Why I call myself a Christian:

Attempting to put it succinctly -- I know that Jesus Christ is who He said He is -- the One sent from God to walk among us, so that we might have life and have it to the full. I know that He is the risen Savior and that God loves every last person, even me (though He is often displeased with me). And for that I am grateful and desire to commit my life to Him and His just and perfect ways. Unfortunately, my actions do not reflect this, and so I am relegated to labeling myself with a generic term that is supposed to encompass much more than any word could ever really do. But in the end, I hope that telling people I am a CHRISTian will serve its purpose in directing attention away from me and toward the only true life-giver, CHRIST Jesus.

It only took me a zillion times of reading the gospel books, hearing sermons on them, reading books about them, etc, etc, before I seemed to begin grasping "how wide, how deep, how long is the love of Christ for us" and before I realized that I could not reason God or the Gospel message of Jesus away. And believe me, that's not a lot of times considering the thick skull I've got and considering how slow I am to comprehend most matters. It really is a miracle that I finally gave in to the truth (but it's a good thing God brought me to my senses when He did). Somehow, I went from repeatedly thinking "OK, that makes sense. and I can't think of a good, concrete reason why I shouldn't believe the Gospel is true, but i just don't buy it" to wondering, "How can I not acknowledge the seeing that this world, our lives, our desires don't make sense without God and Jesus's life doesn't make sense unless He was indeed the Messiah. Not that it's always clear, not that I hold the truth in the palm of my hands, not that I can always articulate what I know to be true, but certain that God is leading me in the right direction.

I can relate to Augustine when he writes "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you." I often wonder, "doesn't everyone who denies God's existence find themselves restless?" I know I did, but I shrugged that off quite well. I kept telling myself that I did not need God, I'm fine without Him, I'm not weak like all these other people. Is it weakness to acknowledge that I am not here on my own accord, that I did not create my own body, my own abilibty to think and feel*, my desire to love and be loved? If so, I am glad to be weak! It is much more satisfying to be made strong than to pretend that I'm everything I am without the help of a being greater than myself.

Conservation of Energy:

If you want a proof of a God whose existence can be proved within our system of logic, using our 5 senses, and confined to that which we can explain on our own terms, you'll never get it because that's not the God that exists. To create the world, He must be outside it, He must be beyond our own capacity to see, hear, touch, think, and feel. There is no less proof or reasoning in this statement than there is for His non-existment in the statement God can not exist because I have not observed Him with my senses and He does not fit the mold I expect Him to.

Coming to terms with the existence of God began for me with my attempts at answering one of those basic questions everyone at some point asks themselves - how did we get here in the first place? Evolution was my answer to that question and much much more.... Until I did some more careful thinking and realized that while it was a very nice theory, it was still just a theory lacking proof, and still relied on fundamental natural principles being in place for it to be possible, and as we reject hypotheses with a low p value, the idea that those very principles that would allow this complex world arrive at the state it's in today to just happen to be in place without there ever having been any intention for it to be this way, is << .01. So, I turned to the theory that there was God who is capable of creating from scratch or at least laying down the "natural laws" that we can accept and allows evolution to run its course without defying our intellect. This was a dissatisfying answer for me at first.

But then I realized that the refusal to take God as the answer had no more logic and sound reasoning than accepting that there is something/someone bigger than myself, this world, and my comprehension. To refuse on the basis of not accepting "an explanation of the unexplainable with something unexplainable," which one of my mentors from high school, understandably, expressed with disdain, would be analagous refusing to accept that a book wound up on a table with the help of something other than the book and the table. To refuse to believe in the supernatural is essentially confining ourselves to a closed system upon which nothing outside it can act. It's the same as saying we observe nothing outside the system of the book and table, and therefore, it would be unreasonable to believe that someone put the book on the table.

Because we can't give an explanation from within the system, do we stop there and say there must be no reason at all and concede that there can be no explanation that requires acknowledgment of anything outside the system?

And actually, to deny the existence of an ultimate creative source is to violate the conservation of energy. Even if we believed in the Big Bang or the pool of amino acids, at the beginning of it all, energy was added to the system, let alone there being mass to begin with. Actually, I heard a very good talk by J.P. Moreland once in which he stepped through the thought experiment of the beginning of time. Who/what ever initiated time, is who we call God. You may want to disregard that time even had a beginning, but it necessarily does: For if time extended backward infinitely, this very moment in time would have never arrived. i.e. if you claim that no one can mark an instant at which time began . The one who began time and set everything in motion is the one I call God.

