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To: Dutchboy88

You wrote:

“If you carefully read what I wrote you will notice that men do cooperate with God...once they are saved.”

If men are saved, then why would they need to cooperate? If you’re saved, it’s finished.

“Your system requires men to cooperate with God in order to be saved.”

God’s system requires men to cooperate with God to grow in love and obedience with or to Him.


96 posted on 10/12/2011 3:21:36 PM PDT by vladimir998 (To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant (or ignorant).)
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To: vladimir998
"If men are saved, then why would they need to cooperate? If you’re saved, it’s finished."

Is this an actual question? Does Rome actually believed that when a man is saved he is finished? Please re read my post. I said, that, "...men do cooperate with God...once they are saved." That is a biblical position and may collide with Rome's view, but I trust that even they are not that far off the reservation. "God’s system requires men to cooperate with God to grow in love and obedience with or to Him."

You first said man is finished when he is saved. Now you say he is required to cooperate to grow. I do not disagree with this last remark. But, what we are discussing here is whether that cooperation is induced by the man, alone (free will unaided by anything outside the man), or by God's operation on his soul/spirit. The biblical position is that nothing occurs by way of spiritual growth until and unless God operates upon him. I Cor 3:7 "So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anythig, but God who causes the growth."

It is God compelling (causing) the man to turn toward him. That you may not "feel" this compulsion is part of God's genius. Sometimes you might feel it. But, once we belong to Him, we are to strain toward Him with our whole soul's effort whether we feel it or not. But, we are never to forget that even this turning is energized, empowered by His Spirit's work in our lives. What do we have that we have not been given? I Cor 2:12 "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God."

The Roman system is dangerously close to a "reward" system wherein grace is mangled into a prize for bringing myself under God's authority by an act of my will. Such a view is religion, but not Christianity. I have noted many times that this is what disqualifies Romanism, but you seem to return to this need to perform time and again.

But, here is a curious item...your own organization even recites the so-called Lord's Prayer (wrongly used) wherein you entreat God not to "...lead you into temptation". Do you simply say this because it is poetic or could He lead someone into temptation? Why ask God for this if the whole matter is a system wherein we are required to cooperate to merit the reward? If He could not do this (lead us into temptation), then why ask for it to not occur?

99 posted on 10/12/2011 4:21:44 PM PDT by Dutchboy88
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