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No conviction of sin
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<blockquote data-quote="losthope" data-source="post: 58624664" data-attributes="member: 94863"><p>To joey down under,</p><p></p><p>You wrote this:</p><p> </p><p></p><p>You write that I would not accept that being still in my fallen nature would displease God. Not at all. I am quite happy to accept, in principle, that God is much more pleased when a person serves God than when the person is serving themselves.</p><p></p><p>However, I do not accept that if you are not on Gods team you are on Satans team. Many people, especially those who have a very strong attachment to a particular cause, have a tendency to assume that anyone who is not on their side is on the opposing side, whatever the circumstances. I am not at all surprised that some of the people in this category were writers of sections of the Bible, because it would only be people strongly following God who would write the scriptures. Therefore it is inevitable that statements about being on one side or the other would appear in the Bible.</p><p></p><p>Maybe you need emotions to feel strongly enough about something to assume that everyone who is not for you is against you. I am not sure about that. I only know that I am not the type of person who thinks in such for or against terms. The result is that any statement about having to be on one side or the other, whether it comes from a modern politician or a writer of the Bible, is something that I regard as not being said or written for someone like me. And before you say that means I am being unscriptural, I will be referring you to some words of Jesus to support my thoughts.</p><p></p><p>In any war there are people and nations that are neutral. The warring nations may not like it, and they may even invade a neutral county and effectively force that country to choose which side to support. Similarly in any argument there are people who are not on one side or the other. Sometimes it is essential that there are people who are neutral; a neutral person is often called in to help to resolve a dispute, whether it is industrial unrest, tension between two communities or a full scale war. Jesus recognised this in Matthew 5:9.</p><p></p><p>You also mentioned the Screwtape Letters. In that book I remember the idea of sins being in opposite pairs of an extreme, so that the devil relies on a persons hatred of the sin at one extreme to drive them into the sin at the opposite extreme. For example, some peoples fears or hatred of gluttony and being overweight will go to the opposite extreme and become anorexic. And vice versa. Similarly some peoples fear or hatred of Satan and sin will drive them to fundamentalism in which you have to be on one side or the other. And some peoples fear of fundamentalists will turn them off religion for life.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>In a sense, that is what I did during the time that I was a believer. Never knowing how some word or deed might be serving Go. But at the same time never knowing if a word or deed might be the opposite of what God wanted.</p><p></p><p> </p><p></p><p>I do not think that it was either lack of belief or lack of conviction. It was more that, because I never had a conviction of sin, I never thought strongly in terms of needing a saviour. I did want Christ as lord. There was no lack of belief. There was a lack of feelings, but at the time I did not really recognise that I lacked feelings.</p><p></p><p>To some extent I concentrated on serving God rather than worrying about the mechanics of how God would accept me. After all, serving God is a long term commitment; salvation is a one time event.</p><p></p><p>Did I have genuine faith in Christ? Well, I thought I did. Maybe my faith was slightly different from yours, but that is inevitable; we are different people.</p><p></p><p> </p><p></p><p>Thinking in terms of the Christian viewpoint, you could argue that God does everything for both believers and unbelievers. Sending rain for the just and the unjust, for example. Supposing it to be true, if God changes everyone, believer or not, how would I know if God regarded me as a true believer, or not?</p><p></p><p>In practice I have no awareness of God changing me. But I accept the possibility.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I assume by this you are referring to one aspect of Calvinism, the idea of predestination so that some are destined to be saved and some are not. I have no idea if that idea is correct. However, if it is correct, it would be a perfectly feasible explanation for failure in my attempt to become a Christian. Many Christians do have that belief, and I have to accept it as a possibility, that the reason for my lack of progress spiritually is because my name is not written in the book of life.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>No, that was not what I meant when I wrote that I cannot fulfil the with all your heart verses. My emphasis was more on the word all than the word heart. Yes, I can put my heart into something, although of course without feelings and emotions my heart is a lot weaker than for most people. However, I have never in my life, including during my time as a believer, been able to put all of anything into doing or believing something. I assume this is a side effect of not having emotions, and therefore not having strong feelings about anything. The result is that when for example the Bible says that I will find God if I seek with all my heart, I have to recognise that I do not have the ability to seek with all my heart.