I
agree to a certain extent that we are able to count or reckon ourselves
dead to sin and alive to God. We really died to sin when we were made
completely new in regeneration. We were baptized into His death and we
were raised in new ness of life in Him. Being in Him makes us
definitively sanctified because we not only died to sin , that is our
sin was imputed to His account in our being identified with Him in His
death but His active and passive righteousness was imputed to our
account in our being raised to new life in Him in being justified. We
were declared righteous in a legal sense. But we still have the remnants
of sin because we do not do what we want to do. Now instead of sin and
righteousness having equal power in us, righteousness rules as we reckon
ourselves dead to sin , since Christ has already done all the work in
concurring sin in us.
But still we are subject to the pull of sin as
if a man were in us tempting us to give into sin. Sin is a metonomy of a
man. There is an active principle in us that has power to pull us down.
We put sin to death by the Spirit. By giving the Spirit more and more
control of our lives we are growing in our sanctification. When we read
and meditate on the word the Spirit uses the word to increase our new
spiritual desires by using our spiritual senses to apprehend the glory
of Christ in our face to face inward renewal. By the process of renewal
through the word we are being transformed from one glory to another as
we see the face of Christ in the revealing of truth in the word of God.
Once
we begin to rejoice in the truth of His word and that revealing we
begin to grow in our desires to glorify Him. As we grow in Him , He then
becomes our all in all.
At the same time we still have all of the
sorrow of this life, and of our humanity, and of our consequences of
sin, and our pain. We still are confronted with the reality of our being
in a finite state, subject to the pangs of death , the sorrows of the
heart and the knowlege of our personal sin. These two experiences are
fountianing up in us as we go from one to another in our moment by
moment experience. As we increase in our desires for Him, and our
understanding increases we begin to experience the heights of joy and
praise in an eternal mindset. In that mindset we learn that there are
experiences beyond our ability to comprehend. We learn that there is a
work of the Spirit that is beyond words. In this frame we are going to
be subjected to more sorrow since we are accustomed to experiencing the
sealing of the Spirit and the effects of that genuine mystical sense. We
are going to feel the pangs of sorrow in a more sensitive way and in
that sensitiveness we will become more unfamiliar with sinning since we
are becoming what we really are in the full understanding of being in
Christ.
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Forums / Main Forum / Why Faith Is A Must
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on: January 09, 2007, 03:36:15 PM
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However, i believe the Bible teaches that,
despite all this persuasion, God does not cross the line of forcing us
to accept Christ. His grace (or undeserved love) and truth, no matter
how desirable, are not irresistible.I
guess since we are talking about choice, that when you say that God
does not cross the line, you mean that he does not violate our free
will? Which makes our choice a self -determined choice. Or you could say
that it is choosing for ourselves. Or you are saying that the cause of
our choosing is from our self determined choice. Since there cannot be a
cause outside of our will , because if there is a cause outside our
will then it would persuade us to choose one way or another.
As i
have said that unless the will is first in choosing then there is a
persuasion that causes us to choose which would violate freedom in how
you describe freedom. But pryor to choosing the mind must have a view of
the object of choice in order for the will to actually embrace either
way. Then the understanding is pryor to the choice also. But what you
are saying that in order for there to be a free choice , the will must
determine for itself , there must not be a cause outside of itself. So
does a person choose to alow the mind to accept the object in order
either to accept the message or not? In that case the mind would be the
will. Or the understanding would choose pryor to the choice. But really
for there to be a choice pryor to the choice of what the minds view of
the message is then the mind must have a view of what choice there would
be in order for the choice of the mind to choose to view whether to
accept the message or not. And since it is absolutely necessary for the
mind to view the message before choosing then there is a cause pryor to
the choice that effects the choice. So then your view of freedom is
questionable since there is a persuasion to choose (the view of the
mind) in order for there to be a choice. Do you really believe that in
order for the will to be free it must be in a state of absolute equal
librium i.e not crossing the line of something or some one causing
choice? I can explain further if you want.
