This post comes from Calvary Chapel Pastors
As I have mentioned before, I grew up in a very godly Christian home.
I believed in Jesus Christ from day one. From the time I was thirteen days old, my parents carried me to church. I slept in the pews and grew up in a God-honoring environment. Yet, as all teenagers must, I came to a place in my spiritual growth and development where I had to create my own relationship with God. I had to develop a spiritual foundation and work through a personal theology. You might say I had to construct my own house of faith in the Lord.
As I moved through that period, being challenged intellectually by my studies—especially my philosophy and biology classes—I came to a short period when I questioned everything. I even began to question the existence of God. I wondered if I really believed in Him at all.
Maybe there is something to atheism, I thought. Maybe all this spiritual stuff is nothing more than the creation of man. I went through a period of real misery, almost sinking from the weight of my oppressive thoughts. Maybe God doesn’t exist. Maybe it is all man’s concepts and ideas, since man appears to need to believe in something. The more I entertained thoughts like these, the more I sank emotionally. And then I thought, Maybe God doesn’t exist—but it’s easier to believe that He does exist than to believe that He doesn’t. As I looked at the world and the universe, I found it much easier to believe in the existence of God than to believe that everything I saw came into being by sheer chance.
If you don’t believe in the existence of God, then you have a lot of explaining to do!
How can you see? How can you hear? How can you walk? How can you feel? How can you remember? Can you really have all of these capacities just by random, blind chance? Not believing in God left too many unanswered questions for me.
My belief in God strengthened as I observed creation. As I studied nature, I saw design and purpose everywhere. I saw delicate balances in nature. I noticed the oxygen/nitrogen cycles. I saw crucial water/dry land proportions, two-thirds to one-third. So it became easier for me to say, “Okay, I believe in God.”
You may say, “Well, Chuck, that’s not much in the way of proof.” And in one way, you’d be right. But in another way, if you’re sinking, then it’s awfully reassuring to feel your foot landing upon something solid! So I thought, Yes, I do believe in God.
But I couldn’t stop there. How could I stop with a limited belief in the existence of God? I had already seen that creation seemed to reveal a consistent divine design and purpose. I reasoned that all of these delicate systems and necessary balances existed because they were required for man’s existence—and if God had a design and a purpose for all created things, then He also must have a design and a purpose for me. And for you too.
– excerpted from Love The More Excellent Way by Chuck Smith
continue reading the views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of Calvary Southampton
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