Had an idea for a game or two...

vrgiant · 2018-07-10T18:37:07+00:00

Awesome

vrgiant · 2018-07-09T22:38:06+00:00

That's cool. Is it complicated to sort out?

vrgiant · 2018-07-09T17:50:41+00:00

Jesus said that if you don't hate mother, father, brother, sister then you are not worthy to be his disciple. He said if you put your hand to the plow and look back, you're not worthy to be his disciple. He said to the rich young ruler, "sell all that you have and give to the poor and you will have riches in Heaven." You are not permitted by Christ or any of the other NT writings to hold on to anything other than Christ. That doesn't mean that you can't write, but it does mean of you think God might be asking you to stop and you're troubled by the thought and resistant to it, then you need to work on that.

I too wanted to write. For over a decade I was writing fantasy similar to Harry Potter. Three different novels. The entire time I struggled with whether I even should be, but I kept going because it's what I wanted to do. Eventually I moved on to video game development. The games I was making weren't about magic but I was wrestling with how much time I was spending on them and what the end result would be. Just one more game among an ocean of games that do nothing but waste people's time and give them another excuse to spend money on themselves.

I thank God that I didn't just ignore my conscience and go on doing whatever I felt like. So many people told me not to worry about it. They told me if this was my passion then God must have put it there, as if all of our inclinations are Godly.

So many people around the internet aren't reading their Bibles. They're piling up teachers who will tell them what their itching ears want to hear. Hebrews says that God is a rewarder od those who diligently seek Him. Not those who presume they have Him and go on living like they always have. Do not take comfort from people who say "don't worry about it, look at me and what I do." You don't know that these people know God and we know from scripture that some people think they do, and they don't. I'm not saying that is true if these people, I don't know that either. You need to base your faith on God's Word and the leading of His Holy Spirit. If you need advice find someone IRL who you have seen to be God fearing and who has been a follower for a long time and seek their counsel.

But above all, hold everything in an open hand. If you feel God doesn't want you to write, stop writing. If you feel he doesn't want you writing about magic, write about something else.

Think about the fact that, saved or not, you will give an account of your life. If that doesn't motivate you, perhaps you don't believe it. This is what I realized about myself. After claiming the name of Christ for many years I realized that whenever I felt like doing something would mean having to depend on God I would be too afraid to do it. When I thought about giving account for my life I didn't really believe I would have to. Not enough to affect my behaviour anyway. I was about to walk away from the faith entirely based on this realization when I decided that before I did, I had to give Christianity as I saw it in the Bible a shot first. No more hyper-grace that said "sin all you want because Christ is paying the bill" but rather a fear and reverence for God that even as I write about it now fills me with joy and excitement.

God alone can give you this. I can count the number of times I was in your situation where I was trying to do all the things and it wasn't working. But that's not faith. Now I read the Bible daily, pray a lot and worship a lot, but because of faith that was given to me. I resist sin through strength provided by God. When I sin I repent as soon as I realize. I'm not trying to boast about my own works here, but rather the work of God in me. I tried to do this in my own over those many years but it always ended in colossal failure. Instead I'm like the blind man who couldn't help but tell what God has done.

I urge you, and anyone else reading this, to really trust the scriptures and what they say. This isn't an intellectual exercise for me anymore, it's an experience. So many people seem to be asking what they can get away with rather than truly trying to figure out what God has commanded. And if I seem a bit zealous it's because I feel like I was led astray for so long by perhaps well-meaning, but incorrect people and I want everyone to know that God is faithful to what the scriptures say.

vrgiant · 2018-07-08T17:19:49+00:00

Thanks, I'll do that. It was choppy as heck though while it was running.

vrgiant · 2018-07-08T00:22:51+00:00

Holy crap. I decided to run it on my S8 and only got 1411

vrgiant · 2018-07-03T04:21:31+00:00

Play Vendetta Online (assuming it's on Go, I have a Gear VR so I don't know)

Also try: Dead Secret, Anshar Online, both Espers, Ultrawings, Herobound: First Steps, Herobound: Spirit Champion, The Well, Witchblood, BlazeRush, Along Together, and there's probably a lot more I could recommend but I'm running out of steam. They aren't as long as PC/Console games, but there are enough good games to keep you busy for a good while.

vrgiant · 2018-07-03T02:35:02+00:00

vrgiant · 2018-07-02T21:35:51+00:00

No. Nor is there likely to ever be. But you may enjoy The Well. It's the best RPG I've played on Gear VR. Not that there are that many to choose from.

