When to judge is an error, it means to condemn. We cannot judge or condemn because it is a lie. God created us in His likeness and we don't have the power to change that but be can think we do. That thinking is changed through metanoia, forgiveness. Matthew 12.7 If you had known what these words mean, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent.

Wow...thx for ur honesty

Spot on.

God is a person Who loves you immeasurably. Ask Him to show you your need for Him, His nature, and His love. I read the story once about a well-educated longtime clergyman who was found by his wife late one night kneeling by their bed weeping desperate tears. “I’ve missed it! I’ve utterly missed it!” he was saying. When we truly perceive what God has done one our behalf, we will grasp His love and be undone. The question is the same for all of us: are we willing? Or, even, are we willing to be willing? Many are not. Read John’s Gospel again. Ask and expect to meet your Lord and God there. He already has this meeting on His agenda. It is of the highest priority for Him.

Thank you for this. I have great concern for those who grew up in the church yet do not have saving faith.

So to put it shortly, we’re seeing Christians basically running on empty become there’s not enough emphasis on what God has done for us. Which I would agree with and is probably why we’re seeing so many Christians insisting on their rights more than serving each other

@@Window4503 Yep agreed. Trying to do things in our own strength rather than realizing that we're utterly dependent on Christ. Going to Him for all our sufficiency as we are designed to do, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, - as the apostle Paul puts it.

So true and good. This is what James is talking about with works and faith.

When we realize obedience results in God’s plan for our lives coming to fruition, it takes on a whole new delight.

They speak of being born again as a one time thing,...you are right that is a false belief. People want to be immediately on the side of the special ones. Being reborn takes a life time, at the least. God gives us all the time we need.

What is read in the bible is all the guidance you need as is the case for all of us. The fact that you are concerned about if you are doing well, is proof your on the straight and narrow. We are instructed to endure to the end, not give up when we think we failed.

I’m going to be blunt, mostly for the sake of keeping things short…you’re too YOU-focused. You started off right with “the Lord brought me back to him.” Who? The Lord, not yourself. HE is the power behind your return, not you! Which is good because that means he’s the one keeping you faithful. You see his love, that’s great! You’ll see it all the time and will never have to question it if you trust that Christ died for your sins and was raised to life for your justification. That can’t be erased by changing emotions. Don’t trust your feelings; they’ll never be right no matter what the Christian “gurus” say. We’re still fallen this side of heaven. They don’t feel it either, they just pretend to so they can brag about it or are so deceived they don’t realize it’s just themselves. This happens even in biblical circles. If you want to reciprocate love, stop looking at you. Mirrors can’t reflect light if they’re folded in on themselves (the theological term for this is “incurvatus in se” if you’re curious). Mirrors only work if they’re constantly facing the light source. So do the same. Reflect on God’s love for you according to the Scriptures, and that will result in you loving others, not out of fear or obligation but out of thankfulness. The power to live a sanctified life comes from abiding in the gospel message; you don’t go past Christ crucified because that event isn’t a single step in a staircase of effort but the elevator you ride in. Hence, “remain in my love” and “apart from me, you can do nothing.” You don’t do good things by saying “God, I’m doing this for you to make myself a good Christian” You do them by saying, “God, you have already made me good through Christ, so I will act as a Christian ought.” Edit: Alas, I was not short.

@@Window4503 Thank you!

@@Window4503 I agree but would add that the power to live a sanctified life comes through the Holy Spirit, Who is continually forming Christ in us.

Blunt, harsh reality, but effectively summed up. Yep.

He's within us, if we have been born of the Spirit: born again. If we haven't, we experience Him convicting us to bring us to salvation, although He doesn't dwell within us yet.

Agreed. I used to be terrified of scriptures like that, while I saw myself more as a slave of God rather than a loved child of God. Ask to receive, amen!

What are you talking about? The whole reason you can say “ask to receive” is because of the Bible. The notion that the Bible is an idol is a misunderstanding of the relationship between God and his Word. The two are inseparable. I believe either Alisa or Melissa Dougherty debunks the notion of the Bible as idolatry. In fact, the only people pushing that narrative are false teachers themselves. There’s a reason Christ used the Scriptures when he was tempted in the wilderness. He has always held the Scriptures in high regard and never once called them an idol. The reason he condemned the teachers of the law is that they added onto the Word and they failed to see Jesus as their fulfillment.

@@agraves561 Good. Separation comes out of guilt and fear. I am with you always means nothing has changed from the beginning of Creation.

@@lindajohnson4204 Separation is your choice, not Christ's. I am with you always. Always means just that. We have never been separate. WE have just thought we were. John 17.20-23

The question is, is He accepting you?

What do you mean by "thinking weakens God in you ?"

