Some would say I’m religious, but I am not. I do not believe in standing on ceremony or any list of thal-shalt-nots or traditions that I must follow to someway earn my way into heaven. Many people misunderstand what faith is and what true Christianity represents. For this reason I feel the need to explain what exactly I do believe. First of all, I believe in a creator, this creator I believe is involved in the world, he has a plan, and has orchestrated the entire universe, the good and the bad in order to display his glory, it is his masterpiece. There are so many things that I could explain, but first to talk a bit about the Bible and what it means to me so that you can understand. The Bible is comprised of two very different and complementing parts. The first the Old Testament is a record of God’s historical dealings with man and particularly with the Jews, the people he chose to be the building blocks for the salvation of the world. In the OT we see that man is sinful, disobedient to God, this started with Adam but includes everyone, the Jews included. God gave the law to the Jews, a code of right and wrong, how God requires us to live. He gave us this law to show us that only he can be perfectly in line with this law and so since it is impossible to follow it and the penalty for not following it is separation from God and true death, we need his help so that we can be reconnected to him and so that he can save us from death or hell if you prefer the term (ultimately some form of eternal punishment for our crimes) You see God wants to spend forever with his creation, he loves us as parents love their children, but he is a just God and being perfect himself, he can not have relationship with guilty persons, namely all of us fallen people who have found ourselves incapable of perfection, since our loss of innocence at the moment of Adam’s first sin. Since he does love us and does not want to be separated from us forever, but instead desires that we would be able to have eternal life and a relationship with him, he has made a way using history and a system of atonement to pay the price for our sin so that we can reconnect with him. This system started with a promise to Adam and Eve that he would provide this way, and starting with them he set up a system of sacrifice that follows all the way through the OT so that the people could understand that sacrifice was necessary to pay for their sins although their sacrifices were only representative of the ultimate sacrifice that God was building up to through history in his perfect time at his perfect moment. Ultimately we have the events that unfold as predicted in the OT, Christ, the Son of God comes and dies after living the only perfect life to ever have been lived, he proves his divinity on earth, lives sinless as a human being and then dies, giving his blood and his body as the sacrifice ultimately necessary to break the bonds of the Law and set us free from our sin. So that covers the Bible and the basics of what it means in a nutshell. Now let me tell you what this means to us. Many feel uncomfortable about the topic of sin. This is natural, we are uncomfortable with it because we are all sinners, and all guilty. We want to think that a merciful God would send us all to heaven, or we look at the world want to say that there is no God, we come up with ways to explain him away with our intellect and our science, but you can not explain away something that actually exists. God is not an idea of mankind that we can simply do away with when he no longer serves our interests. He is there and as much as he loves us, he cannot have a relationship with us while we are tainted, we have to be washed so to speak. This process is called salvation, you’ve probably heard “you need to be saved” or something like it from some “crazy” religious person approaching you on the street or something. The thing is they are correct, but they aren’t giving you an explanation, that is what I’m attempting to do in some fashion here. So we have this salvation, what does it entail? It’s actually much simpler than people try to make it out to be. So many people believe that they cannot approach God because they aren’t good enough or they need to get their life “right” first or something, the thing is that we can’t be good enough, as I’ve already explained, this is why there is salvation in the first place. This is why we have Christ. This is why he went through everything he did; so that we could approach God just as we are and ask for forgiveness and have our relationship restored. The movie “The Passion of Christ” is an excellent resource if you would like to get a better idea of what exactly Christ endured to pay for your sin. Anyhow, all you have to do to obtain salvation is admit your faults, that you are imperfect and fall short of the glory and perfection of God, believe truly that Christ died as the perfect Son of God to pay the price for your sins so that you could be reconnected to God and have eternal life thereby avoiding eternal death and punishment for sin (the price for even the tiniest wrongdoing that separates you from God) and finally commit, you must commit to opening your heart to the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of God given to guide us back to the perfect plan that God desires us to follow with our lives). This can be done with a simple heartfelt petition to God; any person can come to God and simply ask and receive salvation and eternal life. Salvation begins a process and a rebirth in us, once we ask Christ into our hearts and lives we are reborn and God begins to sort of trim off the parts of us that are sinful and restore us to his perfect creation that was originally made in his reflection. That is the basic gist of it, once you are saved you will experience new joys as you learn to enjoy life for what it is truly meant to be, there are so many things that begin to click into place as we realize that God’s way is so much better than ours. I hope that someone who reads this can experience these joys. One last thing, don’t worry if you aren’t perfect, you won’t ever be until this process of life is complete and you go to meet your creator, it is a constant struggle to do what is right in a world that usually does what is wrong. Just make the most of this life, live fully and give as much as you can to the people around you, whether it be a smile or a word of encouragement or the coat off your back. One of the greatest joys of being a believer is realizing what a small piece we are of something so large and yet we are each made to be God’s and given the opportunity to do great things in the power given to us by the Holy Spirit. If you care to read up on what I’ve told you, pick up a bible, the best place to start is probably the book of John followed by Romans, then Acts, and Genesis. I pray the words speak to your heart and mind, as they have to mine!
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