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871	Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself	on: October 21, 2012, 01:02:29 PM
I dont like the the scapegoat teaching having as the moral of the story being death. Although i agree the goat who carried the sins of Gods people had to die i do not see death as the end of how sin was taken care of. I dont like the picture of the goat being sent out into the ugly dark judgement of the world apart from Gods people without drawing a parallel to the Shepherd sheep paradigm. First of all the idea of carrying sin... the weight of something...or in a relational sense that being identity of Gods sheep in the substitutionary mold- the Shepherd actually carrying the sheep for the purpose of showing that God has a completely different view than we do of the events in this world. So in God acting as the complete responsible substitution the scapegoat would actually speak on our behalf as it is sent out into the world ...going before us. I think we get bogged down in the physical elements of a type without understanding the meta physical relationship we have to our Shepherd that gives us a healthy view of identity. So we can draw a parallel to sin that not only needs to be dealt with but how it relates to the scapegoat as carrying that sin as a weight for us. If in fact God does promise to remove our sins as far as the east is from the west so also He promises to carry us who are burdened by the weight of sin and sorrow. There is nothing more comforting and presents to us a completed substitute to know that we have a scapegoat in this world that keeps us from being judged as the wicked. The teaching as a scapegoat carrying these burdens and facing the ultimate disaster in that identity..in the most dangerous environment should give us a new trust in His promise to be our real substitute in this relationship of grace. Its in this paradigm that old things have passed away behold all things are made new. As He goes out before us old reality is meeting new identity.
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872  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Is it a sin not to accept forgiveness? on: October 18, 2012, 09:24:10 PM cont. You must be tough in a world of blame. You must be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. So there is a kind of casting derision on this culture of blame. Because there is not difference in a biblical sense between blame and a curse. So in dealing with people as we experience love beyond the normal we are forced to wrestle with them. "Come out from among them and be ye separate says the Lord." Any time you have wrong anger it is from a fundamental misunderstanding of forgiveness. Because there is only two kinds of anger... sinful anger and righteous indignation. You do not have in between anger. And the hardest cases of dealing with blame and anger is from the self righteous. Those people who do not really seek forgiveness through Gods covenant love alone. So that any reaction in this world is communication of some sort as to what we think of God by how we live in forgiveness or blame. Now you listen to me... a curse is like touching a dead corpse. Its like receiving death by a miss understanding of forgiveness.   Reply Quote Notify

873  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Is it a sin not to accept forgiveness? on: October 18, 2012, 08:55:25 PM LA ....why is it that christians have such a hard time with understanding forgiveness? If God has promised to forgive all of our sins and not hold them against us then how come is so hard to believe Him? Why do christians get anxious and sorrowful when they feel guilty about their sins? It would seem to me that the reaction to our guilt is what determines how we understand the difference between good hate or bad hate. There is always confusion when we experience anxiety. Anxiety is simply not trusting in what God says. And these terms we throw around are not always personally applied correctly in the meta physical paradigm. Because we apply the idea of forgiveness by what we are taught about forgiveness. So the most fundamental partner of belief is experiencing real forgiveness. But is it easy to simply believe the words on the page that God forgives and forgets? Or is it a desire that we have and according to our understanding of the application by the teaching of forgiveness is when we experience the pure desire of forgiveness?   If you look in Psalm 51 i believe this is what the Psalmist is applying to himself in his petition and distinguishing between God and men. Its not that he is trying to exercise his guilt away by confession but its that he acknowledges his inability to cover his own sin and because he knows there is nothing that he can do he abandons all confidence that even his confession is acceptable. So you have all of these restoration pleas...restore the joy...grant me a willing spirit...and put me in the position where i can be of help to others with them knowing this great sin.  All of these petitions are said because he does not have the power nor the understanding to accomplish this restoration. And he says "save me from blood guilt".. or being abandoned by God in his guilt.. a capital guilt....this "save" is being delivered ...which is the only transparent plea from a true understanding of real redemption. Not rehabilitate me or have me come clean but dont let me dwell in this cursed disposition ...that legal conviction voice of the curse. Here hes wrestling with spiritual death ... or that cursed paradigm.  But help me to curse those who are hypocrites (those people who live their lives by the cursed disposition of blame)away from me so that i more and more focus on real forgiveness. This includes a wish for them to be eternally condemned as that by which our anger is consumed by God. Then i will live in the blessed state of continuous forgiveness.     So we see this is a pure desire. Its the same desire we experience when our hearts say .. seek His face.. His face i will seek. In other words we are not trying to act our forgiveness by the culture we are in or even according to what others think it is. But we only trust in Christ to restore us. In this petition we roll our anger over to Him in having to deal with those who do not have our best interest.  The point is that if real forgiveness according to free grace was experienced by all then it would not be hard to forgive ourselves because it would be the under-girding of a hope through encouragement. But we find that most of the time we are all alone in this because very few people really understand God speaking the peace. Finding all of our joy in His love for us that exceeds our worse sin. Because real grace is forgiveness meeting a love that is greater than we could ever understand in which sin actually teaches us through forgiveness just how much God loves us. Real forgiveness is love overcoming sorrow, guilt, and doubt. Real forgiveness is Gods love consuming our hate whether is a real anger toward self or others.   Reply Quote Notify

