How to Know Christ
I still remember wondering whether God was real or not. My life has been difficult and I felt different from everyone around me who kept saying insisting that God loved me and had a great plan for my life.
That sounded fine for other people, but not for me.
No matter how great the plan sounded, I would still disabled and life would always be hard. If God was so good, I wondered, why would he let me get polio and struggle throughout my childhood.
But at the same time, a few friends had started talking to me about faith. Honestly, it made me uncomfortable. One of my new friends, Maggie, was a committed Christian and talked about how important her relationship was Jesus. Her father had recently died which made her words carry more weight since I knew that her life wasn’t perfect. But it still seemed better than mine.
As I lay in bed, wondering who God really was, I asked him if he was real. And if he was, I asked him to show me. That was all I asked. It was a simple prayer.
The next day I decided to try reading the Bible. Though it had never made any sense to me before, I wanted to give it another try just in case. I randomly opened the Bible to John 9 and started reading. The disciples were asking Jesus whose fault it was that a man was born blind – was it his fault or his parents’ fault? Jesus told them that it was no one’s fault, but it happened so that God’s work could be displayed in his life.
The fact that God could use someone’s disability for something good intrigued me.
It gave my disability, and my life, a purpose. It felt as though God was answering my lifelong question. As I sat on my bed reading, I realized that God was speaking to me directly, telling me that his work would be displayed in my life.
I said aloud something like, “God, I know you are real but I don’t know what to do next. Please help me. I commit my life to you, but I need you to show me what that means.”
I knew little about the gospel. I’d been to church and Sunday school my entire life, my parents were Christians, but I hadn’t paid any attention. I never took it very seriously.
After that commitment, I started reading the Bible and praying, though I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. Then I started regularly attending a Bible study and made Christian friends who answered my questions and encouraged me. At their recommendation, I began reading Christian books to understand more about what faith looked like. The first one I read was Shadow of the Almighty by Elisabeth Elliot which helped me see the inner life of someone who was passionate about serving God.
I learned more about my faith, who Jesus was, and why I needed to believe in him to go to heaven.
I understood John 3:16 for the first time.
It says:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that who so ever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life.
That verse encapsulated the gospel.
The basic principles of our faith are that God is righteous and good and we have disobeyed him and lived for ourselves. The only way to be reconciled to God is through Jesus Christ, who bore the penalty for our sins on the cross. We need to accept that free gift and commit our lives to him so we can be free from the power of sin, the penalty of sin and one day free from the presence of sin. I wrote an explanation of the gospel in this post.
If you are reading this and don’t have a relationship with Christ, I’d encourage you to start by praying this prayer.
“God, if you are real, please show me.”
And then look around to see how he is answering you.
If you know that God is real and are ready to commit yourself to Christ, understanding that it is only through Him that we can know God and have eternal life, you can simply pray to him. One example would be to pray: