Christian murderers

[claybevan]

If the OP was, Do christians stumble ?, then the answer is a simple yes,
of course we do, we are not perfect just forgiven. We try but we often fail and if anyone tells you otherwise I think they are either Jesus or they have a short memory.
To the extent of murder, how can we ever tell, I mean how would I react if my granddaughter had been abducted and abused and I was the first one to find the abducter?
Very often and I can only speak for myself I say "there but by the Grace of God go I."
And we are told in:
1 cor. 10:13
the temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure.

I believe he keeps his side of that bargain but there must be times when for whatever reason, be it weakness, anger or our own deliberate fault etc. we do fail and we will have to live with the consequences and the punishment.
The only difference is that if we repent with a broken and contrite heart God will forgive us because Jesus paid the penalty of all sin with his death on the cross.
The prayer below is never far from my heart because when I think I am doing well I very often fall.

Paradoxes

O Changeless God,
Under the conviction of the Spirit I learn that
The more I do, the worse I am,
The more I know, the less I know,
The more holiness I have, the mores sinful I am,
The more I love, the more there is to love.
O wretched man that I am!

O Lord,
I have a wild heart
And cannot stand before thee;
I am like a bird before a man.
How little I love thy truth and ways!
I neglect prayer,
By thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly,
By knowing thou hast saved my soul.
Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be an evangelical hypocrite,
Who sins more safely because grace abounds,
Who tells his lusts that Christ’s blood cleanseth them,
Who reasons that God cannot cast him into hell, for his is saved,
Who loves evangelical preaching, churches, Christians, but lives
Unholily.
My mind is a bucket without a bottom,
With no spiritual understanding,
No desire for the Lord’s Day,
Ever learning but never reaching the truth,
Always at the gospel-well but never holding water.
My conscience is without conviction or contrition,
With nothing to repent of.
My will is without power of decision or resolution.
My heart is without affection, and full of leaks.
My memory has no retention,
So I forget so easily the lessons learned,
And thy truths seep away.
Give me a broken heart that yet carries home the water of grace.

Taken from The Valley of Vision edited by Arthur Bennett

[Diggindeeper]

I still don't see it - it certainly does not seem to be earth-shattering news at all. I've just been googling any news articles about this. The most recent seem to be a few days old and the fact he was a Christian musician is not even stated in many of the articles. And if it is, it's just in passing that he was a pianist that played in Memphis area churches.

Then i say this thread should be entitled, 'teen who played Christian music murders a girl...' Wouldn't that be true, Oscar? If so, then that kinda tends to change the whole discussion here, doesn't it? We do know he played Christian music, in churches. But does anyone know IF the boy is or ever was or ever did call himself a 'Christian'?

I mean, we can't even say he is or is not a Christian to begin with. So, now I'll wait along with Dani H for the day the news is all about 'Agnostic murders his girlfriend'. THAT would be worth discussing........ LOL

[Athanasius]

Then i say this thread should be entitled, 'teen who played Christian music murders a girl...' Wouldn't that be true, Oscar? If so, then that kinda tends to change the whole discussion here, doesn't it? We do know he played Christian music, in churches. But does anyone know IF the boy is or ever was or ever did call himself a 'Christian'?

I mean, we can't even say he is or is not a Christian to begin with. So, now I'll wait along with Dani H for the day the news is all about 'Agnostic murders his girlfriend'. THAT would be worth discussing........ LOL

Not quite as exciting as a Jainist murdering his girlfriend...
...or stepping on a bug.

[Diggindeeper]

...............

[Dani H]

Let's also please remember that the example in the OP is newsworthy to the same media (and audience) that consider anything someone with the last name of Kardashian does to be "news."

It's all relative.

