Leaderboard

Infuriating? Big Book, page 417 And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life —unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concen- trate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

One of the great things about a forum, is that people give their opinions. One of the bad things about a forum, is that people give their opinions. I think you misread read Debbym, I can say this, she is one of the good guys.

No matter how many times debate go on, the answer is "No" and should no. Waste of time to listen to such a debate.

what ivy league life? i never had one of those.... it was a powerful experience listening to every gruesome detail, as if this was going to help this person not use drugs... or help me...

Sorry, fccool, but after reading and re-reading, thinking and re-thinking, you post, I have arrived at this conclusion: [What you are saying doesn't] make any sense at all [to me].

I have found this to be true in my Relationships as well.. It is not easy! Hard lessons still be learning http://www.lightbearers.org/obedience-vs-legalism/ .............................................................................................................................................................................................. Obedience vs Legalism by Ty Gibson | October 16, 2015 A man once came to me and said, “My marriage is falling apart. My wife says she doesn’t have feelings for me anymore, and my feelings for her are pretty much dead too. I guess it’s over, huh?” He was startled by my immediate response. “No, it’s not over. Read the Songs of Solomon and do exactly what it says, and throw in 1 Peter 3:7 for good measure, and you will save your marriage. Not only will you save your marriage, it will become great, far better than what you ever imagined possible.” “What,” he responded with a tone of incredulity. “Just read those Bible passages and do what they say?” “Yes, read and obey, dude, read and obey! And all will be well,” I declared with prophet-level confidence. Still looking skeptical, he said, “But don’t we need some marriage counseling or something?” “You may need counseling,” I said, “if you are especially stubborn and want to take the long, painful route to repairing your marriage. Good Christian counseling can be an immense blessing and sometimes is the only way forward. But it sounds to me like you have an emergency on your hands, so I’m giving you the shortest and fastest route to heal your relationship with your wife. Counseling takes a long time, meeting after meeting after meeting, with both of you sharing feelings, feelings, feelings, and potentially making one another mad, mad, mad (exaggeration for effect). But if you want to bypass all of that and just git ‘er done, brother, read what the Bible says about marriage and obey.” “Um,” he said with a hesitant tone of rebellion, “just obey? That sounds to me like mindless legalism.” “That’s because you’re a spiritual wimp,” I fired back, but with a smile to lighten the blow. “Obedience isn’t legalism, unless you believe God is an arbitrary control freak who hates you. But if you believe God is on your side, a God of tender love who has only your best interest at heart, well, then, in that case, obedience is the most intelligent course you can take.” Obedience is not legalism. “But we don’t love each other anymore,” he said, as if he knew what he was talking about. “Well, then,” I explained, “here’s the first act of obedience you should engage in: stop saying that, and never, ever, say it again. Not loving your wife is not an option according to Ephesians 5:25, and according to your marriage vows. So do not express those sentiments, not one more time, ever again. And in their place, begin expressing, on a regular basis, that you love your wife. Tell her, tell yourself, tell your children, your buddies. Talk her up, not down. Tell her how amazing she is, how beautiful she is, how blessed and happy you are to be her husband.” “But what if it’s not true?” He was trying to wiggle loose. “If it’s not true, then expressing it will be the first step of obedience in making it true! In fact, let me tell you a secret that has been lost by our feelings-obsessed culture: feelings follow actions wherever actions lead.” “What?! Really?” “Yes, really! Guaranteed! Countless couples in our emotionally egocentric culture get divorced because they follow their feelings. But here’s the thing: feelings are often stupid and cannot be trusted. What you can trust is the application of sound principles, which, when applied, produce good feelings.” “So I’m just suppose to act contrary to my feelings?” He said this as if it was the silliest thing he’d ever heard. “Yes,” I stated with absolute firmness. “If your feelings are telling you to end your marriage, defy your feelings and call them what they are—stupid, weak, selfish feelings—and act out a different picture.” “That sounds . . . um . . . crazy.” “No, what’s crazy is that you would consider ending your marriage because of your feelings. What I’m telling you is that if you really want to heal your marriage, actions are the fastest way to do that. Good, sensitive, beautiful actions toward you wife will literally create a new relational dynamic between the two of you. That’s not crazy, dude, that’s what total sanity looks like.” But this article isn’t actually about marriage. It’s about the power of obedience to God’s word. Marriage is just one example of many areas of life concerning which God has something to say. My point is that