How can you be sure you have faith in the right thing?

I was born and raised in a christian home. To this day my parents remain "strong christians" of the nazarene variety. Haveing just left home and finished my first year of college, I've obviously come to to question many of the things I allways held as givens. I enjoy drinking and smoking pot, both of which I do almost everyday. Going to partys all the time my parents have begun to "worry that I'm making wrong decisions" and try to to stop me from going to these partys, which causes some pretty big fights. They desperatly want me to except their religon and be christian and give up all my friends and the things that I like. But I can't bring myself to stop smoking and drinking because I can't see myself being a hermit sitting in my basement never having fun or meeting people. I desperatly love my parents and it hurts me to know that I'm hurting them by choseing the lifestyle I have. But, I can't live my life to please them, I have to live it for myself. Every single night before I go to bed I ask God to reveal himself to me, to show me he is real, and every morning I wake up with nothing, no sign. I can't help but think "this is my parents perspective on the world, but theres a million other perspectives out there, who's to say that the buddhists, or the muslims, or the Jews dont have it right?" Im sure all those religons believe they're right just as much as my parents believe that christianity is right. My father tells me I just need to have faith, but faith is blindly believeing that something is right no matter what anyone says. If your blindly believeing in something, couldn't you be completely wrong and not even realize it? I want to have faith but how do I know I have faith in the right thing? If God really wants me to follow him why won't he just reveal himself? I desperatly love my parents and it kills me to see them in pain because of my unbelief,but not wanting to hurt my parents just isn't enough to commit my life to something. I'm utterly confused and in need of some help, I just dont know where to find it and if it comes how can I really trust it? I just wnt to do the right thing for myself.

 

You know what, I felt the same way. I often wondered who is to say who is right? I asked why is it that so many religions say "it's our way or no way". Then in prayer I came to the realization that religion in itself is man made as is the term religion. I am a Christian by biblical terms. I follow Christ and do my best to live my life according to His teachings. Do I still sin? Yes I do. I am a cig smoker, an occasional drinker, known to have watched porn, had a drug addiction at one point, had pre marital sex, cursed my parents and oh man the list can go on and on. Will I ever be perfect? No. Do I ask God to forgive me of my sins constantly? Yes I do. The important thing is when you ask forgivnes that you truely mean it. Unfortuatly life is hard. I myself have been in situations where I had been before and knew I was doing wrong, yet I gave into the sin for those few seconds of pleasure. Jesus still forgives me and I do my best to not make the mistakes again. It's not like I go out and say "ooo I am gonna do this because I know it's wrong but it's ok cause God will forgive me". Yesterday is gone and tomorrow isn't here. Today is what matters. I know it is tough. I know that hearing the phrase "you just have to have faith" can get frustrating. However, if you go by The Bible, and do your best to live as God wants you to live, your answers will come to you. I don't think God will pop up in front of you and say "This is how it is" but I do think He has put things in your life to try and show you. This truly is a very touchy subject. I can only pray for you and pray that you find your answers. I can give you this though, a lot of answers to your questions are found in The Bible. Pray for guidence as you read the scriptures. Ask the Lord to give you the wisdom you need to live through life. Dedicate your life to Him, not a religion. He will show you what you need to know. Nobody is perfect, and you nor I will never be perfect. But we can certainly try to live our lives as best we can following The Word of God and through prayer. I pray this helps you. I really do.

 

I don't think I could explain it better than Real American did.

 

You're looking for God in the wrong place. While I've never met you to verify this, chances are you're not going to be canonised, and chances are you're not one of those God loves so much that you are to experience a Paul-like conversion experience. Opperate under the assumption that you are not so special that God will reveal himself to you in a dream, on a cloud, and surrounded by blinding lights and choirs of angels. When you think about it, do you really deserve to see God?

Try to look for God revealing Himself to you in everyday experiences. After all, the only reason your having these experiences is because He created them, and that He even created them so that you would be able to enjoy them. You have to learn to love God in a way of which He is worthy, and in this task we are all still learners, every human being upon this earth.

The remarkable thing about faith is that, given time, the faithful can dispell and conquer anything that contradicts faith. Granted this, how can faith possibly be wrong? Faith is a conscious choice; it is a leap by which we entrust outselves to the unknown, something which reason suggests is not there, but your own feelings, your own subjective experience, suggests otherwise.

It's not blindly believing; it's seeing with your heart.

 

its real tricky bro. and the world revolves around the struggle. the devil is everywhere, and when you run from him in one place, he's gonna be waiting where ever you run to. but to answer the subject question. you cant know if you have faith in the right thing, they call it faith because its not based on fact, its based on intuition.

