Can you expand on this? I mean really, "no they aren't" without some support is kinda short, don't you think?No they aren’t.
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Can you expand on this? I mean really, "no they aren't" without some support is kinda short, don't you think?No they aren’t.
Well, I want to be obedient. Hopefully I have been given the freedom to do that.I still stand on my view that this is a solid "False". We are flesh and even though we love God... should never be given the freedom to "do whatever you want".
I have already. But, okay.Can you expand on this? I mean really, "no they aren't" without some support is kinda short, don't you think?
You have the freedom to do that. Christ has set us free from sin...Well, I want to be obedient. Hopefully I have been given the freedom to do that.
OK, thanks...I have already. But, okay.
The reason we love is because God loves us. His love is the cause of our love. So love causes things to happen. In this instance, our lack of love for God results in our sinning because you can’t love God and sin at the same time. However, when we are loving God, we see that our sin causes grief, and we repent. So, love for God results in repentance.
Same thing.You have the freedom to do that. Christ has set us free from sin...
I just wouldn't go telling Christians to "Love God and Do whatever you want".
I would say.. Love God and try, in every action, to be pleasing to Him and shine a light for others to see".
When we sin, it’s because of indifference to what God wants. It’s certainly not out of love. Flesh? Yes. But it’s indifference.OK, thanks...
But it is not our "lack of Love for God" that results in sinning...
It is our flesh. Our fallen nature. We don't stop loving God when we sin. We fail, yes. We disrespect, yes. We disappoint, also yes....
But we never stop loving....
Obviously you believe that when you sin, you do not love God.When we sin, it’s because of indifference to what God wants. It’s certainly not out of love. Flesh? Yes. But it’s indifference.
The primary aspect of God's glory is His love
that glory is expressed/radiated in love for his creation-for us-most fully demonstrated by His own willingness to suffer an excruciatingly humiliating and painful death in human flesh on the cross at the hands of His own creation if that's what it takes to prove that love-in spite of our sin and even hatred of Him.
Do you think that when Jesus told us to love our neighbor as ourselves that He wanted us to hate and deny our neighbor?
Self-hatred is an evil that leads to harm of self and neighbor, spousal abuse, substance abuse, all kinds of ugly excesses.
This is not what Jesus meant by hating self. He meant to deny ourselves, to put our lives and needs beneath that of others.
What fallen man does naturally is to love himself inordinately-it's to not truly love ourselves as we are, in recognition of our limitations, of our innate inferiority to God as created beings.
So the only source of evil is to twist something good into something less good-out of alignment with God's will IOW.
Pride has been classically referred to as "inordinate self-love", just as gluttony is an inordinate desire for food, or lust is an inordinate attraction to sex- desires which in themselves are good and serve their natural purpose as long as they aren't abused-becoming obsessions/idolatry.
For myself it wasn't a deflection so much as Christianity 101 to be honest. The primary aspect of God's glory is His love-and that glory is expressed/radiated in love for his creation-for us-most fully demonstrated by His own willingness to suffer an excruciatingly humiliating and painful death in human flesh on the cross at the hands of His own creation if that's what it takes to prove that love-in spite of our sin and even hatred of Him.
Do you think that when Jesus told us to love our neighbor as ourselves that He wanted us to hate and deny our neighbor? Self-hatred is an evil that leads to harm of self and neighbor, spousal abuse, substance abuse, all kinds of ugly excesses. This is not what Jesus meant by hating self. He meant to deny ourselves, to put our lives and needs beneath that of others.
What fallen man does naturally is to love himself inordinately-it's to not truly love ourselves as we are, in recognition of our limitations, of our innate inferiority to God as created beings. Everything in creation is necessarily good-by virtue of its having been created by God. So the only source of evil is to twist something good into something less good-out of alignment with God's will IOW. Pride has been classically referred to as "inordinate self-love", just as gluttony is an inordinate desire for food, or lust is an inordinate attraction to sex- desires which in themselves are good and serve their natural purpose as long as they aren't abused-becoming obsessions/idolatry. But that abuse- of the good things God has given us -is a constant way of life for fallen man, and it all starts with the abuse of self love, i.e. "pride", which seeks to exalt man above even God Himself-bypassing His authority over our morality as we take on that authority for ourselves. It's to idolize the self.
