The problem is that my mind had the wrong idea. Like so many Christians (unfortunately), I didn’t read my Bible or study it or pray. I bought into the idea that Christianity was a moral thing: Jesus was meant as a motivational speaker for self-help, and the Bible was a moral rulebook of sorts. It was all about being a good person. The Bible and all its stories were quaint little tales that were allegorical of our lives. In other words, the Bible was about me and how to be a better person. Once I got into youth group, things changed. I then found myself at the opposite extreme, believing that it wasn’t about being moral, but rather about an experience. If you say the sinner’s prayer and you get really emotional, you’re golden. That makes you a Christian! The focus, now, was on belief and emotional experiences. It was all about some hippy-dippy experience that happened inside me. I could know I was saved if I cried at youth retreats and could feel God living in my heart. ……barf.
I have to make it clear that this mindset didn’t come from my parents or my church. They were there teaching me the right stuff all along, but it never clicked for me. I think this is a blatant example of the sovereignty of God and the fallen state of man. Sometimes I would get a nudging feeling that I wasn’t doing something right. I often lived in fear, doubting my own ability. How good did I have to be to be good enough? How sincere did my beliefs have to be, to be sincere enough? I had emotions sometimes, but what happens when youth camp is over and the emotions fade? Was that sinner’s prayer really enough to secure my place in Heaven? American Christianity made it seem so easy: believe in your heart that Jesus died for you, and then be a good person. Feel it inside you. The whole thing was so much about internal, personal experiences, and then works based on those experiences. So, I’m supposed to base my life on this feeling inside me? Way too subjective for me. After all, no matter how sincere I am in believing something, that doesn’t mean it’s true. The heart is wicked and the mind is deceitful. If we base our truth and beliefs on what happens inside us, all kinds of lunatics will believe all sorts of crazy things. So, no matter how emotional I tried to be, no matter how morally I lived, something was still missing. It was all too easy and too shallow. I had a feeling that this wasn’t right. There had to be more than this, this just wasn’t enough. I wasn’t passionate about this. I desperately searched for something better, but my eyes were blinded.
So in 2009, when my youth leader told me “Blair, this weekend is going to be life-changing,” I had my doubts. I’d seen everything (I thought) that Christianity had to offer. Nothing impressed me. That weekend we went on a youth retreat. When he started our study on holiness, I turned off my brain as usual. I was a good person, right?
Wrong-o. As hard as I tried to think about anything and everything else during those Bible studies, something was different this time. I kept being drawn back to what he was teaching. When I started listening, I began to pick up on what the Christian life should look like. Of course, I already knew we should just be good people, but this was something more. He didn’t talk about how empowered we are and all the good things we can do. He didn’t talk about believing really hard and an easy “sinner’s prayer” that saves us. He didn’t even talk about a specific moment when we “accept God.” He did talk about the sovereignty of God and how He makes us alive, through no works of our own. He talked about a God who saves us and makes us Holy. He talked about grace, free and unconditional. He talked about lives being radically changed, and a passion for God that leads men to give their hearts and lives. Then, he put a chair right in front of me and sat down, and read this verse:
Thus says the LORD:“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word. (Isaiah 66:1-2 ESV)I don’t know if that does anything for you guys, but for me that was it. If Christianity was true, it didn’t look like I thought it did for all those years. This was something radical, God was some enormous, righteous, majestic God and I was this helpless, finite little creature. I could do nothing.
During a five-minute bathroom break, I took my youth pastor to the corner and asked him the question that had been on my mind for a long time: “Can you be a Christian and not want to read the Bible?” After a long pause, he answered a slow but sure “I don’t think you can.” Of course, I lost it. I had no desire for reading the Bible, I didn’t even really know what it was about. I knew in that moment that I didn’t pair up to the measure of a Christian in the Bible. Sure, maybe I was moral enough, and maybe I was sincere enough. But in the Bible, a Christian is someone who has been made alive. They don’t do good works because that’s what they feel obligated to do—they live Holy lives because they are in awe of God’s grace and He has given them new desires, and a passion for Himself.
I’d like to say that we talked for a few minutes and cleared it all up. In reality, the five-minute break turned into an hour or so of me crying and feeling completely hopeless. I didn’t desire God. This pretty much solidified what I had always feared: that I was bound for Hell. Even after an hour, nothing had changed. Rather, I left that weekend with more questions than ever.
That weekend rocked my world. I finally saw something different about this Christianity thing, and I wanted to know more. I could suddenly see a difference in people like my parents and my youth pastor, and the shallow pseudo-Christianity that is so prominent in America. This was something that made people passionate and humble and joyful—it changed their hearts. I had to know if this was true, and what I needed to do to have what they had.
