How can we have faith?

I’m not here as one who has all the answers, all I want to do through is blog is to share some thoughts I have and some experiences I have had. This blog post is taken from my talk of the same title at at an Alpha course that we ran last term. My aim for this post is to discuss a little bit about what Christian faith is, and then get onto this question of how can we have faith?

Growing up, I used to believe that there was no God, I remember at a young age making the logical connection that the Tooth fairy wasn't real, so neither was Santa, and so neither was Jesus - yes I was that child at school who told the other kids. 

When I was 14 I was invited by a friend and started going to church, because it was full of nice people and I really enjoyed their company, never really had any religious faith of my own.

The big changing point for me in developing faith was when I realised that Christianity was not a religion but a relationship, and a relationship that never ends.

When I was at university I made decisions about my life and I decided what I wanted to do and this led me to living in the US for a year as an extra part of my degree. When I came back to do my final year, I imagined that I would finish that year and from then on the world was my oyster and I would live and work where was best for me. However, in that final year something happened, I met a girl. Although I had had girlfriends in the past, this one was different – firstly, she loved watching rugby. Dream girl! We clicked and got on so well and for me, life was never the same again. No longer was I thinking about my life and my future, but our life and our future, and as we got engaged and then married it was clear that my old life had gone; a new life had begun.

Paul writing to Christians in Corinth — 2 Corinthians 5, verse 17 — says this: ‘Those who become Christians become new persons. They're not the same any more, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun.’

Relationships are exciting, and the most exciting relationship of all is our relationship with God. The Christian faith is all about this relationship with God that eventually defines you. I was on Facebook the other day, and a student that I know had written a status after a weekend away with his church. ‘It's surprised me at times when some of my friends have said "I didn't know you were a Christian." I don't want that to be the case any longer. Being a Christian is now my identity, not just what I believe.’

A Christian is a Christ-ian, a follower of Christ, someone who has a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. How that relationship happens will vary enormously. I mean, some people know the exact date. I know that for me it was a in February half term in 2006. Before that I was not a Christian. I became a Christian on that day, and since then I’ve been a Christian.

Other people would say, `Do you know, I can never remember a time that I wasn’t a Christian.’ Others would say, `Well, I think there was a time when I wasn’t a Christian, and I think I am a Christian now, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how it happened. It was a bit of a process.’ It doesn’t matter which of those categories you’re in; what matters is that you know that you are a Christian now.

John writes this: he says, ‘Yet to all who received him, to those who received Jesus, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God’ — in other words, in the closest possible relationship with God, a child of God. That’s a common analogy in the Bible. The Bible, and especially the New Testament also sometimes uses the analogy of a husband and wife. It’s that close a relationship. But the point is this: if you’re in that relationship, you know you're in that relationship.

In questionnaires filled out after people had done alpha there was a question, ‘Would you have called yourself a Christian at the beginning of Alpha? The answers included:-

• ·   Yes, but without any real experience of a relationship with God.’ 
•     ‘Sort of.’ 
•      I would have called myself a”Christian” (in inverted commas).’ 
•      ‘Not sure.’ 
•      'Ish.’ 
•      ‘Yes, though looking back, possibly no.’

God wants us to be sure. John writes this

‘I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.’

How can we know that? How can we know that we’re a Christian? How can we know that we have eternal life?

Helpfully the books break course books for the alpha course break this idea down into 3 categories

1.     The Word of God

2.     The Work of Jesus

3.     The Witness of the Holy Spirit

1    Word of God

Christians have a confidence in the bible, the promises and the truth to be found on it. It is not based on our feelings about God, but the facts we understand in it.

If you asked me, how I know I’m married, one answer I could give you is to show you our marriage certificate. This is evidence that we’re married. And if you asked me how I know I’m a Christian I would point to the bible.

You see, our feelings are changeable. They go up and down — with the weather, with what we’ve had to eat or drink the night before. And if our faith was dependent on our feelings, it would be up and down all the time. But it isn’t dependant on our feelings it is dependent on the promises of God which we find in here.

One such promise is in Revelation 3:20. ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.’

