Repetitive Sin and Losing Salvation

Answering a question on Quora:

Have I lost my salvation? I keep falling back into the same sin for 6 years deliberately after I repent but after the last time I feel as though I cant be forgiven. and if its not to late how can I get back to the lord and make him happy and proud?

First question: No, you have not lost your salvation. There are two possibilities. Your concern over your sin is good, in either case.

• Jesus spoke about people who received the message of God and fell away because of trouble, persecution, worries, or desires. The message bore no fruit in their lives. He spoke even more about people who heard the message and seemed to understand it intellectually, but never grasped it with humbled, needy hearts. Many of them fooled the world and even did mighty works in Jesus name. The message seemed to bear fruit, in their lives, but it was a false fruit. On Judgment Day, Jesus won’t say, “I knew you and then you fell away so I forgot you.” Jesus will say, “I never knew you.”
  
  In other words, you cannot lose what you never had. But if you decide that this is the case, your concern has placed you on the right path to correcting the situation.
  
  The application for you is to make sure you heard the message not just with your head, not just with your heart, and not a deficient version. Your concern may have brought you to the point where you are ready to correct a bad understanding of the gospel or some deficiency in the way you received it.
  
  
• God’s salvation brings many benefits. If you are saved, “regeneration” means that God has made your dead spirit alive. He has made you one of His sheep and put it in your heart to follow Him and no other. The Father holds you in His hand, the Son also holds you in His hand, and the Spirit indwells you. The Spirit, in fact, closes the lid and seals you with a seal that only Jesus can break. God even predestines you to be transformed into the (figurative) image of Christ, and the judgment of the Second Death, when the lost are cast into the Lake of Fire, has no power over you. He has birthed you into His family and adopted you as an heir with full adult privileges of the family business.
  
  In other words, you cannot “lose” what God has declared done or as good as done.
  
  There are many reasons why God does not give instant victory over sins. For example, He doesn’t want us to grow self-righteous or independent. He wants us to struggle to develop strength or to be able to have the wisdom or empathy to help others. Some other sins are a higher priority as He shapes you for the tasks He has ahead. I cannot read God’s mind, so I cannot tell you which of the hundreds of possibilities apply to you.

Second question: There are two possible reasons you feel as though you cannot be forgiven. You are receiving the Father’s chastisement or you don’t understand forgiveness.

• If you have been saved, then God’s relationship with you changed. Before, He was your Judge, but now, He is your Father. Before, your fate was wrath, but now, you are predestined to reward. In the meantime, we are stuck in these sinful bodies. Our natural hearts are deceitful and incurable until that day. God accepts us as we are, but He loves us too much to leave us that way. He works in us “to will and to do according to His good pleasure.”
  
  God also chastises His children. That feeling of an unforgivable state reflects the interruption in fellowship that happens. This could be a second-level chastisement; you don’t want to find out what the third level is like. There’s even a chastisement to the point of calling us home to heaven for the most severe sins — and yet, the purpose of such extreme measures is preserving the soul.
  
  God presents us with a carrot and a stick. The carrot, the blessings of a restored relationship with God, and the stick, the knowledge that returning to sins will have increasingly severe consequences, should give you something to meditate on and to motivate you.
  
  
• Judicially, Jesus bore the sentence for our sins 1,967 years ago. All of our sins were “future” to Him. God does not forgive our sins just up to that point of our conversion or confession. All the sins of God’s children — past, present, and future — were nailed to the cross.
  
  Jesus Himself commanded the disciples to forgive a repentant brother an unlimited number of times; and Jesus would not issue such a command if the God did not do the same. Whether God already forgave, or God forgives every time does not matter. The result is the same.
  
  Parentally, God does not condemn His children, although He chastises them. Sin does break fellowship with God. It also alienates the Holy Spirit, depriving us of His comfort and power. But what Good Father would not receive a repentant child with open arms?
  
  So the weakness here is failing to trust that God, as Judge, has already forgiven; and as Father has already received you. The problem may be that you are usurping God’s parental privilege and chastising yourself.

Our feelings are not the source of our faith. The scriptures are. It’s tempting to give in to feelings, but we must understand first and then decide to act accordingly. The mind is powerful, and we can control our feelings better than we think.