 

BuddyBuds,

"I can't help but think "this is my parents perspective on the world, but theres a million other perspectives out there, who's to say that the buddhists, or the muslims, or the Jews dont have it right?" Im sure all those religons believe they're right just as much as my parents believe that christianity is right. My father tells me I just need to have faith, but faith is blindly believeing that something is right no matter what anyone says. If your blindly believeing in something, couldn't you be completely wrong and not even realize it? I want to have faith but how do I know I have faith in the right thing?"

-In religion there is either one true God or no God at all. Most people and even most Christians don't understand that Christianity is not Blind faith. This known by the many proofs (prophetic, scientifical, and archaeological) of the Bible that conclude it was inspired by God. This book is unique. There are no other books like it. Simply, the Bible is what seperates Christianity from all other religions. No other book predicts future events before they happen and I am not talking about the end-times I'm talking about events predicted and then fulfilled. No other book has scietifical knowledge written before it was even discovered such as the earth is round. And stories that were once thought as myths such as the Red Sea Crossing are know confirmed as true as archaeologist are discovering artifacts described in the Bible.

If you are trully seeking God here is a good start. On this website is a good testimony that relates to you.

Proof of the Bible...
http://r-campbell34.tripod.com/proof

The fact is there is so much evdidence that points that the Bible is true that it almost takes more faith to reject the Bible. Now, there will be scoffers who will try to discredit these proofs but they never get anywhere. I yet have heard anyone close to to prooving the Bible wrong. People will say that I only look at things that are positve towards Christianity but I have looked at all their sites and I proove them wrong. Infact that is how I found this forum-through an athiest website. The reason why people are so harsh against Christianity is because they hate to be under God's regulations. Most people do not even want to know the truth but they will go to great heights to try to prove it wrong. So don't be suprised when you see 10 rebuttles against what I have just told you. Here is what Jesus said: "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first."

 

BuddyBuds,

"I also have trouble beliving that through all the years since the bibles creation that no corrupt church leader destroyed the true bible and put forth his own instead. How would we ever know?"

Answer: The Dead Sea Scrolls


What are the Dead Sea Scrolls and why are they important?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a large number of manuscripts which have been found in a series of caves in the general area site of the ruins of the desert community of Qumran. Qumran was a settlement in the steep and arid hills at the Northwest end of the Dead Sea. Although there is some argument from scholars, most believe that Qumran was a community of Essenes, an ascetic sect of Jews who were waiting for the Messiah and who had rejected the priesthood in Jerusalem. It is believed that at least partly due to the upheavals at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, these manuscripts were carried to a number of caves in the general area of Qumran and eventually abandoned there.

The "scrolls" are a number of complete scrolls as well as many fragments and even some manuscripts on copper and other materials. They contain many of the writings of the Essenes and other Jewish sects, including a number of apocalyptic and theological treatises. Most significantly for Christians, the scrolls include a large number of fragments and even some complete scrolls of Old Testament. This is very significant because before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known manuscripts of the Old Testament in Hebrew were from AD 900 and later. The oldest complete manuscript was the Leningrad Old Testament manuscript form the eleventh century.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are manuscripts from about 250BC to around AD 50. This moves the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament back over one thousand years, spanning as much as two-thirds of the time from when some of the books were written and the oldest previous available manuscript.

In general, the Dead Sea Scrolls are very similar to the Masoretic Text, which is the oldest previously available text. In most cases in which they differ from the Masoretic Text, they bear similarity to the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament which was done in the third and second centuries BC.

The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they provide strong support for the belief that our present text of the Hebrew Old Testament is very similar to the original writings, giving us even greater confidence that we have the very words of God. For further reading go to the article A Remarkable Collection in the article section of the web site(http://www.evidenceforchristianity.org/Pages/Q84.htm)

 

Campbell, I love you man. The more and more I read your posts the more and more I want to learn. Awsome.

BuddyBuds:

Read this article, it will clear up a lot.

http://www.apologeticsinfo.org/papers/trustworthinessofthebible.html

 

Yeah I can tell you and Campbell will be great friends. You can trade completely meaningless links devoid of evidence about 'Why the Bible is Truth' all day...


PS: I followed your link and saw no evidence. Only speculation.

 

"When are you people going to learn? It's not about who's right or wrong. No denomination's nailed it yet, and they never will because they're all too self-righteous to realize that it doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith. Your hearts are in the right place, but your brains need to wake up."- Serindipity

 

Naw, I was replyin to the original guy to, not tryin to refute ya or anythin.

 

That's your problem. You want to be special; you want God to reveal Himself to you and make all your problems and doubts go away. If you can't get passed the idea that a God who doesn't make Himself known to you isn't real, then you'll never find faith.

 

Yeah, Dogma does have lots of good quotes like that. I like that movie a lot, and even though I'm not a Christian, that movie actually made me LEARN while I was watching it.

