tonyt147

I remembered I got saved through John 3:16 at the age of 13. But I lived in sins for the rest of the way before the Lord pulled be back on the right path five years ago. I'm 30 now. In retrospect, I didn't really understand what happened to me when I got saved except that I was enable to believe in the simple gospel. My verbal confession of faith was an obnoxious 'yes' to the question, 'Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins on the cross?'. I remembered I was so anxious to give the right verbal confession that I didn't know which line to use: 'Jesus is lord', 'Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God', 'Jesus is fully man and fully God', or 'I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins and rose again three days later' etc...I remember I got so frustrated about this issue and thought to myself 'do I have to recite the whole bible before the congregation to prove to you guys that I believed?'. The one thing I didn't believe though was that God enabled me to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was very foolish now that I think about it. As if I enabled myself to believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ or that I needed some formal creed to give me the right answers. The answer was very simple for me at least: 'I believe Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior.'. I said just that when a pastor pulled a quick one on me to try to trip me up so that I would have to give a split second response. The only person in that room who didn't believe in my confession was myself. Because I couldn't believe that I was a child of God by the way I lived for so long after my baptism. So I went on to search for answers endlessly and got trapped in a bunch of false teachings as a result. Now I finally figured it out. The one demonic doctrine that tripped me up was the fact that I didn't believe faith in Christ is a gift of God, and he give it to whomever he want. No one can produce it on their own in whatever way, nor can it be lost once you have received it freely. Because it costed him his son Jesus Christ. Did anyone got saved by shallow theology? What was the journey like for you?

Do you think the rocky soil in the parable of the sower is closely related to this five virgin parable as well? I'm talking about the type with no root.