8061	Forums / Main Forum / Why Faith Is A Must	on: December 25, 2006, 01:57:48 PM
Quote Quote ... But again we are really discussing the sovereignty of God and that aspect of behavior by choice. And since God causes everything, we can conclude that God causes the unbelievers to choose according to the common grace they have in their choices. God is absolutely sovereign and has decreed what ever comes to pass. So really what keeps an unbeliever from the depths of sin is common grace. It is the cause of all philanthropy. God orders all things so that He gets the glory even if men in the state of unbelief acknowledge it or not. Yes, i see what you mean, MBG, and your words remind me of the way Steve Brown puts it: "We can only love to the degree we are loved." To me, it would be insane for me to take God's gift of His Son and the benefit of that gift, which is eternal life, and then thumb my nose at Him by living for sin and not for Him.  The thing is, i once lived in such insanity.  When i first heard the gospel, i accepted it with joy.  I prayed the sinners prayer and knew eternal life was God's gift to me.  I hung out with born again Christians, studied the Bible with them, worshiped with them and sang Christian songs with them.  Then i went off to college and shed my Christianity like it was a coat i no longer needed.  I called myself a Christian but cared not a whip about what God wanted for me.  I lived only for myself. It took a crisis in my life to bring me back to God, and now i cannot imagine turning from Him and going back to the dark depths again.  So i think to myself, "Why did i care so little about Him then?  Why was i so blind?  What makes the change in my desires now?" I think Paul helps me come closer to understanding myself when i read: "For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again." (2 Corinthians 5:14-15) Funny how the depth of God's love did not dawn on me until He helped me through a low point in my life.   I was helpless and prayed in desperation.  I made a deal with Him that if he'd get me out of my trouble i'd get myself to church.  He did, and i did, and i have not turned back in the last 15 years. "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5: I knew the words, but i did not experience them.  I knew that they were true, but i did not trust the truth of those words and let them affect me emotionally.  Jesus might have been the Savior and the Lord to me, but He was not my Savior and my Lord.  That was an important distinction, at least for me.  Realizing that distinction changed my life.  Yes, i must have been insane.  I'm grateful He knew exactly what i needed to draw me closer to Him. * * * So, MBG, you would say that i was not really freely choosing God but that His love overwhelmed me to the point that i could do nothing but turn from my sin and turn to Him?  If so, you might have a point there. Yes i think that you responded to the call of God. At a point and time you were regenerated. The circumstances in our past and how regeneration worked out visible in our experience are all different. Some people are regenerated at their birth, in infancy, or as adults. Some people have a profound experience in salvation, some people have a very ordinary experience. Some people do not know when they were saved. The important thing is that we are trusting Christ in the present. When we are regenerated we are given a new will so that we can respond to the gospel. Our self will is killed, and we are given Gods will. Yet our faculty of will is not eliminated but rather is regenerated. We are the ones who choose to believe, because our new desires cause us to choose Christ, which desires come from a new spiritual knowledge of Christ. We have a new understanding of who Christ is by being able to spiritually view the value of His death and resurrection. In other words prior to being regenerated we were only in darkness, but in regeneration the light comes on, the light of the knowledge of God. Once the light comes on then we begin to see, feel , touch, taste , spiritually, so that we embrace Christ and find in Him our all in all. He becomes our only hope. And yet all of these new desires are spiritual so that we cannot really understand the depth of them and in a mystical sense we cannot explain them as to how they work out. The profound supernatural nature of God dwelling in us by the Holy Spirit in the application of all that we have in our inward experience is beyond words. They begin to deepen in our sanctification but can never really be satisfied in this life, but only in our future heavenly abode. Our spiritual sense being defined by these new desires are were we experience the mystery of super-naturalism. Naturally we do not like to focus on the inward working of the faculties because we are blinded by the physical aspect of seeing feeling touching and so we naturally do not think in terms of spiritual senses. In being carnally effected we live so much in the imagination of what reality exist. We do use all of our physical senses in the out working from our spiritual senses but there is a struggle in this area between accepting that we are physical beings who are effected by the spiritual struggle and embracing the reality of how we are spiritually effected by our physical pains and seeing Christ as being totally man , who identified with us in the physical realm, and on the other hand , we are to struggle with putting our physical appetites under control by meditation in His word and letting the Spirits work illuminate to us individually our experience in this struggle, in an individual sense , because we all have different weaknesses . But yet because the physical aspect so often alarms us to our spiritual inward experience we are to view these inward experiences with the physical aspect as part of the inward spiritual struggle. Because we do not like to admit areas of weakness that are exposed by our physical senses, and being alerted by the physical unless we view our emotional state in our inward experience we really never get to the bottom of our pain. We begin to devalue the mystical and supernatural work, in our carnal disinterest in our mortification. By devaluing the physical senses in our spiritual inward experience we fail to gain an insight into the freedom we have in Christ in our mortification. Because physically we are weak in the natural outworking. These experiences of guilt and blame are from not taking a holistic view of the human condition in the physical and spiritual. For example , we begin to pray, now there are weaknesses that we are confronted with both in the physical senses and the spiritual senses. We are confronted from within and without. We grow weary in prayer because we are physically weak not just because we are struggling spiritually. What we need to see is that just as we are using our physical senses for the spiritual exercise of prayer , our Father in heaven stoops down to our level and offers to us these physical attributes of seeing ,touching, feeling, so that in these personifications of attributed faculties to God , He in fact under-girds our weak state of our faculties by communicating to us the eternal nature of these faculties so that we are deeply aware of our inward spiritual struggle and His answer to our weak senses by inflaming our desires by that communicated personification. Once we veiw these faculties in and eternal sense we are transformed into His image.