(January 7, 2016 at 1:32 pm)orangebox21 Wrote:(January 6, 2016 at 3:10 pm)Old Baby Wrote: I will answer as someone who recently believed.You were not far from the kingdom of heaven. You were recognizing exactly what the law is intended to show, your sin (Galatians 3) You were also right to conclude that God's standard is his way of showing us how hopelessly corrupt we are and how tolerant and longsuffering He is for letting us be that way. For whatever reason your process ended there and you never came to understand that the way to achieve the righteousness you sought is through the cross (2 Cor. 5:21)
The answer is no.
My primary reason for following God was self preservation, i.e. fear of Hell.
I'm not going to say that I didn't consider God's rules to be truly moral. I did. I just failed time and time again to live up to that standard. Had I learned that there would ultimately be no consequences for my "dirty thoughts", I would never have put so much pressure on myself to be what I couldn't be. Instead, I would have probably rationalized God's standard as his way of just showing us how hopelessly corrupt we are and how tolerant and longsuffering He is for letting us be that way.
I actually understand all that, including that the way to be forgiven was through the cross. The fact is that I repented and "accepted Jesus" many times but nothing happened. I did everything I knew to do but I never received any additional strength to be a righteous person. Perhaps I was more righteous in some ways, that is the ways that it was easy for me to emulate (WWJD and all that), but I could never conquer my normal biological sexual desires and I never felt any supernatural force helping me with that. Yes, that "force" was there to saddle me with all the guilt for my failures, but it was strangely absent when I was fighting the urges themselves.
