My final question then. How do I believe/seek with all my heart and not just believe with my mind. How do I gain real saving faith?
I like the patience you show in addressing these posts.
Your question: “What must I do”, does not really have one easy answer, since it depends very heavily on “who you are” and where you are at. I have taught in the prison program and now teach university students from communist China, who will go back to china, or over zoom and emails with student in China. I lived and worked with young people in the intercity and adults and students attending church with me. I just had a young Chinese student, who has been studying with us for almost a year now, who wanted to be baptized and was thinking her communist party member parents would be OK with it, but I suggested she just bring up the possibility to them and they went postal. Those in prison I taught when they were baptized realized; they would be giving up their weapons, leave their gang’s protection, giving up all their possessions to their former gang, and might be beaten to death by other gangs wanting payback. I could not have cleared those hurtles when I became a Christian.
Right now, you lack faithfulness, Love, commitment, power to keep from sinning and hope, which is OK and where you should be.
God has made it as easy as possible for all willing individuals to become Christians, but there is something you do have to “do”. But what you have to do is not something honorable, noble, worthy of anything, righteous or holy. It is something a dead person can do (dead by Christ’s definition of dead in the prodigal son story). Like the prodigal son, your sins that have hurt others has caused you to continue to spiral down into life’s pigsty. Along the way, you have come to your senses and at these points you can make an autonomous free will choice to either: hang in there, be macho, be willing to pay the piper and be willing to accept the just punishment you fully deserve or you can wimp out, give up and surrender to your hated enemy God (He is not supporting your desired “happy” sinful life and thus allowing you to be hell bound). For purely (sinful) selfish reason you want some kind of continued livable existence, so you are just willing to humble except pure undeserved charity from your hated enemy (God). Again, you are not doing this out of a Godly type Love, since you do not have a Godly type Love.
Believing that a benevolent Creator exist is an actually humbling activity, since even the lowliest mature adult on earth can do that, but with this humility you can humbly accept God’s pure undeserving charity (Godly type Love which cannot be forced on you or instinctive to you without being robotic), The main charity you seek should be relieve from the burden in your conscience sin has created, through being truly forgiven. God wants to forgive everyone, but because forgiveness is a transaction, you have to humbly accept forgiveness as pure charity for forgiveness to take place.
If you truly accept God’s forgiveness of your unbelievable huge debt sin has created, you will automatically receive an unbelievable huge Love (Godly type Love) for Jesus taught us in Luke 7 “…he that is forgiven much Loves much…” That Love with the gratitude you now have from all the gifts showered on you, motivates you to do good stuff.
If you become a Christian with the attitude of: “I got to stop sinning” you will fail, but if you quit trying “not to sin” and look around you for the good you can be doing in the next 60 seconds, you with the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, can do that. Fell your life with good stuff and you will not have time to sin. Start with the little faith and new Love you do have and start doing easy good stuff out of gratitude: Wash the dishes without being asked, clean up, call a friend for Christian fellowship and just keep on going and growing.
New Christians may not tap into everything that is available to them to help them experience the transformation:
I do not know of any Christian group, who believe the water itself saves you, since all believe it is God who saves and God is not limited by water.
Water baptism is not a “requirement” for salvation since God does the saving, but is something Christians get to do in order to help them and others.
I know that I needed everything God could provide to assure me of my conversion, both outwardly and mentally. God wants you to physically feel the experience of what is going on Spiritually.
You need to add to your conversion a definite time place and physical experience, which God has provided for you.
Adult believers water immersion is to be a physical outward representation of what had or is happening spiritually in the person being baptized. It is mainly to help the individual being baptized to better grasp what is going on, but it can “witness” to others observing the baptism. It has the elements of going down under the water (burying the old man), placing your dependence in another; the person baptizing you (surrendering your life to God), being washed (having your sins washed away), rising out of the water (rising from the old dead body), and stepping forth out onto the earth (a new person). The person is walking out into the hugs of his new family. It is also a sign of your humility, since it is a humbling act anyone can simple allow someone to do to them (so not a work) and since humility has been shown in the accept of charity (God’s free gift of undeserving forgiveness) it should just support and add to the memory of that acceptance. To refuse Christian water baptism when it is readily available might mean you are not ready to handle other responsibility like having the indwelling Holy Spirit and you are hurting yourself.