Originally posted by Carbon
I don't mean to sound counter-productive, but....
Do you use religion to motivate yourself?
I mean I know that this might sound bad considering you are all religious loving people but I myself find that over essentric religion makes me wary of the person preaching it.
I don't want to put you down I'm just kinda throwing my view into the conversation and wondering if anyone else is like this?
I have a rather crazed grandmother who was very religious and another who is still alive today. They always preach about being christian and get onto me because I don't want to watch a pastor with them on TV.
I am wondering if anyone else is semi-atheist on this forum besides me?
Carbon,
I am not sure what you mean.
I don't like to "Bible-thump" because I was an atheiest and/or agnostic pretty much for 30 years and seeing a bunch of hypocrytes preach never did me any good either. This is one reason I have been careful to restrict my religious comments on a forum like this.
But the church I got to preaches about the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ which I always thought was a bunch of delusionary crap until last year.
Quickly I'll tell you this. I was not doing well in my sales job, I was about to be evicted for the first time in my life, things were not going well. A religious buddy of mine corralled me at his house one day and preached to me about how God is the answer... etc ad nauseum, I thought he was insane.
Anyway, he let me go at about 1pm with a reminder that no matter what my problem was, God could make it disappear with no effort. For months I had already conceeded there might be a God but I thought the Christians, and Jesus were probably all nuts. Nevertheless I said a prayer on my way home. I got home about 1:15pm and the phone was ringing. The short version of this is that a guy from out of state who had never met me, called me and asked if he could wire me $600 to pay my rent. He got it to me to avoid me being evicted. That being the case I negotiated to move out of my apartment and the company had a special on some Luxury Apts right next to the Church I was now involved with and we moved in there for just about free and overall the rent was cheaper because of the special. Weeks later I said a prayer after a job interview, I directly asked God for a favor. Within 30mins a Christian friend of mine called out of the blue with a lead on a job that I eventually took. It paid 150% of what I had previously been making on salary and it had benefits.
This was all within 45days of officially becoming a Christian. There is more. My son became a Christian later, his mother and I got married on a Sat and baptised the following Sunday and now I'm looking at buying a house, all within 18 months of this Christianity thing. I am a poster child for the Life-Changing reality of Jesus Christ. Honest to God I thought it was all a bunch of crap my whole life, but this rapid, unquestionable chain of events has forced me to believe that Jesus is who he said he was. There is NO WAY I had the predominant influence over these events in my life. None. They were either amazing, startling coincidences or a great run of good luck or they were miracles like the Church says they were.
Prior to all this I had already seen too many "coincidences" to believe that they were all "coincidences" anyway and now I have a new outlook.
Most recently I think the Holy Spirit encouraged me to get to camp a day late as I related and that has had and will have a direct positive impact on my Martial Arts career.
So I don't use religion to motivate me, per se, but I mean with what I have been through it is difficult not to shout Praise God every 15 mins. I am new to all of this though and while I'm not a skeptic anymore, I'm trying to do what God wants me to do and this I think is how this thread got started. It seems pretty clear to me now that my Martial Arts interest an abilities are God-given and I am being cleared to pursue them and put them to good use.
I am so greatful for MartialTalk and this thread in particular. I have been a Brown Belt for 11years. This year I joined MartialTalk partly to keep my interest alive... I competed in a tournament circuit and won 1st in Forms, 1st in Weapons and 3rd in Sparring for Central Texas and I have been invited to the State Championships.
There a flood of God trying to help me out and show me what to do and I think I'm getting the picture. It is amazing. Nothing short of amazing. My church says that somehow all my good fortune is meant to glorify God. I am still pondering about all this, but maybe someone else will see this post and get some of the shocking, dramatic, earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting evidence they need to help them out somehow.
I would never have become a Christian through "faith alone" I'm afraid. Which is how you are "supposed" to get there, it took a dramatic, powerful, undeniable intervention by Christ into my life to get me on this train. But I'm here now and I hope I can help others have a portion of what I've seen.
The guy that sort of "brought me to Jesus" has a High School education and makes over $100,000 year. He says it is all God's grace. He is probably now moving toward becoming a Pastor or something. He just recently sold his large house for 1/4 Million to scale down his lifestyle in preparation for what he feels is an impending opportunity to change his focus. There is a lot of this going on in the world.
I hope I touched on your question, but I hope even more how you can see that with an unending stream of "good-luck" pouring toward me, that I can't help but acknowledge it periodically.
Some or all of this is already on my website at
http://www.cdouglashall.com/christ.html
but I will probably update that all later and maybe change the URL. There is a Cross on my homepage which links to that page though and if I change the URL, the link from the cross will still work.
I hope I have not just offended everyone on Earth with my gushing enthusiasm but I could not help myself. I know 7sm and Damian both wanted to caution everyone about addressing the topic. But I hope I have done OK. I wanted to relate my position because it was dramatic and it can not really be explained away.
Again, I want to sincerely thank everyone who has posted to this thread because without you the end result would have been different and I have personally already gotten a lot out of this. Thanks again.
:asian:
I may even have a story if you want to hear it. It just happened Saturday but I'll hesitate before I post about it.
Congratulations.
