So I know this is probably not a shocking title and that it's probably common to see a post like this. However, I've been struggling for some years over my possible loss of salvation. You may have seen my posts in the past. I'll link them below for those who would be interested. They may give a more robust explanation of what has happened.
Has my sin killed me spiritually? Loss of salvation
What to do when you are beyond repentance?
The short of it is as follows:
I became a believer around the age of 10 and saw a stark change in my life and desires. Hatred towards sin and love and desire for Christ. Shortly after I was exposed to pornography and formed an addiction. The following 17 years were an up and down dealing with addiction and the Lord drawing me back to repentance.
Until 2 years ago. I had been in a pit of sin and despair hating my sin and crying out to the Lord to free me from it but being, seemingly, unable to escape it for long. I had good moments of repentance during that time but I would always inevitable fall back into my sin. I would like to point out that this was not a time of me walking away from Christ in a knowing sense. It was a time of gripping Christ, struggling/falling, repenting, gripping Christ and struggling/falling. During that time I had just started seminary but was still struggling in my thought life and occasionally on the internet.
One night I fell to temptation and felt no remorse or brokenness. It was shocking and horrifying. I sinned and felt no conviction over it. I spent the rest of the night in prayer trying to repent and felt that I could not. Unable to feel broken over sin or that what I had done was a problem.
The next morning I woke up and began seeking the Lord about what had happened filled with an intense sense of deep, deep anxiety about my relationship with the Lord. During a time of prayer I felt, what seemed to me, the departing of the Holy Spirit. The reason I believe this to be true is because of the state of my heart and mind afterwords. My heart felt like a stone in my chest and I felt no love or desire for the Lord. My sin didn't seem to be a big deal to me anymore. I opened my bible and it looked like words on a page. It seemed that I no longer believed the Scriptures anymore no matter how hard I fought to. I knew experientially that they were true but there was not heart level belief. It was like I had undergone a de-renewing of my mind and heart. My thoughts were wicked and I had no regard for the Lord. It seemed as though he had left me completely. There was no work of the Holy Spirit occurring in my life. The Word was not illuminated, I was not convicted of sin and I felt a horrible fear of destruction. The most visceral fear of condemnation.
Two years later nothing has changed. At that time this began I had resolved that I would not continue in sin and that I would continue to submit to the Lord even if he had left me. I resolved to live what was rest of my life to the glory of God but that has become difficult in the lack of desire to do so. It does not seem possible to remain faithful to the Lord apart from the Holy Spirit's work to impart those desires. I have no desire to run head long into sin but I also do not desire the Lord.
I ran across these 2 articles last night and I believe they speak to my situation. I'm not sure what to do now.
What Is the Unforgivable Sin?
Beyond Forgiveness: Blasphemy Against the Spirit
The thing that stuck out to me was,
"The unforgivable sin is when you have resisted him so decisively that he has forsaken you and you can no longer repent. You try to repent and you can't repent. You can't be genuinely sorry for your sin or turn away from it. That is a horribly frightening situation to be in."
RC Sproul quoted a theologian saying, "To be sure, hell will be awful for both, but as one theologian has noted, all the sinners in hell would move heaven and earth if they could remove but one transgression from their record and have their punishment even barely alleviated."
Everything in my life points to this reality and I'm not sure how to move forward. My desires to remain faithful to the Lord have departed and I cannot continue if the Spirit does not empower. If there is no returning of the Holy Spirit because I have blasphemed though persistence in sin, what then should one do? Would it not be most profitable in my situation to remove myself from this life for the sake of my eternity?
I've Blashphemed the Holy Spirit. What now?
Discussion in 'General Baptist Discussions' started by Tyler, Dec 10, 2019.
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How could losing Christ not bother you enough to talk about it? How could condemnation not bother you enough to talk about it?
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I don’t believe a Christian can lose their salvation. If you are saved, Holy Spirit indwelling is a permanent condition.
God, Holy Spirit, indwelling is the pledge promise from God that all of His promises are true. One of those promises is that none that have been given to Christ will be lost.
I don’t really want to address your situation directly because I cannot look inside you to see if Holy Spirit indwells.
All I can do is say is work out your salvation in fear and trembling.
Peace to you -
Reformed1689 Well-Known Member
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Reformed1689 Well-Known Member
Honestly it is almost as if you want it to be that you have lost your salvation and have no hope and are seeking just attention. -
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Reformed1689 Well-Known Member
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God is not a quiter and neither should you be. Continue to pursue God. Consider the likes of whom God has brought to repentance. King Manasseh, King Nebuchadnezzar, ect..... God is able.
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All of your focus is on what you are doing, how you are feeling and so forth. You should be focused on what God has done and is doing.
I suggest that you find a quiet place and sing praise songs to God. Music can often bridge all kinds of bad feelings.
Peace to you -
But can I rely on what I'm seeing such as no conviction of sin, lack of faith and belief and not not seeing a lack of fruit or the Lord's work in my life? I'm struggle to think that everything is okay if those things are true. -
I started out where you are before God grabbed me by the collar and jerked me around. So here are some answers from a “been there, done that, got the tee shirt” perspective.
Q1. What do I do if I can't repent?