874  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 18, 2012, 03:46:30 PM Quote from: Kings_kid on October 18, 2012, 03:40:15 PM mbG:  "So the bible does not describe a process by which we can be sure that we have arrived at a better place and say that we are more willing...but throughout our walk it gives us freedom from ourselves so that we receive all that has been promised in our salvation." K_k:  We receive more freedom from ourselves when we become more willing to trust and depend on Him more than on ourselves.  Christ is the Truth that sets us free if we abide in Him.  And if we don't abide in Him He teaches us more about why we need to. And He Himself is "all that has been promised in our salvation" for with Him we receive all good things, eternally. John 8:31-32 "Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My Word, you are My disciples indeed.  And you shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.” Romans 8:31-32  Amplified "What then shall we say to [all] this? If God is for us, who [can be] against us? [Who can be our foe, if God is on our side?] "He who did not withhold or spare [even] His own Son but gave Him up for us all, will He not also with Him freely and graciously give us all [other] things?" Just like I said.. Kk brings the cart ...the will..placing it before the horse... lol will write later ... got to go. Reply Quote Notify

875  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Is it a sin not to accept forgiveness? on: October 18, 2012, 03:43:53 PM We really will never be satisfied ultimately with receiving forgiveness on a horizontal level. There are life effects from sin that is in relationships. So the question is does anyone ever change so that its evident that they do not struggle with that sin that so easily besets them? If you read the ot account of relationships you will see that those saints were doing the same things to one another even tho .. some of them were living up to 900 years. They basically had the same quirks throughout their christian lives. And the focus is on how God redeemed them in spite of their sin. Because the ot account is not a teaching of some psychological secret to make it appear that man could be happier but it was a story of redemption showing how God as a covenant keeping God was always faithful, kind, long suffering, gentle, and forgiving. We see the bible teaches success as we see Gods work in the historical account and seek to give Him all the glory. So we can be freely forgiven out of a sense of the bigness of Gods covenant faithfulness. We can say that for the grace of God we would be the most bitter person in the world. We can live in continuous free forgiveness that is all the source of our happiness even tho we do not always get along in this world.    Reply Quote Notify

876  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 18, 2012, 03:30:59 PM One of the problems we are having with Kk is how he begins to describe salvation in terms of how man relates to God. And the steady drum beat of passing through our will as the necessary beginning of our salvation gives us a huge "I" factor. lol I do not think Kk means to sound like " I have gone through the process of the molding that God does a little bit at a time and it was great because i gave Him more and more of my will ... now let me tell you this secret." lol I mean at some point we got to step out of the way and acknowledge that we will never fully overcome all addictions.. sins... struggle with believing or experiencing victory when we are giving into sin really bad. lol So the bible does not describe a process by which we can be sure that we have arrived at a better place and say that we are more willing...but throughout our walk it gives us freedom from ourselves so that we receive all that has been promised in our salvation. Reply Quote Notify

877  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Why does Christianity/the Bible Make So Many People Completely Crazy? on: October 18, 2012, 03:17:37 PM Because God has made us social creatures we are not only a product of our private exercises but we develop in the mold of the culture. Why is that the bible emphasizes this distinction between where God dwells and the earth? Because no matter how noble or evil or just the endeavor is on this earth in itself never meets the standard of real righteousness or real judgement and destruction. This is why we believe in sovereign grace because the sense of finding justice is ultimately out of our hands. So a lot of this frustration that we feel is not rooted being satisfied in this life with ultimate redemption, ultimate justice, ultimate destruction. Because whether it is a time where we have been on the mountain top and experienced joy and satisfaction...as a member of the earths culture we will never be satisfied. Whether we have one million.. two million... etc.. we just want more. So the question is in describing our own purpose in this life.. our own value ... how do we measure our importance in distinguishing between what is an imagination and what is reality? Because our lust for more is rooted in our value according to our accomplishments. So the real question is what is real freedom since we really are never free of thinking we are more important than we are seeing that we are never ultimately satisfied with what we have. And the only remedy for this evil is to focus on grace. We can point to the historical significance of religious activity in meeting the needs of mankind. But at the same time God has made man a social creature as he relates to others by the image of the perfect man. We are made to worship an image. This is why the message of grace gets us to focus on the holistic freedom that we can only image as we understand who God is and by that who we are. So if there is any redeeming hope.. if there is any justice.. if there is any destruction ... it is only accomplished not only in the future but in this culture as it is carried out by God. And this brings us to the most personal effects that we experience as we try to see things as they really are. We come face to face with God. Because no matter how we try to envision success in any endeavor unless we have found God then nothing is right. In knowing the need to seek the face of God we acknowledge not only His right to order all things but we also place ourselves in His hand acknowledging that He is the only one who allows and withholds powers that move the events in this world that man cannot thwart. Reply Quote Notify

