The title of this thread says it all, but I still feel the need to say more (much more), so here it goes:
I was born to Christian parents and have gone to church since I was a baby, but I've never felt anything about it. I went because my parents wanted me to, but there's not even a single moment in my life where I can say for certain that I felt God in any way. I felt like a stranger in church, not because I couldn't relate with the beliefs of those in there (I could, I've always believed) but because I had never felt God in my life the way I was supposed to.
Sometimes I would try to get closer to God, I would pray, read the bible, ask Him to give me the strength I needed to repent of my sins, worship Him as best as I could, ask Him for faith... but I never got any answer. I would feel like I was just talking to myself, and slowly I would decrease my efforts to search for Him and just give up. And this would go in cycles: praying for him > getting no answer > giving up > repeat.
It was like this ever since I can remember until I went to college, at the age of 19. Then things got even worse and I used college as an opportunity to stay away from God, and that's exactly what I did. I completely ignored God for this past 4 years and I've used all kind of excuses I could to avoid going to church... and I was successful in this. In the past 4 years (almost five) I went to church just about 9-10 times, maybe less.
Curiously, what brought me to my current situation (being here asking for your prayers) was a secular forum about video games, a forum where the anti-christian spirit is very, very strong, and even tough I started reading that forum simply for the video game news, I quickly started to let myself drown in all the "rational" and "scientific" arguments that people in there would use to discredit and make fun of Christians. I drowned so deep in them that I still can't help but to still think that some of those arguments make sense, even tough what I really want is to find out the Truth.
So, I was reading those forums, like I used to do almost every day, when someone posted a thread about the "found missing link" that has been so talked about these last few days. Immediately everyone used it as an opportunity to mock God and Christians, and one particular poster posted a message that he found on the other forums about the issue, as a way to show the ridicule of christian beliefs.
Even if I was as far away from God as one can be, I still didn't thought that the "missing link" proved anything (the existence of a creator ALWAYS made sense to me, even scientific sense, regardless of everything else), but still, because I was far from God, I didn't felt particularly offended by all that mocking of Christianity going on there. If anything, I was starting to get on their side. So, when I decided to click on the link to the other forums that they posted on that video game forum (to mock and ridicule) I didn't expect anything to happen. If anything, I expected to find more proof that Christians where totally out of their minds... but that's not what happened, as you can see by me being here.
I found TalkJesus trough the other forums and what made me decide to join this forum instead of the other one is because the other one made me turn to God for no other reason than fear of the apocalypse and eternal damnation, and that may be a valid way to bring someone to God at first, but I want more than that. How can I be saved if I'm just interested in escaping hell, but do not really love Jesus with all my heart? It doesn't seem to me like that would work. It's not that I'm saying that people in the other forums don't love Jesus (please don't read it that way), but I wanted more than simply being worried about the rapture and the end times, which was what was happening to me while reading those forums. That, and the fact that yesterday in my prayers I asked God if He wanted me to join this forum and ask for prayers here or not, but today I felt the urge to do it, so maybe that's His answer.
And so here I am, after a little more than a week of lurking around, reading the bible and praying, asking for answers... but it doesn't seem to be working. I don't feel absolutely nothing when I pray. I don't feel humble in His presence, I don't feel like crying over the guilt and shame of my sins, and even worse (and there's no point in denying this), I don't even feel like trully repenting of my sins and leaving them behind. And this, I feel, is the reason why none of my prayers seem to be answered, and I'm starting to feel like I'm just heading to another one of those "praying for him > getting no answer > giving up > repeat" cycles I used to go trough in the past. I try to be honest with God, and when I pray I do tell Him that I can't let go of sin and ask him to make me sensitive to the sin in my life, to make me hate sin and to lead me towards repentance. I can't do more than this. Maybe I should, but I can't, and as ugly as this might sound, the truth is that there are many sinfull things in my life that I love and can't imagine myself without them. I know, this is sad and worrying, but that's where I am right now.
These past few days have been some of the most tiring and frustrating days in my whole life, and I feel that if this goes on for much more I wont be able to resist the huge, incredibly huge will I have to just give up and get on with my life. As of right now my head is nothing but a huge turmoil of doubt and confusion. Doubts, doubts, doubts, doubts, doubts... In my heart, I'm always looking for all kinds of arguments as to why the bible might be nothing more but a mix of historical facts and fantasy elements, like many other mythological texts before and after it. And I do know about the bible prophecies, I do know about the bible having been written by a large number of people over a vast period of time, and still keeping it's integrity, but even then, I still find myself looking for arguments and "proofs" to dismiss those things. O God please forgive me!
