Experiences are powerful. We all enjoy positive experiences. We love to remember and relive those experiences. We seek to order our lives in obedience to God so that our future experiences will be positive ones for ourselves and our loved ones.
There is, however, a long-recognized danger associated with experiences. We may, if we are not very careful, evaluate truth claims based on our experience, rather than the evidence.
For example, Galileo claimed that his observations of the sky revealed that the earth revolved around the sun. Today that is a hardly a bold claim. But in that day everyone believed and the Catholic Church taught as dogma that the sun revolved around the earth. Thus no one was even willing to look at his evidence. Everyone’s experience told them he was wrong. They could look and see the sun rise and the sun set. Case closed.
Ask a Charismatic how he knows the gift of tongues is for today and he will point to his experience. He speaks in tongues and it makes him feel more in love with the Lord Jesus. Thus the gift of tongues must be for today. He might be hardpressed to show this from the Bible. But he has had an experience.
Ask a contemplative how he knows that emptying his mind and focusing on one word (Eastern meditation) is a Biblically correct practice, he will point to how he feels after he does this. He will point to how much more he loves Jesus now than before he began the practice.
But what if the Bible teaches that the sign gifts have passed away and that Biblical meditation is thinking about Scripture, not about clearing one’s mind and having a one-word mantra? What if those practices are part of counterfeit spirituality? What if those practices actually displease God? Are we willing to give up enjoyable practices if we see from Scripture that they displease God? Or do we cling to our experience no matter what the Bible says?
Biblical interpretation requires that we check our experiences at the door. Here is how I learned the balance in seminary: We evaluate our experiences in light of what the Scriptures say. We do not evaluate the Scriptures in light of what our experiences say. Thus if my experience can be shown to be clearly contrary to Scripture, I need to give up that experience.
This even impacts our view of what a person must do to be born again. Do not many people follow their experience in this regard? For example, how does a Church of Christ person know that to be saved a person must believe in Jesus, obey Him, confess their sins, be baptized by immersion for the forgiveness of his sins, and repent of all his known sins? He knows that is so because when he was a child or teen or adult he did those things and as he came up from the water, he felt different. And immediately his life began to change.
Even Free Grace people can unwittingly do this. We might think back to when we were born again and what we believed at that time. If at that time we didn’t believe, for example, in the Rapture, then we may conclude that believing in the Rapture is not a condition of eternal life. But what do the Scriptures say? If the Scriptures taught that belief in the Rapture is a condition of eternal life (of course, they do not), then we would simply have to revise our understanding of when we were born again.
“When I was born again, I believed I could lose my salvation. So believing once saved always saved is not a condition of eternal life. ”
“But,” I ask this Baptist who now does believe in OSAS (once saved always saved), “How do you know you were saved at that point and not later when you believed that you were saved once and for all by faith in Jesus?”
At this point my friend points to how his life changed at that point.
But what is that? Experience. Oops. My general response to him is that we do not evaluate Scripture based on experience.
My specific response to him is that God works mightily in the lives of unbelievers. Unbelievers can experience major life change and it can be related to Jesus and Christianity. But it isn’t until the unbelievers believes the truth of John 3:16 that he is born again. Cornelius (Acts 10) is a case in point.
My hope is that we in the Free Grace movement eliminate experience as a guide to what the Scriptures teach. The Scriptures speak for themselves. The Scriptures tell us what to believe. We do not tell the Scriptures what they must teach. May we be like the unbelieving Jews in Berea who searched the Scriptures daily to see if what they were being taught by the apostle Paul was true or not (Acts 17:11). Search the Scriptures.