Twisted Salvation Message.

[PennyLanePrincess]

I'm sorry but so many churches on a mass scale are spreading bold face lies about salvation. Maybe you even believe this. They basically tell you that all you have to do is confess your sins once in your life and you will be saved. People sometimes ask ."How do I know if I am saved?" then someone will answer "Was there ever a time in your life when you asked Jesus into your heart?" the person will say "well yes" and then they will be persuaded that they are saved because on this one occasion they had asked Jesus into thier heart and repented. In order to be saved you have to have faith in Jesus to be your savior and to be your teacher , not for a day but every day of your life. You must repent all your sins you possibly can. Every day when you wake up you must make a true decision to follow God and do what is right. You must read the word of God everyday and pray everyday. You must love god with all your heart all your mind and all your strength and all your soul , not only with your lips. You must love God in secret , not only in public. You must honestly love God. God sees through fakery.I'm not perfect and I am struggeling very badly but that is what we are supposed to be doing. Following God and repenting must be a daily event and we must always be ready for the Lord. This is how you recieve Salvation. Not by saying a prayer one time and then doing evil for the rest of your life! It does not work that way!We must strive to be like him and believe in what he has done for us. I am writing this because I believe most Christians today are actually on thier way to hell and I find it disturbing and disgusting and it shouldn't be this way.
People need to learn the truth because nowhere in the bible does it say that all you have to do is give your heart to God once and be saved for the rest of your life even when you live it apart from God.

 

[martymonster]

My question for you is two fold.

Why do you believe that God would created a place of endless misery and do you believe that God is sovereign?

 

[HighwayMan]

Yeah, it's unfortunate that 90% (or more by your definition) of mankind is going to hell for all eternity.

I wonder, in your version of heaven, would there be enough people to fill a subway train?

 

[Anglian]

Since, according to traditional Christian anthropology death entered into the world through the sin of our first parents, then we ought to see salvation in this context, perhaps? My own Church hold the following view.

Salvation is the divine gift through which men and women are delivered from sin and death (Matt. 18:11; Luke 9:56; Acts 4:12; Titus 3:5) united to Christ and brought to His Eternal kingdom (2 Timothy 4:18). Those who heard St. Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost asked what they had to do to be saved and were told: 'Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:38)

Salvation thus begins with three steps:
Repent
Be Baptized
Receive the gift of the Holy Spirit

Repent, which means to change from what we have been to what we were meant to be in His image, and that we do through committing ourselves to Christ (Psalm 106:10; Hebrews 7:25).

Being baptized is to be born again in union with Christ (Mark 16:16; Romans 6:3).

Receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit means entering into new life in Christ, being nurtured in His Church and to conform to His image (Acts 19:2, 6).

Salvation certainly demands faith in Jesus Christ (Romans 10:10) for we can, none of us, save ourselves even through works; works as a result of faith in Christ Jesus is faith made perfect (James 2:22, 24, 26). Salvation is 'faith working through love' (John 3:16, 17). It is therefore an ongoing, lifelong process (1 Peter 1:9).

Salvation is past tense in that, through the death and resurrection of Our Lord we have been saved (Luke 3:6; 1 Peter 3:21, 22). It is present tense, for we must also be saved by our active participation through faith in our union with Christ by the power of the Spirit (Acts 10:45, 46). But salvation is also future, for we must yet be saved at His glorious Second Coming (2 Peter 3:15; Philippians 2:12: Revelation 7:10; 19:1).

Though we were deeply sunk in our sin and rejected Him, God so loved us that He reached out to embrace us and to save us. He desires not the death of sinners but that all should turn from their sins and live. But we have the free will to say we know better and to reject Him. St. Isaac of Nineveh was of the opinion that Hell was the self-imposed rejection of God's love, which has always seemed to me a reasonable definition.

We turn to God because our love for Him derives from His love for us; fear ought to be no part of our relationship with Him; His dealings with us begin in love and, if we do not reject it, end there too.

Peace upon this house,

Anglian

 

[Stinker]

John 3:8 (King James Version)

8The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.



