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You write so nice!


Thank you for those kind words of encouragement. We have a great and wonderful Savior of Whom to write about and a great salvation to rejoice in!!

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I agree and notice that if Christ is drawing us He will raise us up on the last day this I believe is the covenant of promise that is threaded throughout God's word.


Just remember, a covenant is a relationship, a union of two in love and intimacy. Like all relationships, it can be broken. Our joy is that Christ never breaks His relationship with us nor walks away from us. But we do. The second great part is that when we do walk away, He sends His spirit to work on us and convict us of sin and draw us to repentance and return.

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Free will is not removed from man it is given as part of this anointing of our new birth. Actually the ability to be able to turn or repent constantly does not come from natural man's free will, but God's will and power ,only as He enables us are we capable of doing His will.


The Eastern Orthodox view is very similar. It is that we have not been made "totally depraved" as is the Calvinist paradigm, but that we have been damaged in our free will, and that damage is so bad that without God acting as the first cause in all aspects of our salvation, we would indeed never turn to Him.

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Robots could never respond to God's Love.


Indeed. And neither could the natural man unless the Holy Spirit moved first.

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I believe Job helps to explain this love in which people run from, thinking that as they follow Him into His garrison of love that they will lose what they call personal freedom. but it is in the confines of His Love that we find personal freedom.


I like the way you say this, and I have experienced this very intimately. When I was "in sin", despite my protestations that I was free, I was a slave to my "disordered passions" and they RULED OVER ME. But now I have control over these passions, and while I feel their "shadows" (which is to say, the sense of temptation), there is no substance to them.

And please believe this. I believe everything I have written to you. Now some on this board will say that what I have said is not in line with Catholic teaching, but it really is. I was surprized -- almost to the point of being shocked -- to read the statements in the Catholic Catechism which say the same thing, treating salvation as all of God and nothing of us.

In short, I THOUGHT I knew the Catholic Faith, but I really did not.

May God Bless You,

Brother Ed