But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is,
and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
(Hebrews 11:6 - NKJV)
I believe in God, specifically the God of the Bible, the Father of Jesus Christ. In fact I not only believe in Him, I pretty much know He exists for a fact beyond any reasonable doubt.
Here’s the story of my faith.
When I was a little boy at about three years old I remember playing in my bedroom thinking about God, where in my thoughts it was just a foregone conclusion that He existed.
Where I believe I got this initial faith from was from a vision I had when I was a baby.
When I was very young (my mother swore I was a baby when it happened) I had a vision of God. What happened is I remember my mom and sister playing with me on our living room floor and I remember thinking that I wanted to impress them that I was great. What I did is I rolled over and over on my side for them for about twenty feet until I ended up underneath the telephone table that we had in the front hall.
While I was under the telephone table I literally had a vision of God. Among other things, what I thought was that the world was full of evil with an evil rulership over it, and that God existed beyond this world, separated from me. These thoughts actually terrified me and caused me to go back to my mom crying. (She laughed at me because she thought I got scared because I didn’t know where I was.)
The reason I say this vision is where I got my initial faith from is because the actual thought I thought about God when I was three directly related to the vision I had when I was a baby.
Anyways, that is where I believe I first got my faith in God from.
Then when I was four I had another vision of God, which deepened my faith in Him. In this vision, while the vision took place, I just knew for a fact that God was in heaven and the ruler of the world. And I just knew that He was the absolute greatest being imaginable and that His world was the absolute greatest world imaginable.
I can still picture the vision to this day. The best way I can describe it is the world was the same as this world but it included God in heaven, and the feel of the world was immeasurably greater and more vivid and more powerful and more awesome.
Let me put it this way. It is a world worthy of God living in and it is the place we all want to be. It literally feels like you are in eternity and it is awesome. To me it is truly the absolute greatest place imaginable and way better than anything that any of us in this world could ever imagine!
That is my impression of God’s world, and similarly to me God Himself is the absolute greatest being imaginable – exactly as the Bible describes Him (for more of my thoughts on this see my web-log from 10/16/07: My God: the biggest, the best, the most!).
This is Wayne’s God, the God I have believed in since I was a little boy of three and four years old.
Anyways, later when I was four I came to realise that the God I believed in was in fact the Bible’s God. I remember looking through my sister’s Bible which had pictures in it of the great Bible stories, and I recognised that the God I believed in, a God who ruled over all and who was the greatest being imaginable, was the God of the Bible. It was just a perfect fit in my mind.
Consequently right from when I was four years old I always believed in God while I was growing up, believing Him to specifically be the God of the Bible.
Now believe it or not, growing up I wasn’t a very religious kid. Instead I was a typical, normal Canadian kid who played hockey and dreamed of playing in the NHL, even playing minor hockey at an elite level for ten years.
As I said I did believe in God the entire time I was growing up and as an expression of this I did pray my prayers each night and to a degree it did affect my morality in that I tried being a good kid, but that is about it. My family belonged to the United Church but we only regularly went to church when I was real young, and not very much after I got involved in hockey when I was six years old. I did get a Bible from the Gideon’s when I was in school when I was ten, but I never read it. I actually did not know a whole lot about the God of the Bible except for the famous Old Testament stories and the basic story of Jesus, that He was God’s Son born of a virgin who died for us.
However when I was in my late teens I started to develop a greater interest in God. It actually started during conversations I had with a friend of mine who I used to get high with smoking pot in a park across from my high school during spares or whenever we would skip class.
We used to get high almost daily in our last few years of high school, and a topic we regularly talked about was God. We used to look at the world as being created by Him and talk about how awesome He was.
This made me really get interested in God where I wanted Him to be a daily part of my life. I just thought He was an awesome God and I wanted Him in my life. I even got a Bible for my nineteenth birthday and tried reading it from cover to cover (it was a King James version with Shakespearean English – once I got to Exodus I quit because I didn’t understand it).