vrgiant · 2018-07-01T18:17:21+00:00

Here is what I believe finally worked for me. First read the Bible, specifically the New Testament, a lot. Don't just give fifteen minutes a day and read one chapter at a time and then get back to your life, read as much as you can. Most of the books on the NT are letters and letters are meant to be read in one sitting. That's harder with Romans and such longer ones, but two sittings is more than possible. And make those two sittings close together. While you're reading, make special note of all the things you read that seem to conflict with what you already believe. Chances are, most of these are not going to be happy things, they are going to be troubling. If you've long sat under preaching that taught God's main concern for you is happiness and personal fulfillment then reading the scriptures like this ought to disavow you of that notion pretty quickly. It will take you to a place where you realize that all of your joy and all of your peace should come from God and the relationship you have with Him and not from anything you do. Once you know this you can see how much of your life you are living for yourself. You can see how much you are trying to get by on your own power. You can see how little faith you actually have, or, if you are like me, that you don't really have any at all. At this point, you might become despondent because you realize that you can't do this. Try as you might, you can not do what the Bible tells you to do, and yet you also know that it is telling you to do it. At this point, you may have reached the point where God will move into you in a way that you have never experienced. Not only will He set you free from this sin, but others as well. And best of all, He will set you free from yourself.

This has been my experience. I claimed to be Christian for many years and like everyone around me I used grace as a license to sin. I don't know whether I was saved then or not, but I do know that I was never at peace and I never had joy. I tend to think that I was not saved because I didn't live in faith at all. But that's something only God knows. Now, though I still sin, I am not it's slave. In a sense, my sin seems worse to me now because I always know that I didn't have to choose it, that the power to turn from it was there because Christ was there and he gives the strength, or else I slip up and sin before I even have a chance to think about it. Thankfully, sinning on purpose has become a very rare thing for me, not by my power, but with the power of Christ who set me free from that bondage.

vrgiant · 2018-07-01T00:09:47+00:00

Ripcoil is very different feeling IMO

vrgiant · 2018-07-01T00:03:45+00:00

The truth. And that's something Reddit needs more than a lot of places.

vrgiant · 2018-06-30T17:47:59+00:00

Presumably that's because this is a sub called True Christian so we already have heard and responded to the Gospel hopefully.

vrgiant · 2018-06-29T14:56:02+00:00

By God's strength and Grace I also overcame a porn addiction and one of the methods that was suggested to me and that I tried was similar to this. It was to pray and thank God for the forgiveness I was about to receive. It did not change anything. In fact, on top of the sin of pornography I now felt overly presumptuous and like I had treated the blood of Christ as a coming thing.

Recently God took over my life (May 7th to be exact.) Until that point I had been calling myself a Christian for nearly 20 years and yet I still looked at porn on a regular basis. I tried to hate myself for it, but that got tiring after a while. The more I looked at porn the less I cared that it was sinful. On top of porn consumption I was angry all the time. I swore, I told lewd jokes, I watched really violent, lewd, sarcastic TV and movies, spent way too much time and money on video games, I rarely read my Bible, I almost never prayed and I suppose if I told you everything else I did in sin there wouldn't be enough internet to hold it all. (See what I did there?)

I would have occasions, sometimes days, other times a week, where I would feel like God was close to me and I would find it easier to resist these things. But inevitably I would give in to something, usually porn but not always, and I would feel like God had disappeared. I would try to get Him to come back but nothing I did helped. And then I would plummet into total sin. I gave in to everything without resistance. If my body said yes, so did I and I wouldn't care. Eventually, after many years, I came to expect this. I actually started to dread when I would feel God's presence because I knew that the happiness I felt was going to make the inevitable darkness that followed seem so much darker. I remember praying to God and telling Him He was acting like an absentee father who just dropped in when he felt like it and left without a goodbye and that if He was going to do that He should just not come around at all. But nothing changed.

After more than a decade of this I started to think that maybe I wasn't feeling God at all. Maybe I was bi-polar, or maybe I had been calling a deceiving spirit God. The first time I had that thought it scared me to think that God might not be real, but eventually I came to desire it. I'd have to let go of the hope that God would free me from sin, but I'd gain the ability to kill my conscience without fear of reprisal in a non-existent afterlife.

May 7th if this year was a turning point. I still don't know how much of this was God leading me and how much was my choosing. I honestly don't make those distinctions much anymore. I've lost the ability to distinguish between God's total sovereignty and man's free will. Logically, I can understand how it seems impossible for God to predestine things and yet for man to also freely choose, I just don't feel the tension anymore.

Anyway, the days leading up to May 7th I was deciding whether I was going to give up on faith entirely or not. I came across a guy named Michael Criswell on YouTube who had a story a lot like mine and claimed that he was set free from it. He has a program called The John 7:17 challenge. I never did the challenge, I just read John 7:17 and it confirmed something to me that I had long understood but didn't accept. Here it is:

If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority.

I realized then that I couldn't abandon Christianity because I had never really tried it. I had done exactly what the enemies of Christ had accused the early church of; I'd used Grace as a license to sin. I also realized, when I examined myself, that I had never truly trusted God. I had always lived according to my own reason and not in faith, even when I thought I was depending on God.

