General Music Chat

I think it is a communication issue.

I think you are avoiding offending anyone by seeming to suggest that being a Christian makes you better than them, whereas I am afraid of you missing the witnessing opportunity of the CHANGING POWER of Jesus Christ, God's love.

A good strategy for accomplishing both is...

"I can only tell you how Jesus has made ME better."

"It is not that I am better than you or someone else, but I am certainly better than ME. Jesus has made ME, a better ME, and He can make YOU, a better YOU."





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My form of witness is significantly different than most.
as is that of our Band.
I suppose that it would sound like a get out of hell free card without any discussion of repentence. LOL
And to be honest, I dont believe I sin any less.
Though, as an example, I act less on my lust than I did.
But the old Adam is alive and well. My nature and the Spirit are in constant combat. My spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak.
But I know that the Spirit will win in the end.
All those things are right to strive for as a Chrsitian and surely as you say this is what our Father wants of us.
But they are not my salvation.
Only through Christ, he paid the price of my sins so that I may live forever with my Father.
That is what I witness to.
For if all I witness to is my changed heart, surley those to whom I witness will see my sins.
May Christ be their example, least my weakness be a stumbling block to my brothers.

I agree with you about salvation not being something earned, but something given freely by God from love.

At the same time, salvation means God living and dwelling inside you.

How can that NOT change someone's life and behavior? Of course there is always a struggle against flesh. There would be no sin without the physical world. It's not possible without the physical world. Paul struggled and spoke about the struggle against the flesh, and he was a hard-core believer willing to die for his faith.

We may struggle and we may stumble occassionally, but SURELY, the living God in us should be evident to those who knew us BEFORE such a change?


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"It is not that I am better than you or someone else, but I am certainly better than ME. Jesus has made ME, a better ME, and He can make YOU, a better YOU."

Bingo!!

I knew we'd hit on common ground sooner or later.

i am a scientologist.

i am a scientologist.

*I* am a scientologist.
and i will be in the next life. i signed a Billion Year Contract, and its the best thing i had ever done. my brain is a holding cell for the Xenu offspring that will deliver us from war and disease.

this Jesus you speak of is merely an engram. fools.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qub5rPYTOeM

(tommy davis is a pu**y).

i am a scientologist.

i am a scientologist.

*I* am a scientologist.
and i will be in the next life. i signed a Billion Year Contract, and its the best thing i had ever done. my brain is a holding cell for the Xenu offspring that will deliver us from war and disease.

this Jesus you speak of is merely an engram. fools.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qub5rPYTOeM

(tommy davis is a pu**y).

lol, okay. I hope that was a joke. An overlord named "Xenu" lives in your brain...And thats easier to believe than a loving God? Anything to hide the guilt you feel for your sins, eh? Good luck with that.

Wow, this thread is still going?

How hard is it to understand? Jesus loves you. The end.

That's certainly one way to look at it all...

Wow, this thread is still going?

Soo close to out-doing the forum intrduction sticky. 4 pages short. I had high hopes at one point, but it fizzled.

^.^

Soo close to out-doing the forum intrduction sticky. 4 pages short. I had high hopes at one point, but it fizzled.

O ye of little faith this thread is not over at all. I just haven't had time lately to spend on answering some of the issues last discussed, particularly the notion of "inerrancy" (without error) of the text of The Holy Bible.

I have had my hands full lately. More than full.

But I haven't forgotten, and trust me, this will easily get 4 more pages of responses before all is said and done.

This particular issue is VERY important to me, because I have come to understand that many Christians today are in fact practicing... IDOLATRY and are unaware of it. Only their idol is the Bible now. It is supposed to be perfect, a description which should, and CAN ONLY be applied to Creator God Himself. But sadly, many Christians have become deceived over time, and how subtle the deception is. Because the Bible is "inspired" of God, and is central to Christian teachings, it would be the last place to fear the evils of idolatry. But that is precisely why it has been so successfully deceptive. And yet, without realizing it, many Christians have replaced their relationship to the living God, with a "relationship" to fonts, paper and printed text.

"We don't need anything else because we have the Bible." (Why consult God about anything the Bible says. I can trust the Bible FIRST and consult God LATER about the OTHER things in my life)

"The Bible is perfect and without any possibility of error. The Bible is ALWAYS right." (hmm... like the living God?)

Idolatry at it's worst, is replacing the TRUE GOD with any other form of a god in our lives. Where I place my greatest trust and love, becomes my god. If I trust myself and love myself most, than I am the god of my own life. If I trust my possessions and wealth most, then money is the god of my life, etc...

