The Holy Spirit is the One who gives us assurance, not arguments on a forum, or a Bible teacher, or a theological book, or a detailed argument.
Indeed. The very first words (of the comparative few spoken to me) by God were "everything is going to be okay". Now, I was putting my motorcycle helmet on at that point and understood "everything is going to be okay" NOT to mean that I wouldn't crash my motorcycle that morning or I wouldn't get cancer, or I wouldn't suffer in my life. Everything meant "everything". My going to Hell for my sin would entirely confound that.
I sin. I sin habitually. I've cursed God from the highest and low and everything in between because he wouldn't (or couldn't? or shouldn't?) wave his magic wand and release me from my own particular "thorn in the flesh".No, I don't sin as Ravi does but that's a matter of man-made "extent". There are some who would find my habitual sin appalling in their eyes.
"He who turned you over committed the greater sin." Jesus talked about certain sins like unforgiveness and blaspheming the Holy Spirit as a greater kind of sin.
I think Jesus talks of types: the lost and the found. The lost drill down into sin, the found struggle with sin. On the surface, the two can look the same but inside different things are going on.
I was recently dismissed from my job. A political stitch up was the headline event. But by way of dismissal-mechanism, one of my reports, whose ain't in the greatest mental-state was utilised.
Initially, the betrayal affected me - I'd really put this guy first in many ways .. but in doing so exposed myself to a knife in the back. A few weeks on from the dismissal and I really, really bear him no ill will. I think more of his poor mental state and kind of hope the company won't, in a few months, screw him over. It could have a bad effect on him.
I think that's a product of me being a Christian. I really do. The normal thing would be to hold a grudge, to want to get back etc. But it kind of all fell away given the truth of the matter: a boss who wanted rid + using a guy who can be manipulated.
I think Christians, despite their ongoing sinning, are somehow and in someways, held captive to Christ. He infuses them .. but not in every walk of their life and not at all time of their life. I can, on the one hand, forgive a fellow employee who I trusted .. but who ultimately stuck a knife in my back leading to the loss of my job.
And on the way out the gate from being dismissed from that job, cast a lustful stare up the body of a 16 year old girl in a short skirt crossing the crosswalk on the exit from my work.
Jesus talked in lost/found language. He contrasted the two since that was his mission. The found still sin.
I believe that every time I BREATHE I sin enough to go to hell.
Kind of extreme. But I know what you mean.
You can't accuse me ever of not thinking I sin: I don't believe in sinless perfection. But there is a requirement in the Bible of meeting a certain level of grace, otherwise the concept of "resisting" grace or grace being in "vain" is literally nonsensical.
I told you something of my Christian Start. "Everything is going to be okay"
Now, it either was or it wasn't. I have sinned abominably since salvation. I mean sexual sin of the abominable kind.
Since I can't disbelieve God's very opening sentence to me, I must find a place for scripture that seemingly contradicts what he said to me the very first day I was saved.
It's as simple as that: I cannot be told by God that "everything is going to be okay" if it turns out everything is not going to be okay.
Some people go even further than "Free Grace" advocates, by claiming that saying any kind of prayer for salvation is works salvation.
The way I see it (as an aside)? A rubber duck run over by a truck squeaks. Although the rubber duck squeaked, it wasn't a work by the rubber duck (us). It was a work of the truck (God}. So: we can pray (squeak like a duck), without it being a work of ours.
That would mean you have to be automaticaly saved before you even do anything at all and after that literally nothing you do ultimately matters in regards to your salvation!
Per above, I don't think we "do" anything. Rather, our surrender is "pressed" out of us by the circumstances of our being defeated. We "do" nothing. The NT is replete with examples: the sick, the lame, the hanging on a cross, the fathers of dying children, the despised traitorous tax collectors .. they didn't do anything. Rather they were driven to Christ by their desperate circumstances.
And we are still desperate.
Warnings are completely meaningless unless you heavily re-intrepet them as being decorative instead of literal. Only the devil could even dream up such confusion.
I dunno. God did seem to set people up with an impossible ask. "If you do everything I command of you today...". That is in the Old Testament and from Jesus own lips...
That "impossible ask" seems to have been designed to bring people to the conclusion that they couldn't obey the impossible ask. In other words: they couldn't work their way to God.
So I wouldn't be too quick to interpret "warnings" as warnings of loss of salvation. God can work obliquely...
I am, like I say, holding God to the very first words he spoke to me.
If we were to take what seems to be your logic, which is, "If I find it hard to discern the difference of exactly where a sin unto death and a sin not unto death is, then that eliminates the possibility of there ever being a difference, because I won't have a way of knowing the difference." Our not knowing or not feeling assured does not change or speak to the truth that a line or boundary somewhere exists.
No. But it eliminates assurance. You simply cannot be assured of salvation if your salvation hinges on unknowns. Simple as...
I'm not saying every Christian addicted to porn is going to go to hell. I don't believe that. But I do believe there is a line of sin somewhere
..and I want to examine this. This "somewhere" and the basis for establishing it. Let's look at that...
. Only the Holy Spirit knows where that line is, and only he NEEDS to know. There is no profit or use in throwing away all sense of danger and reverence at the expense of Biblical warnings just for the comfort of feeling safe.
You are vague in your line setting. You say I throw away warning passages. I say you throw away assurance passages. There is no assurance in your theology...none at all.
Does that not trouble you?
11 And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end,
12 that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. (Heb 6:11-12 NKJ)
I find myself, in my own life torn between two extremes ultimately. On the one hand, it doesn't matter what I do, I will never be lost. On the other hand, I am a child of God, this behaviour is completely unbecoming, straight from the arsehole of satan.
I dance between the two. Not giving a fig, because I cannot be lost. And giving a fig because, per Paul, "do you not know what you now are..??"
The logic and profundity of what I know I now am is as much as tension as is the knowledge that I cannot be again lost.
It's a narrow path. A race.
And this is not an isolated passage. There are hundreds like that, and the few verses used for some kind of Eternal Security are far less clear and certainly don't make a very clear effort to convey the idea of "unconditional."
But you cannot but be left with a: "I do not know where the boundary is, therefore I will work.." I appreciate the putridness of my position: the apparent licence to sin as we please (which Paul deals with so simply and profoundly "What?? Do you not know....??"
But yours is equally putrid: no assurance??
Which is the more elegant? Which bends the mind more? Which stands more opposite to the sense that it "ought be this way".
I would argue that once born never lost is the most profound. A salvation by any kind of works at all, is a salvation by works....
I know what the Holy Spirit witnesses to in the Bible, and I won't gamble my soul on a sloppy feel-good theology that a bunch of big books and people with degrees or snake oil salesman teachers want to sell me.
See above. It's the maddest kind of leap. Into a salvation without works. The very first question raised by such an idea is the idea you effectively promote: our sin matters no more and we can now sin as we please. The answer to that is like a still, small voice, the voice of God...
"Do you not know what you now are??"
If anything was to restrain us born againers from sin is this: "do you not know what I have done for you?"
You pause, looking up from the sin you are engaging in and take a look at the blood which drips from the cross. Take a look, more importantly, at the motivation for that blood: love absolute. And your sin wilts. Well, sometimes it wilts...