</p><p></p><p>I hoped that God might understand about my lack of all my heart. Unfortunately my experience so far of being a believer could suggest that God has made no allowances.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Behind the confession of sins referred to in 1 John 1:9 there is the necessity for being convicted of sin. Being sufficiently concerned about sin that you need salvation. I lack such a conviction of sin, and so I am not at all sure that the promise in 1 John 1:9 refers to me. I could say something similar about other verses (as with seeking God with all my heart above). Yes, there are promises in the Bible, but I am not at all sure that they necessarily apply to me.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I have said that I have not experienced any feelings or answers. I have also written that I am not interested in eternal life. But I have not made a connection between the two in the way that you imply. I have never been interested in eternal life. Not in the years before I became a believer, not during the times when I was a believer, not since I was a believer. In the years before I became a believer I obviously had no idea that I would get no feelings and no answers once I became a believer, yet I still had no interest in life after death.</p><p></p><p>It is only much more recently that I have speculated (and that is what it is, speculation) that the reason for my lack of interest in life after death is because I lack awareness of having a spirit. This implies I have no part of me that I am aware of, that could potentially achieve eternal life.</p><p></p><p>You have written several times that I do not believe in eternal life. I am quite happy with the concept of eternal life. Like many other ideas in the Bible I am undecided about whether or not it is true. But because I lack interest in eternal life, it is not something that I have any inclination to study in detail.</p><p></p><p>I am definitely not looking for ways to know God in this life as some kind of compensation for not knowing God after death. I was expecting to know God in this life because this is what Christians told me to expect, and because the Bible tells me to expect it. For example, if Christians are not to know God in their life, what is the point of passages such as Ephesians 3:14-20?</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I believe that one of the major promises in the Bible is that Christians will be able to know God in this life and to have a relationship. I just happen to be more interested in that, than in life after death. You seem to be concentrating more on life after death than knowing God in this life. We are none of us fanatical about every single aspect of the faith. In that sense I was, as a believer, no different from most other Christians, yet my experience was very different from theirs.</p><p></p><p> </p><p></p><p>In principle I agree with you here. Does it also imply that a believer who makes no effort to learn more about Bible teachings is also potentially in trouble with God? My guess would be yes.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Yes I do seriously believe that Jesus would still have been needed as a sacrifice for sin so that believers could know and serve God in this life.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="losthope, post: 58624664, member: 94863"] To joey down under, You wrote this: You write that I would not accept that being still in my fallen nature would displease God. Not at all. I am quite happy to accept, in principle, that God is much more pleased when a person serves God than when the person is serving themselves. However, I do not accept that if you are not on Gods team you are on Satans team. Many people, especially those who have a very strong attachment to a particular cause, have a tendency to assume that anyone who is not on their side is on the opposing side, whatever the circumstances. I am not at all surprised that some of the people in this category were writers of sections of the Bible, because it would only be people strongly following God who would write the scriptures. Therefore it is inevitable that statements about being on one side or the other would appear in the Bible. Maybe you need emotions to feel strongly enough about something to assume that everyone who is not for you is against you. I am not sure about that. I only know that I am not the type of person who thinks in such for or against terms. The result is that any statement about having to be on one side or the other, whether it comes from a modern politician or a writer of the Bible, is something that I regard as not being said or written for someone like me. And before you say that means I am being unscriptural, I will be referring you to some words of Jesus to support my thoughts. In any war there are people and nations that are neutral. The warring nations may not like it, and they may even invade a neutral county and effectively force that country to choose which side to support. Similarly in any argument there are people who are not on one side or the other. Sometimes it is essential that there are people who are neutral; a neutral person is often called in to help to resolve a dispute, whether it is industrial unrest, tension between two communities or a full scale war. Jesus recognised this in Matthew 5:9. You also mentioned the Screwtape Letters. In that book I remember the idea of sins being in opposite pairs of an extreme, so that the devil relies on a persons hatred of the sin at one extreme to drive them into the sin at the opposite extreme. For example, some peoples fears or hatred of gluttony and being overweight will go to the opposite extreme and become anorexic. And vice versa. Similarly some peoples fear or hatred of Satan and sin