The “still small voice “ of Elijah was external and audible, not in the head. When Elijah heard the voice, he went out of the cave to get closer to it. The whole notion that this voice is supposed to be inward is wholly unbiblical and it’s just another example of taking one verse, twisting it out of context (seriously though, read the context…it’s not in his head at all), and making a whole doctrine (plus a plethora of marketable books for desperate Christians) out of it. We know Jesus by reading the Bible and then obeying what God says through it. And praying. That’s it. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually a lot. Now that I’m free from the false doctrine of hearing God apart from Scripture (note that no prophet was ever unsure if God said something or had to sit and quiet their minds), I actually feel closer to him and no longer have “dark night of the soul” periods. The Spirit works through the Word. I’ve found that God answers my questions much more clearly by giving me the right passages at the right time more than ever searching for nonexistent whispers and practicing to hear them like some sort of soothsayer (which is basically what it is, just the Christian version). In context, “my sheep hear my voice” means that we recognize the truth that comes from Christ, not that he’s whispering to us as a primary communication method. Again, context is everything. I know it’s a lot to take in, but many have been severely spiritually damaged by the teaching you’re pushing. Even if you haven’t yet, it’s worth reevaluating and questioning how you’re reading the proof texts you’ve used.

@@Window4503 we know Jesus through His Holy Spirit, Who reveals Him to us according to scripture. He indwells us and begins to transform us from the inside out, forming “Christ in us” according to Paul. no Holy Spirit, no relationship.

They were called lawless. Anyone living a lawless life but claiming to belong to Him doesn’t really know Him, because He rescues us from the power of the enemy.

@@christincommon5496 Umm, it’s pretty lawless to be operating in fruit of the Spirit (the works they list off) outside of relationship with Christ. His Name still carries power and authority.

@Celia Sleigh, The best marker I can point to is that Jesus changes people, so if you are not seeing your life being transformed by the Holy Spirit (from the inside out), then examine yourself to see if you are truly in the faith. This growth happens at different rates for different people, but you should see positive change over time. Holy Spirit is in he process of making us Christlike, and there is evidence of that. He also gives us desire to praise God, worship Him, study His Word, etc. If you don’t see any of that, go before the Lord in humility and truly surrender to Him. He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Ask Him to baptize you in the Holy Spirit. His Spirit will change your life. Peace

We know God through His Holy Spirit, Who reveals Him to us.

Jesus said, "They will know you are My disciples by your love for one another." That's first. Is the love of God (Spirit-led, others-centered, agape love) apparent? Secondly, Jesus said, "You will know a tree by its fruit," etc. Examine the fruit. Deeds, attitude, behavior, a recognizable closeness to God; all of which line up with Scripture and point to Jesus. Not looking for perfection (who qualifies?), but in general. If we see Jesus in the fruit, and the love of God is present, it's a good assumption that someone is truly born again. That said, only God truly knows the heart. But we're not without ways to recognize fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. God Bless!

The people who brag that they did all those things are the very ones whom Jesus tells, "depart from me, for I never knew you". So, see, it is about relationship. Those people did not have one, and it's why He told them to depart from Him.

@@lindajohnson4204 Where in this passage do they brag that they did these things? The ones who are chosen are the ones who helped other people. If we are talking about the same passage, does it say anything about having a relationship with Jesus?

@@truncated7644 Matthew 7:21 ¶Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me in that day, *Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?* 23 And then will I profess unto them, *I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.*

@@lindajohnson4204 is deeper... there's more... keep seeking

What works for me is to pray and listen, read the Word and seek to understand what it says about Him (and not me), look at what Jesus says about Himself, worship, and look for His handiwork in the world.

I liked and commented (at length), but KZfaq removed it somehow. Weird. I pray that you saw it. God Bless!

@@alphamegaradio unfortunately, I didn't see it 🤦‍♀️😬

I believe that is supernatural and actual requires a revelation. I can share a couple of verses that describe it though. Acts 3:19 Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. Acts 17:26-27 And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. There is an aspect of coming to know God that comes by our seeking Him but also humble contrition for sin in repentance.

Read the Bible and don’t go listening to your heart and looking inward or you’ll swiftly be led astray. Yes, the Spirit dwells in us, but Jesus specifically says he would remind us of what he said and that he would not speak on his own but only what he hears.

I see your comments all over these videos. Why do you feel threatened by Christianity? Are you blaming God for something people have done to you?

@@christincommon5496 Its not me. You fundamentalists are the people who run for cover when challenged by us progressive Christians. 😆

@@maluwa6957 nice try.

