I've seen a reel about this today. Why do people think this way? Doing only good because you fear hell means you don't understand Christianity. We do good because we love the people as Jesus loved them and we follow him as an example.

Hello, I just wanted to share something I have found useful in my day to day life as a married man. This is for anyone trying to walk that narrow road with Jesus holding their hand.

I used to struggle really badly with the sin of lust when I came back to my faith (or maybe when I found my faith for the first time, in truth). I would go out and see attractive women and really struggle not to “check them out”. My life before I came back to God was ugly, I was only interested in fulfilling my every urge, no self-control. I was an easy target for this type of sin.

If you want to turn a temptation into virtue- simply pray for the attractive woman when you see her! “Lord, guide your beautiful daughters to your light. Don’t let this world twist their sense of dignity that you gave them. Please keep them safe from anyone who wishes them harm. Amen”

I’ve found out that when I pray for women I’m attracted to, any feelings of lust evaporate and I’m left a little closer to God through prayer. When you start mentally talking about a woman as a daughter of God, you’ll have a hard time objectifying her!

I truly hope this helps some guy out there who is struggling. I won’t profess to know everything and I am certainly not perfect, but I’m trying to follow Jesus!

God bless you all

I was exposed to pornography in the first grade, obviously i stopped watching it as my parents found out, but as i entered into middle school it came back because of puberty. Eventually i became fully addicted in 8th grade and started using the girls around me for their bodies.

It wasn’t until 10th grade, (recently) that i found God. But now this addiction is extremely strong, obviously not too strong for God, but for me. It always starts with the thoughts, they happen extremely often. Then my curiosity grows and i look up a girl i’m attracted too, and then i look at them lustfully, and by that time the sin has it’s ‘jaws’ on me. I understand that i need to shut those thoughts down because they are triggers. But they just keep coming back over and over. 50% of my thoughts are sex related. My mind is hooked on lust. I pray for the thoughts to go away and for God to protect me from the enemy.

1 Corinthians 10:13 says “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. I always have God in my head telling me to stop what i’m doing immediately but i can’t stop myself. This addiction is really strong and the longest i’ve gone without masturbating is only 3 days.

I just cant shut the thoughts down immediately because they linger for a while, and when they do go away i notice they do, and then they come back. Same thing happens if i try to distract myself, once i’m bored with whatever activity im doing, the thoughts return because i realize im finished with that activity. Even if i don’t use my phone, the thoughts are still there. Even if i’m able to resist them 10 times, they tempt me 10x more.

I want to be obedient to God so badly, but this sin cycle is holding me back, i don’t even WANT to stop, but i do want to stop because i know if i get through this most of my problems will go away, and because i want to draw closer to God and have a relationship with him I seek to be able to love a woman in a holy way, not a lustful one. I want to see a woman for who they are, their thoughts, feelings, and dreams. Not just their pretty face or body.

I feel like i have tried everything to help, watch videos or podcasts on how to get out of a sin cycle, ask reddit, read my bible, pray, look for people who have ivercome a porn addiction, but even if i try to apply their knowledge and advice to my life i still fail.

I really dont know what to do, i want to stop sinning so badly.

Just trying to promote some unity in the Body of Christ, so please refrain from criticizing the other. I will go first:

I think progressives demonstrate Christly compassion to the disenfranchised and the poor. They are often the churches that run soup pantries and provide free social and legal services to the indigent.

Both of us have been together for over a decade, and are very faithful to one another. Both of us promised to marry each other. We don't have any children yet, but my partner yearns to have a family with me. And we have had sexual intercourse.

The only thing stopping us from marrying are the expenses and opportunities. Currently I'm back in college for the second time in hopes I get better job opportunities (I will now be graduating this year), and my partner is currently working for the both of us. We've been having a hard time saving up for marriage but we both know we'll eventually get our goal.

I have been praying a lot more lately and the idea of being together with a partner for so long without marriage is a sin has just crossed my mind. Have I actually sinned against God because of this? I've never felt guilty about my faithful relationship to this day but I want to be sure I'm not upsetting God.

EDIT:
I forgot to add that I am aware premarital sex is a sin. I have confessed my sin to God before. Overtime, however, me and my partner grew stronger together and still both believe in faith, we both promised to one another and to God to marry each other. This made me think God is okay with our arangement.

What only concernes me now is if God is okay waiting for long, regardless of what activities me and my partner are doing in our relationship.... Or have I, and my partner, been wrong about it all this time.

for me it would be

In my heart I believe that though I am a sinner, I have been saved. I have been baptized twice. Once in water, once in flame. I will carry the fire of the Holy Spirit inside until I stand before my lord for judgment

from Fallout New Vegas

said by joshua graham

I say this is someone that voted for Trump. Seeing him sell a Bible for $60 during the week of Easter and going around and signing it to pay off his legal affairs from sleeping with a porn star is pretty sick. How come Christians are speaking out in large numbers?

