Julie grew up in a Christian family and “gave her life to Christ” around 10 years old. She didn’t really know what it meant. It was just something she was expected to do.
This is the story of many people in the United States where Christianity is culturally favored, especially in some areas of the country. Christian upbringing, though, doesn’t make one a genuine Christian believer.
I wrote a blog article titled, God Has No Grandchildren, on this point. Christian faith is about relationship with God. We don’t inherit a relationship with God from our parents.
Julie’s story is an example of this. She wandered far from the roots of her Christian upbringing because she didn’t have relationship with God.
Christian faith is only real if it is genuine and personal. No one can make that connection with you but God, Himself. When He does, it changes everything.
Julie’s story is also an example of coming to genuine Christian faith, of being born again and becoming a child of God.
Everyone’s journey is a bit different. Some take many twists and turns, but God is always there, knocking on the door to our hearts, waiting for us to open up and let Him in.
When we do that – knowingly, meaningfully – He gladly meets us where we are. It isn’t anything we do, other than to open up and yield to Him as our Lord and Savior.
We don’t enter into relationship with God on our own terms. The terms are all His, but they are freely given to all who would receive Him.
“[T]o all who … receive him, who [believe] in his name, he [gives] the right to become children of God, … born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
John 1:12-13
Following is Julie’s story in her own words:
If Julie’s story interests you, and you want to hear other stories of people raised in Christian homes, by Christian families and going to church, who come to realize that they are missing something, you can read other stories that get posted from time to time of people raised in Christian families who discover genuine faith in God.
A listener to the Unbelievable! podcast wrote in to Christian Premiere Radio in the UK and shared his faith journey. He was invited in for an interview. His story is a modern tale.
Jim Thring grew up in a non-religious home. He didn’t know much about religion, which is a typical experience for people growing up in the increasingly post-Christian world that characterizes the UK in the 21st Century.
He became a Christian in college. It wasn’t something he set out to do. He didn’t go seeking for truth. Friends of his introduced him to Christianity. They invited him to believe, and he accepted the invitation.
Over the years, though, his faith waned. It became shallow and lifeless. He eventually walked away and became an atheist. He says his atheism become harder core when he came across the New Atheists and began reading their books and attending their lectures.
He was an atheist for almost a decade. He joined the British Humanist Association. He “rode the rhetoric” of people like Christopher Hichens and Richard Dawkins to justify to himself intellectually that he had made a sound decision.
As time went on, though, he began to question the rhetoric. Some of it seemed shallow. Many atheists were putting Christians down as “people who weren’t thinkers or rational at all”. It seemed as if they were simply against whatever Christians said. If Christians believed something, they were against it.
He remembered people he knew from years earlier who were “a lot smarter” than him who were still Christians. He began to soften in his atheism. He began to realize that reason, logic and rational thinking are tools available to more people than atheists, and they don’t inexorably lead to atheism.
He began to realize that a person can dismiss anything. Dogmatic people dismiss things out of hand, and atheists can be as dogmatic as believers.
Darren Brown talks about the “power of belief” as a stimulant. Jim would listen to that and think to himself, “Yeah! That’s what belief is, and now I am free from all that.” As time went on, however, he began to see that his atheism had a powerful stimulant behind it as well.
The maxim that “for everything there is a material explanation” is a very powerful belief. “It means that it doesn’t matter whatever evidence someone puts in front of you, it doesn’t matter what arguments, however well-constructed they might be, or how valid they are, you’ve got a reason to dismiss them.”
He began to be honest about where his atheism lay. Thus, he gradually began going to church again with his wife and spending time with her church friends. He began to take another look at Christian arguments.
At the same time, he sought to address the issues he had with origins, evolution and young earth. He wanted to take a different look at those issues from a different perspective, but he didn’t want a source that was just a “Christian institute”.
He came across John Lennox, the professor of Mathematics at Oxford, and read his book called Gunning for God: How the New Atheists are Missing the Mark. Lennox put those issues in perspective for Jim, but he also addressed the evidence that Jim thought were “knockdown arguments” against the Christian Faith. Lennox turned them around and applied them to atheism.