But more subtly, Idolatry is having something as my God, that is TANGIBLE. That I can SEE and TOUCH, and is therefore... REAL to me. Fashioning idols, and then leaving sacrifices at their feet, is an example of this. Where the adherent can SEE the fashioned God. It's there and available whenever they need to look at it, consult it, make an offering, etc...

The Bible has become the new Idol.

It is physical, so I can touch it. I can see it. I can consult it. I can hold it. It is not invisible as the living God is. It does not require as much effort or patience. Just turn the page and find my answer. No waiting. It's all right there in black and white. Not as many doubts either. I can READ the answers, rather than PRAY and then have a need to be SURE of the answer God makes me FEEL or GIVES ME PEACE ABOUT... INSIDE MY HEART.

Rather than using scripture as it was meant to be used... as a guide, as a textbook, as a tool... Instead, many Christians have come to WORSHIP a textbook, a tool, meant to SERVE MAN, rather than TO BE SERVED "BY" MAN.

Nothing physical can be perfect, in an absolute sense. By nature, it evolves, it changes, it is in a CONSTANT state of decay, according to the 4th law of Thermodynamics.

Something spiritual on the other hand, does not decay. It is eternal.

The Bible has come to be a PHYSICAL REPRESENTATION of an invisible God, to many people. So they idolize it, they worship it, they flower it with praises, like declaring it to be perfect and flawless, when such praises should be reserved for God alone.

It is Christian Idolatry.

And they haven't a clue as to what they are doing.

And yet, it is this shift from the TRUE GOD of spirit (Creator God), to a representative god which is physical (The Bible) which is probably primarily responsible for how shallow and weak of an influence Christianity has become.

If as many hours were spent on COMMUNING WITH GOD HIMSELF as is spent on dissecting a book in church each service, then who knows? Maybe God would actually speak back? Maybe this experience would make us worship Him at least as much as we do a book "inspired" by Him. Maybe Christians would begin again, to cling to their neighbors as tightly as they do to their leather-bound bibles? Maybe they would recognize how desperate people really are for unselfish love in this world, and they would spend a little more time trying to give it, rather than merely having church friends over to the Cracker Barrell after church and calling it a day. After all, they were filled with a message in church, and filled their stomachs as well, right afterward. They're full and happy now, so let's go home and take a nap. Is this comparable to the bad stewards? Who were given small treasures and expected to multiply them into greater treasures, but instead kept them for themselves or buried them to keep it as-is and away from others.

The treasure is God's love and God's truth.

We are expected to MULTIPLY IT to others, to increase it. Not to horde it. Not to selfishly content ourselves with the little treasure we now have, and are so self-righteously proud of (I have the truth and you don't! Laugh at me now, but you'll see what happens later you sinner!). And we are certainly not to hide it, and keep it from others.

Idolatry my friend.

The Bible is the new idol.

And the HEART of Christianity is suffering because of it.

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Oh good, I think

Soo close to out-doing the forum intrduction sticky. 4 pages short. I had high hopes at one point, but it fizzled.

O ye of little faith this thread is not over at all. I just haven't had time lately to spend on answering some of the issues last discussed, particularly the notion of "inerrancy" (without error) of the text of The Holy Bible.

I have had my hands full lately. More than full.

But I haven't forgotten, and trust me, this will easily get 4 more pages of responses before all is said and done.

This particular issue is VERY important to me, because I have come to understand that many Christians today are in fact practicing... IDOLATRY and are unaware of it. Only their idol is the Bible now.
.

So what I hear you saying Craig is that some Christians are ignorantly replacing the “True God” who is spiritual, with a false-God that is tangible, namely the bible. Your position is that Christians shouldn’t view the bible as containing the infallible word of God because of the principle backing the 4th law of thermodynamics – namely that things deteriorate over time.

Syllogistically, nothing physical can be perfect, the bible is physical, and therefore the bible can’t be perfect.

The Bible-Relationship (idolatry) you are referring to manifests itself in this way: Christians trust the tangible Bible more than they trust God Himself, looking to it for immediate answers when really they should be looking to God patiently in faith for spiritual answers directly from Him, in whatever form that might take place, just not infallibly from the Bible.

Is that an adequate summary? Or does it need tweaking?

Chris

Chris,

That is reasonably close, generally speaking.

To further clarify...

It is not just the BIBLE which is physical, but the men who are depended upon to correctly receive and then interpret God's inspiration. And then further, to correctly transcribe that inspiration and copy it faithfully for successive generations, and then translate it correctly into the world's numerous languages.

I suspect that you may say that the Bible is SPIRITUAL, rather than physical, because it is INSPIRED by a spiritual God. But the text I have to read, in order to have that inspiration passed down to me, IS physical and not spiritual. I am reading printed text on a page, after all. The text may be conveying a "spiritually oriented" message, but that message requires typesetters and translators and printing houses to manufacture the physical book I need to read.

