as per Dave Hunt, Teresa is quoted "All religions are equally good. If a man is a Moslem, I'll help him to be a better Moslem. If a man is a Jew, I'll help him to be a better Jew. If a man is a Catholic, I'll help him to be a better Catholic."
Dave concluded: "either Teresa didn't know the Gospel, or ,.......she didn't believe the Gospel."
Teresa would give the poor, sick man PHYSICAL comfort while he was dying,...........but, she would withhold from him the Gospel that would save him from his sins.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8...1655415,00.html
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."
The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone."
Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.
Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.
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Full Version: Mother Teresa, The "saint Of The Gutters,"
hmmm... it sounds to me like "salvation through works"... Unfortunately, ALL false religions are like this and they advocate "works", while Christianity (born again) advocate salvation through Grace.
I just left a born again friend, and a very confused Christian... (who by the way refuses to read the Bible, saying she doesn't understand it and that it is too long...
My friend said something that startled me: she said she believed the only passages WHERE JESUS IS TALKING as being the true words of God, and that she disregards the rest of the Bible...
adding that she heard it FROM AN ORDAINED MINISTER!!! 
I have heard the same thing coming from my (unsaved) husband... He says the same thing, that is the only verses to believe are the verses where Jesus is speaking...
Yet, this false doctrine is coming... from ordained ministers!!! I told my husband that having a degree in religion was not a guarantee of presenting an accurate doctrine; that people whithout any Bible background were at the present time preaching the Gospel all over the world... GOd uses the foolishness of this wolrd to confound the wise... These people without background have more knowledge and wisdom than many others who have been studying the Bible for years!
We are indeed in the "times of apostasy, where "even the elect will be deceived"...
how else can I comprehend all this [nonsense]???
A verse comes to my mind:
Not everyone who calls me "Lord, Lord" will inherit the kingdom of Heaven...
Mother Theresa was Catholic, and in doctrinal error just like John Paul II; the new pope is not any better...
Now, only God knows if she attained the truth. If she did, it sounds like she atteigned it in her last days... -_-Let's hope so...
I just left a born again friend, and a very confused Christian... (who by the way refuses to read the Bible, saying she doesn't understand it and that it is too long...
My friend said something that startled me: she said she believed the only passages WHERE JESUS IS TALKING as being the true words of God, and that she disregards the rest of the Bible...
adding that she heard it FROM AN ORDAINED MINISTER!!! I have heard the same thing coming from my (unsaved) husband... He says the same thing, that is the only verses to believe are the verses where Jesus is speaking...
Yet, this false doctrine is coming... from ordained ministers!!! I told my husband that having a degree in religion was not a guarantee of presenting an accurate doctrine; that people whithout any Bible background were at the present time preaching the Gospel all over the world... GOd uses the foolishness of this wolrd to confound the wise... These people without background have more knowledge and wisdom than many others who have been studying the Bible for years!
We are indeed in the "times of apostasy, where "even the elect will be deceived"...
how else can I comprehend all this [nonsense]???
A verse comes to my mind:
Not everyone who calls me "Lord, Lord" will inherit the kingdom of Heaven...
Mother Theresa was Catholic, and in doctrinal error just like John Paul II; the new pope is not any better...
Now, only God knows if she attained the truth. If she did, it sounds like she atteigned it in her last days... -_-Let's hope so...
QUOTE(Anne @ Aug 23 2007, 08:06 PM) [snapback]119940[/snapback]
she said she believed the only passages WHERE JESUS IS TALKING as being the true words of God, and that she disregards the rest of the Bible...
adding that she heard it FROM AN ORDAINED MINISTER!!! I have heard the same thing coming from my (unsaved) husband... He says the same thing, that is the only verses to believe are the verses where Jesus is speaking...
And Jesus said:
Matt 5 (KJV)
17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
I want to know Him! He is the Word - and I meet Him face to face there.
Jesus also said:
Luke24:
25 Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken:
26 Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?
27 And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
It makes me smile... the thought of being taught, by the Lord, the scriptures - on a 7 mile walk to Emmaus.
Jesus also said:
John 5
39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
Whew!
QUOTE(Anne @ Aug 24 2007, 03:06 AM) [snapback]119940[/snapback]
We are indeed in the "times of apostasy, where "even the elect will be deceived"...
Mat 24:24 For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
But its not possible .So take heart dear sister.
Apostasy is here, because it is prophesied.
It is here so that the Body of Christ can spew out the lukewarm.
25 years ago, the Lord told me He is placing a sword down into the church. I was too young in the Lord to have even known that, that Sword is the Word of God. I thought He was telling me that I am going to backslide .
Many years later, He reminded me of that word and showed me that it is happening NOW. It is the Word of God that is under fire. Under fire from Christians that are taking away the fact that it is the ONLY Word of God. Christians that have joined the voices of the world in bringing the Bible down. That is the Sword that is cutting now. Many are going to fall by the wayside, because they have fallen into disbelieve about what and Who the Word of God really is. Most are reading the Bible like its just another book.
Your friend has no revelation of this as well. IF she knew what I know: she would open it carefully and with respect, because it contains the very words of life eternal. It is very much alive
in the real sense of the word. 
love C
QUOTE(dennis mann @ Aug 23 2007, 12:20 PM) [snapback]119919[/snapback]
as per Dave Hunt, Teresa is quoted "All religions are equally good. If a man is a Moslem, I'll help him to be a better Moslem. If a man is a Jew, I'll help him to be a better Jew. If a man is a Catholic, I'll help him to be a better Catholic."
Dave concluded: "either Teresa didn't know the Gospel, or ,.......she didn't believe the Gospel."
Teresa would give the poor, sick man PHYSICAL comfort while he was dying,...........but, she would withhold from him the Gospel that would save him from his sins.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8...1655415,00.html
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."
The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone."
Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.
Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.
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Hmmmmm so Mother Teresa wasn't perfect, She had doubts like every other human. She struggled like all humans do. Unless of course Dennis you are perfect and never struggle?
[quote name='Dani' date='Aug 24 2007, 02:51 AM' post='119959']
[quote name='Anne' post='119940' date='Aug 23 2007, 08:06 PM']
Yep!
We are indeed in the "times of apostasy, where "even the elect will be deceived"...
Mat 24:24 For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
But its not possible .So take heart dear sister.
Apostasy is here, because it is prophesied.
It is here so that the Body of Christ can spew out the lukewarm.
25 years ago, the Lord told me He is placing a sword down into the church. I was too young in the Lord to have even known that, that Sword is the Word of God. I thought He was telling me that I am going to backslide .
Many years later, He reminded me of that word and showed me that it is happening NOW. It is the Word of God that is under fire. Under fire from Christians that are taking away the fact that it is the ONLY Word of God. Christians that have joined the voices of the world in bringing the Bible down. That is the Sword that is cutting now. Many are going to fall by the wayside, because they have fallen into disbelieve about what and Who the Word of God really is. Most are reading the Bible like its just another book.
Your friend has no revelation of this as well. IF she knew what I know: she would open it carefully and with respect, because it contains the very words of life eternal. It is very much alive in the real sense of the word.
love C
Amen!
A sign of the times! 
[quote name='Anne' post='119940' date='Aug 23 2007, 08:06 PM']
Yep!
QUOTE(C @ Aug 24 2007, 03:03 PM) [snapback]120020[/snapback]
QUOTE(Anne @ Aug 24 2007, 03:06 AM) [snapback]119940[/snapback]
We are indeed in the "times of apostasy, where "even the elect will be deceived"...
Mat 24:24 For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
But its not possible .So take heart dear sister.