[oscarkipling]

Yes, convoluted.
My point was that David did not murder in a straightforward way.
He did it in sneakiness. He didn't dirty his own hands with it. (He did, but he convinced himself he didn't.) This is the murder you see from people who claim to see and claim to follow Jesus.
We do it everyday, in all kinds of ways.
In here, the forums, you see it when a person is obviously mad at you, and they want to cut you with their words. You can obviously see they have just murdered you with their tongue, and you call them on it. But they say, (usually in a dazzling display of arrogance on top of their murdering), who me? I was not angry. I wasn't being rude. I didn't murder you with my tongue. I only had good intentions.
Well, pish posh! We aren't blind to murder! We all saw you do it.

This is the standard we are held to. Not you, but us.
So when we murder with our heart and tongue and words, the greater sin is ours.
We have attempted to "save" you with the Good News/Gospel, while murdering you at the same time. We show ourselves to be the most awful liars. We say we follow Jesus and can show Him to you, when obviously, you can see what hypocrites we are....but we CAN'T see it! We have claimed we can see when it is quite obvious that YOUR sight is keener than OURS!

My point being, we have sinned worse than the man who ate the other mans face.
We do not murder outright. We hide it.
This is the greater sin.
This is the worse murder.
It is not the man who says he is a christian who follows Christ.
It is the man who does what He has said who follows Christ.
You will see far more of the former than the latter.
Even with the latter, you will see they lie and are hypocritical at times.
They are still human and are capable of building elaborate scaffoldings to cover their sin, as David did.
But mostly you won't see them literally bludgeon someone to death.
You will see them do what is even worse in God's eyes - sin and then plaster themselves over with fig leaves to try to hide their nakedness.

You are very sharp, OscarKipling.
You have an amazing bull**** meter.
But our hypocrisies do not make God a liar. They only make US a liar.

You know, this idea of a christian being able to bear bad fruit sometimes, and your thought that it is quite a hedge around us.....there IS one thing you will see in a still imperfect and human follower of Jesus. You will see a relative consistency of good fruit. When you see a piece of bad, it will come as a surprise, not the other way around.And God will chase them down to get them to see what they have done. They will take it to heart and will come and apologize.
The man who is a liar when he says he follows Jesus will never see. You should not expect an apology from that man. You should expect hypocrisy and a sneaky and dishonest hiding as his consistent fruit.

Well, I can't say that I agree that hiding one's hatred and anger towards another is worse than literally ripping off a face, I mean it can be in some special cases, but I cant agree that in principle being angry and doing something about it are the same thing, they are related, but not equivalent.

anyway onto the contradiction, I mean yeah I get that humans are at the root of the contradiction, but it only means anything in regards to humans. That is to say , yes, of course it makes perfect sense that you can distinguish a person that generally believes what they profess by evaluating their actions...there is some range where we can reasonably determine that the sentiment is genuine with imperfect execution or the execution is is at odds because the sentiment is not genuine....however my problem with this is that there isn't anything especially Christian, or spiritual about this concept. You can know a fan of baseball or jazz in this same way, it seems to me that its the way people evaluate behavior vs declaration....but there are people who seem to want to elevate this, or maybe reduce it to a sort of binary if-then christian test. idk, i have a cold...a summer cold ...so a fever with 90 degree weather and no AC..,.,maybe this is jibberish

[oscarkipling]

Oscar...only you could have started this discussion! LOL

Come on, let's get real here. See, the fact is it would never have made the news if it had been reported that 'An American Teen Accused Of Murder.' The only thing that made it NEWSWORTHY to begin with was that the reporter NOTICED he was not only an American, not only a mere 'teen', not only a musician...but he billed all over the place as a CHRISTIAN musician!

THAT fact alone made the news. That someone promoted himself as a CHRISTIAN MUSICIAN would do such a horrific thing! And that shocked the reporter (whoever that was) enough that he or she reported it that way.

It shocks everyone. Even me.

honestly I doubt I would have known about it if it weren't for the thread, but it was the reactions to it that intrigued me the most. I found it interesting that people seemed to intimate...or heck, flat out state that you cannot be a christian and strangle a girl until dead. I guess a christian killing someone is shocking to many people, I cant say I'm shocked....i'm not so sure why you are either.

