Why I am a Christian

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The Apostle John, writing in 1 John 5:9-12 – “We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. Anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart. Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”

Why Is It So?

I am sure you have all heard kids in the supermarket yelling out “Why?” to their parents. We all have, I am sure, questions we want to know the answer to. Why? The question I am often asked is “You are a Christian. Why is it so?” My father, was and remained throughout his life a convinced agnostic and in the few conversations we had about religion and Christianity, he could never understand why it was, that I could not just admit that I would never know if God existed or not, far less a God who was personally interested in me. My reply as ever, was that the very question “Why is it so?” needed to be answered, in order for me to be satisfied.

Why I am a Christian?

Now I could say that at the age of 12, we moved to a town on the coast of Australia, and was invited along to a local youth group and several weeks later, gave my life to Christ and became a Christian. Of course that is partly true. I can’t even claim to be a Christian because I was raised in a Christian country. Australia was and is probably the second most secular country on this planet. Sure Australia has its moral base grounded in historic Christianity, but for the latter part of its history, Australia has been thoroughly secular and non-religious. Even if I had been raised in a country such as England, with Christian parents, that would also, only be partly true and I could have rejected Christianity as many people do. The reason that I am a Christian is not because I chased God, but rather He chased me. Unknown to me at the time, God was chasing me and following my every path with the urgency of a lover after the beloved, just as described in the Song of Songs (Song of Songs 2:2-14).

God had been pursuing me

This piece of poetic Scripture speaks about the love that God has for his people, and the energy He puts in to calling his people to Himself. He is always reaching out, for all to return to His arms. As for me, it wasn’t until I was a 12 year old that I heard that I needed to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. Before that I didn’t know I had to do anything with this Jesus. Jesus was only a curse word for me at the time. That or was just someone or something that the RE teachers bored me with at school.

We are primarily Christians, not because we come to church services or just happened to have been born in a supposedly Christian country. We are primarily Christians, because God first chased and harried us into His arms. We are Christians, if you are one, because God first loved you. And as a tremendous lover, He beckons and calls people all the time to respond to His call, and back to Him. How does He chase us with His love? He chases each person differently, just as each Christian testimony is different.

Take for instance the Apostle Paul in Acts 8 & 9. God chased him through Paul’s mind and his religious upbringing and education. Paul had known about God from his childhood. Paul was a righteous Pharisee who saw persecuting these ‘Christians’ as his religious duty, so that he may somehow find favour with God. As Paul was gloating over the death of the martyr Stephen, God was pursuing Him, probably raising doubts in Paul’s mind as to why Stephen would say at the point of death “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit and forgive them for what they do” (Acts 7:54-60). Surely doubts must have been raised in Paul’s mind as he approved of this death (Acts 8:1). Paul was also wrestling with his conscience. Externally he was a righteous man, a Pharisee of Pharisees. Yet when he internally examined himself and his heart, he found himself failing regarding covetousness, which is the last of the Ten Commandments. Then finally, Jesus himself makes a sudden and dramatic appearance before Paul and confronts him directly, “Why are you kicking against me? Why are you rejecting my advances?” (Acts 9) Paul’s conversion to Christianity is often described as being sudden. But the only thing sudden about his conversion was this climatic appearance of Jesus.

Just as that was true of Paul, it is true of me, just as it is true of all those who profess to call themselves a Christian Disciple. I am a Christian Disciple not because of anything I have done, but rather because He first chased me, and because He first loved me. Jesus himself said “I came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

If you are a Christian today, it is not because of anything you have done. It is because of the events at Christmas and Easter that you are a Christian, when God entered this world as a human baby and took all the necessary steps so that all people could have the choice to be His people or not. In my more smug moments I used to congratulate myself for being a Christian. How proud I was that I, was a Christian and that God was a jolly lucky God that I had decided to follow Him. It was during one of my less self-deluded moments, that I examined myself and I found God pricking my conscience and correcting me, and I read the New Testament “For the Son of Man came, not to be served but to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark10:45).

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Testimony – Sharon

Sharon, a Chinese believer, talks about her journey of faith, from Daoism to Christianity and how Jesus Christ is relevant to her life today.

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Testimony – Adele

Christian testimony

The story of Adele, telling her story of how God rescued her from joining the Jehovah Witnesses cult. Thanks be to God!

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Thank you

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Glimpses 52

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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G’day and welcome to Partake Glimpses Stories, where we see together how Jesus is alive today, working in different peoples lives in different ways. We aim to show Jesus as being relevant to the world today, some 2000 years after He walked the earth, died on a Roman cross, rose again to new life from physical death and ascended back to the right hand of God the Father. Today, once more we take a step back to recent history, into the 20^th century, and a very brief glimpse at the Christianity of a well-known Christian.

