Walking with Jesus

[five sounds]

Ok I know I'm not the only Christian on this forum, and I generally keep my faith to myself as far as discussion goes, because I know it's such a personal thing for everyone and I think it can be hard to do that in the right way.

However, I also think that it would be beneficial to open up discussion for anyone who might share a common experience or whomever it resonates with.

So I try to live by faith in Jesus Christ. It's hard and I have seen people around me 'take' so much better to just slipping into a churchy Christian community and lifestyle, and every time I've tried that I've felt weird about it.

Of course Ive waxed and waned, never rejecting God, but just varying levels of 'trying' I suppose. Or just closeness to the idea or to God maybe. But every time I come back, I feel like more is gained. I've had some great moments with God and in the word that help assure me that He's still with me. But I deep down think/know I'm not likely to overhaul my life and that I'll probably do a lot of the same things wrong again and again.

Part of the problem is I really don't specifically know what to change. I've tried to make changes based on what i thought I should do, but of course that was not coming from God and it wasn't a positive organic change. I've recently been convicted of something that is clear to me and I feel compelled to change it in a way that makes me think I might just try to stay in prayer and wait for those moments. It's always my goal to do that, but again, I flake out.

Ok so that's my situation. No real question I guess, just wanting to open up discussion for whoever wants it.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I don't really have any advice for you; the idea of turning to prayer is too foreign to me. I hope, though, that things work out for you and that you find what you seek.

 

[Qlip]

Well, I certainly don't have any answers for you, fiver. As you know, I grew up religious, and my little church messed me up pretty bad. I've done about everything I can to understand how the world works, and how to be best person I can be in it and somehow not get caught captive again.

I was raised to think God, it's said that people who were raised that way can't ever completely escape it. And in a way, I'm sure this is true, there are thought patterns that go deep. But I really do believe, no matter how much I want to return to something comfortable, I equally want to be free. And in that tension, I see there is something higher than us. It's written everywhere.

I'm not sure where to go from here, except keep an open heart and to listen. I know I can be a better person, and I've never given up on it, although I'm not always convinced that I've made progress. But I do know that there is a such thing as better, and to get there I need to be beyond myself. I'm here with you.

 

[1487610420]

Ok I know I'm not the only Christian on this forum, and I generally keep my faith to myself as far as discussion goes, because I know it's such a personal thing for everyone and I think it can be hard to do that in the right way.

However, I also think that it would be beneficial to open up discussion for anyone who might share a common experience or whomever it resonates with.

So I try to live by faith in Jesus Christ. It's hard and I have seen people around me 'take' so much better to just slipping into a churchy Christian community and lifestyle, and every time I've tried that I've felt weird about it.

Of course Ive waxed and waned, never rejecting God, but just varying levels of 'trying' I suppose. Or just closeness to the idea or to God maybe. But every time I come back, I feel like more is gained. I've had some great moments with God and in the word that help assure me that He's still with me. But I deep down think/know I'm not likely to overhaul my life and that I'll probably do a lot of the same things wrong again and again.

Part of the problem is I really don't specifically know what to change. I've tried to make changes based on what i thought I should do, but of course that was not coming from God and it wasn't a positive organic change. I've recently been convicted of something that is clear to me and I feel compelled to change it in a way that makes me think I might just try to stay in prayer and wait for those moments. It's always my goal to do that, but again, I flake out.

Ok so that's my situation. No real question I guess, just wanting to open up discussion for whoever wants it.

You've recently been convicted?

 

[fetus]

I dunno. I don't have that much advice for you. I guess it's all about coming back again and again, forgetting about the past. Maybe it's just repitition on a large scale. It gets tiring.

I don't know if that made any sense. But it's nice to meet another believer on here.

