[quote=Hearer;490012]Faith follows regeneration. First we have to be born again; then we receive faith as a gift. Otherwise we believe in works and our own flesh.
We are not regenerayed after developing faith but before.
Regeneration is the sovereign work pf God the Holy Spirit. We need only search for God's face, seeking and knocking and wanting a better life. Then we will receive the power to change and to have faith.
Abraham had God come to him to send him to a new country. Jacob saw Godon the staiway and was regenerated. The prophets predicted under the Spirit that we would all be given hearts of flesh having our stony hearts removed. Saul was regenerated and became Paul. Peter was faithless denying the Lord but was made the first apostle through regeneration. All received the gifts of God. The church had scattered at the crucifiixion but were regenerate at Pentecost receiving power from on high and became an unstoppable force filled with faith.
The best we can do is:
seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened, ask and ye shall receive; before your faith is full and flowing enough to make you fruitful. First you have to born again, regenerated.[/quote]
Dear Hearer, "The best we can do is" Calvinism? Not so. With God's grace, you can escape Calvinism! Consider:
"Does God Cause Man To Sin?
"For the omniscient God to know all, it is clearly not necessary that He must plan and cause all. That very idea, as we have shown, limits the scope of God's knowledge and thus actually denies omniscience. Ironically, the major tenets of Calvinism follow directly from this misconception about sovereignty and omniscience.
"It is true that God, being omniscient, knows all before it happens and therefore nothing can happen that He doesn't know. However, Calvin went much further in stating that God knows only what He has decreed. From that hypothesis it necessarily follows that God is the cause of all and therefore the cause of evil. The doctrine of Unconditional Election then follows: that just as evil is God's doing, so salvation, too, must be all of God without even faith on man's part. Pink readily confesses the logical conclusion to which Calvinism's view of sovereignty and omniscience ultimately lead:
... to deny God's foreknowledge is to deny His omniscience. .... But we must go further: not only ... did His omniscient eye see Adam eating of the forbidden fruit, but He decreed beforehand that he should do so. [Emphasis in original.]. (1)
"Here again the confused belief is offered that God's foreknowledge causes what He foreknows to occur, thus denying any choice to man. We have already seen that God, being separate from the time-space-matter universe He created, observes it from outside of time; thus His observation of the future leaves man free to choose. In fact, for God there is no time. Past, present and future are meaningful only to many as part of his temporary existence in this physical universe.
"God's knowledge of what to Him is one eternal present would have no effect upon what to man is still future. Calvin himself accepted this view without realizing its devastating impact upon his denial of man's ability to make genuine choices:
When we ascribe prescience to God, we mean that all things always were, and ever continue, under his eye; that to his knowledge there is no past or future, but all things are present, and indeed so present, that it is not merely the idea of them that is before him (as those objects are which we retain in memory), but that he truly sees and contemplates them as actually under his immediate inspection. This prescience extends to the whole circuit of the world, and to all creatures. (2)
"Are "Tempting" and "Testing" Meaningless Terms?
"Calvinism reasons that God, having foreordained from eternity past that Adam and Eve would eat of the Tree of Knowledge, forbids them to eat of it so He can punish them for doing what He foreordained and caused them to do! Then by Unconditional Election He saves a select few of their descendants to show His grace. That incredible scenario is unbiblical and dishonors God. It is contrary to the very character of a holy and just God who "cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" (James 1:13). Far from causing sin, God doesn't even tempt man to sin, as we have already seen. ...."
(pages 192-193: WHAT LOVE IS THIS: CALVINISM'S MISREPRESENTATION OF GOD. by Dave Hunt. (2002). Sisters, OR: Loyal Publishing.).
Notes.
1. Arthur W. Pink. The Sovereignty of God. (Baker Book House, 2nd printing, 1986); p. 249.
2. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III:xxi,5.
God save us all from all heresies. Amen. In Erie PA Scott R. Harrington
PS We must believe whatever is canonical and true in whatever system, because to reject the canonical in any system is to reject the true and canonical in the only completely infallible source of the Gospel truth: the Holy traditions of the Holy Orthodox Church in the presence of the All-Holy Spirit. So, Dave Hunt is canonical in some things; in his pre tribulation rapture view, he is non-canonical and heretical; but what he has been saying about Calvinism is canonical and true.