Why do Christians believe in God?

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Why do Christians believe in God?
Because of Jesus Christ: his life, death and resurrection.
But what is the evidence for Jesus?
The witness of those who lived with him, and died for him.

It’s really that simple.

Does scepticism define truth? It does not.
Does a pre-existing understanding of the universe that cannot allow for the possibility of Christ, or God, define truth? No.
Does stereotyping define truth? Certainly not: it is self-defence, or a wilful lack of understanding of those who are different.

So, why then is there scepticism?
Well, the assertions of Christianity are a big deal.
This person Jesus Christ lived? The sceptic can usually live with that. (Though not always.)
He died? Sure: we all do that.
But he rose again? No way.
Resurrections don’t happen – so the testimony must be false.
Magic, mental illness, corruption of the church: anything and everything to dispute what is being said.
Metaphorical! The more spiritually inclined sceptic might turn to this reframing of what was written.
And, at the same time, the sceptic will call for evidence.
‘Give me evidence!’ is the cry of the sceptic, as he sets aside the Bible. ‘Give me evidence that will stand up in court!’ as she reaches for another book outlining The Theory of Evolution, on which to build her understanding of life.

But the evidence for Christianity is already here, and has been here all along, passed on faithfully, at high cost, for 2000 years.
The evidence for God is the witnessed accounts of Jesus: his life, death and resurrection.
The evidence for Christ is the New Testament of the Bible: the reason why the church of over two billion exists today.

People saw him.
They watched him preach, they watched him heal, they watched him feed the hungry.
They watched him beaten and crucified, and then they saw him alive again.
One, two, three…five hundred at one time.
Jesus had predicted his own death and resurrection: and now his followers watched it coming true before their own eyes.

Can a person allow for the possibility of God? That is the question.
Can a person let in the possibility that the Jesus Christ of the New Testament actually was real? That is the test.
Because the implications of this person are huge.
If the Jesus of the Bible is real, a doorway is opened up to God by looking at Christ:
here is a person who had power over life and death, in his stated connection with God; here is a person who went through death and came out of the other side again.
Such a person, if real, has the authority to talk about God, about humanity, about death and about life.
Such a person, if real, has the right for our attention.

Is a person who believes in Jesus Christ intellectually inferior, or mentally ill?
Certainly not: if the New Testament accounts are real, the Christian is simply keeping it real, whether or not they are stereotyped or even killed for it.
Because truth today, both scientific and historic, is based in observation,
and Jesus was observed by many, 2000 years ago.
We are not talking about a mere fairy tale here, or the explorations of science fiction: we are talking about history.

Show me the person who has courage to look at the possibility of God, and I will show you the true scientist.
Look at the evidence, with open mind and open heart, and see.
Be truly informed, and then you will be free to decide for yourselves whether Jesus Christ is what the New Testament asserts;
The Saviour of the World, the King of humanity,
The Son of God.

Good Friday is coming…

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Good Friday is coming.
Time for a rest! Easter! A long weekend, and into the school holidays.
But after catching my breath, what does Good Friday really mean to me, when all is uncovered? Everything. Why? Because this person, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, actually saved my life.

He reached into my darkness, into my death, into my grave, and pulled me out.
How? Because he went before me: into death. And then he came out again, with me following close behind.

But what does ‘salvation’ even mean?
Is it a high flying theological concept, only grasped by those vigorously and academically trained?
No. That’s why Mary was so delighted, when she praised God for revealing himself to the poor.
Salvation is close at hand: God, and Jesus, are right here, right now.

What does salvation mean: a life after death?
Heaven, forever?
Yes, but much more: life, here.
A deeper life; a richer life.
A lost soul found again.

But lost how? In drugs? In alcohol? In depression? In despair?
Yes, all of these, and more.
There can be binding power in our own failings, as well: with family, or friends, or colleagues…
And there can be binding power in the wrong that was done to us, from family, or friends, or colleagues…

There is a Way when we have lost our way.
There is a shining Light for those of us who are lost in darkness – whatever form that darkness may take.
On Good Friday, that Light is taking the form of a man on a cross.