If those words (AND ALL THE TRANSLATIONS) are inerrant and perfect, having originated from God's heart and PERFECTLY received and written out by the prophets, then we can agree that God Himself had to ENSURE this accuracy personally, since we are fallen and prone to mistakes, correct? If that is true, then God cannot possibly stop there. He would have to ensure that every translation was accurate, when converting the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic to English or Spanish or anything else. He would have to ensure that an overworked typesetter did not mistakenly change a letter or miss a word. He would have to ensure that any machine in which these books were printed on, were without error and functioning perfectly.

In other words, if God has spoken words so perfectly and precisely, and he expects for us to perfectly reproduce those words for the masses, then He would have to ensure this process continually down the line and for ALL SUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS to come. Otherwise, how could we know we have the EXACT words, originally spoken? If there is a chink ANYWHERE down the line, then the whole theory falls apart, or else God is clumsy, because He started off FORCING US to correctly and without error, interpret and transcribe his words, but later got a little lazy about the process. If these words are precise and perfect, then God has to ensure the perfection and innerancy EVERY STEP OF THE WAY and FOR ALL TIME, without ceasing.

You likely don't believe this is the case. And if true, why wouldn't you? God had to FORCE the original prophet to get it right, why wouldn't he FORCE every typesetter across the globe to do the same?

But like me, you likely don't believe this to be the case.

Otherwise we would be hearing about miracles occuring in printing factories which prevent the errors that would occur occassionally, and additionally, there would not be so many ENGLISH translations of the Bible. They can't all be equally accurate. And you would think that God would be killing off these bad translators, to prevent his perfect words from being altered in any way, or misrepresented.

But He's not doing that for some reason. Apparently He was all worked up about getting the words out there "PERFECT" the first go around, but as it has spread, He is not so dilligent. It is up to us somehow, to determine which manuscripts are accurate, and which translations are bad or lacking. We have to become not only biblical scholars but language scholars, so we can EACH ONE OF US, determine which texts are the "perfect" ones and which ones aren't so perfect.

That's craziness, and God does NOT expect that of us.

But back to the Idolatry aspect...

What has happened is...

THE BIBLE "IS" INSPIRED OF GOD!

And as such, it's ideas are powerful and extraordinary. One can study the text of the Bible for decades and continue to find new things, or deeper understandings of the same thing you had read before many times. I have been so impressed with the Bible the more I studied it, that I often felt like the thing was alive.

I know very well that if I had such feelings, that the early church fathers certainly felt the same joy, amazement and awe, at what the Bible taught and conveyed.

The problem was... and is....

That this awe, can cross a line, and become WORSHIP. It is a subtle occurance, and of course people are still praying to God Himself, but this slight error can be serious and over time, dramatically in error. Imagine two parallel lines rising vertically. If one line strayed ever so slightly, just a fraction of a millimeter from being straight... it would not be so noticeable at first, but as it continues down the wrong path, that line suddenly gets further and further apart from the unchanging vertical line it started out with, so that as more and more time passes, rather than two parallel lines, both rising perfectly vertically, we would start to see almost a letter "V" rather than this: "||"

It is gradual and slight, but as you can see, over time, it sends us far away from the direction we were originally headed in.

An example of this error can be found quite simply, in many church names which are used.

How many times have you seen churches with names like these...

Bible Baptist
Bible Way
Community Bible Church
The Bible Church of (your town)

The list could go on and on and on.

Why are they not instead...

Christ Baptist
Christ Way
Christ Community Church
The Christ Church of (your town)

Titles are important.

In business, it is recommended that you include WHAT YOU DO in the title of your business, rather than just a name. So that it is "Gloria's Flower Shop" rather than just "Gloria's" in which case someone wouldn't know right away what service was being offered, or what the focus of that enterprise was.

This is common sense and you see it practiced more often than not:

Shell Gas
Pizza Hut
Food Lion
Statefarm Insurance
Hair Cuttery

The name lifts up the commodity or service being offered.

When you have a church called "Bible Church" rather than "Jesus' Church" or "Christ Church" then you can see where they are placing their emphasis, whether intentional or not.

They are lifting up the Bible prominently, and not God Himself, when the Bible is merely a tool, as church service itself is, to come into deeper relationship with GOD HIMSELF.

The Bible is a tool to help realize the purpose, it is not the purpose itself.

God is the purpose.

The mistake is somewhat understandable. The Bible IS truly an amazing text, containing inspirations of God, and unlike God Himself, I can physically hold this book, and not wonder whether the Book is ready for me or not, it's a book, it's always available and I don't need confirmation of such. I can take it with me. I can take it home. Put it beside my bed. I can see it. Feel it. Hold it.

