The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum The Spirit's Sealing - another look

No Tom, for me you communicated your thoughts quite clearly. In fact, they express my own thoughts as well. That experiences will come and go is something many of us can say for ourselves. When they have come, at least those which were "good ones", our experiences are said to have been pleasant, joyful, comforting, etc. And, to be honest and faithful, there are those times when those experiences have brought great pain, sorrow, conviction, shame, guilt, etc. Can these be quickly dismissed as not coming from God due to their "negative" nature?

But the question always remains, "Which experience is truly from or of God?" We know "all things work for good to those who love God and who are [the] called according to His purpose." In that sense, everything we experience is due to God's providence. The less than "positive" experiences the old writers used to refer to as "dark providences", which I am a little more than reluctant to accept as a term to describe the providence of God for His elect (cf. Heb 12).

Lastly, I am NOT... and I'm certain neither are you... espousing an emotionless, non-experimental Christianity. This is hardly the case. All I am defending against is the tendency of so many in our day to seek after some ethereal, mystical, 'spiritual', experience of God vs. believing and walking by faith those things which are to be found objectively in God's inspired written Word. Did not our first conviction of sin come from the reading/hearing of the Gospel? Did not that Gospel, the message of the Bible, reveal Christ as altogether lovely? Was it not the Word of God that told us that Christ is willing to save all who would come to Him? Was it not Christ in the Scriptures who beckoned us to come and Who embraced us in all our filthiness? And in all this, was there not an emotional experience, even a great emotional experience in having found Christ and being embraced by Him and knowing that God was no longer our enemy nor He ours and that we were adopted as His sons due to His everlasting love for us? But we didn't SEEK after the result of our salvation, but rather salvation itself. The Spirit works in all of us in different ways experimentally, but always by the same Word, the same truth.