This is so confusing, I'm feeling totally lost right now and I don't know what to do. Sure, the answer seems obvious: I need to repent. But I can't. I obviously don't have the strength or the will to repent, so I ask for His help, but how would God listen to a prayer of someone like me, who's searching for him without faith and, even worse, with no true and honest intentions of saying no to sin? It's as if I'm just giving Jesus a try and see what happens, as if I'm just putting Him to proof, then if nothing happens I'm ready to go back to sin saying "well, I tried but He wanted nothing with me". Deep down I know that this is what I'm doing right now, and it's painfull because I have no faith to think in any other way, and part of me is telling me that I'm just wasting my time and preventing myself from enjoying life and have fun, and the effort I'm doing to not listen to those thoughts in my mind is exhausting and I can't take it much longer.
Until I stumbled upon the other forums, I was someone with dreams and ambitions and I was working towards them, but now I just feel depressed and numb, without the will to do absolutely anything. I don't even feel like getting out of bed when I wake up in the morning. The biggest passion in my life is art, specifically drawing and painting, and for the last few years I've been training myself (and in college) to be either an animator or an illustrator, and drawing made me happy, but now I'm afraid that God might want to take this dream away from me. I'm afraid that it might not be what he wants for me. I know that I should put all my trust in Him and believe that whatever He brings into my future it will make me happy, because it will be the right thing, but that would just bring me back to the "total lack of faith" problem that I have. That, and the sin in my life that I can't let go off... because I don't want to, God help me.
Slowly I've been considering the possibility of using my love for drawing towards God, but because of my pride I see that possibility as being very limiting and allowing no room for the creativity and imagination that I have. May He help me to see things in a different way and lead me towards the right path, even against my will (because there will be no other way to do it but against my will)
And then there's lust, which is another major stumbling block in my path that I can't let go of (once again, because I don't want to, God help me), and I could write a whole book about this subject, but I'm afraid that everything would amount to nothing but worthless arguments to convince myself to keep in sin (something I've been doing a lot).
I think I've already written too much, certainly because of my lack of faith. If I had faith then I would just ask "pray for me" and be assured that God would work His way and do what it's best for me, but because of my pride and sin I feel the need to write and write in order to try and come up with arguments to justify my ways. The point is, there's so much doubt and confusion and sadness going on in my mind right now that I can't take it anymore. I feel I'm heading into a depression. I try to pray but I feel that my lack of faith and my love for sin is getting me nowhere and I feel distant from God. I feel that he doesn't listen to my prayers because he knows that my words are worthless and that I don't really want to leave my life of sin. So thats why I beg of you, please, pray for me. I don't feel like God listens to my prayers, but I'm hoping that at least he will listen to the prayers of the true Christians in this forum and change my life and bring me to repentance and get me out of this depression and apathy.
Again, sorry for all the text, but please please please pray for me, because right now I feel just a step away from giving up.
I was born to Christian parents and have gone to church since I was a baby, but I've never felt anything about it. I went because my parents wanted me to, but there's not even a single moment in my life where I can say for certain that I felt God in any way. I felt like a stranger in church, not because I couldn't relate with the beliefs of those in there (I could, I've always believed) but because I had never felt God in my life the way I was supposed to.
Sometimes I would try to get closer to God, I would pray, read the bible, ask Him to give me the strength I needed to repent of my sins, worship Him as best as I could, ask Him for faith... but I never got any answer. I would feel like I was just talking to myself, and slowly I would decrease my efforts to search for Him and just give up. And this would go in cycles: praying for him > getting no answer > giving up > repeat.
It was like this ever since I can remember until I went to college, at the age of 19. Then things got even worse and I used college as an opportunity to stay away from God, and that's exactly what I did. I completely ignored God for this past 4 years and I've used all kind of excuses I could to avoid going to church... and I was successful in this. In the past 4 years (almost five) I went to church just about 9-10 times, maybe less.
Curiously, what brought me to my current situation (being here asking for your prayers) was a secular forum about video games, a forum where the anti-christian spirit is very, very strong, and even tough I started reading that forum simply for the video game news, I quickly started to let myself drown in all the "rational" and "scientific" arguments that people in there would use to discredit and make fun of Christians. I drowned so deep in them that I still can't help but to still think that some of those arguments make sense, even tough what I really want is to find out the Truth.
So, I was reading those forums, like I used to do almost every day, when someone posted a thread about the "found missing link" that has been so talked about these last few days. Immediately everyone used it as an opportunity to mock God and Christians, and one particular poster posted a message that he found on the other forums about the issue, as a way to show the ridicule of christian beliefs.
Even if I was as far away from God as one can be, I still didn't thought that the "missing link" proved anything (the existence of a creator ALWAYS made sense to me, even scientific sense, regardless of everything else), but still, because I was far from God, I didn't felt particularly offended by all that mocking of Christianity going on there. If anything, I was starting to get on their side. So, when I decided to click on the link to the other forums that they posted on that video game forum (to mock and ridicule) I didn't expect anything to happen. If anything, I expected to find more proof that Christians where totally out of their minds... but that's not what happened, as you can see by me being here.