A couple of years later, in my early twenties I was going through difficulties and I wanted God to help me. As I pursued Him, I felt, in what I can only say was “a strong sense from God” for me to go to Jesus.
I did not know much about biblical Christianity and I did not know much about Jesus but as I pursued Christ I learned that if you want to connect with God, you need to believe in Jesus. So I accepted Jesus into my life, but I never actually repented and made Him my Lord. I only wanted Him to help me do things my way, and I continued in my lifestyle, which at the time, was the lifestyle of a partier who drank and smoked pot and who was full of rebellion.
I ended up going through a couple of really tough years including mental illness, homelessness at times, and prison. During this time I saw God work in my life. I had a small number of visions take place that encouraged me, and I saw Him divinely protect me a number of times, but I also saw Him give me the rope to do what I wanted, which I ended up hanging myself with figuratively speaking – thus the prison time and such.
Finally the last time I was in jail when I was twenty-five, my dad came and told me about Teen Challenge, which is a discipleship program for addicts. My dad had come to the Lord himself a few years earlier and Teen Challenge had just come to his church. I felt that God brought Teen Challenge to me and I responded by deciding from that time on to stop doing things my way and start doing things His way, which included going through their fourteen month addictions program.
This is when I truly repented and I believe truly became saved, making Jesus not just my Saviour, but my Lord and Saviour.
Since this time my faith has grown exponentially.
I always believed God existed, but since I truly committed my life to Christ, I have really gotten to know Him and have really become convinced of Him, including that He truly exists for a fact, and that He in fact is the God of the Bible.
There are a number of things that have given me this faith.
For one thing, I have seen God work in my life the way He promises to work in a person’s life when they believe in Jesus. Among other things, through Christ I have been delivered of my addictions, I have been healed of my mental illness, I have been given the Holy Spirit to walk with me in my life, and God has directed my life, most significantly putting me to work in the ministry as an evangelist and Bible teacher among other things.
For another thing, I have seen God work in countless other people’s lives, again the way He promises to work in a person’s life when they believe in Jesus.
For another thing, I have been in church meetings and felt His presence in significant ways, so significant that when it happens you know for a fact it is God and that He truly exists.
For another thing, I have been to church meetings and seen God work in the supernatural, specifically in miracles, signs, and wonders, literally in ways that you cannot deny that miracles have taken place.
Lastly, my faith has grown through study, including studying the Bible, other religions, and the scientific theories of origins.
Most significantly I have studied the Bible for the purpose of determining if I can trust it as the truth to base my entire life on. Personally I find its teachings worthy of being called the truth of God; I find its teaching of the eternal spiritual world to make perfect sense; and I find it completely reasonable to trust it as being exactly what it claims to be, the word of God written by men of God.
I have also investigated other religions and to be honest I can’t believe their truth is the truth. Most significantly I have major issues with their teachings of the eternal spiritual world; I see blatant errors in some of their writings; and I have major problems with the authenticity of some of their sacred writings.
Also, regarding the scientific theories of origins, I have researched the theories, and I personally cannot believe in them. For one thing, there is no proof that the theories are true. Personally I find it hard to believe that all of life could be created by strictly scientific means, and yet it cannot be proven for a fact. For another thing, I have studied the theory of evolution, and to me it is nothing more than science fiction. (For my actual thoughts about this see my various web-logs on the subject.)
Anyways, after all of this, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that God exists and that He is the God of the Bible.
Now this is not to say that I don’t have times of doubt. There are many times in my life when I wonder “God, do you even exist?!”
The Bible however says that without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6), and what I have learned is God does not go out of His way to prove Himself, particularly to those who already believe in Him and are walking with Him. He wants us to walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). Consequently many times He makes Himself real more to those who are coming to Him, than those who have walked with Him for years. As such, the longer you walk with God, sometimes the less He makes Himself real to you – all so that you can live your life by faith and please Him.
When those times happen for me, I just meditate on what God has done throughout my life to give me faith, and even though I can’t sense Him, by faith I know He’s there.
And I do know He’s there, no doubt about it!