Questions on Christianity

As I stated in my last blog, we are discussing prayer at the church I attend.  What caught my attention was that there are many verses in the Bible which simply instruct us to pray.  These verses have no preconditions or requirements or instructions on what we are to do other than to pray.  For example:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-9 ESV)

However, there are at least 20 verses in the Bible that teach our prayers will only be effective if we conform to God’s will; do something besides pray.  For example:

“We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him.” (John 9:31-32 ESV)

So does God place a condition on whether he answers our prayers or is he more concerned that we just pray?  The Bible seems to give us different answers.  Why does God seem to confuse this issue?

This question is similar to the problem we noted in our discussion on salvation.  We can pick out a verse or two out of the Bible and prove just about any idea we have about a particular subject, including prayer.  That approach makes it very easy for us but to really know what God is saying to us, we must consider what the entire Bible says.

In the church that I attend, we have been talking about prayer.  For me, prayer raises a lot of questions such as:  If God is all-knowing, why does he need us to talk to him in prayer?  He knows more about us than we do ourselves.  Another question is:  Does our prayer really change anything because John tells us “. . .if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.  And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”  (1 John 5:14-15 ESV)  So whatever we ask must be according to God’s will, not our will which appears to mean what we want does not matter.

The preacher at our church made a comment about prayer this last Sunday that addresses some of these questions.  He stated that God is more concerned about how we respond to circumstances in which we find ourselves than he is in giving us what we ask for in our prayers.  The purpose of prayer is to align our will with his.

We said something similar in our blog of November 12, 2017 when we wrote about the book of Ecclesiastes.  Now most people interpret this book as describing what life is like without Christ.  Well, life can be meaningless with or without Christ.  It is not the fleeting moments of our lives that concern God but rather the decisions we make during these fleeting moments  The reason is because those decisions will impact our soul and our soul lives for eternity while the momentary circumstances of our life are so temporary..

Most of our prayers ask God to remove us from the difficult situations in which we find ourselves.  God’s concern is us, not the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Ri Le runs a very successful restaurant business and I have been a patron at his restaurant many times.  In a recent newspaper article about him, Ri Le states one of the most important moments in his life occurred 25 years ago when he attended a five-day retreat by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk.  This meeting changed his life. [1]

So if other religions can have a profound impact on people’s lives, what makes Christianity different from other religions?  One answer is that we have different beliefs.  However, as we have demonstrated in this blog and in my book (see pages 55 to 57), we are finite and that means our beliefs are not totally accurate and they are not totally under our control (what we believe depends largely upon the culture in which we were brought up).

Other Christians maintain that changed lives are evidence of Christianity’s validity.  As we have stated in the blog before “the only way we can truly know our sins are forgiven is if we have a changed life” (see January 13, 2019 posting).  However, as we have seen above, other religions can change people’s lives as well.  So are they valid?

Other Christians maintain that Christianity is a relationship with God.  So can a person of another religion have a relationship with God?  True, some of their beliefs are different than what is taught in the Bible but in looking at the history of Christianity, we see that Christians have held erroneous beliefs as well.  So it is apparent that just because someone holds erroneous beliefs that does not preclude them from having a relationship with God.

So what makes Christianity different from other religions?

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[1]   Scott Cherry,  “Ri Le fuels success in Tulsa”.  Tulsa World, January 27, 2019, p. D3.

He was an honor student in high school and excelled in sports.  He was a World War II veteran serving in Korea.  He married Naomi and together they raised 10 children.  He was a farmer for most of his life.  He occasionally preached at a local church.

He was the hardest working man that I knew and he passed on this passion to many of his descendants.  He loved telling stories, sometimes the same ones over and over, always laughing as if he were telling them for the first time.

Robert Allen Coy was my father-in-law and he went to meet our God this year.  When someone passes from this life to the next, we often say:  ”rest in peace”.  I doubt if Robert is resting in heaven.  He was too much a man of action.

Several years ago in a philosophy class I was taking, a fellow classmate gave me a list of three books he suggested that I read.   Well, I finally got around to reading one of those books.  It was a book about the Existential philosophy.  This branch of philosophy emphasizes that we must deal with the reality of human existence, with “the concrete life of ordinary mankind” [1] and not just some theoretical concepts.  The author defines Existentialism as the attempt to bring the whole man, all of him, into philosophy. [2]  He also criticizes mainstream philosophy  because it teaches detachment as a path to wisdom instead of the Hebraic tradition which teaches commitment and “the passionate involvement of man with his own moral being”. [3]  The existential philosopher Kierkegaard states that religious truth is not a truth of the intellect but a truth that “must penetrate my personal experience or it is nothing”. [4]

The philosophers called the Greco-Roman moralists had the same view.  They were more concerned about what it means to be human and how we should live than they were about theoretical concepts [5].  They thought philosophers should teach as much through the example of their lives as their words. [6]

That is what we have been emphasizing in this blog.  The concept of salvation in Christianity involves the changing of our soul so it is like God; it is not just some theoretical exercise.  It is more than a set of beliefs—our doctrine.  It is more than finding reasons for the validity of our faith—apologetics.  Does not the Bible tell us it is a changed life?  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come”.  (2 Corinthians 5:17 ESV).

A few Sundays ago our pastor summed it up when he stated that the only way we can truly say we are Christians and the only way we can truly know our  sins are forgiven is if we have a changed life.  Christianity must impact our entire life or it is not Christianity.  The same can be applied to any philosophy or religion.  If our philosophy or religion does not have an impact on our lives, what is the purpose of holding those beliefs?

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[1]   William Barrett, Irrational Man.  New York:   Anchor Books, 1958, p. 135.

[2]   Barrett, p. 275.

[3]   Barrett. p. 77.

[4]   Barrett, p. 171.

[5]   Luke Timothy Johnson, Practical Philosophy:  The Greco-Roman Moralists (Part 1).  Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company, 2002, p. 9.

[6]   Johnson, p. 67.