About Jesus  -  Steve Sweetman

I Am A Christian

I am not a Christian because of all the benefits that come my way by being a Christian, and there are many.  I am a Christian because through both rational and spiritual means I have come to understand that the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is the ultimate, absolute, universal truth.  Logic, thus, dictates that I have no other intelligent choice but to submit myself to God, with the assistance of the Spirit of His Son, Jesus.     

Through a rational pursuit of truth, I have come to believe that the Bible is God inspired, historically reliable, intellectually significant, culturally relevant, and trustworthy.  This has led me to the belief that the God of the Bible does, in fact, exist.  That being said, it takes more than a rational exercise to come to the belief that God, who is spirit, actually does exist.  Logically speaking, if God is spirit, it takes some kind of spiritual intervention to discover His reality.  Through a spiritual intervention, the Spirit of God has been placed within me, and because of that, I not only know God exists; in a limited way, I commune with Him.      

Based on both rational and spiritual processes, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ forms the basis to how I view my existence in the material and spiritual universe in which I live.  Philosophically speaking, it is not just my Biblical belief system that forms my worldview, it is my relationship with God that dictates how I view and live in my surrounding environment. 

The Biblical worldview to which I adhere states that God has created us in a shadowy image of Himself, as the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:26 implies.  Similar to God Himself, then, we have both intellectual and spiritual capabilities.  Both the rational and the spiritual are fundamental in the process of relating to God.  Some of us lean more to the rational while others lean more to the spiritual.  It's a product of our individually flawed human character traits, but neglecting or emphasizing one over the other can be a problem. 

Emphasizing the rational over the spiritual can lead to a dry, lifeless, belief system.  Emphasizing the spiritual over the rational can lead to a mysticism that borders on the demonic.  I have seen such unhealthy over-emphases throughout the last fifty years, and still see them today.  For me, I attempt to maintain a Biblical balance between the rational and the spiritual.  This balance has brought me to the conviction that the God of the Bible, who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is the ultimate, absolute, universal truth.  Submitting my life to Him makes me a Christian.