Apostasy is here, because it is prophesied.
It is here so that the Body of Christ can spew out the lukewarm.
25 years ago, the Lord told me He is placing a sword down into the church. I was too young in the Lord to have even known that, that Sword is the Word of God. I thought He was telling me that I am going to backslide .
Many years later, He reminded me of that word and showed me that it is happening NOW. It is the Word of God that is under fire. Under fire from Christians that are taking away the fact that it is the ONLY Word of God. Christians that have joined the voices of the world in bringing the Bible down. That is the Sword that is cutting now. Many are going to fall by the wayside, because they have fallen into disbelieve about what and Who the Word of God really is. Most are reading the Bible like its just another book.
Your friend has no revelation of this as well. IF she knew what I know: she would open it carefully and with respect, because it contains the very words of life eternal. It is very much alive
in the real sense of the word. love C
Amen!
A sign of the times!
Kansas,
Teresa did not preach the Gospel.
She even failed to preach the RCC religion.
I point all people to the Gospel.
The Way of Jesus is Right.
Where i fail to be perfect in faith, love, understanding, humility, forgiveness, wisdom,..........my "way" is wrong.............and, hopefully, God will forgive my sins.
i am counted as righteous (even though i'm not perfectly righteous), because i believe God.............i have a Glorious Hope.
The NT says:........The Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.............i believe that i have that witness from the Spirit.
Abraham was counted as righteous, because he believed God.
Teresa did not preach the Gospel.
She even failed to preach the RCC religion.
I point all people to the Gospel.
The Way of Jesus is Right.
Where i fail to be perfect in faith, love, understanding, humility, forgiveness, wisdom,..........my "way" is wrong.............and, hopefully, God will forgive my sins.
i am counted as righteous (even though i'm not perfectly righteous), because i believe God.............i have a Glorious Hope.
The NT says:........The Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.............i believe that i have that witness from the Spirit.
Abraham was counted as righteous, because he believed God.
QUOTE(Kansasdad @ Aug 24 2007, 08:52 PM) [snapback]120027[/snapback]
QUOTE(dennis mann @ Aug 23 2007, 12:20 PM) [snapback]119919[/snapback]
as per Dave Hunt, Teresa is quoted "All religions are equally good. If a man is a Moslem, I'll help him to be a better Moslem. If a man is a Jew, I'll help him to be a better Jew. If a man is a Catholic, I'll help him to be a better Catholic."
Dave concluded: "either Teresa didn't know the Gospel, or ,.......she didn't believe the Gospel."
Teresa would give the poor, sick man PHYSICAL comfort while he was dying,...........but, she would withhold from him the Gospel that would save him from his sins.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8...1655415,00.html
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."
The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.
And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."
The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa's correspondence. Kolodiejchuk, a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that process.
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John's context, as darkness within faith. Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most spiritually heroic act.
Two very different Catholics predict that the book will be a landmark. The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at the conservative Ave Maria University in Florida, thinks Come Be My Light will eventually rank with St. Augustine's Confessions and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain as an autobiography of spiritual ascent. Martin of America, a much more liberal institution, calls the book "a new ministry for Mother Teresa, a written ministry of her interior life," and says, "It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone."
Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Says Christopher Hitchens, author of The Missionary Position, a scathing polemic on Teresa, and more recently of the atheist manifesto God Is Not Great: "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." Meanwhile, some familiar with the smiling mother's extraordinary drive may diagnose her condition less as a gift of God than as a subconscious attempt at the most radical kind of humility: she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes.
Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.
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Hmmmmm so Mother Teresa wasn't perfect, She had doubts like every other human. She struggled like all humans do. Unless of course Dennis you are perfect and never struggle?
Hmm, nice that they waited until after her death to bring up these lies. JUDGE NOT lest ye be JUDGED.
So let me ask you Dennis, You are counted righteous but she is NOT? so doesn't that make you her judge?'
I know that she had conflictions with the Catholic church....they wanted her somewhere else, but she wanted to stay with the afflicted and help them with God's help. Even if what some of what they say is true, which ONE of them or you and I can CAST THE FIRST STONE?
so on a scale from 1 to 10 where do you place Mother Terresa, and yourself? simple question what is your number?Jesus said NONE are good no none...so get off your pedestal and Praise Jesus.
GOD IS FULL OF GRACE, and he knows our hearts.
This article has indepth info of Teresa :-http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/mothther.htm
Acts 15;1-
And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the mannor of Moses, ye cannot be saved.
2. When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question.
3. And being brought on their way by the church, they passed through Phenice and Samaria, declaring the conversion of the Gentiles; and they caused great joy unto all the brethren.
4. And when they were come to Jerusalem, they were RECEIVED of the church, and of the apostles and elders, and they declared all things that God had done with them.
5. But there ROSE UP A CERTAIN OF THE SECT of PHARISEES which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses.
6. And the apostles and elders came together for to consider the matter.
7. And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said unto them Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by mouth should hear the word of the gospel, and beleive.
8. And God which KNOWETH THE HEARTS, bare them witness giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us;
9. And put no DIFFERENCE between US AND THEM, purifying their hearts by faith.
10. Now therefore why TEMPT YE GOD, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?
11. But we beleive that through the GRACE OF THE LORD JESUS CHRIST WE SHALL BE SAVED, EVEN AS THEY.
and then
16. After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down, and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up.
17. That the residue of men might seek after the LORD, and ALL the GENTILES, upon whom my name is called, saith the LORD, who doeth all these things.
18. KNOWN UNTO GOD are all his works from the beginning of the world.
19. Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God;
20. But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things STRANGLED AND BLOOD.
Teresa pointed people towards Allah, Mohammed, the (false) Jesus of the Koran, the OT Jewish religion, the RCC religion, the Hindu (fake) gods, any religion that people happened to be.
read my first post.
i said:
as per Dave Hunt,.......
If a person was Catholic, she would help him to be a better Catholic.
If a person was a Jew, she would help him to be a better Jew.
If a person was a Muslim, she would help him to be a better Muslim.
i'm not very good, but i think that i'm a little better than Teresa,...........she pointed people towards false gods.
Either she didn't know the Gospel, or she didn't believe the Gospel.
read my first post.
i said:
as per Dave Hunt,.......
If a person was Catholic, she would help him to be a better Catholic.
If a person was a Jew, she would help him to be a better Jew.
If a person was a Muslim, she would help him to be a better Muslim.
i'm not very good, but i think that i'm a little better than Teresa,...........she pointed people towards false gods.
Either she didn't know the Gospel, or she didn't believe the Gospel.
QUOTE(dennis mann @ Aug 25 2007, 03:56 PM) [snapback]120072[/snapback]
Teresa pointed people towards Allah, Mohammed, the (false) Jesus of the Koran, the OT Jewish religion, the RCC religion, the Hindu (fake) gods, any religion that people happened to be.
read my first post.
i said:
as per Dave Hunt,.......
If a person was Catholic, she would help him to be a better Catholic.
If a person was a Jew, she would help him to be a better Jew.
If a person was a Muslim, she would help him to be a better Muslim.
i'm not very good, but i think that i'm a little better than Teresa,...........she pointed people towards false gods.
Either she didn't know the Gospel, or she didn't believe the Gospel.
I have to agree. I can't fault her for doubting her faith, I think perhaps many of us do at times, but to direct people to false gods is another matter entirely.
QUOTE
JUDGE NOT lest ye be JUDGED.
