Assurance of Salvation

So last night, I was sleeping absolutely horribly (read: tossing and turning for hours while trying to sleep), and my mind wandered - as it usually does - and I started thinking about one of the things that I normally struggle with. I'm always feeling like a failure whenever I screw up, and I inevitably start questioning my salvation. I start thinking "If I'm a christian, then I shouldn't be screwing up this much, this consistently... Maybe I didn't say the prayer right. Maybe I didn't really mean it. How do I know if I really mean it or if I'm just trying to use God as a help-line?". And man, it bites. As a little background: I prayed the prayer that I point to as my saving prayer (when I'm confident in my salvation, which seems like it's less and less of late) when I was 5. I've always occasionally questioned "How do I know I'm saved?" since then... but not quite like this. I've prayed several additional prayers for salvation, and quite a few that would probably be saving prayers if they were prayed by a non-saved person (although not necessarily prayed in that context in my case). I'm confident that this is just spiritual warfare now, but during the attacks, not so much. And the most annoying part (and the part that, thinking about it as I write this, makes me think it's an attack) is that I don't get the urge to pray to God for help and salvation again during these, I get the urge to give up. To decide that I'm not actually saved, and to walk away from God. I get the feeling that I'm just straight-up unworthy of salvation, and God's gonna pass me over even if I pray - which I know is an outright lie. The best thing was that last night, when I was thinking this over, I had a serious "thankyou God!!" moment. All of a sudden, John 10:28 popped into my head: "I (Jesus) give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand." Now I just need to remember that verse when I'm feeling like I'm not saved and unworthy.

Post-Christmas thoughts

Well, Christmas is over, and for some reason I'm feelin pretty crappy. And I think I might have realized part of why I couldn't believe that Christmas was here already... I was wanting to have all my issues solved, and have my relationship with God fixed by Christmas. It's a major holiday in terms of Christianity, what with it remembering Christ's birth, so I unconsciously decided that I should have everything fixed by then. And every day i realize that this isn't something that I'm gonna fix within a couple weeks. This is gonna take a MUCH longer time than that. Months, years... I might struggle with this for the rest of my life for all I know. So now, all of a sudden, I've got this crappy feeling in the pit of my stomach, that I was attributing to random guilt over something I was considering doing (that wasn't bad anyway... I'll probably write about that later...) but now I think I've figured it out. Somewhere along the line I had that thought planted in my head - I need to get my life sorted by Christmas. And then I don't so now I've got this guilt and shame because I haven't. That, or I ate too much lunch or drank too much Coke. Ah well, merry Christmas!

Christmas Ramblings

Christmas 2009 is rolling around soon, and it seems like for the second year in a row, it feels like it shouldn't be Christmas yet. It seems like there's no way that it's already December, and that I'm already through 3 rows of my advent calendar. It doesn't seem like Christmas could possibly be in one week from today! Despite having all my Christmas shopping done, all the presents wrapped, and the praise team at church practicing Christmas music, it still doesn't seem possible. What follows is my semi-late-night ramblings on why that might be, at least in my case.

Our society puts out messages about what Christmas is about - the "true meaning" of Christmas. Depending on the TV station, this could be any number of things... love, family, charity, new beginnings. Or, in between 10 minute sections of our favorite Christmas movies, rampant materialism.

As a Christian, I know intellectually what the "true meaning" of Christmas is - it's a celebration of the birth of Jesus. So, because I know better than what all the messages are telling me, I don't get sucked into the rest of it... So why is it still so hard for me to get into a Christmas mood this year? Well, I think I know the answer for me, but it's not something I'd have ever considered if someone had suggested this in previous years. The realization I came to is that it's because my relationship with God is pretty crappy right now.

From what I can tell, to celebrate something, we have to be happy about it. To celebrate somebody's birthday, we have to care about that person. To celebrate a holiday, we have to care about it. To celebrate the birth of Christ, we have to care about Him. If our relationship with God isn't right, we can't truly celebrate. We're either gonna buy into the "inspirational" meaning of Christmas put forth by the movies on the Hallmark channel, or the materialistic meaning put forth by anybody who has a product to sell - or end up with a case of holiday depression.

Christmas can thus be used as a kind of measuring stick for our relationship with God. If we find it easy to focus on Christ during the Christmas season, and to truly celebrate, we're doing something right. But if it's not, it means that maybe we're not as close to God as we should be. And I don't know about you, but this provides me with something to work on this Christmas season.

Blog related note: I'm hopefully gonna actually update this now.

Introduction

Alright, so hello internet. I've been reading Shadow of the Almight recently (Jim Elliot's journal, detailing his life and spiritual journey) and I got inspired to write this, so we'll see how long I keep this up.

A little bit about me first: I'm 16, homeschooled (with an additional class at the local community college), I was raised in a Christian home, and I've been dealing with porn for the last couple years or so. This blog will basically be me talking about the stuff I'm dealing with and the stuff God's laying on my heart, so feel free to comment and ask questions or whatever.

Josh