How Lenient Do You Think Christ Will Be For Our Salvation?
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- čas přidán 6. 05. 2023
- #christianity #mercy #salvation #easternorthodox #evangelical #ldschurch
How merciful do you think Christ will be for judging us? Do you believe He will be lenient? What are your thoughts on this?
“Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:54)
Hi dave i hope your doing well God bless you and your family
Jesus is the Way. If you believe and trust in Christ and His finished work, your salvation is secure. As for the different denominations, I believe if you stand in the fundamentals such as the trinity, deity of Christ, saved by Christ through faith, you are part of the family of God. I believe the different denominations serve to add diversity amongst the believers in Christ and it’s truly not about the Name above the door, but the Name above all names. Jesus is the narrow way. The gate. The door. If you trust in Him, and follow Him, then He will do His work in you and bring it to completion. I trust Him. I believe finding a good church who stands on the word of God is a blessing and fellowship is important.
Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.
Whether I’m correct or not, I don’t know, but I feel as though God has been lenient with me throughout my many many mistakes, but when it comes to the Final Judgment God’s leniency will cease and all of the times that I have turned my back on God’s mercy will be revealed to me and I will experience great regret on one hand, but also immense gratitude on the other because of all of the mercy and love that God has poured out on me despite my failings. I try to remember God’s Judgment to keep me in the narrow path when I am being tempted, and remember His mercy when I am being too harsh on myself. I notice that when I am being harsh on myself I am also being harsh to my neighbor, and the last thing I want is for God to, in return, be harsh on me when I am standing before the dread and great judgment seat of Christ.
God bless you!
He will see and judge us through the blood of Jesus. Just like when the jews painted blood on their doorposts in Egypt during the plagues, when the angel of death came and passed over every door that had the blood.
God is long suffering. Salvation isn’t exclusively a check list, but whether our participation & faith is truly transformative. It’s not about what we do, it’s about what we should, and can become.
Galatians Ch 1: 8But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! 9As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!
I hope this helps, please read in full before responding:
“I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I betrothed you to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one husband. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if some one comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is not strange if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.”
2 Corinthians 11:2-4, 13-15
“The ideology behind ecumenism…is an already well-defined heresy: the Church of Christ does not exist, no one has the Truth, the Church is only now being built. But it takes little reflection to see that the self-liquidation of Orthodoxy, of the Church of Christ, is simultaneously the self-liquidation of Christianity itself; that if no one is the Church of Christ, then the combination of all sects will not be the Church either, not in the sense in which Christ founded it. And if all “Christian” bodies are relative to each other, then all of them together are relative to other “religious” bodies, and “Christian” ecumenism can only end in a syncretic world religion.”-Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future
“HOW NARROW IS THE GATE, and strait is the way that leadeth to life: and few there are that find it! Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall know them.... Not everyone that saith to Me, Lord, Lord shall enter into the Kingdom of heaven: but he that doeth the will of My Father Who is in heaven, he shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Many will say to Me in that day: Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name, and cast out devils in Thy name, and done many miracles in Thy name? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity. Every one therefore that heareth these My words, and doeth them, shall be likened to a wise man that built his house upon a rock.”-Matthew 7:14-16, 21-24
“From an Orthodox point of view, the Branch Theory has many faults. Orthodox Christians wonder how groups with such radical differences could be branches of the same body. Palmer’s Branch Theory reduces unity in the One Holy Catholic Church to agreement on a few vague points of doctrine and practice at the expense of clear doctrine. Ignatius IV, The Patriarch of Antioch, rightly observes the Branch Theory:
‘...cannot be accepted by the Orthodox because it makes of the One Church a mere idea of Platonic Form that is realized everywhere, without being restricted to a place. This means that the idea of the Church, which was determined by the Creator, has not been realized in time, that its founder, Jesus Christ, failed, and that the gates of hell have prevailed against it and uprooted it from the earth.’”-Historian and Archpriest John Morris, The Historic Church
“I was happy to receive your letter-happy not because you are confused about the question that troubles you, but because your attitude reveals that in the truth of Orthodoxy to which you are drawn you wish to find room also for a loving, compassionate attitude to those outside the Orthodox Faith.