Why do so many people, let alone Christians who should know better, take this verse so out of context? (Rhetorical question.) It's the first verse in a series of instructions for judging righteously. It's kind of like reading, "Do not remove stereo from car.", and stopping there! Then, ignoring the subsequent instructions for removing the battery cables so the new stereo won't be fried when installed, therefore never installing the new one. Maybe it would be more clear if it read, Judge not lest ye be judged, until verses 2-5 are read, understood, and followed.
The subsequent instructions for judging righteously are found in Matthew 7:2-5.
In Christ, Angela
Angel of Praise.
When I read the article...the first thing I noticed is that it is NOW being released after she has died.
HOW horrible, when she isn't here to defend herself.!!!
And a verse from the Bible comes to mind...and this is...Let your Yes be Yes and your No be No..
I don't beleive every fly-by-night article and the only gain of this is for someone to make a buck.
And the second question I ask myself is this...Is this article 100% TRUTH? Could it be sensationalized to make big bucks on a new book that eager hungry self-righteous people will run to the store to get DIRT on someone?
And the third most important question I ask myself...Did Jesus go around and pull up dirt about people?
And the most Obvious thing of all is that her records where PROMISED to be kept PRIVATE....so they LIED and therefore they have no FOUNDATION TO STAND ON BUT LIES.
God's blessings to all...
This WORLD will show you some Truth and the ONLY truth that is TRUTH is JESUS, and I have a sneaky suspision that this article was only brought up to cause DISCORD between us....and also the Catholic Church....do they have the right to proclaim someone to be a Saint?...My beleifs are no.... it is not by MIGHT, not by POWER but by the SPIRIT sayeth the LORD.
you want to catch fish? You don't skin them before you catch them. LOVE the LORD thy GOD with all thy heart and with all thy spirit and with all thy mind...and LOVE THY NEIGHBOR as you LOVE THYSELF.
NO more NO less...also we are called to LOVE our enemies...I love you Dennis in Christian love, I know we all have judged wrongly in our lives and I pray, and will examine myself as we all should come together in Christian love.
When I read the article...the first thing I noticed is that it is NOW being released after she has died.
HOW horrible, when she isn't here to defend herself.!!!
And a verse from the Bible comes to mind...and this is...Let your Yes be Yes and your No be No..
I don't beleive every fly-by-night article and the only gain of this is for someone to make a buck.
And the second question I ask myself is this...Is this article 100% TRUTH? Could it be sensationalized to make big bucks on a new book that eager hungry self-righteous people will run to the store to get DIRT on someone?
And the third most important question I ask myself...Did Jesus go around and pull up dirt about people?
And the most Obvious thing of all is that her records where PROMISED to be kept PRIVATE....so they LIED and therefore they have no FOUNDATION TO STAND ON BUT LIES.
God's blessings to all...
This WORLD will show you some Truth and the ONLY truth that is TRUTH is JESUS, and I have a sneaky suspision that this article was only brought up to cause DISCORD between us....and also the Catholic Church....do they have the right to proclaim someone to be a Saint?...My beleifs are no.... it is not by MIGHT, not by POWER but by the SPIRIT sayeth the LORD.
you want to catch fish? You don't skin them before you catch them. LOVE the LORD thy GOD with all thy heart and with all thy spirit and with all thy mind...and LOVE THY NEIGHBOR as you LOVE THYSELF.
NO more NO less...also we are called to LOVE our enemies...I love you Dennis in Christian love, I know we all have judged wrongly in our lives and I pray, and will examine myself as we all should come together in Christian love.
What's funny is just today, I read again the text:
"Worship no god but me. Do not make for yourselves images of anything in heaven or on earth or in the water under the earth. Do not bow down to any idol or worship it, for I am the Lord your God and I tolerate no rivals.'" Deut: 5 7-8 (part of 9).
Not only did He give us the direct command to not worship any other god, but He also gave us a way to identify false god's too. If you pay attention, all false gods use imagery and symbolism and many religions directly practice idol worship.
How could she miss that? It's commandment numero uno!
"Worship no god but me. Do not make for yourselves images of anything in heaven or on earth or in the water under the earth. Do not bow down to any idol or worship it, for I am the Lord your God and I tolerate no rivals.'" Deut: 5 7-8 (part of 9).
Not only did He give us the direct command to not worship any other god, but He also gave us a way to identify false god's too. If you pay attention, all false gods use imagery and symbolism and many religions directly practice idol worship.
How could she miss that? It's commandment numero uno!
I have never been too phyiscally hungry in my lifetime, thankyou Lord, but I have been physically hurt before. I don't recall having cared that the people that helped me up from the ground when I couldn't move were anything.........but were humbled that they were Loving. Thank you Lord for providing those people. I saw You in them.
Much of Paul's writings was to correct error.
Galatians was written to correct the error of the Judaizers............they taught that the Christians MUST obey the Mosaic law to be saved.
Paul said that these Judaizers had lost their salvation, by falling from Grace (NT religion) to the LETTER WHICH KILLS. (LEGALISM and THE OT LAW OF MOSES).
Paul said
"i wish that they would not stop at ONLY circumcision of the foreskin,.......... let them totally castrate themselves".
(my paraphrase)
My point is:
there's a time for severe rebuke,.............it may not be good TO US, but it's good FOR US.
the BIBLE way is:
if a person PUBLICLY teaches false religion and false salvation,.........then the Church must PUBLICLY correct the error, so that the PUBLIC can benefit from the correction, ..........and the PUBLIC needs to know the True Way of Salvation from our sins.
Galatians was written to correct the error of the Judaizers............they taught that the Christians MUST obey the Mosaic law to be saved.
Paul said that these Judaizers had lost their salvation, by falling from Grace (NT religion) to the LETTER WHICH KILLS. (LEGALISM and THE OT LAW OF MOSES).
Paul said
"i wish that they would not stop at ONLY circumcision of the foreskin,.......... let them totally castrate themselves".
(my paraphrase)
My point is:
there's a time for severe rebuke,.............it may not be good TO US, but it's good FOR US.
the BIBLE way is:
if a person PUBLICLY teaches false religion and false salvation,.........then the Church must PUBLICLY correct the error, so that the PUBLIC can benefit from the correction, ..........and the PUBLIC needs to know the True Way of Salvation from our sins.
I see nothing but pride from posters trying to exult themselves above some one else. "I might be bad but at least I am not as bad as her" . How pathetic. Mother Teresa put her faith into action, far more than most of us will ever do. Yes, they will call good evil and evil good.
So now we are able to judge whether some one is considered righteous to God. When did God give that authority over to the likes of anyone on this board?
So now we are able to judge whether some one is considered righteous to God. When did God give that authority over to the likes of anyone on this board?
I truly believe KD that she is God's Holy embrace.
on a scale from 1 to 10 I'd give myself a 0 compared to her0 to 0 is me As God is our Creator HE IS ALL...but his LOVE FOR US MAKES US EVERYTHING... But God said that he is no respecter of persons...and that we are all saved by his HOLY GRACE and Mercy and Love...Yes he is Gracous and the author and finisher of our Faith...I'd imagine that a conversation just as like here took place when Paul came amongst the Jews to preach, after he had turned Jews in to be murdered...but God is mighty and he can take the least of us and use us for his GLORY and his blessings to us, and we will all be persecuted for HIS NAME's SAKE.
What does it mean for Jesus' name sake...Are we an example of what Christ in us wants us to be?
by his GRACE we are all saved, no nothing we have done of ourselves so that we could boast.
I don't recall Mother Teressa every boasting...she loved the LORD and obeyed, she gave those dying hope in an Eternal Home with Christ Jesus our LORD...and I truly beleive that she prayed with each and every one of them.
Those who exhalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exhalted.
