“Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep His promise.” (Hebrews 10:23 NLT)
What is the basis of your faith? There are many “faiths” in the world today, but only one of those faith systems will get you to heaven. But isn’t that awfully “narrow?” If you bought a property, sight unseen, but when you came to claim it as your own, rather than one key to get you in the door, there were 1,000 keys in a series of buckets. What would you do?
Most of us would walk away or break down the door and install a new lock, but that’s not how heaven works. There’s only one way, though there are many “keys” which claim to give you access. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6) The miracle isn’t that there’s only One way, the miracle is that there IS a way!
One of the obstacles to placing our trust in the simple plan of salvation that Jesus offers is that we tend to think more highly of ourselves than we should. We want to pick the Bible apart and try to “prove” certain parts are false or wrong, thus hoping to discredit its Author. We want to take it out of its original context and pretend it’s some kind of modern “western” religion.
John Stonestreet speaks to this idea when he writes: “This caricature of Christianity as a sort-of tribal faith of Westerners is flawed at the core. As Philip Jenkins argued in his book The Next Christendom, it took nearly a millennium and a half before the majority of Christians were Europeans. Even today, that is no longer the case. If we were true to the actual demographic realities, the ‘stereotypical’ Christian would not be a white male but an African woman. In fact, from its inception, Christianity has always been a multiethnic, multilingual, and multicontinental faith.
It is vitally important that we understand the true nature and history of Christianity if we’re going to engage the wider world. The first founders of Christianity were not powerful European rulers hoping to oppress the world. They were Middle Easterners, mostly ‘blue collar,’ almost all of whom died a violent death at the hands of the ruling elite. In fact, the only Europeans who make it into the biblical accounts are the Philistines in the Old Testament and the Romans and Greeks in the New.
As historian Tom Holland and evangelist Glen Scrivener have repeated for years now, this faith so captured Western civilization, we struggle to see just how alien it was to the Western imagination at the beginning. The best of the West—the priority of the individual, the importance of science and reason, the check on state power, the care for the poor and the sick, the dignity of women, the abolition of slavery—is a consequence of the blessed cultural imperialism of an originally Middle Eastern deity.”(See BreakPoint Christianity Isn’t a Western Faith // Hijacking the Pro-Abortion Movement – 02-02-23)
We need not fear the historical accuracy of the Bible or the firsthand documents that teach us of our Faith. Jesus rose from the dead to prove His deity and the power He possesses to change our lives forever. The Bible is filled with stories to verify and identify the strength we can have in the Christian Faith that speaks to us whoever we are or wherever we live.
Admittedly, it seems strange on a lot of levels that the Lord would even allow all the different religions, all the seeming “paths” to heaven, but it just goes to prove the Bible when it says in Proverbs 14:12: “There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death.” Every road is a dead end except one. Please come to Jesus today.
Go to aNewstory.com and find the answers you’ve been searching for.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 