It is so cool to hear your thoughts and to sense the freedom that you were pretty sure MUST be what Christ had brought. I understand the hesitance found in considering many of these Scriptures, for this mirrors so much of my own learning. :) It is a slightly different struggle than those who never really got into Bible Study as you and I have more in-depth questions to ask about particulars that seem to indicate something other than the freedom we have heard in Christ. You are right, many don't want to discuss stuff like we're doing here.

What I have discovered is that these passages and Scriptures that SEEMED to be against the grace of Christ have instead become shining jewels of insight in the simplicity found in them! Really! The verses that gave me the most problems have become a source of tremendous joy and insight. :) Also, in this, I have been forced to continually consider WHY these letters were written, and have been forced to discover the simple flow of thought that was in the writers mind as he wrote what he did. In this, I have discovered how much alike these guys were to us right now. I can many times hear the intensity in how they were communicating as it magically fits the context of the whole! It makes so much sense as far as how it fits together ... just as if it was written as a letter that we would write with a common theme through the whole. After all, if I wrote you a letter ... like this one ... you would read it altogether and would catch the simple connections between what I was communicating whether it was at the beginning, the middle or the end of the letter. You would realize that some of the things I wrote were in direct connection to something you had written even if I didn't include your direct quote in the answer. As a matter of fact, by simple observation, you may even wonder if I had written this first part of this letter AFTER I wrote the rest (which I did :). Okay, okay, back to the letter ....