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8052
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Forums / Theology Forum / Which One Is The Gift?
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on: January 05, 2007, 04:09:08 PM
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"...But
because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us
alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by
grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated
us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the
coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace,
expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you
have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the
gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God
prepared in advance for us to do."
(Ephesians 2:4-10)
Just
one of those unanswered questions i still have. I know that grace means
unmerited favor or undeserved love. What i'm wondering is whether the
"gift of God" of which Paul speaks is the faith or the being saved from hell. I've heard both ideas taught. I'm wondering what idea is better supported by the context and grammar.
I
believe that since the context is Gods soveriegn election in salvation.
Faith being the agency by which we apprehend salvation and through
which we rest in Christ. First unless we know that He is God then we
will not trust Him. So we must have a divine knowlege so that faith can
apprehend and rest in knowing who He is. We believe in things unseen
because God alone has reveal them to us in regeneration.
We have
human faith that we exercise on a daily basis. We sit in a chair
believing that the chair will hold us up. We use our faith in every
relationship , trusting people on different levels , from work
relationships to family relationships to trusting strangers. But this
kind of faith is not saving faith. This kind of faith is human faith.
This kind of faith is built on knowlege by experience. This kind of
trust is really earned by experience. It is a fleeting trust. It is a
trust that will only lead us to reject spiritual knowlege. We cannot
gain salvation through human faith.
Human faith is very earthy and
it is defined by relationships we develope as we live out our lives. It
is devoid of any knowlege of God. Human faith is built on how we are
affected by others. It is entirely within the paradigm legal
relationships. Human faith is entirely built on free will being
exercised for self gratification. There is no fear of God before their
eyes, so that those who only possess human faith are their own gods.
This human faith is totally self absorbed.
Because man in his
natural state is in bondage, the human faith leads him to a system of
self righteousness. The trust he has in people is built on a system of
philosophy and not in the paradigm of supernaturalism and the soveriegn
will of God. The moral system of accountablity is foundational in the
paradigm of human faith. The reason is because human faith is birthed in
the ocean of corruption in the minds view of the external objects so
that it comes out of a state of an inordinate fear of God. So that man
in the exercise of human faith in relationships views the relationships
as a presrequesite or a means to obtain satisfaction from our Heavenly
Father rather than as a hindrance of a denial of self. What ever comes
between God and us is an idol.
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8053
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Forums / Main Forum / Why Faith Is A Must
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on: January 05, 2007, 03:26:32 PM
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Thanks
Soc, I hope you are not through with this discussion. I have just been
taking a little break here on the forums but want to keep discussing. By
your continued diologue i take it that you still want to discuss. I
have been reading some of your other post and i have enjoyed your
thinking through these things. This is a breath of fresh air for me
since there are many things that need to be said and diologuing is the
best way to come to some kind of compromise. I am trying to understand
your position on free will. Do you believe that your sin was not a
hindrance to your choosing Christ ? Thanks Brother.
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Forums / Main Forum / Why Faith Is A Must
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on: December 25, 2006, 01:57:48 PM
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...
But again we are really discussing the soveriegnty of God and that
aspect of behavior by choice. And since God causes everything, we can
conclude that God causes the unbelievers to choose according to the
common grace they have in their choices. God is absolutely soveriegn and
has decreed what ever comes to pass. So really what keeps an unbeliever
from the depths of sin is common grace. It is the cause of all
philanthropy. God orders all things so that He gets the glory even if
men in the state of unbelief acknowlege it or not.
Yes, i see what
you mean, MBG, and your words remind me of the way Steve Brown puts it:
"We can only love to the degree we are loved." To me, it would
be insane for me to take God's gift of His Son and the benefit of that
gift, which is eternal life, and then thumb my nose at Him by living for
sin and not for Him. The thing is, i once lived in such insanity.
