To joey down under,
You have been busy! Four postings in 19 minutes. My guess is that it took more than 19 minutes to type them, unless you can manage over 200 words a minute. There is a lot to respond to. It may take me more than one posting; well see.
You wrote this:
Yes that is right, but I cannot think of any passage that suggests what you are fearing i.e. someone genuinely is seeking after God Himself but God still rejects them for whatever reason. Going back to Saul 1 Samuel 15 . He was not seeking after God. He was being self-pitying because Samuel revealed God had rejected Saul as king.
Again I cant think of any passage that suggests someone genuinely looking to follow Jesus, willing to do all for him, but Jesus rejecting them. Was it God rejecting them as persons or was it God rejecting them because they were only interested in looking after themselves, their own interests, their own needs? They were their own god. They were disobeying the very first important commandment. We are not allowed to put ourselves first.
There is enough anti-religion ammunition in 1 Samuel 15 to keep half a dozen threads going here. But I will ignore that for the moment. I also cannot think of any verse that explicitly says that someone will genuinely seek after God but be rejected. However, there are examples of people who came to God and were rejected for one reason or another, beginning with Cain in Genesis 4. Besides, it is also consistent with the Bible to suggest that a person has to wait until Gods time is right, or for them to be rejected because their name is not in the book of life. I know that many Christians would not accept either of these arguments, but there are also many Christians who would agree with them.
I still dont see where youve got the idea that there may be a waiting period like a period of under contract stage in a house sale. Like the owner could change their mind about selling their house to the buyer. Like the owner waiting to see if the potential buyers home loan has been approved first. Like God saying lets see if the believer is really genuine in their faith before I give him assurance that he is really saved.
Yet you wrote a few days ago that one of the possible answers to prayer is wait. I have to ask, why should the prayer for salvation be different from every other prayer in this respect?
It sounds like you are capable of change, therefore God could change you. What needs to change right now is for you to become able to see that God may be doing things in your life or approaching you in ways different to other Christians you have known because you are different.
I have long been open to the possibility that God could act in my life in a different way because I am unique, just as everyone is unique. I look out for it, but do not detect any sign that God is acting.
I suspect you are letting fear of not qualifying as a Christian cloud your judgement there. Is it faith in Jesus that makes you a Christian- yes or no? Yes that is the starting point because people should start demonstrating good words AS A RESULT of faith from a changed mind, heart and will. However that is the all-important one prerequisite.
Faith in Jesus is important, but I would not say that faith in Jesus is what makes a person a Christian. It is the grace of God that saves a person, not anything that the person does, or believes, or has faith in. However, if you are saying that it is faith from a mind, heart and will changed by God, then I would agree with you, except to say that what God has done is the starting point, not the persons faith.
That was my familiarity with other religions viewpoint that experiential truths are the real truths so dont care about the facts stepping in there. Christian doctrinal truth is built on facts. Disprove Jesus resurrection and Christianity would be destroyed.
It depends what you class as facts. I like to take into account all of the facts. Experience is fact (but open to interpretation). To me everything stated in the Bible is not fact, although I recognise that many Christians think of the Bible as fact and again it is open to interpretation.
Certainly Paul agreed that without the resurrection his faith would be in vain for reasons that would be irrelevant to me. I agree that the resurrection is very important. Yet there are people who call themselves Christian who do not necessarily believe in the resurrection.
In your situation you shouldnt be worrying about lack of experiences like other Christians sometimes do. Remember some Christians spiritual experiences may be mere emotional experiences or actual spiritual deception. Look at the fruits of their experiences. In your case you need to look at the fruits of your knowledge about God. How did your worldview change during the time when you say you believed you were a Christian? Did you make different choices? What were the results of increased knowledge about God and different choices? Again try not to worry that spiritual knowledge in your case may always be objective and never subjective like other Christians.
It is the possibility that many so-called Christian spiritual experiences may be mere emotional experiences that is a potential explanation for why I never had any similar experiences. But whatever the real cause of their experiences, there were fruits of their experiences; they did help people to confirm and increase their faith.
