Corol. 3. It is manifest, that Arminian
notions of moral Agency, and the being of a faculty of Will, cannot
consist together; and that if there can be any such thing as either a
virtuous or vicious act, it cannot be an act of the Will; no Will can be
at all concerned in it. For that act which is performed without
inclination, without Motive, without end, must be performed without any
concern of the Will. To suppose an act of the Will without these,
implies a contradiction. If the soul in its act has no motive or end;
then, in that act (as was observed before) it seeks nothing, goes after
nothing, exerts no inclination to any thing; and this implies, that in
that act it desires nothing, and chooses nothing; so that there is no
act of choice in the case: and that is as much as to say, there is no
act of Will in the case. Which very effectually shuts all vicious and
virtuous acts out of the universe; inasmuch as, according to this, there
can be no vicious or virtuous act wherein the Will is concerned: and
according to the plainest dictates of reason, and the light of nature,
and also the principles of Arminians themselves, there can be no
virtuous or vicious act wherein the Will is not concerned. And therefore
there is no room for any virtuous or vicious acts at all. Corol.
4. If none of the moral actions of intelligent beings are influenced by
either previous inclination or motives, another strange thing will
follow; and this is, that God not only cannot foreknow any of the future
moral actions of his creatures, but he can make no conjecture, can give
no probable guess concerning them. For all conjecture in things of this
nature must depend on some discerning or apprehension of these two
things, previous Disposition and Motive, which, as has been observed,
Arminian notions of moral Agency, in their real consequence, altogether
exclude.
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: March 01, 2008, 04:04:57 PM
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Thanks for your honesty TB. It is refreshing
to see that you are struggling with life in general. Everyone expresses
their experience in a different way. Have you struggled with yourself
most of the time you have been a christian or has it just been more of a
common experience? Ive always seen things through a sensitive
eye. From my young days ive always felt a sense of the bigness of all of
my circumstances, having a strong sense of the meta physical nature of
my circumstances. Having lived in a very intense thought life, it has
been long road to gain a sense of wholeness and balance in dealing with
people in my world. Sometimes i wish i could go back to a more innocent
way of reality. But on the one hand gaining more knowledge is an
interesting life, but then there is so much sorrow and frustration in
looking at my present circumstances. And in this sense i am driven. There
is a spiritual world that we cannot see, and yet it has an effect on
our circumstances by how people behave. It just seems that the world is
so much more interesting when we involve ourselves in the ideas that
bring us to think in terms of the unseen. And maybe its the frustration
we have of thinking in an apologetic way in our thinking and then
voicing these ideas to others. So then the frustration causes us to want
to be more meta physical since the answers are so common and having no
effect to change a persons general disposition. I have heard
that living in our heads is a waste of time. But if we are experiencing
wholeness in our world view then being heavenly minded determines our
physical healthy outlook. So that if we live in our heads in the heaven
lies then we can live above our circumstances, and experience the entire
realm of reality, rather than living in our heads in a moral sense.
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: March 01, 2008, 12:38:47 PM
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I had a time in my life where i was question
the validity of my resisting while i was resisting. I mean prior to
resisting in a lot of questions it seemed successful. Which maybe at the
prior time it was mostly a confidence in my flesh that was resisting.
But then the time came when the struggle increase and then my confidence
in my resisting fell to its lowest. So i was desperate. And it was the
experience of desperation that was so painful and anxiety producing. In a
real way whether i was going through the mountain top or the valley it
was an experience were sin was always present and it came in different
colors. One was too much confidence in myself, and the valley was not
enough confidence in Him. But , He had ordered it in my life for the
purpose of increasing my faith. On the self confident mode, i was not as
interested in seeking Him for who He was, because i was not that
desperate. I felt confident so I was confident. But when He hid His face
from me i was dismayed. So then my sin of self confidence was exposed.
And then i started to deal with issues of faith and dependence.