Third question: You can can “get back to the lord and make him happy and proud” with three steps.

• Make sure you’ve understood the gospel. Technically, this might not be “getting back” to the Lord; it might be getting to Him for the first time.
  
  You feared having lost your salvation. That means that you believed that your salvation was conditional or incomplete. You may have believed that God saves, but salvation ultimately depends on ceremonies (such as baptism) or on your behaviors. The gospel you believe is like a chain with two links. One link represents God’s work, and the other represents your righteousness. Guess which link breaks every time? The biblical gospel has only one link in its chain.
  
  Scroll up to that paragraph that starts out, God’s salvation brings many benefits. Now read each benefit and explain how you can undo that benefit in order to lose your salvation. For example, are you stronger than the Holy Spirit who seals you? Predestination means that God will make something happen. Are you stronger than God? Moreover, if God has forgiven your sins by washing them away and casting them as far away as East is from West, can you filter your sins out of the blood or fetch them back from infinity? If God has erased your sins from the Books of Works, can you write them back in?
  
  Other common misunderstandings regards the meaning of repentance. Many churches ignore it. “Just ask Jesus into your heart,” they say. “Jesus wants to be your friend and make life wonderful for you.” But salvation starts with forgiveness of sins, and conversion starts with an awareness, not that there’s a hole in your life, but that our sins have condemned us.
  
  The other extreme about repentance requires cleaning up our lives in order to be saved. This is tied to the error of thinking you can lose salvation. Trying to earn the gift insults the Giver. Repentance is an attitude, not actions. It means seeing our sins the way God sees them. It does not include reforming yourself; and it cannot, because we cannot achieve the degree of righteousness that God would require. In fact, making reform a requirement for salvation is a form of self-righteousness, one of the sins we must repent from!
  
  Salvation does not result from reform; reform results from salvation. It is not a test for salvation; it tests whether salvation is genuine. Reform gives evidence of salvation; it is a product of salvation; it does not cause it.
  
  
• Assuming you had salvation, then, if you fear having lost it, then you are not trusting in God’s forgiveness. You are fearing that God has changed from Father back into Judge. This is an area where you can please God by expanding your trust in Him.
  
  
• Trust Him to keep you saved.
• Trust that He has already forgiven all your sins.
• Trust that God is now your Father instead of your Judge.
• Trust that your Father will never disown you.
• Thank Jesus, Son of God, for bearing your punishment.
• Thank your Father for His chastisement.
• Thank Him for the promise that one day, He will complete your transformation and free you from sin.
  
  
• Don’t stop repenting. Jesus commanded disciples to forgive every time a brother came in repentance. Trust that what God commands of us, He does.
  
  Bear this in mind: You are focused on one sin. If you think this sin is the only one, you have a problem of self-righteousness. Ironic, isn’t it? We can feel so guilty about one sin that we forget all the other sins we commit. We all commit so many sins, we don’t even recognize all of them. What makes this one sin so special that it costs your salvation while all the others don’t?
  
  Don’t get me wrong. Some sins are more detestable, and different sins cause different levels of damage or chastisement. But sin is sin, and the sacrifice of infinite God the Son was sufficient to cleanse us from any guilt.

I’ll conclude with some practical hints. Make sure you understand the gospel. You can only “get saved” once, but you can make sure of it as many times as you need. Copy Romans 3:28, Ephesians 2:8–9, Titus 3:5, and Romans 8:38–39 onto 3x5 note cards; then read and re-read them until you can recite them from memory. Repent from not trusting God. Increase your trust and make it a habit to thank God for securing you in His love — and even thank Him for His chastisement.

Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for non-remunerated use, and please give credit where credit is due.

Born Again, and Proud of It?

From a question on Quora:

Is it a sin to be proud of yourself and others about being "Born Again"?

Yes, it is a sin to be proud of yourself and others for being born again. Pride indicates that you credit yourself with accomplishing something or having some attribute that makes you better than others.

Now, be careful about saying that others are proud of themselves. They could be boasting of what God has done to make conversion more palatable or attractive to those who have not been born again. The apostle Paul boasted about how gentiles had been turning to God in order to make Jews want what God was doing for non-Jews. Or the intent could be to encourage shy people to share the faith. It’s easy to misread others’ motives, and we should always assume the best about people. 

