Nevertheless...

"I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." Galations 2:20

I'm a Christian. I have friends I admire and respect of other faiths and belief systems, but I'm a Christian. I became a Christian in the "evangelical" way when  I was ten years old.  During a revival at the Hillcrest Baptist Church in Enterprise, Alabama I made a "profession of faith". I gave my heart to Jesus. My church held revivals twice a year. These were two week revivals including the Friday and Saturday nights in between.  If that was not enough, my church provided a Saturday morning service for the "juniors", the children and adolescents. That morning the world-famous evangelist Rev. R.G. Lee laid aside his hell-fire and brimstone rhetoric and used pictures from a children's Sunday School  room to share the gospel. He held up a picture of the serpents and explained that the children in the wilderness only had to look upon the serpents to be spared their wrath. And he explained that accepting Jesus was just as easy.  So  during his "invitation" I asked Jesus to come into my heart. And He did. Riding my bicycle home from Mark Sawyer's house I remember that I didn't feel any different, but I accepted by faith that something important had happened to me.

That happened over 55 years ago. My belief has shifted exponentially over the years, but my faith is stronger than ever.  Because it's not my faith, but "the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." In this age of man-made driver-less automobiles, surely God almighty can arrange an effortless faith, a faith that takes care of itself.

As a child, through early adulthood, I was taught that if you "accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, if you go to church and read your Bible every day" then you will remain "in the center of God's will". And everything will work out the way it's supposed to.  I have found that not to be true.  A college education,  a good credit score and a 41 year marriage has been useful also.  Good medicine has saved my life as well.  When Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull talked about the "good medicine" that spared their lives over and over again, it was one thing.  My "good medicine " is of the pharmacological variety. It won't stop arrows and bullets, but it prevents any number of serious problems.

"Nevertheless I live."  My life has been spared more than once.  There was the afternoon I got hit by a car as a pedestrian and walked away.  I was sore for a few days, but otherwise unhurt. Then there was the near catastrophic collision on I-75 south nearly seven  years ago.  I still have a stiff neck to show for it, but I'm alive to tell the tale. In both cases, "nevertheless I live." Besides those potential physical disasters there have been a multitude of emotional disasters.  But I kept breathing. I got help. "Nevertheless I live."

"Christ lives in me."  I don't have to try to be a Christian. I am a Christian.  And I don't have to "read my Bible every day."  I've read the Bible through more than once. I know the message of the Bible.  I know the stories. I know the characters. I know how it ends.

When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness there weren't three temptations, there were four.  And the fourth was the most deadly.  He said, "If you are the Son of God then prove it."  "If".  Jesus didn't have to prove He was the Son of God, he only had to be the Son of God. You and I don't have to prove we're Christians, we only have be Christians. We are the "ian" and Christ is the rest.

By the time I was a teenager, I decided that that ten year old was not qualified to "accept Jesus." So I got "saved and baptized" again.  As an adult I considered that when Jesus said "Let the children come to me" He meant just that. What that ten year old did was just fine. For that matter what the ten year old did was more authentic than the seventeen year old's decision.  That boy only had a pounding in his chest and the belief that Jesus would accept him.  That seventeen year old had seven more years of Bible study, church and life experience.

So why this abnormal (for me) and church y post?  Like everything else I've ever written, I just had it on my mind. And I thought it might be for someone other than me.