Let me ask you, did you cause your own physical birth?

This is always the objection for Calvinism, we are not robots and we have free will.

Calvin in fact, did not deny free will. In his work the institutes of the christian life he said that.

The problem is this, left to ourselves and our own free will, we are all headed to hell.

Without the intervention and regeneration by God, we will never come to faith in the Lord.



We were all dead in sin, and it is God who made us alive (regeneration). Can a dead man raise himself? No!

The total depravity of men is so clear here I don't understand how people can understand it any other way. Paul said the same thing twice here, in case anybody missed it.

This post has been edited by thomasthai: Sep 12 2019, 09:44 PM

Of course, but back to your original question on how to be born again, the answer is you can't.

Just as you did not caused anything for your physical birth, you cannot cause anything for your spiritual birth. God does that.

It is the Holy Spirit's ministry to cause regeneration.

I think the bottom line of the discussion between prophetjul and unknownwarrior is not on salvation, (we all agree that salvation is based on the merits of Christ, not our own, ie our works), but the doctrine of sanctification.

Or more specifically, who causes a believer's sanctification?

To fail to recognise justification and sanctification, we will end up messing up the gospel itself, like what happened to the catholic church.

When we try to sanctify ourselves by our own might, we will always tend to impugn the finished works of Christ, and we will fall into thinking that we are doing anything to contribute to our salvation.



This has been called the golden chain of salvation. We see that salvation is predestinated, initiated, and completed by God. No one takes credit for his salvation, and no salvation will lost by anyone.

What about sanctification? How and who does it? Let's look at a helpful illustration by our Lord himself.



What is this washing of feet by Jesus that Peter did not understand that time?

Break it down into points:
1) All who have taken a bath is already clean
2) There's some dirt that have been picked up by the feet, only needs their feet cleaned.
3) Jesus does the cleaning.
4) Who they do not let Jesus clean them, they have to part in Him.

This is an illustration by Jesus sanctifying His believers. Jesus Himself does the cleaning. It doesn't mean that they have lost their salvation when they picked up some dirt with their feet.

So how does Jesus sanctify His believers?



We are sanctified by the Word of God. Only when we know His word, the Holy Spirit can do His ministry of sanctification.

Or in humanly words, the Spirit binds our conscience with the truth, and gives us the internal restraint to refrain from the works of the flesh.







Jesus sanctifies the believers when they dwell in His word and walk in the Spirit.

There are much more that can be said, I'll save it for next time.

May the peace of the Lord be with us all.

In the modern evangelical churches, sound expositional preaching of the Word has been replaced by experience, feel good sermons, motivation talks, lovey dovey messages.

The preaching of the Word is where believers should sit under and is a main channel of sanctification.

Believers are drinking kool aid instead of real food of the Word.

That's one of the greatest grieve I have for these churches today.

This post has been edited by thomasthai: Sep 16 2019, 09:05 AM

Granted, my opinion on 1 Tim 3.16 is that the TR/KJV is the correct one (we can tell it's a scribal shorthand error). Even so, from the context we know Christ was manifested in flesh.

I have been speaking to some overseas greek scholars in the textual critic field for the past year or so, although they think that the word of God is better preserved in the Byzantine/TR texts, they don't hold that there is a 'perfect' manuscript.

Every word and reading of every manuscript still needs to be compared and sorted, and they reckon there are probably still years of work to be done.

If you hold that the KJV bible is 'perfect', you have to say that the translators of the KJV, with imperfect and multiple versions of TR manuscripts, managed to create a perfect text, and therefore are equally inspired as the new testament writers?

This post has been edited by thomasthai: Sep 17 2019, 09:14 AM

The base word of robbery here in both Alexandrian and TR is the same, harpazo.

Can be translated as to rob, to seize, to grasp, to snatch, to retain.

The context has to explain the meaning here.

Then to empty Himself, all greek texts (even in the TR texts, KJV based text) word by word translation is heauton ekenosen, self empties. Nothing about reputation here. This is a case of the KJV translators putting their theology into the text.

I used this to check the TR texts. You are welcome to check ny sources:

https://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterli...Greek_Index.htm

This post has been edited by thomasthai: Sep 17 2019, 09:51 AM