I've read what you've said and agree with SOME aspects but I don't buy this line that LIFE is not just about us too. God makes it about us by caring for our plight. The one beaten up along side the road in the story of the Good Samaritan, LIFE was about the one who was hurting too and needed help. In fact God says when you bless a hurting one insomuch as you've done it to another you've done it unto me.
Of course it is in part about us! After all, God would not have done it if it didn't have our redemption and glorification as its product. My point, which maybe isn't as obvious as I think, in saying this life is not about us, is that that it is about Christ. The focus is Christ —not us.
But isn't there a ditch on both sides of the road? One can very well deceive themselves by what you say by never applying the word of God and his instructions for they say well God hasn't done that work in me yet. One could embrace a real false sense of security.
Of course one can get lazy! Of course one can deceive oneself! One can do that in any configuration of doctrine. There is much we need to be aware of and much to avoid and much to pursue! How does that mean your self-determining configuration is more secure than one where God owns all fact?
Sorry but this goes contrary to the scriptuers. Your no worry message sounds appealing to people's minds but let's change worry to staying sober and alert and to making one's calling and election sure.
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. 2 Cor 13:5
So obviously one DOES have to have thought to examine themselves. I'd suggest it's MOST unwise if we don't.
Haha! Don't worry about that, I worry plenty, if that makes you feel better about it!
Are you even serious?? You think that what I espouse means we should not "examine ourselves" and should not work to "make our calling and election sure"? Are you also of the opinion that Calvinism teaches that everything that is going to happen is "automatic" and that God does not after all use means to accomplish what he does? Read John Owen's
Mortification of Sin, and then tell me Calvinism doesn't teach hard effort and believer's work is necessary or important!
Do you really think that exalting God and affirming his immanent work implies that we do nothing??? —What is it about Arminians? I have tried for years to describe this odd point-of-view that (to me, at least) demonstrates a penchant —no, an insistence!— for self-determination and elevation of the human to the point that eternity depends on him to the exclusion of it depending on GOD who made it.
Sorry Mark but this all sounds wonderful, relaxing to hear but it still goes contrary to what I quoted above from
2 Cor 13:5,
WE ARE to examine ourselves, WE ARE to prove ourselves we don't just sit back and say God will do it. NO We must do it. Your way of thinking really opens the door up wide to a sense of false security and isn't really a safe message to put out.
Oh for crying out loud! My security is in Christ. Not in self, like it is for the Arminian. I am not putting out an unsafe, false security, like your Arminian dependence of eternal results on self. THIS
IN NO WAY MEANS THAT THE BELIEVER DOES NOT PURSUE, NOR NEED HE PURSUE, CHRIST. But, again, my security is in CHRIST, not in myself, not in my decisions, not in my freewill, not in the value of anything I am, not in the value of anything I do. It is BECAUSE of being in Christ that what I do has any meaning at all!