But
whether there is a level of confidence or not, the point is that He is
working in us beyond our reasons. And when we are in the valley then our
desperate cry may be filled with doubt. Which is a lesson in itself for
us to learn. Most of the time we are unaware of the depth of our sin,
and we are more confident in ourselves than we think. In fact we would
rather make a fast rule for the christian life and teach others of our
discovery rather than say that we are this mixture of unreliable
information, because we are silenced into the dust. It may be that we
want to think of being totally surrendered that is the answer. Yet we
are still going to want more, because we are grieving. And so what we
long for is Him. Which sometimes , we have a longing that is so faint
and full of doubt that we do not know if He has left us to our selves
and we end our prayers with " I am in darkness." But we should not give
up even tho in our minds we gave up a long time ago. We may give up just
to rest in our grief. We may need to rest from our striving. But we
believed and we were having a relationship with Him, but then it all
seemed to just fade. And so we must go back to His word , get in the
revelation of Jesus and stay in His faithful promises. We must dwell on
His words until we see Him again.
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6580
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Forums / Main Forum / Re: A Mature Christian
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on: February 29, 2008, 10:34:41 PM
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I don t know but i kinda think we love
according to truth. I m sure the verb here has a causal sense. But then
we could posses all of the knowledge but if we do not have love then we
are only a sounding brass. So that maybe if we have the rite knowledge
that it will be a new desire to love from a heart that knows the object
of that love. Blessed are all those that love our Lord Jesus Christ with
an undying love.
I think if you love someone then you would
want to know all about them, talk all the time about them, and speak of
them in a way that makes it easy to know that you love them. So more
than any human being , there is never enough extolling the Lord. And
some times when our love is divided it may seem that we are over
confident , but over confidence in Him is loving Him.
Love
would always be an action, out of a desire to please Him. So that if you
love Him , then it will be easier to give to others without expecting
any love or thing in return. So that it is giving that shows that you
love. Even to your own hurt. Love is being a "mission" to our fellow
man. Treating them as if they were family. In the old testament the
stranger was treated greater then the members of his own household. It
was a custom to think with these social terms so that the children would
value relationships over things. And of course the concept of Adoption,
where all believers are of this family by grace.
People used to
go great distances to do mission work, and leave the family behind and
stay faithful out of a deep sense of love. It use to be that Christ
meant more than a healthy relationship, He meant in a mission sense that
there would be family separation for the kingdom of God and still be
faithful to each other and to Christ. IMNSHO We have a very small kind
of love today.
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6581
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: February 29, 2008, 07:18:30 PM
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http://highlandbiblechurch.org/mp3/2008-02-17.mp3 Hear this. What did Gary Player say to him?
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: February 27, 2008, 07:55:42 AM
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Thanks so much for being honest. And i think
this was your best post as of yet. You are such a good writer. If we
know who God is, then we will understand who we are. So that He says My
sheep hear my voice and they follow me. Which voice is never a
condemning voice. But the voice is not necessarily distinguished as
negative just what comes across as negative to us. Like you will fail at
what ever you do. But the evil is very legal. So that we have a Father
in heaven who speaks everything into reality. We are kinda like Peter,
who was told that he was going to end his life in a place that he did
not wish to be. We are always determined by God to be what He wants us
to be at the place He has determined us to be in every thing that
transpires in our lives. But our adult voice wants to be responsible and
feel a sense of independence so that when we end our lives we will be
rewarded for our good deeds. But we are living in an imaginative world
when we do not understand that we are His children , waiting on His
word, so that when He speaks all will be well. We wait on Him in
expectation. The voice we hear falling on our ears is the gospel voice
of grace and not the power of the law in condemnation or equal Librium
determinism. But we were determined from eternity to be under the
sovereign reign of God for the purpose of being weak so that we would be
as helpless as a child. He makes us able.This is His Fatherly care
being expressed to us through His word being made know by what
transpires in the world around us and in our souls. So that
there is nothing that does not happen without His supernatural power
being manifested from His lips. We are most responsible when we are most
helpless so that we are desperate to seek Him and lay all of our
troubles at His feet. He is most glorified when He is praised for being
our relief, our miracle worker, our refuge, our helper. In this world we
are going to have tribulation, and the only place we can go to get the
courage is to Him. He has a throne of grace that dispenses new power to
us for our new day. It is when we look to Him as a slave to his master,
that we learn to trust in Him alone. If He promises to deliver us by
speaking a word , then we have a hope in HIs word and when He delivers
us, we know His loving voice to us. So that everything we glory in is
supernatural!
