Posted on 03/15/2010 12:07:15 PM PDT by Colofornian
Edited on 03/23/2010 6:15:31 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
When Glenn Beck told listeners of his radio show on March 2 that they should "run as fast as you can" from any church that preached "social or economic justice" because those were code words for Communism and Nazism, he probably thought he was tweaking a few crunchy religious liberals who didn't listen to the show anyway. Instead he managed to outrage Christians in most mainline Protestant denominations, African-American congregations, Hispanic churches, and Catholics...
(Excerpt) Read more at swampland.blogs.time.com ...
You can’t or won’t even explain works for the dead. Now you have a hard time understanding the concept of 100%.
Either God is in control, or man is.
I’ll give you a hint......God is.
I realize it is important to you to believe that you can work hard enough, be good enough...........you can not.
It is your choice to accept the Gift or not.
It is not my problem but yours.
how so?
They damn apostates to outer darkness though. No salvaltion for us. We’re “traitors” to the LdS church.
I don’t want any part of their heaven anyway. Eternal pregnancy is my idea of hell. ;)
Not a contradiction at all.
Allow me to give two analogies -- one short; one longer:
Analogy A:
Girl A is "interested" in Guy B; both are independently @ the same concert; but while, yes, Girl A is interested in him, if she doesn't know he is present in that concert hall, so what? (She is "blind" to his presence) She may be interested in Him; she may be seeking Him in certain contexts, but it's going to take Guy B to "accidentally on purpose" place himself in her pathway on her way to a concession stand for her to "find" him. Was she "seeking" him when she found him? No! She was seeking mere food!
Analogy B:
Imagine that two back-country skiiers are lost in the wilderness -- apart from each other. They each had brief cell-phone coverage before losing it, in which somebody in authority texted them each -- a text that said, "Seek the rescuer who is in your vicinity."
So, that alerts them there's indeed a rescuer in their vicinity. They each have the potential to be on the look out. [That's represents man's potential responsiveness...yet such a man is still in a rather "helpless" situation...lost]
God's role is the rescuer. He's monitoring the lost skiiers. Because, of course, God knows precisely where they are. He sees their predicament. He knows the way out.
And as He tracks these two skiiers, the obvious comes out: Both know the Rescuer is in each of their vicinity, but while one is actively seeking Him, the other is in such a hopeless state with the rest of his life (verge of bankruptcy; wife just left him, substance abuse issues), all he sees from the circumstances of being lost in the wilderness is just another reason to end his life, not find it.
Lost people are only lost relationally to God; it's not that He doesn't know where they are at in life. God is looking for that bankrupt, abandoned, substance abuser to turn to the Rescuer for help. For some in such a condition, He's not necessarily going to "butt in" where not really wanted; yet for others in that exact same situation, He does "butt in" as Sovereign God -- and displays His marvelous grace & mercy.
To the other lost skiier, the one who was once a seeker, it doesn't really matter if he looks in 100 places, 1,000 places, or 10,000 places for the "rescuer." Why? Because that skiier was suffering from snow blindness. He no longer visually seeks the rescuer; because he cannot. He is now blind.
Therefore, if that Rescuer is God, it's going to take God to reveal Himself to the seeker.
My point is that it's not the actual "seeking" that finds God, as much as God seeing the receptivity and openness -- or at least past receptivity and ensuring that He steps into the pathway of a skiier -- so that even a blind skiier will simply "bump" right into Him! A blind skiier is blind -- he cannot look for anyone. God the rescuer is found by those who cannot look for Him.
“...if anyone makes the assistance of grace depend on the humility or obedience of man and does not agree that it is a gift of grace itself that we are obedient and humble, he contradicts the Apostle who says, “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7), and, “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:10). (Council of Orange: Canon 6)
bitttt
But you’d have lots of company though!
Sure!
Everyone must earn exaltation, except those who have never heard of it and died before they did and IF they died without doing their own works, then a good, worthy Mormon must earn it for them by doing works, BUT by then, the deceased (who spent some time in spirit prison waiting for some worthy Mormon to do their Temple Work) has been meeting with worthy spirit missionaries who taught him the lessons so he would understand the Mormon necro-baptism that just took place in his stead in the Mormon Temple where god dwells, but not really because god dwells in heaven in his body of flesh and bone - then after the ordinance is performed in absentia and the spirit lessons taught, the deceased now has the opportunity to choose whether or not the baptism and ordinances are accepted. If the dead guy now accepts those works, then he is allowed to go and do more works so that he too can progress and become a god.
Make sense?
It does to me?
Urroner, the Greek word for grace just means gift.
Now I don't know about the Mormon culture, but in the Christian culture if you receive a gift from someone, it doesn't go down as: "Well, let's see, I held out my hands to receive the gift...that's gotta be at least a .2% 'contribution' to it...and then I unwrapped it! Boy, that has to be at least a whopping 1% 'contribution'!"
Sorry. Doesn't work that way. The giver is the 100%. The receiver was 100% enriched by the gift.
So you believe in predestination and man does not truly have any free agency? This is the only way God is 100% in control.
If God is truly 100% in control then the only way I can sin is if He wants me to sin, else He is not 100% in control.
I have no idea when you are going in the next life. I have no desire to push Christ out of the judgement seat and plant my fat butt there.
Well, plucking on a golden harp for the eternities and sitting on a fluffy cloud ain’t much better. ;-)
Are we lost or does Christ know how to find us if he so desired? If he doesn’t find us, what does that mean? If God is 100% in control then it must mean that God didn’t want Christ to find us.
I have no disagreement, without the grace of Christ and God, I am nothing, but if I don’t accept that grace, and accepting it is a work that I have to do, then I am still nothing.
Well, it really isn't all about YOU urroner, it is about God. What could possible be better than to be in worship to God for eternity.
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