As far as not making the news without the christian slant...idk, a young pretty white girl is murdered in a foreign land, that's like cable news heroin

[oscarkipling]

Still waiting for the day where "agnostic murders his girlfriend" makes any sort of news story ...

maybe check out the onion

[oscarkipling]

Then most likely, it became BIG earth shattering news once people noticed it was a CHRISTIAN musician who committed this murder! People's eyes popped open and they were saying, What? A CHRISTIAN did this?

we probably live in very different words. sometimes when i see some comments here, it makes me want to switch lives for a little while...prince and the pauper style


edit: obviously i'm the pauper


edit: edit: sike i'm the prince

[oscarkipling]

If the OP was, Do christians stumble ?, then the answer is a simple yes,
of course we do, we are not perfect just forgiven. We try but we often fail and if anyone tells you otherwise I think they are either Jesus or they have a short memory.
To the extent of murder, how can we ever tell, I mean how would I react if my granddaughter had been abducted and abused and I was the first one to find the abducter?
Very often and I can only speak for myself I say "there but by the Grace of God go I."
And we are told in:
1 cor. 10:13
the temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure.

I believe he keeps his side of that bargain but there must be times when for whatever reason, be it weakness, anger or our own deliberate fault etc. we do fail and we will have to live with the consequences and the punishment.
The only difference is that if we repent with a broken and contrite heart God will forgive us because Jesus paid the penalty of all sin with his death on the cross.
The prayer below is never far from my heart because when I think I am doing well I very often fall.

Paradoxes

O Changeless God,
Under the conviction of the Spirit I learn that
The more I do, the worse I am,
The more I know, the less I know,
The more holiness I have, the mores sinful I am,
The more I love, the more there is to love.
O wretched man that I am!

O Lord,
I have a wild heart
And cannot stand before thee;
I am like a bird before a man.
How little I love thy truth and ways!
I neglect prayer,
By thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly,
By knowing thou hast saved my soul.
Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be an evangelical hypocrite,
Who sins more safely because grace abounds,
Who tells his lusts that Christ’s blood cleanseth them,
Who reasons that God cannot cast him into hell, for his is saved,
Who loves evangelical preaching, churches, Christians, but lives
Unholily.
My mind is a bucket without a bottom,
With no spiritual understanding,
No desire for the Lord’s Day,
Ever learning but never reaching the truth,
Always at the gospel-well but never holding water.
My conscience is without conviction or contrition,
With nothing to repent of.
My will is without power of decision or resolution.
My heart is without affection, and full of leaks.
My memory has no retention,
So I forget so easily the lessons learned,
And thy truths seep away.
Give me a broken heart that yet carries home the water of grace.

Taken from The Valley of Vision edited by Arthur Bennett

well, yeah, I think you have a reasonable stance on the human struggle...I pretty much agree that there is an inherent conflict...i just dont see that god adds anything to the mix that you couldn't get elsewise

[oscarkipling]

Then i say this thread should be entitled, 'teen who played Christian music murders a girl...' Wouldn't that be true, Oscar? If so, then that kinda tends to change the whole discussion here, doesn't it? We do know he played Christian music, in churches. But does anyone know IF the boy is or ever was or ever did call himself a 'Christian'?

I mean, we can't even say he is or is not a Christian to begin with. So, now I'll wait along with Dani H for the day the news is all about 'Agnostic murders his girlfriend'. THAT would be worth discussing........ LOL

well, yeah it would be true, but the point of discussion is the whole, can a christian also murder thing....I mean I could have just titled the thread "can a christian still sin", but then I wouldn't have sold all these advertising blocks.