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: February 26, 2008, 03:34:42 PM
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When we go through depression, we have very
little relief from the scripture. We have these thoughts that are so
very dominate , so that they war against what we know we should be
thinking. So that our minds are given over to a general depressed
disposition. It effects our emotional stability. We are going to
experience a darkness in our souls in which our feelings go lower than
they ever went before. The sinking feeling is going to be mixed with a
desperate attempt to get out of that downward spiral. So that the inward
struggle becomes bigger than our rational way of living with the
circumstances, and so we are under the dominance of an imagination that
causes us to react differently to these circumstances than we normally
do.
And we have a remedy in the scriptures as well as medicine.
The word of God is powerful, sharper than any double edged sword. The
word tells us that when we have fear and anxiety that we will experience
a very weak if not absent faith. Although we feel this way, yet the
faith of a mustered seed can move mountains. So that we are left to deal
with our lives in a moment by moment struggle rather than having a
certain amount of peace so that we are having it overcome the anxiety,
so that there is a certain flow in life when we are enjoying that peace.
But when we are at war with depression, we learn to fight for peace.
If
we did not struggle in this way then we would not know the kind of
discipline it takes to cast down these imaginations. If you think of
anyone who is handicapped , then you know that they work doubly hard to
overcome that handicap by a great discipline. They balance the handicap
out with going at the handicap. Its the same thing with depression. We
must use the scripture like a hammer. When we discipline ourselves to
meditate on the scripture, we may be doing it in a mechanical way
without any feeling in return. But the end of meditation is that we will
en graft the soul with paradigms of powerful spiritual realities, that
are going to have an effect in the long run. And the mechanical
meditation, that is saying the word out loud in an unfeeling way, will
lead to creating new path ways of desire in the soul that will be the
fortress for gaining some peace over the anxiety.
I am not depressed now, just felt like writing about it.
Obviously
we are going to experience deep darkness of soul, in which we feel the
depressed feeling by having a sinking feeling in our stomachs. Now these
feelings that we sink into, are going to be His to understand on our
behalf. In other words we feel the sinking by the cry in the Psalms and
in that moment of the low we breath in the low and we breath out the
rolling it over to Him. So we say Why are you down cast oh my soul, in
depression this is the sinking, and then we are sighing at this point
under the burden of the bottom of that feeling, and then we say Put your
hope in God, now that is not going to be as encouraging in feeling as
the other sinking feeling, but the desperateness of the cry Put your
hope in God is like please take this from me! So that in the 5 mins of
the meditation we have thought rite even tho we are not over the
condition. But we won the 5 mins. Now we are trained to go from the
lowness to the cry or the plea to the remembering. That is the way of
the Psalmist. And we are forced by the meditation to consider His works
in the past in the scriptures and in our lives after the initial low
feeling realization. So that we learn to go to the place where we give
Him that depressed paradigm in feeling that sinking feeling and then we
force to go to a relinquishment of the depressed state to Him, then we
go to the remembrance. So that this is a refuge in the moment by moment
abiding in the state of depression. You will be rewarded in the end for
battling with His weapons.