Not perfectly...Can you sin and love God at the same time?
As your love of God grows, so does your level of repentance... And not just Love of God, but of yourself and others, all in each and in equal balanced measure...No they aren’t.
That's just it, it's not, at least not perfectly...When you commit a sin Christ died for, how is that loving Him?
Love is the only quality that Scripture appears to identify directly with His essence: “God is love”. And while God is certainly holy, what is holiness to begin with? We define it in terms of purity and perfection and being set apart, which God certainly is even if not all those concepts are readily comprehensible. How do we define and understand perfection or even purity? And are those the real reasons we'd be drawn to God anyway, to worship Him in spirit and truth, to recognize and value His beauty, to glorify Him? We love Him because He first loved us. And I’d submit that holiness is a part of and encompassed within love, and so God’s love is what His holiness consists of anyway.I don't think this is borne out in Scripture. Holiness appears to be God's "primary aspect." The Bible speaks of God's holy hill, His holy tabernacle/temple, His holy angels, His holy throne, His holy word, His holy prophets, and so on. Scripture never describes these things in terms of God's love. God speaks in holiness (Psalms 60:6; Psalm 108:7); He swears by His holiness (Amos 4:2; Psalm 89:35); He is holy (or righteous) in all His works (Psalms 145:17). When Moses met with God, he was told to remove his sandals because he stood on holy ground, not loving ground. The cherubim around God's throne proclaim eternally, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty" (Revelation 4:8; Isaiah 6:3) not "Love, love, love." In light of the Bible's emphasis on God's holiness, it doesn't appear to me that love is His pre-eminent quality.
It speaks primarily of God’s love-absolutely. Atonement theories and opinions and speculations vary (with some placing God’s love as the foci incidentally) but either way according to Jesus’ words: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.” That was God, Himself, hanging on the cross, suffering an excruciatingly humiliating and painful death in human flesh at the hands of His own creation if that’s what it takes to prove a love for man that has no bounds, in spite of our sin. In any case love is the very heart and apex of the Christian faith and the more we know God the more we love Him –and love Him because of His love. Glorification is a matter of the heart, not of rote obedience-just as even the rocks and stones would praise Jesus- if they were capable, if they knew what we should know-and can come to know.None of the redemptive work of Calvary that God accomplished through Christ on our behalf would have been necessary if God were not a perfectly holy God. That Jesus did what he did in atoning for our sin speaks, not only or primarily of God's love, but of the utterly inflexible demands of God's holy justice.
Ok? But you made my point. Pride is exaggerated self-love, while self-hatred is not self-love by any means. And your observations were quite astute IMO. Pride and self-hatred or shame are just the flip side of the same coin; shame immediately followed Adam’s act of pride in fact, of his disobedience of God. Pride sets exaggerated standards. When we think we live up to them we feel superior, and this is one of the three-fold aspects of concupiscence “the pride of life” in this case as per 1 John 2. When we fail to live up to pride’s standards we feel shame, inferior. Either way we’re not on target; we’re still suffering at that point from our distance from God, from our fallen condition IOW where man’s will reigns, no longer subjugated to his Creator. So Aquinas, who recognized pride as “inordinate self-love” also described it thusly: “excessive desire for one's own excellence which rejects subjection to God”No, I think the command acknowledges how naturally we love ourselves, which Paul noted in his letter to the Ephesian believers (Ephesians 5:29). The command is saying, essentially, "You love yourselves very well and very naturally and so, in the same way, love others."
Self-hatred is just Self-love in disguise. I talked once with a teenager who was suicidal because he was, he thought, unattractive, possessed of a dull personality, and not particularly intelligent - just generally drab and unappealing to others. And so, he had convinced himself that his future prospects for a mate and positive notoriety within his social sphere were zero. Why, then, should he continue to live? He hated who he was and so he should simply die. I suggested to him that he was suffering from the always and inevitably destructive consequence of pride. The young man laughed and said, "Proud? I'm not proud of myself! I hate myself!" To which I responded that if he truly hated himself, why did he care at all about his looks, or intelligence, or personality? Where, I asked him, was the upset over his personal attributes (or lack thereof) coming from? What part of him hated who he was and pined to be different? What part of him would rather die than be content with who he was? He hadn't thought about it, he admitted. He hated himself, I pointed out, because he loved himself. And his Self-love was so great, so exaggerated, that, ironically, death was preferable to enduring the wounds to his pride that his perceived lack of personal assets incurred. As we talked, he realized that his self-loathing, his hatred of himself, was indeed just a perverse expression of Self-love, of pride, of ego, that refused to be satisfied with mediocre looks, intelligence and personality.