I can take it to Bible Study. Where we gather and spend our time studying a BOOK "ABOUT" God. And I am sure God desires us to spend time in the Bible. But should we be spending the bulk of our worship time, studying a BOOK "ABOUT" God, as opposed to God Himself? It is almost as if I left a letter on the kitchen counter, and someone found it and decided the author has profound knowledge, but rather than seeking out the author first and foremost, that person spent more time studying the letter I left, even though the author is freely available DIRECTLY, rather than indirectly through a few lines of text.

You have to understand me, that I am not demeaning The Bible, but rather (IMO) putting it back in it's proper context, in it's proper placement in the heirarchy.

Someone gives me a map to help me find God and Heaven, and I begin to worship the map instead, and study every possible detail of it, debating all it's elements with others, rather than using it for what it was intended to be... a map. A guide. A tool. A help-meet to the REAL treasure. The REAL destination God intended.

The Bible is not the destination. It is a roadmap to the destination.

The destination is a deep relationship with God. If my relationship to God is based more upon a map, or set of rules, than on direct communication with God Himself, then my relationship is severely lacking. If my relationship with my wife primarily existed, or even predominantly existed, by my reading a book she wrote many years ago... what would that say about our marrriage? What would that say about our relationship? Maybe for one, that I feel more comfortable or enriched somehow, mostly reading ABOUT her, than actually COMMUNICATING and BEING "WITH" her.

Why though, does it bother people so much, that the Bible may have slight errors, or early misunderstandings of God by the prophets themselves, that got incorporated into the Bible?

Because EXTREMISM leads us to believe that if I can't trust ALL of it, every punctuation mark, then I cannot trust ANY OF IT. May as well throw the whole damn thing out as trash, cause it is not absolutely reliable in every detail. And the other side to that fear, is...

"We may as well just make the rules up as we go along huh? Trusting in an invisible God to guide us? People think God is talking to them all the time! This will be chaos! Anyone can just make anything up and claim it is from God! With this book though, I have it right here in black and white! You can't tell me that the word "Love" should actually be the word "Friend" cause I have it RIGHT HERE in my hand! See? There's the word "Love" visible for BOTH of us to see. No confusion. No trickery. A clear set of rules."

We take comfort in a seemingly clear set of rules. That is easy. I just do what it says here, and I'm in the clear!

But relationships are more involved than that. And love is not that simple by any means. My wife could leave me a set of rules to follow, and I could follow them explicitly, and it doesn't mean our relationship is stable, let alone profoundly close, merely because I adhered to a basic set of rules. What if circumstances changed, and so her direction to me needed to be altered accordingly? If I only clung to the "old" set of rules, then I would be out of luck now, cause she is wanting me to know things have changed, and she wants me to go in a different direction, but I am so wrapped up in the "perfection" and "completeness" of the last set of rules, that I don't bother communicating with her, on the level that she could voice her new desires to me.

Reading a book about someone, can certainly help us understand them better, particularly if we were not personally close enough that we could get to know them DIRECTLY and INTIMATELY ourselves. But there is no way, that reading a book should be our primary source for knowledge about someone we claim to be RELATED TO as our Father.

Would YOU be satisfied primarily READING about your own earthly father, as opposed to being in his presence and communicating personally and directly with him? Would your biological FATHER be happy with that relationship himself?

The answer should be "no" on both counts.

It is the SAME for your Father in Heaven.


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I forgot to mention...

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Ironically, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls while being very useful in showing how accurate and thorough the Jewish scribes were when they copied scripture, nevertheless, also prove that errors HAVE found their way into scripture, as some mistakes WERE found in those scrolls. They were relatively minor mistakes, usually a number being changed inadvertently, or something as simple as a punctuation-type error, but they DID make mistakes. And if the Bible is INERRANT (without mistakes) then it cannot contain ANY mistakes, no matter how minute they seem, or else IT IS errant in places, and therefore not without flaws.

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Chris?



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I personally don't see the point in this thread.

Religion doesn't get you to Heaven...A personal relationship with Jesus Christ does. A person could go to church every Sunday of their life, and still go to Hell. And likewise, a person who has never stepped foot in a church can still accept Jesus and go to Heaven.

You could call me a Christian, but I prefer to simply be known as a guy who's accepted the truth and invited Jesus into my life.

Not e1 understands that. If christians would really read the bible, none of the prophets (including Jesus) taught in a building. Also, when Jesus spoke to Peter about building a church on a rock, Jesus was talking about the human soul not a building.

Giving all you have to a building is good for that building. But giving your soul to GOD is much more rewarding.