Holman Hunt, a painter who lived in the 1800s, illustrated this verse with this painting. And he painted it three times. The most famous one is in St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s called The Light of The World. And it illustrates this verse: Jesus, the Light of the World, is standing at the door of someone’s house. And the house represents your life, my life.

And this particular person has never opened their life to Christ, and that’s shown by the fact that this door is overgrown with weeds and thorns and thistles that have grown up around it. And Jesus is saying:

‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door —I will come in and eat with them and they with me.’

Eating together, in the Middle East and in ancient times, as today, is a sign of friendship. He’s saying, in other words, `I want to come in and have a friendship, a relationship with you’

Well, when Holman Hunt painted this picture, someone said to him, `Hang on a second. You’ve made a mistake.’ He said, `What’s that?’ He said, `Well, you’ve left off the handle. There’s no handle on the door.’ And Holman Hunt replied, `That’s not a mistake. There is a handle, but the handle is on the inside.’

In other words, Jesus is not going to force his way into your life or my life. He says, ‘I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will come in.’ He doesn’t say, `I might come in’ — it’s a promise: ‘I will come in.’ So, for example, if any of you have ever prayed and invited Jesus to come into your life, you can be sure he came in, whatever you felt. It’s not dependent on feelings; it’s a promise: ‘If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in.’

Two other promises made by God are written in your books

Matthew 28:20: Jesus promises, ‘Surely I am with you always’

And then in John 10:28 says: ‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.’ Look them up and see what you think, maybe discuss them with someone you know has faith in Jesus being who he said he was.

2    The Work of Jesus

The second reason for having faith is that it is not based on what we do, but on what Jesus has done for us.

Again, if you asked me how I know I’m married, I could show you the physical proof, a wedding ring or certificate, but another thing I could do is point you to an event that took place at St John’s on 28^th March last year. And if you asked me how I know I’m a Christian, I would point to an event in history: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Stuff that is discussed in the first few weeks of every alpha course.

Let’s look together at Romans 6:23 – Paul writes this:-

‘For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord — or, as some translations put it, the free gift of God.’

Recently our vicar Jeff got a piece of post saying congratulations; you have just won an equal share of $9,000,000. I wonder if anyone reading this thinks it is a genuine cause for celebration?

We always assume there is a catch. And of course with this one there is. There's always a catch. But not with God’s gift. God’s gift to us is free. It's not cheap, but it’s free to us. It cost Jesus everything.

2 Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 21 - Paul writes this:

‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’

A reason we can have faith is because of what Jesus did.

The God of the bible is perfect, we are not perfect, non-of us are. We may think that we are good people, perhaps some of us are great people, but none-of us are perfect. We all fall short of God’s perfection. And therefore we cannot be in relationship with God because that would mean he was associated with imperfection.

But what Jesus did on the cross, and what this verse in 2 Corinthians says, is that ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.’ On the cross Jesus took our sin, our failings and our imperfection —so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ He swapped places with us. He who was perfect – traded his perfection his righteousness with us so that we may be made perfect.

Isn’t it amazing: this exchange takes place, so that God looks at us in the same way that he looked at his own Son, Jesus Christ, because of what Jesus did on the cross for us.

The resurrection is proof that it had worked. I saw a youtube video recently that contained this cheesy poem. ‘On the cross, Christ wrote a cheque for our sins but at the resurrection we all cheered because that meant the cheque cleared.’

So how do we receive this gift that God offers? We receive it by repentance and faith. Repentance is turning away from the bad stuff, the stuff that messes up our lives. What we leave behind is nothing compared to what we receive, and it’s nothing compared to what Jesus gave up on the cross. But we do have to turn away from the bad stuff. That’s repentance.

We receive by repentance and then faith in Jesus Christ. What is faith?

Faith is trust. Everybody exercises faith — I expect you are probably doing it right now if you are sat at your computer. You’re putting your trust and faith in the chair your are sitting in that it will hold you up.

