Featured How To Be Saved

How many times must I answer your question, I have answered it over and over again. Why not address the topic and no me personally. Why are you allowed to violate the rule against addressing the poster?

 

My wife’s uncle Hans was in a German U boat. That guy told horrible stories.

 

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22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
23 meekness, self-control; against such there is no law. Gal 5

Please explain how referencing this passage amounts to me blaming God for my "every failure and fault".

 

Yes, name it & claim it theology is all that’s required…let me just go to God and wrap myself as a gift to Him. Here I am Lord, I’ve just decided to embrace you so take me…I’m saved by my own hand …praise me, yea sure.

Go away. You and your faulty theory is anathema to God because of the blatant refusal to accept God as the Sovereign Lord (from beginning to end) .

 

Lol, you really expecting a intelligible answer?

 

You have never answered this. It is a simple question. Please just answer the question.
"When did God give YOU faith, Van. It's a very simple question. On the timeline of your life, when did God give you faith, Van?"

 

I probably won't sleep over eight hours tonight worrying about it.

 

Just what is the source of Name It and Claim it belief? What I don’t understand is the putting the cart before the horse conversion before regeneration…to my thinking, the HS kind of repurposes the creature (who is damaged by sin) in order that they may see God as Savior but the other viewpoint is man must initiate the process. That seems wacky this way of thinking? Even Luther agreed that man can not initiate, It’s Gods Grace that saves!

 

Differences in the theological understanding of how you come to Christ will never be resolved on this earth. I think the Holy Spirit is the engineer and the one who works salvation in a person from the beginning. But we are commanded to believe. There is a point where you have to tell unconverted people who are not born again yet to repent and believe. The Bible is clear that those who do not do that are responsible for their unbelief and sin. When someone puts their trust in Christ for their salvation and looks to Him as Lord they are saved. Anyone who elevates an understanding of the order of salvation to primary status is completely wrong.
It was J. C. Ryle who said "I will not waste time trying to explain what cannot be explained, and unravel what cannot be unravelled. I will not attempt to show metaphysically in what way an unconverted man can look to Christ, or repent, or believe. But this I know, that it is my plain duty to bid every unbeliever to repent and believe". So be careful calling someone who posts that you hear the gospel, repent and believe, as being some kind of an offense to God. They may just have a different view of the precise order of salvation - just like the differences that exist among the Calvinist community. The fact is at the end of all the debate on theology, you do hear the gospel, repent, and believe.

 

Does this help? There is an animation of a guy explaining it to two other Christians asking him, When we’re you saved?
Salvation Series

 

That's a good little video. I personally think that those elements should be a part of any explanation of the gospel or at least be readily at hand for anyone whose questions moved in one of those directions. But it's also true that Christ and His benefits are only available to those who believe. Those who will not trust or believe in Him have no part in Him. Without believing there is no salvation. Those who believe that God is completely the author and finisher of your faith also believe that there is a point where the person himself, individually, has to believe or come to Christ. Now I know there is in the mind of some an autonomous free will that reigns supreme in all this. I don't believe that for a minute. But the necessity to come and believe is still real and it is done on a conscious level and it is proper to tell people that this is necessary.

 

Can a human choose not to believe and thus thwart the will of God in all other aspects of salvation?

 

That's a good question and I don't know how anyone can really answer that. But what if I turned it around? What if someone said to you "I want to come to Christ but I don't know if I'm elect or if I was included in the atonement? I would say to them that their desire to come to Christ and their desire to believe in Christ is the best evidence that they are "elect" and that Christ is offering them salvation. And that would be in agreement with all the great Calvinist preachers. So you can never get away from the point of decision or the idea of the necessity of coming to Christ by faith. Now was their "decision" the absolute pivotal event? As a Calvinist I would say no but I also have to admit it is THE thing that the person has to do or they will not be saved. You simply cannot get around that. I would give up the Calvinism before I would give that up but I don't have to because that is in reality the teaching of everyone from Ryle to Spurgeon, Owen, Bunyan, Bonar and everyone else.

