The Love of Jesus

[Genesius]

I think that this scripture clearly claims that Sin can lead to one being deceived, such that one becomes hard-hearted and unbelieving. Then one will be at risk to not entering God's rest.

I would suggest that this is not because of God's lack of mercy, but because of our own lack of belief, and love of the Sin which can decieve us.

From Hebrews:

3:7 Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his
voice, 3:8 Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day
of temptation in the wilderness: 3:9 When your fathers tempted me,
proved me, and saw my works forty years.

3:10 Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do
alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways.

3:11 So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.) 3:12
Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of
unbelief, in departing from the living God.

3:13 But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any
of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

3:14 For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of
our confidence stedfast unto the end; 3:15 While it is said, To day if
ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.

3:16 For some, when they had heard, did provoke: howbeit not all that
came out of Egypt by Moses.

3:17 But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them
that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness? 3:18 And to
whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them
that believed not? 3:19 So we see that they could not enter in
because of unbelief.

[undead]

.... human point of view ....

I was speaking subjectively, you are speaking objectively.

I meant in a human subjective context, from the perspective of all humanity. I did not say that John adopted an human (i.e. unregenerate) view of Christ.

You are referring to the WAY humans view Christ (i.e. the attitude that they approach him with).

[John Reece]

I was speaking subjectively, you are speaking objectively.

I meant in a human subjective context, from the perspective of all humanity. I did not say that John adopted an human (i.e. unregenerate) view of Christ.

You are referring to the WAY humans view Christ (i.e. the attitude that they approach him with).

[undead]

That is to say, I am referring to context, when I say "human".

Then you come along and refer to Christ, and point out that it should not be in a human way.

But I never said you should regard spiritual things in a human way.

I only said that John spoke from a human context, even though he regarded spiritual things spiritually.

The two ideas are not incompatible.

In other words, just because we are spiritual, does not mean we have to pretend that we are God.

[John Reece]

That is to say, I am referring to context, when I say "human".
Then you come along and refer to Christ, and point out that it should not be in a human way.

You are quite right about the difference between the text in 2 Corinthians and the text in 1 John. I only referenced the former to note the (admittedly loosely related) point made by Murray : "When we come to share God's view of Christ [...], we also gain his view of people in general."

It has been both my observation and my experience that there is all too often a stark contrast between God's view of Christians enmeshed in sexual sin and the view some Christians have of Christians enmeshed in sexual sin. That's the crux of the God's perspective-vs.-human-perspective issue as far as I am concerned.

In 1972, I experienced a manifestation of the Spirit of God within me — that is, my whole being was flooded with an overwhelming sense of his love — while driving home from a visit with my teenage daughter (= the infant mentioned below) who was living with another family in another town during a prolonged period of time in which I was enmeshed in sexual sinning. I was utterly astonished and blurted out to God, “I do not understand you! you know what I am doing!”

That was not the first time I had had occassion to say to God “I do not understand you!" The first time was the event that totally wrecked my life and set me up for the first of a series of lapses into sexual sinning 14+ years later.

During the Christmas season of 1956, I gave a talk to the youth group in the Methodist church I was serving as pastor while in my 1st year at Duke Divinity School. The gist of my message to the teenagers in the group was that if they would surrender their lives to God, God would bless them. The well-spring of that message was something I did not tell the teenagers but was in my heart: that is, I had surrendered my life to God, and there I was, pastor of a church, a student at Duke, and the happy husband and father of a dearly loved wife and infant daughter — so blessed!

A few months later, during final exams at Duke, my wife told me she was going to go to the grocery store to buy some bread ... and never came back home. It turned out that she had taken the baby and gone home to her parents in northern Virginia, because she had been secretly (that is, she never let me know) obsessed with paranoid schizophrenic (the diagnosis given her when she ultimately wound up as a chronic patient in mental institutions) ideations that I was living in adultery with another woman, when nothing could have been further from the truth. The only extramarital affair I was having was with my studies at Duke and my preparation for preaching at the church where I was serving as pastor.