To be born again, you must understand that you are no better than anybody else. In fact, you are under the same judgment as everybody else because “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” There is nothing in your nature that makes you superior to others in God’s eyes. 

No good action you have done can make up for the bad things you have done because we already owe those good actions to our Creator. “My good outweighs my bad” is like saying “I’ll pay June’s rent with what I failed to pay in May;” you still owe May’s rent. 

Being born again is a gift from God. All we can contribute is getting our pride and self-righteous attempts at self-justification out of the way, and in despair, submitting to His offer of redemption and mercy, trusting God 100% and ourselves 0%. 

Did you give spiritual birth to yourself? There is no pride in being born again. God the Son experienced the darkness of separation from the Father and experienced torture and death on the Cross. God gave you conviction of sins, enlightenment of the understanding of the gospel, and faith to trust in Him. God regenerates the soul, endows and seals with the Holy Spirit. God forgives, credits you with Christ’s payment, and credits you with Christ’s righteousness. God adds you to the universal church and predestines you to the resurrection, the transformation of your body, and everlasting life in His glorious presence. Just what do you think you contributed to all of that? 

There is relief over having escaped judgment. There is rejoicing over receiving God’s undeserved favor and the blessings that come with redemption. There is gratitude and a determination to demonstrate that gratitude by reforming, that is, turning away from former sins and learning to do those things that are loving and right. There is a desire to develop knowledge of God, relationship with God, and relationship with His other children. There is concern about those who have not experienced redemption. 

But there is no pride in yourself. Pride in yourself could be just a sign of immaturity. But it could also be a sign that you don’t understand the gospel. Study the scriptures, especially the epistles. Learn. Examine your life. Be certain.

If you are proud, be proud of God. Rejoice in the dignity of being His child and all that being born again entails, but give the glory to the God who did it all.

Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler. Posting this on Quora probably put it in the public domain, and I don't mind its use by individuals or for non-monetary purposes. However, please respect intellectual property and give credit where credit is due.

Israel's "Genocide" Against the Midianites

The Problem of Evil...

includes an argument that, when God commanded Israel to wipe out certain populations, He contradicted His own nature. If God contradicted Himself, then He is not Good, is misrepresented by the Old Testament, or does not exist.
I've never seen an Atheist put it that logically, but that's what their lazy rhetorical questions imply.
One specific example of "genocides" is Israel's first significant war, one against the Midianites and the five kingdoms led by Balak.
In Numbers 31:16, we read that the prophet Balaam advised the Baal-worshiping nations to lure the men of Israel to sexually sin and to worshiping their idols. Numbers 25 documents that this had resulted in the deaths of 24,000 Israelites. God then orders Israel to war against the nations that had lured them into sin, killing every man, woman, and male child (chapter 31).
Chapter 31 verse 19 adds a new element of understanding. The killing had made Israel's warriors ritually unclean -- which is another way to say, they had sinned. They were required to remain outside the camp of Israel for a week while undergoing purification rituals prescribed in Numbers 19:11-22.
In other words, although going to war had been a necessity, in God's eyes, acts of war were still an evil. This implies that God's judgment reflected weighing the evil of killing in war and the evil of failing to go to war.
Refraining from the war would have violated justice against the Baal-worshipers whose actions had cost thousands of Israelite lives. The events of chapter 25 were an insult to God Himself. Inaction would have left in place the temptation to sin. And the silence would constitute a failure to warn Israelites against repeating their apostasy.
So like the Atheist, God saw the so-called genocides as evil. However, unlike the Atheist, He had weighed the war against its context and judged it necessary. This answer may be generalized to the subsequent wars as Israel took possession of the promised land. One more lesson can be drawn from Numbers 25 through 31. Temptation can have life-and-death costs. Believers must deal decisively with circumstances that would draw us away from God and into sin and idolatry.
Copyright 2020 Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for personal and non-profit use, provided credit is given where credit is due.