Jesus hung there, beaten and dying, 2000 years ago.
He was executed, but why?
Because the religious leaders of the day couldn’t tolerate him.
Because the state was afraid of him.
What power did this man carry, to become such a threat without committing a single crime?
He Loved: with all of the power and audacity of God.

Love is compelling: love can change the world.
Divine Love can transform a nation – but at no little cost!
Such a Love demands our all, that we might gain much more:
A greater Way, a better Way; a Way of radical goodness and love.
The Way of God.

What does Good Friday mean? The cost to Jesus of saving us.
He is the Light in the Darkness – the light at the end of the tunnel.
Hope, stronger than despair.
Life, overcoming death.
Beauty and purity overcoming our corruption.

The cross is an invitation to come.
Come, and look at this man:
he’s hanging there for us, for me and for you.
His sacrifice is an offer; he is beckoning:
‘Come, and I will give you rest.’
‘Come, and I will give you new life.’
‘Come, and I will change you.’

Come, and leave the past behind.
There is a new day: a resurrection from death.
There is a new kind of life.
Look, and see that God is both powerful and good.

The Heart of Christianity.

What is the heart of Christianity?
‘For God so loved the World that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ John 3:16 NIV.

What to gain from this very sigificant verse from the Bible?
1) God. He’s here.
2) He loved the world enough to send his son into it, even though he knew he would be crucified by the ones he was trying to save.
3) There is a spiritual death.
4) There is a way to spiritual life, through faith: belief and trust in Christ.

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Christianity? It’s all about Christ.

Christianity is built on Christ.

The Word of God, the Bible, the Book to read, is Jesus Christ: the Word made into flesh – the Revelation of God in the form of a man.

If we want to know about God, we can look at Christ. The boundaries of our definitions of God, our understanding, our theology, our spirituality, can be formed on Christ. If we who are Christian disagree with each other, we can look to Christ.

We are all brothers and sisters, with different ideas, different outworkings, different spiritualities: we are all unique, and human.

But Christ was the unique Son of God: One with God. Jesus makes God known to us: the wine can be seen clearly through the wineglass.

Through Christ we also can connect to God – through God’s Spirit, we can taste the wine of God for ourselves. Through Christ, we can see our own humanity more clearly – through Christ we can live, and breathe, and have our being.

I may love, as a human being: but with Christ, I can Love.

The Church is the Body of Christ: those people who have connected to Christ, by God’s Spirit – those people who love God, and Christ.

Worship is love of God, in many different forms: it is the love of God, through music, through a service, through the help offered to our neighbour, through the internet in poetry and real conversation.

Prayer is connection with God: through words, through wordless moaned need, through searching for God, through wrestling with God in pain and suffering, through inspired thought and feeling to be more than we are – through life, and through death.

Communion is connection with God: through the profundity of joining in Jesus’s sacrifice – the offering of his own body and blood in order to save us from our own flaws.

The Spirit of God fills us: the Spirit of God empowers us to be more than we are.

Christianity is Love: the Love of Christ, to seek to save humanity; the love of Christians for Christ, offering themselves to God in return.

Christianity is Light: Light, bright, lifted up high for all to see – Light, shining in the Darkness, shining in our darkness, that we might be changed and come to know God, in our hearts and minds, and become more like him.

There is a higher place: a place to aspire to, a place to find; a place dwelling with the mind and heart of God.

God can be found through Christ.

 

 

Why am I Christian?

