6120	Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.	on: August 17, 2008, 06:12:59 PM
We use a very small part of our brain. Which is why there is reason to believe that we were very intelligent in the pre fall paradigm of thinking. So that in a sense we all are starting from this fallen inclination to underachieve. Could it be that since we are very limited in our thinking ability that there is some kind of damage in certain areas of the brain that is undetectable ? Or could it be a spiritually dead conscious activity in the inter communication to the physical brain? For certain we know that the connections of activity of the flow of information to the areas of the brain have some natural qualities and some self programing involved. If there is a connection to the faculties in the communication of the nature of the Spirit as a cause, that being the will is determined by the desires, which involves an understanding of truth in the mind, then there also is a physical cause in a process as to all the connections of the brain that naturally work to bring about the end of a man working these logical sequences in learning. But is it because there are areas that are less enabled so that it brings in other avenues of information to balance out that weakness or do men determine to exercise their own weakness as the primary reason for and increase knowledge? Or could it be that the circumstances one faces create the heroism to achieve beyond the limits of ones natural abilities? We know that unless there is a work of the Spirit, then all attempts to resist by willing will be of no avail. Since the will cannot produce as the cause the connection to gain knowledge, but knowledge is prior to the activity of willing. And that new knowledge is according to is nature. And our knowledge of evil is from our first parents as having a power to work in us prior to our working. So that evil is prior to a physical defective action. It is an evil imagination, or a thought that comes to the point of having an evil action. In this sense the inclination to do anything is naturally different in each one of us. But we know that it is impossible for us to not on sin this side of heaven, since we still have a nature of evil. So that how we understand ability may have a direct effect on how we process knowledge and how much knowledge we are able to acquire and keep. Since what we do not agree on, we are made aware by the work of God as He teaches us through His Spirit.

6118	Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denomination are you?	on: August 20, 2008, 07:16:43 PM
Quote from: billbennett on August 20, 2008, 05:11:38 PM A baptismal thread would be interesting, as long as we could begin with the premise that it is not necessary for salvation. Since baptism is symbolic of our identification with Christ's death and resurrection, it would seem that immersion would be the most vivid representation of this (lowering the candidate into the water symbolizing his death and raising one out of the water symbolizing his resurrection). Also, I never have understood infant baptism. NT baptism always seemed to come after (often immediately after) a person trusting in Christ. I am all for dedicating a baby/child to the Lord, both from the parents perspective and the church's as well. But this should not take the place of believer's baptism, IMO. Also believer's baptism is a great testimony to the family/friends of the new believer, a testimony by ceremony so to speak. Bill  Bill, I think one of the problems of being involved with these different kinds of physical dedications is that it is not necessarily a reflection of what is going on in the heart of a person. And although these things are important at the moment of time that it happens, yet salvation is mostly a focus of the transformation that is going on in an everyday paradigm. The thief on the cross > although the chances are small in the sense of normal means , yet it speaks of the causes. Its just like being a spiritual infant in sanctification and pointing back to when we were saved that defines who we presently are in Christ, rather than having a testimony of our growth by being transformed. What follows our growth is the amount of fresh understanding we have by that growth and all of the present causes of the use of the means the encourage others to grow in Him. So that our loving Jesus is a fresh love not lukewarm. Then our speech will be seasoned with salt, or we will have the encouragement of the Spirit to cause others to rejoice in Him with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Not only will it go from our lips but it will show itself in our writing as well." My heart have You pierced."

6113	Forums / Main Forum / Re: Denomination are you?	on: August 21, 2008, 04:52:14 PM
Quote from: billbennett on August 21, 2008, 12:47:04 PM Tom (MBG), That was a great post. For me, baptism was very meaningful, because it did signify the change that was going on in my life. I had trusted Christ a couple weeks prior, and God was already working in my life in some very tangible ways. His forgiveness and grace was so real! You are right that God's work in our lives is not finished at the time we first come to know Christ, but as you described is a process. We grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It is living in this relationship with Christ, abiding in Him as a branch in the vine, that allows us to bear spiritual fruit acceptable to Him. Bill     Yes, its always good to read your post, Bill. We should be thankful that we have the Lord of the universe promising to listen to our prayers. And we have been shown that He is good even when we struggle with a trial or sin, that seems to bring us down and cause us to walk with the weight of all of the inward griefs. But He has given us His word and promised to speak to us in His language. We have been justified by faith, fully made righteous by His work, and we are enabled to walk in His love for the rest of our days, that is having a  taste of His goodness, or His sincerity in answering our every failure. He sincerely loves us in reminding us as He meets us in every disabled learned disposition of doubt. And even tho we feel disconnected in this world, where people have departed from listening to Him, yet we know that we are not left to experience the same temptations to be hard toward Him. We have been given Christ, in such a personal way, that we know the place of being sincere to Him. And since He does not judge us as if we are questioning His being our present help in time of need, then our desire to be sincere to Him, is only as we are being enabled to understand His greatest understanding of our weakness that we know this connection to be the only real sincere place ,where our weakness is lost in His love. We grow weak in order to experience His strength, and when we have found that place of rest, then we are aware that He is all we need.