Did my worldview change during the time that I was a believer? That is a difficult question to answer, because for years before then I had been searching for God and learning about Christianity and the Bible, and so I was already familiar with the type of worldview of Christians. I already had experience of having such a worldview as a possibility, so that when I did become a believer it was a simple change to accept something that I was already familiar with as a possibility.
Did I make different choices? I cannot remember any example of that, recognising that it was a very long time ago.
What were the results of increased knowledge about God? I am glad you said knowledge about God rather than knowing God. Again I do not know, because I already had knowledge about God before I became a believer. Undoubtedly that made my transition to being a believer easier in some ways, because I did not have as much to learn as many new Christians. At the same time it also meant that not much changed after I became a believer.
This will take a bit of dissection unfortunately.
1. How is your memory for how you viewed life from a Christian viewpoint compared to your current (you claim) agnostic viewpoint?
There are some searching questions here and so I am taking them one at a time. For question 1, there are many differences. When I was a believer I thought in terms of what God wanted, and tried to live my life accordingly although of course I sometimes failed in this. I believed that God had a plan for my life, and was waiting for God to guide me, not showing me the whole picture beforehand, but maybe just the odd nudge as required. I told people about my faith because I wanted them to know God. I saw myself as a servant of God.
What about now? I would not say that I have one single consistent worldview. I still recognise the possibility of the Christian viewpoint. Although I am personally without God, I accept that some people may be in touch with God not many, but some. At the same time I live my life in a world without God. That is part of the reason why I call myself agnostic rather than atheist.
One thing that has not changed is my attitude to life after death. I was not interested as a believer, and I remain uninterested now.
2. Can you identify the times when you started to move from doubt to severe doubt to complete unbelief?
Your question suggests that there were specific events that caused a change in my faith and my doubts. Or maybe that my doubts gradually increased until the doubts overwhelmed my faith. In practice it was a much more chaotic process, with times of faith interspersed with times of varying amounts of doubt.
For almost my first year as a Christian there were few doubts. I knew that I had not received any feedback from God, but it did not worry me unduly because I knew that Gods blessings did not always begin immediately a person was saved. Then there were months when the doubts were there because I had received no feedback, but there was also trust in a God I believed was faithful. For the last three months or so I alternated between more or less giving up, and then trusting that God would respond. Finally after much prayer I decided that something was clearly wrong, and that I needed to begin again and come to God again, doing it right this time (although I did not know then, or now, what I had done wrong). I stopped calling myself a Christian. Even then it was not complete unbelief; it was a recognition that something had gone wrong and that with Gods help it could be put right hopefully very soon. I am still waiting for it to happen.
3. Did any thoughts have the kind of tone that Satan used when testing Jesus? Matthew 4:1-11
Could Satan possibly have asked you these things repeatedly until you thought these thoughts were your own: IF you are a Christian then why arent your prayers being answered?
It is possible that I have been influenced in this way by Satan, but I consider it to be very unlikely. Because if Satan did affect me and God did not affect me, during the time that I was a believer and was trusting God, what does that say about Gods power in comparison with Satans power? I know about Job, but I can assure you my situation has always been very different from that of Job. Remember that Satan chose Job because Job was so favoured by God. I do not have that privilege.
Even before I became a believer I recognised that God had to act in salvation, and that it was feedback from God that strengthened peoples faith. I also knew before I became a believer that some people receive an immediate response and some have to wait for a while. In other words, I recognised the possibility of the problem before it happened. But I did not dwell on this potential problem, because I trusted God to act and expected God to act.
As you know already God does not always answer our prayers.
IF you are a Christian then why arent you feeling Gods presence? IF you are a REAL Christian why arent others seeing any spiritual growth? IF you are a Christian then why arent you hearing God like others? Answer 1peter 1:3-11.
1 Peter 1:3-11 is not helpful to me. It suggests that Christians should accept whatever God does or does not do for them because there will be a reward in heaven. Not relevant for me, because I am not interested in life after death. For me there has to be a response from God in this life. If it does not happen, then to me my faith is worth nothing.
(This is part 1 of 2. The computer said that it was too long to include all in one posting.)