 

[Also]

"A Christian is not a person who experiences no bad desires. A Christian is a person who is at war with those desires by the power of the Spirit. Conflict in your soul is not all bad. Even though we long for the day when our flesh will be utterly defunct and only pure and loving desires will fill our hearts, yet there is something worse than the war within between flesh and Spirit—namely, no war within because the flesh controls the citadel and all the outposts. Praise God for the war within! Serenity in sin is death. The Spirit has landed to do battle with the flesh. So take heart if your soul feels like a battlefield at times. The sign of whether you are indwelt by the Spirit is not that you have no bad desires, but that you are at war with them!" John Piper

I can relate to everything you wrote. Sometimes our willingness to battle at all is the victory itself. We will fail, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, but the beauty of the cross is that it works despite our attempts to change our instincts and desires.

 

[chubber]

[MENTION=18819]five sounds[/MENTION], what do you feel guilty about?

 

[Riva]

Assuming I understand your issue properly -

It's hard and I have seen people around me 'take' so much better to just slipping into a churchy Christian community and lifestyle

I genuinely dislike religious communities including mine. I seldom go to public places of payer. They pressure you to live a certain way. The level of hypocrisy is too much in those places.

However, there is no requirement by your religion to stick to religious communities does it? It should be a private thing done at your home without anyone to bother you. My advice is to keep it private and don't try to fit into to a religious community.

Infact I advice myself not to try to fit into any community. Leaned that in highschool the very very hard way.

Also you are a Fi user. Large communities where people agree with each other due to peer pressure would genuinely disgust you. Pray, confess your sins, etc in your privacy and you'd feel more spiritual.

----

Perhaps I understood your issue incorrectly. maybe it's about losing faith?

 

[gromit]

When I make changes, I think it's because I have a strong experience where I come to realize those behaviors or attitudes are really hurting someone else (or multiple people) or myself - or I guess sometimes that it is impeding me from getting something I truly want with my whole heart. But it is really based on things that I hold dear, I cannot arbitrarily decide I wanna change xyz about my life and then expect to be successful at it.

And then, like you say, it's a slow process, and not a straight path, definitely slip-ups or mistakes along the way, but overall there is progress.

I don't really do prayer so much anymore, but I do try to listen to what I know is right deep down, to my values, I suppose.

 

[Kas]

I don't think I can be much help about it.

I came to the point when I started to question everything (and I don't mean this as only religion). If I don't know (can't know) the answer I simply assume that any answer is possible untill I come to different conclussion (since then I just observe and learn). It makes me agnostic, but still I attend to church, although not that regularly as I used to.

Before that I didn't feel well in church communities as well. I think that as riva said it depends on the person and it isn't working for everyone. Well I generally rarely like to belong to particular communities, it's too much there like everyone needs to agree with others. Also I was never religious in the way some people are, when they tell me as they felt the God existance, I heven't felt like that, I feel sometimes belonging to the world and how everything makes sense. So maybe I'm spiritual in a different way.

Maybe you can think about some form of retreat(if it's even the right word) or meditation? I was on something like this two times for a couple of days and then far from city I found time to think things over. Now it's still easier to me to analyse my life and anything else when I'm somewhere far in a calm place. I need some peace and silence to think. But maybe you work differently...

 

[five sounds]

You've recently been convicted?

I replied and then thought you were trolling me and deleted my post heh.

I mean that I got a strong, clear feeling that something was not right and I should turn from it.

 

[five sounds]

It's about maintaining faith and growing in it for sure.

I really appreciate what you wrote about communities, because I feel like you understand what I'm saying. Jesus does stress community of believers (aka The Chuch), but I also know that a lot of religious institutions are not The Church in God's eyes. Jesus ate and communed with the sinners in the community and found the ones who responded to his message and rolled with them. And that feels more natural to me. The problem is not getting sucked into 'the world' in the process.

Assuming I understand your issue properly -



I genuinely dislike religious communities including mine. I seldom go to public places of payer. They pressure you to live a certain way. The level of hypocrisy is too much in those places.

However, there is no requirement by your religion to stick to religious communities does it? It should be a private thing done at your home without anyone to bother you. My advice is to keep it private and don't try to fit into to a religious community.

Infact I advice myself not to try to fit into any community. Leaned that in highschool the very very hard way.

Also you are a Fi user. Large communities where people agree with each other due to peer pressure would genuinely disgust you. Pray, confess your sins, etc in your privacy and you'd feel more spiritual.

