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Desire to be a vessel of honor unto the Lord Jesus Christ?
Join For His Glory for a discussion on how
https://christianforums.net/threads/a-vessel-of-honor.110278/
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Taking the time to pray? Christ is the answer in times of need
https://christianforums.net/threads/psalm-70-1-save-me-o-god-lord-help-me-now.108509/
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Depending upon the Holy Spirit for all you do?
Read through the following study by Tenchi for more on this topic
https://christianforums.net/threads/without-the-holy-spirit-we-can-do-nothing.109419/
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How are famous preachers sometimes effected by sin?
Join Sola Scriptura for a discussion on the subject
https://christianforums.net/threads/anointed-preaching-teaching.109331/#post-1912042
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Why did God create humans with the freewill to sin only to re-create glorified humans without the ability to sin?
- Thread starter chessman
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Razeontherock
Member
Testing is an interesting term. When He "tests" us, it's not quite the way we think of that concept.
Perfect, as a verb, is more like it. Jesus needed to be perfected. Can you place the one word required to do that?
DiscipleDave
Member
The entire Bible reveals we are being tested. Those who pass will enter into Heaven, those who do not pass will never enter into Heaven. Let me rephrase "go with Satan" in a better way. "God is testing everyone to see if they will follow God or choose to follow satan" Your master is to whom you choose to obey, says Scriptures. But with this generation, how many SAY Jesus is their Master, yet they willingly choose to do those things which they know full well are sinful? Those who do such things, Fail to understand the Word of God that plainly teaches "your master is to whom you obey"
Are you suggesting that God would not be a Tyrant if God forced people to worship Him? Is it not commonly known that anyone who forces people to worship them, is considered a Tyrant? Therefore the statement i made that God is not a Tyrant is a True statement. God is not a tyrant and is not going to force anyone to serve Him, if they do not want to serve Him. Those who do not want to serve Him will not be allowed into Heaven, because He is not a Tyrant and is not going to MAKE anyone serve Him, if they don't want to serve Him.
This is True. But i am not referring to those who do not believe in Christ. i am talking to those who proclaim to be Christian, yet choose to obey His enemy and knowingly and willingly commit sin. Every time a person is tempted to commit sin, they choose to either obey God or obey satan (who is the one doing the tempting). God is saying "Don't do it, it is sinful, it is against ME, do the right thing, do the Godly thing". satan is saying "Do it, sure it is wrong, but just repent of it afterwards like you do all the time, you want to do it, just do it. Repent later" Who you choose to obey reveals who your master is.
lol, if that were True, then Jesus would have never said "A new commandment I give unto you, LOVE ONE ANOTHER" Sounds to me like Jesus thought is was something that you choose to do. He even commands us to do it. A man on the corner of the road with a sign asking for food. you choose to love him and help him, or you choose to judge him and not love him. You choose to give to this or that charity. You choose to help someone in need. You choose to give to the poor. You choose to LOVE.
What makes a person Righteous is doing that which is righteous.
1Jn_2:29 If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him.
Everyone that doeth righteousness is Righteous and born of Him. Woe to them who think they are Righteous yet do that which is UNrighteous while proclaiming with their lips they are Righteous. Those who Do righteousness are Righteous, those who do unrighteousness are unrighteous. simple really.
1Jn_3:7 Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous.
Devil worshipers show kindness to their own, devil worshipers show empathy for one of their own friends suffering in the world, devil worshipers feel joy and pain of others, devil worshipers love their own.
Just because a person has that Spirit in them, does not mean they are forced to choose to LOVE. i have the Spirit of Love in me, it does not MAKE me do anything at all. It merely prompts me to LOVE, the choice is mine to make. i see a bum on the street corner asking for money or food. Does the Spirit of Love force me to give to that bum, or does that Spirit prompt me to Love him and help him out? The choice is mine to make. No spirit, good or bad, can FORCE you to do anything at all (save possession cases) You choose which one you will listen to and which one you will deny. Know you not that when Good is present evil is present to (on Earth right now) Where evil is there is also good. When you have an opportunitity to help a bum on the corner, that would a be a good thing, but evil is present also telling you not to give to the bum. Whether you Love or fail to Love, it is most certainly a choice you make. That is why Jesus COMMANDED us Christians to "Love One Another" to "Love our enemies" to "Do good to those who do bad to you" You choose to Love or choose not to Love.
Can Atheists have goodness towards one another? Can Atheists Love One Another. Love is not exclusive to only Christians. Yes Love is a Spiritual force for goodness towards one another, i agree. But it is not limited to only Christians. Just because the Holy Ghost resides in a professed Christians does not mean that person will be overflowing with LOVE for others now does it? Because we choose to Love or not to Love, even if we have the Holy Ghost residing in us. When a person chooses not to Love and that person has the Holy Ghost, that is when the Holy Ghost is grieved. The Holy Ghost in us, does not MAKE us Love, as it seems childeye is saying, which i could be wrong.