Colossians 1:13 (King James Version)

13Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The kingdom of Jesus Christ is a spiritual kingdom. We are commanded to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The books of John teach that whosoever believes this is 'born of God' and therefore is born again so their soul/spirit must have been translated (relocated) into the spiritual body of Christ where it was washed in Christ's blood (Eph.1:7).

The scriptures teach that the moment one comes to the kind of belief commanded by the New Testament, they are never the same again. Those who continue to sin throughout the rest of their life is evidence that they were never born again though they claim they have been.

 

[PennyLanePrincess]

My question for you is two fold.

Why do you believe that God would created a place of endless misery and do you believe that God is sovereign?

God created that misery for demons and Satan because they rebelled against God and have done much evil. Evil beyond understanding. Humans were not meant to go there but because Adam and Eve ate the fruit and were decieved by Satan sin entered into them. God is a righteous God therefore he must punish sin. God now gives us a choice. The choice is who are you going to follow. It's either Satan or God. You know it's like the Bob Dylan song "Your gonna have to serve somebody." That's why I said everyday when you wake up you have to make a concious decision to follow Jesus. If your not doing that then your just going to go straight back into the ways of the world. Jesus clearly tells us that we can not love him and the world at the same time. Jesus made forgiveness available to us but he says " If anyone does not pick up thier cross and walk with me they are unworthy. " We have to crucify our sin and that doesn't happen in a day let alone a lifetime. The idea is to get more like Jesus everyday. The idea is to live for him and not the world.

Do I think God had supreme rule? Well yes.

 

[PennyLanePrincess]

Yeah, it's unfortunate that 90% (or more by your definition) of mankind is going to hell for all eternity.

I wonder, in your version of heaven, would there be enough people to fill a subway train?

Your right. Ninety percent of people are probably going to hell.

 

[PennyLanePrincess]

Yeah but what about "Worship the Lord with fear and trembling."
or "The fear of God is the begginning of knowledge." If you have a relashionship with Jesus then don't be afraid but if we turn away from him you should be afraid. When it comes to your soul you should be concerned.

 

[HuntingMan]

Something interesting about the idea that only a 'few' might end up being saved....

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, out of every nation, and from tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, having been clothed in long white robes, with palm branches in their hands.
(Rev 7:9 )

I dont know...call it wishful thinking...but that hardly looks like just a few to me.

 

[HuntingMan]

I'm sorry but so many churches on a mass scale are spreading bold face lies about salvation. Maybe you even believe this. They basically tell you that all you have to do is confess your sins once in your life and you will be saved. People sometimes ask ."How do I know if I am saved?" then someone will answer "Was there ever a time in your life when you asked Jesus into your heart?" the person will say "well yes" and then they will be persuaded that they are saved because on this one occasion they had asked Jesus into thier heart and repented. In order to be saved you have to have faith in Jesus to be your savior and to be your teacher , not for a day but every day of your life. You must repent all your sins you possibly can. Every day when you wake up you must make a true decision to follow God and do what is right. You must read the word of God everyday and pray everyday. You must love god with all your heart all your mind and all your strength and all your soul , not only with your lips. You must love God in secret , not only in public. You must honestly love God. God sees through fakery.I'm not perfect and I am struggeling very badly but that is what we are supposed to be doing. Following God and repenting must be a daily event and we must always be ready for the Lord. This is how you recieve Salvation. Not by saying a prayer one time and then doing evil for the rest of your life! It does not work that way!We must strive to be like him and believe in what he has done for us. I am writing this because I believe most Christians today are actually on thier way to hell and I find it disturbing and disgusting and it shouldn't be this way.
People need to learn the truth because nowhere in the bible does it say that all you have to do is give your heart to God once and be saved for the rest of your life even when you live it apart from God.

I agree with much of your post here.
Many people believe that once they say the sinners prayer, thats it, its done...salvation is now a debt owed to them by God. It doesnt work that way.

2 Thess 2 speaks about a falling away that MUST come before the day of the Lord where His own are gathered to Him. In those days it will happen that some portion will fall away, an apostasy, and it would seem that we could very well be seeing that sort of thing now.
A huge part of the church has turned to New Age philosophies that have been integrated into the gospel....teaching things such as many paths to God and other godless nonsense.