will drive them to fundamentalism in which you have to be on one side or the other. And some peoples fear of fundamentalists will turn them off religion for life. In a sense, that is what I did during the time that I was a believer. Never knowing how some word or deed might be serving Go. But at the same time never knowing if a word or deed might be the opposite of what God wanted. I do not think that it was either lack of belief or lack of conviction. It was more that, because I never had a conviction of sin, I never thought strongly in terms of needing a saviour. I did want Christ as lord. There was no lack of belief. There was a lack of feelings, but at the time I did not really recognise that I lacked feelings. To some extent I concentrated on serving God rather than worrying about the mechanics of how God would accept me. After all, serving God is a long term commitment; salvation is a one time event. Did I have genuine faith in Christ? Well, I thought I did. Maybe my faith was slightly different from yours, but that is inevitable; we are different people. Thinking in terms of the Christian viewpoint, you could argue that God does everything for both believers and unbelievers. Sending rain for the just and the unjust, for example. Supposing it to be true, if God changes everyone, believer or not, how would I know if God regarded me as a true believer, or not? In practice I have no awareness of God changing me. But I accept the possibility. I assume by this you are referring to one aspect of Calvinism, the idea of predestination so that some are destined to be saved and some are not. I have no idea if that idea is correct. However, if it is correct, it would be a perfectly feasible explanation for failure in my attempt to become a Christian. Many Christians do have that belief, and I have to accept it as a possibility, that the reason for my lack of progress spiritually is because my name is not written in the book of life. No, that was not what I meant when I wrote that I cannot fulfil the with all your heart verses. My emphasis was more on the word all than the word heart. Yes, I can put my heart into something, although of course without feelings and emotions my heart is a lot weaker than for most people. However, I have never in my life, including during my time as a believer, been able to put all of anything into doing or believing something. I assume this is a side effect of not having emotions, and therefore not having strong feelings about anything. The result is that when for example the Bible says that I will find God if I seek with all my heart, I have to recognise that I do not have the ability to seek with all my heart. I hoped that God might understand about my lack of all my heart. Unfortunately my experience so far of being a believer could suggest that God has made no allowances. Behind the confession of sins referred to in 1 John 1:9 there is the necessity for being convicted of sin. Being sufficiently concerned about sin that you need salvation. I lack such a conviction of sin, and so I am not at all sure that the promise in 1 John 1:9 refers to me. I could say something similar about other verses (as with seeking God with all my heart above). Yes, there are promises in the Bible, but I am not at all sure that they necessarily apply to me. I have said that I have not experienced any feelings or answers. I have also written that I am not interested in eternal life. But I have not made a connection between the two in the way that you imply. I have never been interested in eternal life. Not in the years before I became a believer, not during the times when I was a believer, not since I was a believer. In the years before I became a believer I obviously had no idea that I would get no feelings and no answers once I became a believer, yet I still had no interest in life after death. It is only much more recently that I have speculated (and that is what it is, speculation) that the reason for my lack of interest in life after death is because I lack awareness of having a spirit. This implies I have no part of me that I am aware of, that could potentially achieve eternal life. You have written several times that I do not believe in eternal life. I am quite happy with the concept of eternal life. Like many other ideas in the Bible I am undecided about whether or not it is true. But because I lack interest in eternal life, it is not something that I have any inclination to study in detail. I am definitely not looking for ways to know God in this life as some kind of compensation for not knowing God after death. I was expecting to know God in this life because this is what Christians told me to expect, and because the Bible tells me to expect it. For example, if Christians are not to know God in their life, what is the point of passages such as Ephesians 3:14-20? I believe that one of the major promises in the Bible is that Christians will be able to know God in this life and to have a relationship. I just happen to be more interested in that, than in life after death. You seem to be concentrating more on life after death than knowing God in this life. We are none of us fanatical about every single aspect of the faith. In that sense I was, as a believer, no different from most other Christians, yet my experience was very different from theirs. In principle I agree with you here. Does it also imply that a believer who makes no effort to learn more about Bible teachings is also potentially in trouble with God? My guess would be yes. Yes I do seriously believe that Jesus would still have been needed as a sacrifice for sin so that believers could know and serve God in this life. [/QUOTE]
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