878  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 16, 2012, 06:43:38 PM Some of this self denial is preconceived by the position one takes on how pride and humility are taught when you take the whole bible and bring these two paradigms into context. Because the semi plagenism view is that a christian can be identified in the proud group. So they take the scriptures where there is an ultimate warning that the proud will be humbled by God teaching them a lesson and apply it across the board as a universal warning. But the bible is clear about drawing parallels to the reprobate being in the proud group and the believers being in the humble group. got to go will take this up later. Reply Quote Notify

879  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Does Jesus support captial punishment? on: October 14, 2012, 11:19:51 AM There is a difference between God perfect judgement and mans system of judgment. This is why God speaks from heaven. Because Gods throne is His ruling by His laws, decrees, statutes, and promises that was in His eternal counsel from eternity past. The evidence of God being on His throne is how He executes justice in His order through His eternal counsel. Nothing surprises God because it was ordered before the world was created. Because God was present before all generations then He is obviously given the glory of knowing all things. How can man think that God is not in heaven and is not watching everything? Now this watching is not a moral will reacting to the events of this world but His eyes are ordering things according to His pre ordained word. He watches over the righteous but the way of the wicked will be destroyed. The righteous get what the desire but the desires of the wicked come to nothing. So we live in a universe where the potential through evil is in the paradigm of destruction. That means that God places the premium on who knows He is watching and not what we can understand by His watching. God has already spoken and His law will be upheld. Not one small stroke of the pen will be without force. Because the law does not only show men their sin. It does not only remind men of their rebellion against a holy God but His law curses... declares death on the heads of all men. His law places men under a pox and they eventually have His wrath poured upon their heads. Now God desires to kill and end all evil and every evil intent of mens hearts. The present desire of God is to destroy evil men. We put to death in a spiritual sense as God desires. But only God can order the real judgement of men both in this life and the one to come. We are creatures who create blessing and cursing. In mourning over the present state of our own evil and the cursed evil of this world we as it were throw ashes on our heads wishing that God would look at our sorrow from the death of the ashes and avenge our blood. Every saint that is persecuted enters heaven with a plea" to judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood. " Then we are given a white robe of Christ righteous judgement and told to wait a little longer before we judge them. Now listen to me .. you must understand righteous indignation in order to deal with the root cause of your anger. Reply Quote Notify

880  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 14, 2012, 10:56:35 AM We live in a society because we are made to be social creatures. The communication that is at some level of how we view justice is how we understand our purpose and how we are appreciated for the good we do.  So every society lives according to two voices. These voices are distinguished between two opposing views. There is the purely secular voice as opposed the created voice. How one is molded is how these voices teach a person through threats or promises. The world does not just teach us a world view but it seeks to mold us by threats. A lot of people talk as if the christian experience is kind of a quiet way of self denial. I see this laissie faire attitude about keeping to the standard of peace in a society which is an unwise approach that leads to adding many personal problems. God first loves us in order to promote peace through strength. On the one hand we acknowledge that God rules the universe and nothing that thwart His purposes. On the other hand if God is our God then we approach this life by a strength that is beyond belief. We do not apologize for Gods power to judge nor do we apologize for His strength that works so powerfully in us. The quality of our lives depends upon our advancing in this holistic struggle. We do not look to the right or the left ... we keep our eyes on the prize. This is why ignorance is not bliss. Knowledge is the path to freedom. Because the world was created by an idea that God put into His perfect order that evidences His beauty. Spiritual knowledge is the only structure of health that we experience that gives us a real sense of our purpose. Our purpose is ordered by our personal knowledge that is applied to every situation. This is why the apostle encouraged the nt saints to keep on reminding themselves of the grace that they will receive in the new order of things. Our self image is only pleasurable as we are reminded of our purpose by living in the grace that we have received. The world lives by the principle of work for worth. When we learn to think correctly we will experience more and more opposition. The world is going in a direction where they do not want to hear what they need most. They do not want the value of the life of a person to be freely given by God. So we are always faced with an extreme hatred in forcing our view of free grace upon them while that gives them a sense of freedom in which they appreciate that which does not promote their person importance. We live in this grace because it is the only way that we experience eternal life. Our experience of eternal life is foreign to their way of living. Even if we show them what it is they will not see it for how important it is for living in real reality. This is why God has provided all that we need to see with our spiritual eyes. Because He promises to teach us in a way that cannot be seen. He speaks to us as the way He teaches us His daily wisdom. The more we apply ourselves to knowledge the more spiritual oxygen we will be given to think correctly by hearing God speak to us. He promises to hear the prayers of the righteous. Or the mature. It means that our knowledge is how our minds experience the boundaries of Gods way of creating. In learning to hear Gods created voice of wisdom we experience more and more of His power and pleasure. We must grow to see that all things in this life are ordered by our loving Father and His purposes are going to be completed for His own glory. When we are bathed in His purposes through the Spirit of illumination then we begin to glory in all things going one way to the end of God being shown to be God. In this we experience His power and pleasure more than we could ever handle.    Reply Quote Notify

