Jesus was kind, this was from the link you provided, and so should we be kind.
Precisely!
The kindest thing you could do for an evil person is to make sure they know that they are God's enemy and that they will eventually lose their battle against Him in a very permanent and unfriendly way.
No one ever ask to be saved who didn't know they were lost.
Only by God's grace, mercy and forgiveness can we be saved. I doubt there are a handful of people who deserve salvation though their own merit.
There is a very exact number of people who deserve salvation through their own merit.
That number is exactly zero.
Jesus died for sinners; why would he need to die for the just?
There are none who are just. There are some who are less unjust than others but none who are without the need for a savior.
None of us can judge in the way that our Lord will judge.
Why add the phrase "in the way that"?
What does that phrase mean? We are repeatedly commanded not only to judge others but to do so with "righteous judgment" ((John 7:24). Is that not the way God judges?
Of course, God has far more information that we have access to and He is infinitely more intelligent and wise than we are but that only alters the content of the judgement not the manner in which it was carried out.
If we have been wronged, then we are asked to forgive them in the same way that we want God to forgive us, The Lord's Prayer.
The Lord's prayer doesn't utter one single syllable about forgiving people the way we WANT other to forgive us. The phrase you are referring to make our forgiveness contingent upon our having forgiven others. A principle that applies under the Law, not under grace. Under grace you have already been forgiven because you turned toward God and asked for that forgiveness and believed that Jesus died to pay the sin debt that you owe and that God raised Him from the dead.
The biblical principle being that forgiveness is offered when there is repentance. The bible does not teach in either the Old Testament or the New that we are to offer blanket forgiveness to anyone who wrongs us whether they've repented or not. That is foolishness of the highest order. It makes a mockery of justice and cheapens Christ death to the point of worthlessness because if we are allowed to forgive the unrepentant, why wasn't God allowed to the same? Where then is the need for Christ to die if forgiveness is offered for nothing?
I don't condone evil, I know we have to repent, it's hard enough to change ourselves, I am not sure what influence we have over others.
Well, there are two points here...
First, if you are talking about repentance in the sense that you cannot be forgiven of sin until you stop sinning, then once again, you have placed yourself under the law and you might as well start calling yourself a Messianic Jew rather than a Christian. For the Christian, repentance is the act of acknowledging that you are a sinner and are worthy of eternal separation from the Father (i.e. worthy of death) and as a result of that realization, asking God to apply the shed blood of Christ to your account and to give you newness of life by virtue of His resurrection. That is what it means to repent under the dispensation of grace. If you have done that then you are forgiven. You are hidden in Christ and none of your sins can justly be held against you because they have already been held against Christ.
Secondly, God is far more interested in what He is doing in you than what is being done through you. In many cases, the two are the very same thing but not always. Always place the priority on what God is doing in your own heart and the fruit of the Spirit will come on its own.
All the law of God hangs and depends on the two greatest commandments, if we could live fully by the greatest commandments, we would not need any other law.
There is no other law and you do not need those two! The rest of the Mosaic Law is not based on those two laws they are those two laws. There are some 600 laws or so in the Mosaic Law and they are all summed up by the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are likewise summed up by the two laws you are so hung up on. The point being that it's all the same thing. The Law is the Law. It doesn't matter if you're talking two or two hundred!
James 2:10 For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.
There are many definitions of love in the Bible, and yours wasn't one of them.
Of course it is. It doesn't use those words but it communicates the same concepts. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is just another way of saying the same thing.
And it isn't my definition anyway! It is THE definition! Words mean things, Eric. No one asked me what the definition of love should be and I don't get a vote. Love is what it is. The fact that I can articulate that meaning doesn't mean I get any credit toward having defined it.
I said I liked your definition of love, but if you are going to come back with remarks like this, so be it. We are asked to love and pray for our enemies, and presumably enemies are people who have harmed us or done evil.
I didn't suggest you didn't like it, I said that you'd have never come up with it. And that's the truth and you know it!
The definition as I articulated it is entirely consistent with every precept you can discuss that has anything to do with biblical love. If you think otherwise then you ought not have liked my definition and instead offered a rebuttal that showed how it is in someway unbiblical.
Is that what you tell the mirror?
You stupid, foolish hypocrite! Do you even pay a single bit of attention to even your own posts?!!!
If you ever say another word like this to me, it'll be the last thing you ever say to me that I'll ever read. I DO NOT suffer fools well and I tolerate hypocrites even less. You will not get another warning. If you want to permanently end any possibility of discussing anything with me then all you've got to do is say anything even slightly similar to this again.
Clete
