Hi Grail,
Interesting post.
"The practice of Loving God and loving one another will reduce the sin in your life."
A "sure thing".
You make a good point here:
"you are liable to step on real sins trying to avoid fake sins."
Some of us can get so caught up in what "real" sinning truly is. Like one brother of mine, he has said something to the effect of 'I feel like I've already sinned 10 times between the time my eyes open, and my feet hit the floor". It seems attitude has a lot to do with this kind of thinking. He hadn't acted on the thoughts, or lied there and fed them, he had them only for a moment.
I understand him very well as he and I both have some of the same issues, lol...we can condemn ourselves over a thought that just flitted out of ...nowhere? Ha.
But, He that began a good work in us is faithful.....!!
There ya go.
Self condemning can lead to problems on several levels. For one if your beating yourself up it is easy to condemn others.
Misery loves company.
A lot of Christians have grown up with the hellfire and brimstone form of preaching that looks for ways to condemn others to glorify themselves....its the same old story....the Jewish leaders pretty much did the same thing.
Us menz have our ways, you can look at history. Did they make it a sin not to help one another? A sin not to do Good Deeds? NO! Your "rightness" is based on what you do not do. It is a lazy man's religion, you can practice it from a closet. LOL it is, but it is not an exaggeration. It is called monasticism and asceticism, part of Christian history. Some of these guys swore of women...heck the world, and lived in the desert, caves, trees, graveyards, and towers....sort of taking it to the crazy level.
It gets to be a long story...a little morbid, since Christ suffered and said not to be of the world....they figured that Christ wanted us to suffer and deny ourselves the pleasures of life...so some whipped themselves and each other as they sung hymns. Some wore torture devices under their clothes, slept on rocks and ate rancid food and of course women, sex, and nudity were dirty, nasty, and sinful....I will stop there because the Christian witch hunts and inquisitions took it to a whole new level of insanity.
We worked out way out of most of that but we replaced it with an on going list of fake sins. It is not that hard to know and understand Christian sins. Common sense goes along way but some see common sense as anti-religious. This thread would be a good place to discuss what we should do and not do as Christians. Love God and love one another...
If you love one another you are not going to murder one another.
If you love one another you are not going to have sex with someone's wife.
If you love one another you are not going to steal from one another.
If you love one another you will be kind to one another.
Sex and relationships is a matter of respect for yourself and your partner.
Same goes for drinking, you can harm yourself and others with drunkenness.
If you love God you will know that coming together and worshipping God and singing praises to God is as important as telling Him your troubles.
Beyond this there are deviances and with this it gets more complicated, most of these deviances have connections to sexuality and most are addressed in the scriptures. The LGBTQ community practices most of these deviances. And this is the point of contention with a growing number of Christian groups. They consider biblical morality as unfair and cruel. Along with this is drug use and certainly part of, but not limited to, the LGBTQ community and subculture. Biblically the topic is cut and dry...but for me it is a matter of common sense...it is dangerous. These people are "not after"....older people....they are after our young. By "after" I do not mean just physically, but also culturally. To do this they have to demean biblical and social morals, our culture, and our history...ergo the cancel culture initiatives. They are tired of being the dregs of society. They want it to be religiously and socially acceptable and a norm to be LGBTQ and take drugs. For Christianity this is the driving force for OSAS. They want to be accepted in Christianity, they want to think they can do what they want and go to heaven. So they develop beliefs that say that if you believe in Christ you can do all of this and still go to heaven. Dangerous because it is a path to hell, and dangerous because the LGBTQ community is not after old people to have sex with and the drug community is not after old people to hang out and do drugs with, they are after our young. That is why they target colleges.
One of the problems with this is that being LGBTQ or taking drugs does not make you successful. So they have to live in a society, that has social programs for financial support and is very lenient to crime....they do not want go to prison. This is all part of the democrat approach to government.
There are other deviances...some of it has been on the rise for years. You are going see a reduction of prosecution and imprisonment of child molesters and child trafficking. The push for this will be from the democrat side of the government. There is an increase effort to prosecute human trafficking but that is because these people have a tendency to target young adults that do drugs. The democrats are not going to come down on drugs so these are their people that are being targeted, so that is a concern for them.
Mostly Christianity is in fact about common sense...I know that common sense is a bad concept in some Christian groups. Opposing human reasoning....LOL...humans that do not reason...is that a good thing?
I say common sense is salvation through Christ...then be good and do good.