881  Forums / Break Room / Re: Godspell“As long as we live there is never enough singing.” ― Martin Luther on: October 13, 2012, 11:41:39 PM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oLibIX4KEg&feature=relmfu ACT 2 Remove Reply Quote Notify

882  Forums / Break Room / Re: Anger and Lust, the relationship on: October 13, 2012, 10:29:55 PM I think if a person losses his temper its because he gets jealous ...i mean as a normal cycle ...because he doesnt trust the other person. And so lust really is what happens when he gets angry. And this kind of anxiety that someone experiences is usually because his relationship is built on the physical rather than an emotional connection. So a person who is angry experiences anxiety in relationships. The lust is an uncontrolled imagination. So along with the anxiety he experiences pain. I mean anytime a person is filled with jealousy and rage there is gonna be pain.  A normal relationship has trust that is learned over a period of time. Trust is essential as the basis of enjoying the other person. The question is why are people attracted to one another? What draws a person to another person? So you have the potential to depend upon someone for the wrong reasons. In all relationships there is an attraction of people who are on the same emotional level. And in good relationships there is a connection on the basis of trust and not pain. So the question is can you bring something positive into the relationship without getting some thing in return. I do not believe that a person can take that burden of pain from the other person as the proof of love. But we all must have a private personal growth that we can recharge ourselves and bring that into the relationship. As well as our learning to be loved by God as the basis of dealing with our personal anger we also must respect the boundaries of the other person. In a close relationship there is always tendency to always point to the sensitive areas of the other person. So in order for there to be a healthy soil for growth there should be forbidden areas that we pursue. Trust is built on respecting another person so as not to create anxiety by not being sensitive to their good points and bad. So we can go outside those boundaries and cause a lot of hurt and anger. I think these two things are the biggest obstacles of healthy relationships. Reply Quote Notify

883  Forums / Main Forum / Re: God is perfect love -- in both Testaments on: October 13, 2012, 01:53:43 PM God is love. If God is love then He orders every event for the good of every man. So why is there harm and abuse in this world? If God is love then He does all things according to His relationship to men. If God is love then He does not harm man out of treachery. God has made man a thinking being. This is why man has the ability to experience real freedom. But without God man does not have the ability to reason or create redemption. God must be the judge of all the thoughts of man because man acts according to what he devises in his mind. Gods standard of peace and tranquility cannot be compromised. So that one wayward thought in the universe is a declaration of war against Gods peaceful purposes. But God is consistent with His design for man to experiences good according to mans value as God created him. So that even the allowance of freedom at the expense of that good is allowed by God because God is bound to be good in reordering the bad. If we were to put all the schemes of man on a time line then we would be able to understand what Gods love was like in the history of these hidden purposes. But we do not have the ability to see all of the reasons for mans treachery.  In order for us to be able to understand the real circumstances of a persons life then we must be able to judge all the thoughts of all the generations so that we understand Gods standard of loving man. Because God acts according to the real reality of a persons experience knowing the secrets of a mans heart. Most of the judgments made by man are from a very short sighted understanding of all the facts. God is the only one who can bring ultimate justice to this earth. Because God is love then He works in our lives as His people to reorder all of our wayward desires and thoughts. Our desires are fundamentally for the purpose of creating our world. Gods love to us works in us to create our world as He desires and recreates the evil in our world. Gods love is so big that we do not understand all of the unseen thoughts and words spoken that effect our circumstances. This is why in acknowledged our inability to understand the reality of just how big Gods love is to us we begin to see just how big His grace is that gives us real security in being and not just what we think is real. In knowing just how big God is we must listen to what He says about how He works so that we will learn how to have fellowship with a God whose love is beyond what we could ever imagine. Then we will see a more profound change from knowing how much we are loved. Reply Quote Notify

884  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: If eternal torture is dead, what about "everyone gets saved"? on: October 13, 2012, 01:18:28 PM I agree that God always wins. God will make everything right in His time. And this is the principle of God getting glory in this world. We think we win by our own performance. But God always does things both positive and negative to show that He alone wins and it is in the context of how valuable the deliverance appears to the world for His own elect. This is what is so confusing about this world. Its that we do not understand how God has made us. We are always trying to out guess God or think that God should work this or that way. We do not understand that Gods smile is not what we think it looks like by the circumstances we experience. Gods measurements about our success are not according to our value. Because God has given us the ability to persevere through this world because He is the I am... He always is the same.  