Posted on 09/24/2016 6:51:14 AM PDT by kindred
I never did either, but I heard about one: my wife's first husband.
Ping
That's interesting.
I've sometimes wondered if what people experience as what we call hell, is not really just being in the presence of a holy God in an unregenerate state.
God is pure and holy and it called a *consuming fire*.
Hebrews 12:28-29 Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
Being in His presence in sin cannot be a pleasant experience. So it's not that God is cruelly punishing with fire those people who don't submit to Him, but rather it is the natural consequence of their decision to reject Him and continue in their sin.
That would be Elsie.
His tagline......
Hades is locative. A very real place.
We too easily confuse good and evil as fellowship with God and then arrogantly pursue one or denying the other as a counterfeit substitute for fellowship with Him and performing per His Plan.
Keeping it simple, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, all mankind now has that knowledge, able to recognize good and evil.
God had warned not to eat the fruit, lest we would surely die.
This is so important and obvious that we overlook it and its implications.
All humanity is now condemned prior to salvation. We also have this ability to know good and evil. God warned us we would surely die with this knowledge.
It not only applies to initial salvation, but also is manifested in postsalvation sin.
Salvation is based upon forgiveness, which only happens when we face Him, recognize our shortcomings and failure to perform His Will, and recognize the penalties for those failures have already been paid for by Jesus Christ at the Cross.
Not one good person by divine standards. We still have sin in our genetic composition and still have scarred souls after salvation.
Human good works fail to meet divine standards.
Since you and I have inherited the life of Adam in our blood (the life is in the blood; the blood is not the life, it carries the life in it) we are not capable of being good in and of our efforts. It is a new life which GOD places in us via His Holy Spirit that generates 'good works' ... we cannot behave/do good deeds without the source of Good in us. And James would know, since he did not believe in Jesus as Messiah until after the resurrection.
BUT THEN JAMES had a spiritual conversion, and it was so strong in him (that tends to be the result of The Spirit of GOD coming in to cleanse and raise one up in the way that we should go) that he was the leader of the Body of Believers in Jerusalem, the site of the opening of the Kingdom of Grace-dealt righteousness. James says someone can claim to be born from above, but without the Holy Spirit transforming that one via new life in that one, it is not likely that one has actually been born from above.
Too many read James and think he was speaking of good deeds toward the poor and the orphaned, and they miss that James is/was a living example of what being born from above translates into in living.
It was common for a Jew to say 'we have Abraham and Moses as our source so we are the chosen ones. What JAmes wrote to the Jews in Jerusalem likely was aimed at addressing this faux identity from derivation, to refocus their minds on the one-to-one relationship GOD establishes when someone is born from above.
Here at FR we see sincere Catholics and Mormons claiming they are followers of 'the one true church', much the way the Jews in James's day would cite that they are descended from Abraham and Moses so they are the favored ones. That is a clear sign of 'institutionalization' not salvation. James addresses that mistake by telling his audience that the behavior of that one tells us what Life is in them. The faux life claims an institution as their source of righteousness (works based religions all do that); the truly born from above live because HIS LIFE is in them, raising them up in the way that they should go.
So long as you are in this fleshly body inherited from Adam, you will have his blood-life carrying his fallen nature throughout your body. BUT GOD has a way to grace you with HIS life via Christ's blood shed for you, so that by spiritual quickening you have Christ LIFE blood as your spiritual inheritance. And God will transform those of such Spirit Life, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, when He comes to get us in the clouds and return to the Father's House. In that moment of transformation, the body and blood inherited from Adam will be left behind, so the sin nature will nop longer be a apart of your reality.
James taught that the new life can manifest in our behavior and James taught that he would show that new life as the NEW LIFE leads his behavior. The old life would gradually lose power over him. And it did ... it is said that James's knees were like camel knees, he spent so much time on them following the resurrection and accepting leadership of the Ekklesia in Jerusalem.
ping-a-ling
>>That would be Elsie.
His tagline......<<
Thanks — hat tip to Elsie :)
ping-a-ling
New Life is certainly manifest in the life of the believer. It will absolutely not be recognized by the world or the standards of the world. The world remains in abject sin.
Everyone is touched by sin, whether saved or lost. Nor are there degrees of sin. Sin is sin. It is all of the darkness and utterly unacceptable to God. Christ came that we might have the burden of sin - guilt, shame, fear, judgement - removed from our lives.
We remain, however, condemned by the world. Did not the world condemn Jesus and did he not overcome the world in his resurrection? So we are lifted above the condemnation of the world by the blood of Christ that has the power to cleanse us of our unrighteous selves.
None of us are worthy, certainly not before our New Life in Christ but also not in our New Life in Christ. We hide in the Rock of our salvation with the certain knowledge that He will stand in our stead before the throne of God in the final judgement and give testimony to our love for Him.
Our love for Him is born of His saving grace and nurtured by His constant presence in our lives. Were I to even for a moment be abandoned by Christ I would be lost to death and destruction. He holds me in the palm of His hand because it is His Will to do so. Praise God for my eternal and most undeserved salvation.
Amen!
See you in the clouds!
For me, the concept of "Church" is somewhat elusive and difficult to define.
I didn't grow up in an organized religion, didn't have to go to a place, nor had a place to go to, on Sunday until the time when I was marched to Chapel.
I'm still not much of a group joining kinda guy, but with age often comes a little wisdom and I do wish now that I could find that place to go to on Sunday.
As it is, I seem to be somewhere in between the Protestants and the Catholics and Orthodox with points of view that each do not accept and some find intolerable.
And yet, we all are reading the same Bible, more or less, and believe in the same Jesus, more or less. Fascinating, our division is, as Yoda might say.
For example, regarding both "Church" and works, here's a quote from something I was reading this morning:
"in My Church nothing has been lost, rather the people lost the presence of My Church in their hearts; the world today in its extreme debauchery is filled not only with error but conspicuously provokes My Deity and My Law; how can I recognize My Church in them?"I think that our doing good works is testimony to the "God within" that is naturally apart of all of us due to our being created by the Creator of all. He, the Creator, is in all of His creation.
Unfortunately, Satan's malware can and will corrupt the OEM Software, but fortunately Jesus is the Ultimate Anti-malware.
However, the key seems to be in fully downloading and then running all of His Anti-malware.
Many, me included, and even those in the highest places of organized religion, have all sorts of malware and bugs running concurrently with the Father's OEM Firmware and Software, and along side of Jesus' Anti-malware, most of which we are unaware of or in denial of.
Our egos are a soft target for Satan's manipulation. Our rationalizing our worth by the words we've memorized or by the goodness of our works alone is some of Satan's stuff and we like it!
However, if you are loving your neighbor, dying to yourself by denying your self in small sacrifices so you can do for others instead, your good works honor Jesus' Commandment and testify to the Creator within.
Otoh, someone who claims the love of Jesus, yet their works suggest a different allegiance altogether, are suspect.
In that regard, a quote from this message has me thinking on things:
"I have shown to them My Kingdom and taught them the knowledge of holy things, but they have not given Me full return for all the graces I have given them;Indeed.
I nurtured them and they were not satisfied with the food I was giving them;
I gave them drink but in their folly they substituted it with mercury yielding My Glory to their own;
although they once said: "I will not yield God's Glory to another one's, yet they yielded My Glory to self glory;
now I shall plant the lowly in their place;pride was not created for man;
what has dust and ashes to pride itself on?"
Yes, I believe that, but God is omnipresent and while those who go to hell may be isolated in that one particular place, it still could be that God’s presence in their unregenerated, unredeemed state feels like burning.
Is this a trick question?
Note to self: fire my PR manager.
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