----

Perhaps I understood your issue incorrectly. maybe it's about losing faith?

 

[five sounds]

I really love that. Thank you. I feel like I know that, but then I read about people who confess the Lord's name and don't follow and God doesn't seem to think that's okay.

"A Christian is not a person who experiences no bad desires. A Christian is a person who is at war with those desires by the power of the Spirit. Conflict in your soul is not all bad. Even though we long for the day when our flesh will be utterly defunct and only pure and loving desires will fill our hearts, yet there is something worse than the war within between flesh and Spirit—namely, no war within because the flesh controls the citadel and all the outposts. Praise God for the war within! Serenity in sin is death. The Spirit has landed to do battle with the flesh. So take heart if your soul feels like a battlefield at times. The sign of whether you are indwelt by the Spirit is not that you have no bad desires, but that you are at war with them!" John Piper

I can relate to everything you wrote. Sometimes our willingness to battle at all is the victory itself. We will fail, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, but the beauty of the cross is that it works despite our attempts to change our instincts and desires.

 

[Lark]

It's about maintaining faith and growing in it for sure.

I really appreciate what you wrote about communities, because I feel like you understand what I'm saying. Jesus does stress community of believers (aka The Chuch), but I also know that a lot of religious institutions are not The Church in God's eyes. Jesus ate and communed with the sinners in the community and found the ones who responded to his message and rolled with them. And that feels more natural to me. The problem is not getting sucked into 'the world' in the process.

Jesus was also pretty orthodox or at least traditional and well versed in scripture and traditions.

I've read a lot of Jewish thinkers writing about Jesus, Erich Fromm wrote about both Jewish scriptures (You Shall Be As Gods, which has chapters on the Jesus story too, he does think of it as more of a story than anything else I think) and also Jesus life and ministry (The Dogma of Christ), then there's Martin Buber and others writing about Hasidics which is interesting as they seem to very similar in their thinking to Jesus.

The difference would seem to whether or not Jesus was claiming to be an incarnation of God or the incarnate son of God, that's an interesting topic all by itself, its possible to set up an argument between the Jesus as described in the scriptures, derived from collections of Jesus quotes and stories from an oral tradition, and Pauline Christianity. Its controversial to so do because most Christian traditions would reject that, whether they are protestant or RCC. Anyway, there are a number of literary treatments of precisely that question, Kahil Gibran's Son of Man is just one of the better ones. In all of them Jesus does challenge the authorities but remains consistent with authority derived from scripture and tradition.

Anyway, I'm not sure what sort of change you want to make, ultimately if you are divining a way by prayer or faith, a sort of personal revelation, reading is not going to be that important but I am going to make a recommendation anyway, check out Confessions Of A Justified Sinner by James Hogg, its a good antidote to some of the stranger sumersaults of reason religion can give rise to, and also The Discourse on Free Will between Erasmus and Luther. It could seem worldly, all too worldly, maybe, with a focus on the temporal, but I would suggest that we all live in the world, whatever our eventual trusted/hoped for/desired fate, and therefore these sources and the questions they deal with remain vital.

 

[indra]

I felt like demonspawn in church growing up. No quarter.

 

[Beorn]

It's about maintaining faith and growing in it for sure.

I really appreciate what you wrote about communities, because I feel like you understand what I'm saying. Jesus does stress community of believers (aka The Chuch), but I also know that a lot of religious institutions are not The Church in God's eyes. Jesus ate and communed with the sinners in the community and found the ones who responded to his message and rolled with them. And that feels more natural to me. The problem is not getting sucked into 'the world' in the process.

What is it about the christian culture that you've come into contact with that you have issues with?

 

[Beorn]

Huh, the song that came to my mind was GusGus's believe

 

[GarrotTheThief]

My experience is that growing up in Chuch I was strongly religious in the sense that I put all things before Him, The Lord to Judge but at the same time I was a sinful creature.

But yet, I prayed, and still do every night, and when I forget I say a prayer many times to make up for it.