@@christincommon5496 No point blaming God because God is a man made theory

@@maluwa6957 oh ok. Your worship of self makes way more sense. You can’t even keep your own heart beating another 10 minutes, but you control your own universe. You are one bump on the head away from drooling on yourself the rest of your life. A little humility is good for the soul. You will meet the God you are denying one day, and you will be judged by Him. I’m just giving you a little heads up that it’s not too late to open your eyes to the truth. Oh btw it’s going to get real here very soon and you will start seeing the spiritual manifest. When that happens, you will know what I have said is true. Good day.

Those who are born of the Spirit may be bothered by doubts, but they will not disbelieve in Jesus. When we were saved, God gave us a new nature. We still have the old, nature, which might be glad to forget about God, and all the strife from the world, the flesh and the devil, which attacks us when we believe in Jesus. But our old nature can't stop us from believing in Jesus, without taking the new nature with it, and the new nature would never leave Jesus.

@@lindajohnson4204 I believed exactly that yet here I am.

@@artemrotar8492 You weren't born again.

@@artemrotar8492 You're here on a Christian site, trying to threaten the Christians that we're going to lose our faith, like supposedly you did. It's just another spin on the supposed unreality of God. Back in the 60s (I'm old), I remember the way that this worked. The poster boy for losing your faith was "James Joyce". Gloating atheists chortled gleefully amongst themselves: "oh, it would be _impossible_ to read _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ and _still believe_ in God! It's absolutely _devastating to faith!"_ I was afraid to have to deal with something that "devastating," since I was having a very difficult life as it was, although I did catch a look at _Dubliners._ I even bought it. But later I realized that what they were talking about was a young man, at the end of his childhood, who decides not to renew his dispensation of childhood belief in God. This was not someone who was ever born again, then lost his faith. God draws close to children, and generally they believe in God, or are a lot closer to believing, than most adults. But it is not unusual for people who are more interested in what the world has to offer, to just lose interest in God and choose to go on in worldliness, without Him. Some of those people come back and believe and are saved, later. But yeah, all the ones who make that claim, that they 'had what you now have,' and they are 'now unbelievers': no.

@@lindajohnson4204 Respectfully, I was only trying to provide some clarity from the perspective of someone who deconverted. I’m sorry if it came across as attacking Christians or arguing in bad faith.

A "mental defense" against what or whom? Those here to assail them with the bad news that they're eventually going to lose their faith, and the doubts they feel are the evidence? But that is not true. This is not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy, even though that is thrown at us. NTS asserts that by being born and bred x, no one who was an x would ever do yz. But there are truths about what people will do or won't do: precisely, why will or won't they do it? What is their motivation? What, if anything, is keeping them from doing it? And there are things that, if we stumbled so that we did them, even if we do, it would never be because of God. We won't become murderers or thieves because God inspired us to be those, even if we fell so badly that we became those things. That's not "no true Scotsman", because it is an argument about God who tells us what to do or not do, not about the "Scotsman". So are there any limits on what we as Christians will do? Yes, and not because of the kind of "Scotsman" we may be. That we belong to Him, once we are truly saved, doesn't mean that we, of ourselves, have some kind of inborn or acquired by effort, "right stuff" that cannot be corrupted. That's what your Scotsman is said to have, the nature that Scotsmen like to assume a good Scotsman is born and bred to have, and cannot fall from, _in his own, born and bred, Scotsman nature._ There is no idea of God doing anything to change him, or to keep him, but both are promises of God to us who put our faith in Jesus. The difference in saying that we will not lose our faith, once we are born again, in reality, and "No True Scotsman", is that we are talking about God as if He is real and as if He keeps the promises He has made to us. The locus of our preservation is in God, not in us. It is ours, as a gift of the Savior. We won't lose our faith, not because we are so solidly faithful, through and through (we aren't), but because God is. That might still sound like NTS to you, but the Scotsmen's faith is in the Scotsman, not in God. If you want to deny the reality of God, what else is new? Instead of trying to scare Christians, that we're about to lose our faith, you need to be saved, yourself. You need to let God draw you to Himself. I could care less about "No True Scotsman", NTS candrop dead as far as I'm concerned, but I know that my faith should _never_ be _in myself_ to keep myself saved. If I had to depend on myself to keep my faith, I wouldn't last a day. But I have believed through some really grueling times, because God kept me, making Himself real enough to me, that my faith was upheld and I still believe. Christians who have strong doubts need to seek their help from the Lord, and not believe the fear tactics of those who for some reason, take it upon themselves to try to destroy our faith. When I was in my teens, I felt very weak in my faith, and wrestled day and night with attacks from bad theology. I seriously messed up my life. I was in terror of losing my faith when I was 13. Yet God kept me. I will be 70 at the end of next month. I have lots of problems in my life, but I am so grateful that I don't have the problems I had as a teen, afraid I was losing my faith. Had I just stood on the little bit that I could, in spite of what all the bad theology said, I could have made it through that time a lot faster and less painfully, and I would not have had to mess up my life.