When i first heard the gospel, i accepted it with joy. I prayed the
sinners prayer and knew eternal life was God's gift to me. I hung out
with born again Christians, studied the Bible with them, worshipped with
them and sang Christian songs with them. Then i went off to college
and shed my Christianity like it was a coat i no longer needed. I
called myself a Christian but cared not a whip about what God wanted for
me. I lived only for myself. It took a crisis in my life to
bring me back to God, and now i cannot imagine turning from Him and
going back to the dark depths again. So i think to myself, "Why did i
care so little about Him then? Why was i so blind? What makes the
change in my desires now?" I think Paul helps me come closer to
understanding myself when i read: "For Christ's love compels us,
because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.
And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for
themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again." (2 Corinthians 5:14-15) Funny
how the depth of God's love did not dawn on me until He helped me
through a low point in my life. I was helpless and prayed in
desperation. I made a deal with Him that if he'd get me out of my
trouble i'd get myself to church. He did, and i did, and i have not
turned back in the last 15 years. "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:  I
knew the words, but i did not experience them. I knew that they were
true, but i did not trust the truth of those words and let them affect
me emotionally. Jesus might have been the Savior and the Lord to me,
but He was not my Savior and my Lord. That was an
important distinction, at least for me. Realizing that distinction
changed my life. Yes, i must have been insane. I'm grateful He knew
exactly what i needed to draw me closer to Him.
* * *So,
MBG, you would say that i was not really freely choosing God but that
His love overwhelmed me to the point that i could do nothing but turn
from my sin and turn to Him? If so, you might have a point there.
Yes
i think that you responded to the call of God. At a point and time you
were regenerated. The circumstances in our past and how regeneration
worked out visibley in our experience are all different. Some people are
regenerated at their birth, in infantancy, or as adults. Some people
have a profound experience in salvation, some people have a very
ordinary experience. Some people do not know when they were saved. The
important thing is that we are trusting Christ in the present.
When
we are regenerated we are given a new will so that we can respond to the
gospel. Our self will is killed, and we are given Gods will. Yet our
faculty of will is not elimanted but rather is regenerated. We are the
ones who choose to believe, because our new desires cause us to choose
Christ, which desires come from a new spiritual knowlege of Christ. We
have a new understanding of who Christ is by being able to spiritually
view the value of His death and ressurrection. In other words pryor to
being regenerated we were only in darkness, but in regeneration the
light comes on, the light of the knowlege of God. Once the light comes
on then we begin to see, feel , touch, taste , spiritually, so that we
embrace Christ and find in Him our all in all. He becomes our only hope.
And yet all of these new desires are spiritual so that we cannot
really understand the depth of them and in a mystical sense we cannot
explain them as to how they work out. The profound supernatural nature
of God dwelling in us by the Holy Spirit in the application of all that
we have in our inward experience is beyond words. They begin to deepen
in our sanctification but can never really be sastified in this life,
but only in our future heavenly abode.
Our spiritual sense being
defined by these new desires are were we experience the mystery of
supernaturalism. Naturally we do not like to focus on the inward working
of the faculties because we are blinded by the physical aspect of
seeing feeling touching and so we naturally do not think in terms of
spiritual senses. In being carnally effected we live so much in the
imagination of what reality exist. We do use all of our physical senses
in the out working from our spiritual senses but there is a struggle in
this area between accepting that we are physical beings who are effected
by the spiritual struggle and embracing the reality of how we are
spiritually effected by our physical pains and seeing Christ as being
totally man , who identified with us in the physical realm, and on the
other hand , we are to struggle with putting our physical appetites
under control by meditation in His word and letting the Spirits work
illuminate to us individually our expereience in this struggle, in an
individual sense , because we all have different weaknesses .
But
yet because the physical aspect so often alarms us to our spiritual
inward expereince we are to view these inward experiences with the
physical aspect as part of the inward spiritual struggle. Because we do
not like to admit areas of weakness that are exposed by our physical
senses, and being alerted by the physical unless we veiw our emotional
state in our inward expereience we really never get to the bottom of our
pain. We begin to devalue the mystical and supernatural work, in our
carnal disinterest in our mortification. By devaluing the physical
senses in our spiritual inward expereince we fail to gain an insight
into the freedom we have in Christ in our mortification. Because
physically we are weak in the natural outworking.
