How do you guys know when you believed enough? Or good enough beliefs?
If our relationship with others and God is based on receiving our own reward, we do not know love and have seriously violated the teaching of our Lord.
*IF*...
1 John 4:19 We love because he first loved us.
If our relationship with others and God is based on receiving our own reward, we do not know love and have seriously violated the teaching of our Lord.
Our relationship with God is based on Him doing it all for us except the choice to believe. He placed us where we were most likely to turn to Him. He calls us, enlightens us, died for us, doing Himself what we are incapable of doing for ourselves, sustains us, seals us, promises us. He is faithful even when we are faithless because He cannot deny Himself. The only thing He won't do is override our will and force salvation on us. God owes us nothing. WE owe Him everything. But your assumption that anyone is hanging their submission to and love for God over his head as a bargaining chip is just......unbelievable....
John 6:35-40 35Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. 36But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. 37 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day."
Here is an interesting link I stumbled on regarding the topic of blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
Acts 17:24-31 24“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”
Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit - http://www.answers.org/bible/blasphemy.html