Christianity - An explanation

If someone asked you to explain Christianity in 5 minutes, how would you do it? There's many ways of having a go and here's a couple of pages that might help if you get put on the spot.

Firstly, God loves us, and he wants to have an ongoing one to one relationship with us. This is because through this relationship he will guide us towards the good things in life, such as love; trust; friendship; community; material things that we need; purposefulness; self-motivation; kindness; forgiveness; peace; creativity; belonging and security. He also wants this relationship to help equip us to deal with the bad things that also inevitably happen in life.

However, no-one can be forced into a loving relationship, so God gives us the free will to choose the relationship if we want it or not, rather like a father who gives his children the room to make their own way. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, most people choose not to have this relationship and prefer to go it alone in chasing personal goals, such as money, a better job, power, houses, cars, clothes, fantastic holidays, fame and so on. As these types of goals also make the economy go round, we are bombarded by advertising and peer pressure that tells us we can achieve happiness through these things.

There are two problems with going it alone though: One is that, despite the massive effort needed to attain these goals, they generally don’t provide long term satisfaction regardless of what the advertisers and our peers say. Once one goal is attained, it doesn’t feel as good as we thought it would, so we then start the quest for the next thing, and so on until a point comes when you ask yourself where is your life going? It’s possible to have the things in life to which we think we should aspire, but still feel trapped and unhappy.

The second problem is more serious than a lack of satisfaction. Many people have the misconception that because they are decent and try to live a good life, then they will go to heaven in the end, even if they don’t believe in God now.  However, as we pursue our solo goals, we inevitably do some bad things and hurt people on the way. We get greedy, envious and step on people to get up the ladder. Everyone does it, as it’s part of human nature. So despite our self-image which says we are good guys, we conveniently manage to forget all the bad things we do.  Meanwhile, God is having to keep a tab on what we have done wrong, and when we do finally meet him and we say ‘Well, even though I didn’t want to know you on earth, since I was basically a good person, can we start the relationship now please?” Unfortunately, he will get out the list and might say something like: “But someone has to pay for all this.” The way we will have to pay is to be separated from him forever, never to have that relationship, even though we have been finally presented with the truth about his existence. When we eventually want the relationship, it will be denied us.

Fortunately, like a loving parent with a wayward child, God loves us unconditionally. He doesn’t want to have that unpleasant conversation, and he still wants to have a relationship despite the wrong things we do. However, he can’t just wipe the slate clean. Someone has to pay for it, and this is where Jesus comes into the story.

Jesus was sent to earth for three main reasons: The first was to act as a substitute for us in paying for the things that we do wrong. Even though he had a perfect relationship with his father, he was denied this relationship as he died on the cross. This is why just before he died he cried out “Father, why have you forsaken me.” What happened there was that despite the fact that, unlike us, he had done nothing wrong, he was forcibly separated from his father just before he died.  In doing this he paid the price of our wrongdoing with his life and temporarily sacrificed his relationship with his father so that we won’t have to be separated as a result of our wrongdoing. The result of this is that if we believe in Jesus and accept him into our lives, we receive a ‘get out of jail free’ card, which wipes the slate clean of all our wrong-doing once and for all, opening up the possibility for us to have a direct relationship with God now.

Secondly, just as Jesus returned to life after he died, we can also overcome the inevitability of our own death by having this ongoing relationship with God. The good news is that once we recognise Jesus and accept him, we don’t have to buy our way to heaven by doing good deeds or by being perfect people. God recognises that we will we still mess up, but we don’t have to worry about that as Jesus has already paid for this up-front. This is liberating and frees us up to work on building our new relationship with God in our time on earth, without fear or guilt.

The third reason that Jesus came to earth for, was to provide hard evidence of the existence of God. Following discussions with sceptical non-Christians, it has to be concluded that it is virtually impossible to convince someone of the existence of God on the basis of abstract notions of faith. What is needed is hard evidence that can lead us to a rational decision for ourselves without involving any leap of faith. God recognised this by sending Jesus as a real person whose actions and words in the historical record provide the evidence on which we can reach a verdict, much as a jury would in a murder trial.

A commonly held viewpoint is that Jesus was a great teacher, but he was just a man and not the Son of God. However, the charge on which he was executed was blasphemy, because he clearly claimed to be the Son of God. If this is the case then he can only be one of three things: First he was a madman who had deluded himself into thinking he was God. The second is that he was an evil man who knew he wasn’t God but deceived others to follow him. The third is that he was who he said he was – namely the Son of God.  Given these options, one thing he could not logically be is simply a good man and teacher.

What we have to do is balance the evidence for ourselves and make a choice one way or the other. Balancing the evidence based on his words and actions on earth has led many sceptical people to change their minds. The challenge is that everyone should look at the evidence and make up our own minds. As with a jury, we can never have perfect evidence, but we have to come to a decision that is beyond reasonable doubt. Making a leap of faith has nothing to do with making a decision about Jesus. The worst thing to do is to go through life without looking for the evidence or coming to a verdict. It’s better to reject the evidence and take your own chances in the future, than never to have heard it in the first place. If it’s not true, then it is irrelevant, but if it is true it’s vitally important. Also, like a trial jury, we only have limited time to reach our verdict. We have to decide one way or the other whilst we are on earth. If it happens to be true, it would be a tragedy if we pitch up at the gates of heaven without having come to a verdict about Jesus. This is because making no decision will result in the uncomfortable discussion with God and being denied a relationship with him, simply because we couldn’t be bothered to find out about Jesus whilst we were on earth.

For many years, the Church focused our attention on the inevitability of death and threatened terrible things that would happen to us when we die should we not accept Jesus. It’s still possible to see the occasional street preacher on a Saturday morning threatening shoppers with the fires of hell. Most shoppers simply look away and carry onto the next shop. However, this approach of using what is in effect a death threat, is way out of touch with how most people think today.  Trying to ‘sell’ Christianity by focussing on what happens to us when we die is beyond the comprehension of most of us as death isn’t on our minds. Anyone who uses Christianity as some form of heavenly life insurance is not very likely to get many customers. More importantly, this approach is inconsistent with what God wants for us, namely a loving one to one relationship. Who has ever heard of anyone falling in love as a result of receiving a death threat!   

However, people are very interested in finding out how to obtain happiness and cope with tough times. God wants to establish an ongoing relationship with us now so that he can guide us in how to live life to the full, free from the things that hold us back and make us unhappy. As mentioned earlier, a relationship with God can provide us with love, trust, friendship, community, the material things that we need, purposefulness, self-motivation, kindness, forgiveness, peace, creativity, belonging and security. It can also equip us with the ability to deal with the hard things that well undoubtedly come our way as a normal part of life. If a TV advert claimed to provide all these for free, then many people who may be sceptical about Christianity might well be interested in finding out more. Focussing on these issues provides a positive rather than a negative reason for wanting a relationship with God. The first step is to accept Jesus, and ask him into our lives. Once this happens, we get strength from the Holy Spirit who comes to live within us and tunes us in to hearing how to develop the relationship with God the Father. It takes time, but when we ask for guidance, we’ll receive it and start to live in a new and exciting way.