Anyhow, after being assured by my father that my wife was safe at her parent’s home, and after finishing my final exams at Duke, I went home to the parsonage of the church where I was to preach the following Sunday, and went into the sanctuary of the church building, where I had said to the teenagers in the youth group a few months earlier, (in so many words) “Give your life to God and he will bless you.” I wandered round and round the aisles of the sanctuary with tears streaming down my face, with the words of this hymn going through my mind:

Hast thou not seen
How thy desires e'er have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?

And this lament: “God, I don’t understand you at all!

When I speak of differences between God’s perspective and human perspective, it is from a background of having had my own human perspective vs. God’s perspective alternately dismayed by tragic loss and astonished by manifestations of unmerited love — over decades of experience as a person as well as experience as a pastor and mental health counselor.

By the way, a closing thought: Just before I succumbed to the advances of a woman seeking a relationship with me — after 14 years of avoiding any relationship with any woman other than the wife who had been committed to a mental institution 14 years earlier — a pastor confided in me about his having become sexually involved with a designing younger woman in his congregation. My response to him was to judge him and to strongly rebuke him for what he was doing. My conviction was that I had remained faithful to my wife throughout the 14 years that she had been in and out of mental institutions, so (I thought) there was no excuse for this pastor who had a well wife who was a teacher in a local high school. In short order, I was taught a very costly lesson as a direct and almost immediate consequence of my having expressed such a judgmental attitude toward that pastor.

[undead]

It turned out that she had taken the baby and gone home to her parents in northern Virginia.

Jdg 19:2 And his concubine played the whore against him, and went away from him unto her father's house to Bethlehemjudah, and was there four whole months.

And your wife was away for 14 years and more?

Who's sexually sinning?

Mat 19:9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.

[headheart]

[ .... ]

Attend to a defence of your primary argument !

Headheart

[headheart]

In short order, I was taught a very costly lesson as a direct and almost immediate consequence of my having expressed such a judgmental attitude toward that pastor.

Dear John Reece,

I hardly expect that [.....] will be unable to appreciate this, for his own private interpretations of the Law, seem to cloud his perception. For some of us it takes a very long time and a lot of hard knocks before we come down to earth and stop pretending to play God.

The spirit of condemnation is certainly one that I have found to spout forth like a bitter stream on 'Mystical Union or Diabolical Confusion?'

Headheart.

[John Reece]

And your wife was away for 14 years and more?

No, of course not. I finished my appointment at the church within a couple of weeks, resigned from the ministry, and went to live with my wife at her parents home until her parents and I could figure out what to about a problem that none of us understood. We were all in a state of psychological denial with regard to the nature and severity of her illness.

My wife cycled through periods when she seemed to be doing better, so hope would arise in me that she was coming out of it and would be O.K. But invariably my hope would be crushed by renewed verbalizations of paranoid ideation.

Being very naive (and completely ignorant with regard to mental illness), I finally said to her father, "She seemed alright when I married her; maybe it's just me; maybe if I go into the army and serve a term of enlistment (for which I had had a ministerial deferment that was no longer valid, as I had resigned from the ministry), maybe she'll get better." He agreed; so, that's what I did.

While I was serving in the U.S. in Germany I started getting letters from a lawyer wanting me to sign a paper saying I had deserted my wife, so she could get a divorce. That I could not do, as I had not deserted her and was providing support via a military allotment. So I got a compassionate leave to go back home and talk to her attorney, who told me he did not know how to handle her case, except to say that she had no grounds for a divorce without my signing a false statement.