True, but even demons are His children, they are fallen children.
No matter how you slice it, you still choose to worship or not worship. NOBODY worships or praises God without choosing to do so, Even when a person is moved by the Holy Ghost, they still choose to do that which they are moved to do, they are NOT moved by the Holy Ghost, They choose to act upon what the Holy Ghost is moving them to do.
Tyrant = a cruel and oppressive ruler.
God is not a Tyrant = True Statement.
God does not force anyone to worship Him = True Statement.
We most certainly decide whether or not we worship God or praise Him, it is called Free Will. NOBODY worships God without choosing to do so.
^i^
††† In His Holy and Precious Name, Jesus Christ †††
DiscipleDave
Thank you for your response. I don't believe that the bible reveals that we are all being tested in our obedience to God, by God. I believe that God is sifting with vanity and the illusion of freewill is part of that vanity. I do not see why the all knowing God would test us to see if we will obey Him or not according to any independent discretion, while His apostle Paul teaches that the carnal mind is in darkness and cannot serve that which is the spiritual Light. If it is then proposed that one who is enlightened could afterward choose the darkness, then I must wonder whether that person was actually ever enlightened.
It's that question which causes me to ponder why anyone would ever be allowed into heaven with a free will, assuming that such a free will could at anytime freely choose to disavow the Truth of God after they have already been allowed in. And if we cannot disavow the Truth of God after being allowed into heaven, then there must have been some factor that changed the fundamental reasoning of the will so as to make it conclusively definitive. This is a major problem with Free will theology.
I agree my master is whom I obey, but that does not mean that we are not subject to carnal reasoning through an ignorance of God, and also therefore made subject to a spiritual reasoning through the knowledge of God. Hence men's wills are subject to knowledge and ignorance of God even as the fool will chooses out of his foolishness differently than those possessed of wisdom. To be subject is to be subservient to higher powers which is not indicative of a freewill particularly in the moral/ immoral purview.
Moreover, To be obedient to God I must first trust Him, and hence the integrity of the Character of God is ultimately going to be questioned every time I even ponder any direct disobedience. So faith in God is the more prevalent issue concerning obedience, not the narrative of a free will to disobey. And therefore I conclude that, objectively speaking, to be obedient, the Truth of God's Character must be more persuasive than the lie that precedes every act of disobedience. Otherwise all moral/immoral choices would be randomly made out of ignorance of what is actually true. And truth it self would then be purely subjective to each individual according to a carnal reasoning, rather than pertaining to God's actual and True Character. In other words, only the carnal mind would presume to judge whether God is trustworthy or not, so as to count it as up to their own discretion to choose whether to obey or disobey.
I'm saying that God would be a tyrant if He forced someone to worship Him out of fear of death if they did not. However, if He forced someone to worship Him by displaying a Love that suffered a cruel and torturous death on a cross in their stead, then He of course would not be a tyrant.
Respectfully, I feel that the scripture is making my point. The scripture provided does not say that doing what is righteous makes a person righteous, which by the way I consider to be what Paul calls righteousness by works. No, the scripture is saying that righteous people do righteous things, but more importantly that they are righteous because they are born of Him. Notice that the righteous person that does what is righteous is born of Him, which is the same as what I'm saying, which then implies, that if not born of Him, we cannot be righteous and do what is righteous at our discretion. The question then becomes, can we choose to be born of Him and then choose to not be born of Him and then choose to be born of Him again and so on and so forth, as freewill theology implies? The bible says we cannot serve two masters in such a way, which makes freewill a vanity as opposed to anything Eternal and Godly.
I sense the filthy rags of self attributable claims of empathy and goodness. God's Love does not claim the existence of empathy separate and apart from God's Spirit. It's my impression from scripture that it is Satan's vanity to gradually lose sight of the fact that he did not earn or deserve the attributes that made him beautiful to begin with, for which reason he would more and more despise those who are less endowed and yet content in their station. Hence such vanity arises through a false imagery of god, that does not actually esteem God as God, but rather worships the creation over the Creator.
Of course as a matter of circumstance regarding our carnal state of corruption vs the remnant of our spiritual goodness, a moral/immoral choice is going to reveal which power is prevalent in a person whether that power be of light or darkness. The lie exists to subvert the Truth which means the Truth came first. Therefore, the suggestion that we can choose not to Love others comes from Satan and not God. It's as if Satan is suggesting that God's Spirit forcing us to be good by Loving one another is somehow a bad thing and an imposition.
