Dangers in "let go and let God"

What is “let-go-and-let-God” theology? It’s called Keswick theology, and it’s one of the most significant strands of second-blessing theology. It assumes that Christians experience two “blessings.”

 The first, noted Dr. Andrew Naselli, is getting “saved,” and the second is "getting serious."  He is research manager for D.A. Carson, administrator of Themelios, and an adjunct faculty member at several schools. He is author of Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology.   Naselli notes the change taught by "let go and let God" is dramatic:

• from a defeated to a victorious
• from a lower to a higher
• from a shallow to a deeper
• from a fruitless to a more abundant
• from being “carnal” to being “spiritual”
• from merely having Jesus as your Savior to making Jesus your Master

Sounds really useful, doesn't it?  This line of theology emphasizes people experience this second blessing through surrender and faith, so, “Let go and let God, very appealing because Christians struggle with sin and want to be victorious in that struggle now.

                          Historical perspective
Keswick theology offers a quick fix, and its shortcut to instant victory appeals to genuine longings for holiness. Keswick (pronounced KE H-zick) is a small town in the scenic Lake District of northwest England. Since 1875, it has hosted a week-long meeting in July for the Keswick Convention. The movement’s first generation (about 1875– 1920) epitomized what we still call “Keswick theology” today.

People who influenced Keswick theology include John Wesley, Charles Finney, and Hannah Whitall Smith. Significant proponents of Keswick theology include Evan H. Hopkins (Keswick’s formative theologian), H. Moule (Keswick’s scholar and best theologian), F. B. Meyer (Keswick’s international ambassador), Andrew Murray (Keswick’s foremost devotional author), J. Hudson Taylor and Amy Carmichael (Keswick’s foremost missionaries), Frances Havergal (Keswick’s hymnist), and W. H. Griffith Thomas, and Robert C. McQuilkin (leaders of the victorious life movement).

People who were influenced by Keswick theology include leaders of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (A. B. Simpson), Moody Bible Institute (D. L. Moody and R. A. Torrey), and Dallas Seminary (Lewis Chafer and Charles Ryrie).

Beginning in the 1920s, the Keswick Convention’s view of sanctification began to shift from the view promoted by the leaders of the early convention. William Scroggie (1877– 1958) led that transformation to a view of sanctification closer to the Reformed view. The official Keswick Convention that now hosts the annual Keswick conferences holds a Reformed view of sanctification and invites speakers who are confessionally reformed.

Perhaps, its most famous proponent of "let go and let God" is Oswald Chambers. In "My utmost for His highest," a devotional I have greatly enjoyed over the years, wrote:

Oswald Chambers

"God does not give us overcoming life: He gives us life as we overcome. The strain is the strength. If there is no strain, there is no strength. Are you asking God to give you life and liberty and joy? 

"God never gives strength for tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the minute The temptation is to face difficulties from a common-sense standpoint. The saint is hilarious when he is crushed with difficulties because the thing is so ludicrously impossible to anyone but God."  

"'I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.'" ~John 16:33

So, what is the big problem?    How should we respond?

                       Not biblically sound
"Let go and let God" Keswick theology, however, is not biblically sound. If that is so, then there are big problems worth considering carefully.  Here are tendencies:

1. Creates two categories of Christians--fundamental, linchpin issue.
2. Portrays a shallow and incomplete view of sin in the Christian life.
3. Promotes passivity, not activity.
4. Views the Christian’s free will as autonomously starting and stopping sanctification.
5. Establishes superficial formulas for instantaneous sanctification.
6. Develops disillusionment and frustration for the “have-nots.”
7. Misinterprets personal experiences.

You can tell that Keswick theology has influenced people when you hear a Christian “testimony” like this: “I was saved when I was eight years old, and I surrendered to Christ when I was seventeen.” 

They infer, "I was saved...and now, really saved and surrendered. I've really got it, now."

There are two tiers or levels of genuine Christianity, according to "let go and let God."

levels of Christians

First tier 
“Saved,”so Jesus became their Savior and they became a Christian. 

Second tier 
By “surrendered,” so they gave full control of their lives to Jesus as their Master, yielded to do whatever He wanted them to do, and “dedicated” themselves through surrender and faith. 

"We shouldn’t determine our view of sanctification by counting up who we perceive to be the most holy Christians and seeing which view has the most. Scripture, and Scripture alone, must determine our view of sanctification," Naselli reminds us.

---

J.I. Packer recounts his walk into "let go and let God"

"I was converted – that is, I came to the Lord Jesus Christ in a decisive commitment, needing and seeking God’s pardon and acceptance, conscious of Christ’s redeeming love for me and his personal call to me – in my first university term, a little more than half a century ago. 

The group nurturing me was heavily pietistic in style, and left me in no doubt that the most important thing for me as a Christian was the quality of my walk with God: in which, of course, they were entirely right. 

                     Elitist spirituality

J.I. Packer

They were also, however, somewhat elitist in spirit, holding that only Bible-believing evangelicals could say anything worth hearing about the Christian life, and the leaders encouraged the rest of us to assume that anyone thought sound enough to address the group on this theme was sure to be good. 