She had been a secretary at the headquarters of the CIA at Langley when I married her, and on the basis of that history she had gotten a job at the Pentagon while I was serving in the Army. I went to see her supervisors there and was told that they had been trying to get in touch with me because she was too mentally ill to function there and they needed me to help resolve the problem they were having with her. However, I was still in a state of psychological denial about the severity of her illness and could not bring myself to take measures to have her committed. It took an intervention on the part of a neighbor of my parents, whose son was an attorney, to start that process. The attorney took me before a judge and walked me through the commitment process. Then the judge said, shall I order a deputy to pick her up and take her to the hospital, or do you want to take her. A combination of ignorance, inexperience, and naïveté prompted me to say "I'll take her."

I took the commitment papers home with me and tried to persuade her to go with me to the hospital; but she would not agree to go without taking our baby daughter with us. So the three of us set out on the trip from the suburbs of Washington DC to the state mental hospital in Staunton VA. Throughout the 150 mile trip she kept grabbing the steering in attempts to get me to turn back, but we finally got to the hospital where doctors evaluated her and admitted her. I was told to take the baby and go out of the building via the front entrance, and my wife was led off in the opposite direction; but when I got to the top of the long flight of steps at the front of the building, with our baby daughter in my arms, a couple of hospital attendants were taking my wife along the walkway adjacent to and parallel to the front of the building. My wife looked up and saw us and started screaming for the baby, and the baby started crying for her mother. All the way home the baby cried inconsolably, because she had never before been separated from her mother, and to have been taken away with her mother screaming for her was a heart-wrenching horror for all three of us.

I spent the next 14 years doing everything I could to keep the marriage intact, including being the only person in the world who ever visited my wife whenever she was confined to a mental institution (until my daughter became of age and began to visit her). Time and time again I signed her out against medical advice, hoping that she would be able to resume a normal life, despite what I was told by her doctors (that is, that she was not well enough to resume a normal life outside a hospital setting). When out the hospital, she invariably stopped taking prescribed medication and regressed until my mother would finally say, "John, you've got to do something!" — meaning, get her back into a hospital, because I could not make her take her medication against her will. I always procrastinated the inevitable as long as I could, because I so dreaded, and could hardly bear, the emotional trauma that always attended my having to take her back to the hospital.

[headheart]

I always procrastinated the inevitable as long as I could, because I so dreaded, and could hardly bear, the emotional trauma that always attended my having to take her back to the hospital.

Oh John, this aches my soul.

Lovingly in Christ,
headheart

[Littlejoe]

Hi Headheart!

Congrats on the successful Angio! I offered up a prayer for you when you wrote that you would undergo the procedure. (I had an uncle who died during the procedure, [his heart was VERY bad] so I know it has it's dangers).

To your OP. I agree with you and disagree with you. I believe the bible is clear that a true believer cannot be lost/lose his salvation because of sin(s). After all, Christ died for all of our sins, past, present and future, did he not? However, I also believe the bible is equally clear that a believer can turn his back and walk away from God...and can reach a point where he is no longer a true believer. We are justified by grace, through faith. If there is no longer faith, there is no longer salvation. I firmly believe I have seen this happen three different times in my life. In each case, I was firmly convinced that each of these three people knew Christ as there saviour, believed it firmly and completely. I spent many hours counseling with two of these individuals, trying to turn them back to God, but to no avail...as least as of this writing.

LJ

[undead]

...so (I thought) there was no excuse for this pastor who had a well wife who was a teacher in a local high school. In short order, I was taught a very costly lesson as a direct and almost immediate consequence of my having expressed such a judgmental attitude toward that pastor.

1Ti 3:2 A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach.

Well, the judgmental attitude was warranted in part because a man with two wives cannot serve as a "bishop". I guess by his own admission he had two wives and was probably being deceitful about it too. May be it was your approach that was wrong. May be he was confessing his sin and you overreacted. Often it is the approach that is so wanting. Having said that many pastors and bishops are suspect, especially those that live off tithes and don't work for their living, and are lazy too.

I know how it is with mental illness. I know its not pleasant; and I have experienced similar but perhaps not quite so acute with other persons in my own life, so I can empathize with you. It's like you married someone, and then you find you are trapped by someone who turns out to be very different from the person whom you first met. Well I think it is a cross that not everyone can bear. God is slower to judge in such situations than the man who just likes having multiple wives.