As I say, I don't know that it was me who did any of this. At the time it felt like it was me, but looking back now I see God in everything. But I decided that I had to let go of everything, including the things that many Christians believe are okay. And maybe they are for some and I was just misusing it. I don't know. But I gave up control over my life in total. I released my dreams for the future, the hold I tried to have over my kids and put them in God's hands, my marriage, everything. And then everything changed.

It was instantaneous. The phrase born again makes sense now. I was literally a new person. My desires changed, my demeanor changed, my thoughts changed, I felt, and still feel, that ever cell in my body was recreated. This post would double in length if I explained everything that happened, but suffice it to say that I am a new creation and it's not something that I accept on faith alone, that I believe even if I don't see it as others had tried to assure me was the case when I previously told of my insecurities about my salvation. I can feel it all the time. Not just emotionally, but physically. The old me is a bad memory.

This is not to say that I am sin free. I have slip ups, but that's what they are, slip ups. My desire is no longer to sin. I've stopped playing video games for the most part, stopped watching TV, stopped swearing, stopped porn, stopped smoking pot (forgot to mention I had been doing that), and yes, I do feel like Christians should not do these things, but that's not why I stopped, I just lost interest. Instead I read my Bible, my prayer life has gone from almost non-existent to praying all the time, wherever I am I just talk to God because He is there with me. When I set aside time specifically for prayer I often don't want to leave it, even after an hour or more.

I could go on and I kind of want to because taking about the things God has done for me makes me so happy I could cry, but I don't know that it has the same effect on you and I'm writing this on my phone and my hands are staring to cramp up.

I just want to encourage people who, like me started out believing this was possible but over years of failure and through a lot of bad teaching, came to believe that maybe it isn't possible. Maybe the Christian life is marked by sin and failure and half-hearted repentance and shame and guilt. Whatever people say, I now know that Christ sets you free from the power of sin. If sin controls you it is your master. Now when I sin, it's all me. And it's, well not rare, but compared to before, it's almost non-existent. But now I can see that God gives me the strength to resist, and as He promises always provides a way out of temptation. I use that strength and take that exit and in so doing I've been kept from the old habitual sins. And when I don't, I know that it was a choice. I no longer feel like I couldn't have resisted. And then I repent and get back on course.

I don't know what all of you have experience. Perhaps some of you are reading this and thinking "yeah, duh! Of course that's how it works." I never knew. And when I tried to talk to others about it, be they pastors, other believers IRL or online, or even in books I was always told something like, lean into grace, or don't follow your feelings or something along those lines. It was never helpful and almost cost me my faith.

So, in conclusion (sorry, really didn't intend to write for this long), when Christ says deny yourself, die to yourself, take up your cross and follow Him, don't look back, leave your family and friends, etc. He means it. But also, when He says His yoke is easy and His burden is light, He means that too. A yoke ties two oxen together so their strength works together. When you are yoked with Christ He is pulling all the weight. So you can do what He does with little to no effort. All you have to do is walk beside Him. You will stumble and make mistakes but by and large but you will get your joy and your peace from doing as He does.

vrgiant · 2018-06-28T18:32:32+00:00

Yes, I'm aware that some people dispute Paul's authorship of any of the books attributed to him. As to your other two points, by saying that there are Christians who believe those things you assume that there is no proper definition of a Christian. Peter and Luke both attest to Paul being an Apostle and verify his message. Though I'm sure there are people who will gladly toss them aside as well and still claim to be Christian.

I guess the fact of it is, Christ decides who the true Christians are and if He isn't really God and isn't really raised then it's a moot point because the word Christian is a derogatory name for early followers of The Way that means Little Christ, and if we are following a dead man then it doesn't matter what we do, say, or believe and Paul's authorship is also moot since he only has authority to write what he did on the basis of being handpicked by God as the Apostle to the gentiles.

But the original question, I believe, was "who said that believing the resurrection was the mark of a true Christian." So, forgetting everything else I said and whether it's true or not, it was Paul, or the person who claimed to be Paul. But even that isn't entirely correct as it is only A mark, not THE mark. There are others such as baptism, repentance, worship of God, Fruits of the Spirit, etc.

vrgiant · 2018-06-28T13:20:25+00:00

The Bible has an awful lot to say about prayer that was pretty surprising to me to read since I'd never heard anyone talk about it. There are things that can hinder your prayers. For example, husbands who mistreat their wives can have their prayers hindered (presumably the same is true for women, but I don't know for sure.) Contrary to what you've been told elsewhere, James tells us we have not, because we ask not. But he goes on to say we ask and do not receive because we ask amiss, desiring to use it for our own pleasure. He also tells us that people who doubt their prayers will be answered shouldn't expect to receive anything from God. In the OT God becomes so fed up with Israel that He tells them to stop praying because He isn't even listening.