I started reading my Bible and praying, just because I didn’t know what else to do. I honestly, at the age of 19, had no clue what the Bible was all about. I didn’t even realize that some of the books were letters, that there were so many different authors, that it was true historically, etc. I always thought it was a bunch of stories and rules. So I began reading the Bible and understanding the big picture. In addition to this, I read and studied the history of the Bible, how it was formed, if it was accurate, etc. I struggled for a while trying to figure out if the Bible was even true, and I poured through sites and articles about the historicity of the Bible. Through all of this, praying was the hardest thing to do. I didn’t know what to pray, so I just prayed that God would make me feel something and give me assurance on how to be a Christian. I prayed that, if Christianity were true, He would prove it to me. Looking back, most of this was spurred on by a fear of Hell. But God would soon show me something that was as infinitely great as Hell is bad.
Here is where you would probably expect me to tell some big story about how He proved it to me through some miraculous experience. Sorry, I don’t have one of those. But the thing is, I don’t want you to believe in Jesus just because I’ve felt and experienced Him in my life. While I know that I’ve encountered Him personally, Christianity isn’t true just because I feel it inside me. The thing that finally got me was studying and coming to the conclusion that the Bible could be trusted. That was the first step for me, and probably for anyone who thinks objectively as I do. Without a doubt, God WAS working inside me, but to a skeptical, logical (I thought) teenage girl, I refused to trust something happening inside me. I will not deny for a second that God had already opened up my heart—but He allowed it to be open to the truth, and the truth is what saved me. God showed me that truth was truth, despite my emotions and feelings, and then it was up to me to respond to what I knew as true. Then, I was able to trust my emotional experiences, because I had a reason to believe they were true, not the other way around.
In the end, it isn’t about something that happens in me (emotional) and it isn’t about “What would Jesus do?” (moral). It’s about what Jesus did. If the Bible is true, my salvation is already accomplished for me. American Christianity has taken the Christian life and made it a personal, inward experience. But in the Bible, Christianity was always a corporate, objective truth—it isn’t dependent on whether or not we feel it inside of us. Jesus isn’t alive because I feel Him in my heart, He is alive because He is alive. Salvation is bought and paid for, and you can do nothing emotionally or morally to earn it. If you feel called to Christ, don’t doubt it. Don’t focus on doing good works, but ask God to give you new desires. Don’t focus on emotional experiences, because your heart and your mind will deceive you. If you don’t always start crying at the name of Jesus—it’s okay. We still live in the flesh and it is at war with the Spirit. You will have dry seasons and times that reading the Bible and praying is hard and you simply do not feel like doing it (Isaiah 59:1-2). But, don’t doubt your salvation in these times. Rather, rest in the fact that Christ already accomplished your salvation and that doesn’t change based on your emotions or actions. Read the Bible and pray, even when it’s hard, because you will be drawn back in by seeing God….He’s pretty irresistible.
Don’t buy into the multitude of lies about Christianity. I had to learn not to look for that one “aha!” moment that I became saved, or the moment I “accepted” Christ. I had to learn not to base the assurance of my salvation on the “sinner’s prayer” or on my emotional experiences. I had to learn that my salvation was accomplished outside of me, a very long time ago, as part of God’s plan established before time began. When God opens your eyes to that and draws you to Himself because of it, that is when you are made alive. When I focus on what is going on inside of me, I’m just confused and empty. When I focus on what Christ did despite my confusion and helplessness, that is what gives me satisfaction and assurance and joy. All along, I was trying to hold on to God. Now I’ve realized, HE is the one holding on to me. I need just relax and enjoy it.
I had someone tell me the other day that I should probably lighten up on posting about Jesus on my social networking sites. They chalked it up to having been raised in a Southern Baptist home with the Bible under my nose my entire childhood. This isn’t the first time, either. I’ve had many people suggest that I am ignorant or blindly believing what I do because it’s what I was raised in. But what I hope to express through this post is this: I am not a Christian because of my family or surroundings or because it’s what my parents taught me. I am not a Christian who ignores truth and history and evidence and facts. I am a Christian because I believe wholeheartedly that it is true and that God has allowed me to see that. I don’t bend the truth based on my beliefs, I mold my beliefs to the truth.
As for posting about it? Heck ya. You can bet your bottom dollar I’ll post about it from here on to eternity. My posts aren’t an attempt to make someone change their ways or force my opinions on anyone. But my heart has been completely captivated by a Savior, and I can’t hold it in. While it’s a faulty metaphor, I always compare it to falling in love with a human. When it happens, you can’t get enough of that person and you want to shout it from the rooftops and declare it to the world and you want everyone else to see the beauty you see in that person. Christ has captured my heart and my affections and I simply can’t keep it to myself. That’s why I’m writing this post, that’s why we started this blog, and that’s why I intend to live a life that looks radically different from the world, even if it causes people to think I’m weird/outspoken/annoying/wrong/anything else you can think of. People thought the same stuff about Jesus, so I’ll consider it an honor.
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