Dear Howard:<br><br>I tend to agree with you. I believe that it is possible to hold to Armenian views in the mind, for a while, following true conversion, as I did, particularly if that is what one has been taught and never exposed to the true Gospel, which is only found summarized in the doctrines of grace. <br><br>However, I must say that at the same time as I held to these Arminian views, at least tenuously in my mind, the Lord, by His Spirit, had caused me to seriously doubt my salvation through a decision for Christ and a prayer of acceptance and so on and so on. He taught me that I was a sinner, and that there was an eternity facing me of uncertain nature and that I needed a saviour and that I wanted Him to assure me of it, not any man or any doctrinal camp or any church or preacher any thing, or any one, else. When I read several years later that this is exactly how Bunyan's pastor advised all of his flock it rang as pure truth in my ears.<br><br>I was so sick of my own error and the errors I had been taught that I wanted to hear it from the lips of the Saviour, in my ear of faith, and I contend, that though I knew it not at the time, it was His Spirit and His Spirit only that created my desire for His testimony in my soul, and Who wouldn't let me rest with anything short of it. He brought many scriptures with power that testified to me of the correctness of this position, in spite of the myriad teachings to the contrary in the religious community by the most educated and seemingly pious of men. <br><br>Eventually He revealed Himself with power to my soul and at the same time, placed a specific inner conviction that this work and all true work was a sovereign work of Him. This was made crystal clear to me, and though I didn't know it at the time, from that point on I was a believer in the doctrines of grace. He did this long before I heard the doctrines of grace taught. But, when I did hear them I recognized them instantly to be the pure truth of God and the encapsulation of key scripture and my own experience of same.<br><br>He also subsequently brought emminant men who testified extensively to these same things, men like Calvin, Edwards, Owen, Philpot, Huntington, and Bunyan. <br><br>I am aware of the nuances and varied paths that the Lord leads His elect children down and that one has to be careful in how one evaluates individual experience, but I believe that it is highly unusual if not impossible for one to accept a Christ that he hasn't been humbled enough to see his true desperate need for, and to then have been shown the divine beauty of, two aspects of scriptural experience I trace all over the Old and New Testament. <br><br>I believe also, contrary to the teachings of men like John Wesley, that part of the evidence of the new birth is a growing awarness of the pervasive, awful, devastating nature of sin and all of it's consequences, applied personally to ones life. I have heard it said that Whitefield believed that Wesley was a believer and while I greatly respect and admire Whitefield, I believe his theological expertise was in evangelism, not sanctification. As such, how Wesley could have persisted in his error, and not have been shown it, if only only his death bed, is beyond me. Perhaps he was shown this at some point, I have not read of his doing so however. We are also taught that, with respect to false teachers, "Ye shall know them by their fruits" and when I look at the fruit of Wesleys work in all of it's error and false teaching, I have to wonder how such a bastion of Arminian error could be called a good fruit.<br><br>These are my convictions in this regard and I guess I would have to summarize it like this. Since we are dealing with the only really important matter in time or eternity, is it not foolish to err on the side of lack of assurance of faith rather than on the side an "excess" of assurance, if indeed there can be any such thing. In other words, this isn't a game of horse shoes and close doesn't count, and since the scriptures are repleat with passages that deal with warnings about presumption and false teachers on the one hand, and "full assurance of understanding", the "witness Himself beareth witness with our spirit", "joy uspeakable and full of glory" and to "know Him and the power of His resurrection" on the other hand, I fail to see the merit in encouraging any thing less than a personal spiritual knowledge of same, divinely revealed to the soul. <br><br>Just my opinion,<br><br>Gerry