- You face God at the judgement seat and you burn in hell. Does that bother you? The thought didn’t bother me at the time. First, it only seemed like an unlikely possibility with “you are born, you die and when you are gone, you don’t even leave behind a hole to show that you were here” as the more likely outcome ... which isn’t particularly comforting either. However, let’s at least be honest with ourselves. If you are not a “friend of God” and it doesn’t seem like God is much of a friend of yours, then we belong in a place with all of God’s other enemies. If God and you had irreconcilably parted ways, then this reality would not bother you. Give it time and you will grow to REALLY hate God. Read Romans 1 for an example.
Q2. If I'm hard hearted and cannot repent of sin, what then do I do?
- You are sort of asking the exact same question twice. Here is a better question: How sure are you that the reason that you cannot repent is because you are “hard hearted”? You are smarter than I am ... because I have never been able to figure out where God was leading before God led me there.
- Personal story (Reader’s Digest Version): I always had a talent for Architecture. Before I was aware that there was a God, there was Architecture. It was one of God’s gifts to me at birth. So I was doing everything that I knew to do to please God and suddenly the bottom fell out of my world. (Like unemployed in a recession with a few hundred dollars between me and homelessness bad). I angrily confronted God about to formally renounce our covenant and go back to crime and the streets. ... Long story short, it was never about what I did or didn’t do for God. God needed to show me that Architecture (His gift to me) had occupied the place in my heart that belonged to God and God alone. It was all about getting ME right with GOD before God could trust me with anything else.
- From your own story, it strikes me that God tried to approach you with a soft word and a gently touch, but you shrugged that off. Isn’t there a verse in Proverbs about God calling and calling and then just stepping back and laughing at your calamity when you are finally ready to cry out to him? Quit whining when you set the conditions for this lesson. Is it possible that God has not abandoned you to hell, but is prepared to do whatever it takes to get through to you and keep you out of hell? You chose the 2x4 solution, so now you need to just see it through to the end.
Q3. Do I keep going?
- That sort of depends on what you mean by “keep going”. If you are asking about just accepting damnation ... sure, go ahead. If you have peace with hating God then you probably are reprobate. On the other hand, the thought of being damned seems to bother you, so you are going to make a lousy sinner and depress all of the other drunkards, fornicators and God haters around you.
- If you are asking about just falling into a pit of depression and disengaging from life ... just quit trying. Then I suggest that the verse about “If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves” ... well you seminary types know the verse. The one constant in life is change and as long as you are alive, you can have hope that things will change. The valley of the shadow of death may be long, but it does not go on forever. There are “green pastures” at the end of it (I am speaking of seasons of refreshing in this life).
Q4. Do I kill myself?
- I have given this question an unhealthy amount of thought over the years. I am the oldest of three brothers and the only surviving one. The youngest was murdered and the middle brother committed suicide. I came close at one point. That was when I discovered the power that comes from being ready to die. Think about it for a moment, you can attempt ANYTHING else with absolutely no fear of failure because whatever happens, death will always be waiting as an option of last resort. You can fill your car with gas and drive to California and live on a beach and become a full time surfer (there is nothing to stop you). You can get a part time job in Dallas Texas to pay for flying lessons and become an Alaskan Bush Pilot (what is there to stop you). Open a neighborhood grocery store in a small town. Learn to become a plumber and just travel the country living in a town for a month and moving on. You have nothing to loose so you have nothing to fear.
Q5. What do I do????
- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You say that you are resisting the “sin that so easily ensnares us”. That sounds like a generally good idea, but a former SOB like me expects that someone in a seminary knows that DOING GOOD don’t get no one saved. I assume that you apologized to God and asked for His forgiveness. God never struck me as someone that was swayed by begging. Say it. Mean it. Move on.
- I am not God (which is good for all of us), so I will not pretend to have a clue what God is up to.
That being the case, I offer the best general advice that I have to give:
- Tell God how you feel. (Be honest, He already knows).
- Take time to just quietly listen for God’s answer.
- You were too busy when God wanted to talk, so now you need to be patient until God decides he is ready to speak and you are ready to listen.
- Do something. A law of physics is that static friction is greater than dynamic friction so it is harder to start something moving from rest than it is to turn an already moving object. Stop being an emotional sponge and do something to help someone else. Anything for anyone.
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Tyler, just keep praying and reading the Bible. Somewhere in Scripture is your answer.
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If you still have time on your hands, get a second job. Idle hands is the Devil's workshop.
Next, realize that viewing pornography is at least partially a symptom to a problem. But you still have to make sure you don't feed your addiction. But don't stop pornography because it is a sin, do it because it is bad for you. Using pornography will lower your overall happiness in life. In addition, you will miss opportunities feeding a porn addiction. Fight it as something that is unhealthy for you, not just something you should not do.
Finally, read Deuteronomy. The kings of Israel were suppose to read it every day. Deuteronomy lists the actual sexual offenses God hates and goes into quite some detail. Realize that being unclean was not the same as sinning or else having daughters would be a sin.
Read Deuteronomy because it lists what the sexual sins are. You may be surprised. I know when I was a teenager, I was surprised at how much I was lied to. Remember that in Acts 15, it says to not to have sexual immorality just as Moses taught. You can find that in Deuteronomy.
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