That was not an indictment upon you, but upon all men.
I'll accept that you meant to use a generic "you" rather than a specific "you." I do wonder, however, why you used "you" instead of "we." It makes it seem as though you are claiming to be above the rest of us.
No comparison. A lie is a lie. Adultery is adultery.And fornication is fornication.
No argument.
We're not talking about something that is subjective to cultural mores. We're talking about what God's Word says independent of culture. And in accordance with this fornication in Corinth is fornication in Tulsa , Oklahoma.
And if a person, be he homosexual or heterosexual, is unwilling to lay down his fornicating in order to be obedient to Christ, it is idolatry as well as fornication.
Many in this forum are guilty of both.
I would agree if the subject
were fornication. The trouble is that you have defined activities as fornication that the Bible does not.
If by prayer and honest study of the Scriptures you conclude something counter to what God's Word says, then you've concluded wrong.
I don't disagree with the statement above, as far as it goes. What I do disagree with is your unfounded assumption that my conclusion goes counter to God's Word. It is instead the result of what God says in the Bible.
It just isn't as complicated as people want to make it. But so many of us want to reword God's Word to say what we want it to say instead of just accepting what it says.
Thank you for finally admitting that you can't just accept what God's word says.
If he is walking in the spirit, he is going to be aligned with what God's Word says. Sin does not become sin based upon what I believe. It is sin because God says so.
Right. Fornication, incest, and adultery are sin. But not all sex is fornication, incest, or adultery. Sex within a loving, committed, faithful marriage is not sin. Especially a Christian marriage covenanted with God.
One of the ways of testing the spirits is to see what the spirit is telling you in relation to what God's Word says. That's one of the reasons He gave it to us. And if a person thinks that he is walking in the spirit and receiving something correct that is contrary to God's Word, then he is not dealing with the HOLY spirit but another spirit.
Again I don't disagree with this statement. But this has nothing to do with our disagreement
God does not author confusion. A God of ordeer does not divide His house against itself by saying one thing in His Holy Inerrant Word and then getting the deliverer of truth, The Holy Spirit, to turn around and tell you something else.
I agree with this statement. But I disagee that it applies to our disagreement.
He is a God of ORDER. And if "a spirit" is telling you something that is contrary to what the Word says, it is NOT the Holy Spirit.
One more time. True but irrelevent.
Again, it just isn't that complicated. It's our wants and desires that lead us to think that the Holy Spirit is validating our wants and desires when it's really an unclean spirit telling us what we want to hear.
One way to prevent that is to pray and to study the Scriptures. As you learn more of God's will, and begin to walk in it, your earthly Sin Nature has less control over you.
This is why, as a Christian, you HAVE TO accept God's Word as absolute truth. If you don't, the door is opened for every measure of confusion that the world has ever imagined.
Exactly. It is important to be sure that you are in line with God's will. And the Bible is the most important tool for discovering that will.
Take this one issue of homosexual fornication. People are going back and forth on it. God's Word clearly says one thing. But because some are being lead by unHoly desires, they have dismissed what God's Word says, and proceeded to discount God's Word as absolute truth. Some have gone so far as to discount it as God's Word at all. Still others have done Word studies to find alternate meanings. WHile others have quote commentators whose version of the truth they like better than God's.
The same can be said for a lot of things in life. There are those that don't revere the Bible as God's word. Some of them believe the wrong things. Some of them believe things that are not wrong in themselves, but the way they apply them to life is wrong. Some come, coincidently, to the right conclusions, but all are lost.
But all of this has nothing to do with our disagreement.
Why would a God of order send His people through that much disorder to get to the truth? Why would a God of order say one thing in His Word, yet expect us to dig and word study and quote other men to know what He is saying?
I mainly agree with what you are saying, but I sense a hidden assumption that I don't fully share.
I believe in the inerrancy of the Scriptures, and in a Plain Meaning interpretation. The Holy Spirit has preserved those writings that we need to understand God's will. But, the prophets and apostles were writing to specific people within specific cultures. To fully understand the sense, we need to understand how the original readers would have understood it.
Usually the obvious sense in the translation is the same as the original sense, but sometimes there is translation bias, or the culture is different enough that without knowing the difference we could mke the wrong assumptions.
You seem to be implying that we don't need to understnd these things. That the plain sense of the English translation as heard in today's culture is always correct, even if it would conflict with the historical usage. If you don't mean to imply this I apologize.
He does not. That's what men do.
Exactly. That is why it is important to understand the Plain Meaning as the original readers would have understood it.
It's as though the very people who are saying they are Christians in this forum have taken on the personas of Muslims. Muslims also believe that God's Word has been corrupted. Yet much like the folks in this forum, none of these Muslims seem to be able to pinpoint the time that God's Word changed from what they think it should say to what it actually says .
I'm not sure thatI'd go so far as to insult the other posters for their honest beliefs, but yes, there are a lot of opinions of the accuracy of the Scriptures that I don't endorse.
Of course it's nonesense. It's nonesense because every man...NO man gets to decide what is sin. And we are talking about people who say that they have acknowledged, confessed and repented of their sins, but who now say that what God says is sin is not sin.
But if God has nowhere declared it to be sin, then on what basis are you declaring this action -- toward which, presumably, you yourself feel no "temptation" to be a sin for someone else? As you said, "NO man gets to decide what is sin."
If you don't think it is sin, how could there have been an acknowledgment, confession and repentance of acts of sin that you don't consider to be sin?
There are lots of things that are not sin, but which if I were to do them I would not be walking in God's best will for my life. For me they are as sinful as things labelled as Sin (1 Corinthians 8). But if I see another Christian doing these same things, I don't know that he is not walking in God's will. God will judge him, and it would be sinful for me to stand in God's place.
No you are talking about a sexual activity which you have labelled Sin without examining what Gaod has to say about it.
And God has not WILLED that any of His Children sin. God's will is that you live in obedience to Him. That does not change from Christian to Christian.
I agree.
