God - Yes, Bible - Sometimes, Church - Never

[Thinktank]

I believe in God.
I believe prayer is a good thing.
I wouldn't want to mock God - EVER.
I feel sorry for the people who do mock God.

I like the bible - mostly the New Testament.
The bible is full of good wisdom. Like where it says to honour
your mother and father. There's nothing goofier than people who
say bad things about their parents. But there are some parts of the bible
that don't make sense to me. Like where it says, to be perfect, a person
should give away ALL their property - and then they are perfect. That doesn't make sense.
There isn't a Christian on earth that would give away their money.

I don't like church. When I went to church, back in the early 1990s, some people
there pretended to be friends, but ended up being two-faced.
One time the song leader told everyone to raise their hands. I didn't. He got mad and repeated
more loudly RAISE YOUR HANDS!. So I did raise my hands. Now, I wouldn't even go to church.
I would teach people about God, and the bible, without any churches. That's what I would do.




.

[ILBT uh-huh]

Good post.

[tryscotty]

I don't blame you for not wanting to go to the church you described. I wouldn't either. On a side note Jesus told a rich man to sell everything and follow him because Jesus knew this rich man loved his riches first and needed to have love for God first. In the Bible there are very rich servants of God. God wants first place that's all.

[Thinktank]

Are you sure?

How can you be sure what Jesus was thinking?




.

[tryscotty]

Are you sure?

How can you be sure what Jesus was thinking?




.

If you read the entire acct it's very clear where the mans heart was. Jesus asked many to follow him, how many do you read he asked to sell everything? I can only think of one. I can think of many who had great wealth who served God though. The apostle Paul for one.

[MechanicMan]

I believe in God.
I believe prayer is a good thing.
I wouldn't want to mock God - EVER.
I feel sorry for the people who do mock God.

I like the bible - mostly the New Testament.
The bible is full of good wisdom. Like where it says to honour
your mother and father. There's nothing goofier than people who
say bad things about their parents. But there are some parts of the bible
that don't make sense to me. Like where it says, to be perfect, a person
should give away ALL their property - and then they are perfect. That doesn't make sense.
There isn't a Christian on earth that would give away their money.

I don't like church. When I went to church, back in the early 1990s, some people
there pretended to be friends, but ended up being two-faced.
One time the song leader told everyone to raise their hands. I didn't. He got mad and repeated
more loudly RAISE YOUR HANDS!. So I did raise my hands. Now, I wouldn't even go to church.
I would teach people about God, and the bible, without any churches. That's what I would do.




.

Its a shame that experiences like these make you lump all churches into the same category. Not every person who calls themselves a Christian is one, and not every Church out there is a Church in the true biblical sense.

[1nick]

:-k :129: :-#

[Charles Whitman II]

a man does not need a special building to worship the almighty.

[tryscotty]

a man does not need a special building to worship the almighty.

If one professes to be a Christian meeting together is required.

[MechanicMan]

a man does not need a special building to worship the almighty.

If one professes to be a Christian meeting together is required.

Agreed! Hebrews 10:25 (King James Version)

25 Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.

Now this assembling together does not necessitate a building called "a church". In fact in the first century (new testament times) the Christians would meet house to house in an "underground" fashion. Being a Christian was very bad for ones health in those days. Where they could meet publicly they would, where they could not it was usually home meetings.

Matthew 18:20 For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

[averagejoe]

I kinda like the story of Elijah, He prayed by himself to right'en Israel's heathen ways. God answered him by sending fire from the heavens to consume a sacrifice soaked in water. The priest's of Baal had tried all day to start a fire for the sacrifice. He then slew the 450 priest of Baal.

Heres a short version of the event...

Elijah was a man of incredible faith who apparently emerged from complete obscurity with an initial, terrible prophetic pronouncement in I Kings 17:1: “As the Lord God of Israel lives, before whom I stand [serve], there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” God backed him up, proving that Elijah was, indeed, a prophet of God that the nations would ignore at their peril. We know nothing about Elijah’s prior background, but subsequent events hint at some possibilities. Elijah was remarkably hardened to human suffering, whether it was his own suffering or the sufferings of others plagued by his pronouncements. As the drought in the kingdom of Israel stretched into years, the streams dried up, people and livestock starved to death or died of thirst. Elijah suffered with the people living in the drought region, even though God miraculously intervened just enough to keep Elijah himself alive.