These experiences
of guilt and blame are from not taking a wholistic veiw of the human
condition in the physical and spiritual. For example , we begin to pray,
now there are weaknesses that we are confronted with both in the
physcial senses and the spiritual senses. We are confronted from within
and without. We grow weary in prayer because we are phyisically weak not
just because we are strugging spiritually. What we need to see is that
just as we are using our physical senses for the spiritual exercise of
prayer , our Father in heaven stoops down to our level and offers to us
these physical attributes of seeing ,touching, feeling, so that in these
personifications of attributed faculties to God , He infact undergurds
our weak state of our faculties by communicating to us the eternal
nature of these faculties so that we are deeply aware of our inward
spiritual struggle and His answer to our weak senses by inflaming our
desires by that communicated personification. Once we veiw these
faculties in and eternal sense we are transformed into His image.
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8064
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Forums / Theology Forum / Opening Up
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on: December 24, 2006, 02:45:00 PM
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I
agree with you jlee. It is very helpful to trust someone to listen to us
and uphold us. First we are very complex creatures . We have deep
emotions, and we are always thinking of something that will either lead
to anxiety or will lead to peace and tranquility. There are a thousand
avenues of thought in a persons mind and there are just as many
intersections. In our culture we are trained to think small thoughts
that are insignificant when it comes to closing down the avenues of
thoughts that lead to sin and because our thinking is of little
consequence we find that our faculties of mind, will and emotion
tumultiously out of sinc. In this paradigm we become captives to our
imagination. When we imagine ourselves to be at peace having our
faculties working in unison but we are not resting in Christ then we
are going to return to our way of shallow thinking.
Yet we must
become aware of our tendencies to trust in those thoughts that will lead
us into our besetting sins. First we have bent toward a certian way of
thinking by our being in state of sin. Because of the complexity of the
problem of our minds natural waywardness, we decieve ourselves into
thinking that our problem does not have layers of deception but only
that we are unhappy on the surfice and we need to seek a remedy that
will give a short term relief. We are always bent toward short term
solutions because we are also physically burdened with pain and by our
natural sense we want to live rather than to die. Here the mixture of
the physical has a direct effect on the way we think and we naturally
want to get the shorterm remedy. Its just like taking medication for our
physical pain. We get relief from our pain and in our carnal paradigm
we tend to trust in the medication rather than in Him alone. This way of
thinking is so engrained in each one of us that it blinds us to really
experiencing freedom in Christ by resting in His work alone. The good
meds. lead us into imaginative shallow ways of thinking. Instead of
seeing Christ in the serpent pole we worship the serpent on the pole.
But
the truth is our trust is always mixed with corruption. When we begin
to rest in Christ then we even begin to trust that we are resting in
Christ by our own trust. So this is were there is more to trusting in
Christ than just thinking rite thoughts. There is a sense of Christ that
cannot really be explained. There is a spiritual sense in His divine
illumination that causes us to not trust in our trusting Him. Because
our faith is a gift, then we know that trusting is something that does
not come natural to us. The paradigm of trusting then is a supernatural
paradigm. So really trusting in Him does not originate from an
intellectual paradigm. Even though the mind and the intellectual
thoughts are a part of trusting, these do not lead to trusting in Him
alone. Intellectually accepting a doctrinal position is just one part of
the trusting paradigm. There must be a new will, a new sight , a new
hearing, and a new touch. There must be a new man in order for there to
be an real spiritual understanding of trusting.
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Forums / Main Forum / Why Faith Is A Must
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on: December 19, 2006, 01:58:05 PM
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Yes, i think i understand, MBG. There is no one righteous or good
because the standard for righteousness and goodness is Jesus Himself,
who was and is perfect. Even Jesus said, "There is no one good but God
alone".
I understand that everything you or i think is tainted by our sinful nature (what popular culture might call our dark side), so that what we think is unselfish and giving love on our part really has some degree of selfishness to it.