I firmly believe that this is indeed what Orthodoxy teaches….
I will set forth briefly what I believe to be the Orthodox attitude towards non-Orthodox Christians.
1. Orthodoxy is the Church founded by Christ for the salvation of mankind, and therefore we should guard with our life the purity of its teaching and our own faithfulness to it. In the Orthodox Church alone is grace given through the sacraments (most other churches don’t even claim to have sacraments in any serious sense). The Orthodox Church alone is the Body of Christ, and if salvation is difficult enough within the Orthodox Church, how much more difficult must it be outside the Church!
2. However, it is not for us to define the state of those who are outside the Orthodox Church. If God wishes to grant salvation to some who are Christians in the best way they know, but without ever knowing the Orthodox Church-that is up to Him, not us. But when He does this, it is outside the normal way that He established for salvation-which is in the Church, as a part of the Body of Christ. I myself can accept the experience of Protestants being ‘born-again’ in Christ; I have met people who have changed their lives entirely through meeting Christ, and I cannot deny their experience just because they are not Orthodox. I call these people “subjective” or “beginning” Christians. But until they are united to the Orthodox Church they cannot have the fullness of Christianity, they cannot be objectively Christian as belonging to the Body of Christ and receiving the grace of the sacraments. I think this is why there are so many sects among them-they begin the Christian life with a genuine conversion to Christ, but they cannot continue the Christian life in the right way until they are united to the Orthodox Church, and they therefore substitute their own opinions and subjective experiences for the Church’s teaching and sacraments.
About those Christians who are outside the Orthodox Church, therefore, I would say: they do not yet have the full truth-perhaps it just hasn’t been revealed to them yet, or perhaps it is our fault for not living and teaching the Orthodox Faith in a way they can understand. With such people we cannot be one in the Faith, but there is no reason why we should regard them as totally estranged or as equal to pagans (although we should not be hostile to pagans either-they also haven’t yet seen the truth!). It is true that many of the non-Orthodox hymns contain a teaching or at least an emphasis that is wrong-especially the idea that when one is “saved” he does not need to do anything more because Christ has done it all. This idea prevents people from seeing the truth of Orthodoxy which emphasizes the idea of struggling for one’s salvation even after Christ has given it to us, as St. Paul says: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling [Phil. 2:12]. But almost all of the religious Christmas carols are all right, and they are sung by Orthodox Christians in America (some of them in even the strictest monasteries!).
The word “heretic” is indeed used too frequently nowadays. It has a definite meaning and function, to distinguish new teachings from the Orthodox teaching; but few of the non-Orthodox Christians today are consciously “heretics,” and it really does no good to call them that.
In the end, I think, Fr. Dimitry Dudko’s attitude is the correct one: We should view the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox (if only we ourselves would give them a better example!). There is no reason why we cannot call them Christians and be on good terms with them, recognize that we have at least our faith in Christ in common, and live in peace especially with our own families. St. Innocent’s attitude to the Roman Catholics in California is a good example for us. A harsh, polemical attitude is called for only when the non-Orthodox are trying to take away our flocks or change our teaching.…
As for prejudices-these belong to people, not the Church. Orthodoxy does not require you to accept any prejudices or opinions about other races, nations, etc.”-From "Pastoral Guidance", Chapter 84 of Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works.
“In the year 1817, King Frederick William III of Prussia was still upset. He was a member of the Reformed Church, and his late wife Louise had been a Lutheran. It was not their different church memberships itself that upset him. What bugged him was that he and his queen could not receive communion in each other’s churches. Even though she had been dead for seven years (and he would not remarry for another three), the question was still on his mind, and of course the divided religious loyalties of his subjects also concerned him.
The division of Prussians into two Protestant churches had existed for some two hundred years, when in 1617 Prince-Elector John Sigismund declared his conversion from Lutheranism to Calvinism. Most of his subjects remained Lutheran at the time, but the Reformed faith grew in Prussia after its monarch’s conversion, especially with the reception of many Calvinist refugees fleeing religious persecution in other parts of western Europe. Over time, the descendants of those refugees formed a significant minority in Prussia.