-donald draper

[claybevan]

well, yeah, I think you have a reasonable stance on the human struggle...I pretty much agree that there is an inherent conflict...i just dont see that god adds anything to the mix that you couldn't get elsewise

Hi there you,
I've tried elsewhere and nothing comes even close.
Nothing I tried and believe me I tried, filled that part of me that was searching for, well for want of better words, 'real love'

Money didn't cut it, friends often let me down, men certainly failed ( or was it me ) traveling was okay for a while and on I went, it took me ages to actually acknowledge what I now know had been with me all along. God patiently waiting, for me to grow up and reach out for what really mattered, a love that would last, an unconditional love ( we love him because he first loved us)
When I did actually look up, everything fell into place. What more can I say, believing him him doesn't exempt me from life's trials but he's there when I am going through them and believe it or not He Speaks, He Guides, He Loves, He Saves, He Protects and there's much more!
You know the Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy yarn, Marvin says something like " Life, don't talk to me about life, what's the point of everything?"
Well when God came into my life so did the point of everything.
And the most amazing thing is that he came for 'The Paupers'
You may have found what you want in the world, me well I guess I'm just greedy, I wanted more.

[oscarkipling]

Hi there you,
I've tried elsewhere and nothing comes even close.
Nothing I tried and believe me I tried, filled that part of me that was searching for, well for want of better words, 'real love'

Money didn't cut it, friends often let me down, men certainly failed ( or was it me ) traveling was okay for a while and on I went, it took me ages to actually acknowledge what I now know had been with me all along. God patiently waiting, for me to grow up and reach out for what really mattered, a love that would last, an unconditional love ( we love him because he first loved us)
When I did actually look up, everything fell into place. What more can I say, believing him him doesn't exempt me from life's trials but he's there when I am going through them and believe it or not He Speaks, He Guides, He Loves, He Saves, He Protects and there's much more!
You know the Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy yarn, Marvin says something like " Life, don't talk to me about life, what's the point of everything?"
Well when God came into my life so did the point of everything.
And the most amazing thing is that he came for 'The Paupers'
You may have found what you want in the world, me well I guess I'm just greedy, I wanted more.

Perhaps I wasn't very clear, I meant that at the very least the struggle that claybevan was describing could be explained just as well without the addition of God into it. The internal struggle between what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing, the difficulty of following your convictions or even basic decency. Jumping to the front of the line is faster than waiting, stealing a car is easier than buying or making one, Its harder to admit that you aren't as cool or smart or kind as you thought than to persist in the delusion, it is easier to be generous to your friends and family than it is to be generous to strangers, acquiring knowledge is not only more difficult to do than remaining ignorant, and once you see some things you cant unsee it. That's like the nature of value, it costs, its hard, but I dont see that there is anything added by saying that God has anything to do with these conflicts and contradictions. Nor do I believe that reconciling or overcoming these innate issues requires that there be a God, or that the addition of God makes overcoming these things make any more sense or seem more natural. If I thought it was done on purpose i'd call it slight of hand, but I dont think it is, Its simply an attempt to contextualize and understand an aspect of human nature...and its compelling because so much of it is true.

anyway, I'm not particularly fond of the idea that someone else's inability to "find what they were looking for" or be "fulfilled" by whatever means of fulfillment they sought is a really good indicator that God can do something that can't be achieved through other means. to be perfectly honest, most of the things that people list as the things they sought to "fill the hole" are entirely inappropriate for their problems. In what world would it make sense to seek out money and travel when your problem is a lack of maturity, and self reflection. What sense could it possibly make to use drugs and sex to resolve your lack of education. Of course people aren't able to fill their holes, because they aren't using appropriate solutions. There is something that is pretty clear about many Christians that have their holes filled, that is they are mature, optimistic, self aware, patient and thoughtful...invariably they attribute this stuff to God, but these are precisely the attributes that any well adjusted successful adult displays...and they are solutions to many of the problems that people profess to have had before Jesus...i dont think i've ever seen anyone say "before Jesus I approached my problems with self reflection,optimism, maturity, patience and thoughtfulness, but none of that compares to Jesus"...maybe they are out there, but those seem to be the things Jesus brings to the table...well other than the miracles which range from ludicrously mundane, to woefully unsubstantiated. Anyway, it should be obvious that you dont need Jesus for that natural stuff. okay last thing... everything fell into place? really? what does that even mean, you are not exempt from life's trials, but you have a better attitude about them? anyway idk, i prolly blew that all out of proportion...if so i'll blame my poor health and the heat and my diet of oreo cookies.