The real question to me, is how much through such freewill reasoning do we take for granted the Love and empathy, the spiritual component that is attributable to God, when we begin to think that we choose/volunteer to Love at our discretion? Is this not Satan's vanity working in us? (Please see description referencing Satan's vanity in the preceding response above).
Yes we all generally know love in some capacity, even because were created through God's Word. To me, the Holy Spirit quickens that love which was already there yet dying away in our corruptible existence. And this dying away is the corruption that entered in through a false image of god introduced by Satan in the garden to mankind, which also introduced distrust toward God followed by disobedience. Therefore, only through belief in the Christ as the True Image of God sent by God, can we attain the quickening, even as we are essentially confessing that God's Love is far beyond that which we ever imagined Love to be in the first place. He loved his enemies as though they could not help their own ignorance, therefore he forgave them even as they scorned and mocked him and scourged him with a most zealous cruelty.
The fact that we choose one way does not prove we could have chosen the other. I therefore do not and cannot choose/decide to worship or not worship God. His Glory does not come and go at my discretion.
True worship of God is manifested through knowing God, not by any allusion or illusion that we are free to decide whether He is worthy or not.
God is worthy of praise because of Who He is, not because we freely decide if He is worthy or not. If we decided He is unworthy, then we do not know Him. There is no free will concerning True worship since we are subject to ignorance and knowledge of God. Therefore anyone who really knows God, would not ever say or even think that they can choose to not worship Him. Therefore Jesus said that God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
1 John 4:19: We love him, because he first loved us.
I'm not saying this to belittle your point, but I am not interested in judging anyone who proclaims Christ, yet is still carnal in some aspect of weakness. The change from carnal to spiritual doesn't happen overnight in my experience. I myself do not claim to be free from following my own lusts without fail. I am full while others go hungry, and I have a house while others are homeless. I have not sold everything I own and given it to the poor. I still have forms of pride. So I am not perfect in many aspects and I don't feel I have any business criticizing someone else's imperfection.
But I will say that I don't have any desire/will to hurt anyone, which is what we do when we do to others what we wouldn't want done to us, which is sin. I can't choose to have that desire because of God's Word in me. However there is a difference between being righteous and not sinning in my view, since I don't believe that not hurting someone shows that I am righteous. I need to be concerned about lifting up other people and seeing to the needs and well-being of others so as to be practicing what is righteous. When I'm doing that, then I'm not worried about sinning or not sinning. Galatians 5:16
In regards to repentance, a true repentance is brought about by a sincere sorrow in seeing that I have hurt someone, which thanks be to God and His Christ, I am convicted of through the Holy Spirit. If I truly don't want to hurt anyone or see others hurt, then I will not willfully do it again.
My interest in this discussion is concerning whether we choose to obey or disobey according to a freewill and subsequently whether God is testing us to see if we will obey or disobey. To elaborate further, a freewill would be "free" and able to choose good or evil either way in regard to how we treat our fellow man. I don't believe that is how the will operates. And if God's purpose were to test us, then in my mind Satan would be seen as doing God's will as the tempter and accuser. No, I believe the will is between a carnal and spiritual existence when proposing a workable dichotomy to explain contrary desires. The reason why God made Adam a corruptible soul, is to learn the value of the Godly attributes we take for granted in vanity. Every temptation is composed of only vain imagery without any actual fulfillment of some value to one's stature. So I believe that Satan simply lies to exploit our weakness and to ultimately hurt God.
When Jesus says, "A new commandment I give unto you, LOVE ONE ANOTHER", I believe we are seeing the simplicity of the Spirit of Christ, and that is what he is teaching us. I don't see how this being given as a commandment should be seen as a choice or perceived as a prerogative. Of course Jesus would know that Love is Spirit and the Spirit of God, so this is why I say Love is not a choice or decision. We don't manifest God at our discretion. He creates us and endows us with His Spirit, we don't Create Him when we fancy. 1 John 4:13.
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atpollard
Member
You mean like Paul chose on the road to Damascus?
(God has a thumb on the scale.)
I believe Paul did have a choice. Jesus had a plan for Saul but He knew what he would choose. He chose life in Jesus but he could still have chosen otherwise. Good thing for all of us that he did as he did.
I think God created out of love and what He created was good. We read that even some of the angels of God chose to sin so it could be that creating a living being includes own mind will and spirit. And any other spirit other then God whose Spirit is Holy and pure in itself can sin. God stated no other God would be created after Him. So all others in being created with their own spirit angels or mankind have the potential to sin. Because of sexual reproduction the flesh adds to that weakness in regard to man. Ref sexual immorality.