One year after he became king, Frederick issued a new liturgical service book which was to be used in common between both the Reformed and Lutheran Christians in Prussia. It was 1799, Louise was still living, and this would set them and their country on the path to a common religious life. Frederick’s final solution to this problem in 1817 was to urge that the Reformed and Lutheran churches in Prussia unite into a single denominational administration in a legal act known as the Prussian Union of Churches. It began with the union of two congregations in Potsdam on October 31, 1817, the three hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. Other congregations soon followed. The king’s order actually did not have absolute legal force in itself, because of how the congregations were governed, but many voluntarily chose to become Union churches.
The new, united denomination, which in 1821 took the name The Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands, was founded on the notion of doctrinal pluralism-members were not required to adhere to the classic confessions of either Lutheranism or the Reformed churches-with a common liturgical and parish life. In 1829, the king required all Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia to give up their respective names and be renamed Evangelical. The denomination, which suffered various dissensions and schisms over the years in fully implementing the union, eventually became the largest independent church in the German Empire.
What laid the groundwork for the Prussian Union was a movement begun in the sixteenth century, initiated shortly after the Magisterial Reformation, known to historians as the Radical Reformation. This movement had a number of influences, such as pietism, which was begun by a Lutheran pastor but was trans-denominational, and millenarianism, a focus on the coming end of the world.
What characterizes the Radical Reform most, however, is that it was not so much focused on church bodies as organizations; rather, it was a movement within and between various groups of theologians who belonged to different communions. The Radical Reformers reacted not only against the perceived corruption and apostasy of the Roman Catholic Church, but also against the Magisterial Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, who enjoyed state support for their churches.
The Radicals felt that Luther and Calvin had not gone far enough in their reform, so they took the basic doctrinal presuppositions of the Reformation and carried their logic further. In this revolution within the revolution, the Radicals changed how Scripture was to be read, how church membership was understood, the meaning and practice of baptism, and in some cases, even the traditional doctrines about the identity of God.
In some ways, the Radical Reformers merely took the doctrines of the first Reformers to their logical conclusions. Perhaps the most significant current within the Radical Reformation, however, was the growing notion that Christianity was a sort of private contract between the believer and God, which did not depend on membership in any specific church or confession of any specific doctrinal tradition.”-Fr. Stephen Andrew Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy
“...The Growth of the Ecumenical Movement.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, many Christians began to believe that they should make an effort to overcome centuries old divisions. Part of this movement can be traced back to such events as the Prussian Union of 1817, which united the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the north German lands ruled by the Hohenzollern family. Another very important root of the Ecumenical Movement came from the missionary field, where various Protestant groups found it necessary to cooperate. This led to a series of world missionary conferences. A group of Protestant leaders met in Edinburgh in 1910 to lay down plans for international cooperation on missionary work. However, the First World War prevented the realization of this plan. Finally, in 1921 a group of Protestant leaders at Lake Mohonk, New York organized the International Missionary Council.
At about the same time, another parallel movement arose to try to resolve the doctrinal disagreements among Protestants. This gave rise to the Faith and Order Movement which held international conferences at Lausanne in 1927 and Edinburgh in 1937. The next year, a meeting at Utrecht proposed the union of the International Missionary Council and the Faith and Order Movement to form a World Council of Churches. However, once again war intervened postponing the foundation of the World Council of Churches until a meeting at Amsterdam in 1948....Meanwhile, some American Churches organized the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America in 1898, which merged with several other groups to form the National Council of Churches in the U.S.A. in 1950.”
Also, I think one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, the heresy of ecumenism that you can have basically a schizophrenic “christ” that is full of contradictions but his body is one, is really a product of our culture more than scripture, truth and history. It also falls into a bit of nestorianism in a sense as well. There are many warnings throughout scripture regarding these issues and throughout the early church. That said, I think we should be focused on our salvation and repentance and not trying to find out how far we can push ourselves away from the truth, and how much we can get away with, I think that is backwards thinking to try and see how much can we forsake the apostolic fullness that He left in His Church. This ecclesiological relativism / post modern ecclesiology isn’t what Christ wanted. We should follow His Church that is a concrete reality in History, the One, Holy, Catholic(whole/fullness) and Apostolic Church (Orthodox Church.) Trust God loves others way more than we can conceive, and way more than we do, but don’t use that as an excuse to leave what we have received in fullness from His Church, and the scriptures that were put together by His Church.
