Let me write here about persevering prayer. If
you want something you would do anything to obtain it . You would break
down every wall to get to the thing you wanted. You would knock , then
you would knock again , then you would knock again until someone came to
the door and answered. Now that is what prayer is like in the spiritual
realm . Nothing good will come to those who withdraw from a constant
determination to obtain the prize and the goodness that God has
promised. This is the way of perseverance. This is the way of building
convictions that are going to be the strength to continue to find the
overcoming strength in every situation so that you know, i mean you know
that He has spoken that word. There is a sense in which it is
like chopping down a tree. There is this big 3 foot wide oak and you are
beginning to hit the outer surface. Then you get tired and you come
back to it with more determination and more perseverance.But the more
you hit that to toward the center the harder it gets to chip. And then
you grow weary of hitting that hard wood. You determine that this time
its going to fall. This time your going to see it fall with that last
blow. But it doesnt , every thing is silent. Thats the way God works. We
pray and we pray, we meditate and we get a certain assurance. But the
assurance is not very strong , so we pray in the Holy Spirit and we pray
in the word. We feel stronger after the initial perseverance. But then
we grow weary again. God seems to be silent. Yes we get a number of
assurances that He is listening and we can feel the tree starting to
crack but there is not enough there. So we go months, sometimes yrs, i
mean really crying out. We cry, we groan, we complain, we question. But
still there is no answer. We are worn out trying to find that answer. We
go to praying again and again. Even tho there is a certain assurance
still it is not the word that is spoken that we are so wanting to hear.
Oh how we persevere. We begin to understand that pray is the absolute
hardest persevering means we have in this life. And then all of a sudden
there is the boom, there is the word, it is Gods time, all along it was
there for us, all along there was God who was planning to answer. And
oh, how we see this power of God to create a miracle that was beyond our
own to ability produce. So that we are rewarded for months and maybe
yrs of knocking. This is what we learn to do as a way of life. There are
these things that God rewards that are extra ordinary. If we determine
to seek God in an extra ordinary way, then God will show Himself extra
ordinary to us. So we want more , and we seek Him with more in
tenseness.
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Is the believer's heart still "desperately wicked?"
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on: December 20, 2008, 06:37:10 AM
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Paul is not presenting a dichotomy of
carnality and spiritually in these verses. Just like we take for granted
that we have a new identity in Christ , we chip away at our confidence
in measuring our states of dealing with sin and the problems we have as a
result of the ongoing discipline we encounter because of our sins and
the general welfare of having to face things in this life for the
purpose of growing in our understanding of Him by this discipline. Even
if we were receiving discipline for our sins the answer is always the
same. That is the gospel. The gospel is the power of God for the
salvation of all those who believe. God has saved us and given us a
completely new identity in Christ , but salvation is also an ongoing
process of peeks and valleys. We obtain a better understanding by
striving as a runner is trying to finish the race. We use the means of
grace in order to obtain the prize. We forget what is behind. We make it
our life long preoccupation to find all of our forgiveness in Him as
the way of forgetting. That is how we strive. We strive in dependence on
His power to go from strength to strength. This is living in the grace
of God. Or it is seeing everything that comes into our lives as Gods
design to keep us from growing distant into giving up, and giving us the
ability to avoid those things that would cause us to fall, those
situations and sins that would bring us under a constant irritation of
living under the power of sin. There is a sense in which the
use of means brings about a conversion in our confidence that gives us a
deepening of assurance that we will obtain the prize, that is we are
seeing victory in subduing the wills of evil men, we are being kept by
the power of God from the hands of wicked men. This is Gods way of
increasing our desire to persevere in the means of grace , prayer ,
meditation, and the sacraments. We have a tendency to go from a new
conversion of the Holy Spirits illumination to us of a confidence that
is designed to bring us into a new rest from our own works into a
speaking confidence that the Shepperd has designed to cause us to dwell
in the Fathers eternal love by the speaking power of the Holy Spirit
through the word , or that illumination of the new understanding of His
present help by making a way in every situation for us to over come the
present temptation that would weaken our confidence in His ongoing
battle for us so that we dwell in this stout heart ed way of living
with this witness of the Spirit. The Spirit lust for control, and that
is what we experience in this conversion experience. But if we
consider that our sins have separated us from His ongoing care then we
are not only cutting ourselves off from a trust in His praise worthy
work on our behalf, but we are sinning in not obtaining all that He has
in His promise to be a present help in time of need for all sinners at
all times. If our Father has promised to be faithful even tho we are
unfaithful, then there is nothing that we can do to change the
fundamental way of receiving ongoing acceptance. I would say there is a
lack of understanding here due to a lack of dwelling on His word, and
having a distaste for those doctrines that would bring us to the place
where we see Him as sovereign in the willing part. You really cannot
experience a consistent present understanding of His assurance if you
are always seeing this dichotomy in His power meeting your willingness.
Or having an illusion of a self determination in your will. We
are to pray in the Spirit so that we might destroy the present design of
the enemy to destroy our faith and the faith of those around us. This
is why liberal theology is so dangerous. It causes us to dwell in these
illusions that we are not to access this kind of destroying power so
that we might be bold in our access to our Father. We are not able to be
in a relationship with our Father as His special children. We are seen
as universally struggling to obtain a general love that is dependent
upon our imagined self will. There will be no assurance that we will
obtain the prize in this kind of fits of lack of confidence if we are
always encouraged to find our hope in our own confidence. If
you do not believe that i have spoken the word here, that is, an
application to your soul in the Psalmist way then you are unbelieving. I
hope to show you how to think in order to pin the enemy.
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Is the believer's heart still "desperately wicked?"
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on: December 19, 2008, 03:54:04 PM
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Hey RR,
I
think I get what you're saying. Right...there is now a choice between
the old man and the new, whereas prior to our redemption, there wasn't.