6111	Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.	on: August 23, 2008, 09:19:21 AM
This sounds like emergent. The pastor is more interested in the process than historical truth. So that he is trying to find the balance between everyones belief system. So if you have a conviction about what should be said, then that is one view. The purpose is to get people to agree rather than the historical way of teaching and encouraging. It can be frustrating , especially if you hold some very deep convictions. I agree, this is a waste of time. If the truth is from someones personal feelings and experience, then the revelation of the hidden personal problem is more important than the historical teaching. So if you try to share you convictions as historically accurate you may be labeled divisive. My personal experience in this is that there is a tendency to turn toward labeling people, applying rules or overstepping the boundaries of relationship to limit personal freedoms. Wards of the state, or politically structured church discipline.(edelweiss, edelweiss', bless my home land forever,) When you get a bunch of wayward sheep together along with the wolves and you start talking about other things that are not indirect in a biblical sense, then the inevitable direction will be to set up your own rules or system that determines the behavior. Once a person learns to view life this way, then they get really legalistic, and forceful. To me this is teaching people to look at others sins without seeing your own sins in light of others. The point and the counter point of self and circumstance is to be argued from the law of non -contradiction. This is very weird. I would distance myself from this for the sake of my own sanity. Why arent people upset about the political debates going on inside the walls of the church? Cause they have been taught through this discipline a sorta fascism. In theater we have this imaginary wall between the stage and the people in the seats. This wall is seldom broken. And in a sense what goes on in the preaching and teaching of the church is the same kind of process. Theater is strictly acting a part, where in the church you have the unseen work of the Spirit on a man, who is using these supernatural words and convictions that go to the hearts of the people and work to bring them to the glory of Christ. So that just like going to the theater and being a passive recipient on the feelings , the church does this on the inside of a person to heal them supernaturally without breaking the wall of personal communication toward one person. But the emergent has been an attempt to break the wall, so that man and the state become the agents for change and the congregation becomes active rather than the word and the Spirit. There are these powerful supernatural paradigms that are new ways of viewing the world that come in the light of all of the law of God. And we are not dealing with a moral fight in a direct way. Within the natural disposition of a sinner is not only the inability to come to unity or having a society of viewing alternative reasons for new discoveries of connection rather than processing a moral rule in connection. These new discoveries come indirectly through a point and time deliverance, or looking for the miracle, that new discovery, beyond the human understanding. This is a learned world view of deepening the understanding of the limits of the power of self within the unified understanding of the definition of connection. For we share in the unity of that discovery through supernaturalism rather than by the means of self discovery through the agency of a principled disciplined procession.   The rules of communication are different. Since what we confess is the truth of what we do. Our identity is individualist, by the reception of individual confessions of truth as the understanding of the reality of who we are in light of what we do. We know the way of truth to be the way of deliverance in a prior example of remembering the art of coming to a new way of transformation through being converted by the confession of the truth rather than the self discovery through the process of self disclosure. These powers are the limits of human security since individualism comes through the process of having these effects of growing through the reception of these passive pre dispositions in the set of new discovered desires that convert our understanding to a new world view in order for us to be at liberty in connection. Our disposition is the only example of what the truth is in connection as having a converted cohesion of being of one mind.

Most of my writing in 2008 were led along by paraphrasing a Psalm. I was thinking through each phrase in a particular Psalm and applying the biblical epistemology correctly.

