Diserner
Well-known member
Just some thoughts on my spiritual journey here.
I have been very careful and diligent to pursue the Lord all my life, and thus I have to trust he honors his promise to be a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. However, it's always good to self-examine, and also to try find a brutal honesty with oneself.
When I first went online I encountered a lot of thinking that just wasn't my normal patterns—and it exposed a lot of weaknesses in my walk. I had a fairly simple spiritual understanding although I tried to "figure" out what the Word was saying to me. In all those years—about 30 years—of walking seriously with the Lord, most of my core doctrines remain unchanged, although they took a lot of second-guessing when they were so vehemently challenged by those I met online, with weird ideas that I had never met before. And it made me realize that I had weaknesses in my own methods of ascertaining truth, particularly that I didn't realize how much intellectual pride and peer pressure could really influence a person, and that beliefs were in fact not derived from the mind at all, but in an altogether different realm of spiritual warfare. I had encountered spiritual warfare before, mainly in areas like depression or unbelief or mistreatment of others, but never had the intellectual element just hit me straight in the gut like when other people passionately told me how wrong and ungodly I was.
Well that's a lot of writing just to preference a simpler idea that all led me to, as I re-stabilized and learned from my mistakes, and gradually prayed more and more, and argued less and less, spent more time with God than people who kept telling me how much holier and smarter they were, and realizing my own propensities to be stubborn and allow deceptive strongholds in, recognizing I was not a fundamentally better person. So after my doctrines stabilized from these initial and prolonged encounters, I stayed solidly back to my original beliefs, more or less, with a deeper conviction and understanding of why I believed them. So a lot of good came from all this, even though at times it felt like a waste.
The two areas I feel most conflicted about are, the amount the intellect derives truth from Scripture over God revealing what Scripture is supposed to say, and the balance between our efforts at holiness and the grace of God, and how to understand those two in juxtaposition.
As to the first, seeing how many people were utterly convinced that the Bible intellectually told them the opposite of what it told me, I could not believe that both of us were complete imbeciles in a sense, nor dishonest, and it's a cheap and easy way out to accuse of dishonesty, that I see happen way to much, and falls into judging the heart that one simply cannot know. And so more and more I leaned away from my initial intimidation into intellectualism into realizing, that we need the Spirit to tell us what the Word means, and in the end, no truths really come to us through the intellect, as much as it seems we need that to read words, we still don't realize how deep the meaning of words really runs, and that words in the end are actually referring to and saying supernatural things with metaphysical referents, and it is a kind of unbelief and naturalism to think that words alone contain truth.
As to the second, this was a huge deal for me, as I started out in a fervor or works preaching holiness, and that all the Christians everywhere weren't holy enough, and had all let sin into their lives, and we all needed to strive harder to be holy, and then I ran into a terrible experience of seeing it was all a work of the flesh based in my own spiritual pride, and that all holiness is not external striving but a gift from God through the Cross alone, that works itself out in as freely over time, and that the more you strove to be holy, the more manipulative and self-righteous you became, putting burdens of demands on the flesh to produce what only the grace of God can. And this was a big revelation for me, so much so that I was really tempted by Free Grace ideas and even Calvinism in some sense, to try find such pure grace that it would even eliminate anything at all I did, but I knew this couldn't be right. And even though I found out I wasn't even close to as holy as I thought I was, I began correcting back from thinking grace was just eliminating the will, into realizing that it was just our propensity to take credit for whatever God does in us, secretly deep in our heart, rather than eliminating any commands or ideas of holy living altogether, as surely judgment and a call to holiness were big themes in the Bible, and even though we are saved by grace, sin is constantly warned against in Scripture even in a way that jeopardizes our salvation.
So long story short, I'm calibrating that truth comes more directly from God than from intellectual study, and that holiness is still an important concept even if the idea is often used to smuggle pride and self-righteousness into our lives.
I have been very careful and diligent to pursue the Lord all my life, and thus I have to trust he honors his promise to be a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. However, it's always good to self-examine, and also to try find a brutal honesty with oneself.
When I first went online I encountered a lot of thinking that just wasn't my normal patterns—and it exposed a lot of weaknesses in my walk. I had a fairly simple spiritual understanding although I tried to "figure" out what the Word was saying to me. In all those years—about 30 years—of walking seriously with the Lord, most of my core doctrines remain unchanged, although they took a lot of second-guessing when they were so vehemently challenged by those I met online, with weird ideas that I had never met before. And it made me realize that I had weaknesses in my own methods of ascertaining truth, particularly that I didn't realize how much intellectual pride and peer pressure could really influence a person, and that beliefs were in fact not derived from the mind at all, but in an altogether different realm of spiritual warfare. I had encountered spiritual warfare before, mainly in areas like depression or unbelief or mistreatment of others, but never had the intellectual element just hit me straight in the gut like when other people passionately told me how wrong and ungodly I was.
Well that's a lot of writing just to preference a simpler idea that all led me to, as I re-stabilized and learned from my mistakes, and gradually prayed more and more, and argued less and less, spent more time with God than people who kept telling me how much holier and smarter they were, and realizing my own propensities to be stubborn and allow deceptive strongholds in, recognizing I was not a fundamentally better person. So after my doctrines stabilized from these initial and prolonged encounters, I stayed solidly back to my original beliefs, more or less, with a deeper conviction and understanding of why I believed them. So a lot of good came from all this, even though at times it felt like a waste.
The two areas I feel most conflicted about are, the amount the intellect derives truth from Scripture over God revealing what Scripture is supposed to say, and the balance between our efforts at holiness and the grace of God, and how to understand those two in juxtaposition.
As to the first, seeing how many people were utterly convinced that the Bible intellectually told them the opposite of what it told me, I could not believe that both of us were complete imbeciles in a sense, nor dishonest, and it's a cheap and easy way out to accuse of dishonesty, that I see happen way to much, and falls into judging the heart that one simply cannot know. And so more and more I leaned away from my initial intimidation into intellectualism into realizing, that we need the Spirit to tell us what the Word means, and in the end, no truths really come to us through the intellect, as much as it seems we need that to read words, we still don't realize how deep the meaning of words really runs, and that words in the end are actually referring to and saying supernatural things with metaphysical referents, and it is a kind of unbelief and naturalism to think that words alone contain truth.
As to the second, this was a huge deal for me, as I started out in a fervor or works preaching holiness, and that all the Christians everywhere weren't holy enough, and had all let sin into their lives, and we all needed to strive harder to be holy, and then I ran into a terrible experience of seeing it was all a work of the flesh based in my own spiritual pride, and that all holiness is not external striving but a gift from God through the Cross alone, that works itself out in as freely over time, and that the more you strove to be holy, the more manipulative and self-righteous you became, putting burdens of demands on the flesh to produce what only the grace of God can. And this was a big revelation for me, so much so that I was really tempted by Free Grace ideas and even Calvinism in some sense, to try find such pure grace that it would even eliminate anything at all I did, but I knew this couldn't be right. And even though I found out I wasn't even close to as holy as I thought I was, I began correcting back from thinking grace was just eliminating the will, into realizing that it was just our propensity to take credit for whatever God does in us, secretly deep in our heart, rather than eliminating any commands or ideas of holy living altogether, as surely judgment and a call to holiness were big themes in the Bible, and even though we are saved by grace, sin is constantly warned against in Scripture even in a way that jeopardizes our salvation.
So long story short, I'm calibrating that truth comes more directly from God than from intellectual study, and that holiness is still an important concept even if the idea is often used to smuggle pride and self-righteousness into our lives.