Then, you wonder "well, just because there is a 'Creator' or as Aquinas might call it, the 'First mover,' how do we know it's not just some impersonal force?" Well, how is it that this force would just happen to create something in a way that "made sense" to us? We claim that we can explain away God because we have an explanation for how the world got here, how genes direct our biological processes, how ATP supplies our energy, how we can use resources to make machines to do work for us -- we have explanations for 'everything' that make sense to us. But do we really think this creative force could have gotten all of this working in a way that makes sense to us without all of it making sense to "It"? This force has a mind that understands -- that MADE -- the logic we use.

By the way, how do we start our thoughts any way? I can see how we start a movement. The muscles contract because there are electrical impulses sent from our neurons to muscle fibers which activate that actin/myosin cross-bridge motion. We can even describe the detailed role of small molecules like calcium and ATP yadayada in the whole process. But what initiated the very first electrical impulse? We think we're so smart because we can describe how we get the shape of action potentials -- what ion channels are opening and closing when, but have you ever noticed how we always start with "something" causes a small change in voltage which triggers this whole chain of events. But we are never bothered that we don't know what that very first electrical stimulus is. Close your eyes and think of the answer to 2+2. What was that very first impulse that got the right neurons firing the right way for you to think "4"? -- Free will is a violation of the conservation of energy unless we believe that we each have a spirit whose source is outside of that which we define as the material world.

Why is it that we have no problems looking outside a system for some answers but not for others? I think for the same reason we shy away from lots of issues and challenges and problems -- when ever things start getting personal or close to the heart, we get uncomfortable.

Rejecting the null hypothesis:

I used to think there was no way God could exist. I thought suffering and pain was clear evidenc. Then I realized that doesn't prove God doesn't exist, just that I thought I had a right to disagree with the way He runs things. I also used to think evolution could expalin away the existence of God.

I've had plenty of discussions with friends, peers, even my advisor about evolution. And I'm all the more convinced that evolution went only as far as Darwin took it -- to the differentiation of species. It was responsible for the origin of species, not the origin of life. I reject the null hypothesis (there was no intelligent design in arriving at human life today as we know it or even life in general; rather, a series of millions upon millions of random events got us to the state we are in now) because the p value is infinitesimally small.

The Gospel in circuits

Now I've only talked about why I know God exists. But why do I care? Because without Him, I am like a dead resistor. But when I'm plugged into God the power source, there is life flowing through me. I could have more life flowing through me if I wouldn't resist so much, but I've got lots of pride, self-will, sometimes just stubborn denial of the capabilities of God -- all these things make me more on the order of a giga-ohm resistor rather than kilo-ohm or less. The power supply is limitless -- it's my resistance that keeps me from be full of the life of christ. Really, though, I care because I want to know more about this God who is able to create and give life - I want to know this God who is so amazing - whose intellect is mind-boggling - in His creativity, ingenuity -- He's the absolute best engineer out there! He also is so generous to give us life, to allow us to know love, to desire to give to us, to always be available to us. For me not to acknowledge Him and be grateful to Him would be like me ignoring my mom and just eating the meals she lovingly cooks for me, living in the house she keeps clean for me, wearing the clothes she washes for me, living by the advice she gives to me. It's like never appreciating my mom and thanking her for all she's done for me because for all intensive purposes, my life is not affected by whether or not I acknowledge or appreciate her as long as she continues to do all those things for me that she does out of her affection and care for me. But how awful for her would that be! And b/c I do appreciate her, it would be awful for me if she did not know that I appreciate her immensely! Yet, how much more do I want to show God that I appreciate Him!

So, the bad news was that for a lot of my life, and still now in many ways, I ignored God or continue to forget I owe everything to Him, my life itself. The good news is He is the omnipresent source, and just waiting for me to plug in. Actually, the circuit analogy does not stop there. It's great to realize that the resistor needs to be plugged into the source to have any use. But you can build much more interesting circuits with more resistors and components. We were intended to also be networked with other people -- and when they're working in parallel, you can even help each other lower that resistance -- ha ha, ok, i know that's about as cheesy an analogy as one could come up with, but it's true -- God ultimately desires for us to know Him and realize that we are known best by Him, but He also desires for us to live in relationship with other people.