As I've grown I've become somewhat of a strange Christian. I take the view that I am a Christian Shaman - this is a very polarizing thing to say, and I am come from perhaps the strictest Christian church on earth.

Practically speaking, I am trying to recover my faith, or the power it gave me in peace in comfort in a spiritual sense. I believe that we cannot even know what to expect with a spiritual crisis as we are young and have unyielding faith. But as the years pass we begin to see how evil some are at times and how good at other times, and the world becomes a shifty, shaky, place where the serpent seems to come in through others at will just as soon as they put their best foot forward right after

When we see how the world is stricken with evil, personal and global experiences alike, it causes our hearts and souls to crack.

This is what I think is being healed in us but I do not believe anyone is forsaken.

I think we all have a deep Chironic wound of some kind that must be healed.

For the record I am not church going now and I am not sure if I need to be. I fear small communities and I fear people learning of my interests in occult taboo things. If I could have the courage to be who I was I'm not sure how it would go...but one day maybe I won't be afraid to tell people what my interests really are.

 

[Beorn]

I'm looking forward to this discussion, but before we get any farther I do get the sense that David Horton's book Ordinary might be helpful.

Here's a few relevant paragraphs from a review in Christianity Today:

Horton argues that the underlying theology behind oft-heard calls to be wild and crazy radical believers—as if Christianity were an extreme sport—is works righteousness in a new, consumerist mode. For some time, radical has been a favorite word of advertisers and ideologues alike. Every website with something to sell now routinely promises a transformative experience.

Instead of another call to be radical, extraordinary, or transformative, Horton would have us return to the ordinary means of grace, those practices of the church in which God has promised to make himself known: preaching the gospel, teaching the faith, administering the sacraments, and worshiping with a local congregation. Instead of advertising life-changing experiences or the next big thing, the aim is a sustainable faith for the long haul. The great strength of being ordinary, after all, is that you can do it for a lifetime.

...

In a similar vein, we are often reminded that “radical” means getting to the root of things (as the Latin radix means “root”). But a good gardener (in one of Horton’s illustrations) does not keep pulling everything up by the roots and moving it around. You need to stay put for a while, untransformed, if you are to grow. It’s like being married, in that the key virtues are faithfulness and constancy, not radical transformation.

Or consider one of the best vignettes in the book, which illustrates Horton’s point that ordinary doesn’t mean mediocre. A passerby once stopped at a massive construction site and asked what everybody was doing. “Hauling dirt,” replied one. “Cutting stones,” said another. “Building a cathedral,” said a third. All true. For the only way to build a beautiful church is to do a great deal of mundane, unglamorous labor, and to do it conscientiously and well. The impatient desire to be radical and extraordinary, to hasten the coming of the next big thing, interrupts the humble work required to accomplish something excellent.

The Case Against 'Radical' Christianity | Christianity Today

 

[miss fortune]

I have always found myself incapable of really believing in any religion that I've met... sometimes there are some admirable religious figures but somehow my brain processes them in the same category as Santa Claus... wouldn't it be nice

not to say that I haven't met plenty of wonderful religious people who really DO put effort into trying to love everyone, withholding judgement in favor of offering assistance and mercy and appreciating the beauty of the world around them. my own mother falls into that category and I like that about her... she always did drag us all to church every sunday when I was growing up and I was also made to attend sunday school and bible school as well (VBS... the one week summer thing). I saw things that I liked and things that I very much disliked as well.

I guess you could say that I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with religion in a way... there are some things of true beauty in religion- stories, poetry, art, architecture and music and such and there's a certain beauty in faith in a way and the actions of kindness it can bring in some people. There's also a real ugliness though... judging people who think or behave differently and trying to make others conform to one's own religious beliefs... forgetting to treat others the way that you'd hope to be treated, judging and forgetting that you too shall be judged. It's blessed are the merciful and I see very little of that from the most public faces of religion.

I once had a thread here expressing the fact that it would be nice to be capable of believing in something... some sort of weight to be removed in a way. An escape from my fear of being just plain bad and irredeemable... forgiveness, you might say. My mind doesn't work that way though, unfortunately.

Good luck to you and may you find what you are looking for