@@lindajohnson4204 NTS: No true republican would vote for Hillary. Actually, many republicans did. And it angered them that other people who were republican could say that about them, leading many who were formerly republican to no longer be a member of the party. Same for Christianity. No true Christian could deconvert. Many have, and when you tell us we were never sincere believers, we feel you are wrong and it enforces our belief that we made the right choice to leave.

@@truncated7644 No one with the Holy Spirit living within them would "de-convert". The difference in "No True Scotsman", and the case of being born again by grace, through faith in Jesus, is God. Are you claiming that you had the real, born again experience?

@@lindajohnson4204 Yes, absolutely.

@@truncated7644 You mean Republicans voted for Hillary? Horrors! I can't remember whether McCain was still alive then. I think he would have. I didn't vote for either one. I tried really hard to vote for Hillary, about three concerted efforts, since although no right is anything without an acknowledged right to life, the pro-life political movement is just phony. They just use "the unborn" to get power to get what they really care about, including getting themselves ahead in politics. Here come the brand new stars, now! I will skip the egregious examples of the corruption of that movement. However, I do not like to vote for a candidate who scoffs at the importance of the lives of babies, either. So I'm really conflicted about it. Usually, I try to justify whatever political choice I make, at least three ways, one which agrees with my faith, but also something that is less relevant to it, and third would be something that more or less bridges the secular with faith. Since I can't think of examples I want to give right now, I'm probably not explaining this so it could be understood. My main point is that I don't want to leave the moral issues out of my choice, yet I also understand the argument against input from Christians in terms of valid fears of Dominionism, which I'm very much against as a theological position, as well as a political one. So I try to have more than one basis for a political choice that I make. While I was trying so hard to vote for Hillary, I heard her say, "You people have to stop believing what you believe!" Okay, that means that she had no respect for the First Amendment as it relates to our faith,, and would be willing to act against us. But none of the other front running candidates took freedom of religion seriously,either, including Bernie Sanders, who had been a *conscientious objector* (beneficiary of policies provided in the interest of religious freedom) during Vietnam. He just laughed. Johnson the Libertarian party candidate, said religious freedom is a "black hole": it would just pull everything else in with it. I would remind him that maybe black holes act that way because of the _weightiness_ of the content of black holes. Never before had every candidate been so willing to openly disregard the most basic constitutional rights. Not good. Except Trump, and he was the "Christian's friend", right? But he, in turn, had friends of his own, and there was also the matter of how true a friend to Christians, or to Christianity, he could be, if he showed such disregard for morality of all kinds. He pretended to like the Bible and be taking Jesus seriously just long enough for the photo op, then showed himself consistently contemptuous of God. His friend, Putin, declared himself "World Protector of Christians", and right about that time, rolled back religious freedom in Russia to close to USSR levels, allowing only Orthodox to as much as share their faith. Modi of India was supposed to be another friend of Trump, and he looks the other way as Indian Christians are persecuted and murdered by Hindus dedicated to India for Hinduism principles. Trump was also said to be friends with the dictator of the Philippines and with other bad news around the globe. But as a Christian, I was also concerned with the people who were trying to tell Christians that we had to vote for Trump. They were the worst bunch of false prophets, constantly trying to insinuate or say outright that obedience to God required a vote for Trump. Which it did not. I mean, it was a lot worse than that. But basically, Christians were terrorized by the abandonment of religious freedom at a time when hatred of Christians is growing, and were herded into the box canyon of voting for Trump. Which they all did not do, but who cares about that truth? Ordinarily, I wouldn't have let religious freedom take the center stage of my political decision-making, but it usually was not necessary. But in this case, it was counter-balanced by the false prophet-friendly, demagogue-friendly scariness of Trump, who also showed contempt for the Constitution by the way. I heard him say that separation of powers is a bad system: "not good for the people" (I assume he meant "too slow", etc). So yeah, I still had my secular reason to oppose Trump, as well as Hillary, and I had plenty of reason to know we were messed up. Neither front running candidates took the Constitution seriously, and that those men and women could laugh at a time like that, did not bode well. I didn't vote because the candidates didn't give us anyone to vote for. Whichever one we voted for, it would have exploded in our faces. I was not the only evangelical believer who didn't vote for either one, but that does not match the spin that has done the same dishonest thing to the term evangelical that they did to fundamentalist before. Evangelical has to do with sharing the gospel of salvation so that people may be saved, but the use by the media turns it into a certain Trump-shaped political philosophy, which it is not. That is willful deception. I wish I could expect better, but I don't.