Intensity...

       This week we were learning about the evidences of salvation. When I first read about this week a little bit ago I thought it would be so easy because who doesn't know what salvation is, right? Well if I've never been wrong before I was definitely wrong this time. The first day our teacher, whose name is Stephen, said that before anyone will believe what you say they need to believe who you are. For a large part of the day he told us who he was, and his story of salvation. Then he had us each go up and tell our story of salvation. We then went over the fact that only the Holy Spirit has the right to tell you that you have become a child of God. Which makes sense, who else has the right to say that we are their children other than our parents? This week is going to be a bit difficult to write about because it really was intense but I am going to do my best to describe the wonderful things God has been doing in my heart and what He has been showing me this week. So the first term we went over this week was enlightenment. At this point I wish we spoke Spanish because it is much more clearly explained in Spanish. Here is a quick lesson so I can use what I need to to describe enlightenment. There are two words in Spanish for to know. One is Saber which is head knowledge. It's when you know things like math or my hair color or your classmates name. The other one is Conocer and this is to know someone intimately. This is how you know your wife, or your best friend. Conocer has to do more with the heart. So enlightenment is something that happens in the mind, when you saber the truth and saber God.
           So we were talking a lot about when we lead people to Christ because it's a practical application to these things since that is part of what we will be doing on outreach. We talked about how when we "lead" people to Christ sometimes people come up because they've been enlightened. They believe in God and now saber about Him and they want to be assured that they will go to Heaven because they don't want to go to hell. They know God is real and they want to go to Heaven, so they are willing to "pray the prayer" but there heart hasn't changed, they do not yet conocer God, there was no change in heart. But wait! Didn't I just say that no one can say whether or not you are a child of God, only God Himself? Yes, I did  just say that. I'm not saying every person who responds did not actually want a change of heart, for all we know all of them did or none of them did, but that's the thing, there is no way we can know.
            Okay, so wait, then what is salvation? Good question, that just happens to be the next thing. Salvation is an ongoing relationship with Christ. Salvation is a relationship. A lot of people when you ask or hear about eternal life they will talk about how one day they will have eternal life, that one day they will live eternally in Heaven with the Lord. But that's not actually what eternal life is, eternal life has already started! John 17:3 says "now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." So salvation is to conocer God. To be in real relationship with Him- a profound, deep, loving, knowing relationship with God. So do you value eternal life or eternal love? When eternal life is valued it is because of fear and selfishness, it is knowing God's nature but not His character. The desire for eternal life is because they do not want to suffer any longer which is selfishness not salvation. One super encouraging thing about his is God wants, He DESIRES to be known! He wants us to experience true love for Him. There are a couple of things that we may be doing to hinder ourselves from knowing God. We may be thinking knowing God may increase our pride and make us think we are special or something. There is something completely wrong with this... God wants us to be special, we are special (Isaiah 57:15 explains that even though He lives in a Holy place He also lives with the ones who are contrite and lowly in Spirit to revive their hearts.) The second thing is the religious view which is only the pastor can really know God so they don't really try. They choose the value what the pastor says more than what God is telling them. But what God tells us is the most important thing and we should take what the pastor says to God. The third one is the pessimistic view which is you shouldn't waste your time, you can't get to know God anyway so why even try. Although we can never FULLY know God, because He is an infinite God and the more we discover the more there will be to discover, we can still know Him. And the more we know Him the happier and more fulfilled we are in life.
I'm sure you've heard before that Christianity it not a religion, but why? A religion is a set of beliefs (a cause) and a set of action (effects.) Christianity is not a cause and effect, it is a relationship. We need to spend time with Him, just like any other relationship, talk to Him, and LISTEN to what He is saying too. It's just like the relationship you have with your best friend. If you don't take time for those relationships eventually you will not know that person anymore.
          Now one thing a lot of people think is that when enlightenment happens that is their salvation. Many times they think that is because the person tells them "now you have been saved" but we can't know that for sure because we do not know their heart. A person's salvation is when they start their repentance and faith produces a heart connection, conocer, and that starts their continuing relationship. When they have nothing more than enlightenment it is like their are born dead into their rebirth.
          That night we had a class where we read 1 John in order to prepare us for the next day of class. The next day in class we looked at the evidences of salvation. There are seven evidences of salvation.
1. Walking in the light (1 John 1:6-7) 
In order for this part to make sense we had to define a couple of things first.
Walk-purposeful action in a specific direction
Fall- An involuntary action
Temptation- A proposition presented to the ind to fulfill a good appetite in a way forbidden by God.
Sin- The decision to satisfy good appetites in ways forbidden by God.