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6587
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: February 26, 2008, 05:34:27 AM
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I apologize for derailing the other thread. I hope this is the rite place. Why
is Jesus my only hope in this life, and the one to come? First because
in saving me, He gave me new life. He gave me His life. He is my only
strength. So that when i am weak, He is strong. My natural way is to
trust in my own strength. And in having this tendency, i have a level of
misery in this life. But He shows me that i have no strength in myself,
so that I once again experience renewal, by being sustained
spiritually by His life alone, and then I have that illumination that i
have been freed from sin by Him ,feeling totally helpless in my own
strength to go one more step. In knowing that i am unable, and He has
made me able then is when i experience His strength. So then we must
glory in our weakness so that He can make His strength perfect in us. We
must glory by finding in Christ our all in all. We must strengthen our
feeble spiritual knees by going before Him and pouring our hearts out to
Him in praise and adoration. Acknowledging Him as the only source of
strength and finding in seeking Him that we will receive strength upon
strength, so that we know that we will have assurance of His working His
strength in us, by our desires to see Him as our alone strength. When
we receive His strength, then we want more of it. And when we get more
strength then we are being drawn in such a way, that we are encouraged
to rest in our Heavenly Fathers arms and have such high experience of
His strength, that we are assured of being in a place of refuge that we
can always go. If you do not believe that this has a practical effect on what transpires in your future then I question whether you know Him. So i ask you again kindly sir, to tell me how much you love Jesus.
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Forums / Main Forum / Re: Devil's Advocate
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on: February 25, 2008, 09:20:40 PM
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I will start.
Why is Jesus my only
hope in this life, and the one to come? First because in saving me, He
gave me new life. He gave me His life. He is my only strength. So that
when i am weak, He is strong. My natural way is to trust in my own
strength. And in having this tendency, i have a level of misery in this
life. But He shows me that i have no strength in myself, so that I once
again experience renewal, by being sustained spiritually by His life
alone, and then I have that illumination that i have been freed from sin
by Him ,feeling totally helpless in my own strength to go one more
step. In knowing that i am unable, and He has made me able then is when
i experience His strength. So then we must glory in our weakness so
that He can make His strength perfect in us. We must glory by finding in
Christ our all in all. We must strengthen our feeble spiritual knees by
going before Him and pouring our hearts out to Him in praise and
adoration. Acknowledging Him as the only source of strength and finding
in seeking Him that we will receive strength upon strength, so that we
know that we will have assurance of His working His strength in us, by
our desires to see Him as our alone strength. When we receive His
strength, then we want more of it. And when we get more strength then we
are being drawn in such a way, that we are encouraged to rest in our
Heavenly Fathers arms and have such high experience of His strength,
that we are assured of being in a place of refuge that we can always go.
If you do not believe that this has a practical effect on what transpires in your future then I question whether you know Him.
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6590
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: February 25, 2008, 08:50:31 PM
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We are more than conquerors through Him who
loved us. And we live in this reality. Even when there are enemies on
every side, and then we have a disposition to faint, that is our time to
be in a trial for the purpose of making us keep our eyes only on
Christ. For in Him we have a sure victory, and in His time we will
experience all that we long for in the victory. Even if it is a request
that is long in being answered. We may wait many yrs for an answer. The
really deep things come with long hard pleading , and we are to be
encouraged in making our request in a day by day morning by morning way.
If our request were answered rite away then we would never learn to
wait in expectation. So that when we learn to wait, we learn to look for
the relief in the morning. Which is a time in which we see Him faintly
in worship, and we begin to rise in our affection as we look into His
word, and we worship Him with all of our hearts, crying out to Him,
praising Him, seeing Him as the beginning and end of all things, and
having our full rest in His perfect strength. For we only have honor
when we have our only refuge in Him. We see His beauty when we
are looking at creation. We see the natural order of things in creation,
so that all of the movements of the trees, and the movements of the
ocean, are for our enjoyment, so that we understand His being clothed
with majesty, by experiencing His strength in the rising of the waves.
His work in the oceans movements are heard in an over whelming way,
when we hear the thunder of the crashing waves and the constant noise of
the waves as they crash together one after another. Just as in the
rising of the waves, so we look to Him for our strength, knowing that
nothing that rises in our lives happens by chance. But He has
established His throne from eternity, so that everything has been
purposed in Him to be in our lives for our good and for His glory. So we
learn through these movements and sounds of creation to enjoy the
beauty of His majestic work. And we learn to long for Him , to bring on
the new heaven and earth, which will be a perfect experience ,being
beyond our understanding of our present senses. We live in Him, who
moves and has His being in every space in the universe. He is all of God
in every space.