Will God be lenient towards Mormons that believe such very strange things about God, his church, and the path to salvation? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. Personally, I believe scripture is clear that it is not worth it to risk it. Better to pursue the narrow path now than to wish you had later.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of heaven.
I think we should hope God is more merciful than we could ever imagine - because I know when I meet my maker, my record will be less than perfect. However, we should assume nothing, never mind try to change doctrine according to how we think it should read. That means Mormons may make it - and we should hope so!
Tomorrow we will discuss how many angels can fit into the head of a pin…
What does Scripture teach ?
A lot. Well, for example, in Matt 25, Our Lord tells people,that even call Him Lord, that they are going to Hell fire. Why ? Because they didn’t feed the hungry, clothe the naked or visit those in prison.
In John’s Gospel, Chapter 6, Our Lord says we must eat His Flesh and Drink His Blood or we have no life in us.
In Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 16, Our Lord says we must be baptized to be saved.
These are the Words of Jesus. And they are the teachings of Christ’s Church since the Day of Pentecost.
Hey, Dave why haven't you ever talked to a black convert to the LDS church? or a convert that has had dreams and revelation that told them to join the LDS church?
It is most likely prelest.
@@LadyMaria what do you mean? What’s prelest?
@@ancientanswers Russian word for "spiritual delusion".
@@LadyMaria Ahhh so its prelest that @DaveBartosiewicz hasn't asked black converts or converts that have had dreams and revelation. I was thinking the same thing. Its almost like he's never felt the spirit or read the bibles description of the Holy Spirit. I'm new here.
@@ancientanswers No. It's prelest to think any of you, regardless of race, have had actual revelations including your Joseph Smith.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved!!!! There is no other Way!!!! Salvation is NOT dependent on anything but His finished work on the cross!!!! Jesus plus NOTHING is EVERYTHING! Jesus plus ANYTHING is NOTHING! Belief is NOT just a mental assent, it is a conviction of having lived a life of rebellion against a holy God and being repulsed for having done so, and turning to Jesus, fully God and fully man, for forgiveness by fully trusting He took on God's wrath for my sin so I may live and live abundantly in Him!!!! Jesus in my place!!!! That's the gospel in four words!!!! Come as you are with all your filthy rags fully committed to Him!!!! He will transform you to be more like Him throughout your life AFTER He saves you. Don't try cleaning up your life on your own. That's the religion of human achievement. It's useless.
Saw the question. Depends upon ones interpretations and beliefs. It is hard to get past Greek Orthodoxy and Latin Roman Catholicism to know the Jewish mind of Yeshua the Anointed One.
I'm leaving Orthodoxy, was a mormon my whole life- (25 years) Tired of trying to figure out the truth, finding out mormonism wasn't true shattered my reality. I'm all sorts of messed up now.
I am so sorry. I hope you maintain your personal relationship with Christ. I truly do.
Brother, I know how hard your journey can be...especially finding out about Mormonism after being born into it. It is such an all-encompassing lifestyle that everything in your reality has been built around and on. Please don't give up. The truth has been in the Bible all along, you can put your faith in it. You can dig in every direction, and you will not find the things you found with the LDS.
I was a Mormon for 41 years it was shattering to find out it wasn’t true. But because I had a relation ship w Jesus I was lead to the true Jesus and it was so freeing! I truly pray you have found Him and found the kind of freedom he can only give! God bless you
Brother your pain hurts my soul! I understand how difficult it is to find out something is a lie. I was Protestant most of my life and found out it was all a lie, but I embraced Orthodoxy and it has renewed me.
I promise you it is not difficult, you won’t have to spend countless of time trying to “figure out” what is the Truth. God is merciful and knows our weakness, that’s why He gave us Church History that is clear to see where the Truth is. If you are willing, I would love to speak with you and private and hear out your frustrations and pain and offer any help that I can. I promise you the answer is not difficult and that it is Orthodoxy. Be patient brother, God loves you and He feels your pain.
@@NoeticInsightMy husband also left Mormonism for Holy Orthodoxy. There's many who have. It's a beautiful blessed thing.