Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Paul's word does not have authority over the word of Jesus and the prophets. One does not have to believe Jesus rose from the dead but one must do the works of the son of man in order to be saved. As it is written;
"He who believes in me shall do the works I do and far greater than these."
"All those who do good to the resurrection of life, those who do evil to the resurrection of condemnation."
"The upright shall dwell in the land, the blameless shall remain in it."
"My chosen one's shall inherit my holy mountain, my servants shall dwell there."
"Walk in my presence and be blameless,"says the Lord
"Blessed are the pure of heart, they will see God."
My take...
Jesus came to wake us up to Reality...in a sense you could call that ' to save us' from
our idiot delusions that this place is real...oh really? Jesus: Here, lemme show you something...Peter? Join me walking on water. Is this place what you thought it was? No. Is there something going on you were not aware of? Yes, and I'm here to show you...thus, save you.
So, if a person believes in a different set of Laws...Spiritual Laws, believes in the
Unseen World of the non-physical...that all is possible...that Jesus was able to actually
raise from the 'dead'...you are saved.
Saved from the limited egoic Thought System that keeps people in this Dream World.
Bingo! You are free from delusion. Oh, I mean saved from delusion.
Here's my take, Miss Hepburn:
"Lord, if that be you permit me to get out of this boat and walk upon the water to you."
"Don't do it, Peter."
"Why, Lord?"
"Because God has made provisions in the Laws of Nature that men cannot walk on a surface lighter than themselves. You will sink and drown."
"Then how can you do it, Lord."
"I can't. You are having a hallucination, Peter. You are talking to yourself. I'm on the shore somewhere fast asleep."
So it's okay to believe in spiritual laws. We're free to believe whatever we want. But it doesn't prove they exist, so we just take it on faith they do without any proof. Nobody has ever seen a bonafide spirit or brought back verifiable proof/photos of any because contact between the spirit world and the natural world is strictly forbidden by God because it upsets the natural laws by placing them in conflict with the spiritual laws.
Thus I can still be deluded by religion because without any concrete proof of all of this it is based strictly on faith. We can never get beyond "faith without evidence" in this world because God has separated the two with an iron barrier that cannot be penetrated. This is why a spirit has never appeared in front of a 1000 people and let it be examined. All spirit sighting by the millions have a perfectly natural explanation even if some of them might have been real. Just as God has never let Himself be known/seen, so spirits have never truly let themselves be known/seen. It's all been subjective spiritual writings or doctored videos/pictures.
Making "Jesus" Lord, need not mean worshiping a man, then. It could simply mean that if the way in which Jesus (the myth or the man, either way) portrayed the nature/spirit of God is true, it would allow one to stop fearing God and start trusting that a God who is "our Father" and who IS love would not be against us or angry with us. Allowing that confidence to sink in would make that spirit of Love one's "Lord" (rule one's life) and dispel the fear, raising us out of that death as well. If the spirit of Love rules us, then we are "saved": free of the felt need to hide from an angry god, and free to love.
Making "Jesus" Lord, need not mean worshiping a man, then. It could simply mean that if the way in which Jesus (the myth or the man, either way) portrayed the nature/spirit of God is true, it would allow one to stop fearing God and start trusting that a God who is "our Father" and who IS love would not be against us or angry with us. Allowing that confidence to sink in would make that spirit of Love one's "Lord" (rule one's life) and dispel the fear, raising us out of that death as well. If the spirit of Love rules us, then we are "saved": free of the felt need to hide from an angry god, and free to love.
Very well explained Pleroo. When we are perfected in love Christ has come in the flesh. We deny Christ to some extent until we are perfected in love
I personally am convinced that God raises Christ within us, then we become Christ conscious, while we seek God anywhere other than within and do not acknowledge God within each other we will never see him never mind find him. . The communication of our faith will become effective by the acknowledgement of this. Philemon 1:6. A confession of believing Jesus died on a cross for sin and raised him from the dead never changed my life one iota,what is changing my life is the acknowledgement God awakened Christ within me. It literally is a veil being lifted off your eyes.