Perhaps a better example of faith comes from a guy called Blondin. Blondin was a famous tightrope walker and acrobat in the nineteenth century. Large crowds used to watch him, particularly when he was crossing the Niagara Falls. There is a story of one time when a royal party came over from England to watch it, and it included the Duke of Newcastle. And on this particular occasion what Blondin did was, having walked across and back, he then took a wheelbarrow and he wheeled that across and back. And there was a huge crowd there cheering him. And Blondin went up to the party, the royal party, and he said, `Look, do you believe that I could put somebody in the wheelbarrow and wheel them across?’ And they all said yes. The Duke of Newcastle said yes, and he turned to the Duke of Newcastle and he said, `Hop in!’

Now, that is faith! It would have been foolish — he didn’t, incidentally, hop in! Putting your faith in a tightrope walker is not really that wise a move. But putting your faith in Jesus is a wise move, because unlike Blondin he is more than just a man, he is God.

And through faith in Jesus, and what he has done, we can receive the promises of God in his word, that we have eternal life.

3    The witness of the Holy Spirit.

The third reason to have faith is the witness of the Holy Spirit. So we have the word of God, the work of Jesus; and the witness of the Holy Spirit.

Back to my marriage, if you asked me the question how do I know I’m married, I can point to a marriage certificate, I can point to an event that took place in March, but the third thing that I can point to is the last year and a bit months of experience of marriage.  And if you asked me how I know I’m a Christian, I can point the bible, to the event that took place in history but I can also point to experience.

We looked at this verse where Jesus says: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in.’ Actually, it’s not Jesus who comes in; it’s the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Jesus. Jesus comes in by his Spirit. And the Spirit of God can come into your life and my life.

What happens when he comes in? Well, he begins to transform us. 

Galatians, chapter 5, verse 22 - Paul writes this:

‘But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’

These are the characteristics that begin to develop in our lives and these fruit of the Spirit in our lives, they take time. And in my case, they’re taking a very long time! But hopefully, as life goes on we become more loving, more joyful, more kind, more patient and so on. 

When I first started going out with Cathie, I remember that we talked constantly and I suddenly thought, hang on at some point we are simply going to run out of things to talk about. I was telling her all my stories and my interests and at some point she was going to turn to me and say, ‘Aidan, I have heard that one so many times.’ I told a mate of mine this who had had a girlfriend for 3 years at that point, and he said don’t worry because at that point you will have started to make your own stories. That is the best part of the relationship because you go from talking about your interests to sharing your interests. And he was right and it is the same with God.

When you start a relationship with God, you get to a point where the things that he is interested in, become your interests. You can see the impact of this in your life and you can recognise the Love of God working in you through his Holy Spirit.

And then not only are there objective changes; there’s also a subjective experience.

The Holy Spirit brings a deep, personal conviction that we are in a relationship with God. Paul writes in Romans 8, verse 16, that ‘the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God’.

What’s the difference between faith and knowledge?

Faith is trusting that a chair will hold your wait and deciding to sit in it, knowledge is the experience of having sat in the chair and knowing that it is safe to sit on. Initially you take a step (or sit) of faith, but then you know.

And inviting Jesus in is a step of faith, but when he comes in, the Holy Spirit testifies: he ‘testifies to our spirit that we are children of God’ and that we’re loved by him.

In conclusion, I am writing this because I took that step of faith, and then God gave me the knowledge that I'm in a relationship with him through his Son. That is what Christians believe.

We know we have a relationship with God because of the promises in his word— he will come in. We know it because of the death of Jesus for us, what he did for us. And we know it because the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

If you want to Jesus to come in to your life then all you have to ask. Jesus is alive, he’s where you are reading this. You can pray this in your heart quietly to him and he will hear.

Lord Jesus Christ, thank you that you love me so much. Thank you that you stand at the door of my life and you knock.

And tonight I want to invite you in. I turn away from all the bad stuff in my life, all the things that I know are not right. I’m sorry for them and I ask your forgiveness.

Thank you that you died for me on the cross so that I could be totally forgiven, the slate could be wiped clean and that I can make a new start.

And tonight I put my trust in you. I ask you to come in and to fill me with your Holy Spirit, to help me to lead the kind of life that deep down I long to lead. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Amen.

There is greater joy in God!

This blog is taken from a talk I gave recently at a youth event that we run at for the young people at King’s Church. It is about Joy and how there is greater joy to be found in God. This is, in my opinion, the most important idea if you are to live a fruitful life as a Christian.

What is joy?

