Common Salvation vs. Common Experience: by Dean Gotcher

Common Salvation vs. Common Experience:
where "experiencing God" means experiencing "oneness" with others

Dean Gotcher

Unity is a byproduct of individuals coming together in Christ, dead to themselves and alive in Christ, rather than "experiencing God," i.e. experiencing the sensation of "oneness" with others, where "human nature," with its quest for oneness with the world (with others), engenders unity.

"Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ." "I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not. And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." "Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities." Jude 1:3-8

The "common salvation" involves "contending" for the faith "once delivered unto the saints." It is preaching and teaching the gospel message "as given" (without tampering it with "human wisdom" to 'justify' "human nature"), it is confronting man and his love of sin, his love of this world, it is not a process of 'change' which builds itself upon the common experience of "unity," tolerating the flesh for the sake of unity.