I'm good with that.
Here's a sticky point, though: If our old
man has been crucified -- does that imply a total and thorough death,
rendering it no longer able to lure or entice us into sin -- or,
has it died in the sense that we are no longer under the condemnation it
brought us; yet the flesh is undergoing a life-time process of being
crucified ( crucifixion is often slow and painful; whereas death is
instantaneous.) Hmmm. Again, I have no 'thus saith the Lord' here.
No
because the apostle urges us to mortify the deeds of the flesh. There
are so many areas that we are not aware of that are related to sins of
omission and sins of commission that have been worked in us not only
having been under the dominion of sin in our former ways prior to our
new birth, but the ways that we learned to deal with those sins as a way
of the flesh in how we viewed the law in relation to the nature of the
power we had over that sin. There is a certain way in the mortification
of the flesh that changes our understanding in a transforming way. It is
this understanding that is directly related to what we have been
discussing here about identity. That is that divine knowledge is the
revealing of a new conscious level of being in a new state of being. I
guess you could say that it is really having an understanding of our
image of who we made aware that we are no longer what we were. Like we
were given an assurance of these things by having a change in what we
loved. We loved the world, we only saw things as they related to us in
how they made us think and feel in relation to these personal rewards.
But then this whole other world opened up, that is the world of the
unseen, the world that had an image that perfectly matched the longings
that were predominately from our imaginations, now is a reality in
Christ. Now we are in a relationship with a Person through the Holy
Spirit. This being the origin of our new understanding. That is we see
everything in this life as originating in a personal relationship from a
fellowship with this new immunation of divine consciousness as the
cause of our new identity.
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Is the believer's heart still "desperately wicked?"
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on: December 19, 2008, 01:30:42 PM
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Good questions JR and very interesting discussion with RR and BB. There
are a number of angles here in this understanding of the functioning
healthy identity in Christ. First if we just trust that we have been
redefined in terms of our view of having confidence in our position in
Christ , we may be setting ourselves up for failure. Its like having
something hanging over our heads that is entirely too difficult to make
it work in a normal way of functioning in this world with these
different circumstances, the physical problems we encounter, the
physiological make up of a person and the impossibles of struggling with
sin that we have not grown to overcome , and then the mystery of how
the power of the besetting sins moves in an out of our lives. Cause we
are not dealing with resistant theology here. I am continuing to write
just giving you a heads up.
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Is the believer's heart still "desperately wicked?"
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on: December 18, 2008, 10:23:50 PM
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Through
regeneration we have received a new nature, a nature that desires to
please God. Furthermore, we have been indwelt by the Spirit of God, who
just as He raised Christ from the death has given new life to us.
I
think Jim has presented a very balanced view; that although we do still
yield to the old nature at times, that we are no longer slaves to sin.
And to the original question, I am going to answer no. Our identity is
no longer the same as before regeneration. And regeneration does change
the heart of a man/woman.
Bill
I agree with Jim and
also with you on the above Bill--this is a biblical truth. Our
identity once we have been born again of the Spirit is that of being a
child of God. We are no longer "mere" men as Paul emphasized in1 Cor
3:3 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and
quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere
men? (NIV) Prior to being born again, a child of God was a son
of Adam, in other words a "mere" man. Once born again of the Spirit,
the "old <spirit of man> is gone." However, since the new
nature (the Spirit of Christ in us) continues to be encapsulated in the
old <sinful> Adamic body of flesh while we are in this world, the
struggle continues. Paul is very much aware of this but he knows the
solution: Rom 7:24-25 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks
be to God-- through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind
am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of
sin. (NIV) Grace to all of you!
The
Spirit of God is the cause of our goodness expressed through the entire
process of how we come to produce a work. There is no division by
having a good self with the shell of a bad self. All causes are from the
reality of the nature of that cause. The flesh is a metonymy in
scripture that defines sin and a corruption of every part of our being
and body. Its like having the mind of sin that determines how we are
going to choose or the view we have of an object, the pleasure we have
in our knowledge of the object and the desire we express as the choice
based on being pleased with the object. Its like fighting with another
mind. Thats why the apostle expresses his frustration as a believer that
he has been given a new knowledge in being identified with the death
and resurrection of Christ. So that he has a new identity that defines
what he desires the most, or his old will has been destroyed and
replaced with a new will, that is a new set of desires. But this is not a
cause from a principle designed to cause the choice , but this cause is
from a person , that is the Holy Spirit. And yet it is his personal
choice since the cause is from the transformation of all of his
faculties, the condition of his soul. The flesh or the body does not
cause a choice. There is a pre meditation in every sin. So there is a
process of the souls faculties that cause a man to make a choice prior
to that man doing a sin. Ever sin that a believer does is because a
believer is still a sinner. Or a believers faculties are still
corrupted.
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Forums / Main Forum / Re: Is the Christian's heart still 'desperately wicked?'
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on: December 17, 2008, 09:21:06 PM
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** I freely do admit that it may well have
been a bit foolish on my part to try to talk about the dynamics I've
referred to - especially the dynamic of "entitlement" I wrote about -
with people who really seem to cherish them.
I think your
definition of entitlement is that your interested in everyone going to
church and being good members. Because i hardly ever see you talk about
doctrine. So if we do not behave as you say then we love "entitlement."
In other words instead of focusing on the doctrines and the glory of
Christ you would rather keep a close eye on those religious people who
cause problems. Kinda like a baby sitter as you are used to dealing in.
Always sick of people who you fail to teach properly.
I am not new here. There is a history here.
If
your preaching doesn't make you feel helpless to take care of all of
the needs as you stand as a reconcile r then your preaching yourself.
mbG
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