Some of us may read or hear that word ‘joy’ and think that it is just a good ‘Christian’ word. You might be at a prayer meeting and someone prays, “Lord thank you for Joy.” And some ‘super-spiritual’ people will go, “mmmm. Amen.”

But actually what does it really mean?

The dictionary would tell us that joy is to be happy or excessively pleased. But I think that as Christians, we can know a joy that is deeper routed than a feeling of happiness.

What does the bible say about joy? John 15: 9-11. Jesus is telling his disciples about how they will bear fruit, once he is gone.

⁹ “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. ¹⁰ If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. ¹¹ I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

Read verse 11 again.

This idea of God’s joy is frequently mentioned throughout the Old and New Testaments. Some of them are

• Psalm 16:11, “In your presence is fullness of joy, and at your right hand are pleasures forever”
• Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart”
• 1 Peter 1:8, “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and are filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory”
•  Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always! And again I say, Rejoice!”

God is Joy! Joy is at the heart of God’s plan for us, and is at the heart of God himself. We will never understand the significance of Joy in human life until we understand its importance to God.

What does joy look like?

I can give you a couple of examples of what Godly joy looks like in people today. Terry Virgo, the founder of New Frontiers, the worldwide group of churches that King’s is apart of, was speaking at a conference in Brighton.

Afterwards, he invited anyone who wanted to make a commitment to Jesus, to come to the front and they were going to pray that they were baptised with the Holy Spirit and be filled with the Spirit for the first time.

A man called Simon Holley came and stood at the front, at this time Simon Holley is the leader of Kings Arms Church in Bedford, which is a fantastic, spirit filled church. Simon speaks all around the country and has seen many signs and wonders.

When asked, why are you going to the front, Simon responds, ‘are you kidding? Terry Virgo is going to pray for people to be filled with the Spirit. I don’t care that I have been filled before; I want to be filled again! That is a man who is filled with the Joy of God, and keeps going back for more.

Another example, are the kind of Christians that are living in the Muslim world, either as missionaries or people who are converted from Islam.

The work of organisations such as Frontiers, OMF and others is that we are seeing people becoming Christians in places that have never heard the gospel before.

In the Muslim world you hear stories of becoming being born again and immediately facing persecution. They face rejection from their families, and in many cases put themselves in mortal danger.

The only way they can maintain their faith, can maintain their life as a Christian is that they understand there is greater joy to be found in God than in the troubled world they are living at that time.

Why is it important?

I said at the beginning that this is, in my opinion, the most important thing, if you are to live a fruitful life as a Christian.

The bible puts Joy in the non-optional category. Joy is a command! Subsequently, joylessness is a serious sin and something that religious people are particularly prone to indulge in. The love and Joy of God has to be at your core, and all action flows from that core.

There are many things in the Christian life that we feel we have to do. But acting out of obligation is not what we are called to do. Not lying because we aren’t supposed to, not getting into that relationship because we are not allowed to, etc. My friends, hatefully submitting to Christian rules achieves nothing. It isn’t glorifying God and it certainly isn’t joyful.

I am getting married next year and my fiancé and I are asking married couples for advice, so that we know can learn from their experience in marriage. If we talk to a couple who have been married for 20 years and it turns out that they actually hate each other. They can’t stand one another, and the only reason they are together is that they don’t believe in divorce. I am not going to turn to Cathie, my fiancé, and say, that is what I want for us when we get married.

In a similar way, if you don’t find Joy in God, if you don’t enjoy your relationship with God, how can you ever expect to encourage someone else to follow your example and become a Christian!

I feel this strongly, because it is something that when I was your age I never truly understood. I became a Christian when I was about 16 and spent two years trying my best to be a good Christian.

Then as I got a bit older I started going to parties that were different. Drinking, smoking and sex are activities that appear very fun and look extremely tempting. The thought that the Christian life was boring, was clear in my mind. At this point in my life, I went to university and went completely off the rails.

All of this was because I didn’t understand that there was a greater joy in God than in the temptations of this world. But there is!

You see, the problem with all of the worldly pleasures is that they leave you feeling rough. They provide a brief, temporary thrill and then when that goes you feel worse than when you started. Drinking gives you a hangover, smoking has all sorts of health risks and indulging in sexual sin and one night stands leaves you feeling empty like nothing else can.

