I do think I see one thing I can relate to and somewhat understand in what you said in your post, and it’s a very new thing for me so I would not have been able to relate at all except for very recently. It’s when you say you asked God about sanctification and all your desire to sin left you.
I had recently said to God, I have struggled to trust You more these 14 years. I have insisted on trust even when people thought I was a weirdo for it and I didn’t care what they thought. My entire being was focused on trusting You more and more and it filled my whole world. But I lack love and I see trust is not enough. Faith is not enough. I am so filled with all these resentments and angers just like everyone else, even the people I know who don’t trust You at all. I hate myself and I hate them as well, we are all intolerable. If I, who trust You, have the same lack of love as those who don’t trust you at all, what is the point of anything? I see that I lack love and I see that it will never be in me unless You give it to me. I want to flee others and I want to flee myself. I do not have love so I can’t love others and I hate myself every bit as much as I hate everyone else.
Soon after, I realized my passions, angers and resentments were somehow knocked out. Someone would do or say something awful, ugly, unfair and I would hold back these tears until after they’d gone. I could not figure out what the tears were about since I wasn’t angry or resentful at how they’d acted. It took me awhile to figure out that what I was feeling with the tears was pity.I was crying because I pitied them seeing as how they were still being tossed around by their passions when He had somehow let me escape mine.
But I think I can see we both received the same gift, miracle, mercy. I would explain it as not being ruled by my passions any more, which I think might be the same thing as your “ no desire to sin.” I am not aware of any great outward sins I was stuck in but inwardly, I was murdering everyone over and over again for their pettinesses, their selfishnesses, their lack of care for me even though I was the same way as them. And you asked God about sanctification, I asked Him for love, but what He gave us seems to be the same thing. I don’t know if it is love, this pity for others still in that captivity. I kind of think it isn’t...but I don’t know.
But we differ on whether we were trusting God, however imperfectly, or had eternal life before our passions were calmed. I was trusting Him and asking for what I saw I lacked. I could see He was saving me every day, leading me every day, teaching me about what was right, teaching me the obedience of trust by the things I suffered. I just couldn’t do what was right even though I knew it was right. I could not. My passions would not allow it. My passions were the enemies in the land.
My main concern is to build up the trust of others rather than making them sad or defeated, seeing as how such great good came to me by learning to radically trust rather than worry and by asking for what I saw I lacked. How could I not want this great blessing for them or fail to encourage them to lay aside worries for trust? If they are growing in trust, they are doing the one thing God has asked of them and HE is the one growing it. So it’s very easy to see He is saving them every day, so why would anyone say to them, you are not saved until your passions are subdued or until your trust is grown huge. And if they have received a down payment of Gods Spirit and are being led into the hard things they suffer to grow their trust, I think some could be sidetracked by your saying one is not being saved by God and being kept by God until they no longer sin in their hearts. I would just like you to reconsider the babies and not discourage them and I am writing this last part with tears and hope that you might consider those still weak in their trust.
