To joey down under.
You wrote this:
I would say this is becoming like someone saying another person who is careful with their money either "stingy" or "thrifty" depending on their own attitude towards money.
You say excessive focus on experience; I say concern about never having a prayer answered. Lets call the whole thing off.
1. Do you agree that you are questioning any possible faith you have had at the past because you (in your own mind) have not received any perceptible "feedback" from God one way or the other - yes or no?
No, I am not questioning my faith in the past. I really was a believer. What I am questioning is whether my prayer for salvation was answered, because with no feedback from God I had no confirmation that I was saved.
2. Does any passage or verse in the Bible say that personal experience of any type will prove a person's salvation - yes or no?
There may or may not be such a passage, but there are plenty of verses that make promises about what believers will experience, for example John 15:5-8, Luke 11:9-13.
Spiritual fruits came from those emotional experiences because of the Holy Spirit's powerful ministry on their actual human spirit and emotions were stimulated as a result. Emotions were a response to God, emotions did not create the link to God.
I did the same thing as you are doing right now - looking for experiences to prove that I really had a genuine faith. When they did not come I gave up and became resigned to never knowing if I would really know I was saved and if it had all been an illusion. If Christians expect signs and experiences as a continuous part of their walk with God then their faith will be severely shaken when they eventually do experience hard times if they live long enough.
If emotions are (part of) a response to God, then our lack of emotions is not a problem. However, I think that in most people, emotions do appear to create a link to God, though in many (or maybe in all) cases I suspect that it is self-deception rather than being a real link to God. In other words, I would not expect a lack of emotions to be a problem if God really does affect people. And yet a lack of emotions does seem to affect peoples awareness of what God is doing in them.
I did not necessarily expect signs and experiences as a continuous part of a walk with God. Just one or two would have made a huge difference to me. For me the complete lack of feedback did cause my faith to be severely shaken. Maybe, as I suggested, because I am the type of person who expected God to act in my life as a believer. But at the time, I had no idea why I was apparently not receiving any feedback from God; the possibility that it was due to my lack of emotions did not occur to me until about 25 years later.
I hope you did not take those unfulfilled promises as God turning his back on you. They were mistaken that their thoughts were from God. They probably thought they were giving you encouragement as well.
I was disappointed by those unfulfilled promises but not surprised. I knew that it was not only my own prayers that had never been answered, but also the prayers of the many people who have prayed for me over the years have also not been answered. This was just another example of a lack of an answer to prayers for me. Yes, they mistakenly believed that their thoughts were from God, and they probably thought they were giving me encouragement.
I know it is easy to say but believe me - from looking back at what I have gone through - God gives us what we need, not what we want. I want to feel what I felt in the past but I probably never will. I don't know why God hasn't answered your prayers the way you want them to be but one day you will know Losthope. 1 Corinthians 13:12
God gives us what we need, not what we want. It sounds right, but this sentence reminds me of something that a very patronising doctor said, in a statement that I reject completely. However, if God really does give us what we need, why did God not help me to know God and to have fellowship with God all those years ago? The result of apparently receiving nothing from God is that I have missed out on more than 37 years of fellowship with God and spiritual growth. I thought that the gospel message tells us that fellowship with God is what we were made for; in other words, what we need.
Like you, I do not know why God has not answered my prayers in the way that I hoped for or at least has not answered my prayers in any way that I am aware of. You say that one day I will know, and in 1 Corinthians 13:12 I assume that Paul is writing of finding out the whole truth after death. But for me, uninterested in life after death, that promise is irrelevant. I wanted to know God in this life. And if that want was not also a need, why am I still trying to find God all of these years later?
Having said that, in the past I have used that same verse to suggest various things that Christians may discover after death, things that they reject now but which could be made clear to them later.
Losthope: It is not due to lack of understanding of the Bible, it is due to different Bible passages saying different things.
Joey: That is why it is so important to keep it in context. Use the who, what, when, where and why method when examining scripture.
A good principle. As someone once said, if you take a
text out of con
text you are left with a con.
Do you mind expanding further by what you mean by stepping out in faith and how it went "wrong"?
In the 1970s I was on my knees asking for forgiveness through Jesus and asking God into my life. I stepped out in faith, trusting that if I reached out to God, God would reach out to me. I kept on as an active Christian, trusting for as long as I was able to, about two years, until it became abundantly clear that God was not going to respond to me. Then I recognised that my attempt to be a Christian had been a failure, and I needed to give up and begin again when things were right.
I did the same again in 2007, but this time it only lasted two weeks. Things occurred much more quickly the second time because of the memory of what had happened in the 1970s. There is no point in me trying a third time, not until I find out what went wrong before and something is done to put it right.
Read what you just typed then read this passage. Luke 15:11-32 Who do you think you sound like - the prodigal son or the eldest son? Who knows why God appears to give good things to some people and not to others? Who knows why everybody else seems to have wonderful prayers answered and we both just plod on doing the same thing day after day after day.... after day and never seeming to get anywhere spiritually (experience wise)?
Me? More like the older brother. I do not know why God appears to give good things to some people and not to others. I can think of several possible reasons, but I do not know for certain. What I am trying to do is to find out why I have apparently not received anything from God. For example, is it because I have not experienced a conviction of sin? Or because God wants me to wait for some reason? Or because my name is not in the book of life?
I repeat that wanting to be a believer for what God can give them (eternal life, for example) is very common among Christians, and I cannot believe that God would reject me simply because I might want the benefits of being saved. After all, Jesus did promise life more abundant.
If you do not even experience emotions it is very unlikely that you would ever experience discernment as christians called into discernment-type ministries.
Why ever not? Are you suggesting that the spiritual gift of discernment of spirits is something to do with the emotions? If spiritual awareness is solely to do with the emotions, then I would be permanently excluded from any type of spiritual experience. And that is another of my possible explanations for why I received no feedback from God during my time as a believer.
I am trying to find out if spiritual awareness and emotional experience really are closely linked. If they are, then it has serious implications for the validity of the Christian message, and for the reality of the salvation of many people who call themselves Christians.
You looking at non-christian material (even if you were comparing what it said with an open Bible in your lap) is as dangerous as throwing a lit cigarette into the dry Aussie bush in a heatwave.
Anyone wanting to convert adherents of another religion to Christianity would need to be familiar with the teachings of that other religion, and be able to compare them with the Bible. Just as Paul did in Athens in Acts 17. That is presumably why they teach about other religions in many Bible colleges and other theological courses.
I remember the ex-President Bill Clinton when asked if he ever smoked marijuana replying "yes but I didn't inhale." You did the spiritual equivalent.
I disagree. I tried to learn about particular practices (though not until many years after my time as a believer) while at the same time not accepting their spiritual teachings. Sometimes actively rejecting the spiritual message but still hoping to gain something from the practice of meditation. I realise that some Christians have a need to reject everything associated with other religions, but I repeat that people of other faiths pray, yet I do not see Christians condemning the use of prayer for that reason.
It is interesting that at least three times in your posting you have used a verse or an idea that I have used in the past in a very different way, including the following. I can remember someone using a parody of that famous statement of Bill Clinton. Very funny but too rude to repeat here.
Yu should be thanking God for his incredible protection of you from deception. psalm 23 You must be a sheep He loves very much.
It is a bit like not having emotions. People tell me how lucky I am, not having to suffer negative emotions or things like panic attacks. True, but I am also missing out on positive experiences such as joy and love. In the same way my lack of spiritual awareness has benefits in that I suspect I am immune from the attacks of Satan, but the cost of this is estrangement from the influence of the Holy Spirit.