Elijah had said there would be no rain except “by his word.” After three and ½ years of extreme suffering all around him, Elijah still exhibited no need to declare an end to the drought and the famine and death it caused. As I Kings 18:1 relates, it was God who was moved to have mercy on the people of Israel, not Elijah. God told Elijah to end the drought. If God had not essentially said to Elijah “Enough is enough, Elijah, it is time to declare an end to this suffering,” who knows how long Elijah would have let the people of Israel continue to suffer. Elijah appears to have been a man whose background included the endurance of much personal suffering as he was remarkably unmoved by either his own suffering or that of the people around him. God may also have intervened to end this drought after three and ½ years in order to allow it to be a direct precedent to the three and ½ ministry of the two witnesses in the latter days.

When the time came to end the drought, Elijah arranged a contest with the priests of Baal, the false god then worshipped by most Israelites, to see who could call down fire from heaven upon a burnt offering (see I Kings 18:20-46). Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal with dripping sarcasm as they gyrated around the altar and slashed themselves with knives to draw the attentions of their non-existent god. The King James Version of the Bible doesn’t do justice to Elijah’s sarcasm as he mocked them. I’ll cite I Kings 18:27 from the Complete Jewish Bible, translated by David Stern: “Around noon Eliyahu [Elijah] began ridiculing them: ‘Shout louder! After all, he’s a god isn’t he? Maybe he’s daydreaming, or he’s on the potty, or he’s away on a trip. Maybe he’s asleep, and you need to wake him up.’” I actually think even Mr. Stern rendered Elijah’s words a bit delicately. When Elijah mocked Baal’s prophets with the words “Maybe…he’s on the potty,” I think Elijah’s words would have been even more “earthy” if they were translated into the street language of his (or our) time. Elijah was no shrinking violet, and he could use blunt, crude expressions of speech.

When Elijah’s turn came to call on God for divine fire, he had the crowd soak the sacrifice three times with four carrels of water each time. Can you imagine how valuable that water was in a time when no rain had fallen in three and ½ years? That amounted to 12 barrels of water, one for each of the tribes of Israel. He may have poured out the entire drinking water supply brought for the assembled multitude present at that sacrifice. The God of Israel answered Elijah’s prayer and consumed the sacrifice with fire sent from heaven, shocking the masses into realizing that Elijah’s God really was the true and living God. This shock of the Israelites of Elijah’s time aptly foreshadows the shock that modern evolutionists (and the nations deceived by them) will experience when the miracles of the two witnesses again proves that there really is a true and living God.

Elijah then had the crowd forcibly restrain the 450 prophets of Baal as he personally “slew them there.” Elijah very likely disemboweled, decapitated and dismembered the 450 false prophets with a sword in assembly-line fashion, immune to their screamed pleas for mercy. Readers who have seen certain movies will be able to visualize specific movie scenes to realize what Elijah did in killing 450 fellow human beings. Those who have seen the Lord of the Rings movies will recall the scenes of Aragorn slashing his way through throngs of orcs and uruks. Those who have seen the recent movie, 300 (about King Leonidas and his Spartans slaughtering thousands of Persians at Thermopylae) can visualize the kind of bloody slaughter Elijah did to the 450 prophets of Baal with his sword. The heroic movie figures of Aragorn and Leonidas did not slaughter people mindlessly for sport or thrills. They slaughtered evil ones in the name of righteousness and truth.

[Thinktank]

Somewhere in the Old Testament, Exodus 31:12-15
it says :
Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death.

I worked on Sunday, two times last year. I wonder if God was telling that
person to kill EVERYONE who works on Sunday, or just those people who
were doing it in those days, or just the people in that particular neighbourhood?
to me, it doesn't make sense.

Whenever the bible talks about killing people, I'm never sure who are the good guys
and who are the bad guys, because - most Christians consider themselves to be the
good guys, and people who go to other churches to be the bad guys.