Who can counsel God? What man was with God when God created the world? Who has existed through all generations with the knowledge and experience that God has? Who are you oh man to talk back to God? This is why we avoid the possibilities as man sees them. But we only trust in Gods word. If we have been brought in to Gods household then we have all the promises and all the riches through Christ. So this is more than just our wishing that God would work this way or that way. Its believing in the presence of great opposition that we will always win. Its not just believing that sometimes we lose and sometimes we win. Or always looking at life as if we are gonna die. But its a confession that we will persevere to the end and trample under foot all of our enemies. And even tho we grow weak and we lose our abilities yet that spirit of stouthearted is a shield against all opposition. How can we rise above all the worlds tendencies to put men in a mold and go outside of that mold to give the most hopeless man a real hope? It is because God always does what He wants so that He looks the best. Even if it means that we must struggle. You see the christian life is about fighting battles and winning little battles. Its about going from valleys to mountain tops and back to valleys. Its about being in the valley and walking up to a rock above our enemies and circumstances and experiencing freedom to have confidence that we will not fail because God will not lose. Where have all the leaders gone? Why does everyone seem so bogged down in the hopelessness and sorrows of this world? Where is the generation that says God promised it and i believe it and we will all prosper? Its because we think that God in ordering events for His own glory is not in the end good for us. Did you know that God does all of the success in our trials and we end up trampling our enemies because God promises to destroy all our foes Himself and yet He is gracious enough to reward us for His success? If in fact God is successful from beginning to end then why cant we offer hope that is not normal? Reply Quote Notify

885	Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Praying in the Spirit	on: October 13, 2012, 12:39:31 PM
Praying in the Spirit is praying with confidence that God goes before us and He will make our paths straight. This confidence comes from calling on God to intervene in our lives. The Spirit gives us an emanation of God as a spirit of faithfulness  to trust Him as a covenant keeping God. The Spirit witnesses with our spirits where by we cry.. we call.. we plead so that we experience preservation. Preservation is simply the absence of the voice of the opposition to our faith. Preservation is living in the hope of our calling. The Spirit draws us to the God of all grace. Praying in the Spirit is confessing sin for the purpose finding the beginning of our new identity. It is stripping away all of our trust in our understanding of how we have grown and being drawn to the experience of our first love. It is being reduced to a heart that is enlarged at the point were we experienced grace the most. In this experience we are brought back to our Father who is always kind.. always merciful... always faithful... always long suffering.... we are brought back to the glory of our first love. Our hearts are enlarged to find a joy that is as simple as our first experience of salvation and yet it is enlarged by our maturity of Gods love for us. The Spirit moves through our desires to want a more willing spirit...that spirit is a kind of baptism of experiencing     886  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Why does Christianity/the Bible Make So Many People Completely Crazy? on: October 13, 2012, 12:19:37 PM I agree Bill... if the gospel is a gospel of grace then we must always start with the christain experience as a gift to us from beginning to end. And throughout our christian growth we must always go back to grace in reasoning about the value of our new lives in seeing ourselves in the context of living in grace looking outside that door seeing the conflict over the threshold as the law being outside of our dwelling. Because grace is not just the answer to our sin but its a single principle that keeps us from all opposition. So we say there is principle of grace and the opposition is the principle of the law. The bible depicts a principle as a mind or a way of thinking. The mind of grace is in direct opposition to the mind of the law. So that any mixture of the law places us back under the bondage of the law. God is as big as grace is flourishing in our lives. There is nothing that we have that has not been given to us by God. There is no misunderstanding that we face where we have found more freedom than others that does not prove that grace is real. If we have any comfort.. if we have any solace it is because we have learned more grace. This is why the bible says that God is the God of all grace. If we have been moved to anything that is righteous it is because the power and understanding that we have is gifted to us by grace. But the law says we earned it in some ways so that we begin to experience bondage because we place ourselves in Gods position.    Reply Quote Notify 887  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 13, 2012, 11:56:30 AM Ive been discussing the christian lifestyle in a mindset that crosses against the grain of the modern day mindset. Ive pointed out the problems with different ways of seeing the world. Ive been showing how our problems come from a disconnect between learning doctrines and how wrong we can approach a true understanding of ourselves by how we apply these doctrines to the words we trust in about our image and the way we see the world. All words begin from God describing their meaning that cannot be compromised in drawing from the truth of them in the context of how they were passed down from one generation to another. So the context of who God describes Himself to be and our understanding of who we are is confined by God from one generation to another through His covenant faithfulness. So that our learning these doctrines and the context of which these doctrines are applied are unlocked as we seek to understand them as ancient ideas. This is what the bible shows as the art of learning by the Spirit by hearing what our fathers have said. Its a single gospel message that is pure as it is described in the holistic historical context that it was given. But in this day and age it is depicted in the context of a more pure gospel than the ancient way of passing it down through hearing. And in this sense we have made these greek creation gods to be a system of ideas divorced from the holistic teaching of the gospel so that all of these different systems of teaching become the new gods. It is much easier to take a doctrine out of its context and make it applicable in the wrong way so that it is reduced down in law form.  