Your salvation is about your relationship with Christ Himself at the most basic level. If you are not a Calvinist I would just say don't make an idol of your autonomous free will. It's not as free as you think and it tends to be depraved when the Holy Spirit doesn't intervene. If you are a Calvinist and lean to a high level of divine determinism remember that even if something is completely determined it still has to happen. YOU still have to believe.

 

There are different stages of salvation… you will believe after the mantle of original sin is removed so you recognize that you were under the sin curse in the first place… but to make belief as the primary cause for salvation is ludicrous. There is three items that free will people object to (perhaps more) and they are Original Sin; Total Depravity & Irresistible Grace. They will argue that this theological doctrine is irrational because it denies’Free Will’ doctrines where the creature, man decides his/her … todays “there/them” stance with God. The claim I’ve heard is that systematic theology is a creation of Augustine of Hippo who was a gnostic, then a Catholic so it has to be pagan or worse … Reformed Calvinistic . Heaven forbid! This attempt to discredit fellow Christians is disingenuous at best an unscrupulous in reality

 

Yeah. I keep seeing that thrown around and have specifically asked how that is but no one answers. That little video is good and you could even take it further and say that the whole Bible is a story of how man is in an impossible situation and God is saving some. Specifically, you could say it's all about Christ and why He is qualified and how he goes about saving people. And we are mere observers in all this. And I agree that belief is not a primary cause at all. But it is the way we link to the gospel message. That is clearly taught in scripture. When the reformers say you are saved by "faith alone" they just mean that that is the way as a rational creature you take hold of the gift of salvation for yourself. And my point is that since that is the case - since faith is alone and unique in this role, that a person who calls on people to believe in Jesus is doing right and is doing enough even if his theological explanation of how this occurs is different than mine. The Bible clearly teaches explicitly that anyone who refuses to come to Christ by faith is lost. Whether I say that's because his sins were not atoned for or he was not of the elect or, if I choose to say it's because his sovereign choice was to reject Christ - he's lost. In the same way, if someone says that as near as they can tell, they upon hearing the gospel, decided they were lost and needed Christ and they came to Christ by faith I don't see where that should be a problem if they came to Christ by faith. I don't agree with their analysis of why they came but I don't see why it would nullify the reality of their salvation.

 

You and I don't agree on the process...but, we do agree on the end result. Wow...I've found one who isn't an elitist, arrogant person. Few and far between....thanks.

 

You never actually answered the question, except to say "I don't know" which is really a copout on the question.
Here's the question: "Can a human choose not to believe and thus thwart the will of God in all other aspects of salvation?"

The answer is quite easy. The answer is "no." No human can thwart the will of God. No human, whom God has chosen to save, can defeat God's will by choosing not to believe. If a person does not believe, they have not been chosen.
In your analogy the person questioning if he is elect is still attempting to be the ruler of his destiny. He is living in fear and looking squarely at himself, not Christ Jesus and His Word. Second, the evidence of faith is perseverance, so it is good and right to consider one's faith and research scripture to see what God tells them as they progress in faith.

But, the answer to the question is an easy...no.

 

Since you have never answered the question, how about you answer it just this once.
Here's the question:

When did God give YOU faith, Van?

It's a very simple question. On the timeline of your life, when did God give you faith, Van?

(The question is very relevant to the topic of this thread so it's not about you, it's about "how to be saved.")

 

I don't know how else to answer if I don't know. It's only a copout ( I like that word, man) if you refuse to give the answer you know because it's uncomfortable. There are plenty of scriptures that seem to indicate God giving you a choice and a command to repent. I don't know how you can get around them. But there are plenty of other scriptures that clearly teach God being active in all parts of our salvation and having already determined it.

So someone who absolutely refuses to believe or come to Christ because they loved their sin too much or loved the world too much - I assume their choice was absolutely real. And I fully believe that they could have come and if they had they would have been saved. But I also believe that you could say, after observing that they don't repent and come to Christ, that they were never elect and that their rejection was at least permissively ordained by God. Now there are some logical problems with that from a human standpoint but I know that an awful lot of Calvinist theologians agree with me (or more properly, I agree with them) on this tension. This is the mainstream of practical Calvinist theology among Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians who are evangelical.