Why not? He finally chose to obey but he could have chosen otherwise and accepted his fate.
atpollard
Member
He sailed to the furthest point from where God told him to go, wound up cast overboard in a storm and died in the belly of a fish ... I don’t think it gets much more “chosen otherwise and accepted his fate” than that! However, even then, God refused to accept “No” for an answer and Jonah was vomited up on a beach and resurrected.
I view that as just about as “irresistable draw of God” as it gets. Jonah seems to have resolved himself to the inevitable.
If people can really say “No” to the will of God, then where are they in scripture? Lots of people don’t want to do what God asks them to do, but none seem to ultimately refuse in the end. Moses didn’t want to go, but he went. Jonah didn’t want to go, but he went. Saul wasn’t looking to become a Christian Apostle, but he went. Where are the people who actually chose not to obey God?
You just affirmed my position with this statement.
Why did they go? Was it because God forced them or because of their faith?
God glorified His name through Jonah to the members of the ship he was on.
For Jonah proclaimed who He was and who was the God that was causing the raging seas to that crew.
They tried to row back to shore at first rather then throw Jonah overboard.
They finally gave in to Jonah's word to throw him overboard and all would be well.
Then this happened.
Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. 16 At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.
Who knows God may have used Jonah to glorify Himself all along so He allowed Jonah to flee.
According to Paul's own words He was set aside at birth for the work Jesus called Him to. That's grace. God obviously allowed Paul to live in unbelief until the set time of His appointment to be a Apostle of Lord. And that revelation to Paul was not without effect. He worked with great zeal for the Lords name.
Oh who knows the detailed plains of the Lord!
Its not a bad thing.
God was a savior and a redeemer to Jonah and Paul and Moses. And He chose to love them. He works for the good of those who love Him.
And as Job found out you can't argue with the Almighty and prevail.
Besides I think Jonah, Paul and Moses loved God.
For Jonah proclaimed who He was and who was the God that was causing the raging seas to that crew.
They tried to row back to shore at first rather then throw Jonah overboard.
They finally gave in to Jonah's word to throw him overboard and all would be well.
Then this happened.
Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. 16 At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.
Who knows God may have used Jonah to glorify Himself all along so He allowed Jonah to flee.
According to Paul's own words He was set aside at birth for the work Jesus called Him to. That's grace. God obviously allowed Paul to live in unbelief until the set time of His appointment to be a Apostle of Lord. And that revelation to Paul was not without effect. He worked with great zeal for the Lords name.
Oh who knows the detailed plains of the Lord!
Its not a bad thing.
God was a savior and a redeemer to Jonah and Paul and Moses. And He chose to love them. He works for the good of those who love Him.
And as Job found out you can't argue with the Almighty and prevail.
Besides I think Jonah, Paul and Moses loved God.
Gregg T
Member
In that God is willing that none perish, yet some refuse to believe so as to be saved, many people have said "no" to God, no to His will. "who desires all men to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth." 1Ti 2:4 (see 2Pet 3:9).
atpollard
Member
I have no desire to get into a Predestination vs Free Will debate, but 1 Timothy 2:4 is an appropriate verse to support your point, but 2 Peter 3:9 is not. The context of 2 Peter is God delaying His second coming in order to allow more time for all of the saints to be gathered into the Church. So the “all” that God desires to be saved in 2 Peter is all of the future saints, not all of the people in the world.
I can’t argue with 1 Timothy 2:4 without engaging in “Scripture pong” and I hate “Scripture pong”. So I will yield that point to you.
atpollard
Member
Yes indeed. THAT is the question.
Could Jonah have continued to refuse forever, or would God have continued to compel Jonah towards Nineveh until he complied. Who am I, God ... how should I know the answer to questions like that!
At the core is the question can the will of man defeat the will of God?
I tend to believe that the answer is “No”.
This is most certainly true. But, we still have a tendency to want to do things our own way even with this knowledge.
And this is where the answer is found. They weren't coerced or forced by God to obey in the end, they did it out of love and respect for God.
Gregg T
Member
I think God created us with a will that we might choose to trust Him, to obey Him, to follow Him, to learn His ways and do accordingly; and these all leading to our learning to love God.
"Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
(Deu 6:4-5)
Gregg T
Member
The immediate audience in 2Pet 3:9 is Peter's contemporaries, "The Lord ... is patient toward you"; but whether or not it implies people in the future, still it is "not wishing for any to perish" and "for all to come to repentance".
Since we both mentioned 2Pet, you asked earlier:
Here are some of them in Scripture who had knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, "For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them" (2Pet 2:21).
And Balaam knew the will of the LORD but was contrary to it (Num 22), and yet "loved the wages of unrighteousness" 2Pet 2:15. Evidently he said no to the LORD as his end is described in 2Pet 2:17.
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