But we know that the true holistic gospel is not successful by process principles but its a description of being applied to the soul by the Spirit. So we seek to uncover the causes in a meta physical way that gives us a true understanding of God and ourselves. We do this by always being consistent about these original ideas in the context of our modern world. Reply Quote Notify 888  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 12, 2012, 01:22:24 PM I guess what the conversation is trying to get to is to strip away all pretexts of self and begin there. I think it was the apostle who said that he is nothing. So what is nothing? Is it the absence of everything? If nothing is the absence of everything then is it really nothing? Or is nothing .. non existence? Well to be intellectually honest nothing is a comparison with something that someone compares with a thing that ceases to have power. So you got to be something to prove nothing. Is nothing an annihilation of self? How can one cease to exist in total? Obviously nothing would be a self that you no longer feel connected to seeing there is always a self to decide there is nothing. And i guess you could say its the forgotten self. So you dont really know who you are .. or you come to the point where your relation to the objects of your knowledge are not really true objects seeing that you lose a sense that you trust in your understanding of any object of your faith whether it is cognitive or physical. How can your only hope be in Christ if you think the object is to be understood by your faculties? I think nothing is a growing understanding that you must abandon your own trust in your understanding of all objects. And you must cast yourself completely on Christ as your only hope of understanding. Reply Quote Notify 889  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 11, 2012, 03:43:42 PM This is the difference between my understanding of true knowledge as opposed to the absence of a clear reason to be sure exactly what is the definition of christian faith as I have detected RR and Mi to explain... kind of like Buddhism. Christian faith does not preclude the observation of something we are sure of in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of faith that leaves us nothing to be sure of. But faith is defined and complete by the words of scripture and the work of the Spirit. God tells us what we are like and we are enlightened to trust in every word that He has spoken. Got to go will get back to this.   Reply Quote Notify 890  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: If eternal torture is dead, what about "everyone gets saved"? on: October 10, 2012, 12:58:23 PM The law of God is His proving through all governments and generations that He is moving time to its ultimate end by providing the structure so that men will not destroy themselves and the earth. The law of God is seen in His order of creation and the beauty of all that He has made. Without this order the world would experience a darkness and pain that would cause suicide. So God holds the earth together even tho lawless men seek to undermine Gods goodness and beauty. The whole structure of the seen and unseen is moved by a God who relates to us with perfect responses as people in the mist of Gods created order. God has made His statute, decrees, laws, commands and promises to always uphold all that He has created. God sees the big picture but lawless man is held captive to his own lust and imagines God to be out of control. Every man being finite experiences dread because man cannot trust a God that does exactly as He has set up the foundations to be because man is a law breaker. So man experiences bondage out of imaginations that God cannot possibly keep it together. God is free to do as He pleases because He cannot be lawless. So His creation cannot get what they imagine. So God works to balance out mans destructive ways and He proves Himself faithful to man by acting to defend man according to His ordering everything by His law.  Nothing surprises God or thwarts His purposes.  Reply Quote Notify 891  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 10, 2012, 12:24:21 PM Christ is the Lamb of God who purchased men from every tribe and language people and nation. He rules in the center of the throne. Because He did this work as a procession from heaven and then back again it is a timeless picture of Him coming to set the captive free... and to take them to eternal bliss and enjoyment where every tear will be wiped away. The purpose of Christ procession was to lead a whole host of men with Him to heaven. This purpose is so there will be unhindered praise and glory directed to Christ as He rolls the sky up like a scroll so that He will be clearly seen in His glory throughout .. that glory that is veiled to this day. When we see Him we will see real , praise honor glory.. power wealth wisdom... strength.  We will experience unhindered imitation of the beauty of Christ without any adversity to these attributes. No sorrow will be mixed.. not pain.. no alienation.. but everything will be made new. We shall behold these most beautiful heavenly creatures , with the elders, the angels, and the brightness of His throne beaming out over the new earth where any attribute that we have will only increase unto eternity. What a vision that dwarfs this dark earth. Reply Quote Notify 892  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 10, 2012, 12:05:29 PM Its funny because as Beacon has stated we initially were given a new will when we were regenerated. In other words we had no ability to deny ourselves by ourselves. We needed a self that was new.  This is why the apostle says to put on the new self. What is this new self? It is our view of ourselves being freed from the fowlers snare. Another word picture is that we were set free from the chains of our old self. My understanding of this as i describe it is that we are no longer bound to the tension of this world. I understand that there is always tension but when we understand that we are completely different from our old self .. even tho it may be that we have forgotten what that was like being that our salvation happened a very long time ago... yet in thinking of who we are now we must understand that we have a new name that has not changed over all these years! Christ name is to be exalted over all the earth. Christ name really is His authority to rule over all the earth. There is nothing that can thwart Christ purposes in this earth and therefore we come in the name or authority of Christ. So our new name gives us a completely new identity in which we cannot be separated from Christ. Now think of this. We are in union with the Name that is above every other name. When we think of our name now we are not really identified as that name but we are in the Name of Christ. This means that Christ not only has shown His absolute power over this earth but He has provided us through His name a real defender. We are never without hope in Christ. Our old self has been shown for what its worth. Its been squelched under the resurrection power of Christ.  