Undignified!

I recently had a conversation with a lady who complained about how her Christian friends had religion inserted in every area of their lives. We were sitting down to talk for the first time, and she did not know that I was a Christian. When she paused, I shared with her that I was a person of the Christian faith who also had God inserted in every area of my life, and this is not because I want to show that I am righteous, and I have a “special” relationship with God (I don’t). It is quite the opposite.

You see, I grew up in a pastors’ home. My parents were strict believers and very particular about how we showed up. So, I grew up and in fact, maintained a certain level of moral self-uprightness. In today’s world, I honestly could have passed for person who had it together on morality – on the outside. I didn’t know I was only but a whitewashed tomb (Matthew 23:27-28). I thought I did good. But then I found the love of God. Oh my, my, my! I found love, joy, peace, and righteousness that transcended anything that my self-righteousness could offer. I found light – true light. And it transformed my life forever. The amazing thing is that since I truly committed my life to God (not the outward display I did), I have learned that the love, peace, joy, etc. in Him never ends – there's always a new level I encounter every day. It’s beautiful. It’s something I can’t explain with words. It can only be experienced.

So, that’s me – the self-righteous, moral person, who found out that her morality was in fact, filthy. On the other end of the spectrum, are those who hardly ever lived a good life, maybe did one or two good things, but for the most part of their lives, they did all the wrong things, maybe even committed terrible crimes. They were the kind of people that nobody wants their children or spouses to associate with. I mean bad people (haha). But then they too find God. They find the love of Christ. They discover that someone could truly love them, accept them, and be intentional about them. They found similar kind of peace, joy, and amazing-ness that the moral sinner found. For them, like the self-righteous God-discoverer, they are blown away, “So, despite my sins and crimes and faults, I still get a chance at love, true love?” It’s amazing to them.

To these two groups of Christians and those around and in between, God is their life. Not because they want to show off as being righteous, but because they have come to realize that there is no righteousness in a person. No one can be righteous by their good works or bad works. Righteousness is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8). They have come to see that “I could not save myself. I can never save myself. I will never save myself. I am a person who will constantly, for the rest of my life, need a Crutch; and Christ is my Crutch. He keeps me standing every day, and I will never let Him go.” For us, God is the air we breathe. Without Him, we have discovered that life is empty. So, every aspect of our lives – our marriages, children, work, our values, decision-making, etc. has God in it, and it is honestly not intended to offend anybody. It is just what it is. Excuse us for acting and speaking undignified (as the Nigerian music minister, Dunsin Oyekan, puts it).

Someone may ask, “How do you even know that God is real? Why are you acting so crazy for a God you can’t even see?”

Before I respond, I would like to say that I absolutely respect those who do not believe that there is God, because they have an immense amount of faith. I mean, it would take 100,000 times more faith than I have right now to believe that this world got hit by something or crashed into itself and by itself produced intelligent creatures, like humans and other animals and organized everything in nature to function seamlessly like a well-oiled machine. Anyone who truly believes that does not know that he/she has believed more blindly than the Christian does.

However, to answer that question, first, for the Christian, there is a witness inside of them that confirms that not only is God real and present with them every day, but that they are also God’s children (Romans 8:16). Like I said earlier, it is something that cannot be explained. It must be experienced. Secondly, several evidence (including creation) points to the existence of God. Please, read these articles from Gotquestions.org. I won’t be able to explain it as well as they have: Correct Religion, Theodicy, and Is God Real?

Additionally, as a person, I have seen God in action. Asides from experiencing God in my daily life (which is every moment), I have experienced God in mighty, amazing ways. For example:

• I heard my younger sister say, “I am done with cancer meds, I choose to believe God for my complete healing.” She was diagnosed with leukemia at 15 years old. While in the hospital, contaminated blood was mistakenly transfused into her and she got Hepatitis B. Cancer with Hepatitis B in a teenager - unthinkable. She was treated for the cancer, never treated for the Hepatitis B – God cleared that, miraculously. After months of cancer treatment, she got frustrated, and said she was done. She’s 33 years old now, still cancer free.

• I have been in a meeting where the choir was ministering in songs, and someone got up from a wheelchair.

• I have seen/heard the testimony of a person who was shot several times by robbers. His shirt had many bullet holes in it, but he did not get hurt, not even a scratch.

• My husband and I have seen God overturn (in a matter of hours) an event at work that could have gotten him fired.

• I have heard my daughter pray for her sister’s healing and by the next morning, the person prayed for was completely healed, as if the previous day never happened.
  

These are only a few – very very very very few – of the God-experiences I have had in my short life on earth, not counting other experiences shared by other believers around the world. It is honestly too late to tell some of us that there is no God.

