As another thread has touched everyone very close to the core.
" belief"
I was wondering if evryone wouldn't mind shareing their beleifs on these subject matters.
I will start.
Sin = to me any and all such actions that are not fair / just / loving or out of line with God's ways.
false religion = Any belief that is not scripturally taught and is followed by a group of people.
false worship = and way of actions that are in harmony with the first 2 sin + false religion is false worship to me.
I beleive that all sin is counted the same in God's eye's. wether we steal or murder it is all the same to me.
I beleive people can unkowingly be part of false religion yet that doesn't make them "bad" in God's eyes.
I also beleive that if we know we are sining and we chose to do things against the bible's clearly spelled out bad practices that this is false worship. for we say we beleive but we are not practising what we preach. I beleive this to be a very dangerous area. more so than just sinners or people who are in false religion.
TD just my current understanding.
Okay-dokey
Sin - Anything not done in faith, any action, regardless of the morality, not taken because God said so, humans are very good at being moral and nice, but not so good on seeking God for the right actions to take. Jesus did what he saw the father doing, if he'd tried to minister to every single situation that upset or bothered him, he would've been overwhelmed by the pain and abuse. He followed his father's will and His father knew what and who needed doing and when.
Anything not done in faith is done in sin, faith comes from being certain of God, from knowing him. Its impossible to truly know God and do something like adultary or murder in any sort of faith, but people who do know God can fall into the trap of being emotionally manipulated, or controlled into doing something that's not in God's will because that "something" seems good and kind and moral and selfless.
- If it aint what the father's doing, don't do it. If you don't know what the father's doing, ask him. Don't make the mistake of trying to take patterns and rules from the Bible in all situations.
False religion - pretty much everything, Christian or otherwise, that hasn't grown from from your relationship with God. Two people can have identical beliefs, but one has a relationship with God, the other's never encountered him. Religion itself is the opposite of relationship, and, on the whole, people prefer religion because its easier to have a set of rules to try to follow that actually lay down their lives every day and seek God's rule in their lives. The flesh likes religion, it makes it feel righteous and moral and justified without having to really come face-to-face with our true depravity (but it also means we miss out on coming face to face with Jesus' true power and love and greatness to overcome this)
Our flesh is a survivor, knowing Jesus means it has to be sacrified so that the Spirit of God can lead us. Religion allows the flesh to still lead, and fools us into thinking we're saved/know God/good enough etc.
False worship - actually impossible, people who don't know God don't know worship. Listen to churches on a sunday morning, then take their musicions and the words to their songs away, and ask them to sing praises to God. Take people out of their comfort zone and see if they focus on God and not themselves.
But you could say its anything not borne from the Spirit of God.
Sin will damage us and other people whather its murdering someone or something more subtle like self-righteousness. If anything, self-righteousness is more deadly because at least a murderer is going to know his sin was a sin so is more easily able to repent. Self-righteous, pride-filled people think they're righteous, so don't realise the need to repent.
The remedy to sin is the same - the blood of the lamb.
People who are in religion and not in a relationship with God are loved by God as much as any other. He wants them out of religion and in His presence, but religion is very potent, and many people pefer the control to freedom because with freedom comes responsibility. When someone's seeking or calling out to know God, truly, He'll draw them to him. He knows our hearts better than we do. He knows when someone's "seeking" only because they want to confirm their pet doctrine about him, and when someone truly wants to know Him.
I agree, those who claim to serve God and whom the world looks to as having something to do with God, actually bear more responsibiity before God. The Christian churches who prefer money, pleasing people, controlling people in the name of God need to get on their faces because those who might be seeking might end up in religion which is a worse place to be than anything else.
In this, the WTBTS doesn't actually have the same amount of responsibility as "Christendom" because, on the whole, the JW's are not taken seriously by the world at large. If someone wants to find out about God, they're more likely to go to their local C of E or baptist or methodist church that a KH. Onloy the WTBTS and JW's actually think the WTBTS has any sort of spiritual authority (thankfully - not that some don`t get sucked in)
But if people really, truly want God, he'll find them. Whqat's sad is that, in all denominations, there are people who believe they're serving God when they're following religion. They never get changed, or broken, or refined, or experience the Kingdom of God, or the power of God.