QUOTE="Dorothy Mae,
- If they want His kingdom, they must accept Him as king. Makes perfect sense.
This is the stupidest thing I have ever read. Show me one sinner who is in love with sin who actually wants Jesus. Just one.
From the blogsite of Reluctantheretic:
God’s Hand & Our Free Will
"If God had respected my free will, I would still be involved in a panoply of sins so disgusting and heinous that I will not mention them here. Or I would now be long dead and gone from this world. Given the severity of my wickedness and the insanity of my actions, I think probably the latter. Think of the Hippie Movement of the 1960’s and imagine every licentious, dirty, and wicked thing that the Movement promoted. That was me, and that was my “free will choice,” so to speak. I loved the sins of the flesh, I had declared myself an atheist, and I despised Christians. I wanted nothing at all to do with them or their Jesus. That was my free will. Go away God! Go away Christians!
So how did I come to the point of repenting and turning to Christ in sorrow for my sins? Did God overtake and remove my free will, eliciting from me a robotic response of repentance which He desired? Was my will violated in such a manner that I had no choice but to do what I was told?
No, God simply let me “run out my string.”
There is a saying in the Twelve Steps book of AA which says that you cannot make an addict change until he has hit the bottom and is watching his last bubble of air float to the surface. That is exactly what God did with me, allowing me to, of my own “free will,” hit the bottom and realize that all the “fun” I was having was about to kill me. Far from the sense of carnal excitement I felt when I took my first hit of marijuana, my life had become, in four years of unrestrained hedonism, a joyless tedium racked with sorrow and drug-induced psychosis. I was in deep trouble and I knew it, filled with suicidal thoughts but dreadfully scared of the black void which my atheism said was the ultimate end of man. Of my own free will, I began an intense search for the garden gate which offered escape from this fool’s paradise into which I had eagerly dashed. No one had to tell me it was get out or die – and no one was coercing me! I had come to the point that I knew it was the only option left for me. Yet even then, I could have chosen to shake my fist at God and die. I took the choice to live and began my search."
This is man in his natural state. He is in love with himself and as long as the world is a good place to him, he has no interest in a God whose love demands total self-giving and sacrifice. This is why we have so many unbelievers here in the United States. We have so many luxuries, so many goodies, so much hedonism, that people feel no need for God. All our toys and pleasures make us happy, and like selfish little children that we are, we tell God "Uhhhhh.....I really don't need you, but thanks anyway."
And what happened in the paragraph above in italics is how each and every created being will finally come to God. Some will not come to realize their nothingness until after they die and the true reality of their being sets in. Devoid of all their happy little consumerist toys, their hedonistic pleasures, their carnal delights, they will see themselves bare naked souls before the majesty of God. Only then will they cry out for mercy, seeing the One that the human heart longs for in the deepest parts of its reality.
But it will be too late then to avoid the painful transition which must take place. That soul, used to being selfish, will now realize that it must release everything it has held onto. C.S. Lewis beautifully portrayed this in his small book THE GREAT DIVORCE. In this story, souls that have died are given the choice to let go of themselves and enter the heavenly realm. They refuse and return to the bus to go back to Graytown.
God will keep offering to each soul until that painful moment that the soul relinquishes itself and enters into the union of self-giving love which is the love of the Trinity. The more sins on a person's soul, the more painful and the longer it will take to be rid of these things.
God does not stop loving. He does not stop offering Himself to His creation. God is love, therefore, that is all He can do, for love, real love of which we know so very little, is always seeking the best for the object of its affection. It is always looking to give of itself completely so that the other may be blessed and filled with joy. And if human beings can do this in limited ways, think of the unending love of the limitless God.
Think of it.