Sin In the Spiritual Realm

People think they will be accountable only for their actions. They act surprised when you tell them that lust and hatred are adultery and murder in the heart, respectively. Yet everyone can finish the quote, "Man looks on the outward appearance, but...."

God is Spirit, so He observes not only the physical dimensions, but also the spiritual dimensions. Our thoughts are events in the spirit dimensions; so to God, they are just as real as our physical actions. "But I didn't lie get out of trouble." Too late, you already did it in your heart.

If you caught yourself before you blasphemed, you still thought it before you pronounced it. God heard that thought. If you pouted because somebody else got something you thought you deserved, you committed covetousness, and God saw. If you wanted to take it, God saw that mental theft.

You might think, "If God will judge me for thinking it, I'd might as well do it." But that will merely give God a second crime to judge, plus a victim that you hurt. Do yourself a favor. If you are not going to entrust your soul to Christ, at least try not to further stoke the fires of your future pit in hell by carrying out the misdeeds that you think up.

Think not within yourself, "but I mean well." God has seen all the times you didn't mean well. Repent of your self righteousness and entrust your soul to Christ today.

How to Get Spotless Garments

From a question on Quora

What did the Bible mean when it said "Only those that their garment was without impurity will see Jesus"?

Our first challenge is to determine what passage in the Bible the question refers to. It has me stumped. It sounds like a paraphrase from memory of a sermon. The closest Bible wording would come from Hebrews 12:14, Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

However, the quote states biblical principles using the Bible's symbolic language.

Clothes, in this sense, symbolize your history of thoughts and actions. Impurity symbolizes sin. For example, save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh (Jude 1:23). The garment polluted by the flesh represents the lifestyle and trappings of a worldly, carnal lifestyle. For example, the “party animal” may seem “cool,” but charisma, popularity, and pleasure can be deadly moral traps.

Another form of polluted garment is the life of self-righteous hypocrites. "But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men; for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments (Matthew 23:5). Phylacteries are small leather boxes containing Hebrew texts, worn by Jewish men. The tassels were white to symbolize purity, with a blue thread symbolizing heaven. Some wore over-sized tassels to draw attention, as though it made them holier than thou, like the priests who wear elegant robes or backwards collars. The point is that they dressed to impress other people when they went to synagogue rather than presenting themselves humbly before God.

Many miss the warning that God is so holy that nobody can defile His presence without being cleansed of their guilt. We think of the Beatitudes as rules for peace and beauty, but the passage includes this razor-edged gem: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God (Matthew 5:8)

People think the Ten Commandments were given so we could make ourselves holy. However, they are just the summary of 613 commandments in the Old Testament. Their most important purpose is to show us that none of us are pure in heart because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20).

Obeying the Ten Commandments is profitable, but it cannot make us righteous. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). For all of us have become like one who is unclean [ceremonially defiled or diseased], And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away (Isaiah 64:6). If we understand that, then we can understand that the Law has become our tutor unto Christ, so that we may be justified by faith (Galatians 3:24) instead of trying to be justified by deeds or heritage.

The Bible uses two metaphors for how we can have clean clothes, that is, be freed from our guilt.

The first metaphor is being washed in the blood of the Lamb. In Old Testament Israel, animals were sacrificed to temporarily cover sin. The sacrifice of an animal was a substitute for punishment of the sinner. The animals symbolized Messiah Jesus whose sacrifice would permanently remove guilt. He [God the Father] made Him [God the Son] who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him [Christ] (2 Corinthians 5:21). When we place our faith in Christ, God credits our punishment to Jesus’s death on the cross and credits Jesus’s righteousness to us.

You can find this language in the first epistle (letter) of the apostle John: if we walk in the Light as He Himself [Christ] is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). Another place is in Revelation: These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14).

Whereas the first metaphor focuses on sins being washed away, the second metaphor emphasizes the substitution. I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed… (Revelation 3:18).

The command to “buy” in a spiritual sense confuses many. They think the “price” is sacraments and good deeds, but the price of God’s grace is the opposite. It is free. Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters; And you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost (Isaiah 55:1). The price is our pride.

