We are often confronted as Christian men with the sometimes difficult question of ‘why are you a Christian?’ For some men, it is easy, they have been set from a life of sin and evil and have been radically transformed by the saving grace of Jesus Christ. These amazing stories of redemption make compelling reading (or listening) and certainly go a long way to defeat the neo-athiests who want to pull down all things Christianity stands for. Some of of us have stories that are less dramatic but are still powerful in their own right.
However, I want to touch on 3 words that might help define our individual journeys. Spirituality, Faith and Religion.
Quite often we make a mistake of focussing on the latter, religion to try and define what is in fact a spiritual and faith journey. As a Christian, I believe in the saving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus of Christ. Christianity is a ‘saving faith’, one in which God rescues us from our sins and from the evil of this world. But to get to this point of faith, to belief, we most often have been on a spiritual journey, an awakening to spiritual truths (or lack of spiritual truths) and have gone on a quest to find the answers to something that is missing in our lives and can’t be found in just the physical world. Religion then is just a term to define the ‘brand’ of Christianity (or other world religion) that we have put our faith in.
Unfortunately, some people start and finish with ‘religion’. They have neither found spirituality nor a saving faith but instead have found in often made made ways a religious substitute for a saving faith.
If you have read this far, you might have a story of how you came to a ‘saving faith’ in Christ. Why don’t you share your story here.