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Originally Posted by zeek
She was in the LRC for years without sensing [or thinking she sensed as the case may be] God's presence? That's amazing! Why would she stay? Of course, if she made the right noises she would have no problem being accepted.
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She is a simple woman with a pure heart; sincere, naive, and uneducated. She trusts everything that "more educated and knowledgeable" brothers and sisters tell her. So she just enjoys the meetings, messages, and mingling with saints. That is her way of "enjoying the Lord". BTW, she is Chinese, but I don't think it's the main factor here. The problem is that she does not know any other ways to "contact" the Lord. In the LRC (at least in my locality), prayer is not a dialog, conversation with God, but rather a mantra, authoritative command, and a vain repetition with a loud voice. But as I said earlier, my mother-in-law still loves God and, probably, more than I do. "Blessed are the pure in heart".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
I had a dramatic, life-changing, never-forgetting experience of salvation regeneration while all alone in my bedroom. It was like no "dose" I had ever had before, and I had been "dosed" up for a long time.
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Ohio, I have read about similar experiences like yours. So I find your story credible.
I want to share Anthony Bloom's testimony that always inspires me: "Up to my middle teens I was an unbeliever and very aggressively anti-church. I knew no god; I wasn’t interested and hated everything connected with the idea of God. Later, I began to look for meaning in life. Studying and making oneself useful for life didn’t convince me at all. As a member of a Russian youth organization I was talked into listening to a presentation by a priest. The presentation made me more indignant and angry. I immediately went home and asked my Mother for a book of the Gospel. I counted chapters looking for the shortest one and started reading St. Mark. While I was reading the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I suddenly became aware that on the other side of my desk there was a presence. And the certainty was so strong that it was Christ standing there that it has never left me. This was the real turning point because Christ was alive and I had been in His presence. I could say with certainty that what the Gospel said about the crucifixion of the prophet of Galilee was true. History I had to believe, the Resurrection I knew for a fact. It began as an event that left all problems of disbelief behind because it was a direct and personal experience.” He saw nothing. He heard nothing. He just became aware of God's presence. This was neither a sensory hallucination nor a trance-like state, nor even the product of emotions. It was an encounter experienced with complete sobriety and equilibrium. Anthony Bloom used to say about this event that “God for me became a fact.”
I believe God must become a fact for every Christian, not just be a theory or an abstract idea. But this happens only through personal relationship of man and God. I don't know if God was a fact for WL, but I believe that in the LRC, God is rather an abstract principle than a fact. They are too busy with God's plan, God's church, and God's economy that they don't have time to establish a personal relationship with God himself.
“We should try to live in such a way that if the Gospels were lost, they could be re-written by looking at us.” (Anthony Bloom)