I threw my tv out of the house back in 1990, and then the first Iraq war started.
I remember one of the girls in church came up to me with a gigantic smile, and said,
'I believe this war will cause the end of the world.' And then other people in the church
were saying it could possibly be the end of the world, so I told them the war was for oil.
I told them to relax themselves, and not try to hope for the end of the world - but I brought
my tv back, to watch the news of the war, and have had a tv ever since.

Later, in 2003, I was banned from a Christian forum (crosswalk.com) for thinking and saying
that we shouldn't go and kill Iraqis. That forum was incredibly, unbelievably, interested in promoting that war in Iraq.
Maybe they wanted to be like Elijah, and slaughter evil people. They flat out banned me, and I realized, two Christians
can have two completely different opinions, so it might be difficult to 'assemble' with other
Christians.

[tryscotty]

They flat out banned me, and I realized, two Christians
can have two completely different opinions, so it might be difficult to 'assemble' with other
Christians.

These ones as you described would not be true Christians or one's who actually listen to Jesus when he said very clear, "Love your enemies" He also restored the Roman soldiers ear after the Apostle Peter stuck him. Jesus than said "return the sword to its place, whoever uses the sword will die by the sword" If thats not clear enough , its a well documented fact that no first century Christian (those in the best position to know what Jesus taught) would go to war. They in fact were martyred for their refusal to fight. A group of like minded believers and followers of Jesus would certainly be able to get along, in fact Jesus again stated. " you will know my followers by the love they have among themselves"

[ILBT uh-huh]

I give up. You guys know way to much about religion and take it far too seriously.

[MechanicMan]

Somewhere in the Old Testament, Exodus 31:12-15
it says :
Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death.

I worked on Sunday, two times last year. I wonder if God was telling that
person to kill EVERYONE who works on Sunday, or just those people who
were doing it in those days, or just the people in that particular neighbourhood?
to me, it doesn't make sense.

Whenever the bible talks about killing people, I'm never sure who are the good guys
and who are the bad guys, because - most Christians consider themselves to be the
good guys, and people who go to other churches to be the bad guys.

I threw my tv out of the house back in 1990, and then the first Iraq war started.
I remember one of the girls in church came up to me with a gigantic smile, and said,
'I believe this war will cause the end of the world.' And then other people in the church
were saying it could possibly be the end of the world, so I told them the war was for oil.
I told them to relax themselves, and not try to hope for the end of the world - but I brought
my tv back, to watch the news of the war, and have had a tv ever since.

Later, in 2003, I was banned from a Christian forum (crosswalk.com) for thinking and saying
that we shouldn't go and kill Iraqis. That forum was incredibly, unbelievably, interested in promoting that war in Iraq.
Maybe they wanted to be like Elijah, and slaughter evil people. They flat out banned me, and I realized, two Christians
can have two completely different opinions, so it might be difficult to 'assemble' with other
Christians.

When Jesus Christ came and lived a perfectly sinless life and kept all ten commandments of God PERFECTLY, and then offered himself as a sacrifice to God for the sins of the people who could NEVER keep all ten commandments, he fulfilled all of Gods laws for those who believe on His name for salvation. The punishment is no longer in effect for working on the Sabbath but the moral part of keeping one day holy and unto the lord is still in effect.

As far as the professing "Christians" who look forward to the end of the world, this is an un-biblical and relatively new form of endtimes theology called dispensationalism. You must remember that in order for something to be truly Christian it would have to be found in the bible, and have been taught by Jesus and the Apostles. Dispensationalism does not meet this criteria.

Crosswalk.com holds to many beliefs that are not biblically sound, orthodox christian beliefs.

As for it being difficult for Christians to assembly with other Christians, it is not that difficult. Most Churches have statements of faith that outline their beliefs, so you have a measuring stick to judge them by. If those beliefs are contrary to or not found in the bible, they are NOT CHRISTIAN. Jesus warned of this very problem when he said in Matthew chapter 7 verse
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
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.

Simply put, Christians that dont act like Christians are not Christians. A Christian is someone who life is conformed to the Word of God, not someone who goes to "Church" once a week and puts money in the plate to ease the conscience so they can go live like Children of the Devil the rest of the week. The Bible calls these people HYPOCRITES