Patience? (That’s not something you want to pray for though, because then you’ll be given more opportunities to exercise it. ) Focus? That was Peter’s problem in a trial when he began to sink. And the perfecting of our faith.
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:2(
You must not have read the Wikipedia article. “Alternative facts” is a joke. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Lying is a brand here.
Jesus disagrees.
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.” Matthew 22:37-38
Many people play Lottery and gamble in the hope that they will win knowing that most loose…and yet they still play anyway.
In choosing to have faith in Christ and believe in the Bible we are simply making a binary choice…follow crhsit and you might win, font believe and follow in his ways and you have zero chance of winning if it turns out to be true. Its that simple really.
There is one simple caveat however…just like a fan who follows a football team…you are not in if you dont follow the philosophy…so its fooolish to claim if there is a God he will save me because He is too good to let people die. That was the mistake of all humanity in Noah’s flood. They said to themselves, there has never been rain and a flood, God wouldnt do this to us…they were very wrong!
I believe free will came in as a binary choice between good and evil and was a result of Lucifers rebellion in heaven. Sure we could argue it still exists because God doesnt force compliance, but in all honesty is that really true?
Anyway, God warned Adam and Eve about Satan lurking immediately after He created them.
Genesis 2:16And the LORD God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, 17but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
i believe prior to Lucifers transgression it wasnt an issue the bible seems to relate it more to our salvation.
hmmm i wonder what this could be? It can’t be theological debates and YECism because biblical theology supports it far more strongly the TEism…stray cats, and dogs persistent need to poo in someones else’s yard come to mind
This sort of points to my view on the matter, that we will always desire to and be able to follow our best values. The impressive thing about human morality is that we all know that we fail to live up to our own standards, which means that at root we know we’re broken, and I doubt there’s a human in existence who wouldn’t be thrilled to encounter a genie or something that could grant the wish that we would always live up to our own standards.
And in addition we will know Jesus directly, no longer “through a glass darkly” but “face to face”, and just as we have friends who inspire us to be better than we have been, knowing Him without the muddling of our fallen selves will inspire up to be more like Him than we could ever imagine.
So I don’t think that our wills will be restricted, in a fashion like God putting a governor on our desires so we can’t choose what is wrong, rather the situation will be that we so clearly see what is good and what we ought to be so that will be the desire of our hearts, so the idea of doing something wrong will be as foreign to us as randomly choosing a house and tossing a fire bomb into it (recognizing that there are humans who could consider that to be fun).
One way of looking at it is that we would clearly see that we would be disappointed in ourselves for doing less than the very best, experiencing that before we fail ourselves that way, so we make the choices that will make us feel proud of ourselves for doing what makes Jesus happy with us, and those things will be what make us happy.
A doctor friend once observed to me that he judged me incapable of deliberately harming someone even out of extreme anger. Assuming this to be true, does that mean my will is constrained? and if it is constrained, is it not because that is how I have shaped my will?
I don’t believe that there are humans without constraint on their wills, that everyone has things they just won’t do. By some definitions that means we don’t have free will, but if those are things that we have shaped for ourselves, have built into our own character, is not that itself an exercise of free will?
I once encountered cats that didn’t go after birds, or at least didn’t do so outside – they were farm cats and had learned that any small creature inside the barns or sheds or garage were fair game, but that outside only rodents were allowed as prey. The interesting thing is that the family had managed to train this into one female cat, and that cat trained her offspring and their offspring to the same standard.
So – did those cats have free will? did their training constrain their wills? And if the training did so, was that a bad thing? Which is a way to ask, if we get trained to make good choices, is that a violation of free will?
On this perspective, I would say that heaven will be a place where Augustine’s admonition to “Love God and do as you please” will reach its full fruition, where our love for God will mean only being pleased by those things which please Him.
Well yes, but I am not sure this means what so many of the religious think it means… i.e. that only religion mongers (those who talk God all the time) have a place in heaven. For some passages in the Bible tell a different story… like Isaiah 1 and Matthew 25 – that those who love God are not the religion mongers at all. but those who share His love for His children… those who are like Him, a servant of servants, giving of themselves to others.
I can’t imagine rocks, non-living things, anesthetized, comatose, or sleeping living things having free will; so I propose that things that are not conscious don’t have and can’t exercise free will.
Since all–or at least most–living humans appear to sleep, seems to me fair to say, living humans in this world don’t have or aren’t exercising free will while they’re sleeping. While they’re awake, they may be conscious, but are they exercising or capable of exercising free will?
In 2015 Pixar Animation Studios produced Inside Out, depicting “the experiences of a young girl, Riley, and the personifications of her five core emotions, Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, as she suffers from homesickness in the aftermath of her family moving cross-country.”
Conceived by Pete Docter in late 2009 after observing changes in his daughter’s personality as she grew older; it was subsequently greenlit and its story developed by Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, who consulted psychologists and neuroscientists in an effort to portray the mind with greater accuracy.
Morsella and his colleagues came up with … something they call “Passive Frame Theory,” and their provocative idea goes like this: nearly all of your brain’s work is conducted in different lobes and regions at the unconscious level, completely without your knowledge. When the processing is done and there is a decision to make or a physical act to perform, that very small job is served up to the conscious mind, which executes the work and then flatters itself that it was in charge all the time.
The conscious you, in effect, is like a not terribly bright CEO, whose subordinates do all of the research, draft all of the documents, then lay them out and say, “Sign here, sir.” The CEO does–and takes the credit.