I want you to picture that you are in a desert, dying of thirst and looking for water. You come across a big lake of toilet water. What is going to happen? You are going to drink it!

This lake of toilet water is like worldly pleasures, because you will be sustained initially, but then you will get sick. However, if you didn’t have any other option, despite being sick you would have to go back to this stinking disgusting lake.

Similarly with me, even though my hangovers were getting worse, I kept getting drunk. It came to a point where one night I was so drunk that I slipped on a bathroom floor and landed neck first on a sheet of metal and almost died.

It was soon after this that I discovered that worldly pleasures are no match for God’s plan for us. The joy that you can find in God is like a stream of fresh water next to that foul smelly lake. This water is refreshing, healthy and life giving and will sustain you.

Now next to the fresh water, how does the lake full of toilet water look? It no longer looks appealing! Similarly if you live in the Joy of God and focus on the fact that have eternal life with him, then worldly pleasures, ones that make you sick, no longer seem appealing.

If you focus on enjoying God, then you want to experience more of it. You want to grow in it, and that is when good works and leading a good lifestyle happen. If you find that there is greater joy in God. Then you no longer have to lead a life of hateful, religious submitting and obedience, but a life where joy in God is at your centre and all you do is a response to that.

How can we be more joyful?

Now I want to finish with a few things that I have found crucial in increasing the joy in my life.

1.      Pursue joy now

Growing up we all think that joy will come someday when conditions change.

We go to school and we think life will get better, once we have finished this term. Anyone think that?

Or we will be able to find joy once we have finished are exams and we get to the summer holidays. Or when we go up a year at school?When you get older you think, life will get better once you have left home, then you think you will be happy when you get a girlfriend or boyfriend and get married. When you are married you think life will be more joyful once you have children, and then once you are tired all the time with kids you think you will be happy when they leave, then you realise that you were happier whilst they still lived at home.

Before you realise it you are old and you have had a joyless life!

Stop! Pursue joy now! This is God’s day. It is the day that God made, a day that Christ’s death on the cross has redeemed.

2.      Find a joy mentor

You should identify those people around you who give you joy and bring out the best in you. A joy mentor you could call them. We all have people around us who don’t, and it is not that we should abandon these friendships, but if you are spending time with them, look to spend at least that amount of time with your joy mentors.

All of my friends at university are non-Christian, and although I genuinely love them and now that I have left university I miss them a lot, I cannot say that they brought out the joy in me, certainly not Godly joy. In my final year, once God had got me back on the right track, I found friends who did bring the best out of me.

I am still close with my non-Christian friends, but I like to think that I have found a balance.

3.      Worship/Prayer

When we tell other people about being a Christian we can say we believe in a relational God and that we can have a relationship with him today. If that is the case then we should live it!

Good relationships are built on communication. Cathie, my fiancé, lives 30 miles away and we don’t get to see each much more than once every two weeks, but we talk every day on the phone.

When life gets tough, we need to know that we can fall back on God in prayer. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas are imprisoned because they were living as Christians. When in prison, the lowest of lows, it tells us that they were praying and singing hymns of praise to God. As a result there was an earthquake and the prison doors flew open.

Your prayers should build your joy in God. So often you hear people praying in a tone that screams boredom, just as if they are going through the motions.

How do you imagine Paul and Silas were praying that night in prison?

To be Christian, means to be in Christ, in his perfection. In this perfection we can have a relationship with the living God who is perfect love and Joy. Be happy about it!

Why Christianity and not other religions?

This blog is taken from a talk I did at the youth club that we run at King’s Church High Wycombe. We have a small God spot in the middle of the evening, and this term we have been trying to answer some of the questions that the young people have raised. This time I tried to answer the question, ‘Why Christianity and not other religions?’

Firstly, I will quickly give you a background about myself and the angle that I am coming from. As a young boy I didn’t believe in God, and I didn’t go to church. When I was 14 I decided that all of this religion stuff was important to think about and I set out to prove, to myself at least, that it was rubbish. I initially looked to Islam, as I thought Muslims seemed the most devoted religious group, and I read the Koran (an English translation), but after deciding that it seemed really unlikely I went along with my friend to a local church. It wasn’t until I was nearly 16, so just less than 2 years later that I decided to become a Christian.

