As a follow up to ‘Still Saved After Denying The Lord’, I have a question for you.
A friend of mine, once a very loving and dedicated Christian, has over the past several years gone through many traumas in her life. Having thrown herself on God’s mercy and spent many hours in prayer, she has received no solution to her problems. For example, she has prayed constantly that the Lord would bring peace to the heart of her mother -also a Christian- who is suffering from dementia and is living in a confused and tortured state literally trapped inside her own body. These prayers have not been answered.
She now believes in her heart that God can not exist and that Jesus was just a good man who was crucified along with countless others.
Where Peter, understandably, denied the Lord out of fear, this lady has made a conscious decision that God is not real – not out of bitterness but by deliberation. What happens to her Salvation?
Today I read this letter “OSAS & Unanswered Prayer” on your site. It’s my shame but I often become very discouraged if I read such a “testimony”. What is troubling me is this: “Having thrown herself on God’s mercy and spent many hours in prayer, she has received no solution to her problems.” Can this happen that a believer trusts her/his problems or troubles to the Lord and she/he does not receive a solution/deliverance?
Here’s another follow-up to “OSAS And Unanswered Prayer.”
You listed four things that you believe can prevent believers from being delivered from their afflictions, putting a very fine point on the issue:
1. Lack of faith, 2. Unconfessed sins, 3. Subconscious feelings that we deserve to be afflicted, 4. Secret desire to remain where we are.
My questions are these:
1. If we have a subconscious feeling that we deserve to be afflicted, does God hold this against us? (if so, why?). Your answer seems to imply this.
2. If we are held responsible for things of which we are not conscious, how do we recognize this and “repent” of it?
This is a very serious set of questions for me as I am very introspective, know I cannot fully understand what’s going on inside me, so it would seem that I am doomed to a life of (mostly) unanswered prayer.
A Bible Study by Jack Kelley
As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
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