 

Good, then you know the basics, you have the raw materials for real understanding.

It is good to question your beliefs. Really questioning your faith is not the same thing at all as abandoning it or trying to destroy it. It is a search to find the deeper meaning of your faith. And I guarantee you, your faith means something.

Just become really good at asking good questions. The best questions are those that suggest a better, more complete answer every time you ask. A couple of my favorites are: What is the essential nature of reality? What do all of the religions, what do all people, what does everything have in common? When two entities circle one another (a common relationship) what is at the center of the circle?

I have more questions than these, of course, but hopefully these give you the idea.

I don't know if you remember those "magic eye" pictures that were kind of popular about ten years ago. They looked like nothing, like a bunch of random dots, like a still frame from a television set when the cable has gone out. But when you relaxed your eyes and learned to look at it just so . . . a 3-D image would emerge that was as real as your eyeballs.

Experiencing God is kind of like that. When it happens (and for you I believe it probably will happen) the experience is so powerful, vivid, mind/soul/reality altering that there is no doubt that what you are "seeing" is as real as you are, maybe even more real than you are.

But, like any powerful experience (true love, an epiphany, a profound artistic experience, or even just sex, drugs and rock and roll) the actual experience is never what you imagined it to be before you had it. If you are insist on seeing, for example, Charlton Heston in a white robe, or Alanis Morisette in a tutu and a circus master's jacket, then you risk not seeing what really IS there.

Faith is the choice to believe that the unknown is worth knowing. Real faith (which is not necessarily blind) is a response to something sensed but not yet known.

I wouldn't advise blind faith in anything. Most things that you can really get into have a limited amount of "deeper meaning." At one time or another, I have thoroughly gotten into (and still participate on a more than normal level) Baseball (GO DODGERS), the music of Yes, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Bob Marley, books by J.R.R. Tolkien, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Pirsig, playing the guitar, classical realist oil painting, etc. but I am not going to assume that I need look no further for an even more complete, deeper meaning.

All of the religions offer a way to find the knowledge of God, the wisdom of God, the love of God and a way of life in harmony with the will of God.

Well, as they say, God is Love. This is the core, the root, the life, the essence of Christianity. If you know love then you have the greatest spiritual gift, the mysterious stuff of the universe, the holy man's glow.

Maybe God does reveal himself.

The good news, and the bad news, is that this confusion and helplessness will compell you to find what you are looking for. You will know you can trust it because it will feel, it will BE more than just healthy, it will be vital, like the life force itself.

And, of course, as any good mystic will tell you, it is really simple, but there is more to all of this than words can convey.

As Joseph Campbell said "I don't have to have faith, I have experience."

Peace and Love

 

This is what i think. Every other religion or philosphy out there has to do with self. Self enlightenment etc. Some through strict regulations or meditation to bring yourself in higher sense of being. But it all has to do with self. While christianity has to do the Jesus. You put your faith in him and he the one who does the work through you. Has nothing to do with self. You have to surrender yourself. Which is the hardest thing one can possibly do. To surrender ones self.

 

I try to sin every day.

You know what else is fun? Mooning people. Just try it. Moon your friends. Moon your neighbors. It's so much fun!

And if you want to have faith in the right thing... Serve others selflessly and you will find God (and your faith) in their eyes.

 

Self Indulgence isn't a sin?

Proverbs 21:17: "He who loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich."

Provers 23:21: "For drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."

Proverbs 23:30: "Those who linger over wine. Who go to sample bowls of mixed wine. Do not gaze at wine when it is red. When it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly. In the end it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper."

Isaiah 5:11: "Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks; who stay up late at night until they are inflammed with wine. They have harps and lyres at their banquets, tambourines and flutes and wine, but they have no regard for the deeds of the Lord."

Luke 21:34: "Be careful or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness, and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you unexpectedly like a trap."

Galations 5:13: "Do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature"

Galations 5:16: "So I say, live by the Spirit and you will not not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the spirit."

Ephesians 5:18: "Do not get drunk on wine which leads to debauchery."

Your body is a temple. God's holy spirit wants to live in a clean temple. Not one that is full of smoke and alcohol.

 

Nothing to excess.
(would that include quoting the bible?)

 

Epiphany... I still don't see where it calls it a sin. Your quotes say it would be best to avoid it. They say it's hard to get ahead with your head full of wine. It doesn't say it's a sin and Jesus' first miracle was making wine. Hmmmm...

Overindulgence is self destructive. But enjoying all that has been given is no sin. God gave us the garden to eat from whatever we wish... except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... or judgement. That is for him to determine and if you are taking his place on this I suggest you'll have to answer for it.