We must come to God in utter, desperate humility. Grace means “gift,” and a gift cannot be earned. To offer God our efforts, the efforts of others, or our heritage as a price of grace is to insult the Giver. Note that the symbolic purchase of gold makes you rich; but if you had something to buy it with, you would already have been rich. Pride is the reason it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man — or a religious man — to enter the kingdom of God (Luke 18:25). When you let go of pride and exchange your need for God’s grace, He makes you spiritually rich.

Also note that the transaction has to actually take place. We cannot simply agree with the exchange intellectually or desire it without understanding. The mind, heart, and soul must motivate an act of the will.

Summary

The quote is not from the Bible. It does summarize biblical principles using biblical symbolism. Clean garments represent the righteousness of God the Son. God credits this righteousness to those who let go of any merit of their own and trust in, and only in, Christ and the price He paid for our sins on the cross.



Since I already posted the bulk of this on Quora, I can't copyright it. But I trust that if you use it, you will give credit where Credit is due.

Dating

My dad warned me against women who would take advantage of me, but he should have warned me against my own predatory, testosterone-poisoned mind.

In the natural mind, the goal of dating is "hooking up" or "scoring." This puts the wrong pressures on people who date. Reaching the goal sets you up for heartbreak and endangers the future of the relationship. Most dangerously, the carnal definition of "dating" risks creating an innocent human life whom you sentence to, at best, the stigma of illegitimacy, the emotional wounds of growing up fatherless, or at worst, the torture of being chemically burned to death or being vivisected, without even the benefit of anaesthetic, before birth.

Proper dating, however, can serve as a tool of socialization: learning self restraint, learning to enjoy, understand, and honor the opposite sex, and developing friendships.

I did not realize until I was around 25 that I needed to correct my goals in dating. I changed from looking for a wife to learning to enjoy women as friends, without the sexual or marital agenda.

Think of how men and women approach shopping. A woman enjoys shopping for the experience, whereas a man sets a goal of hunting down his prey, the specific item or deal. As I matured, I learned to shop at hardware stores just to get ideas and to see what's available for solving problems later. That's similar to the mindset one needs in dating.

Around my 27th birthday, I was praying for somebody to disciple. The Lord revealed to me that a man's ultimate disciple is (or ought to be) his wife. That was the end of that prayer request.

About a month later, God gave me that disciple. It did not take years of dating to know that she was the one. By the end of the year, we were married. It's been almost 30 years, now. The point is, a guy needs to look at dating as practice lessons in leadership, discipling, and responsibility, too.

With the right mindset about the purpose of dating, it becomes a lot easier to counter testosterone poisoning. Date to enjoy, to learn, to develop restraint. Let the goals come in their own time.

Review: Our Favorite Sins

Todd Hunter's "Our Favorite Sins" has the right idea. For the most part, Hunter's insights are thought-provoking and inspiring. Many of his chapter start with specific examples of sins, only to veer away from the topic at hand to discuss sin in a more general sense. This lack of organization would annoy if it weren't for the strength of the rest of his writing.

I found it difficult to put down the book as Hunter found more and more ways to explain his main point - that our evil desires come from within and must be reordered if we are to deal with and quit our sins. Hunter uses the example of Joseph, whose desires were reordered in such a way that he was able to think of God first when Potiphar's wife attempted to seduce him. He refused her.

Hunter says that we can refuse sin, too, if we reorder our desires. Hunter's suggestions, which he gives in the last quarter of the book, clearly show his Anglican background, however. While reading and memorizing prayers, listening to Scripture at church and participating in communion are all good things, Hunter seems to place their importance over that of the Bible itself, of reading the Bible for oneself. And his insistence that these "spiritual disciplines" be done on a regular daily basis morning, day and night would likely have most Christians overwhelmed.

I understand the importance of making certain things regular parts of our lives in order to grow spiritually and stay strong, but Hunter never addresses the possibility that those things can be taken too far - to the point of creating a works-based faith. He never really seems to get to the heart of solution, either. His insights on our sinful desires are wonderful, but there is so much more to be said and done beyond the few spiritual disciplines Hunter focuses on. I know this from personal experience.

So, if you can read the beginning of Hunter's book by itself, or read the whole book with what I've written in mind, you'll be able to take a lot away from this book. Just be careful.

*This book was given to me for free in exchange for my honest review of it.