Why am I Christian? I have quite a few reasons. I’m starting with a bit of life story, and ending with some arguments: because we are all, in some ways, formed by our lives. Why not grab a coffee, and join me for a decent read? 🙂

I was born in the seventies, in Wellington, New Zealand. My father was a tall man: with a brilliant mind, and a struggling heart. He lost it, from time to time – and when he did, our house became profoundly unsafe. I love my father deeply – I lost him, at ten: he died. It took me twenty years to begin to grieve; it has taken me thirty years to come to terms with his abuse. He would never have harmed me – would have been horrified at the thought – but he did harm those I love.

My mother had a difficult life: more difficult than mine. She was born into World War Two: it was scary for her, as a child. She was given many challenges, of many kinds – too many. They showed themselves: sometimes they got the better of her. But she also had a keen mind, and used it well.

My brother is a genius. That’s about all I have to say about that. 🙂

I was raised Anglican – but, unlike others, I was not forced to go regularly to church. There were many things I did have to do: church was not one of them. I’m grateful to my mother for that: for me, it was the right approach. The traditional setting didn’t connect with me as a child: it was boring sitting in church. To have been made to do it weekly would have been a problem.

My mother gave me a white New Testament, when I was eight: I think she gave it to me on the way to the Easter Show, in Auckland. 🙂 I read through it, with interest: though I couldn’t understand why there was so much repetition between the four gospels. Why write the same story four times? 🙂  The words were connecting with my mind – I read of this man, Jesus, and what he did, and I believed in God in my mind, as I was raised – but the Bible did not connect with my heart.

When I was fifteen, I felt spiritually up in the air. I prayed to God, and I began to search for him. I went with Mum to buy my own Bible – I read it, cover to cover. But, in the words of U2, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for – I hadn’t found God.

When I was seventeen, I came top equal in New Zealand in Bursary with the top boy. My Mum, in my childhood, had implored my father not to extend me: she had wanted me to be an ordinary child. I guess she failed, at multiple levels. 🙂 But the reasons for the academic success were wrong. I had emerged as an academic perfectionist, going over and over the same material thoroughly, getting control over this expression of my life: yet in truth, this didn’t really represent who I was – or at least who I was going to be.

I decided to become a doctor: that was a good call. I went to med-school, in Auckland – I fully immersed myself in more academic pursuit. My mind was thoroughly occupied, but my heart had been neglected. I had been going out with a boyfriend I should never have been with – all respect to him, but we were too similar. (I think he was rather like my father, come to think…) He broke up with me – also a good call. But it cost me. And watching him with someone else brought out the worst in me.

My heart was broken open: raw, with many years of neglect. I sat in a med-school lecture theatre in a lot of pain: withdrew to the toilets, with my good friends trying to comfort me.

During Easter I watched the same TV mini-series I had watched for maybe eight years, Easter after Easter, but had never really grasped: Jesus of Nazareth. I saw the scene, the ‘Last Supper,’ the beginnings of ‘Communion,’ in which Jesus is sitting at the table with his friends, passing out bread and wine, and saying, with tears in his eyes: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ I stared at him, and suddenly a door opened within me. ‘It’s true!’ I ran downstairs, wept, and my life was changed forever.

That’s what they call being ‘born again’.

That moment, I now know, saved my life: not only in a spiritual sense, for a life to come, but in this life – that moment gave me what I needed to live.

Now I read the Bible, and it was alive: every verse was real – every verse was true.

‘Build your house on the rock, don’t built it on the sand.

Build it on the rock, so when the floods come, you will be able to stand.’ (Paraphrased.)

I built my life on Christ: proactively, systematically. I moved away from the Anglican Church, which didn’t connect culturally – I moved into a Pentecostal Church. For a season I connected, spiritually, culturally – and then I encountered the weakness of church leadership, in a deeply damaging way. I left – looked for another church: that church collapsed, through false accusation of a leader. I looked for another church: that church collapsed, due to finances and internal conflict. I looked for another church: we disagreed with the leader, and moved on. I went to another church: my childhood realities hit the fan, and church leadership added to the damage through lack of understanding.