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Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.
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on: February 23, 2008, 11:27:44 AM
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Its interesting to read about your human
experience. Whether the underlying cause of this world view is from a
principled source is what i am trying to figure out. With the amount of
time that i have in a day, it really is of very little value to me as to
what others think about me even those closest to me. And don t take
that the wrong way. And maybe the world view of living on a set of
principles is very different from my world view. Just thinking here. But
i have always approached myself examination in a way that i am very
deceived about my circumstances, and my initial feelings, that is these
areas of guilt, fear, and shame in which i consider these a plague due
to the sin that i carry around, not the actions necessarily. Sin is like
living with a person who is very principled by its attraction to the
law for the purpose of accusing. And then there is this natural tendency
to live under the dominion of a legal principle rather than rising
above this step theology and really experiencing the super naturalistic
paradigms that come from the Spirit through the word. If i looked at
myself the way people are trained to look at themselves in this culture
of legalism, i would lose the desire to trust in Christ alone, and it
would be a divided heart of unbelief. Of which i struggle with, in hours
of preaching to myself. After much meditation in His word, it
seems to me that as we become more entrenched in this imperialistic
paradigm in this culture where these realities are felt through the
interaction in these relationships, it becomes more of feeling in me of
the utter helplessness in depending even on those in the church. We live
in a very evil time when men trade outward sins for inward sins and in
caring for the heart, there are all kinds of fancy programs that are not
of the Spirit. And even tho there are some positive things that are
happening in helping, yet there is not enough time in a day to be
thinking in this way. Because it comes down to what we love the most. I
am not talking about perfectionism here but just simple direction, of
the circumspect kind. We live in a time were men are dualistic. We
really do not have a choice as to growing or retreating, if we are not
growing in our orthodoxy then we are retreating from the oracles into
dualism.
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Forums / Main Forum / Re: Devil's Advocate
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on: February 22, 2008, 11:15:45 AM
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The
perception that "we" as "children of God" have within us the power to
show someone else God is completely incorrect. I am not saying that God
does not allow us the priviledge to walk with Him and to assist Him in
caring for others, but any leading or heart changing is all of Him.
Only God can open the eyes of another. It is His voice that calls. It is His hand that is in charge.
We
are only like small children in the grocery store with Dad. He allows
us to pick up a box of cereal from the shelf and drop it into the
cart...thus we grow to understand the task of shopping. But just as the
small child isn't really needed, but greatly enjoyed, so our Lord is
with us. And just like a small child, sometimes, okay often we pick
stuff off of the shelf because it looks good, and our Dad might not
fight with us about not needing it, He just quietly puts the uneeded
stuff back. He pays.
But if the athiest is looking for God's
mighty hand, He needs to go to the source. We don't lead people to
Christ. He does that. He just allows us to help a bit sometimes...or
to think we do, because He loves having us with Him, and every bit of
real time we spend with Him, we are blessed with the view of His hand
upon all. It's just that if you don't know Him, You don't know Him.
Just
remember that if you are an indicative genius and not from a collective
set of rules, then there will be a natural following in a revived since
because we are separate from Gods working .(in this since we are not
robots). "If God is with them you will not be able to stop these men.
"We are each important. If the works that we perform are not a wonder,
then the praise that we give Him is not according to His purpose in
performing them through us. And i am not talking mainly about the
physical realm. But His authority exercised through us to bring men to
the end of themselves and to see Christ exalted as He deserves to be and
as He has planned it through us. This is His pleasure and His glory! He
created us protecting us to become saints and then returning us back
into His image, and that is what is attractive, even to those who have
no depth of understanding. Because we go beyond the nature of human
resistance and our initial adversarial responses is in this circumspect
disposition of supernaturalism. Casting down the imaginations of pet
project or legalistic Christianity. This is the real world.
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| 6616
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Forums / Main Forum / Re: Devil's Advocate
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on: February 22, 2008, 10:00:09 AM
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the wisdom of man is foolishness to GOD.
you would like to fight on your own grounds about things that are not on your ground why is that?
