Hi! DEADn
I really am getting to look forward to reading your Posts here because they have a straightforward sentiment about them.
Jesus knocks on the door of everyone's heart with an individual sound which is especially recognized by the individual themselves. I've often thought that Jesus has perhaps knocked on doors of a zillion hearts and not once has the sound been the same for any one of them. So, I'm careful not to question the legitimacy of someone's introduction to Jesus.
For instance, I have a very close Christian friend who awoke one morning with a compelling need to search for the person of God. She had never seen the inside of a Church before that day. She climbed into her car and randomly drove down the street and stopped at the first building that had the look of a church and entered. As she tells it, she was just sitting there and listening to some man speaking when a very uncomfortable dark feeling came over her. Immediately after, she heard a calm but strong voice in her heart/mind saying: "The One whom you are seeking is not to be found here!"
So, right there and then she got up from her seat and left the building to drive back home. On her way home, she saw another building with a huge inviting church sign and she decided to enter this building looking for God. And, she found Him.
Do you know what the first building was about? It was a spiritualist church filled with Mediums and Occult.
The wonderful thing about Jesus is that, when we answer the knock at the door, we discover that He did not arrive to shame or threaten us. On the contrary! He quietly embraces us and begins to speak about His hopes and heartfelt desires for us.
I myself was born with a severe facial deformity. My father had threatened more than once to murder me. He would justify it by saying, "When the cow has a calf that is born deformed, you kill both the cow and the calf".
By the time I was in my early teens, I was severely damaged psychologically; by the time I was 20 years, I had become a raging menace.
But Jesus knocked on my door too. Actually, I think that He first needed to pound on my roof to get my attention. Sometimes people are found in the very depths of the 'Land of Stolen Spirits' where God has to pipe SonLight to them before they can hear His knock at their door. :)
DEADn, you wrote: "He spoke about crying out to God and God not answering".
God can never be fitted into some man-conceived formula. It took me a very long time to figure that out for myself. I can't tell you how many self-help Christian books I read during the early years of my Christian journey.
God doesn't like being asked to answer according to a formula. Neither does He desire long prayers or self-mutilation. No, God isn't like that.
Did you know that sometimes God answers prayer so wonderfully that some might be tempted to say that He is 'spoiling' His children?
Take me, for instance. When I first heard the Gospel of Repentance, I was a safe-cracker and thief. This was essentially because I couldn't last at a job for more than three days before my warped mind and behavior would cause me to be fired.
Anyways, on the very day I was to hear the Gospel, I awoke with an injury to my knee and I was barely able to walk. But I had told a criminal friend of mine that I would meet him at a certain building which was adjacent to another which we were preparing to break into. So, I dragged myself up the street in great pain because our rent and food depended on a successful crime.
To make a long story short, I was beginning to panic about my injury. When I arrived at the building where I was to meet my criminal cohort, a Bible minister was inside and I asked him if he would drive me to the hospital. He replied, "How about I pray for you first?". I answered, "Well, I'll let you do your magic wand trick if you promise to drive me to the hospital afterwards".
I was instantaneously healed as he was praying for me.
So, I stopped my criminal behavior right there and then But I had no money or food. I was sleeping in the local parks and eating at a free food place. One day I desperately needed socks and I was walking down the city sidewalk and saw a crumpled bag sitting on the shelf in a public phone booth. There was two brand new pairs of socks in the bag!
I could tell you so many more stories like that where God richly spoiled me because that was the only language I could understand from Him at the time.
But as I mentioned before, I was a complete mess psychologically ... a true double-minded man. Even after hearing the Gospel and even after seeing God's hand over my life in most miraculous ways, I shamefully returned to criminal behavior.
Why did this happen?
Well, I couldn't really ever trust a God who created me with such a suffocating deformity. Nor was was I able to differentiate my Heavenly Father's behavior from what I had learned of my earthly father. As was the case with Jonah, I had become angry with God; I blamed Him for all my anguish and failures. I would find myself screaming at Him saying: "I can't live with you and I can't live without you!"; "If you hadn't given me this deformity, I might have had a fair chance at life!".
So, it could be said that I only had a reverential attachment to God; much like I had with my parents. Never once had my earthly father hugged me nor did my mother ever embrace me. So, I knew nothing about what a relationship really meant. I knew only about personal attachments. I could only love God for who He was, not for what He had done.
Again to make the story short:
I ended up in a prison cell doing a major sentence.
I was sitting on the edge of my steel bed frame preparing to stretch out and pull the blankets over my head when a movie suddenly appeared in the air before me. It startled me at first. The movie was paused and the frame showed a sketch of a man holding a revolver aimed to the side his head. The trigger had been pulled because a bullet was already exiting the barrel and was milliseconds from slamming into his head. It was clearly someone playing Russian roulette.
I distinctly heard a voice asking, “What do you think this man’s last words were?”
I thought about the question for moment before hurriedly answering: “Wow! I’ve got such bad luck!”
Somehow, I guessed that my first response was unsatisfactory.
Once again the same picture of the man holding a revolver to his head appeared.
A voice again asked, “What do you think this man’s last words should have been?”
I was a bit perplexed at this point. It was clear to me that the unfortunate man had terrible luck. But that shallow observation was becoming increasingly unsettling to me.
Then I thought to myself that anyone who would play such a dangerous game had to be awfully stupid. The odds of blowing your head off were unacceptably high.
I replied aloud, “What a stupid man I am!”
The voice returned firmly saying, “Yes. His situation had nothing to do with bad luck. It had everything to do with the stupid decision he made..
The voice continued, “You can’t continue blaming everyone else for the lost time of your life. You have to take responsibility for your own foolish and poor decisions. As long as you insist to blame everything bad in your life on your parents, your upbringing, your deformity and all your other tired excuses, you can never redeem the time.”
It was made clear. For years I begrudgingly resigned myself to being the victim of bad luck. If I continued insisting to shift the responsibility for my life to someone else, I would utterly fail to discover the meaning of my own existence. My parents could not tell me who I was. My parents gave me the title of the book, but this could never fully tell who I really am. If I refused to write the chapters to my own book, who was going compose them for me? That was something that only I myself could author from within.
And that is what changed my thinking and life and has me the man I am today.
So, DEADn, God does answer! Sometimes in ways which we never suspected nor desired. But He does indeed answer! And His answers have secrets of healing and restoration hidden in them.
Oh, an' maybe I should mention too that Jesus holds unbelievably stunning healing and restoration powers. There came a day where I was sufficiently healed in mind and heart that I was able to gain steady employment. Later, I became an executive at a leading multinational corporation; reporting to their Vice President.
Unfortunately, nearly every Christian whom I had come to know during the dark days of my troubled walk disowned me; especially after my imprisonment. Even the minister who had laid hands on me for healing and who led me to Jesus; he abandoned me too.
But there was one Christian man who stuck with me through thick and thin; who insisted to have the faith of God for me through every disappointment and miserable betrayal I gave him through those days of my living in the Land of Stolen Spirits. He's 74 years of age now and only last week mentioned that he didn't expect to remain on the earth too much longer. I will profoundly miss him after his passing.
Now, about sinful nature and theories as such.
That's another subject for another day, perhaps. I discovered things for myself about this too because of my own deliverance from the "miry clay" of my times past.