We have all fallen short of the Glory of God...Jesus is the potter we are the clay. He is the good sheperd, he loves us dearly.
on a scale from 1 to 10 I'd give myself a 0 compared to her
0 to 0 is me As God is our Creator HE IS ALL...but his LOVE FOR US MAKES US EVERYTHING... But God said that he is no respecter of persons...and that we are all saved by his HOLY GRACE and Mercy and Love...Yes he is Gracous and the author and finisher of our Faith...I'd imagine that a conversation just as like here took place when Paul came amongst the Jews to preach, after he had turned Jews in to be murdered...but God is mighty and he can take the least of us and use us for his GLORY and his blessings to us, and we will all be persecuted for HIS NAME's SAKE.What does it mean for Jesus' name sake...Are we an example of what Christ in us wants us to be?
by his GRACE we are all saved, no nothing we have done of ourselves so that we could boast.
I don't recall Mother Teressa every boasting...she loved the LORD and obeyed, she gave those dying hope in an Eternal Home with Christ Jesus our LORD...and I truly beleive that she prayed with each and every one of them.
Those who exhalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exhalted.
We have all fallen short of the Glory of God...Jesus is the potter we are the clay. He is the good sheperd, he loves us dearly.
There is no scale from 0 to anywhere in Christianity
We are suppose to be "dead" and Christ is suppose to be the One getting all the glory.
If we allow ourselves to compare ourselves, we actually think that we can in someway move "up the scale" which is not what we are suppose to do (so no man can glory)
"Up the scale" or "down the scale" means there are some kind of "work" involved.
Our only "work" is to believe God and His promises and act accordingly. He does the rest through us.
Php 2:13 for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.
We are not even doing the "willing" God wills, His will in us, for His good pleasure.
None will have any glory. It belongs to God. Sister Theresa did many good things, but she can have no glory. If there is any glory to be given, it belongs to God.
Eph 2:9 not of works, that no man should glory.
Its between Theresa and God. If she did what she did because she thought it will move her "up the scale" she will have her house burnt down.(Only God and Theresa knows that answer) If she truly believed that she could just feed the poor and not bring the gospel to the Muslims, or Hindus, but just allow them to be better Muslims or Hindus, then she did not really know the gospel and all the feeding of the poor was just that: feeding the poor. It would be the same in God's eyes as how He views the actions of the Red Cross.To God she would be the person in the white dress feeding the poor and the Red Cross were those with the red cross, feeding the poor..same value.
We are suppose to be "dead" and Christ is suppose to be the One getting all the glory.
If we allow ourselves to compare ourselves, we actually think that we can in someway move "up the scale" which is not what we are suppose to do (so no man can glory)
"Up the scale" or "down the scale" means there are some kind of "work" involved.
Our only "work" is to believe God and His promises and act accordingly. He does the rest through us.
Php 2:13 for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.
We are not even doing the "willing" God wills, His will in us, for His good pleasure.
None will have any glory. It belongs to God. Sister Theresa did many good things, but she can have no glory. If there is any glory to be given, it belongs to God.
Eph 2:9 not of works, that no man should glory.
Its between Theresa and God. If she did what she did because she thought it will move her "up the scale" she will have her house burnt down.(Only God and Theresa knows that answer) If she truly believed that she could just feed the poor and not bring the gospel to the Muslims, or Hindus, but just allow them to be better Muslims or Hindus, then she did not really know the gospel and all the feeding of the poor was just that: feeding the poor. It would be the same in God's eyes as how He views the actions of the Red Cross.To God she would be the person in the white dress feeding the poor and the Red Cross were those with the red cross, feeding the poor..same value.
CWhat about the crown he gives us?
I know in Revelations it says that the 24 elders cast their crowns down at the foot of the Lamb....Singing Holy Holy Holy, IS THE LAMB OF GOD.
And I sure hope she is in Heaven, cause if not I'm in a whole heap of TROUBLE
God's blessings to you all.
I think you must first explain why you would be in trouble is she is not in heaven.
Php 4:1 Wherefore, my brethren beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my beloved.
Here his brethren is his crown.
1Th 2:19 For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of glorying? Are not even ye, before our Lord Jesus at his coming?
1Th 2:20 For ye are our glory and our joy.
Again these are their crown, who came to Jesus through their ministry.
Now here is another crown:
2Ti 4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith:
2Ti 4:8 henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day; and not to me only, but also to all them that have loved his appearing
Righteous crowns are received by those who have finished the course of FAITH. Faith is counted as righteousness. If we believe the promises, we get to be righteous ( if we do not fall back from this faith)
Faith in WHAT He says is real faith (not only believing IN God, but BELIEVING Him)
(Look up all the promises and see if you believe them to be true and you will know if you do , because they will make you ACT in a certain way, IF you believe them )
Man also wears a crown of: Heb 2:7 Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; Thou crownedst him with glory and honor, And didst set him over the works of thy hands: Heb 2:9 But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God he should taste of death for every man.
So if you want this crown, you have to follow Jesus and take up your cross and die to self.
That would be believing God, when He says: YOU ARE crucified with Christ......now you have to believe that (faith in the Word ) and walk (faith without works is dead....so walk , which will be the work, as if you believe the truth ) as if you believe it: That will be accounted as righteousness to you.
Here is another crown:Jas 1:12 Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he hath been approved, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord promised to them that love him.
if we love Him, we obey Him: Jesus spoke to John about this again in Revelation:Rev 2:7 ........To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life,.........
See, we get to overcome when we believe the promises are true: You were cleansed, your sins are forgiven, your sins have been TAKEN AWAY (Behold the Lamb of God Who TAKETH AWAY the sins of the world) you have been perfected, God HAS given you all that pertains to life and godliness, It is Him, Who is the author and FINISHER of your faith. You no longer live, but Christ lives IN YOU. etc etc
Who do you see in the mirror? Yourself or Christ?
Rev 3:11 I come quickly: hold fast that which thou hast, that no one take thy crown.
Unlike the teachings of men, you and I can actually loose our crowns , even the crown of life (as Jesus is pointing out)
SO, bottom line: Have faith in the Word of God . Believe that it is true as it is. Then WALK as if you believe it: And you will overcome , because God will honor your faith and MAKE you to overcome, because HE IS ABLE.
love C
Php 4:1 Wherefore, my brethren beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my beloved.
Here his brethren is his crown.
1Th 2:19 For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of glorying? Are not even ye, before our Lord Jesus at his coming?
1Th 2:20 For ye are our glory and our joy.
Again these are their crown, who came to Jesus through their ministry.
Now here is another crown:
2Ti 4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith:
2Ti 4:8 henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day; and not to me only, but also to all them that have loved his appearing
Righteous crowns are received by those who have finished the course of FAITH. Faith is counted as righteousness. If we believe the promises, we get to be righteous ( if we do not fall back from this faith)
Faith in WHAT He says is real faith (not only believing IN God, but BELIEVING Him)
(Look up all the promises and see if you believe them to be true and you will know if you do , because they will make you ACT in a certain way, IF you believe them
)Man also wears a crown of: Heb 2:7 Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; Thou crownedst him with glory and honor, And didst set him over the works of thy hands: Heb 2:9 But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God he should taste of death for every man.
So if you want this crown, you have to follow Jesus and take up your cross and die to self.
That would be believing God, when He says: YOU ARE crucified with Christ......now you have to believe that (faith in the Word ) and walk (faith without works is dead....so walk , which will be the work, as if you believe the truth ) as if you believe it: That will be accounted as righteousness to you.
