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Why I am a Christian

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As a teenage Christian, I am frequently asked about my faith. Some people merely want to know what I believe, but others wish to know why I believe. I am a Christian for far too many reasons than could possibly be listed out in a single post; however, I do want to share with you a few of the key reasons for my faith.

First, I am a Christian because of my personal experiences. For example, at my eighth birthday I was barefoot, and my friend who happened to be wearing cowboy boots stepped on my toe as he rushed to get some birthday cake. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, except that it hurt. However, a few months later when my toenail began to be pushed half an inch up by something inside of my toe, I began to think about it a bit more.

My parents took me to the podiatrist, who thought that I may have had a cancerous growth within my toe. I then went through a surgery where half of the bone inside of it was removed, the rest was filed down until it was round, and then the flesh was stitched back up. The doctors discovered that I did not have cancer, but instead I had a bone spur, an improper growth of bone where my toe had tried to heal after it had been broken when my friend stepped on it.

After I regained consciousness, I was sent home, and the doctors gave my parents some extremely strong pain medicine to give to me. In fact, it was so strong that the doctors told my parents that it might make me vomit. I guess they expected me to be in some serious pain, after all, I had just had half of my toe chopped off.

Curiously, I never had to take a single pill. The doctor wouldn’t believe me. He insisted that the pain would have been too unbearable for an eight year old boy to handle without medicine, but the truth is that I never felt any pain the whole time. My family and I have always attributed my lack of pain to God’s grace and love, and I continue to believe that it was God’s hand in my life that spared me from what could have been a very painful experience.

Second, I believe in God for reason’s sake. People may claim that belief in God is irrational, but I have found quite the opposite to be true. C.S. Lewis does a far better job of explaining why this is than I could ever do, but here are a few of the reasons that I believe there must be a God.

As good place as any to begin this discussion would have to be man’s innate longing for God. Anyone who is at all familiar with history can see that civilizations across the globe, even ones isolated from those in the western world, have gods. From the Egyptians to the Sioux Indians, primitive peoples have always had gods, and I believe that that points to an inherent longing for God.

In fact, the very people who reject the existence of any God or gods still believe in something higher than themselves. They believe in reason. They place their faith in reason and they postulate that it is good. But how could it have any significance, how could it be worth bothering with, if there is ultimately no meaning in the universe, if there is no created purpose for our existence?

To reject God requires one to reject reason, purpose, meaning, and even beauty. All that remains is the physical world and a bunch of blobs made out of cells made out of molecules made out of atoms that are running around eating each other. The priest would be no more holy than the rapist or the dog, and there would be no standard by which anything could be judged. Without a standard, the world becomes a relativistic, irrational, arational mess. A form of skepticism so critical of everything that it cannot even claim to know any truth, even its own – and if it were to claim that, it would be self defeating – becomes the rule.

Even the most adamant of materialists could not claim materialism to be good or true. They could say that wealth and pleasure make them happy, but happiness would mean nothing and factual statements would hold no weight. There would ultimately be no reason for existence outside of one’s own feeling that one should live, but even that would be devoid of meaning.

Either we live in a God created world, as men have a natural inclination to believe, or else we live in a chemical stew that is devoid of any purpose. Belief in either world requires faith. To believe in a God-made world requires faith in a God, a God who is the embodiment of reason, but to believe in an atheistic world requires faith in everything. It requires faith that there is no God, that science is right, and that the natural inclinations of men are wrong, even though the world would have no purpose and thus the only standard for anything would be those very inclinations. It therefore requires faith in the irrational.

I also believe in God because I believe that Jesus was God come in the flesh. Eyewitness accounts and the historical documentation of Jesus are irrefutable. Jesus is real, and he did crazy things while he was on earth. Either he was a madman who possessed technology far superior to our own that allowed him to perform superhuman acts, or he was the son of God.

I look around and I see a beautiful world, order and meaning, a design, and a place where inexplicable things occur. I cannot believe that it all happened by chance or that it all came from nothing. This world was built with a plan in mind, and we can tell when things are going according to that plan. We also have an innate understanding of how things should be, which can only be explained through the existence of an intercessor. That is why I believe in God. That is why I am proud to call myself a Christ follower.

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