Yes, which was my point about Jesus’ words. But the self-hatred you described above appeared to me to speak otherwise.I've never said that hating one's self involved spousal or substance abuse, or "ugly excesses." Not loving one's self does not equate to destructive self-hatred. Jesus described it as "denying one's self," sacrificing one's desires, goals and rights for Christ's sake and the sake of others. Living this way is particularly antagonistic to the idea of "doing what I want," but it does not entail drug use or beating one's spouse.
Some of this is just a matter of word-usage/semantics. Yes, self-acceptance is good; self-aggrandizement is not. But to dislike the self in any case is wrong-it’s to hate a part of God’s good creation-and actually reflects fallen man’s loss of innocence, and not humility as some may think.Actually, what I think should replace self-esteem and self-love is self-acceptance. God made us as we are physically and with the personality type and mental faculties we possess and so we ought to accept how He has made us and be content that He has done right and well in doing so.
Ok, a Christian philosopher named Augustine made this statement, “The only possible source of evil is good”. If that sounds counter-intuitive at first we must recognize that nothing in God’s creation is evil; it’s literally all good. So evil has no reality of its own; it “exists” only in relation to good, just as darkness exists only in relation to light. When we detract from good in any way, by opting for a lesser good over a greater one, we sin. The source for this is a matter of the will rather than from anything innately evil. And the free will that makes that evil possible is a good, itself, as a gift of God given to certain rational created beings. But as that puts the will in charge, so to speak, evil originates from there, from the abuse of our freedom IOW, whether that of men or of angels.It seems to me that what causes a thing to be twisted out of shape is the "source of evil," not the thing that is twisted. The former produces the latter and thus is its source. In any case, evil is, as Christian philosophers have said, the absence of good. It is what causes "twisting" to occur.
Pride is never good-I didn’t and wouldn’t say otherwise. Anything inordinate is evil, because it misses the mark in terms of God’s will. Anything less than the perfect good is less than it should be. Evil can be more or less evil by degree but even a white lie is an anomaly in creation.And what is "inordinate," exactly? I don't see Scripture talking of pride in this way, making some pride okay so long as it isn't "inordinate."
Love is the only quality that Scripture appears to identify directly with His essence: “God is love”.
And while God is certainly holy, what is holiness to begin with? We define it in terms of purity and perfection and being set apart, which God certainly is even if not all those concepts are readily comprehensible.
How do we define and understand perfection or even purity?
And are those the real reasons we'd be drawn to God anyway, to worship Him in spirit and truth, to recognize and value His beauty, to glorify Him?
We love Him because He first loved us. And I’d submit that holiness is a part of and encompassed within love, and so God’s love is what His holiness consists of anyway.
In any case love is the very heart and apex of the Christian faith and the more we know God the more we love Him –and love Him because of His love.
But you made my point. Pride is exaggerated self-love, while self-hatred is not self-love by any means.
When we fail to live up to pride’s standards we feel shame, inferior.
Some of this is just a matter of word-usage/semantics.
But to dislike the self in any case is wrong-it’s to hate a part of God’s good creation-and actually reflects fallen man’s loss of innocence, and not humility as some may think.
Ok, a Christian philosopher named Augustine made this statement, “The only possible source of evil is good”. If that sounds counter-intuitive at first we must recognize that nothing in God’s creation is evil; it’s literally all good.
When we detract from good in any way, by opting for a lesser good over a greater one, we sin.
Every evil act is committed in the desire for some perceived good.
Even in the case of torture, some sense of power and superiority over another person is obtained, which the perpetrator experiences as good at the time,
Pride is never good-I didn’t and wouldn’t say otherwise. Anything inordinate is evil, because it misses the mark in terms of God’s will. Anything less than the perfect good is less than it should be. Evil can be more or less evil by degree but even a white lie is an anomaly in creation.