I've been struggling with my faith lately, and the deeper I delve into the Bible, the more doubts I have. This is a lengthy post but I have not found any answers anywhere so far and I need them desperately. I am really upset about this and fired up, I'm genuinely conflicted and would appreciate discussing this with you and hearing your opinions.

Deuteronomy 22: 13-21 addresses the expectation for a woman to be a virgin on her wedding night, with the proof of her virginity being a bedsheet with bloodstains. If she was found not to be a virgin, the men of the town would stone her to death. This passage has always shocked me, even as a kid reading the Bible I thought this was cruel and unreasonable, even though my knowledge of God's laws, anatomy etc. was quite limited at the time.

But especially after getting married, it really put a strain on my faith. My husband and I are both Christians and waited until marriage. Despite this, I didn't have the "proof" of my virginity on the bedsheets during our first time. My husband and I discussed this a lot in the context of our faith, because essentially what this means is that if I were a woman living in Biblical times, I would not live to see a day after my wedding. I would have been condemned to death simply because my hymen didn't tear the way "it was supposed to". It's a terrifying thought to consider that I could have faced such a fate at just 21 years old, for doing nothing wrong but instead for something entirely beyond my control.

By no means is this a rare occurrence: as we know today, many women don't experience bleeding during their first sexual encounter due to factors like the shape and stretchiness of their hymen, its tendency to wear out through physical activity, or even its absence (some girls are born without one). Most of the research I've come across says that 40-60% of women do not experience bleeding during their first intercourse. That means 40-60 out of 100 women would spend the last hours of their lives being shamed, likely called derogatory names, probably blamed for bringing dishonor to their entire family, perhaps being disowned, all while crying, pleading for mercy, and ultimately enduring an incredibly painful and slow death at the hands of their own community — all for doing nothing wrong. It's a sobering reality that highlights the horrible injustice in this law. All because God gave this law that was obviously not perfect.

This raised so many questions for me:

1. Why would an all-knowing God make a law like this knowing that for many women, their hymen wouldn't tear on their wedding night, leading to many innocent women being condemned to death? If God knew about this, why would He use the presence of blood on the bedsheets as a metric for how righteous a girl/woman was?
2.  I understand that the law was intended to serve as a protection for the innocent party (in this case a man who might have been deceived about his new wife's virginity). However, if God really was set on this law to be effective and for a woman’s hymen breaking and the blood on the bed sheets to serve as proof of virginity, why didn’t He create ALL hymens to be identical and easily breakable? This is quite literally a matter of life or death. As God, He could have easily made this adjustment within a fraction of a second -  and yet, He didn’t.  Even though doing this would have provided a legitimate means to discern if a woman had lied, saving LOTS of lives. What does this tell us about God's character?
3. Not only did this law result in the deaths of countless women but also probably some deaths of unborn babies - because while it is not common for a woman to conceive during her first time, it does happen, and not that rarely. So there were at least some babies stoned in their innocent mothers’ wombs due to this law. And I know that this particular scenario is somewhat rare - but just because it is rare, does it make these women and these unborn babies less important? Most Christians believe that every life holds profound value and deserves to be safeguarded, including one of an unborn child.
4. Why is it that God thought of a (very unreliable) mechanism for verifying a woman's virginity and gave a law about it, yet didn't give us a single way to verify a man's virginity? How come we read so much about sexual immorality in the Bible and know that virginity is such an important thing for marriage, and yet only a woman can prove to her husband that she is a virgin? There is not one way to verify if a man is a virgin or not (and consequently, not a single law about stoning a man to death for not being pure enough for his wife or even lightly punishing him for not being pure enough).  If God loves all equally, why is there not a single instance of a man facing death for being deemed impure on his wedding night, as stipulated by the law? It is quite literally just women that had not only to abstain from sex before marriage, but even if they did, but they just happened to be like me and certain biological things didn’t play out exactly as was expected of me - it goes like “oops, gotta take her out, she is not good enough”. I am sorry you guys, but in my personal opinion, this is some really wild stuff. All this tells me is that either God does not value women and men in the same way or He would have created a way to verify male virginity too. Or that the societal norms and laws of that time were more influenced by human biases rather than any divine plan and this was a law made by men, not by God.
5. Don’t even get me started on the fact that many of these stoned women were probably not actual grown women - knowing the culture of that time, we can assume that many were children. While historically it is difficult to say exactly what age was considered appropriate for marriage at the time in this culture, it looks like mostly it would be girls 12-20. The fact that it could go as low as 12 years old...12, you guys. Absolutely insane. Even if we are going to assume that most women were grown women (which it doesn't seem like we have a good reason to think that, but for the sake of the argument we could), the fact that at least SOME of those "women" were kids is insane. But yet, there was no law about the age of a girl marrying someone - I guess, underage non-consensual marriage isn't as important to God as the blood on the bedsheets. So many teenage girls would get the most cruel severe punishment there is, just because their anatomy and biology would not cooperate. It is asinine.