6110	Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Freedom Of The Will Jonathan Edwards	on: August 23, 2008, 11:56:29 AM
1. Defining "Free Will" as choice absent any predilection could be challenged.  Flip a coin; tails I commit adultery; heads I don't.  Is that Free Will?  Electrons change energy levels and photons choose slits in the two-slit interference experiment with no apparent cause - do they have Free Will? Your the one who later in this post said that God was the cause of the created universe. If there is no cause then there is no reason for the existence of the smallest particle. Now if there is an existence of anything then in order for that thing to exist there must be an act of the will for it to be put into existence. If the power to make it exist is exercised, then it must be a power of choice. Otherwise there could be no emanation of the reality of existence. We do live in a conscious universe so that the cause is conscious reality of the existence of whatever is known. There is no difference in knowing. So that what is not known has no cause since it never has existence from our view. That is God determines what we know by its existence. Whatever happens by chance happens apart from a personal involvement of an idea. How can anything exist apart from an idea of what it is? And how can anything not have a causal knowledge in our being conscious of our view of ideas that we have? Is there such a logical idea of an uncaused cause?

6213	Forums / Theology Forum / Re: Romans and the Flesh Monster.	on: July 06, 2008, 03:19:09 PM
Our language indeed does not begin to describe the extent of the truth of who God is. But this language is the means by which God works His sovereign plan in time. We know that the truth of God has a back drop of the reality of our own humanness. So that we describe God as other, that is we do not understand His ways, and on our own we are in complete darkness, not being able to know God. The bible describes God as being other because in order for us to know Him we must be made holy by His revealing to us that divine knowledge , otherwise we would stay completely in the dark. But God is not completely other, since what He is like is evidenced by what He has made. He is three persons and yet one in substance. So that what He has made is an emanation of Himself for which He has worked His goodness for the purpose of bringing Himself glory by His goodness and pleasure in the end of His creating. If God were just other, then our purpose for existing would be from nothingness. But God works in creation for His pleasure of His goodness, and we receive that purpose in our existence by His perfect good working in us. And even tho we come with the corruption, yet Gods purpose in the working out of all things is Him emanating the pleasure through each second cause so that we experience that good pleasure. If God were only "other" then we could not understand who we are in that working. We have been created in His image, so that each person is of value, having a mind will and emotion. The potential of faculties is in the process of being renewed in God working out all things for His glory and pleasure. If we had no ability to understand who God is, then what He made us to be would be a bad reflection on His purposes. But since He has made all things for the purpose of bringing Himself glory, then our understanding of who He is in order to bring Him glory is essential. Other wise the universe would be a complete contradiction. And we know that Gods determination to work out all things for His glory cannot co exist with nothingness's in our understanding. If we understand any thing about who God is, it is by His giving us that ability. Other wise God could not communicate Himself to us in that bringing Himself glory. Here we struggle with sin. And from our view, we lack faith to see beyond the corrupted views of His working out all things in us for our good. Our natural predisposition is to think independently and we have a terrible time with struggling in this paradigm with a hardness of heart. Our vision is not as God sees. But He has given us some descriptions of Himself for the purpose of strengthening our faith as we are meditating on these truths in His word. What He has spoken is a breath of life, so that we cannot be extended in our believing unless we are being en grafted by the truth of that illumination. We must begin the process of vivification in order to make these eternal realities our normal dispositional sense. For we are to set our affections on things above and not on the things of this earth. Because the work that God does in us is seen in the spiritual realm, in the eternal mindset, with new spiritual eyes. We eye Gods purposes when we live by faith and not by physical sight. So that we are cast into turmoil since we have a love of our own way. We must experience His perfect light by having a greater understanding of Him being to us always faithful. We experience this by Him speaking to us His promises, in the illumination of our understanding. And since we are not always having the same assurance, then sometimes we must struggle long and hard in order to have that assurance once again. So that sometimes we sink into the depths of the circumstances of this life, and then we are in a desperate crying and we are weeping before our loving Father. And since He is always available to us, then there is always a place we can go to, as the only place where we could receive this ongoing grace of assurance. Our Father does indeed work in the unseen, beyond our ability to reason. How we have come into this world and how we know our weaknesses by that are what He is to us in each struggle. All of our thinking of these things are what He has done in us to draw us to Him by the level of that struggle. He has given us a perfect asking in His word for every malady. Our hearts were made by Him, and He knows just what to teach us to say to Him so that we are made aware more and more of His working these things out through us. Even when we sink and struggle, yet He knows, He reaches down to our level. And He wants us to communicate to Him as we pour out our hearts to Him. The malady we have as an experience is what He uses to make His word and work in us come to fruitation. If we can learn to plead the promises and ask according to His will, then we can be raised up above our anxiety to look at His salvation. Because our natural state of being under these trials is what makes us to struggle to go to Him and get that relief and assurance of having our hope strengthened by the experience of the illumination of His promises being ours by that fellowship of the Spirit of understanding. Oh that we would be strengthened to be able to stand firm!