Amen Sdowney
And Cuja I know your not trying to pin me to a wall.
But in essence what I said was true...submission. Being a follower of Christ is to be a slave to the righteousness...This is a willing relationship to be a bond servant of Christ. Bond servant is different from a slave in that in the Roman times and the original Hebrew concept this was a willing servitude, and it was also a permanent position. It is literally turning your entire life over to God.
The thing is, we will all still sin. I still sin. But I know that when I sin, God does not hold that against me, Christ is my advocate before God. It is like when you come to the gate of Heaven Peter is standing there ready to turn you away, and Jesus steps up and says "Hey Peter...he's good..he's with me."
I know when I was saved I could literally feel my conscious change. Things I was doing in my life immediately felt wrong. I was heading down a dark path, and by dark I mean occult. My friends and I played with Ouija boards, attempted spells, all sorts of stuff. When I got saved I immediately knew that was not what I should associate with. I did good for about a year, was in church, was active and building up my faith. I was 18-19 during this period. To old to be in the youth group, and the church did not have a ton of college students. So there was no one for me to really be discipled by, I kinda floundered in my studies, in my overall walk. Life interrupted me and I joined the Navy. I was a typical sailor...drunk and trying to hook up with the local women at every port (key word there is try
LOL ). I did not have a great testimony for God during that time. And yeah if you looked at me you would probably would not think "there goes a Christian".
Well towards the end of my time in the Navy I met a girl, we got married and had my first son. That led me out of the service. We both started getting back into a church family, and building our faith back up. But we were going through the motions really. After a couple of years I ended up getting hooked on online gambling. This lost me my house as I was gambling the mortgage payment away. I was getting beat down.
I sat up one night just utterly defeated, they were going to put the notice on the door in just a few days, there was no hope of turning back now. Something inside of me had me open my Bible to the book of James.
James 1:6-8 "But he must ask in faith without doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways".
WOW that was me...I was tossed and turned...and every time I got my paycheck I would pray to God. I would pray that He would get me a big pay out this time around so I can get the house payment caught up, and all the other bills caught up, and most importantly...so that my wife would not find out. See I had not told her what was going on.
I kept reading:
James 1:22 "But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers of the word who delude themselves."
James 2:14 "What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him?"
James 2:17 "Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself"
That was me. I had faith, I knew God had saved my soul already. But the works that I had were empty. I went to church, but I did it because that is what I told myself I needed to do, not because I wanted to go in order to please God, praise God, and to worship God with others. We did not practice our faith anywhere but at church, we did not participate in events other than church, or anything like that.
James 2:18 "But someone may well say, 'You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.' "
When I read that I was broken. Our works, what we do, should be an outward expression of what God has done to us on the inside. It was at that moment that I realized while I had trusted God with my soul, I had not trusted God with my life. I cried. God played some flashbacks in my mind, the many times He provided me an opportunity to tell my wife, come clean, and fix it. He showed me different opportunities where He offered me a hand up, and I refused it. I had not submitted to Him my life.
Needless to say my wife stuck with me, 22 years this year. We both realized that we had not really submitted our lives as individuals, nor our marriage as a couple to God. And since then our marriage has been smooth sailing.
See even though I was saved when I was 18, I was like the Hebrews that were saved from Egypt. They were saved but they had not yet submitted to God. God promised them a plentiful land. And 3 days after being saved they started to grumble and make demands and whine. It is because they had not submitted to God and trust God that God made them wander the wilderness for 40 years. Once the grumbling generation died off the new generation finally submitted to God's desire and God brought them to the land of milk and honey. So for that time after being saved, until that night reading James, I was like one of the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness. God was leading me but I was grumbling. I thought I could do things on my own, and just use God as a safety net. But that is not what God wants.
While there is no strait formula for salvation, as in anyone that says 4 hail Mary's while standing on one leg will get salvation. We must work out our own salvation as the Bible says...we each have our own hurdles to overcome. But for each of us, salvation is obtained the same way, by having faith. What it would take for you, or for the next guy to make that step of faith is what may be different for each of them. But it is all about faith.