Understanding the bible

[FallentoReason]

Why, Satan and the fallen angels knew God, they still know He exists, they have rejected who He is, not His existence. All the Christians in my church know God is real, they do not need physical sight to believe, through the Holy Spirit we see God as plain as we see the church building when we enter the parking lot. Faith in God leads to believing ie. knowing. Once a person truly experiences God that person knows God exists, once a person knows God exists that person can never truly deny He doesn't.
Not a oxymoron, rather a rejecting of who God is. I do not know many who have rejected who God is, it's rather rare, even to the point of being extremely rare. This is why I can know that those who say they were Christians and say God is not real, never truly believed He does exist.

It's a very subtle point you're trying to make and I know what you mean. I guess for me it was kind of like having my eyes closed while talking to someone who claimed to be something, and then when I had the courage to open my eyes to confirm it all I saw was myself in the mirror. Sorry that probably wasn't the best analogy but it's rather early in the morning!

Maybe you need to talk to a group of Christians and see what they have experienced through the Holy Spirit. I can tell you that if you were to ask people in my church you would hear many comments, yet there would be a similarity between each person. So for those I know as Christians they would not reject God, they have experienced Him through the Holy Spirit. As for my church God and our experiences are not subjective, indeed they are real and our experiences are much the same.
Leaving it up to the individual is not what Christ wanted, you need to remember, Christ formed the church so that those who are believers will share in their experience with God.

I've heard many testimonies and I have to agree that they all have a common theme amongst them. I also see their reasons for needing something to comfort them as some of these people had rather dark pasts. There's others where the correlation between the experience and God seems rather arbitrary.. But who am I to judge their own experience. As I said, it's all subjective and there's no way of really being able to test any of it.

As for things like speaking in tongues, these things must conform to scriptures, this takes deep study with the Holy Spirit guiding one to the truth. These differences make up the many denominations, as long as each believe in salvation through Christ the Son of God then we must consider them Christian churches. Remember the Church is the bride of Christ, and as biblical speaking, the bride is to serve the Groom and the Groom to provide for the bride. Want a hint to speaking in tongues, it's plural.

Christ always mentioned the Church i.e. singular. I think ideally Christianity is meant to be unified under one 'denomination'. Otherwise Christ would of had/wanted many brides and I think that sounds very suss =)

If the requirement for a church is to teach salvation through faith in Christ, then that is saying something about the individual and their requirement for 'membership'. According to this I was definitely a Christian then.

It is the unbeliever that has a problem with the definition of Christianity, not the Christian church. Yes there's a way to determine what the scriptures say about how God works through them, allowing the Holy Spirit to guide one through scripture to reveal the truth. This however leaves the unbeliever without the ability to understand the deep meanings within the scriptures, the Holy Spirit will reveal salvation to the unbeliever, but will not work through them to understand the scriptures and the way they work in a believers life.

I understand that the Holy Spirit is key to making everything fit. The problem is how do I know I really have it? The problem for me when a Christian in this case says 'just believe, let God work through you' is that to me it's like I have a bike without wheels and the Christian says 'just have the faith that it will work' but I can clearly see I'm going to get nowhere.

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I would say, read Plutarch, read Luke-Acts, and do so in the Greek or with a good concordance. After that, read the scholarship outside of the christian set. Finally, after forming your own conclusions, read Gott. I find Gott to be far from the last word. After all, she's just another internet preacher.

Ok, sounds like a plan. Thanks for that.