You may say, these are just coincidences. Christians have chosen to call them God-incidences – that is, coincidences orchestrated by God.

Someone else may say, “It seems you think that God is real because He has been good to you, what about when bad things happen, and what about all those God did not heal or save from danger?”

That is a very good question. You see, to the genuine Christian, God is real, and God is good regardless of the things that happen to them. Every human on earth, whether they realize it or not, has an enemy (1 Peter 5:8). His name is Satan. He is God’s archenemy too. And his purpose is to destroy whatever it is that God stands for (John 10:10). For example, since God’s stands for health, satan stands for sicknesses / diseases; since God stands for love, satan stands for hatred; since God stands for life, satan stands for death, etcetera, you get the gist. The devil (satan) is the author of every evil thing that happens on earth. So, yes, there may be that Christian whose sister sadly succumbed to cancer and passed on, to her God is still good and he is still real, because she knows that satan was the doer of that evil. I have had bad things happen to me in my life. Things that I have previously asked God, “Why did you allow that to happen to me?” But I have come to learn that God did not do that. The devil did, and he very much works through people – people who make the wrong choices and hurt other people. As Christians, we know that evil is not the work of God (James 1:17). But we also know that God would judge evil and one day, this will all be over. Satan would have no power to cause harm anymore and God’s perfect will alone would be done on earth (Revelation 20:10).

So, before you ask, yes, true Christians believe, in the words of Rev. Hagin, that there is a heaven to gain and a hell to shun.

“Well, why would a good, loving God send people to hell if he truly loved them?”, You may ask.

I am happy to tell you that our good loving God never has and never will send anybody to hell. He never has and He never will. Let me explain.

Hell was made for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41). God did not make hell for human beings. He made hell as a place of judgment for the devil who rebelled against Him. Rather, He created human beings to have fellowship (or a relationship) with Him. In fact, He made humans like Himself, so that while He governed the heavens, humans governed the earth, like an administrator or a delegate (Genesis 1:26-28; Psalm 115:16). We were made to be God’s delegates. But humans made a bad choice (Genesis 3). They rebelled against God, like the devil did, and was unable to function as God would have them function – as extensions of God on the earth. Because humans rebelled as the devil did, taking sides with the devil in the same camp, they deserved to end up in hell like the devil. Remember, hell was prepared for satan AND his angels – those who took sides with him. So, on behalf of all of humanity, the first man, Adam, took sides with the devil and seemed to seal the destiny of humanity to hell (Romans 5:12-14). But God would not have that.

He had made humans to be like Him – to be His hands and feet on the earth. To administer His created world. To be gods like Him within our spheres of influence (Psalm 82:6; John 10:34). Of course, God would not let the devil win. So, He came by Himself to the earth to do a work of redemption – that is, taking us all back from the devil. And that came at a price. First, He had to come to earth as a human (to take the place of humans, He had to be a human Himself – Hebrews 2:16-18). Then, He had to take on the punishment of sin for humanity (because sin must be punished – Romans 6:23). This required Him to shed His blood (that is, die, on a cross). Before Jesus, there was nothing special about dying on a cross. It was just the way that the Romans painfully executed those that were considered very terrible criminals. Even though Jesus did nothing wrong while He was on earth, He was killed the way terrible criminals were killed, because unknown to His false accusers, He was carrying on Him the sins of the whole world (pedophilia, rape, murder, fraud, self-righteousness, corruption, prostitution, worry, gossip, theft, name it – He bore them all). So, even though, physically, He had done nothing wrong, spiritually (for all of humanity), Jesus was made the filthiest sinner that ever hung on a cross (2 Corinthians 5:21). The moment Jesus died on that Cross, he served the punishment that every single human being that ever walked, presently walks, and will ever walk this earth deserved. He took it all. He redeemed everyone back from the devil. Now, it was left for each person to accept the redemption that He had bought. Sin was a problem. Jesus brought the cure. To experience the deliverance from sin, one must believe in and accept the cure that Jesus offers (Romans 10:9-10). Anyone who refuses to accept it chooses to take sides with the devil and will end up in the place that was prepared for the devil and his associates (John 3:18, 36; Matthew 25:41).

So, God has never and will never send anyone to hell. Instead, God has graciously provided a way of escape for everyone so that they do not end up in the same fate as the devil. Unfortunately, some people would still reject God and maintain sides with the devil. Those people would end up in hell – completely by their own choice. As doctors offer vaccination for a deadly disease, God offered His blood as vaccine for sin. As some people would still die by that deadly disease because they refused to be vaccinated, people would still go to hell because they refused God’s cure for sin. So, was it God that sent them to hell? Absolutely, not!

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