[The following is a letter I wrote to a friend, with a few edits for privacy]

Let me say this:  I appreciate your position, and I am not particularly in most of the camps that you might expect.

Summing it up, I hear about four main statements in your email.

First, there have been many different positions and view regarding holiness..  Which you cataloged quite well.

Second, you really don’t care which one is most doctrinally correct, but are sick of the compromise in your own heart and unless it can help with that, you’re not satisfied.   You said, “All I know right now is that I’m bound to sin and I don’t know how to get out”.

Third, You’re sick of the crap (scripturally, “dung”).  You want to know the experiential love, experiential forgiveness, and experiential cleanness of heart.  No more hypocrisy from yourself or others.  You want the real deal.

And, finally, the question of how to know anything arises.  “The only way I will know or anyone on this earth will know is if God shows us personally.”

I think some of these questions are proper place of a heart for your condition.  Let me remind you, however, truth is a person.

Let me present my Gospel, if you will…

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Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Matthew 7:24

[H]e is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built.

Luke 6:48

Growing up, spending a lot of time in Matthew, I sort of got the impression from Matthew 7:24, that listening to and following Jesus was kind of like considering real estate on the beach.  You have sandy portions and you have rocky portions.  In some places, there are only dunes, and in other places, namely, upon Jesus, there is a rock sticking out, and it is at this place that one should build their house, rather than upon the sand.  The “choice”, if you will, was simply to follow the instructions or to live a different way, which, of course, would be wrong, and result in failure.

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