The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Hello TheRocketSurgeon (dig the name) I don't think you read my statement correctly. I said no argument could shake my faith because there isn't any real evidence that can be presented that would refute the reality of God. Also if it were up to me to stay a Christian I wouldn't stay a Christian, but bless the Lord it isn't. God is the one who will keep me to the end. At the very moment I gave my life to Christ is the very moment that I couldn't lose my faith. When I was younger I used to be afraid of losing my faith and I learned later that no one can take anyone out of the Father's hands. It says that God saves to the utter most. The most that I do with my faith is obey what God says. When I was covered by the blood of Christ and was justified by His sacrifice, by dieing on the cross and rising from the dead, there is nothing that can cause me to lose it because my salvation isn't up to me but God.

There is a difference though from mental assent and faith. There are may people who are willing to say that Jesus is the Christ and God in the flesh but have never put their faith in him for saving them from their sins. There may even be an emotional attachment to God or a love for the church but that doesn't save a person. Who cares if you think Jesus is God it won't save you. What saves you is actually repenting of your sins accepting Jesus's death on the cross as your death, and His resurrection from the dead as you raising to new life. Your assurance of this transaction is that the Holy Spirit takes up habitation in your body. Your desires begin to line up with God's desires and sin is no longer enjoyable. If you have never experienced that then you were never a Christian.

Ahh, the No True Scotsman™. Guess I shouldn't be surprised to hear it from someone so obviously fanatical. Don't worry, you're not even close to the first to tell me that load of tripe.

How can you possibly begin to guess how I felt? I assure you, I was as "on fire for Jesus" as anyone you have ever met. However, I also have a strong streak of skepticism and had spent much of my childhood reading books besides the Bible (I also have read the Bible all the way through as a Believer, in two translations: NIV and NKJV, and have taken a university-level course on the History of the Bible, in which we practically read the whole thing again). I was a saved, or as we called it "born again" Christian and was studying the Word in order to get closer to Him, to repent of my sins and follow the Word of God, as we all did.

The difference is that, when faced with things that conflicted with what I was being taught in my church, I did not reject them simply because I did not like where the evidence led. When I found contradictions and plain errors in the Bible, which I was taught to believe was the unquestionable, literal Word of God, I did not ignore what I had found. Indeed, at first I looked more closely into these things because I wanted to be closer to God, and I recognized that it was possible that I was being a "Bible idolator" instead of trying to know my Creator wholly... after all, if the men who wrote the Bible put something in there that was not in agreement with what we could discover about the world around us, it meant that the Creator had done what we found, not what those men wrote.

You know the funny thing about it? I can't tell one major way in which I'm different, in terms of "sin desires", now than I was in the past, although I do find it much easier to realize that many of the "sins" that the Bible attributes to God's will are actually silly things, but I do not harm my fellow man, I do not hold violence or hatred in my heart (less so than even when I was a Christian), and I seek to do good because it is the best way to live as a moral, social animal-- human, in other words.

That is why I say I do not think you are being honest. An honest person would recognize that what they feel isn't necessarily the truth; an honest person would admit that the book in which they place their faith as the Word of God seems to be the work of humans, since God in that book orders/contains genocide, slavery, and almost every form of intolerance the Bronze Age tribal sheepherder priests held... and strangely, God makes several very easy mistakes that the Creator of the Universe would have known, but that the Hebrews did not know. (For one example, look at Genesis 30:25-47, where it describes a type of inheritance/adaptation that was disproven by Gregor Mendel when he discovered genetics...until the 1800s, everyone thought what the Bible taught was true, but now we know better.)

God knows no more than Bronze Age desert people. Now why is that? Be honest. Try it!