Here is another crown:Jas 1:12 Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he hath been approved, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord promised to them that love him.
if we love Him, we obey Him: Jesus spoke to John about this again in Revelation:Rev 2:7 ........To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life,.........
See, we get to overcome when we believe the promises are true: You were cleansed, your sins are forgiven, your sins have been TAKEN AWAY (Behold the Lamb of God Who TAKETH AWAY the sins of the world) you have been perfected, God HAS given you all that pertains to life and godliness, It is Him, Who is the author and FINISHER of your faith. You no longer live, but Christ lives IN YOU. etc etc
Who do you see in the mirror? Yourself or Christ?
Rev 3:11 I come quickly: hold fast that which thou hast, that no one take thy crown.
Unlike the teachings of men, you and I can actually loose our crowns , even the crown of life (as Jesus is pointing out)
SO, bottom line: Have faith in the Word of God . Believe that it is true as it is. Then WALK as if you believe it: And you will overcome , because God will honor your faith and MAKE you to overcome, because HE IS ABLE.
love C
Joy is the mood of the believer.
The fruit of the Spirit is Love, Joy, Peace, helpfulness, goodness, faithfulness, forgiveness, etc
Gal 5;22
an apple tree produces apples.
A CHRISTian produces the fruit of the HOLY Spirit.
by super-natural DIVINE power.
Teresa said "the silence and emptiness is so great".
Teresa looked at her life, and THERE WAS NOTHING IN IT to rejoice about.
when a CHRISTian looks at his own life, he sees the Love and Righteousness that the HOLY SPIRIT produces.........and a life filled with super-natural Joy.
this is the GREAT MIRACLE of being born-again,............we see the changed life of the believer.
in the PHYSICAL OT, the believer receives great PHYSICAL BLESSINGS,........crops, livestock, victories, children,
the FEAR OF GOD is on the surrounding nations.
in the SPIRITUAL NT, the believer receives GREAT SPIRITUAL BLESSINGS-----super-natural love, joy, peace of mind and heart, a clean conscience, boldness to approach the Throne of Grace,
Teresa didn't have the HOLY SPIRIT.
She pointed people to false gods.
If she ever had the HOLY SPIRIT, the SPIRIT left her.
She would be persecuted by the public, if she preached Christ,.........so, she compromised with the world............she said "all religions are equally good".
She wanted the (fake) "love" from the world, rather than the True Love from Christ.
The fruit of the Spirit is Love, Joy, Peace, helpfulness, goodness, faithfulness, forgiveness, etc
Gal 5;22
an apple tree produces apples.
A CHRISTian produces the fruit of the HOLY Spirit.
by super-natural DIVINE power.
Teresa said "the silence and emptiness is so great".
Teresa looked at her life, and THERE WAS NOTHING IN IT to rejoice about.
when a CHRISTian looks at his own life, he sees the Love and Righteousness that the HOLY SPIRIT produces.........and a life filled with super-natural Joy.
this is the GREAT MIRACLE of being born-again,............we see the changed life of the believer.
in the PHYSICAL OT, the believer receives great PHYSICAL BLESSINGS,........crops, livestock, victories, children,
the FEAR OF GOD is on the surrounding nations.
in the SPIRITUAL NT, the believer receives GREAT SPIRITUAL BLESSINGS-----super-natural love, joy, peace of mind and heart, a clean conscience, boldness to approach the Throne of Grace,
Teresa didn't have the HOLY SPIRIT.
She pointed people to false gods.
If she ever had the HOLY SPIRIT, the SPIRIT left her.
She would be persecuted by the public, if she preached Christ,.........so, she compromised with the world............she said "all religions are equally good".
She wanted the (fake) "love" from the world, rather than the True Love from Christ.
Thank you C, what a wonderful story our LORD tells us. His crown is LOVE too.
That was kind of a joke C. You see, the WORLD has made Mother Terresa an ICON, and IDOL...and then the WORLD has a tendency to compare themselves with her. I'm learning not to do that and we all fall short ...God tells us to look to HIM and HIM alone, and not to look for the honor of man, but to look to Christ, and that you will be persecuted for not looking to man and our Vain ambitions. I do beleive in God's promises, and he tells us I will NEVER Leave you NOR FORSAKE you. HE said on the CROSS, Father forgive them for they know not what they do. He also said, INTO YOUR HANDS LORD I commit my spirit. He also said, It is Finished. He also cried, My God, My God why hath thou forsaken me.
We are also reminded of a similar story, when Paul tells the people that if it where possible they would pluck out his eyes...for they are focusing on him as their ICON, IDOLIZING him instead of where the true Power of the Holy Spirit comes from and dwells amongst us, and in us,(looking outside of self and looking for other lovers instead of looking WITHIN where the SPIRIT of the LORD our GOD dwells and is our strength and our provision) for all those who call out upon the name of Jesus and surrender at his feet.
Dennis, please don't go there, you do not know for certain that what is being released is true. I mean they promised to NOT release this stuff and they did anyway...what does that tell you about THEIR character while they are attacking her Character?
And in the face of danger, maybe she did have to keep silent or face death, and JUST maybe this is why her JOY was so silent...and there are a lot of IF's and Maybe's in this situation. She saw death all around her, God knows how she handled herself for his Glory, it is not for me to judge.
And just MAYBE
She was supressed from expressing her true Joy....and obeyed God by helping (obeying God)anyway in the face of adversity.
We where MADE to WORSHIP GOD, it is our ONE DESIRE to gaze upon the Beauty of our GOD.
Psalms 28. Unto thee will I cry, O LORD my rock; be not SILENT TO ME; lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down unto the pit.
Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy HOLY ORACLE.
3. Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts.
4. Give them according ot their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours; give them after the work of their hands; give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert.
5. Because they regard not the works of the LORD, no the operation of HIS HANDS, he shall destroy them, and not build them up.
6. Blessed be the LORD, because he hath heard the voice of my supplications.
7. The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped; therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth, and with my song will I praise him.
8. The LORD IS THEIR STRENGTH, and HE IS the SAVING STRENGTH OF HIS ANNOINTED.
9. SAVE THY PEOPLE, and BLESS THINE INHERITANCE; FEED THEM ALSO, and LIFT THEM UP FOREVER.
Amen
We are called to pray for our enemies as well.
Maybe just maybe when she said I will make them a better Hindu or Moslem or whatever....she was talking about how she would silently pray for them to come to Christ Jesus. I beleive God knows her heart and was with her every step...for even in the FACE OF FEAR of being killed she still obeyed God and helped the sick and the dying, and I am sure she gave God the Glory....why because I beleive she Loved the LORD JESUS and her felllow man.
Jesus our LORD was often referred to a man of many sorrows...HE KEPT SILENT when the accusers came against him(not defending himself but giving God the Glory.
He often spent I am sure hours of in the Mountain top, praying for us sinners...and for strength from our Heavenly Father....just like David in the Psalms.
And just like Mary being pregnant in the times she lived, I'm sure she had to hide herself for a while had she appeared openly and telling everyone she was going to have a baby and that the baby would be the SON of the LIVING GOD, she would have been stoned to death.
And if we read all thoughout Psalms you will hear the crys of David in the face of adversity...
Psalms 42. As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
2. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?
3. My tears have been my meat day and night, while they contiually say unto me, Where is thy God?
and listen to this verse 9...listen closely and you will hear the same crys of of LORD as he hung on the Cross at Calvary.
9. I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forsaken me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
And on the Cross our LORD said, Oh LORD thy GOD why hath thou forsaken me.
APATHY, as he looked down upon the crowds, knowing how much he loved each and every one of us, and how he longed for us to love one another as he loves us and loves his Father in Heaven.