Reply Quote Notify 893  Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denying Yourself on: October 10, 2012, 11:35:57 AM Theres a difference between self denial and destroying oneself. We know who we are by our image of who we are. So self denial is really coming to the true knowledge of self. Where is the danger in self destruction? It is to think of ourselves lesser than God thinks of us by understanding that Satan comes to seek and destroy. But God always mends our broken heart.. forgives our sins...and remains faithful when we are not. Satan tries to alienate us from the mindset of redemption. Redemption gives us value. Because Christ has purchased us with His own blood. Christ has given His life for us so that we might possess eternal life. This eternal life is qualified in our relationship to Christ who leads us to our Father. Our value is not just seen in Christ giving Himself for us but its seen in how Christ has made a way for us to approach a holy God without any hindrances. So when we are talking about being redeemed we are enjoying the quality of Christ work in defining the quality of the life we possess in terms of our relating to Christ through the Spirit in knowing our Father. When we are talking about this kind of self denial it is always with the purpose of finding something of value that surpasses any thing we could bring that is equal or greater value than Christ work that brings us to our Father. So self denial is not really a denial of our basic human needs but its to kill any thing that destroys the soul. But we cannot confront evil in a physical sense because we would need to go out of this world to find true peace with ourselves. Because the world is on a course that we have no control over. This is why the bible distinguishes between the spiritual world and the physical world. We really are involved in a spiritual battle. So in thinking in terms of self denial we must advance beyond our own ability to tear down strongholds ..which hold people captive in their destructive schemes... seeking to destroy anything that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. So we see that the redemption is a world view that is clearly defined by God ..we fight with spiritual weapons against anything that would try to redefine Gods original purpose in this world and we advance looking unto Christ to see the total destruction of the schemes of man who set themselves up as gods. We do this through word and Spirit. The terms are much bigger than we are.   Reply Quote Notify 894  Forums / Main Forum / Re: All the red + All the black = The Wholeness on: October 09, 2012, 03:42:56 AM We automatically believe in something or someone by the perception we have about them or that thing. We believe it by the language we attach in describing it according to our understanding. This is how God made us by speaking and we were made. So there is nothing that happens in this world that exist outside of God creating it for His own glory and pleasure. We see the natural order of things and our perception is dulled by our lack of understanding because it is not easy to reason from a God centered view of how things come into our lives and how people really are ...according to what they perceive the world to be. If we really understood the beauty in this world and the purpose of people in our lives we would rest in God and it would be the most fitting to praise Him. And this is the ultimate enjoyment from a view that all things are ordered for Gods glory. It is to rest knowing that God exist in our understanding by creating time for the purpose of showing His goodness. If in fact God spoke and it was brought into exist then ..what ever that thing was ..who ever that person was...then the direction this world is going in could not be without His hand reordering it for our good and for His glory. He thwarts the purposes of all people. When we acknowledge that God is God in all things then we sort of become detached from what we see according to our view. We more readily place the things and events in time into Gods hands and then we rejoice that God has ordered them for His own glory.We acknowledge that God has spoken and there is nothing that He has not understood .. no event or any thing that exist that He does not view that is not working to bring about His ultimate purpose. With this view of of our world we find the most pleasure.  Reply Quote Notify 895  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Praying in the Spirit on: October 02, 2012, 09:50:26 PM The ot narrative is the gospel account of the lives of the ot saints. So when we read the narrative of their lives it is in the context of the ot worship book. Without a holistic understand of the worship book we are guilty of applying nt greek thinking to the text. The narrative contains more than a historical account. Instead it is put in the context of Gods covenant teaching. So the explanations of Gods view of the narrative are controlled by the worship book so that the concepts are the personal stroke of the Spirit that it is the mind of God as the Trinitarian line is weaved through it. So instead it being focused on the main characters we are brought face to face with the unseen purposes of God directly paralleling the worship motif. This is the sweetness of a more clear understanding of these words and phrases used to link the ot teaching of the covenant of grace to Gods redemptive purposes as these catch words are seen throughout the narrative that can only be understood in the context of the worship motif.   