Have you ever heard someone say that they fell into sin? This, however, does not make sense because sin is a decision and falling is an involuntary action therefore you do not fall into sin. You either walk in the darkness or you walk in the light. An interesting question that was presented was if you knew that you wouldn't get caught and no one would find out what you did, would you do it? If so that is sin, even if you didn't do it yet, because sin starts in the heart. Actually doing it, the actual action of sin is a result of the sin that we committed in the heart. Have you also heard of someone saying that every single day you sin? That you cannot go a day without sinning? I went my whole life thinking that, that every single person sins every single day. Show me in the Bible where it says that? You are going to be looking for a very long time because it doesn't. The thing is we train ourselves to think that we sin every day. So much so that sometimes if I would be praying for the forgiveness of my sins while doing intercession or something like that I would ask for forgiveness and say "I'm not too sure what they are but I know I sinned today so please forgive me." And if I thought that I hadn't sinned I would ask for forgiveness from that! I can just imagine God saying one day she'll get it. One day she'll understand that I sent my son to take away her sin. Now I'm definitely not saying that I do not sin, nope! And I'm not saying that there are people who have never sinned because the Bible says "for all have sin and fall short of the glory of God." -Romans 3:23. But once we have gotten to the point where we hate our sin, we are repulsed from it, we ask for forgiveness, and we begin to conocer God we can begin to stop sinning. If we hate our sin we will be convicted of it and we will never want to do it again. Although we may still do it, we ask for forgiveness, and try harder not to sin. It is possible to go all day without sinning. How freeing is that?!?
It's not easy though, it's like if you were to run a marathon. You wouldn't just wake up one day and decide that you wanted to do it, and do it. It would be terrible. Rather you train for the marathon everyday, intensely, giving up things that you normally would do for it. That's what we need to do with God. And the closer we get to God the more we will hate our sin and the more we will want to stop doing it. I could probably go on for a while longer but I'm only on number one so I will move on. : p

2. Love the Law: 1 John 2:3-5
Some people may not be interested in this because they think there is too much in the law and it may be too hard to complete it. Well there is a reassuring thought, God will never give us a commandment that we cannot keep. God tells us to be perfect. Do you think He would tell us to do that if we couldn't? NO! Now He's not asking us to never have a pimple, or a cut, or a blemish, no that would be impossible. However He is asking us to be perfect in love.
There are many other laws than to be perfect and holy. Look at the ten commandments for example. Now all of those things may be hard, but God didn't just make them because He was bored one day, He made them for our own good. As Christians we love the law because it keeps junk out of our lives. Let's take adultery for example. When you commit adultery you are breaking the bond made between two people. Do you think that is a wise thing for us to do? We love the law because we will never have to deal with the junk that breaking or hating the law brings to us!! How exciting.
Another reason why we love the law is because our sin is destructive. It destroys us and it destroys people and things around us.

3. Love your brother 1 John 2:9-11
There is an equation we got for this.
God gave Jesus who gave His life to us and we should give our lives to our brother. (It looks a lot cooler with arrows.)
Now we have to ask ourselves, do I love those that I once hated?

4. Fellowship With God: 1 John 2:18-29
We had two definitions with this
General Revelation- What we can know about God through Creation.
Special revelation- What we can know about God through the Bible, dreams, intercession, His Voice, and, the ultimate one, Jesus.

Fellowship with God is very important in our walk with Him, as mentioned before.

