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My eyes are so bad it's amazing I can write anything at all. Well, I can't see what I write, I just have to hope that myu figers are on the right keys as I feel my way. The Lord does help me a lot. When I can't see the word I want on the menyu, such as "Copy" or "paste" or Read aloud" I'll ask him to show it to me and He will. He just did that with the word "paste" so i could put the link below to A Q Pink's sermon on Counterfeit swaving faith.
I had no idea there were so many messages out there about this very sort of thing, all the ways it can seem someone is saved or has the Holy Spirit when in fact they don't. Mostly it's see,med to me that pastors want to give reassuring messages that we are in fact saved, and of course often that is exactly what is needed, but I'm afraid I don't remember hearing this other message from a pastor beofre, how easy it is to deceive ourselves that we are in the faith when we are not. That may just be my faulty memory.'
Pink, Ryle, Owen all say quite a bit about this problem of people deceiving themselves about their salvation. A month or so ago this theme put me in a deep state of fear about my own salvation. Was I ever really saved? Do Ireally have the Holy Spirit? What about those horrible sins I've committed just in the last few years? And He started to show me those sins. A couple of them looked like the sort that damn a person who isn't saved, and from which they cannot be saved, as per that passage in Hebrews. The dread I felt was terrible. It went on for wee,kks. Ifelt God had completely abandoned me. I had a real sense that I could very well go to Hell after years of deceiving myself.
Then THe Lord agve me a surpprising reassurance that I am in fact saved. I was trembling with fear over my sins and I'd said I want ed to go on trembling because I didn't want to get complacent about sin any more. But the trembling was pretty heaving, ral trembling, real shaking, a cold dread in the pit of my stomach. I said to the Lord, I just want to go on trembling until I'm saved. And at that moment the tremgling stopped. It rapidly faded away to nothing. So what did that mean? I am saved NOW. The trembling stopped when I was saved, and that is now. I didn't get up and leap for joy right away. I doubted it. It's a subjective experience of course, however objectiving in form. I've learned to doubt my experiences. But over time I've become confinced. Only He could have stopped the trembling. And there is no other wayt to interpret it given the terms I'd presented Him with but that I am in fact saved. So although to some extent the cold dread remains, or comes back from time to time, I ham now overall reassuraced that I am saved and am relearning how to put my trust in Him for that.
There messages have made me awfully aware of the situation of others though. Mostly unbelievers. My own terror of Hell is enough to make me want to save everybody else from it, and yet I'm not much of an evangelist and I don't reallyh inow where to start. Those I have presented with the gospel have all said no many times.
At the beginning of April I started on a Spiritual Renewal Project. I'm still on it, I'm never going to get off it.
A few months into it I istian Now? Listen to His Answer - YouTube
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