Jim’s deconstructed faith began to be rebuilt. Jim’s journey is an interesting one. To hear the whole story, I have embedded the interview below:
J. Warner Wallace, the “cold case detective”, has become a leading Christian apologist. He brings a unique perspective to the world of faith.
Having grown up in an atheist family, he didn’t come to faith until well into adulthood. He didn’t grow up in the church, obviously. The traditional focus on personal experience and testimonies in evangelicalism was not part of his background. He didn’t come to faith through experience or the influence of personal testimonies. For him, it was simply a matter of the facts.
Wallace observes that the most popular answer people give for being a Christian is that they were raised in a Christian family. The second most popular answer people give for being a Christian is some experience that demonstrates to them personally that Christianity is true.
Wallace criticizes these bases for Christian faith because Mormons give similar answers to explain their belief in Mormonism. The number one answer people give for being a Mormon is that they were raised in a Mormon family, and the second most popular answer is some experience that demonstrated for them that Mormonism is true.
Christians don’t think Mormonism is true, but their stories of coming to faith are the same as ours. Thus, Wallace concludes, experience can be a powerful thing, but it doesn’t necessarily settle the truth of the matter, and people who rely on personal experience are relying on a weak anchor to faith.
More important than experience is whether something is true.
Wallace goes on to share his testimony in the short interchange linked at the end of this article with the caveat given above – don’t put too much faith in his (or anyone else’s) testimony. Still, we like testimonies, right?
I recently gave a presentation on faith (and doubt). We moderns tend to think of faith as the opposite of doubt – as in proof or evidence, or the lack thereof – but that isn’t the way Scripture presents faith to us. Cosmological and fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God and so on are elementary.
We shouldn’t be commended for merely believing God exists. God has made himself obvious. (Rom. 1:20) Even the demons believe … and bristle! (James 2:19)
Rather, faith involves trust and relationship. It involves a willingness to rely on God, rather than rely on ourselves. A willingness to wait on Him, to trust Him, and to be confident in His goodness toward us. Faith is believing God loves us and desires us to love Him.
We receive God’s grace by faith; it’s not anything we do, lest anyone boast. Rather the grace we receive is the gift of God offered to us out of His love for us. (Eph. 2:8-9)
“Anyone who comes to God must believe He exists”
Hebrews 11:6a
Of course!
“and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”
Hebrews 11:6b
Faith is not just believing that God exists, but believing that He really does reward those who desire Him.
I had not previously thought of the story of Adam and Eve in the context of faith before. After all, they didn’t doubt God existed. God walked with them in the cool of the day in the garden. They knew God face to face!
When Satan tempted them, however, they lacked faith. They failed to trust that God was trustworthy.
It may not seem immediately obvious that the story of Adam and Eve is a story of unbelief, but I think it is. When Satan focused their attention on the seeming goodness of the fruit to eat and questioned why God would not want them to eat what was good for them, Satan was tempting them to doubt God’s goodness toward them.
Adam and Eve ignored God’s warning, determining for themselves what was best for them. Unbelief is an unwillingness to rely on God and a choosing to rely on ourselves and our own ability to determine what is best for us – rather then rely on God.
Adam and Eve were intrigued by Satan’s claim that eating the fruit would make them like God. They bought into the claim that God didn’t want them to be like Him, knowing good from evil. At the core of that temptation is the desire not to be dependent on God and to be self-sustaining, self-determining, and self-righteous.
Of course, God did want them to be like Him. After all, God made them in His very image! It was the very core purpose of His plan for them to be like Him!
The statue outside the library in the Irish town where CS Lewis was born depicts him, as the Narnia narrator Digory Kirke, stepping into a wardrobe.
Ever since I read Mere Christianity in college as a new believer I have been a lifelong admirer of CS Lewis. He may be better known for his children’s series of books, The Chronicles of Narnia, but he wrote other fiction, including a trilogy of science fiction novels, and Lewis was much more than a writer of fiction.