GOD LOVES YOU
That was kind of a joke C.
You see, the WORLD has made Mother Terresa an ICON, and IDOL...and then the WORLD has a tendency to compare themselves with her. I'm learning not to do that and we all fall short ...God tells us to look to HIM and HIM alone, and not to look for the honor of man, but to look to Christ, and that you will be persecuted for not looking to man and our Vain ambitions. I do beleive in God's promises, and he tells us I will NEVER Leave you NOR FORSAKE you. HE said on the CROSS, Father forgive them for they know not what they do. He also said, INTO YOUR HANDS LORD I commit my spirit. He also said, It is Finished. He also cried, My God, My God why hath thou forsaken me.We are also reminded of a similar story, when Paul tells the people that if it where possible they would pluck out his eyes...for they are focusing on him as their ICON, IDOLIZING him instead of where the true Power of the Holy Spirit comes from and dwells amongst us, and in us,(looking outside of self and looking for other lovers instead of looking WITHIN where the SPIRIT of the LORD our GOD dwells and is our strength and our provision) for all those who call out upon the name of Jesus and surrender at his feet.
Dennis, please don't go there, you do not know for certain that what is being released is true. I mean they promised to NOT release this stuff and they did anyway...what does that tell you about THEIR character while they are attacking her Character?
And in the face of danger, maybe she did have to keep silent or face death, and JUST maybe this is why her JOY was so silent...and there are a lot of IF's and Maybe's in this situation. She saw death all around her, God knows how she handled herself for his Glory, it is not for me to judge.
And just MAYBE
She was supressed from expressing her true Joy....and obeyed God by helping (obeying God)anyway in the face of adversity.
We where MADE to WORSHIP GOD, it is our ONE DESIRE to gaze upon the Beauty of our GOD.
Psalms 28. Unto thee will I cry, O LORD my rock; be not SILENT TO ME; lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down unto the pit.
Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy HOLY ORACLE.
3. Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts.
4. Give them according ot their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours; give them after the work of their hands; give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert.
5. Because they regard not the works of the LORD, no the operation of HIS HANDS, he shall destroy them, and not build them up.
6. Blessed be the LORD, because he hath heard the voice of my supplications.
7. The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped; therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth, and with my song will I praise him.
8. The LORD IS THEIR STRENGTH, and HE IS the SAVING STRENGTH OF HIS ANNOINTED.
9. SAVE THY PEOPLE, and BLESS THINE INHERITANCE; FEED THEM ALSO, and LIFT THEM UP FOREVER.
Amen
We are called to pray for our enemies as well.
Maybe just maybe when she said I will make them a better Hindu or Moslem or whatever....she was talking about how she would silently pray for them to come to Christ Jesus. I beleive God knows her heart and was with her every step...for even in the FACE OF FEAR of being killed she still obeyed God and helped the sick and the dying, and I am sure she gave God the Glory....why because I beleive she Loved the LORD JESUS and her felllow man.
Jesus our LORD was often referred to a man of many sorrows...HE KEPT SILENT when the accusers came against him(not defending himself but giving God the Glory.
He often spent I am sure hours of in the Mountain top, praying for us sinners...and for strength from our Heavenly Father....just like David in the Psalms.
And just like Mary being pregnant in the times she lived, I'm sure she had to hide herself for a while had she appeared openly and telling everyone she was going to have a baby and that the baby would be the SON of the LIVING GOD, she would have been stoned to death.
And if we read all thoughout Psalms you will hear the crys of David in the face of adversity...
Psalms 42. As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
2. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?
3. My tears have been my meat day and night, while they contiually say unto me, Where is thy God?
and listen to this verse 9...listen closely and you will hear the same crys of of LORD as he hung on the Cross at Calvary.
9. I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forsaken me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
And on the Cross our LORD said, Oh LORD thy GOD why hath thou forsaken me.
APATHY, as he looked down upon the crowds, knowing how much he loved each and every one of us, and how he longed for us to love one another as he loves us and loves his Father in Heaven.
GOD LOVES YOU
if we are faced with danger........(murderers, persecutors, stoners, muslims, pharisees, etc),..............what are we supposed to do?
the early Church SCATTERED from jerusalem, .............some went to Egypt, Antioch, Greece, rome, ............to escape the persecutions............
Stephen was stoned first, then, Peter was locked up..............
then, the Church fled jerusalem, except the apostles stayed in jerusalem.
and God used the scattering of the Church to spread the Gospel............all over the world..............God did not rebuke the Church because she fled the persecutions.
the early Church SCATTERED from jerusalem, .............some went to Egypt, Antioch, Greece, rome, ............to escape the persecutions............
Stephen was stoned first, then, Peter was locked up..............
then, the Church fled jerusalem, except the apostles stayed in jerusalem.
and God used the scattering of the Church to spread the Gospel............all over the world..............God did not rebuke the Church because she fled the persecutions.
QUOTE(wernotalone @ Aug 28 2007, 07:45 AM) [snapback]120282[/snapback]
Thank you C, what a wonderful story our LORD tells us. His crown is LOVE too.
That was kind of a joke C.
You see, the WORLD has made Mother Terresa an ICON, and IDOL...and then the WORLD has a tendency to compare themselves with her. I'm learning not to do that and we all fall short ...God tells us to look to HIM and HIM alone, and not to look for the honor of man, but to look to Christ, and that you will be persecuted for not looking to man and our Vain ambitions. I do beleive in God's promises, and he tells us I will NEVER Leave you NOR FORSAKE you. HE said on the CROSS, Father forgive them for they know not what they do. He also said, INTO YOUR HANDS LORD I commit my spirit. He also said, It is Finished. He also cried, My God, My God why hath thou forsaken me.We are also reminded of a similar story, when Paul tells the people that if it where possible they would pluck out his eyes...for they are focusing on him as their ICON, IDOLIZING him instead of where the true Power of the Holy Spirit comes from and dwells amongst us, and in us,(looking outside of self and looking for other lovers instead of looking WITHIN where the SPIRIT of the LORD our GOD dwells and is our strength and our provision) for all those who call out upon the name of Jesus and surrender at his feet.
Dennis, please don't go there, you do not know for certain that what is being released is true. I mean they promised to NOT release this stuff and they did anyway...what does that tell you about THEIR character while they are attacking her Character?
And in the face of danger, maybe she did have to keep silent or face death, and JUST maybe this is why her JOY was so silent...and there are a lot of IF's and Maybe's in this situation. She saw death all around her, God knows how she handled herself for his Glory, it is not for me to judge.
And just MAYBE
She was supressed from expressing her true Joy....and obeyed God by helping (obeying God)anyway in the face of adversity.
We where MADE to WORSHIP GOD, it is our ONE DESIRE to gaze upon the Beauty of our GOD.
Psalms 28. Unto thee will I cry, O LORD my rock; be not SILENT TO ME; lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down unto the pit.
Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy HOLY ORACLE.
3. Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts.
4. Give them according ot their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours; give them after the work of their hands; give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert.
5. Because they regard not the works of the LORD, no the operation of HIS HANDS, he shall destroy them, and not build them up.
6. Blessed be the LORD, because he hath heard the voice of my supplications.
7. The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped; therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth, and with my song will I praise him.
8. The LORD IS THEIR STRENGTH, and HE IS the SAVING STRENGTH OF HIS ANNOINTED.
9. SAVE THY PEOPLE, and BLESS THINE INHERITANCE; FEED THEM ALSO, and LIFT THEM UP FOREVER.
Amen
We are called to pray for our enemies as well.
