrines you know, and which you don’t, are pretty unimportant. This is why Abraham was blessed without circumcision (Romans 4:1-12). Notice that last verse: “walk in the steps of… Abraham”; the Jews, though they had all of his doctrines, and more (John 8:37-40), were not able to rule their spirits and hearts and accept Jesus’ words as Abraham had done.
So though they may have walked in Abraham’s statutes, they did not walk in his steps (their souls did not judge as he did). And the one is far, far, far more important than the other. That’s why Apollos was blessed even without the understanding of doctrine that Aquila and Priscilla brought him (Acts 18:24-28). To be sure, he grew in grace and knowledge as a result of that meeting (2 Peter 3:18), which was absolutely a great thing. And this was a chance for Apollos to reject the truth, and be cast aside as so many others have been (Psalms 125:5, Psalms 40:4).
A test which he passed – that time, for that truth. Because all new understanding is a test. Doctrines exist to teach us about God, yes, but also to give us a chance to prove to God that we DO love judgment, mercy, and faith. Will you say “what I have is enough”? Revelation 3:17. Or will you receive it readily, and search the scriptures whether it is true or false? (Acts 17:11). Will you embrace a new truth… or desperately search for excuses why you don’t have to? That is all God needs to know about you.
Because THAT matters. Which doctrines you know, right at this moment, doesn’t. What matters is that your soul is capable of correctly judging whether a new doctrine is good or evil; and then making the spirit and heart accept it, or reject it, no matter what other factors are in play. So contrary to what literally every religion on Earth teaches, which doctrines you know, which way you prove your faith, and to whom you show mercy, is unimportant.
For if you have broken your spirit and ruled your heart, and taught your soul to judge righteous judgment, then His spirit can lead you into all truth (John 16:13). That’s why there is no magic list of checkboxes. That’s why all observances, prayers, and beliefs are completely meaningless, when done for their own sake. There are just three simple questions, and absolutely nothing else in the universe matters for your salvation: Can God trust your soul to judge the right Way? Can God trust your spirit to hear and speak the Truth? Can God trust your heart to surrender its Life?