If my faith had been built on the church, it would have been crucified by now. But my faith was never built on the church: it was built on Christ. Christianity isn’t defined by the Church: Christianity is defined by Christ.

Eventually, I returned to the Anglican Church. Now, with faith, and with an older mind, I could connect deeply with the traditions that had bored me as a child: there was a profound depth to the spirituality there, though it was being expressed over two or three hundred years with the same culture – there was spiritual truth. I joined in their culture, the church culture of my childhood: I healed. I found a church leader able to handle my independent and vigorous expression: even willing to open the door wide to my outworking.

I emerged, deeply Christian.

More floods came: I wrestled with God, in my suppressed and emerging adolescence – through my writing, I metaphorically threw chalices of wine at the face of Christ. ‘That’s for all the bullshit!’ I tend to call a spade a spade – but do you know the beauty of it? So does Christ.

Our human wrestling isn’t new to God: the Bible is full of it.

Mine was never going to be a simple black and white faith. I had to go through hell, to take the bull by the horns, to face death, to test Christ, in the midst of my own profound suffering. But I always knew, through it all, that Christ would win. And I’m glad he did.

Why am I Christian? Because Christ saved my life, and my soul.

He was bigger than me: in my rage, in my intensity, in my thinking, in my testing of justice, in my testing of character – he had already sorted it, two thousand years before I was born.

He had already offered all the answers: the Master of all things good.

In my life, Medicine was not enough. Psychology was not enough. Philosophy would not have been enough. Science was not enough. Academic success was not enough. And money? Well, that doesn’t even reach the list. There’s a place for all these things – they are all important. But none of them were capable of saving me.

‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ That was what saved me.

He was right.

Why am I Christian? Because the testimony was passed on to me, for two thousand years, from those who lived with Jesus: those who ate with him, slept with him (and I’m not talking Mary Magdalene here 🙂 ), who watched what he was doing, who listened to what he was saying – who ran away when he was accused, who mostly couldn’t bear to watch him being crucified (though John did), who buried him, who saw him alive again after death, and who spread the great significance of this person, who was one with God, all around, even though, for many, it killed them.

Why am I Christian? That testimony reached me, two thousand years later. I trusted it, as I was raised – I tested the reliability of it, later, and was satisfied that my trust, and the trust of others in the church, for two thousand years, had been well placed.

Why am I Christian? Because I found the writing in the Bible to be true, and powerful. It brought the solution. So we’re fallible? Oh, yeah! So there’s a way to fix it? Bring it on! This person Jesus is offering to carry our darkness? Wow. He’s going to die, doing it? Shiver up the spine. What do I have to do? Agree to it? And that moment, right there, is at the heart of Christianity.

Do I agree, to this person dying on my behalf, to carry my own darkness? I might have said ‘no’ – in my writing, I do say say, ‘no’. I love this person: he’s profound. And yet, there is a response beyond trying to save the one you love: there’s the need to save everyone else, including me.

So, yeah: I agree. Faith. Trust. He’s carrying it. And I’m being changed to be more like him, through that trust.

Corruption isn’t fixed: it can be undone. Wow. There is hope for humanity: even a broken, beaten, corrupted humanity. Sure, humanity has good as well as bad: it ain’t all bad. But what is our inspiration? What is our goal: to simply be us? Even define ourselves as God, or a part of God, in our current state? No: my goal is to reach higher than this – to aspire toward someone greater than I am, God, who is greater than humanity.

Why am I Christian? Because Christianity works. Through all of my scientific training, Christianity stands. Through all of my profound emotional and spiritual testing, Christianity stands. I may fall: I may be overwhelmed, in mind and heart, and unable to feel God, or be unable to see anything, in my human vulnerability – but Christianity still stands. God isn’t me: he sees beyond what I can see.