We may or may not agree on numbers tho.
I dont think any of us is qualified to say '90 % of...."
What I CAN say is that GOD knows those who are His..those who WILL accept and follow Him.
MY job....and YOUR job....is simply to preach the gospel to the world.
I understand your worries and concern, but you will drive yourself insane if you think YOU can talk people into salvation.
Jesus said ONLY if the Father draw a man, can he come to Him....if there is no drawing, we may as well be speaking into the wind.

I'll end by saying that you are absolutely correct.
Salvation does not end at 'I do'.
When a man can say the words then live his entire life like a heathen (as Ive seen some do), then it must be questioned if he ever really had the gift at all.
And of course, there is always apostasy to keep oneself from, even if they have.
Nothing is absolutely final from OUR point of view until we are standing in the line of sheep on His right.

 

[MamaZ]

Salvation has to be a true conversion of being born again. There will be fruits that follow.. For it is not us that wills ourselves to be Christ like. It is Christ in us the Hope of Glory.. This is why Jesus tells us we must be born again..

 

[martymonster]

God created that misery for demons and Satan because they rebelled against God and have done much evil. Evil beyond understanding. Humans were not meant to go there but because Adam and Eve ate the fruit and were decieved by Satan sin entered into them.

You said that humans' were not meant to go there, so does that mean you don't think God is soverign?


[/quote]
Do I think God had supreme rule? Well yes.[/quote]


So you think God was sovereign once but He's not now then?

 

[LilLamb219]

To the OP, if you put a lot of things into your plan of salvation that WE MUST DO, then you have a works righteous type of salvation.

Salvation comes from God 100%. It's all His doing and we don't contribute to it. The things you've stated in your original post about reading God's Word, loving him, trying to do what is right, those are the results of being saved and wanting to know more about Him and giving thanks for what He has done. But those things are not what saves us.

What saves us is God Himself, who came to earth in the form of man, lived a perfectly obedient life that we never could and died on the cross in our substitute so we could be reconciled to Him. God gives us faith to believe this good news!! THAT is salvation. We do things that follow such as what you listed above because of our salvation, not for it, or as I said earlier, you have added works to the Gospel and are preaching a different Gospel than what the bible teaches.

You are correct in saying that salvation isn't us giving our heart to God or Jesus or asking him into our heart, for if we add something that WE must do to gain salvation, then we make ourselves into a Savior instead of looking completely to our triune God who did so much for us!

 

[HuntingMan]

I dont think the OP meant we did things to 'gain' salvation...at least I didnt get that impression at all.
What seemed to be saying, and I agree with it, is that even tho we cannot 'earn' salvation there ARE obligations that go along with it.

Paul teaching, for instance, the Corinthians about how to behave, is completely pointless *IF* there is nothing on THEIR part that is *required* as believers.
Apparently things dont always come as natural to some as they do others seeing that some churches didnt seem to have a lot of problems, while some did.

Nothing we can do earns us salvation, but there are absolutely requirements on our part in this walk.
Refusal to walk in those things shows that we may not have salvation to begin with....or worse, that we have come to Him then spit in His face.

 

[Benoni]

Salvation has to be a true conversion of being born again. There will be fruits that follow.. For it is not us that wills ourselves to be Christ like. It is Christ in us the Hope of Glory.. This is why Jesus tells us we must be born again..

What about the thief on the cross?

 

[MamaZ]

What about the thief on the cross?

What about him?

 

[LilLamb219]

I dont think the OP meant we did things to 'gain' salvation...at least I didnt get that impression at all.
What seemed to be saying, and I agree with it, is that even tho we cannot 'earn' salvation there ARE obligations that go along with it.

Paul teaching, for instance, the Corinthians about how to behave, is completely pointless *IF* there is nothing on THEIR part that is *required* as believers.
Apparently things dont always come as natural to some as they do others seeing that some churches didnt seem to have a lot of problems, while some did.

Nothing we can do earns us salvation, but there are absolutely requirements on our part in this walk.
Refusal to walk in those things shows that we may not have salvation to begin with....or worse, that we have come to Him then spit in His face.