obedient action to the inherently good principles of God’s word will invariably produce positive new realities in a person’s life.If that sounds like “legalism” to you, that’s either because you have a terrible misconception of God’s character or because you need to start at ground zero and be born again. Obedience is not legalism. And legalism is most emphatically not obedience. Obedience is the love-motivated process of acting in accordance with God’s word because you believe that you are living under His favor and that He only has your best interest at heart. Obedience is trust, fueled by love, in action. Legalism, by contrast, is the anxious effort to earn God’s favor because you believe, at least on an emotional level, that God’s love is conditional and therefore that He holds you at a distance until you prove yourself worthy. It is a form of religious narcissism, a way of keeping self as one’s center while projecting the illusion of serving God. Once you come to Jesus in response to His love, just as you are, receiving salvation as the free gift of His grace, the instructions in His word look like liberty and feel protective. You’re like, “Wow, Lord, thank You for showing me the principles of life by which I can, by Your empowering grace, repair my broken relationships and flourish in every aspect of life.” Obedience is the love-motivated process of acting in accordance with God’s word because you believe that you are living under His favor and that He only has your best interest at heart. Obedience, in this relational context, is voluntary, rendered from the heart. Paul says it like this: Paul is speaking here to the person who has come to Christ in response to His grace, not to the unbeliever. To those who have not embraced God’s merciful love, the idea of obedience can only feel like externally imposed bondage. But those who know God’s good character as it is revealed in Jesus make themselves voluntarily obedient to the Lord. But note Paul’s specific, qualifying language: “from the heart.” In other worlds, the obedience of the grace-immersed believer springs up from deep inside. It is composed of willing, affectionate faith that is lodged in God’s essential goodness. There is a direct correlation between obedience and knowing. Jesus put it like this: According to Jesus, doing modifies knowing. One of the great rational fallacies of our scientific age is that knowledge consists of intellectual facts that reside outside of behavioral engagement. Scripture, rather, communicates a more holistic view of knowledge. We do not really come to know anything or anyone by mere objective thinking without subjective doing. In other words, one cannot truly know God by analyzing, contemplating, or intellectualizing data about God. Rather, God can only be known through what we might call experiential knowing, by relational engagement, by full-person interaction. Anything else is at best only knowing about God. So Jesus basically says, Do what I’m telling you and you will know, once you are on the inside of the doing, that I am telling you the truth straight from God. There are things that can only be understood from the inside. God’s word testifies to its veracity by the effects, the outcomes, the results it produces when its principles are implemented. God’s law looks and feels different from the inside than it does from the outside. Once you embrace its stunning vision of life as relational integrity, God’s law feels liberating rather than restricting. Obedience to God’s word places you in a position of commitment to people above and beyond your feelings, and sometimes contrary to them. And then—surprise, surprise—you are acting in the only manner that has the power to create positive feelings between yourself and others. Whenever you are uncertain how to proceed with God, the safest course you can follow is to engage in active obedience. In the case of marriage, for example, the concrete commitment of two people to one another is the only framework within which the true nature of love can be understood. If you stand on the outside quibbling about your feelings, love will gradually vanish and your commitment to the relationship will die. But if a married couple remains on the inside of absolute commitment and actively obeys God’s word by engaging in beautiful actions toward one another, they will experience positive results in the form of security, trust and, yes, positive emotional feelings. Whenever you are uncertain how to proceed with God, the safest course you can follow is to engage in active obedience. Simply do what God says, and things will get better, clarity will come, problems will diminish, and quality of life will increase. The guy with stupid feelings about his marriage contacted me about a year after our conversation. “I thought my marriage was over,” he testified, “and I thought that what you were telling me was crazy. But you sounded so sure that I thought I should follow your advice and see what might happen. I read the Song of Solomon and other Scriptures about marriage, and I just started treating my wife the way God’s word said I should. And it was amazing to watch her come back alive to me! She was blown away and started treating me differently. And sure enough, just like you said, our feelings for one another started getting better and better, and now its like we’re dating again. We just really love each other more than ever.” I was not at all surprised, because God is good and everything He says in His word is calculated to our present and eternal flourishing.