Maybe just maybe when she said I will make them a better Hindu or Moslem or whatever....she was talking about how she would silently pray for them to come to Christ Jesus. I beleive God knows her heart and was with her every step...for even in the FACE OF FEAR of being killed she still obeyed God and helped the sick and the dying, and I am sure she gave God the Glory....why because I beleive she Loved the LORD JESUS and her felllow man.
Jesus our LORD was often referred to a man of many sorrows...HE KEPT SILENT when the accusers came against him(not defending himself but giving God the Glory.
He often spent I am sure hours of in the Mountain top, praying for us sinners...and for strength from our Heavenly Father....just like David in the Psalms.
And just like Mary being pregnant in the times she lived, I'm sure she had to hide herself for a while had she appeared openly and telling everyone she was going to have a baby and that the baby would be the SON of the LIVING GOD, she would have been stoned to death.
And if we read all thoughout Psalms you will hear the crys of David in the face of adversity...
Psalms 42. As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
2. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?
3. My tears have been my meat day and night, while they contiually say unto me, Where is thy God?
and listen to this verse 9...listen closely and you will hear the same crys of of LORD as he hung on the Cross at Calvary.
9. I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forsaken me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
And on the Cross our LORD said, Oh LORD thy GOD why hath thou forsaken me.
APATHY, as he looked down upon the crowds, knowing how much he loved each and every one of us, and how he longed for us to love one another as he loves us and loves his Father in Heaven.
GOD LOVES YOU
Great Post
QUOTE(dennis mann @ Aug 28 2007, 01:32 PM) [snapback]120287[/snapback]
if we are faced with danger........(murderers, persecutors, stoners, muslims, pharisees, etc),..............what are we supposed to do?
the early Church SCATTERED from jerusalem, .............some went to Egypt, Antioch, Greece, rome, ............to escape the persecutions............
Stephen was stoned first, then, Peter was locked up..............
then, the Church fled jerusalem, except the apostles stayed in jerusalem.
and God used the scattering of the Church to spread the Gospel............all over the world..............God did not rebuke the Church because she fled the persecutions.
Yes Dennis I know...and how are we to know if she wispered the WORD of GOD to unbeleivers...and like the fish multiplied...it just takes one SHOUTING from the Rooftops that JESUS IS LORD...I LOVE YOU...
YOU TOO KD.
I'd be careful about quoting something that somebody said without any real documented evidences.
Your right Miki, it seems they broke some kind of Privacy Act.
Dennis,
That double edge sword is sharp on both sides. Thank goodness that He died for me, and now I have the luxury of learning by His Grace.
And I don't think all Christians enjoy the (NT) fruit as much as you make it out. Most of the time I am not encouraged by viewing all the "lost" people to the devil. Additionally, I am still in this (OT) physical body training to become like Him. My fruit is the few times I am able to rely on Him to get me past willful sin.
With regard to works, I have been sincerely called an "angel" only twice in my life, but both times have come when doing works that have come from my heart through Him. My grandmother, whom I feel was mostly responsibe for showing me Christ, never once mentioned the Scripture to me, and she was Church of Christ! The mention of the Holy Spirit was void in her generation. All bible.
How also do you know that God was just did not bring MT any words for a time. How awful would the silence be if you felt He wasn't speaking. Be glad glad that you feel He is speaking to you.
I don't know if you are like me, but I kind of hear it in your post, frustrated with everything not being as it should. Hang in there, we will get there, and hopefully show someone the way while we run.
That double edge sword is sharp on both sides. Thank goodness that He died for me, and now I have the luxury of learning by His Grace.
And I don't think all Christians enjoy the (NT) fruit as much as you make it out. Most of the time I am not encouraged by viewing all the "lost" people to the devil. Additionally, I am still in this (OT) physical body training to become like Him. My fruit is the few times I am able to rely on Him to get me past willful sin.
With regard to works, I have been sincerely called an "angel" only twice in my life, but both times have come when doing works that have come from my heart through Him. My grandmother, whom I feel was mostly responsibe for showing me Christ, never once mentioned the Scripture to me, and she was Church of Christ! The mention of the Holy Spirit was void in her generation. All bible.
How also do you know that God was just did not bring MT any words for a time. How awful would the silence be if you felt He wasn't speaking. Be glad glad that you feel He is speaking to you.
I don't know if you are like me, but I kind of hear it in your post, frustrated with everything not being as it should. Hang in there, we will get there, and hopefully show someone the way while we run.
I don't know about other believers but I really struggle being a good witness and Iknow it is our responsibility. My son was too young to understand when Satan's greatest tool,
that being divorce entered our lives. Such a shame but we were not living Godly lives and
Satan gets the upper hand and before you know it all is lost. The divorce cost me just about
everything and depression took the rest. Now when I try to witness I feel like people are thinking,
man Im glad I'm not like you! The world is so into pocessions that if you don't have alot then
people don't want to hear what you have to say. I sure am glad God sees things differently.
When I had alot of worldly goods, I didn't know Jesus and He was not apart of my every day
life .
Now that I've been born again of the Spirit, I have nothing really other thanJesus to depend on. It is sure a humbling experience and believe me there is not alot of
compassion in todays world. Too bad I could not have realised that Jesus was my Lord and
Saviour before everything fell apart. Now I am an old man with no friends because I don't
pocess alot of material things. I would be too embarassed to say how much I have lost
in the material sense, makes it very hard to witness even to my son.
God Bless
Thunder
QUOTE(crystal sea @ Aug 28 2007, 11:11 PM) [snapback]120357[/snapback]
Dennis,
That double edge sword is sharp on both sides. Thank goodness that He died for me, and now I have the luxury of learning by His Grace.
And I don't think all Christians enjoy the (NT) fruit as much as you make it out. Most of the time I am not encouraged by viewing all the "lost" people to the devil. Additionally, I am still in this (OT) physical body training to become like Him. My fruit is the few times I am able to rely on Him to get me past willful sin.
With regard to works, I have been sincerely called an "angel" only twice in my life, but both times have come when doing works that have come from my heart through Him. My grandmother, whom I feel was mostly responsibe for showing me Christ, never once mentioned the Scripture to me, and she was Church of Christ! The mention of the Holy Spirit was void in her generation. All bible.
How also do you know that God was just did not bring MT any words for a time. How awful would the silence be if you felt He wasn't speaking. Be glad glad that you feel He is speaking to you.
I don't know if you are like me, but I kind of hear it in your post, frustrated with everything not being as it should. Hang in there, we will get there, and hopefully show someone the way while we run.
for many years, i stumbled and bumbled along, rejecting the Gospel, and sometimes , accepting it with lukewarmness.
i've been in (and out of) the Church , off and on, for 40 years.
i'm 51 yo..............i was baptized at 10.
in recent years, i stopped going to church, and i did some research at home............i read the Bible, the Bible Dictionary, Dave Hunt's books, the internet, i found Shekel's articles, i read on other christian discussion forums, etc.............
and i've made a lot of progress (i think) the last few years.
i have no outward PHYSICAL Signs, like tongues-talking, or SLAIN IN THE SPIRIT, or miracles...........but, i've learned that God is not in the PHYSICAL SIGNS...........