I found TalkJesus trough the other forums and what made me decide to join this forum instead of the other one is because the other one made me turn to God for no other reason than fear of the apocalypse and eternal damnation, and that may be a valid way to bring someone to God at first, but I want more than that. How can I be saved if I'm just interested in escaping hell, but do not really love Jesus with all my heart? It doesn't seem to me like that would work. It's not that I'm saying that people in the other forums don't love Jesus (please don't read it that way), but I wanted more than simply being worried about the rapture and the end times, which was what was happening to me while reading those forums. That, and the fact that yesterday in my prayers I asked God if He wanted me to join this forum and ask for prayers here or not, but today I felt the urge to do it, so maybe that's His answer.
And so here I am, after a little more than a week of lurking around, reading the bible and praying, asking for answers... but it doesn't seem to be working. I don't feel absolutely nothing when I pray. I don't feel humble in His presence, I don't feel like crying over the guilt and shame of my sins, and even worse (and there's no point in denying this), I don't even feel like trully repenting of my sins and leaving them behind. And this, I feel, is the reason why none of my prayers seem to be answered, and I'm starting to feel like I'm just heading to another one of those "praying for him > getting no answer > giving up > repeat" cycles I used to go trough in the past. I try to be honest with God, and when I pray I do tell Him that I can't let go of sin and ask him to make me sensitive to the sin in my life, to make me hate sin and to lead me towards repentance. I can't do more than this. Maybe I should, but I can't, and as ugly as this might sound, the truth is that there are many sinfull things in my life that I love and can't imagine myself without them. I know, this is sad and worrying, but that's where I am right now.
These past few days have been some of the most tiring and frustrating days in my whole life, and I feel that if this goes on for much more I wont be able to resist the huge, incredibly huge will I have to just give up and get on with my life. As of right now my head is nothing but a huge turmoil of doubt and confusion. Doubts, doubts, doubts, doubts, doubts... In my heart, I'm always looking for all kinds of arguments as to why the bible might be nothing more but a mix of historical facts and fantasy elements, like many other mythological texts before and after it. And I do know about the bible prophecies, I do know about the bible having been written by a large number of people over a vast period of time, and still keeping it's integrity, but even then, I still find myself looking for arguments and "proofs" to dismiss those things. O God please forgive me!
This is so confusing, I'm feeling totally lost right now and I don't know what to do. Sure, the answer seems obvious: I need to repent. But I can't. I obviously don't have the strength or the will to repent, so I ask for His help, but how would God listen to a prayer of someone like me, who's searching for him without faith and, even worse, with no true and honest intentions of saying no to sin? It's as if I'm just giving Jesus a try and see what happens, as if I'm just putting Him to proof, then if nothing happens I'm ready to go back to sin saying "well, I tried but He wanted nothing with me". Deep down I know that this is what I'm doing right now, and it's painfull because I have no faith to think in any other way, and part of me is telling me that I'm just wasting my time and preventing myself from enjoying life and have fun, and the effort I'm doing to not listen to those thoughts in my mind is exhausting and I can't take it much longer.
Until I stumbled upon the other forums, I was someone with dreams and ambitions and I was working towards them, but now I just feel depressed and numb, without the will to do absolutely anything. I don't even feel like getting out of bed when I wake up in the morning. The biggest passion in my life is art, specifically drawing and painting, and for the last few years I've been training myself (and in college) to be either an animator or an illustrator, and drawing made me happy, but now I'm afraid that God might want to take this dream away from me. I'm afraid that it might not be what he wants for me. I know that I should put all my trust in Him and believe that whatever He brings into my future it will make me happy, because it will be the right thing, but that would just bring me back to the "total lack of faith" problem that I have. That, and the sin in my life that I can't let go off... because I don't want to, God help me.
Slowly I've been considering the possibility of using my love for drawing towards God, but because of my pride I see that possibility as being very limiting and allowing no room for the creativity and imagination that I have. May He help me to see things in a different way and lead me towards the right path, even against my will (because there will be no other way to do it but against my will)
And then there's lust, which is another major stumbling block in my path that I can't let go of (once again, because I don't want to, God help me), and I could write a whole book about this subject, but I'm afraid that everything would amount to nothing but worthless arguments to convince myself to keep in sin (something I've been doing a lot).
I think I've already written too much, certainly because of my lack of faith. If I had faith then I would just ask "pray for me" and be assured that God would work His way and do what it's best for me, but because of my pride and sin I feel the need to write and write in order to try and come up with arguments to justify my ways. The point is, there's so much doubt and confusion and sadness going on in my mind right now that I can't take it anymore. I feel I'm heading into a depression. I try to pray but I feel that my lack of faith and my love for sin is getting me nowhere and I feel distant from God. I feel that he doesn't listen to my prayers because he knows that my words are worthless and that I don't really want to leave my life of sin. So thats why I beg of you, please, pray for me. I don't feel like God listens to my prayers, but I'm hoping that at least he will listen to the prayers of the true Christians in this forum and change my life and bring me to repentance and get me out of this depression and apathy.
Again, sorry for all the text, but please please please pray for me, because right now I feel just a step away from giving up.
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