I was about 6 or 7 when I heard my grandmother fussing about treatment that the organist had been receiving because 'everyone' was certain she was wearing lipstick. I had determined at that early age that one should not base judgment on what others said or we think we see until .... The church that I helped to raise up has a lot of visitors. Today planted directly in my view was an older woman wearing some solid but colorful earrings. Would it have drawn her closer to God by insisting that she remove them? What if it was a young woman with a very short dress? I just don't worry about it. I wish I had the opportunity to meet the woman involved in the story. Yes, it is a habit of mine to seek out people having a difficult time and making friends with them. Mostly from childhood experiences, I learned that some people are in more need of friendship than others.

The issue is that there is a oneness of opposites in the trinity. Rachel, I hate to say this as you are searching, but your God is too small and you are reading modern western mindsets into the text instead of ancient eastern mindsets. As we enter the realm of the infinite, outside of time and space it is only one God but a God so out side of time and space that finite minds cannot conserve. But many ideas are in this problem, including the Roman Catholic view of trinity which looks at a 3 leaf clover or a rope with 3 strands. To try to translate into our mindset a glass of water representing time and space with someone outside of time and space putting in 3 fingers that reveals 3 aspects of this someone that we need to know to have a relationship with this someone. It might be good for you to look into studies on "The Angel of the Lord" and there is a fantastic book written by a non-Trinitarian (He's a Jewish Rabbi) James Kugel "The God of Old" http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Old-Inside-World/dp/0743235851

I don't know how He does it, but He is aware of EVERY particle in the universe! Knows my thoughts even before I utter the words .

It is vanishingly improbable that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland will create microscopic black holes... and even if it did, they would sink to the centre of the earth and we'd never even notice. So that's one less thing to worry about...

They don't mean the same thing, which is why I knew instantly that I didn't say it.

They are two completely different concepts. You have a tendency to read into what you are reading what you think people are saying instead of what they are not saying. If you would ask yourself what is the intent of the author, that would help. This is why I'm suggesting trying to read whole paragraphs, rather than picking out sentences, or worse, portions of sentence, or, even worse, single words. This isn't a good methodology. You have done this with me, with A. T. Jones,, in addition to Scripture.

God makes one new man out of God and a man. And in Christ, God and man met so that they can be one.(Jones)

A Jew and Gentile are only reconciled to each other if they are each reconciled to God by Christ. The cross is the means of reconciliation by revelation. When the truth the cross reveals is believed, then those who believe are reconciled to God, and to others.

You are simply stuck in the habit of answering a question that is not asked. Answer the question directly, please. Who do you think is the one new man Jones was referring to? Don't send me into a wild-goose-chase for what you think Jones meant.

