KevinSim wrote:consiglieri wrote:How do your three conclusions follow from your four assumptions?
After having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have come to the conclusion that if someone asks God a direct question, ready to base the whole rest of that someone's life on whatever answer God provides, and can't count on God giving that someone a direct yes or no answer to that question, then there is no way in the world that that someone can ever know the will of God in her/his life with any degree of certainty.
One of my assumptions was that
God wants us to know God's will. Therefore I conclude that if someone asks God a direct question in the mentioned manner,
God will provide that someone with an answer s/he can count on.
I put this method to work in Autumn 1976, during my senior year in high school. My question was whether or not the LDS Church is true. God answered in the affirmative. The LDS Church teaches that Jesus is the Christ, that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, and that Thomas Monson is currently a prophet of God; so I conclude that all of those three teachings are true.
Let me see if I get this right. In High School you gave a great deal of thought to your first assumptions and figured God must answer. Got an answer from God that the LDS Church was true....yada yada yada....and now in 2012 you have fallen back to assuming that there is a God. Right?
The first answer from God carried nothing that put God past an assumption and to a fact?
Or have you lost faith and returned to assuming God exists and therefore yada yada yada?
If your first encounter with God was not all that convincing how can you be certain of the answer? I smell a foul smell here. Care at all to investigate?
Did you take no thought but to ask.........well, no, you said that you gave it a lot of thought and therefore you studied it out in your mind.
Wait a second that protocol is ONLY for those who have entered in at the gate and stand upon the rock of Christ, having been adopted according to his grace having been visited of the promise of the Father and truly wrought upon and cleansed by the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost.
I figure from all your assuming about God existence that KNOWING the Lord which is the earnest of salvation and certain knowledge that God lives and is just and true, having worked a new creation upon you having you partake of the heavenly gift and been witness in your inward parts of his marvelous power and grace in conceiving you his son leaving you a new man in Christ alive in varied gifts and above all a certain knowledge of God as they were Anciently want to call the entire experience.........to know the Lord.
This is strictly in the Biblical sense of knowing. An intimate exchange has taken place where a conception is completed and brought forth a new creature. Sexual knowing is just mere carnal knowledge, this spiritual intercourse is fully actualizing in a higher state of existence but it remains precisely how the seed of God is produced. Not therefore carnal sex but an infinite and eternal sex without a combination from shared genital exchanges but a higher order of exchange where your offer your whole heart and die to the natural man and God revives you with a new heart and refurbishing your whole might, mind and strength with a forever oneness with God where he is in you and you in him forever and ever.
So if we likened it to carnal sex, spiritual oneness is a connection that never ends, is never climaxed and finished but ongoing as it is eternal and of the duration of eternity.
Is that where you came from to ask God Kevin? Is that oneness with God still in you and do you abide in that moment to moment? Or was it just your arrogance that decided that you deserve that the Most High God and Supreme Being of the Universe owes you an answer because you want one?
I think that someone capable of that degree of presumption will go on to presume an answer as well. Like 1+1=2.
I know God answered me but now I am not sure God is real.............SHUT UP!