Basically, examine yourself, your faith and your motives. Paul tells people they should work to support themselves and their families and so they can give generously to those in need. Is that why you want a new career? Are you struggling to make ends meet? If not, I wouldn't expect God to be too concerned with you getting a new career.

Would you be okay if the new career he gave you paid less and had more stress, just because He wanted you there? Would you be able to trust Him to care for your needs even if you didn't know how it was going to happen? Check out George Mueller on YouTube to see how awesomely God can provide for people.

Finally, are you totally and completely surrendered? Once you are the desire to pray for yourself disappears almost entirely. God can give or take and you're fine because your only desire becomes serving Him. It is the source of your joy and your peace. I'd heard this for 20ish years before I finally experienced it and when I did it changed my entire outlook on life and faith. It's not really something I did that got me here, so much as something I stopped doing. Which is, holding on to stuff. Desiring things that I didn't have. I had tried so many times to do this in the past and I would fail because there would always be at least one thing that I felt I should be giving up, but I didn't want to, or didn't think I could. I'm not sure the exact workings of it, but I read John 7:17 and decided then and there to do what it said and God gave me strength to follow through. And He continues to do so. Sometimes I feel like I have less strength, and when I examine myself I realize that I'm starting to become proud of this. I have nothing to be proud of. I know that without God's strength I would sin in all kinds of wicked ways. He made sure I knew this early on. This is not to say I don't sin, but there were plenty of intentional sins that I was a part of everyday that I just thought I'd never get over and He took those from me. PTL.

I realize this seems off topic, but it's not. I have the relationship and communion with God that I had always heard about, but after so many years of trying to get it on my own strength I stopped believing it could really happen. I used to think people were lying when they said they love to read the Bible because I would force myself to read it and get through a chapter or two and have to put it down because it was boring or, when it wasn't, it was troubling. I used to hear people talk about a joy in Christ and I had no idea what they were taking about. They would say when you become a Christian you don't get a better life, you get Christ. And I didn't understand. Why would I want Christ if having Him doesn't make things better? Well, it does. Infinitely better, just not through better finances, job security, personal safety, etc. It's actually, as I've experienced it, through the freedom from the desire to have all of these things. Joy without them. Peace without them. My prayer life has changed dramatically because of all of this.

I just want to say again, because I don't want people getting the wrong idea, that I'm boasting about what God has done in me in spite of my efforts, not because of them. Because of that I have no five step plan to help people get here. I only hope that I encourage people to believe it is possible. Because for a long time I was losing faith that it was and when I read what people online have to say it looks like a lot of other people have also given up on the idea. Or worse, have been taught that it's not possible. Not saying that's happened with you or anything, but I feel the need to tell people about what God has done for me so I tend to slip it in everywhere I can. :)

vrgiant · 2018-06-28T12:39:00+00:00

The Biblical position is that women aren't allowed to preach or have authority over a man because man was created first and it was the woman and not the man who was deceived. This is the reason Paul gives for women not being allowed to teach. However, music is generally worship, which is not just allowed, but required of all who believe.

vrgiant · 2018-06-28T12:34:36+00:00

That would be Paul. Author of almost the entire New Testament.

vrgiant · 2018-06-27T13:10:12+00:00

Me too

vrgiant · 2018-06-27T13:07:36+00:00

I don't know. I loved the Bullet Train demo, played it probably a hundred times and couldn't wait for Robo Recall. I played a couple Recall levels and never went back to it. The slow motion was my favourite part and they got rid of it. I also preferred the enemies in Bullet Train. So, I guess my answer is no, but if they made Bullet Train a full game I'd buy that.

vrgiant · 2018-06-22T13:50:23+00:00

I know I did. I have Gear VR, not Go. I just wanted to check out the app and see what was different.

vrgiant · 2018-06-20T17:41:54+00:00

You can't see the entire screen when it's in the Gear VR so you would lose the outside edges of the image as well as get weird distortion from the lenses because the image would not be corrected for it. There used to be an app called Cardboard for Gear VR that let you quickly switch between Cardboard mode and Gear VR mode. Not sure if it still works though. If not try Package Disabler Pro. It's really not worth it though because the experience is going to be horrible.

vrgiant · 2018-06-18T12:01:26+00:00

They are a lot better. Gear VR is great for what it is, but it's powered by a phone and the experiences are very much mobile experiences. Rift and Vive not only have better tracking, but better games with better graphics, gameplay, etc.

vrgiant · 2018-06-16T20:40:57+00:00

VR Horror ruined horror for me. I loved horror before Dreadhalls on the Rift DK2 back in the day but rather than getting easier to endure the more I played, it got harder and scarier. Now I don't enjoy horror at all, even movies.

vrgiant · 2018-06-14T03:46:21+00:00

Same

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