Disclaimer: Analogies are really useful for me in thinking about difficult concepts, and I really enjoy using them. But I have to be careful about trying to take analogies too far. They are not substitutes for the thing I am trying to describe itself, just a tool to get me started. But I do believe God gives us parallels between the way He works and the way other things we seem to accept more readily work.

Another question I've wondered about is how people can say God is gracious when He will only allow Himself to be truly known by people who are not marred by any sin -- not even a single sin. He despises sin. Even 1 little lie, 1 mean insult, 1 impure thought makes us unfit to enter His kingdom. That sounds a little hard-nosed and unmerciful, doesn't it? Until you realize that it's only as hard to accept as the fact that if you put even a teeny tiny bit of noise through an op-amp, you'd get a saturated wacked-out signal out. Well, God is an IDEAL op-amp -- He defines what it means to be ideal and perfect. By His nature, He can't accept any noise. It's not that He does not want to let a signal pass - it just doesn't work right because of His ideal nature. When we try to enter His kingdom with our sin, the system blows up. <\p>

Ah, but there is a solution. Jesus is the Way - a bridge for us to access God -- i.e., Jesus closes the loop and stabilizes the system. By accepting the punishment for MY sin, He enables me to be blameless before God. God required the Israelites to sacrifice an animal, for blood to be shed, in order for their sins to be forgiven. Jesus became the ultimate sacrifice that pays the price for all our sins once and for all.

Empiricism:

You might be saying (might being the operative word) "Well, the theory is all well and good, but I'm an experimentalist. I don't want just abstract theory. I need hands-on reality." Good news for you, then! Because that's precisely what God gives us - real life! And the only way to really know and believe that for yourself is to test it out. Use the scientific method - start with the hypothesis that God does exist. Live as though God exists and see if the data fits your hypothesis. For the longest time, I saw that life was consistent with a world in which the God existed. But I found myself constantly thinking, "But I just don't believe it." I finally decided to test out the hypothesis. I prayed to God, "If you are there, God, please reveal yourself to me." More and more, God increases my faith. And it's NOT because I wanted it -- I'd always shunned faith because it connoted stupidity and rejection of intellect. I didn't want to have to be classified as a "believer," as someone who couldn't use reasoning and therefore, resorted to faith -- But that's the price I pay for accepting the truth.

Running on empty: So, i've discovered that my spirit works like a car engine in some ways. I always need fuel to run -- I need to fuel up regularly -- and that's why reading the Bible is so important. When I first fill up my gas tank, I can feel that my car is doing well. It doesn't hurt to fill up frequently and not let the gas level go below 1/4 tank, but it does hurt to keep waiting to get to the empty mark. I know that, but for some reason, even when I see that indicator nearing the red marks on the gas guage, I keep trying pushing my limits. No matter how many times I put myself in a panic stage in which I can feel my car struggling to run on fumes, I rarely get myself to go to that gas station before I reach that stage. I don't enjoy being stressed out like that or damaging my engine - it's just laziness. I'm getting better about it though (filling up my car's gas tank, that is), and I've discovered that I don't even notice the effects of spending those few extra minutes a week at the gas station - it's even a nice little break to accomplish a task with so little effort - but I do notice the benefits of not running on empty.... Now to transfer that kind of discipline to my Scripture reading habits.

So, why was it so hard for me to believe? "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness' made his light to shine in our hearts to give us light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us." -- II Corinthians 4:4-7.

Current questions: Jesus had to leave so that Counselor could come --- While Jesus was here on earth, could no one else have the Holy Spirit in them? By what authority, then, was John the Baptist able to baptise and preach, or the disciples able to drive out demons?
Christians have told me that becoming a Christian does not necessarily happen at a given point in time, which sounds reasonable -- Some people just find themselves believing in the claims of Christ and being committed to following Him. But if upon acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior over one's life, that person is baptised with the Holy Spirit (as Michael Green aptly argues), there is an event that marks the instant at which one becomes a Christian, no? Another way to think of it is that accepting Jesus' atonement for my sin is when I would say I became a Christian. I think some people might say that they just always knew they were forgiven in Christ. But atonement and baptism with the Spirit are inseparable (J.I. Packer), and surely, the Holy Spirit's initial entry into someone's life happens at particular moment, doesn't it?