May 26
Scott's counseling on this passage was quite illuminating.
The Apostle Paul was basically saying that if you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law, but you will be better off and so will everyone else if you follow the leading of the spirit. Obedience is not required, but it is EXTREMELY beneficial and nonetheless destructive. I think people who are not saved are less likely to become acquainted with Jesus if we ignore the spirit's leading. I mean, I know most people are just going to fall blindly into a pit because they simply don't care, at least not in a good way. A lot of people do care, but they care in a scornful and disdaining manner, so as to resist God's will for their life and run to the arms of death. That's unfortunately how things are. We are therefore to pray for our enemies and bless those who persecute us. It won't work with everyone and sometimes they'll need to witness the miracle of Christ at work in His people over and over to really appreciate it or even recognize it. We must submit.
But it really is amazing that our acts of vileness, our moments of searing anger, our sexual folly, our moments of gluttony, do not cancel out the LOVE that Christ Jesus allows God The Father to have for us by His constant intercession on our behalves.
THANK YOU LORD!
May 31
Well...haven't been doing my homework as instructed, obviously...
The first segment of Gal5:16-24 is kind of confusing. It says "walk by the spirit". Egh. I don't know. I keep getting confused by these instructions. Jesus paid for all of our sin yet the New Testament adds instructions galore. I've heard people talk about disobeying God's commandments like you're not a Christian if you sin. Saying things like "Well, you don't even have a God if you're just doing whatever you want" Like....surre.....Why does God say that He will give you the desires of your heart if "whatever I want" is so damning? Yes, I understand sin is evil and God hates it. I also understand that I am not God and I never will be God and I will never live to the standard of Christ so long as I live. Physically, I am capable of that. If I took God's commands and I adhered to them as if He IS God, MY God, my commander in chief and everything beyond and along it, like a 20star general who isn't secretly a traitor, yes, I would never sin. If I did, it would be like once every 5 years or less often. You can't dish out criticism like that and take yourself seriously without being downright dishonest. Ok, so maybe Charles Stanley has reached this point in his life where sin (not just sexually immoral acts, which apparently sometimes gets abbreviated to "sin" so that it doesn't sound so ...pornographic, I guess?) is so appalling that he just never engages in it. As for 99.9999% of the world, I don't see that playing out. Yes, the Christian's fruit will grow as he goes, but there is no indication in The Bible of what the extent and frequency of that growth is to be.
AAAnyway.......talking with this guy from church has really been helpful at getting that rhetoric off my heart. I don't see much improvement this week compared to last. Maybe a 2% upward tick in goodness, but I don't know if it's even that much. It might be like 7% worse than it was the week before. idk. I haven't been watching X rated hardcore stuff, but I've been dabbling in movies about people that meet and go wild over each other for x period of time until whenever.....idk. I'm not proud of this by any means, but I don't see a way out that I would consider amicable. I know sex isn't everything, but it really seems like the more I resist, the more it burns into my heart. ug. I do need to rejoice in the distance I've created between me & hardcore smut, because I was simply engaging way too much with that and it was time consuming and also drawing out the temptation to physically carry out some of the stuff I was watching, which is not something I am in a position to be messing with, unless I were to concede to the "pro-choice" movement that abortion isn't that big of a thing......of course, "that big" is a relative term. Christ will forgive any sin. Murder isn't any worse than a host of other sins. Murder is basically the absence of a person from this Earth. A baby is just a person who hasn't accomplished anything, good or bad. If two non believers have a one night stand and conceive a child, and all the big hearted Christians, who have asked in faith and received abundantly The Holy Spirit, are being called to deal with things other than this baby whose life probably hangs in the balance, the world would probably not be at much of a loss if that baby was aborted. I am not saying God wouldn't care, but I'm saying if people will bad choices that will have huge ramifications against humanity, that means one of two things 1) The End is near 2) God stopped it from happening. There's also maybe a third possibility that might be too complicated to even begin writing about. I'm not even sure I'm getting what I'm saying effectively communicated as it is. And this is all just speculation. The Old Testament when it talks about the penalty for murder, and how to distinguish a murderer from someone who was just being a tad careless, it does insinuate something along the lines of the hypothetical scenario I described, but society is a very complicated web of words actions thoughts and feelings and many of them intersect in ways that