I listened with great expectation and excitement to the preachers and teachers whom the group brought in week by week, not doubting that they were the top devotional instructors in Britain, perhaps in the world. 

And I came a "cropper."  (a person who cultivates or harvests)

Whether what I thought I heard was what was really being said may be left an open question, but it seemed to me that what I was being told was this: 

There are two sorts of Christians, first-class and second-class, ‘spiritual’ and ‘carnal’ (a distinction drawn from the King James rendering of 1 Cor. 3:1-3). 

The former know sustained peace and joy, constant inner confidence, and regular victory over temptation and sin, in a way that the latter do not. Those who hope to be of use to God must become ‘spiritual’ in the stated sense. 

As a lonely, nervy, adolescent introvert whose new-found assurance had not changed his temperament overnight, I had to conclude that I was not ‘spiritual’ yet. But I wanted to be useful to God. 

             Supposed deeper spirituality

So what was I to do?  ‘Let go, and let God’  There is a secret, I was told, of rising from carnality to spirituality, a secret mirrored in the maxim: Let go, and let God. 

I vividly recall a radiant clergyman in an Oxford pulpit enforcing this. The secret had to do with being Spirit-filled. The Spirit-filled person, it was said, is taken out of the second half of Romans 7, understood (misunderstood, I would now maintain) as an analysis of constant moral defeat through self-reliance, into Romans 8, where he walks confidently in the Spirit and is not so defeated. 

The way to be Spirit-filled, so I gathered, was as follows:

First, one must deny self. 

Did not Jesus require self-denial from his disciples as in Luke 9:23?

Yes, but clearly what he meant was the negating of carnal self — that is to say self-will, self-assertion, self-centeredness and self-worship, the Adamic syndrome in human nature, the egocentric behavior pattern, rooted in anti-God aspirations and attitudes, for which the common name is original sin. 

What I seemed to be hearing, however, was a call to deny personal self, so that I could be taken over by Jesus Christ in such a way that my present experience of thinking and willing would become something different, an experience of Christ himself living in me, animating me, and doing the thinking and willing for me. 

Put like that, it sounds more like the formula of demon-possession than the ministry of the indwelling Christ according to the New Testament. But in those days I knew nothing about demon-possession,and what I have just put into words seemed to be the plain meaning of ‘I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me’ from Galatians 2:20 as expounded by the approved speakers. 

We used to sing this chorus:

O to be saved from myself, dear Lord,
O to be lost in Thee;
O that it may be no more I
But Christ who lives in me!

Whatever its author may have meant, I sang it wholeheartedly in the sense spelled out above.

The rest of the secret was bound up in the double-barreled phrase "consecration and faith." 

Consecration meant total self-surrender, laying one’s all on the altar, handing over every part of one’s life to the lordship of Jesus. Through consecration one would be emptied of self, and the empty vessel would then automatically be filled with the Spirit so that Christ’s power within one would be ready for use. 

With consecration was to go faith, which was explained as looking to the indwelling Christ moment by moment, not only to do one’s thinking and choosing in and for one, but also to do one’s fighting and resisting of temptation. 

Rather then meet temptation directly (which would be fighting in one’s own strength), one should hand it over to Christ to deal with, and look to him to banish it. Such was the consecration-and-faith technique as I understood it – heap powerful magic, as I took it to be, the precious secret of what was called victorious living.

                  Scraped for complete consecration

 I scraped my inside, figuratively speaking, to ensure that my consecration was complete, and labored to ‘let go and let God’ when temptation made its presence felt. 

Henry Ironside

At that time I did not know that Harry Ironside, sometime pastor of Moody Memorial Church, Chicago, once drove himself into a full-scale mental breakdown through trying to get into the higher life as I was trying to get into it; and I would not have dared to conclude, as I have concluded since, that this higher life as described is a will-o’-the-wisp, an unreality that no one has ever laid hold of at all, and that those who testify to their experience in these terms really, if unwittingly, distort what has happened to them. 


                      
                          
                           Technique was not working

All I knew was that the expected experience was not coming. 

The technique was not working. 

Why not? Well, since the teaching declared that everything depends on consecration being total, the fault had to lie in me. So I must scrape my inside again to find whatever maggots of unconsecrated self-hood still lurked there. I became fairly frantic.

And then (thank God) the group was given an old clergyman’s library, and in it was an uncut set of Owen, and I cut the pages of volume VI more or less at random, and read Owen on mortification – and God used what the old Puritan had written three centuries before to sort me out."
~J. I. Packer, in his introduction to John Owen’s The Mortification of Sin

So, what do we do with all this?  
How to I respond to my real sin?

Be killing sin...or sin will be killing you!


So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.  ~Romans 8:12-17 ESV)

Dane Ortlund

"I am a sinner. I sin," Dane Ortlund said. "Not just in the past but in the present. But in Christ I’m not a sinner but cleansed, whole. And as I step out into my day in soul-calm because of that free gift of cleansing, I find that actually, strangely, startlingly—I begin to live out practically what I already am positionally.

"I delight to love others. It takes effort and requires the sobering of suffering. But love cannot help but be kindled by gospel rest.

How can you possibly stiff-arm this? Repent of your small thoughts of God’s love, your resistance to swallowing Christ’s atoning work whole. Repent and let Him love you."