I'm glad we've had so much discussion on repentance, faith, sacrifice, obedience, and works. However, I have an honest and harmless question that I don't feel I've been given a straight answer to.
I believe my question is important for several reasons. If you don't agree my question to be important or necessary you are invited to ignore it.
For those who may have the mental bandwidth to consider my question with the knowledge and understanding of the scriptures as proof, please do answer the question:
How do we know if one is saved or is living in salvation or not? How can we tell even if we don't know this person's deeds? What do the scriptures of both the Old and New Testament say on this question?
[emoji119]?It is through Him that we live, move, and have our being![emoji119]?
With all due respect, you seem to be trying to generate attention and lack regard for good answers you've already been given. It's intuitively obvious the Holy Spirit is not discerned in other people by any physical sense. God does not put a Hindu dot on anybody's forehead. Just as we are not omniscient to see the future, as is the Lord, we are neither omniscient to discern the hearts of others as God can. Again, the Bible has stated by our confession and our fruits, though, even in these things, there is no certainty in short order, since these things can be feigned, the way an emotionally dead sociopath feigns, mimics, emotions, the best of them able to fool everybody, for a time, anyway.
Bottom line, you can't and will never have God's sure and explicit knowledge of the hearts of others, and you are not, therefore, to summarily judged anybody's salvation, even be seeking to, as ultimate judgement is God's, alone. You're just barking at the wind, ostensibly seeking some sort of nonexistant litmus paper that reads invisible spirits, and, if others here lack mental breadth, why don't you, who one must presume has mental breadth wide as a river others lack (to offer that criticism of everybody else), and if you're not the usual message board legend in your own mind, please spit out how you run into somebody in the produce aisle of the supermarket and determine their salvation. I'm void such mental bandwidth and need real help, then. Has it however briefly crossed your mind you're filled with criticism of answers you received, offering nothing, nada, yourself? I, for one, am dying to see some expansive bandwidth around here, would often settle for just a little real spirituality or human decency.
In that vein, as painful as it must be for you, it couldn't hurt to give some people who've gone to the trouble of giving you some good and scriptural answers a little thank you. Or is that not in your "Christian" bandwidth? Lastly, if you want Old Testament answers, don't ask questions about New Testament Christianity.
