Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
You said, "We must be those who live the righteousness of God."
I asked if that is what you think you are doing. Apparently not, because you admitted that you [ as part of the royal "we"] are often not good at it. If that's the case, then I submit that your righteousness is not "of God" because, as I'm sure you are aware, God is supposed to be very good at it.
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I think you are both misunderstanding me and misrepresenting what I have said (though not necessarily intentionally).
That I, and any of us, are not always and completely righteous is a given. But whether we are or are not righteous is not a matter of feelings. It is a matter of fact.
The best among us will reach the end of this part of our experience of the kingdom without ever being 100%, all the time righteous. But dismissing the righteousness we do exhibit and experience as "not of God" because we aren't as good at it as He is misrepresents things. While there is an argument that we are not righteous until we are 100% righteous, at the same time, we are called to fulfill the righteousness of the law. In this lifetime. So it must be that what we do fulfill of righteousness is righteous despite the fact that we are not 100% righteous.
If we are righteous, it is not us but Him. The only true righteousness is His righteousness. If you think that we have to be 100% before it is his righteousness, then I do not know what scripture you subscribe to. Mine says to "just do it." There are others who clutter their version with footnotes that suggest that we not bother trying until it feels right. Or to forget about reckoning yourself dead to sin because it is hard.
Studies have shown that the mental aspects of emotional and physical pain are very related. They also show that we notice and remember what is wrong or bad much more than what is normal and good. So it might be that unless we are clinically depressed, feeling bad could be a choice rather than something concrete.
I did not go through that to say feelings are irrelevant. But feelings that are not clearly tied to specific things that legitimately should create those feelings may be telling us something that is not true. We become euphoric because a group gets whipped into a frenzy. As a result we are convinced that what we hear at the time has to be right. It is associated with euphoria. On the other hand, we get taught to feel bad when anyone mentions certain things — religion, clergy, communion (rather than Lord's table), "going to church," "Sunday" — and if they say it in a meeting, the groaning from some becomes a groundswell to drive out the heretic, or bring the wayward member back to their senses and shut them up.
Surely if we cut someone off on the road we should feel bad about it. we may not have the opportunity to stop and repent to that person, but we should at least repent to God. But that does not make every case of "feeling bad" into a spiritual problem. Neither does it make every case of feeling good into evidence of a spiritual mountaintop. And it does not mean that a period of days or even weeks or months in which we do not experience some kind of emotional high or other thing that we identify as a sense of the presence of God means that he has left us.
Where can a go from your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, you're there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you're there.
Despite my admitted lack of mastery of much of anything, I believe that it is in the realization of the presence of God without "feeling it" that causes us to act as if we are children of God without having a feeling about it. To obey because we know we are called to obey. To stop hiding behind Lee's nonsense that if I don't feel it, I shouldn't do it because it somehow turns from being out of grace and into duty. You may not think of it as being from Lee, and surely there are others who teach similarly. But it is wrong. Jesus did not tell the 11 to go and disciple, baptize, and teach them to obey when they have a feeling. I think that teaching such a thing would get you "least in the kingdom" status (Matt 5:19).
Guess what. We have a duty. It was not put upon us before grace came to us. But even the grace teaches us to obey. Stories about "waiting for dispensing" or "premature light" are cop-outs for those who don't want to at least try and fail. Better to try and fail at obeying than to just say "I knew I couldn't do it, so I didn't even try. I buried the little will-power I might have had in the sand with my one talent."