The
only problem with this position is that I have heard (and read) your
own fellow Christians being critical of it. People like R.C. Sproul,
Greg Kokl, Lee Strobel and others do not seem to have an ounce of
sympathy (well, maybe an ounce), for those of their fellow
Christians who want to try and communicate their position from strictly
the experiential end of the equation. The chief gripe they seem to have
(and report) is that they are tired of Christians who feel the need to
"check their brains at the church door" (and I concur wholeheartedly).
But I am afraid that this is something that you are simply not going to
be able to "emote your way through." Like I said; anyone can have
an experience. New Agers have them, Hindus have them, Muslims have
them, on the sheer subjective scale, how are theirs any less (or more)
convincing than yours! I've found there to be a suprisingly
large number of Christians out there who are not fact-phobic. And, while
I wholley disagree with their conclusions, my suggestion to you is that
you follow their example. There is nothing very virtuous about simply
going to your own little corner of your existence with your own little
"wonderful experience" and pretending that you are somehow "superior" to
those who would render reasons for what it is they believe.
I
agree, if there is a gathering of the saints, and then someone gets up
and has an objective proposal from the scriptures then there is always
going to be a subjective reaction in those who are attending. So that in
order for the purposes of God to be effective there is this whole realm
of spiritual understanding that will determine how one views the
objective world of struggling in our obedience or utterly failing due to
a lack of understanding about these subjective realities. "Thy word
have i hid in my heart that i might not sin against God." This is mainly
a indicative proposition first. First because most people take the
bible off the night stand and by reading it bring it into their minds.
And this is not going to be an encouragement to persevere because the
majority of them only take it off the night stand when there is
trouble, they have been feeling so guilty that they have no where else
to go, or they have not had any indicative experiences. The majority of
men have their own world of justice as it relates to love and hate, so
that unless men dwell with having a spiritual understanding of Gods
unfailing love, His absolute faithfulness, and His eternal
determinations, then mens experience will lack that "heart after God
"that leaves all these determinations in His hands. Thats why the Lord
did not commit Himself to any man, because He knew the fickleness of
mens hearts, This speaks to us in the nature of what self generated
feelings are as opposed to what true spiritual passion that over comes
all distorted personality deficiencies in discipling. Hiding
the word is keeping it as the most cherished set of propositions that go
beyond causing us to love the word, but drive us to dwell in the realm
of belonging to a new reality, a reality that no one else can understand
about our experiential understanding. Its not that the individual
spiritual experience is dangerous, but its in the lack of understanding
of the subjectiveness that causes one to lose heart in perseverance.
Each man has his own inward experience, and that is how he understands
what the truth is , how he is going to conduct himself, and what he
teaches others in regards to the truth. Because the truth or lie is
always hidden in each mans heart beyond the sight of men and even beyond
himself. Each man who experiences one conversion after another in the
process of salvation, has his life hidden in Christ beyond the
condemnation of other men who cannot read the heart. So that God must
reveal this hidden knowledge of oneself in the process of renewal so
that only God will receive the praise. "There is a way that seems rite
to a man" That is the way of mans wisdom, and the community that trust
in mans moral ability rather than searching out Gods revealed treasures
that are hidden from the majority of men. We become more
helpless the farther we go in this spiritual journey. That is why it is
so important to hide the truth in our hearts , because we are teaching
others what to believe by our indicative understanding in our
desperation for more super naturalistic revealings. We are sure of that
truth as it relates to our experience and that is what we teach others. This
is the below surface apologetic that we lack so much today. Just
compare the writings of Owen and others to the present day theologians.
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But really , we dont want to start a behavioral neighborhood feud. No
if we believe that God by His grace enables us then we will argue to our
graves that it is not really our righteousness. And if we judge a
brother when the scripture says there is no condemnation arent we using
our two lines to disobey? I know of this attitude, i still deal with it.
My argument is not necessarily about behavior but doctrine. 
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