we can't fully understand in the present tense, much less try to predict. The example I gave is a very bare bones basic example that probably isn't even accurate because of the extent of how bare the bones are, to continue the metaphor, but the idea that things are happening and are going to happen that God knows about, and can manipulate IF THEY ARE WILLING. Obviously, God doesn't need to get express consent from His people, and we, usually not having the slightest clue how our present circumstances advance God's kingdom (or not), we can't say we would say "No" if we knew what was really going on and how it makes perfect sense when it's all over. But there are many people who just don't care. Their hearts are hardened and they have no willingness to get to know God or even OF God, and have nothing to give to this decaying world except more decay. If there's 1,000 Christians (extremely low number, just an example,k?) who are spread over 2 large counties in a medium sized state in the USA, and there's 9,000 people who are just blindly walking off the cliffs, and there's 7,000 people who want to hear the word but might not even know they want to hear it because they have no knowledge of their ignorance (?!) --- those 1,000 people all need to be ON FIRE for God, absolutely committed to serving and laying down their life at any opportunity in order for all 7,000 people who are ambiguously pro-Christ to be saved by the hands of men. God might intervene on their behalf regardless, but we have no reason to assume that just based on what The Bible says. Jesus does say that we will be judged according to our deeds. So if anyone out there is doing what they "know" to be right and not just flaking it, then, I hypothesize that God will step in and rescue them, but again, we as Christians cannot rely on that scenario. We must step up! I must step up. I'm not much good to anyone at this point tho. I have sinned. I still need to request forgiveness from My Heavenly Father. I'm sorry, Lord Jesus.
JUNE 1
My evil desires got the best of me and I broke out into total savagery. Not sure if the Ever Accountable software picked up that, but I'll have to wait and see what becomes of that. I need to quit this nonsense.
I wanted to take a nap but my dang rib is loose or something. I almost went to the emergency room, but my mom and my sister talked it over and decided it's PROBABLY not an **emergency** but it's something a doctor should probably look at and see what can be done if anything. If it's a broken rib, from what I know, there's not MUCH they can do...but maybe they can help me keep from furthering the damage so that someday it'll heal. I fell the other day just basically walking on this sidewalkless Earth......can't even be safe just taking a freakin' walk. I don't even know what caused it I think I basically just tripped over my feet but I don't know if there was a semi-halfway decent reason for that, like I was trying to avoid moving toward a car or if I was just so lost in my thoughts that I just wasn't paying enough attention to where my feet were....idk..
One good thing for sure tho, I definitely won't want to have sex in this state. One point for celibacy, one point for THE UNBORN, and point for...endurance or whatever the motto "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is referred to as in The Bible...maybe it's not referred to in The Bible...idk.
Anyway......
ffmm
Uh...yeah. I suck. What else is new? idk.....
I feel like a fake for saying further, like "I'm sorry". I don't feel uplifted. Saying "Thank you Jesus" just feels robotic. They're both true, but those coexisting statements don't really run over well out loud individually. As far as I know, there's no phrase that encompasses both. "Please, Lord, may this sin be put to death" I guess that's one way of wording it. Idk. I actually prayed for forgiveness etc. before I started writing this.
hmmmmmmmmmm.......idk. I guess that's it. I should probably talk about other life stuff in a separate blog post.
JUNE 6TH
Up until Friday, and again, this afternoon, I was doing rather well with my mental celibacy. I'd gone all day Wednesday, Thursday and most of Friday....not a huge improvement over the norm, but still....eh...
I really hope I can keep from sinking again on Tuesday. If I could go Monday Tues Wed AND Thrs, that'd be soupppppur. But if I can at least go MT&W, that'd be...something....ish...
Idk.
JUNE 8TH
Failed again.
RRRR..........and I'd just been doing rather well, reading two chapters of Isiah, getting all in the spirit of it..........but I guess that was like 6 hours ago....or 4...not sure what time that was...
I really have no idea what to make of Paul's sympathetic statement about doing what he doesn't want and not doing what he wants etc.....based on how vehement he is about sexual sin, it seems hard to imagine he's talking about that....but on the other hand WHAT Is he talking about? Is he saying he feels hate when he wants to be all about love or that he doubts God's goodness when he wants to trust God with all his heart? (sigh) I know those are things I should be more concerned about.......still feel like I got a lightyear to go. I really would be surprised if I live to be 70. I hope I can at least get to a point where I care more about that than I currently do about things such as this greedy desire......(s).........
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