The Gateway to Encountering God  …

All kinds of people in all kinds of cultures over thousand of years have come to the humbling conclusion that there really is a God who made us, who loves us, and who we can know right now.  But we can’t experience God on our own terms just as we can’t truly experience another person on our own terms… we don’t get to make up the God we want, but we can encounter the God who is.  This God, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, is a disturbing God.  Encountering this God will not leave you unchanged.

Christianity is about a way of living life in relationship with God.  Like any relationship it includes believing and doing.  I believe certain things about the people I love.  The more accurate my perception of them, the better I am able to know them and love them.  But real love is not just belief or empty words – it also involves action – doing real acts of love.  So what I believe and what I do really matters.  Could it be that just as there are physical principles (like the law of gravity) that govern the physical universe, so too there are basic spiritual principles which were meant to govern my soul ?  What if there was a path waiting for me, a path not of my own making, but made by the one who made me ?!

In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus offers Neo an opportunity to leave the surface of things and see “how deep the rabbit-hole goes…  But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”

Here are doors or six stepping stones on the way to growing in a relationship with God.  These steps are part of an ancient path – they are the essentials of what Christians have believed, across different centuries, cultures, denominations, and languages.  They form Christianity 101.  Think of them as a series of doorways to step through.  If you can embrace the first principle, then you are ready to step through the door to the second principle.  If you dont agree with the first principle or struggle with it, you can click on it which will take you down into a fuller explanation of it.  See how far you are ready to go through these six doors!

Click on any of the six principles below to dig into it in more detail.

1.      God loves me and knows me by name…

   But if that is true,
   Why is it that most people are not experiencing this relationship with God ?
   Because…

2.      I feel cut off from God…

   
   But if that is true,
   How can this gulf be bridged ?

3.       Jesus came to restore our relationships with God…

   
   But if that is true,
   Then why am I still separated from God ?
   Because…

4.      We must each individually receive Jesus Christ…

   
   But how do I do that ?

5.      I can have a new relationship with God right now…

   
   Now What ?
   

6.      I can begin to live like a follower of Jesus… 

Going Deeper:

        Why even bother with religion ?

What about all the horrible things that  have been done in the name of religion ?

        The Narrow Path

        Tell me more about what your particular church believes

* We are indebted to the work of Dr. Bill Bright for several of the concepts and illustrations that appear in our Christianity 101 pages.