Q: Why are Christians left on earth once they’re saved?
A: To help other people believe
Q: Why am I doing this year with Navs?
A: To help other people believe (directly or indirectly)
Q: Why are you mentioning this now?
A: Because someone I’ve been meeting up with has just become a Christian, and that means I must be doing my job well!
Andre is a Malaysian guy that I met in Freshers’ Week back in September, when I randomly knocked on his door with a packet of cookies (well, not completely randomly – he’d given his address to someone on Freshers’ Fair and I popped round). He spent the first two terms (probably around 18 meetings) asking loads of questions and listening intently to the answers. Towards the end the questions were more along the lines of “Why do I find it so hard to do what I think is right?”, so I could see he’d taken on board what answers I’d been giving to his questions. Then I saw him just now for the first time this term and asked him where he was up to. It turns out that he’d prayed a prayer of repentance and belief recently, so, in my eyes (and God’s I believe), is a Christian. So we spent some time going through what that meant, and assuring him that it was real and irreversible. But also explaining why this didn’t mean life would be easy from now on.
We talked a lot and prayed a bit. Was awesome!
I’m glad to be doing my job 🙂
Conga-ratulations. Just don’t go thinking everyone’s that easy… 😛
Fantastic stuff!
I guess God helped a bit… but well done all the same!
Irreversible? No money-back guarantees?
Pfft. :-p
MaW: I do know that, trust me.
gjnf: I think it might be the other way around, but I could be wrong.
Simon: Yes and no… no neeeeeed.
Well irreversible implies you can’t unbecome a Christian. Which strikes me as rubbish.
Even google agrees.
Well it might sound rubbish to you, but I believe it’s true and in line with what the Bible teaches. It teaches that when you become a Christian you become a “new creation” and you gain “eternal life”. A common mis-conception is that eternal life is something you gain when you die, but in fact it starts when you become a Christian. And the whole idea of an eternal life is that it goes on forever, so you cannot stop it at will.
Becoming a Christian isn’t a lifestyle choice, nor a moral one, it’s a change in what and who you are, and is, as I said, irreversible.
To think that God’s rescue plan for an individual can be rejected and removed once it’s been accepted strikes me as rubbish.
Of course this raises interesting moral questions such as “If someone’s becomes a Christian and then decides to reject it/become a Buddhist/Hindu/Muslim, do you believe they still have eternal life?” My answer would have a couple of bits to it:
1 – I would probably doubt whether they had truly been a Christian, but I don’t think it’s impossible for this to happen.
2 – I would say that yes they do still have eternal life.
Oh and I trust God more than I do google… I feel he had more experience, information and intelligence… but google might be your closest thing.
So people can believe but can’t stop believing?
Doesn’t that undermine science completely?
If I hypothesise that the moon is made of cheese and later find out that it isn’t will I have to keep believing it’s made of cheese and disappear in a puff of logic?
Google is provably existent which to a mere simpleton like me, without “experience, information and intelligence” as you put it makes it a more useful thing for me to believe in.
1 – If it did undermine science completely it wouldn’t matter – science isn’t truth. God is.
2 – I didn’t say you couldn’t stop believing – I said you couldn’t get rid of your eternal life. Initial belief leads to God giving eternal life. If that belief changes or disappears, it does not change what God has done.
If you believe the moon is made of moon rock, then change your mind to believe it’s made of cheese – does it change whether you were right in the first place?
Didn’t mean to offend or condescend with the google comment, it just struck me as interesting that it was your first port of call, whereas God is mine. You obviously have faith in google 🙂
Oh, and what did you search for in google? “unbecome a Christian” turned up mainly Buddhist stuff for me. Although it did turn up http://www.biblequery.org/2cor.htm (search for unbecome) which shows that not all Christians would agree with me on this, but also that I’m not alone in thinking this. http://www.biblequery.org/eph.htm has a clearer explanation under Ephesians 1:14, and http://www.biblequery.org/heb.htm is another one from the same site – under Hebrews 6:4-12.
Evidently I have some faith in google too.
“science isn’t truth. God is.”
Well with statements like that which I believe are completely untrue this discussion isn’t going to get very far. Are you going to argue that 1+1=2 isn’t true? (Or are you going to use the normal Christian tactic of bending definitions ;-))
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~slocks/decon.html
http://www.answering-christianity.com/death.htm is amusing. Instant death eh? Must be some new way of describing eternal life.
http://www.ffrf.org/lfif/
yadda yadda yadda
I cba Alex. You know we’ll always believe different things.
Sorry, I didn’t say “science is false”. All I meant was that science isn’t the thing I ultimately trust in – the thing I consider to be reliably true. But you’re right, so long as we disagree on that, I’m sure we will believe different things.
As for the links – the first and third ones are particularly interesting, and having read them I do feel quite challenged. But it doesn’t change what I believe, just gets me thinking about how it applies to those situations… I assume the same is true with you when you read any pro-Jesus site.
However the second link is not really credible, it uses passages with obvious metaphor and takes them literally, and also mixes Old Testament and New Testament teaching, showing a mis-understanding of the Bible. Of course it’s easy to find sites saying similar things about Islam or about Atheism.
And OK, we’ll stop now, cos we have probably reached the end of interesting conversation as we have highlighted that it’s our base belief that defines all the rest and since they differ… we’re not going to agree. But I wouldn’t say we’ll “always believe different things” – you never know – one day you might just convince me.
Ah booo! It was just getting started.
*throws popcorn at Simon and x3ja*
aww, c’mon, you can do better than that….