Three Ways to Keep Christianity Simple

Have you ever wondered as a Christian believer how to keep your faith simple and effective over all the years of your life? Have you wondered how to keep your first love for Christ alive in spite of all the cultural, financial, and psychological pressures of modern life?   

I'm going to share three insights that I hope are as meaningful to you as they have been for me in keeping your personal walk with Jesus zestful and focused.

1. Keep in mind that the core teaching of Christianity has to do with the Triune God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is a great mystery and we ought to feel no shame in receiving it as a gift of divine revelation, rather than a product of our own rational deduction of what we think God could or should be. 

Other world religions have core beliefs about God that must also be accepted through faith and not rationally deduced from experience. For instance, Hinduism professes to believe in a million gods, whereas Buddhism teaches that there is no personal God at all. 

So when the Bible shows us the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit each acting as fully God in different historical situations, while existing together as One God, we do well to make this a primary building block of our view of reality. This teaching of the Trinity is especially meaningful to me as a theologian-psychologist because it answers so many important questions about humanity's existence and God's existence; how they are similar and how they differ.

We know from anthropology, psychology, and sociology that humans do not live successfully in isolation. And from your practical experience you know that those people who are loners do not do well in life. They become depressed, develop no social skills, and over time lose even the ability to converse meaningfully. There are two mental disorders that lead to this condition, known as the avoidant personality disorder and the schizoid personality disorder. In both conditions individuals isolate themselves from others, and hide in the margins of life, work, and civilization. Before long, their emotions shrivel up and their cognition becomes bleak and barren. Their spirit dies within them, and even their bodies look forlorn and forsaken.

Looking back at what the Word of God teaches us, however, offers a remedy. God declared way back in Genesis, during the foundational epoch of an ancient civilization, that it is not good for persons to live alone. Why? Because, from God's point of view He has created them for friendship, fellowship, love, empathy, communication, communion, trust, and lifelong interpersonal learning.

In other words, just as God Himself is an interpersonal Trinity, so we are made in His image as interpersonal selves. Whatever else we are called to know or to do, we can never get away from the universal calling to become meaningfully involved with others as God is and does.

Knowing this keeps your life simple in this way: you dedicate yourself to become a lifelong student of personality development and social communication, so that you're always gaining greater facility in meeting, talking to, caring for, and living together with friends, acquaintences, and family members. This calling to caring relationships won't end with your personal death, but is resurrected with your body and personality for eternal pursuit in heaven.

Think of how both in the Bible and today God is always involved in relationships — perceiving, speaking, listening, caring, confronting, feeling, thinking, and acting. And you are invited to do the same!

But you can forsake your calling in Christ altogether by insisting so vehemently on your own selfish ways that you separate yourself from God and spend eternity in hell.

Instead, why not spend your life drawing ever closer in your thoughts and feelings, sensations and spirit, to the living Triune God, and through God's love for others, to them as well. Why not treat even strangers or newcomers as potential new friends? God does, or else he never would have chosen you while you were yet His enemy.

2. Make the Bible, God's personal revelation of who He is and what He expects from you, the foundation of your life. That means reading it many times through, on your own or in a Bible study group, all the while you are going through school, working at a job, or raising a family.

You will no doubt run up against many human opinions, some of them from very smart people, who will contradict what you learn and believe in Scripture. But where were they when God laid the foundation of the Cosmos? When He set the stars in heaven and created the fish in the ocean? When He made the thousand types of butterflies, and formed them to emerge as delicately winged and beautifully colored creatures out of former worms?

Recently a person emailed me to say he had read a Bible verse in his daily devotional that reinforced just what he was in the process of doing with his relationships:

"Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old sinful nature and all its wicked deeds. Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him" (Col 3:9-10).

3. Many atheistic scientists and pseudo-philosophers have been quite enamored with themselves during the short time their enfleshed skeletons walk around, and they make grand pronouncements about God, truth, and meaning. But far greater heed should be paid to Jesus Christ, the Son who was sent by the Father from heaven to teach us about God, truth, and the meaning of life. Don't let His voice from the New Testament or His Spirit whom He sends to indwell you, get lost in the shuffle. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me (Jn 14:6)."

It's amazing how well you can do in keeping your first love for Christ, and developing a humble spirit for learning the Word of God, by just placing the Trinity, the Bible, and the love of Christ for you at the center of your consciousness. 

And if you need a little more encouragement, I invite you to read the Compass Series books that my wife and I have provided for fellow Christians or those interested in the Christian faith. In fact, when you read our words, we feel a family feeling toward you, a bond that originates in the Trinity and is passed to us on earth. You are why we write, and we always pray that our concepts are just what you are hoping to find.

May I say, since it's that time of year, Merry Christmas to you, and may God the Father, Son, and Spirit draw very close to you in the coming year!