Why am I Christian? Because the arguments against Christianity are failing to see Christianity for what it actually is. I can have compassion for a person who has been abused by Christianity: but abuse is not Christianity. A black and white representation of God, looking only at certain parts of the Old Testament, without looking at the whole, also is not Christianity: there is more to understand than this. A personal lack of encounter of God can’t, in itself, define whether or not God exists: especially if others are testifying that they have seen him. A focus on corruption in the church, or the outworking of Christianity, also doesn’t get to the nitty gritty of what Christianity is: anyone can point out the corruption in any worldview – the corruption is the entire reason why Christ came. The Theory of Evolution doesn’t exclude God: science doesn’t exclude, or fight against God in any way (I used to be a theistic Evolutionist, believing God to have used Evolution to create life). And assumptions don’t begin to test actual truth.

Why am I Christian? Because the alternatives, to my mind and heart, are not as true, or as helpful. Atheism says nothing of why we are here, or where we are going: it is a stand against another answer. Agnosticism says nothing, knowingly. Anti-theism is reacting against another person’s view. Humanism overlaps significantly, in the humanitarian considerations, but assumes, sometimes, a superiority over religion that does not apply: religion is not inferior – it is different in outlook. Humanism has the consideration of humanity, as Christ had, but without the empowerment of God. Pantheism, or Eastern spirituality, is claiming that we already are a part of an impersonal God: which defines the status quo differently, but doesn’t change it. Eastern spirituality is different from Middle Eastern spirituality (Jesus was a Jew). As to Judaism and Islam: there is a huge overlap there, both being theistic, as with many expressions of spirituality and religion, which see an overarching Creator God as transcending humanity, and yet able to be known. I consider this perspective vital for our future, both here and in the life to come.

Why am I Christian? In summary, because I consider Christianity is true, and it works. I consider that Jesus was actually as he is described in the New Testament: he lived, giving food to the hungry, healing the sick, and showing us how we could connect with God. He died, crucified, because the religious leaders of the day couldn’t tolerate him. And he rose again – physically, not only spiritually. He actually overcame death, in order that we also could overcome death, and be with God.

Wow.

Imagine meeting someone like this: the disciples actually did. That realization, there, that I had, at seventeen: that understanding that this stuff, written, passed on, is actually true – that is Christianity.

Why not join me? 🙂 I’d love to see you here.

 

 

 

 

What is Christianity?

What is Christianity?

I find Christianity gets a lot of different representation by different people. For some, Christianity seems to be about abuse, or judgement: abuse of priests, or a bad experience of judgment from certain evangelists. Others seem to carry a view that because church leadership can carry power, that, definitionally, that means the leadership abused that power, and therefore corrupted any passed on truth, for the purpose of control.

Some seem to view Christians as superstitious, lacking in rational thought, and dependent: incapable of independent thought.

Others seem to see Jesus as a humanist: caring for human need, and passing on human philosophy. Period.

It seems to be profoundly easy to interpret Christianity, Christians, and Christ himself, according to who we are: if we have been abused, if we have experienced corrupt leadership, if our own view is atheism, and we are independent, if what’s important to us is the caring for humanity part of what is written about Jesus, and not the rest…

In this age, we are free to pick and choose what we like, what we find helpful, what works for us…but this is not Christianity. This is us.

So, then: what is Christianity?

Priests may abuse – but this is not Christianity.

An evangelist may inappropriately judge his neighbour – but this is not Christianity.

Any leader in power might abuse that power – but this is not Christianity.

Some Christians may be viewed as dependent – but this is not the full scope of Christianity.

Christ offered a lot of humanitarian care, as does the Church today, and so do non-Christian organisations – this also is not the full definition of Christianity.

So, then: what is Christianity? What defines Christianity?

Christianity is defined by Christ.

Christ is not defined by Christians: rather, Christians are defined by Christ.

So then, who is this person, Jesus Christ? That is the nitty gritty question, for anyone who wants to take a serious look at Christianity.

Who is Jesus Christ, does he carry real authority, and should we trust him?

Join me, as I start to explore Jesus…