also Hi there

[claybevan]

Perhaps I wasn't very clear, I meant that at the very least the struggle that claybevan was describing could be explained just as well without the addition of God into it. The internal struggle between what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing, the difficulty of following your convictions or even basic decency. Jumping to the front of the line is faster than waiting, stealing a car is easier than buying or making one, Its harder to admit that you aren't as cool or smart or kind as you thought than to persist in the delusion, it is easier to be generous to your friends and family than it is to be generous to strangers, acquiring knowledge is not only more difficult to do than remaining ignorant, and once you see some things you cant unsee it. That's like the nature of value, it costs, its hard, but I dont see that there is anything added by saying that God has anything to do with these conflicts and contradictions. Nor do I believe that reconciling or overcoming these innate issues requires that there be a God, or that the addition of God makes overcoming these things make any more sense or seem more natural. If I thought it was done on purpose i'd call it slight of hand, but I dont think it is, Its simply an attempt to contextualize and understand an aspect of human nature...and its compelling because so much of it is true.

anyway, I'm not particularly fond of the idea that someone else's inability to "find what they were looking for" or be "fulfilled" by whatever means of fulfillment they sought is a really good indicator that God can do something that can't be achieved through other means. to be perfectly honest, most of the things that people list as the things they sought to "fill the hole" are entirely inappropriate for their problems. In what world would it make sense to seek out money and travel when your problem is a lack of maturity, and self reflection. What sense could it possibly make to use drugs and sex to resolve your lack of education. Of course people aren't able to fill their holes, because they aren't using appropriate solutions. There is something that is pretty clear about many Christians that have their holes filled, that is they are mature, optimistic, self aware, patient and thoughtful...invariably they attribute this stuff to God, but these are precisely the attributes that any well adjusted successful adult displays...and they are solutions to many of the problems that people profess to have had before Jesus...i dont think i've ever seen anyone say "before Jesus I approached my problems with self reflection,optimism, maturity, patience and thoughtfulness, but none of that compares to Jesus"...maybe they are out there, but those seem to be the things Jesus brings to the table...well other than the miracles which range from ludicrously mundane, to woefully unsubstantiated. Anyway, it should be obvious that you dont need Jesus for that natural stuff. okay last thing... everything fell into place? really? what does that even mean, you are not exempt from life's trials, but you have a better attitude about them? anyway idk, i prolly blew that all out of proportion...if so i'll blame my poor health and the heat and my diet of oreo cookies.


also Hi there

I think you're missing the point, it wasn't about solving problems it was about finding out why I felt incomplete no matter what I did or how maturely I approached life.
You asked if christians stumble and I gave you my answer.
You clearly have everything sorted and have found meaning, contentment and fulfilment in your life, so it's understandable that you don't feel any need to add God to the mix.
oreo cookies eh! what's in em?

[oscarkipling]

I think you're missing the point, it wasn't about solving problems it was about finding out why I felt incomplete no matter what I did or how maturely I approached life.
You asked if christians stumble and I gave you my answer.
You clearly have everything sorted and have found meaning, contentment and fulfilment in your life, so it's understandable that you don't feel any need to add God to the mix.
oreo cookies eh! what's in em?

I guess, yeah, I probably wasn't really responding to what you said, but just what I thought you were saying based on past dealings. Perhaps your belief in God really did do something unique for you, I dont have a clue what that could be outside of the sorts of things I described, but hey its only my best guess at whats happening. I dont really believe that I have everything sorted out, but then i dont really believe that you believe that i do either, anyway thanks for taking the time to respond.