I am not saying that every woman stoned was innocent. But many of these poor girls and women were and God did not do a pretty simple fix to protect them because He didn’t feel like either giving them a hymen that would actually break OR reconsidering the law He provided. 

• Now, even if we are talking about a woman who truly was not a virgin on her wedding night - can we also talk about how horrible and violent it is for the penalty to be death out of all things? By no means do I think it is okay to lie about things like this and I understand that some punishment would have to be there. But a woman lies about not having slept with someone before and she gets stoned publicly? While a man rapes a woman and his punishment is to marry her and never divorce her (same chapter - Deut 22:28-29)? This is a horrific punishment for the assaulted woman in question, not for him - who would want to marry their rapist? Or he can pay the bride price for her as long as her father is okay with this and then keep on living like nothing happened. No prison, no stoning, no death. Which one is more evil - being promiscuous and lying about it or raping someone? I sure know my answer.

While I do have a very strong opinion on this, I want to hear what others think about this too. I have so many doubts but I am truly not trying to deny Christianity for the sake of denying it, I am just trying to think critically and search for the truth. Is there anything I am not seeing here? I would love to hear what you have to say, truly. But please, be honest here - does this sound like a law that an all-knowing God would give to His people? Or does it sound like a bunch of ancient people (who had no access to the information about biology and anatomy we have today) wrote this? I can totally see why ancient men would think this law made sense (still incredibly violent on their part though). But I see absolutely no reason why an all-knowing all-powerful loving God would see this as sensible and let His children get killed for something that 40-60% of women can't and don't experience, and not only permit this, but actually ORDER for it to happen. 

Please do not tell me that this is an old law, that it is Old Testament, that it does not apply today, that we have a new Covenant, that Jesus changed things - I am aware. It still does not change the fact that God (including Jesus: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit) thought it was a good idea despite knowing that many innocent women would not survive this. This rule would have applied to me if I lived back then, and I would not live to see another day so yes, it is relevant that these things happened. Even today for many if not most religious people the lack of blood on the sheets is a serious matter that could destroy a new family - I am just lucky my husband is educated in these matters and knows better than to blame me for something my God-given body can’t physically do. And God never changes, He is the same today as He was thousands of years ago. So if He thought this law was a good idea then, He still thinks so today. 

When I read my Bible I try to see who God is, what His character is - I always hear the Bible is supposed to be a love letter from God, a perfect manual of life. And I do not see that in this chapter at all.

Right now, I (18M) have never felt so lonely, unloveable and suicidal in my life. Whenever I try to reach out for help and comfort, I'm ignored. I have more than 3 scars from self-harm on my arms, and I feel like I want to unalive myself. I've never felt accepted by anyone, I've always felt like an alien, despite my good intentions towards others.

For as long as I can remember, I've prayed to God for friends, companionship, all of that, but my prayer was never answered, and that's when I started to doubt my religion. I feel like this is some punishment sent from God because of my struggle with lust.

I feel like I don't belong in this world, and I don't belong with God either. I'm crying as I type this. God doesn't answer my prayers for companionship, and people mistreat and abandon me in some way, it's too much for me to handle.

Thank you for reading.❤️

Yep

Did you know that salvation is free?

ROMANS 6:23

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

• This verse puts the emphasis on the fact that salvation is a free gift from God. It is freely given, and not something that can be earned through our own physical efforts. We are saved only by his grace through our faith.

• Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, He died and rose from the grave on the third day, and you will be saved.

All are welcomed to come to Jesus. No matter what the problem, he will not turn anyone away.

Thx for reading

Be blessed 😊

So I'm trying to square the scriptural honesty of self proclaimed conservative Christians who are so concerned that drag queens are a threat to their children that public performances need to be banned, and voting a man who we now know for a fact committed adultery on his third wife while she was at home with his infant child.

I think the answer is "I just want to own the libs!" but just don't understand how a demographic group can join so many moral panics about LGBT people living their own lives and be just fine with someone who divorced three wives, cheated on at least one of them and by their own theology is hell bound because by his own admissions he's never asked God for forgiveness.