Just read the sermon! Jones doesn't have to defend his statements, because he was very clear in what he said! I can sum it up for you. Jones went back to Eden, and explained what happened when Adam and Eve believed the lie that the enemy presented, that God did not have their best interest at heart and was not to be trusted, which was receiving the mind of Satan, the enmity. This is the enmity, the principle of sin, to distrust God and His word. In order to build back trust, to win man back to trust and friendship, God sent His only Son, who knew Him best. to show us what God is really like. When be believe the truth that Christ so gloriously revealed, we are transformed into the same image, and set free, as knowing the truth, sets us free. To know God is life eternal. This is how we are reconciled to God. 18 All this is done by God, who through Christ changed us from enemies into his friends and gave us the task of making others his friends also. 19 Our message is that God was making all human beings his friends through Christ.[a]God did not keep an account of their sins, and he has given us the message which tells how he makes them his friends. 20 Here we are, then, speaking for Christ, as though God himself were making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ's behalf: let God change you from enemies into his friends! This is from the GNT. I hadn't noticed this translation of this passage before. It's beautiful! The message of Christ, of His cross, makes us God's friends! This is the message we are to give to unbelievers, what a wonderful God God is, who has given His all, all that can be given, in order to win us back to trust and friendship. If two people are at odds with one another, the only way to true and permanent peace is to both to become right with God, and then, as a direct consequence, they will become right with one another, because it is impossible to set right with God, the principle of whose kingdom is to love your enemies, and not be right with another who is a servant of Christ. This, in a nutshell, is the message of Ephesians 2, which Jones eloquently explicated.

I quoted this same sermon! Did you also quote this independently, or did you get the idea from me? It's not important, but it would be pretty cool if you also independently posted the same sermon I did on the same subject. I wholeheartedly agree. I always thought this was a difficult passage to understand until I read what Jones said, and then it seemed simple. What a privilege it would have been to have heard him speak in person! Thank God, his sermons have been preserved for us.

For me, A.T Jones had the best understanding that made the most sense. Yes it is a bit lengthy.

Paul did not say in Ephesians 2 that "the body of Christ was created on the cross." I have seen you take other people to task because they claim the Scriptures say something, and then you quote what the Scriptures actually say, and make the point that it doesn't say what they are claiming. I would do that here, but I don't even know where to start. When you say that it is saying something, why not quote what it actually says?

You added "created on the cross". Other than that it's ok. A problem with your idea is that the body of Christ consists of only believers, as 1 Cor. 12 shows. As I understand your idea, you disagree that the body of Christ consists of believers, but 1 Cor. 12, which describes the body of Christ, does not include unbelievers. So Paul's idea in 1 Cor. 12 is only believers, and thus so is Ephesians 2, given that these two are the same.

Ephesians chapter 2.

You said every Christian denomination says it's the body of Christ. You are wrong in saying this. I referred you to the Wiki article because it talks about this. Your response here doesn't make sense, as you were the one who made the statement about every Christian denomination.

Samie, according to the usage of Paul, such a 1 Cor. 12, we see that the body of Christ consists of believers in Christ. So you're question as to when the body of Christ was formed is tantamount to asking when were there believers in Christ. The first believers would have been in the garden of Eden. If the body of Christ consists in believers in Christ, this could not have started at the cross, or else Abraham could not be the father of all who believe.

This came to mind. I don't know how angels and the Holy Spirit do it, but somehow they communicate with our minds.

I've never heard that Jesus is the Holy Spirit....

Socialism has nothing to do crime. Take a look at Norway, a typical socialistic government. The country has been one of the nice places to live, no crimes, people have 5 weeks of vacation a year paid by the government, maternity leave for women and man paid by the government. Doesn't it sound good? The people pay high tax about 70% of their income. Free education and free healthcare, but wait until you sick . It could take up to 5 years of waiting period for nonemergency cases for an operation. Now some physicians are opening up some sort of private practice and the people who can afford and cannot wait are treated by these private providers. You pay your own cost. An automobile costs sky high because what they call value added tax. A small Subaru would cost the Norweigian about $120,000.00. Since influx of foreigners from especially Middle Eastern countries the crime has been steadily going up, mind you this is a socialistic country which takes care of people. The crime free Norway has disappeared . Look at another socialistic country, Greece! This country is broke. People do not want work. They oppose raising retirement age from 52yrs. age! Who would pay to run the country whether it is capitalistic or socialistic? The America has been a good country to live, but it has been steadily declining because corruption of politicians, too many who get freebees from this liberal government who are more than anxious to hand out freebees in exchange for the votes.