If at first you don't succeed... then you get back up and you think about what it was that caused you to fail, and then you ask God to please help you to understand why, and to show you what you are doing wrong, so that you can make the needed corrections to be able to do better next time. And then you go on, until you are finally able to overcome whatever it was, that caused you to fail.
God wants to help us.
He wants us to succeed, with His help and with Him providing us with the strength to do His Will for us. He wants us to be happy, and that success that you will eventually have if you persevere and trust Him to help you and show you and give you the needed strength, every step of the way, that will bring you something even better than happiness - JOY.
Joy - true spiritual joy, that no man (or woman) can take away from you, because it is real and lasting, unlike temporary and fleeting human happiness. And you will also feel much better about the person that God has helped you to become (with His help - always with His help) and you will eventually also be able to start to actually really like the person that He has helped you to become.
You just have to ask Him and trust that He will show you how. God is Good and loves to see His children happy and joyful.
I grew up Christian. And did it all.. did baptism, did being "saved", did churches, did it all. But it was not enough. I still had questions, because life here, even after all that, still was relatively miserable and I needed to understand why. Even though I was blessed in so many ways, and much more that I deserved, life here was still pretty miserable. If not in one way, then it is in another. Like when people die, to name one thing. I had (relatively) good, kind and loving parents, nice siblings and really nice surroundings (with lots of nature, trees etc close to home) where I grew up and which I liked and really very little to complain of while growing up. Much of the time, it was great. But the world still was a bad place (because of people mostly and how people can be).
But at some point I came to ask, why? Why does life here have to be this way? Why is it so difficult, why is there so much suffering and why does it seem like it is futile for so many people to find real and lasting happiness? The one day the answers started coming. I was learning lots of new things, discovering that the world we are in, is basically (as far as the worldly system goes) built mostly, if not almost totally, on lies. Somewhere, someone lies, due to selfishness and/or greed or for whatever other insane reason. God heard me and many answers began to come. People here lie like hell. All the time people lie. Why? I was learning a lot and discovered that a big and crucial part of the cause of all of this suffering is that people have become slaves to the oppressive Babylonian market "beast" system that drains the life out of people. I discovered that the system has been designed to make slaves of everyone, to the rich, who use it to benefit just them and at the expense of everyone else, while also destroying and polluting the planet because of how wasteful it is.
So, is that all what it means to be saved then? Having to undergo all this suffering, having to slave away at your slave job (place of employment) and having to watch your friends and family go through it too. And even if they can't or won't see it, you still can. Until one day when it will all finally be over with... so that then we can all go to heaven? But until then, we've got to keep slaving away to keep the system going. And all those churches (where the oppressed people go so they can get "saved") remember, they need the money too, so more people can come and be "saved" too and it all just keeps going on and on while the world just keeps getting worse and worse but they tell everyone not to worry because in the end it is all going to be ok.
Yet in the meantime, everyone is oppressed except for the select few who know how the system works and don't mind making it work exclusively just for them, which means everyone else is getting constantly ripped off and have to be exploited, suffer and work as slaves for the rich, so that the rich people can continue to be wasteful and greedy. And the irony? The rich people are not happy EITHER. All the rich people are miserable. Nobody wants to be their friend for real, even though there are always people who will be willing to hang around (for the handouts). Rich people are not happy, they lie awake at night and worry about how they are going to try and keep from losing it all, when that is also futile, because eventually they do lose all of it.
Eventually God showed me that the reason everyone is so unhappy is because no one is following the Instructions He gave, which is the only way that leads to not only happiness but also to JOY. And that can only start once we stop rejecting God. It's not God's fault that people are unhappy. It's not God's fault that people suffer, either. WE do all of that. We cause it, because we choose it, because of wanting to go our "own" way, instead of the right way (and our "own" way is not really our own because it's Satan's way really, because whenever we are not listening to God, we are automatically listening to Satan).
The only way, to make the world a better place, where people can live and be happy as long as they are here, is by going back to the Law and learn to live by the Eternal Principles we were given in God's Law. That is the recipe for success and we need to learn it, to know it, to then be able to Live by it.
And we need to learn to do that before we can go to heaven, because that is what people in heaven are like and they all live by God's Laws and they don't break it, like people do here. We are here, because we did, so now, we have to re-learn to keep God's Laws and Ways and not our own, before we can go back to heaven where we all originally came from.
So to me, I now see Salvation actually lies within that. It is actually contained within God's Law, and it has been in there all along.. in God's Law there is Salvation. Because, it and learning the Eternal Principles in it, is what actually prepares you for being able to live a REAL
Life. Through The Law God teaches us how to live, and how to actually know how to relate in a
healthy way with any and all people and situations. It teaches you God's Wisdom, His Ways and His Way of thinking, which is the only really SANE Way of thinking and it's the recipe for success. And as a bonus, God Blesses you when you make the effort to learn it and keep it. You could try keeping the real Sabbath as a test. Don't go shopping, do the shopping on another day, etc. Be different than the world, don't worry about what your friends might say. Do your best to explain to them why, if they ask, and if they want to be negative, just smile at them and tell them that you want to do it. And see what happens. You might be surprised, even if just with the peace of mind just doing that can bring. It feels good to do the things that are pleasing to God.
So at this point I've come to see it as a journey and not only a destination. Scripture talks of the
hope of salvation - 1 Thessalonians 5:8. There is a journey described in the Bible for whoever wishes to walk it.
Being "saved" also means being made FREE - True Freedom (God's Law is known as the Perfect Royal Laws of Liberty) and going back to keeping only God's Laws, is the ONLY Way to put an end to all of the evil that is constantly going on in this world.
There is an inscription on the Liberty Bell (which is a partial quote from God's Law) -
Leviticus 25:10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim Liberty throughout [
all] the land unto
all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
Let Freedom ring.
1 Thessalonians 5:8 But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the
hope of salvation.
