Another Devotion

[sweetgurlsammi]

The devotion i studied on 29 June 2004 was about Lusting for things and fadding from the lord, The downfall effect of christ.

First you start watching a "R" movie. You get hooked on watching those movies, you have to see them. then you repeat that funny line in the movie that has that cus word in it. you know the one that "slipped" out. Later you start cussing more and more. Then you start "skipping" church. Then you stop praying. Sooner or later some one ask your religion. You say "umm i was saved a couple of years ago but i dont go to church." then you find your self breaking the law. 2 yrs later your in Jail for stealing some thing. You get drunk at a party and drive home, you crash, and your crying to god begging to be alive, you open your eyes but you dont see the inside of the ER. you see your favorite childhood memery, your on a missionary trip In Las Vegas ridding the ride at NewYork, NewYork. then it fades, you see your favorite X-mas you know the one that you spent with you church giving gifts to the homeless, and feeding them. It fades again, you see that wall you wrote on with paint when you were in the 6th grade (thats when you started fadding). It fades again now your watching that "R" movie that you lusted for you hated watching your life on replay. It fades again your at the party watching yourself drink. It fades again and you see your self crash. It fades one last time and you look around everything is white, and your begging to be alive, when a man walks up and says (ur name) he says hes The Lord, you dont belive him, he tells you what you said in the 2nd grade during State testing, "Dear hevenly father i come to you today to ask you to help me through this test, father (ur bff's name) is trying to cheat off of me, please help him/her too. Amen" you knew that only God would know that. And you belive him. Then he told you that he will let you live if you go back to you old life or die and stay in the new life, he told you what you would have to do if you go back to your old life, the life of God and Church, and you pick

If you go to your Old life, the life of God and Church, then you have to make new friends you cant hangout w/ ur old friends any more, you're going to have to serve community sevice and you will be parilised from the knees down.

If you choose to die you will remain in an unknown place, b/c God didn't tell you if you are going to Hevan or Hell.

Which road do you choose?


And to think this all started b/c one "R" movie.
Lust is a bad thing dont do it if you can help it. its Deadly! It can lead to bad things.


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My Choice would have been to live and go through pain, what would yours have been?

[Corvus]

The devotion i studied on 29 June 2004 was about Lusting for things and fadding from the lord, The downfall effect of christ.

First you start watching a "R" movie. You get hooked on watching those movies, you have to see them. then you repeat that funny line in the movie that has that cus word in it. you know the one that "slipped" out. Later you start cussing more and more. Then you start "skipping" church. Then you stop praying. Sooner or later some one ask your religion. You say "umm i was saved a couple of years ago but i dont go to church." then you find your self breaking the law. 2 yrs later your in Jail for stealing some thing. You get drunk at a party and drive home, you crash, and your crying to god begging to be alive, you open your eyes but you dont see the inside of the ER. you see your favorite childhood memery, your on a missionary trip In Las Vegas ridding the ride at NewYork, NewYork. then it fades, you see your favorite X-mas you know the one that you spent with you church giving gifts to the homeless, and feeding them. It fades again, you see that wall you wrote on with paint when you were in the 6th grade (thats when you started fadding). It fades again now your watching that "R" movie that you lusted for you hated watching your life on replay. It fades again your at the party watching yourself drink. It fades again and you see your self crash. It fades one last time and you look around everything is white, and your begging to be alive, when a man walks up and says (ur name) he says hes The Lord, you dont belive him, he tells you what you said in the 2nd grade during State testing, "Dear hevenly father i come to you today to ask you to help me through this test, father (ur bff's name) is trying to cheat off of me, please help him/her too. Amen" you knew that only God would know that. And you belive him. Then he told you that he will let you live if you go back to you old life or die and stay in the new life, he told you what you would have to do if you go back to your old life, the life of God and Church, and you pick

If you go to your Old life, the life of God and Church, then you have to make new friends you cant hangout w/ ur old friends any more, you're going to have to serve community sevice and you will be parilised from the knees down.

If you choose to die you will remain in an unknown place, b/c God didn't tell you if you are going to Hevan or Hell.

Which road do you choose?


And to think this all started b/c one "R" movie.
Lust is a bad thing dont do it if you can help it. its Deadly! It can lead to bad things.


____________________________________________



My Choice would have been to live and go through pain, what would yours have been?

All topics need a question to debate, but, this seems rather confusing. Would you rather watch an R video than live your old life, is that what you are aksing? I'm not sure I understand your answer either.


Your example of an R rated movie seems strange in that free will is something that has never entered into the equation. It's all a matter of cause and effect, which is often the case, but if true, then one cannot be blamed for their actions. Plenty of us have seen R rated movies with little or no consequence. I have read books worse than any R rated movie, and enjoyed them. The same allegation thrown down, like a gauntlet, at the feet of movies has, in times past, been thrown at the feet of books. G. K. Chesterton wrote an essay in the 1901 century on the supposed ill effects that people reputed to them, and here is what he had to say:

But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness-- we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read The Egoist and The Master Builder. It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.

Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish.

So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: the whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected, and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth century duellist, and the modern cowboy recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanised and naked narrative as this.

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws, and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott's Ivanhoe, Scott's Rob Roy, Scott's Lady of the Lake, Byron's Corsair, Wordsworth's Rob Roy's Grave, Stevenson's Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton's Iron Pirate, and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for what ever other reason the errand-boy reads The Red Revenge, it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.

...

If the authors and publishers of Dick Deadshot, and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should he seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiocy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old book stall in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.

Also, does it make you a better person to live in imposed ignorance of sin? That isn't opposing sin, or bearing up to it, that is running away from it.

[filiasan]

Being the weak human being that I am, I would not choose to live in pain. And being the moody type, I can easily become bitter. What good is suffering yourself to please a god, when you're only doing it out of obligation? I'm pretty sure that your Lord wouldn't want someone that's pretending to follow Him, but deep down is resentful for it.

[Amadeus]

In this senario, I hope I would not be too prideful to see how badlt I messed up. I would choose to follow God and be paralyzed. I would thank Him every day for that second chance. A lot of people don't get one!

[Nyril]

If your faith is too weak to absorb a single R-rated movie, is it strong enough for god? If your self-image can be so changed by a single 2 hour session of violence and such, why would god want you?

[Amadeus]

Though you have a good point about the weakness of our faith in this senario, God wants ALL of us; even the weak ones. ESPECIALLY the weak ones. Our streangth is not our own, and we are bound to stumble. Only God can pick us up again and tell us to keep going.

[perfessor]

Though you have a good point about the weakness of our faith in this senario, God wants ALL of us; even the weak ones. ESPECIALLY the weak ones. Our streangth is not our own, and we are bound to stumble. Only God can pick us up again and tell us to keep going.

"Our strength is not our own"??? I'm sorry, I do not agree. We are not puppets. We have our strength, our will, our intelligence. If I stumble, I can make a choice on my own - to lie there and cry, or to pick myself up again.

Please, sweetgurlsammi, realize that the story you were told is propaganda. It's purpose may be laudable - keep you on the straight and narrow, understand the dangers, etc. etc. But no one gets dragged inexorably into perdition the way you described - it's ridiculous.

[Amadeus]

Professor: I guess what I meant by "our strength is not our own" is that OUR strength is not suffiscient. We are not strong enough to resist sin all of the time. I was merely emphasising our need for God.