Nevertheless 'sexual sin' as you call it probably would not even have been a sin in the days of the apostles: just treated as having two wives, which after all was far fewer than King David.

So perhaps its not so bad as you make out .... more a case of fallen pride that you found you weren't so strong as you thought. But I don't think it comes under the "sin that leads to death" category from what you say, though I guess you got embroiled in some difficulties of honesty later on. Phariseeism is a far more likely contender for the sin that leads to death.

Pharisees are alive and well. The ultimate Pharisees are of course the Police and Judiciary and such like. But Phariseeism is also prevalent withing the denominations amongst the ministers and such like - professional clerics I always mistrust. I have never related to professional clerics or ministers. I was converted by a layman, and that's my style. Don't really have the time of day for anyone who behaves like a Pharisee.

As the song says "I'd rather trust a man who works with his hands." May be that's just my own personal experience.

Genesis - Chamber of 32 Doors / Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
.
.
I'd rather trust a countryman than a townman,
You can judge by his eyes, take a look if you can,
He'll smile through his guard,
Survival trains hard.
I'd rather trust a man who works with his hands,
He looks at you once, you know he understands,
Don't need any shield,
When you're out in the field.
.
.

[headheart]

Hi Headheart!

Congrats on the successful Angio! I offered up a prayer for you when you wrote that you would undergo the procedure. (I had an uncle who died during the procedure, [his heart was VERY bad] so I know it has it's dangers).

Thank-you for your prayers. It is the first time I learned of the procedure and it certainly beats having a massive scar on my chest and being wired etc.

To your OP. I agree with you and disagree with you. I believe the bible is clear that a true believer cannot be lost/lose his salvation because of sin(s). After all, Christ died for all of our sins, past, present and future, did he not? However, I also believe the bible is equally clear that a believer can turn his back and walk away from God...and can reach a point where he is no longer a true believer. We are justified by grace, through faith. If there is no longer faith, there is no longer salvation. I firmly believe I have seen this happen three different times in my life. In each case, I was firmly convinced that each of these three people knew Christ as there saviour, believed it firmly and completely. I spent many hours counseling with two of these individuals, trying to turn them back to God, but to no avail...as least as of this writing.

LJ

How far can one go before one exhausts the mercy of God, I cannot personally answer that, but it has been my own experience that the good shepherd must sometimes cripple a wayward one, or even end their path of destruction to present them.

We are to run the race for the prize and many are those who do not value this gift that was bought with a price we could not afford, such will not receive much in the life to come. I am glad that it is not my job to decide who gets what, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

Headheart.

[headheart]

I spent many hours counseling with two of these individuals, trying to turn them back to God, but to no avail...as least as of this writing.

LJ

Dear LJ,

I have also witnessed those who were pillars go cold and distant and return to their old ways, but I have lived long enough to see the same ones who fell in this way find mercy at the throne and gradually extricate themselves from the mess of their lives. It was always as the result of the ultimate counsellor, the one whom we trust for the wisdom in the first place. I have also seen those who were in primary positions fall down to sins of the flesh that were so horrific that I did not know how what to think or to say, until he showed me that I was only standing by His grace. Like Bob Dylan still sings, 'The Saving Grace'....I fear that some think he is too far gone to know the mercy of God.

Once again, I think I will reserve my opinions about who gets what and where they end up and defer to the one who is perfect and never makes mistakes in his choices.

Lovingly in Christ,
Headheart.

[headheart]

Pharisees are alive and well. The ultimate Pharisees are of course the Police and Judiciary and such like. But Phariseeism is also prevalent withing the denominations amongst the ministers and such like - professional clerics I always mistrust. I have never related to professional clerics or ministers.
.

Why are you attacking the Police and the Judiciary, the denominations, the ministers and such like ? All who are the world are not the world. (organized flesh, energized by the demonic)



headheart