I'm not sure I understand. Both Justification and Sanctification are God's work within us. We can only cooperate in Sanctification, but it's not up to us to try to do it...a blade of grass doesn't grow on its own.

If you and the OP are stating that living the life of a Christian are important things, yes, I'd agree. But, ultimately it's God's doing to grow us in faith. We can read the Bible, but we can't force faith to come from it, that's what the Holy Spirit will do.

We need to be careful as Christians that we don't take away any of our triune God's glory and try to give it back to mankind.

 

[LilLamb219]

I've come back to this as it is confusing, honestly. I mean, a Christian's walk is not to gain anything, but because we have what has been given as a gift and we appreciate it. To state that if someone doesn't do a bible study that he/she isn't a Christian is really false.

Putting the law onto people is a burden and to state that if you don't do such and such and such then you're not a Christian is a burden. We are only Christians because of our triune God and what He has done for us. We stay that way because of Him.

But, on the other hand, we can fall from faith and leave Him. Which is what I sort of see a hint of in the postings. If we consciously sin, then it shows we're turning from him and back to self. Rejection of Christ is what damns us. We can fall from faith by turning from Him and back to our self and going back to doing worldly things.

But as for any requirement to stay in the faith, well, again, if we connect something to "faith", we know that it comes from God, for faith is gift talk. We can show our thanksgiving and appreciation to God by doing all the things listed in the original posting, but by stating that you aren't a Christian if you aren't doing such and such and such, really does make a works type of Christianity, and we have to be very careful that we stay away from wording such as that.

There is a Law/Gospel distinction that I think is what is trying to be said here. The Law states that we need to do or don't do something, but the Law doesn't save us. The Gospel doesn't ever state anything we must do or not do, it points to our triune God and what He does for us. Being aware of the distinctions and how they relate to us is really a difficult thing to grasp and probably even more difficult to explain.

 

[Miracle Storm]

I'm sorry but so many churches on a mass scale are spreading bold face lies about salvation. Maybe you even believe this. They basically tell you that all you have to do is confess your sins once in your life and you will be saved. People sometimes ask ."How do I know if I am saved?" then someone will answer "Was there ever a time in your life when you asked Jesus into your heart?" the person will say "well yes" and then they will be persuaded that they are saved because on this one occasion they had asked Jesus into thier heart and repented. In order to be saved you have to have faith in Jesus to be your savior and to be your teacher , not for a day but every day of your life. You must repent all your sins you possibly can. Every day when you wake up you must make a true decision to follow God and do what is right. You must read the word of God everyday and pray everyday. You must love god with all your heart all your mind and all your strength and all your soul , not only with your lips. You must love God in secret , not only in public. You must honestly love God. God sees through fakery.I'm not perfect and I am struggeling very badly but that is what we are supposed to be doing. Following God and repenting must be a daily event and we must always be ready for the Lord. This is how you recieve Salvation. Not by saying a prayer one time and then doing evil for the rest of your life! It does not work that way!We must strive to be like him and believe in what he has done for us. I am writing this because I believe most Christians today are actually on thier way to hell and I find it disturbing and disgusting and it shouldn't be this way.
People need to learn the truth because nowhere in the bible does it say that all you have to do is give your heart to God once and be saved for the rest of your life even when you live it apart from God.

by your version if someone has a busy morning and does not pray, repent or dedicate theirself to doing God's will that day they would surely go to hell if they die that day...God didn't go to all the trouble of sending His only begotten son to save us just so we would have to live in fear of hell every minute and every mistake..

Once you are saved nothing can take that salvation away from you. Why? It is a gift and God doesn't renege on His promises or take back His gift of Salvation.

Ephesians 1:13And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, 14who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession—to the praise of his glory.

When saved, we do not get a promise that says..."Oh maybe if you are good enough" "Well if you do right everyday"

No I believe when we were saved our names were written in the book of life...each given a seal, the Holy Spirit, Who is a GUARANTEE of our inheritance.

 

[Phinehas2]

Jesus Christ has made the way to salvation and eternal life, thats why we are all wordking out our salvation.