Remove Reply Quote Notify 896  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Spiritually dead on: October 02, 2012, 09:32:52 PM How do we put sin to death? But word and Spirit. The word is a washing agent. The bible says that we are washed by the word. Why does the word has such a powerful effect on us? Because it helps us put sin to death by grace. You see that evil is any thought we have that redefines the plan of God to be less successful than our own power. The thing about sin is that as long as it is not identified as what it is then we will try to respond to it.. trying better in the flesh to appease our guilt.. remembering sin over the promise of God to forget it.. or developing a scheme to avoid it so we think it is no longer powerful. But the bible is direct. The bible does not deal in potentials. It gets rite to the heart of sin and exposes it to grace. The bible is Gods anti intuitive response in our fighting with sin. It is impossible for us to kill sin by our own wisdom. When we seek to ignore our old response to sin by teaching ourselves how God responds to our sin then we are learning the mind set of grace .. grace always overcomes sin. Reply Quote Notify 897  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Spiritually dead on: October 02, 2012, 08:58:33 PM Ive been listening to the book of Exodus on tape the last couple of days. When we are talking about sin and the effects of sin it is never just a personal war. If we look at how societies grow in evil so that a man begins to practice putting other men in slavery we must see that its not a steady decline but its an evil that gains new ground and prevents men from returning to freedom. And this is the story of Pharaoh. The society had become so evil that the Pharaoh was enslaving the Jews with impunity. This is what is interesting about how God responded to Pharaoh in small warnings and a steady increase in the judgment. So in a sense God was showing Pharaoh through His slow destruction that He is more wise that men who think they are wise in how they obtained the power over other people. God had Pharaoh on a leash as if He was laughing as He was slowly teaching him a lesson about his evil tactics. This is the way sin is. Its a very small problem that grows into a big scheme against mankind. What we must understand is that we cannot control sin. It must be destroyed. Sin is so bad that its activity is to end the human race and destroy the whole earth. So when we are seeking to get to the bottom of the problem we look at what the bible says about it spreading like a disease that never stops growing. So at every turn.. .in every moment we are not just dealing with a bad attitude or a sorrow but we are dealing with a cursed destroying power. This is why the apostle says that in order for us to be somewhat successful with the flesh we must put sin to death. We must seek to destroy it. Now this is what people do not understand. Its how sin deceives us. One of the workings of sin is to deceive us about our own power and how deep the effects of sin that is in us. Sin not only is working to destroy the entire race of man but it makes us our own worse enemy. Sin works in our feeling confident about ourselves to think that we can control it. But we must understand that sin is much deeper than what we think we need to control it. The sin in us is at the level of our not being able to fully understand how it is seeking to destroy us. So we are always in danger of living in a certain level of self confidence but never really experiencing the effects of Gods salvation.    Reply Quote Notify 898  Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Spiritually dead on: October 01, 2012, 09:16:04 PM We were dead in sins and trespasses. Not dead because we sin but we are born in sin therefore we are dead spiritually. So there is a huge conspiracy of death in this world. The world is a system that is going on a course of death and destruction. This is why the bible talks about the heavens where God dwells is where eternal life is and the earth where man dwells is a place of death. Why is it a place of death? Because man was cursed with death because of the sin of Adam. Now when a person is born into this world they seek after dead idols. So the natural course for all men is to die as he worships dead idols. So all men devise their own way because they image a dead idol. They are like a still born child. I guess you could say that it is foolish for man not to bow down and worship God. Because God has created man. God knows us better than we know ourselves because He designed us. So we believe that Gods ways are blessed and mans ways are destructive. Man in his state of death seeks after destruction. He has made a pact with the Devil so to speak. So man has a blindness in which he is attracted to death.. that being the way of destruction... which is how he thinks by how he views the world and other people. Man is blind to being able to distinguish between God and other people. Man in worshiping the creature rather than the creator brings death and destruction to other people. Its the old adage that the blind are leading the blind.   Reply Quote Notify 899  Forums / Main Forum / Re: The Red Letter Boarding Pass on: September 30, 2012, 04:42:41 PM Onetake that Psalm is written from a seasoned and experienced saint. Hes really not coming to God out of a sense of dread or fear. And in a sense we all have confidence because of what God describes us to be even tho we know if he judged us... we would not stand .. yet we actually have confidence to put our finger on the phrase ... "Do not let me be put to shame"... and look up to heaven tapping our finger on that verse. Why does this man make absolute statements about who he wants to appear in the future if he is not as responsible as he wants to be vindicated? Because he knows the God who has covenanted with him and this man understand the seriousness of those who would seek to undermine Gods faithfulness. This Psalm is the divine re creator Psalm. Reply Quote Notify 900  Forums / Main Forum / Re: The Red Letter Boarding Pass on: September 30, 2012, 04:09:12 PM Although i disagree with Kk its not because he is direct about what he believes. To be intellectually honest i am seeing both sides of this argument. One person is sure that the bible is saying what he believes it to say and the other side is arguing that is not as easy to understand as Kk is presenting it. But both sides are very dogmatic about their position. I can see how this could become focused on the style of the argument rather than the details of how you would disagree with Kk.By just stating that its not understandable then how can you know that what Kk is presenting is not correct? How can you be dogmatic that he is wrong?  I disagree with Kk because he is saying that we share in our responsibility to approach God in our acceptable way. So God sort of is the divine mover and shaker molding our wills to do as He wants us to do. But i have stated that we cannot do one good thing so Christ had to do the work on our behalf so that we are totally accepted by grace. Not only is our salvation a gift but our faith is a gift as well. And we are unable unless God makes us able.