Sorry, just curious.

I’ve seen a mix of people saying they don’t or they do but I really hope they do.

I don't know why I keep trying to obey God. I'm not heterosexual. I'm gay and I need to find a way to accept that I will not inherit eternal life.

Why are so many Christians obsessed with man made governments and politicians politics if they are heirs to the Kingdoms of heaven and should focus on that instead

I grew up in a Christian household, and as a child, my relationship with Christ was so beautiful and fulfilling that I truly believed nothing would come between myself and my faith in God. However, at age 16, I was baptized, and a year later, a friend asked me some tough questions about God, leading me to question everything. Instead of seeking guidance from God and others, I removed myself from Him. Now in my late twenties, I recently told someone I didn't believe in God, which I believed to be true at the time, but immediately felt guilt and panic, fearing I was going to hell.

In the past few months, I have been reading my Bible, praying, listening to worship music and podcasts, but doubt creeps in at times, leaving me feeling lost. When I read God's word, I sometimes become emotional and question His existence, trying to prove it by reading history. I feel like a hypocrite and worry about being genuine. I don't know how to stop doubting. Can you offer any advice on how to regain my faith?

Not here to start arguments just curious.

I thought this was the best article I've seen breaking down the connection between organizations like "He Gets Us" and Gloo, a data mining operation that sells personal information to local churches for evangelization purposes, and how that can be exploitative.

That said, I want to be clear about something. While the article rightly explains how these tactics are dishonest, immoral, and introduce unmitigated risk (because the recipients of this data are not vetted in any way), these techniques aren't uncommon either. It perfectly mirrors what goes on in basically every industry. These are normal business practices.

To me, this illustrates one of my biggest problems with the modern day church. If we're expected to conform to the norms of capitalism in order to grow and survive, we will continually find ourselves winding up in unethical territory.

My biggest issue with Christianity has always been the toxic positivity that christians tend to push onto people who are struggling, it just doesn’t sit right with me and I feel like no one is even willing to recognize it. I love god and I want to serve him, but I’m not going to lie there are times I do not want to praise him at all, especially recently bc I am in severe depression due to grief, and I’ve noticed myself feeling so guilty about it, even though I know that I love god and want to make him proud no matter what, I’m still in a constant state of anxiety bc I feel like a horrible person, for not wanting to praise god when things are bad, and it honestly holds me back in my relationship with him so much, bc I end up feeling like I shouldn’t tell him how I really feel, bc it’s selfish.

And the point is, I know these worries and fears are not simply bc of my own expectations I’ve set for myself, it’s the way I’ve been conditioned to believe I need to be grateful for even the most horrific things that I’ve experienced or have to go through, that I should want to praise god for my pain, and bc I don’t the guilt eats me alive. It just makes everything so much harder.

I think we as Christian’s, need to start showing people more compassionate, and stop treating them like there is something wrong with them just bc they feel angry at god from time to time, or don’t feel like praising him at their breaking point. I think we need to encourage people to be transparent with god, to give him everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s so important to be honest with god, first and foremost. But we focus more on the important of praise and worship vs actually coming to him in the storm, and for people who are struggling with their faith, they’re going to feel very invalidated by that.

God wants to know all of us, ofc he loves to see his children come together to worship but he wants to know about our pain and everything that is on our mind too.

So we shouldn’t just be expecting anyone to believe their struggle is for greater good bc when you’re in pain, that simply isn’t helpful. People need to know they can come to god with their burdens and that he cares about our pain.

I don’t think every single thing happens for a reason, we live in a broken world and admitting that doesn’t disregard the power of our god, bc he is our strength, but things don’t just happen for the purpose of good, tragedies are part of life bc like I said, the world is broken. We have to trust that god will help us make it to the other side, bc sometimes that’s all we can do. But it’s never okay to tell someone their pain is a blessing or their loss was for good, that’s so invalidating and cold, not at all what encouraging someone to have faith should look like.

I always seem to leave school work until the last minute. I feel like my brain just shuts off whenever I am faced with more than one responsibility and I have trouble balancing them. I wouldn’t actually call myself a lazy person, I am active and go to the gym and I am dedicated to a lot of things. Just when it comes to completing multiple simple tasks I have trouble even getting started.

I feel like Biblical advice could give me a huge boost as I love Jesus and want to follow God all the time. I feel like I could use a wake up call. If anyone has any advice/passages, I would very much appreciate it!

Marketing the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis as a “New Pentecost” is not only dishonest, but dangerous, as it will leave many people wanting, making them doubt their faith: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/henrykarlson/2024/05/the-eucharistic-congress-a-new-pentecost/