Lewis was a professor, a poet, a critic of English literature, and he was a first-rate Christian thinker with an ability to tease nuanced meaning out of complex ideas with rare clarity in his writing. Having been an atheist up to his 30’s. Lewis came to Christianity with a wealth of knowledge in the classic languages and literature from a scholarly and secular perspective.
His autobiographical book, Surprised by Joy, is a literary cornucopia of allegorical references to the classics. Ancient Greek, Roman, Celtic and Germanic writings were the universe in which his mind operated and found meaning. He was intimately familiar with the myths found in these writings.
When he became a Christian, and he looked back on that wealth of knowledge with new insight, the language of classic literature became the background and (in some ways) the springboard for his belief in “the true myth”, as he came to call it. The “true myth” is the life, death and resurrection of God who became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
While Lewis is known for being a Christian apologist in addition to being a writer of children’s fiction, he was first and foremost a scholar of classic literature. He was a lifelong professor of English Literature with tenures at Oxford University (Magdalen College, 1925–1954) and Cambridge University (Magdalene College, 1954–1963). His books include a highly regarded and well-used critique of Paradise Lost and a textbook on Sixteenth Century English literature.
To say that Lewis was a prodigious writer and thinker is to understate the fact. He wrote over 30 books of varying types in addition to his “fulltime job” as a distinguished university professor and sought-after lecturer.
Given the legacy of thought and writing that Lewis generated, one might suppose that Lewis had no time for the more mundane matters of life. One might suppose that his ego was as prodigious as the volume of his writing, and one might be wrong about such suppositions.
Lewis was one of a kind. Born in 1898, Lewis didn’t marry until 1956. One might suppose that bachelorhood allowed him the luxury of time, but Lewis made a different kind of lifetime commitment that infringed greatly on his time. Lewis took in an older woman he didn’t previously know and cared and provided for her until she died.
The backstory is that Lewis and Paddy Moore met as soldiers in the trenches during the Great War (WWI). They made a pact with each other that the survivor of them would take care of the family of the other if one of them did not survive the war. Lewis, himself, was injured and ended his involvement in the war in the hospital, but Paddy Moore went missing and was never found.
True to his word, CS Lewis, who had interrupted his college years to volunteer for the war, took Paddy’s mother and sister in to live with him on a very modest student’s budget. Lewis cared and provided for Mrs. Moore the rest of her life – a total of 30 years – routinely doing the household chores himself. After she developed dementia and was moved to a nursing home, Lewis visited her every day until she passed.
Perhaps because of that care and provision (and very generous charitable giving), Lewis lived a very modest life, but he always found time for hospitality. Lewis was, perhaps, as generous with his hospitality as he was prodigious in his writing and professorial vocation.
When the Germans invaded Poland, Lewis opened up his home to several groups of children forced to evacuate the big cities. Lewis also regularly hosted the Inklings on Thursday evenings in his classroom for nearly two decades. (They met alternately at the Eagle and Child Pub, affectionately known as The Bird and Baby) on Tuesdays at midday).
The Inklings were more or less an ad hoc group of writers and thinkers who met to discuss their literary works in progress and whatever other subjects suited their fancy, often late into the night. J.R.R. Tolkien was a faithful member of this group from the beginning, reading the Lord of the Rings to his fellow Inklings, who critiqued it, before it was published. Including a small handful of regulars, the group included about 15 frequent visitors and another dozen infrequent visitors and guests over the years.
As noted above, Lewis married later in life. The marriage, itself, was an exercise in hospitality. Lewis opened his home to Joy Gresham Davidman, a writer from New York city, and her two sons, David and Douglas. They eventually married in a civil ceremony so she could gain British citizenship. What began as a gesture of generous hospitality, turned into true romantic affection.
They were married a short while later, by a priest this time. Their wedding vows were exchanged in a hospital because Joy developed cancer. They spent four more years together, but cancer eventually claimed her. Their unlikely story is the subject of the movie, Shadowlands, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger and directed by Sir Richard Attenborough. Lewis also wrote about her death in A Grief Observed.
But all of this is prelude to the real purpose for which I write today. My inspiration comes from Douglas Gresham, one of Joy’s sons, who was very young when he went to live with his mother in the home of CS Lewis.
Navigating by Faith 