5. Abide in Christ: 1 John 2: 24-25
Abiding in Christ can be a very exciting thing. He is going all around the world and He will take us there. If we keep up with Him he will take us around the world. One thing the teacher said is it's almost like Jesus has ADHD, He is all over the place and we need to keep up with Him. We need to start practicing so we will be able to keep up and reach all the people He wants us to.

6. Witness of the Spirit: 1 John 3:24
God has the spirit of adoption. Like I said before no one else has the right to call us Children of God, only Him, and His spirit has to adopt us. When we speak to a group of people we do not have to worry about "getting them saved" we just have to pray that the spirit of adoption will speak to them, and He will.
Our spirit is the breath of God, that is what gives us understanding.

7. Love not the world: 1 John 2:15
God insists that we have a change in purpose from pleasing ourselves to pleasing Him.Before we knew Him sin ruled our lives. When we know Him we think it is okay that we still have some sin, but take out most or the "worst" but our whole lives need to be only Christ.
When it says love not the world it is not saying do not love the creation God has put in it, the people He created, or the sinners, it is to hate the world system. To hate anything that operates to keep you enslaved to sin. Satan comes to steal kill and destroy. He will steal your life, kill you, and, if that is not enough he will destroy you as well. Even if you are already a Christian the world will come to try to steal you again.
In 1 John 2:16 it shows us that satan only has three tools to destroy us.
1. The lust of the flesh: This is wanting to be as God was. He tempted Eve with this and also used it in the tower of Babel (Gen. 10:9.)
2. The lust of the eyes:  Judges 3: 7-8 This is materialistic things. It is like people who praise Baal they just praise him to get stuff.
3. The vain pride of life. We learned about this idol called molek. People would throw their friggin babies into it's hands and the baby would burn alive as a sacrifice. They would throw it twenty feet into the air and, if they missed, they would try again. (Leviticus18:21, Leviticus 20:2, 1 Kings 11:7-11)That is grotesque. I'm sure almost everyone would agree.
Modern day this is abortion, so why aren't we just as disgusted?

That is all seven of them. Then we have an overview. One equation we had was awakening+conviction+ repentance (which all comes from the Spirit)= A heart connection with God.

If you decided to walk in the light you will still sin but it will suck. You will be convicted of the sin and want to run back to the light. You will hate your sin more and more and not want to go back to it. God is much more concerned with where our hearts are rather than whether or not we sinned and, if we focus on that too, it will become easier and easier.

The people who don't go to Heaven are the ones who don't want to be there. Sin is the destruction of your life. Living in sin is destruction and makes your life terrible. When people choose sin they love there sin and want to be in their sin. When they die they are going into a reality of what they have been living their whole lives.

The final thing we talked about was forgiveness. 2 Corinthians 7:10-11 ¹⁰ Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. ¹¹ See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done. At every point you have proved yourselves to be innocent in this matter.

There is a very long list I could go into with this but I do not feel the need to. However all of those things is what repentance looks like.  It is when you HATE your sin.
We looked at the difference between Godly and worldly sorrow.

Godly sorrow leads to repentance which leads to salvation which =no regrets.
Worldly sorrow= death

People who don't have a relationship with Jesus are killing themselves because they are all SO broken and sad but they are not dealing with their sin.
Repentance means the sorrow from sin. It's a change of mind about sin because you hate it and you are repulsed. It's a complete transformation of purpose.


If you have something that you feel badly about doing, and don't want to do it anymore, but still go back to it, is it repentance?

Our ideas lead to beliefs which lead to actions which leads to habits which leads to character which leads to ultimate destiny. If you don't change your mind about something you'll never change your actions.

Now one part of the equation of salvation is faith. Biblical faith is unmovable, it's an unwavering commitment. You commit yourself to Him because He is real. Believe in Him and bind yourself to Him. God is not just a little story to believe in but a relationship that literally changes everything.

There is SOO much more I could get into, this week was absolutely amazing, life changing week, that has got me thinking about a lot of stuff.  I apologize for this being so long, but it was needed.
Now I will finally finish getting ready for Creel. That is where we are going next week so I will be without internet. I hear it's amazing though. (But pray for me I also hear it is cold. : p) : D