[font="arial][size="2"]What I've discovered here, as on other Christian forums, is that those who do the most changing of their mind are those who had relied the most on men's doctrines outside God's Word which men playing religion have imparted to them instead of God's Truth in His Word which is simplicity.
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Mmmm..
So it sounds like people who change their minds are weaker in their faith than people who find the simple truth of God and latch onto it.
If this is the case, then how do you know if your simple truth is the same simple truth of the gospel and not man's opinion?
Seems to me that as soon as you read and process anything from the Bible, it takes on some opinion, unless it is simply used to parrot back without thought. All we can have is on opinion about truth - only God can actually generate truth.
Someone in a constant state of change about what they believe shows they have yet to come to the Truth in God's Word, but are still seeking what is Truth, whether they want to admit it or not.
What I have noticed about the people who change their minds completely about any truth (one example is my sister - one day she is a Baptist - and in her mind has always been a Baptist, the next week she is a Pentecostal) have not processed the truth they have encountered in order to form an opinion about it. Therefore, the truth is never understood and remains like the seed planted in rocky soil and is easily disregarded and replaced.
God's Word is not a Book of opinion, nor a Book of man's philosophy.
Agreed - same with all God's creation; but if we do not know what the ocean is (for example) because we are not allowed to understand it (process it in our minds and form an opinion about it) how it is going to become apart of our experience? It cannot - it simply remains an object with a name. Wheat is good, but it cannot used by the body if it is not processed and turned into eatable food - bread is an opinion an expression of wheat; just like our opinion of scripture is the usable form and expression of God's Word. The problem I have with your idea is that it seems to be promoting an anti-intellectualism position - that somehow, we need to only be able to parrot back God's Word, in an unprocessed form (if that were even possible) and if we stray from a perfect performance of regurgitating the pure Word, it would be tarnished and become simply "man's opinion", without any resemblance of God's Truth. In my opinion, your position is perfectionistic in theory and impossible to achieve in practice; and finally, even if it was possible, it would not be useful.
There is no other form of literature on earth like God's Holy Writ. It is The Living Word of God, and reveals new things daily for every generation that believes.
I disagree. If we are not allowed to think about it and form an opinion about it, God's Word ends up being treated like a dead doctrine with nothing to offer but an arcane, memorized, snap shot of an event in history that ended 2000 years ago. Here is an interesting example; the Amish read from a Bible that is written in an ancient form of their own language (sort of like us reading Beowulf), which they can parrot back perfectly, but cannot understand. This practice, which was instituted to protect, ended up becoming totally useless - the irony is that they first translated their version from the Vulgate because their ancestors realized that the Latin was not accessible to the common person.
Those new things revealed may seem to be about change, but it is not. It's about the continued revealing of God's Plan of Salvation. New prophecies will be revealed and come to pass until Christ's second coming, and even leading into God's Eternity. But His Salvation will ever be the same.
All requiring thought and processing, to be understood and useful.