Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Why Christianity?

The question is simple, but the most complex of eternity: Why Christianity?

Let's begin with a scripture from the Message translation. 1 John 5 says, "Every God-begotten person conquers the world's ways. The conquering power that brings the world to its knees is our faith. The person who wins out over the world's ways is simply the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus -- the Divine Christ!"

"The conquering power that brings the world to its knees is our faith."

I was raised in a very strange environment. My mother attended the Church of God Holiness, an offshoot of Wesleyan theology that was and is hybrid of mainline Methodism and Pentecostalism without the sign gifts. My father attended the Church of Jack Daniels, regularly. On occasion, he would go to the United Jim Beam church just to break up the monotony.

The swings in mood were breathtaking.

I hated church. Hated it. The old joke that when I was a kid I had a drug problem -- my mother drug me to church every Sunday -- was my life. I mean, my father didn't have to go, so why did I?

When I was 15, I got a driver's license. I left my my mother's church and headed to a Methodist church down the road because I had friends there. Done and done. I liked it better, but only because of friends, not because of my "religion." I really didn't have any.

I remember distinctly trying to read the book of Romans once. I had no idea what I was reading. I quit.

One summer, we formed a little band and lo and behold we began to tour some churches int he area of all denominations. I loved it. Loved it. I even spoke on a couple of occasions, but like the preacher in the movies and books of Left Behind, no one should have listened to me because I didn't listen to myself. I was performing, not preaching.

Then in the deepest of ironies, I became my father in every way, evening attending a variation of his church, going to the Canadian version quite often.

Twenty years passed, I was a non-practicing agnostic (I didn't care about either side of the argument), but I sure didn't believe in the Bible I had never really read.

Long story short, I had a crisis in my life, a hole in my heart, and I went searching for sobriety. I had reached the pinnacle of my work/career life, as deputy sports editor of one of the best sports sections in the country.

It wasn't enough. For some reason, the weight of the world was on my shoulders and a huge hole was everywhere else.

Then the world shifted and I fell off.

When I came to, the questions of why were at the forefront of my existence. Why didn't I feel as if accomplishment was ever going to be enough? Why didn't I feel like I was whole? Why?

I voluntarily turned myself into a treatment center and the next thing you know people were talking about a higher power of my own choosing, which didn't seem right to me. But all my thinking was about values and beliefs and getting the right ones. Then one day, in a parking garage, I had my Damascus moment. God spoke to me somehow, and life turned upside down. For the very first time I understood it was never about doing right, it was about His grace. It was never about being perfect and meeting expectations so that I could be loved. It was about being loved so that I was free to simply be. It was about God, not me. When I fail today, and I still do, it happens when I switch those two around again and it becomes about me not God. It happens fewer and fewer times today.

This is my sermon this weekend in essence. God reached out to me in a real and substantial way. God changed my life, changed me, changed existence and reality. Everything I thought I knew, I did not. Everything I believed was wrong. Everything I loved, family withstanding, was proven to be the wrong thing.

Nineteen years have passed and I know one thing above all else: The conquering power that brings the world to its knees is our faith.

Why Christianity?

Jesus is the answer. Only Jesus.

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