So,
you are really not saying Christians are good and non-Christians are
not, rather, what you are saying is that all Christians and
non-Christians (at least to some degree) are really evil.
Unbelievers are not as evil as their potential of evil. There is a
difference between murder and just hating someone. The punishment
demands are different. On the positive side the rewards for giving 1
million dollars are far greater than giving 10 dollars. And these
circumstances involve personal choices that come with reward or
punishment. But really what keeps an unbeliever from being the worse
that he possibly could be? What makes an unbeliever do good acts of
kindness? Well there is a sense in which the rewards or punishment
encourage them to act with moral conviction. But again we are really
discussing the soveriegnty of God and that aspect of behavior by choice.
And since God causes everything , we can conclude that God causes the
unbelievers to choose according to the common grace they have in their
choices. God is absolutely soveriegn and has decreed what ever comes to
pass. So really what keeps an unbeliever from the depths of sin is
common grace. It is the cause of all philanthropy. God orders all things
so that He gets the glory even if men in the state of unbelief
acknowlege it or not.
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8073
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Forums / Main Forum / Why Faith Is A Must
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on: December 19, 2006, 01:13:42 PM
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I would not say the Bible teaches that a non-Christian's desires are 100% evil 100% of the time.
\"THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE;
11. THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS,
THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD;
12. ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS;
THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD,
THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.\"
13. \"THEIR THROAT IS AN OPEN GRAVE,
WITH THEIR TONGUES THEY KEEP DECEIVING,\"
\"THE POISON OF ASPS IS UNDER THEIR LIPS\";
14. \"WHOSE MOUTH IS FULL OF CURSING AND BITTERNESS\";
15. \"THEIR FEET ARE SWIFT TO SHED BLOOD,
16. DESTRUCTION AND MISERY ARE IN THEIR PATHS,
17. AND THE PATH OF PEACE THEY HAVE NOT KNOWN.\"
18. \"THERE IS NO FEAR OF GOD BEFORE THEIR EYES.\"
Here
is the state of men under sin. Men are corrupted in every area of
their being both spirit and body. All of their deeds are only evil
continually. Because men do not posses the righteousness of Christ their
deeds are evil. All men are not as evil as they could be because there
are different levels of sin in a natural way.
Men may do good things
in the sense of philantrophy. But spiritually there is no goodness in
mens actions because the philantropous acts are from an evil heart. Men
being aleinated from God, do acts of goodness in a self righteous way in
display of their independence from God. Their deeds are offensive to
God because they are done in the spirit of alienation from God to self.
Choices come from desires that are from the deepest recesses of the
soul. An unbelievers soul is dead to spiritual things and there is no
love to God in his heart not having spiritual affections ,men are void
of divine light and life in soul and mind. An unbelievers freedom to
choose is that he can choose what he desires most for himself. In that
sense there is a goodness in choosing morally good. And there is a good
consequence in choosing or making morally good choices. But every choice
is done from an evil desire not being spiritually good. It seems that
there is some freedom to choose but really unbelievers are in the state
of bondage and from our view point as believers ,their choices are
bondage choices.
Even as believers we are still corrupted with
sin because we still possess the remnants of sin in our whole being. We
are corrupted entirely. The goodness that we have comes from a heart
that has been regenerated. The desires that come from our souls are
spiritually good desires. There is a spiritual goodness in our personal
choices because the desires are our desires , our soul has been
transfromed, but because our goodness comes from a corrupted heart the
desires are mixed with corruption so that they are unacceptable before
the eye of God. We have been imputed with the righteousness of Christ
and all our works compared to His accomplished work in His obedience,
and death and ressurrection are unacceptable we brought under the light
of divine justice. Our goodness is only accepted because we are good
because we have Christ goodness to our account. So the above passage
even applies to us and we are brought to silence when we see ourselves
before the law we see our potential as sinners and we turn to Christ
being fully convinced by the law that we possess the above corruption.
We are ungodly in ourselves as believers.
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