The start of a spiritual journey

As well as being people who were like minded in terms of world view and a desire to get to know God more, the students in the Christian Union explained the Christian Gospel in a simple way which appealed to me as an engineer called the 4 spiritual laws .

While I now see these as an over-simplification of how things are, they were, at the time, very appealing and encouraging.

These can be summarised as:

1. God loves you and created you to know Him personally.

2. Man is sinful and separated from God, so we cannot know Him personally or experience His love.

3.Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through Him alone we can know God personally and experience God’s love.

4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord; then we can know God personally and experience His love.

And the pamphlet continues to affirm that the Bible promises eternal life to all who receive Christ.

“The testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:11-13).

As my journey continued, I realised that there was much more to the Gospel than that but these simple statements, which appealed to my desire for certainty, were the doorway to confirming my desire to follow Jesus and they gave me an assurance that I was accepted by Him in a way which I had not had any certainty of before. I believed they were true statements partly because they seemed to resonate with the gaps in the knowledge I had acquired during my childhood and because of the lives of those I met who affirmed them.

So my belief in God and in the Christian belief started with a combination of trusting authority, subjective experience and what I can only call the “virtue” which I found in the character and teaching of Jesus. I had no knowledge of what empirical evidence existed to support the truth of these beliefs. That came later.

With a keen interest and fascination with science, engineering and finding out how things worked, I wanted to find out what I could about Christian, and other, faiths which led to the question “what can we know?” “What, if anything, can we be sure of?”