Beginnings

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906 in Germany. He was a a Lutheran pastor and theologian and had spent time studying in the USA and pastored two churches in London, England in the early 1930s. He returned to Germany to lead an illegal training centre for pastors during which time, he also called for more vocal and active opposition from the churches towards Hitler’s treatment of Jews. Because of this, he was forbidden from preaching, teaching, and all speaking in public to gathered audiences. Dietrich was ultimately arrested and imprisoned for his part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. What we will concentrate on in this study is how he viewed and lived Christian discipleship. In doing so we will look at some excerpts from two of his published writings “The Cost of Discipleship” and “Letters and Papers from Prison”

Discipleship

Jesus Christ, when He talked about the cost of following Him and being His disciple said this: “If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me.” (Matthew 10:38; 16v24-25)

Echoing these words, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote “When Jesus Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. … Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Jesus Christ, nor is it hero worship, but intimacy with Christ.” (The Cost of Discipleship). He knew that as a Christian, a person has to take up their own cross in following Jesus and count the cost of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Dietrich also wrote “Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected. … The Christian disciple must receive his portion from God every day. If he stores it up as a permanent possession, he spoils not only the gift, but himself as well, for he sets his heart on accumulated wealth, and makes it a barrier between himself and God. Where our treasure is, there is our trust, our security, our consolation and our God. Hoarding is idolatry.” (The Cost of Discipleship)

In a Sermon on 2 Corinthians 12v9, he said that “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians adjusts themselves far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense and shock the world far more than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.“

A Cost of Following Jesus

These are strong and powerful words I am sure you would agree! So did Bonhoeffer’s life match his words? In one extreme example, we look at his first days in prison

“For my first night in prison I was locked up in an admission cell. The blankets in the camp had such a foul smell that in spite of the cold it was impossible to use them. Next morning a piece of bread was thrown into my cell; I had to pick it up from the floor. The sound of the prison’s staff vile abuse of the prisoners who were held for investigation penetrated into my cell for the first time; since then, I have heard it every day from morning to night.

The first night in my cell I could sleep very little because in the next cell a prisoner wept loudly for several hours. Nobody took any notice.

After twelve days the authorities got to know of my family connections. While this was of course, a great relief for me personally, from an objective point of view it was most embarrassing to see how everything changed from that moment,. I was put in a more spacious cell which was cleaned for me daily by one of the men. When the food came round I was offered larger rations, which I always refused, since they would have been at the expense of other prisoners.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, The Third Testament)

So, after just twelve nights in atrocious conditions, because he had good connections on the outside of prison, he was moved to a more spacious, cleaner and quieter cell. He probably had no choice about the cell he was given. He could have just eaten the extra food given to him there. But he decided not to, because to eat that extra food, he would have robbed somebody else. For him, material possessions and food were part of his Christian discipleship – part of the cost of following Jesus Christ faithfully. Just as they are of your Christian discipleship – whether you are aware of it or not.

Speak Out!

But another facet of the cost of Dietrich Bonhoeffer following Jesus was speaking out for those who had no voice. In the case of Bonhoeffer, the Jewish race undergoing systematic persecution and extinction under Hitler and the German Nazis.

He wrote those: “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; … Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?” Letters and Papers from Prison

He ultimately paid the price for his speaking out for those who had no voice. His life motto could be summed up in these 2 sentences from his writings: “One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons … Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility,” He was eventually hanged on April 9, 1945 following the failure of an assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944. His life actions echoed his words. How are you counting the cost of being a disciple of Jesus Christ? What do your material possessions and consumption of necessities of food say about your being a Christian? Are you willing to speak up for those who have no voice in your local community, national community and global community?

If this has helped you in your journey of faith, please do let us know how it has helped your own journey of faith by making a comment below!. Thank you.

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Glimpses 49

A Father’s Plea!

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G’day and welcome to Partake Glimpses Stories. Where we see together how Jesus is alive today, working in peoples lives in different ways and is relevant to the world today, 2000 years after He walked the earth, died, rose again and ascended to the right hand of God the Father. I tell you today a story told to me by Jim Allis about one of his experiences!

Help Me!

A man who we will call “G” had told me that his daughter just had to get saved and healed. He then asked me to go and see her. He added “She intends going to a spiritualist; please stop her.” I sought the Lord in prayer that morning and I received an assurance in my heart that He was going to heal her, but first she must hear the gospel and become a Christian.

Telling the story

Arriving at her front door she readily invited me in . I said “I know your Dad has told you the way to God; may I have ten minutes to do the same?” She agreed and listened attentively as I went to Genesis 3 and explained how sin came into the world. I moved on to the prophecies in Isaiah concerning the Messiah, and then the fulfilled prophecies in the Gospels, especially dealing with Isaiah 53 in relation to the cross and Jesus purpose in coming into the world. All this I explained is unveiled in the gospels and showed her the relevant passages.

What must I do?

She listened carefully and then said “Can I ask Him now into my heart ?” The Holy Spirit had prepared her, and she prayed and simply, sought forgiveness and asked Jesus into her heart. Then I said “I believe the Lord wants to heal you, what is wrong with you? She said “Well, it’s very painful, tennis elbow” I was ignorant regarding this problem but others tell me it is extremely painful. I prayed with her and our Lord drew near and touched her and she was healed. Praise the Lord! Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever!

If you have found this helpful, please do let us know how it has helped your own journey of faith. Thank you.

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