God is in the inner-life........intense love, joy, wisdom, forgiveness, longsuffering, etc
Gal 5;22
when people ask "WHY DOES GOD ALLOW THORNS, THISTLES, EARTHQUAKES, FLOODS?"...........i have a reasonable answer for them.
or "HOW DO YOU GET FAITH?"...........i have an answer for them.
or "ISN'T HELL TOO GREAT A PUNISHMENT FOR PEOPLE?"............i have an answer for them.
i've figured a lot of things out, in recent years.
i'm not a super-christian by no means.............but, if Teresa is pointing people to false gods, that's a horrific mistake, and it's typical of the RCC.
i've been in (and out of) the Church , off and on, for 40 years.
i'm 51 yo..............i was baptized at 10.
in recent years, i stopped going to church, and i did some research at home............i read the Bible, the Bible Dictionary, Dave Hunt's books, the internet, i found Shekel's articles, i read on other christian discussion forums, etc.............
and i've made a lot of progress (i think) the last few years.
i have no outward PHYSICAL Signs, like tongues-talking, or SLAIN IN THE SPIRIT, or miracles...........but, i've learned that God is not in the PHYSICAL SIGNS...........
God is in the inner-life........intense love, joy, wisdom, forgiveness, longsuffering, etc
Gal 5;22
when people ask "WHY DOES GOD ALLOW THORNS, THISTLES, EARTHQUAKES, FLOODS?"...........i have a reasonable answer for them.
or "HOW DO YOU GET FAITH?"...........i have an answer for them.
or "ISN'T HELL TOO GREAT A PUNISHMENT FOR PEOPLE?"............i have an answer for them.
i've figured a lot of things out, in recent years.
i'm not a super-christian by no means.............but, if Teresa is pointing people to false gods, that's a horrific mistake, and it's typical of the RCC.
Mother Teresa was a real person loved by God. Do not judge her. You have no right. Even the angels did not place any judgment on satan. If they would not talk ill of satan what makes you think you can talk ill of Mother Teresa, some one who live a life as a humble servant in the face of great evil. I see way too much pride being put on display.
QUOTE(taltimbr @ Aug 30 2007, 01:23 AM) [snapback]120404[/snapback]
I don't know about other believers but I really struggle being a good witness and Iknow it is our responsibility. My son was too young to understand when Satan's greatest tool,
that being divorce entered our lives. Such a shame but we were not living Godly lives and
Satan gets the upper hand and before you know it all is lost. The divorce cost me just about
everything and depression took the rest. Now when I try to witness I feel like people are thinking,
man Im glad I'm not like you! The world is so into pocessions that if you don't have alot then
people don't want to hear what you have to say. I sure am glad God sees things differently.
When I had alot of worldly goods, I didn't know Jesus and He was not apart of my every day
life .
Now that I've been born again of the Spirit, I have nothing really other thanJesus to depend on. It is sure a humbling experience and believe me there is not alot of
compassion in todays world. Too bad I could not have realised that Jesus was my Lord and
Saviour before everything fell apart. Now I am an old man with no friends because I don't
pocess alot of material things. I would be too embarassed to say how much I have lost
in the material sense, makes it very hard to witness even to my son.
God Bless
Thunder
Brother, you are exactly where you must be and not out of God's will or plan . We cannot look back and say "what if" because that will keep you from your purpose . God stripped me from a few(lets also no say how much
) as well and I can honestly say : Oh dear Lord , how wonderful are Your ways. You have truly been good to me and you have placed my feet in pleasant paths. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. I will always be thankful because He took me through that. He is SOOOOO Good !Do you know how lucky you are to be in a position to say: I have to trust God for everything. Most people have seen to it that they have a buffer built in between them and God so that the never have to say that, if they can at all help it. You can say it !
Everything fell apart SO that you can today say: He is my Lord and saviour. The things of this world are traps and mostly they get people to look away from the Lord Jesus and not TO Him.
Your testimony must not be: Look how much I have I am a Christian, but : Look, here is a God that can save you from the curse.Look I believe Him and He looks out for me !
Its not what you have in material things, but the fact that you are a new creation. Created in His image. Your spirit has been recreated, now your mind must be conformed to the Word and last HE will see to the immortality of the body in the resurrection.
So now you have to start speaking the Word. Get it into you and speak it. Rely on the promises and stand on them. That is what you HAVE
Wonderful promises from a God that does not lie.Praise God, for HE IS GOOD.
love C
QUOTE(taltimbr @ Aug 29 2007, 11:23 PM) [snapback]120404[/snapback]
I don't know about other believers but I really struggle being a good witness and Iknow it is our responsibility. My son was too young to understand when Satan's greatest tool,
that being divorce entered our lives. Such a shame but we were not living Godly lives and
Satan gets the upper hand and before you know it all is lost. The divorce cost me just about
everything and depression took the rest. Now when I try to witness I feel like people are thinking,
man Im glad I'm not like you! The world is so into pocessions that if you don't have alot then
people don't want to hear what you have to say. I sure am glad God sees things differently.
When I had alot of worldly goods, I didn't know Jesus and He was not apart of my every day
life .
Now that I've been born again of the Spirit, I have nothing really other thanJesus to depend on. It is sure a humbling experience and believe me there is not alot of
compassion in todays world. Too bad I could not have realised that Jesus was my Lord and
Saviour before everything fell apart. Now I am an old man with no friends because I don't
pocess alot of material things. I would be too embarassed to say how much I have lost
in the material sense, makes it very hard to witness even to my son.
God Bless
You may have lost the whole world but you gained your soul!
The devils using guilt to keep you back. Forgive yourself and get on with it. Jesus has.
Teresa of Calcutta was and is an outstanding model for all who love Jesus Christ and desire to walk with Him! Few have the courage to take up the calling that God placed on her life. Those that stand in judgement, I wonder if you have ever read any of her writings... she is someone who learned how to love, and isn't this what being a friend and believer in Jesus is all about? At the end of the day Jesus will not judge us on how well we know the bible, how correct our doctrine is, or much we attend church... He will want to know if we have learned to love...
Caneman
Caneman
QUOTE(Caneman @ Oct 25 2007, 10:20 PM) [snapback]126131[/snapback]
Teresa of Calcutta was and is an outstanding model for all who love Jesus Christ and desire to walk with Him! Few have the courage to take up the calling that God placed on her life. Those that stand in judgement, I wonder if you have ever read any of her writings... she is someone who learned how to love, and isn't this what being a friend and believer in Jesus is all about? At the end of the day Jesus will not judge us on how well we know the bible, how correct our doctrine is, or much we attend church... He will want to know if we have learned to love...
Caneman
Caneman this sounds very nice and right and spiritual, but it is not what God teaches us in total. The love (agape) bit is true, and we do have to love. That would be one aspect of being saved, but not the only one, because I know non-Christians who are great philanthropists, but have not salvation.
Remember that God tells us that the sum of His Words are truth, so we really need to look carefully at the whole Bible and what it teaches about salvation.
Psa 119:160 The sum of thy word is truth;
One aspect about salvation is definitely :Mat 7:22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out demons, and by thy name do many mighty works?
Mat 7:23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
Mat 7:24 Every one therefore that heareth these words of mine, and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise man, who built his house upon the rock:
Mat 7:25 and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and if fell not: for it was founded upon the rock.
Mat 7:26 And every one that heareth these words of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand:
Mat 7:27 and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and smote upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall thereof.
I am not talking about Theresa here, I am talking about all of us.
C
I was referring only to Teresa of Calcutta... her motivation was out of love for Jesus, the philanthropist is usually motivated by guilt and they are doing good works to assuage their own guilty feelings. Doing good works out of obedience to Jesus is good, but the better part is to do good works out of love for Jesus... there is a huge difference between these two ideals. Please don't confuse bible knowledge as knowing Jesus, just because you have an intellectual understanding and agreement with biblical truth does not make you a Christian... the very same bible you refer to tells us that the demons believe in truth yet I think you would agree they don't "know" Jesus.
Caneman
Caneman
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