Now I want to talk about two things in particular that arise when considering this topic. Firstly, there is a view point that religion is specific to where you are from, and actually that all religions point to the same thing and therefore all religions lead to God.

I want to address this, in particular focussing on the 5 major world religions;-

Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism

I know there are plenty of others, but I would like to look at these five. I think a lot of people look at three of these in particular and point out that they have the same God with different names, be it God, Allah or Jehovah. However, if you look at these religions they all contradict each other in a fundamental way, and there is no way that they can all be true.

Buddhism for example says that there is no creator God, but all of the other major religions say that there is. Focussing for a moment on Islam, Christianity and Judaism; the issue of Jesus’ death on the cross is divisive for all three. The Christian faith is built around the idea of Christ’s death. Followers of the Jewish religion believe that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messiah, Jews view the coming Messiah as a saviour or warrior and having him die doesn’t make sense. In Islam the cross is still crucial. The point of the Koran is that it is literal, and that Allah dictated the Koran in its entirety to the last Prophet Mohammed. The Koran teaches about Jesus, and that he was the second most important prophet behind Mohammed. However, the Koran also teaches that Allah would never let one of his prophets die in a way as demeaning as crucifixion. In Serah 4 of the Koran there are 6 long arguments directed to a group of Jews in Medina who claimed to have killed Jesus, saying that they were mistaken and in fact Allah had raised Jesus to be with him

Now, Jesus was either crucified or was not crucified; therefore both religions cannot be true.

I would be happy to discuss the validity of the Koran in this instance but that is not the point of what I am saying, I just want to use it as an example to show that not all religions can possibly be true. It could be that one is correct, but either one or none in fact will lead to God.

Secondly I want to discuss what is different about Christianity compared to other religions.

Religions are about man’s attempt to reach God. Every religion has things where if you do this, then you can get to God. In Islam there are 5 things you must do, the 5 Pillars of Islam to get to paradise. In Buddhism there 8 steps to reaching enlightenment and the list goes wrong.

Christianity is in fact the exact opposite. The Bible says that there is nothing that YOU can do, to get to heaven. In the bible it says that we have ALL fallen short of the glory of god. We believe in a God that is perfect, and therefore, anything short of perfection is not good enough for him.

However, the bible tells us that God loves us, so much that he came up with a plan for us. The bible says that if someone who was perfect was willing to take the punishment for our imperfection, then we would be covered by that and would be able to be with God. Now the only person who could be perfect was God himself, so he gave himself in human form, He died on a cross so that we could be covered by Him. Being Christian literally means to be in Christ, and to be in Christ means that you are covered by perfection.

In that way, the Christianity that is written about in the bible is the anti-religion. If religion is Man searching for God, Christianity is God searching for Man.

Jesus said I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. Now, I know that some people reading this will be thinking that this sounds arrogant. To say that the Bible is right and everyone else is wrong, certainly sounds arrogant, but to understand Christianity and to acknowledge that we are flawed and can do nothing to save ourselves is actually the most humble thing.

We have to acknowledge that the only way is if Jesus helps us. Most people don’t like admitting that there is something that they cannot do. I for one am struggling to admit that at the age of 22 and at 17 stone, I am never going to be a professional sportsman. When you become a Christian, you say that I cannot do this on my own, I need Jesus. Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, I cannot get to God, unless Jesus’ helps me. And Jesus offers that help to me, to you and to everyone.

The other thing that comes of God’s rescue plan is that it goes further than getting us to heaven. The bible tells us that the redemption found in Jesus, means that we can have a friendship with God. I remember when I was at infant school we were taught the Lord’s prayer, but it wasn’t until I became a Christian that the line ‘Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’ made sense. God’s love and forgiveness doesn’t start when you die, it starts from the moment you accept Jesus into your life. Unlike Islam or the other major religions you can have a relationship with God today, by acknowledging that we are not perfect, we don’t match up to the perfect standards of the God who created the earth and the heavens, and that we need the help of Jesus.