I personally am convinced that God raises Christ within us, then we become Christ conscious, while we seek God anywhere other than within and do not acknowledge God within each other we will never see him never mind find him. . The communication of our faith will become effective by the acknowledgement of this. Philemon 1:6. A confession of believing Jesus died on a cross for sin and raised him from the dead never changed my life one iota,what is changing my life is the acknowledgement God awakened Christ within me. It literally is a veil being lifted off your eyes.
I have asked but I've never really seen a good, Biblical teaching of that.
I personally am convinced that God raises Christ within us, then we become Christ conscious, while we seek God anywhere other than within and do not acknowledge God within each other we will never see him never mind find him. . The communication of our faith will become effective by the acknowledgement of this. Philemon 1:6. A confession of believing Jesus died on a cross for sin and raised him from the dead never changed my life one iota,what is changing my life is the acknowledgement God awakened Christ within me. It literally is a veil being lifted off your eyes.
I'd like to feel Christ raised within me, so would millions of other Christians who are falling away from the faith.
What I wonder is "Is this God/Jesus failing us OR is it our failing God/Jesus?" Who's to blame for Jesus never having manifested himself to me and millions of others who have prayed and, by their own testimony, never felt any sort of response from him?
Last edited by thrillobyte; 01-11-2016 at 10:31 AM..
I'd like to feel Christ raised within me, so would millions of other Christians who are falling away from the faith.
What I wonder is "Is this God/Jesus failing us OR is it our failing God/Jesus?" Who's to blame for Jesus never having manifested himself to me and millions of others who have prayed and, by their own testimony, never felt any sort of response from him?
The god we have conceived in our alienated minds is not God. God is hidden from us not because God is hiding from us, but because we have formed all these different concepts of him and about him that conceal him. If God is Spirit, and my experience I know God is Spirit, then the meeting place between God and man is in the Spirit. Now how could anyone meet God there if they do not believe the real self is Spirit too and worse still a spirit that is unclean and condemned, you will run a mile believing you are unclean and God is pure. It is why Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross, because they(the fundamentalists) could not accept what they saw unconditionally and freely flowing like rivers of living water from him was God.
Romans 10:9-10 that, if ever you should be avowing with your mouth the declaration that Jesus is Lord, and should be believing in your heart that God rouses Him from among the dead, you shall be saved." (10) For with the heart it is believed for righteousness, yet with the mouth it is avowed for salvation."
I don't get the bolded part from a logical POV. That's like saying, "If you love her in your heart" and we all know love cannot be forced. One can show outward feelings of love toward a person without actually loving them "with all your heart". In the same way, one can profess to believe and even want to believe but being able to do so in one's heart is a product of conditioning over a lifetime and things like evaluating the research that says "Yea or Nay". How about saying, "Sure, I believe" without actually believing in my heart because I am incapable of doing it?
I used to believe in my heart once that God raised Jesus. I suppose I never really stopped to think about it. This was before the Internet when all the writings and research by skeptical scholars became available.
After reading what they had to say I had to admit to myself that while anything is possible, "Sure it's possible God raised Jesus" it was the lack of concrete evidence and not the words of anonymous writers 50-100 years later who weren't even there to see it, that just made it impossible for me to believe "in my heart" that Jesus actually raised bodily from the dead. "Possible, but not probable", being a deist who believes that God respects natural law and allows it to operate fully. I think it's equally probable that the disciples believed they saw Christ, but again the belief will always be a matter of faith and not any hard evidence.
So am I damned because I would acknowledge Jesus and say "Yes, it's possible God raised him, but I have to go with the evidence that indicates He did not"?
Hi Thrill,
The section of Scripture you took Romans 10:9 from is Paul dealing with Israel. That section is Romans 9 through 11. The Jew needed to avow "Jesus is Lord" and be "believing in [their] heart that God rouses Him from among the dead." The reason this is so is given in verse 11. It begins with "For" which is understood to mean "The reason this is so is:"
The believer of the nations believes 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 and Romans 4:24,25.
There is no concrete evidence that the four accounts were written 50 to 100 years after Christ died.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
