Posted on 04/16/2006 5:08:46 PM PDT by JamesP81
The tagline is a quote from Emanuel Swedenborg, btw.
Posts 9 & 13 are inconsistent. Why do you deny the Trinity as one God revealed in 3 persons?
Doctrine of faith. We believe Jesus Christ to be the one God of heaven and earth.
One cannot be separated and understood as three.
I do not put much weight in Paul's letters. They aren't very spiritual.
As to your first statement, it doesn't matter how much weight we place in the pauline epistles, as much as it matters we first confess our sins to Him and turn away from sin to return to Him, all through faith in Christ, each and every time we study Scripture.
Next, we allow the Word of God to be communicated to us. The Word is His Divine revelation of what He planned to communicate to us.
When the Word is communicated to us, by speech or by print, we first enter into a comprehension of the Word by our thinking. While we remain in faith through Christ, there is nothing unrighteous in our faith preventing God from taking that thinking in the soul and making it understood to our scarred souls, then very similar to a heart or pumping machine of our blood, there is also nothing unrighteous in our faith to prevent Him from making that Word understood in our spirit.
Paul, an apostle to the Romans, bears witness of things spiritual throughout His epistles. Yet those things spiritual are not discerned except where shown to us by God. In the case of our becoming further sanctified, this is also a work of God, the Holy Spirit.
At present you might feel more comfortable not discerning the persons of the Godhead, but one important facet of our learning is to recognize that in our scarred thinking, our scarred soul, our proper learning is based upon His work, not our feelings or emotions, but rather our faith in Him in all things.
Instead of taking my word for it, or any religious word for it, try returning to Him, and allow Him, through faith in Him, to guide you appropriately.
I'm with you up until scarred souls - what is that?
Paul's letters do not have the same internal sense as the words of the Lord which comprise the four gospels and revelation.
Even after salvation, we still have a natural man with whom to contend in our thinking, decision making and behavior.
Our thinking processes reside with our soul as discerned from our body or spirit.
Both believers and unbelievers have souls. The term 'Soul Man', although might be intended as a worldly complement is actually a criticism of the believer. We may advance soulish thinking, decisions and behavior or we may remain in faith and through Him advance in our thinking, decisions and behavior as the new man in Christ. The old man was dichotomous with body and soul, dead in the spirit. The new man is alive in the regenerated spirit, with body and soul.
As believers, until the ressurrection, we still have a corrupt body, and our thinking is still scarred from past thinking habits when we were dead to Him in the spirit. Some of those scarred soulish thoughts were generated by genetics. Some were scarred in our souls by wrong thinking. Whenever we step out of fellowship with Him today, after salvation, until we return to Him (repentence) and confess our known and unknown sins to Him (confession), we continue to operate independent of His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and return to scarring our thinking processes.
This is why some Christians degenerate into either lasciviousness or in asceticism. Some may fall into legalism, following their thinking that so long as they open a textbook and quote its grammar, they are advancing with God. But unless the believer returns to Him on His grounds via 1st John 1:9, continuing involvement in religious things will tend to remove the believer from growth in the believer's spirit, and worse, tend to scar his thinking so that when he perceives sin, rather than returning to God, he returns to a counterfeit system of thinking still separate from the Holy Spirit.
We all have scarred souls. Until we suffer the first death, while we return to Him and remain in fellowship with Him, He is free to advance us in sanctification, further faith, doctine, belief, in our spirit, through our souls, through faith in Him.
An analogy might be made in playing basketball. If we step out of bounds as when we sin, if we step back in the game on our own volition, independent of righteous authority and judgment, none of our advancement is counted for anything righteously good. We might continue down court and score many a basket, but the referree will never allow those actions to be credited as scors worthy of reward. Likewise, when we sin, we step out of God's bounds or plan for our activity in His plan. Until we turn back to Him, hand the ball back to Him, for Him to grant us forgiveness and allows us to rebound into proper recognized behavior.
All our behavior begins with thinking. Subliminal or active decision making is still influenced by our thinking. Where we have sinned in the past, we may develop habits not only in our flesh, our body, and our actions, but also in our thinking and decision making processes.
By having faith in Christ, He is free to indwell us, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit providing a temple for Him within us. That begins in our soul, our thinking, where He is free to regenerate our spirit and continue His sanctification of us.
The scarred soul is a major impediment to our advancement in what might be called an epistemilogical rehabilitation, because where we interrupt His work in us with our independent thinking, our scarred soul is likely to be numb in perception of our rejection of Him. This is why faith is pre-eminent to feeling or emotion in our relationship with God. Faith allows Him to do the work and doesn't provide any obstacles to His sanctification processes, whereas feeling and emotions maybe frought with scarred erroneous thinking, decisions, and perceptions idle for deception.
Try Galations. It is one of the best guides in Scripture for spiritual growth.
I don't waste my time reading falsities.
The purpose of this is to subjugate the external or natural man... which turns those sins into something benign - they are still there but cannot be attached to by evil spirits like they could prior to regeneration. If you are calling this a healed scar, then I understand what you mean.
The process of regeneration is instantaneous. Sanctification is a continuous process through faith in Him prior to the first death and beginning with our initial faith.
The Lord endured continous temptations while He was in the world. If the regeneration process were instantaneous, we'd be perfect, which is not the case for anyone but the Lord.
Regeneration simply means we have a spirit that is living as God has regenerated that spirit in us. Our previous spirit was dead from God (some might argue for dichotomous anthropology sating unbelievers simply have no spirit,..wrt a proper fellowship with God through His plan, both interpretations are identical for we need not dwell on how the dead remian dead, but focus instead upon a life through our Lord Christ Jesus, a Living God)(another definition of death is a state of exstence involving separation).
Our perfection in sinlessness falls under the doctrines or continuing faith of sanctification, not regeneration. Upon our initial saving faith in Christ, we are positionally sanctified with God and saved by His work. We still retain an old sin nature, and while remaining in fellowship with Him, may continue to advance in sanctification.
Regeneration only occurs once.
Eternal life begins at regeneration, when we believe in the salvation work of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit imputes life to the human spirit. His decision to give us life as been predestined and is a perfect decision by God the Father in eternoty past.
There is nothing we can do nor anything God would ever do to reject that eternal life once we have been regenerated. This doesn't mean we don't sin after salvation, nor does it mean we don't continue to be sanctified by the Holy Spirit as we remain in fellowship with Him and respond to all things through faith in Him, by His problem solving devices. This point of irrevocable eternal life is that God has already predestined our eternal life and His decisions are Perfect. If He were to allow any of those regenerated to lose eternal life, then there is no grounds for any to retain eternal life. Eternal life is not a question of morality. It is only based upon faith in Him and His work by grace.
You are quite correct to note we continue to resist temptation and are able to do so through faith in Him.
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