Many Christians talk about receiving salvation as saying a prayer to "ask Jesus into your heart." At Woodland Hills, we believe that this approach has far too often been turned into a formula used to deal with the fear of facing an eternity in hell.
The Christian doctrine of original sin first took center-stage in the fifth century, mainly with the controversy involving Pelagius and Augustine. Three positions on original sin eventually emerged from the fifth-century debates:
At Woodland Hills, we believe we first need to stop and refocus the question. When many Christians ask these kinds of questions about salvation, they make two mistakes. First, they think that "being saved" primarily means "being saved from Hell." And second, they approach the question with a “legal” picture of God, meaning they frame the question in terms of a courtroom, where God is both the judge and the prosecuting attorney, and we are the sinful defendant.
Jesus clearly and unambiguously tells us that we are not to make judgments about other people’s salvation, and to emphasize his point, he says that whatever standard we use to judge others will be used to judge us
Around Woodland Hills, whenever we ask how to explain something regarding our relationship with Christ, one of the first concepts we turn to is covenant relationship. Therefore, we would explain grace by setting it in the context of a covenant-love relationship.
Jesus was always navigating this very question, but he doesn’t give us any formulas. Instead, we can discern certain principles that seem to guide his decisions.
The idea that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the “unforgivable sin” has caused many people—even many Christians—to worry about whether they might have committed this sin.
The type of sin referred to here is comparable to the "unforgivable sin" mentioned by Jesus in Mark 3:28-29 (associated with "blasphemy of the Holy Spirit").
"We just started attending last summer and we love it! This past weekend the music was so beautiful, I felt the Holy Spirit there and wept the entire time. And then the message on relationships spoke right to my own struggles. God is here."