I was born to Christian parents and I was raised by memorizing Bible verses and being taken to church three times a week. If anyone should have been a Christian by default, it was me. I was homeschooled through a Christian curriculum, and we had meetings with other Christian families quite often.

I was also a people-pleaser, and I knew that my parents wanted me to be a Christian, like them, more than anything, so I did what I could to make them happy and I said the “prayer of salvation” when I was five years old. I thought that was enough. Even as I grew up and matured, I continually ignored any misgivings I might have had about the state of my soul. I dismissed them as an “attack from Satan,” as my pastor would have called it. Eventually, however, these doubts became strong enough that I realized I could no longer ignore them. Then I realized I didn’t care. 

I am a Christian because at the age of six I embraced the Gospel, accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior through faith. At that age the Holy Spirit gave me the understanding of the burden of sin I carried after hearing the story of Pilgrim’s Progress and Christian’s journey to the foot of the cross, where upon reaching it, his own enormous backpack came loose and rolled away. I also understood from what my parents, who were recently saved themselves, taught me about God and sin and grace and heaven and hell. I was afraid of hell and comprehended Jesus as the way to heaven. That’s why I became a Christian, but it isn’t why I am a Christian now.

By that last statement I don’t mean to imply that a Christian can lose their salvation. I believe the Bible makes it clear that we are eternally secure once we give our lives to Christ (John 10:27-28; Rom. 8:38-39). But I do see that a believer can be ineffective by walking away from the reality of the Gospel in his life and ceasing to live as a Christian, as many have. I grew up in Sunday school and going to Bible camps, but lived out a pretty mediocre Christianity by the time I reached high school, and it didn’t improve much during a year at Emmaus Bible College. Although I met my future wife there, who influenced me greatly that what I learned at Emmaus was worth living out fully. She seemed to be doing just that. Tons of research suggests that Christians walk away from church and the faith because what they put faith in rather blindly as a youth doesn’t intellectually square when they’re older. I think this was a danger for me too.

One mistake many people make is to think that our intuitions are largely unreliable or intellectually irrelevant as a deliverance of reason.  I am not one of those persons. To be clear, we generally trust our minds to inform us of a physical universe. Am I supposed to become skeptical just because my mind perceives truths concerning God, sin, and guilt? I think not!

Now, if one reflects on their moral condition with the corollary that God exists, we’ll see that we’re morally guilty before a Holy and righteous God. We’ll also notice that Christianity, as a justifiable set of beliefs, looks really good. The beauty and plausibility of Christianity is not merely it’s positive arguments —though I think there are many— it’s that Christianity, well at least, mere-Christianity, basically agrees with our intuitions about what God would be like in case He existed. That God would be holy, righteous, and just explains recognition of moral failure. That God would be love, explains our sense that He desires to restore us, forgive us, and rescue us from ourselves. When the Judeo/Christian account indicates that God has “lowered the bar” so that everyone can enter into a love relationship with Him, I’m buying it. When our descriptions of God match scriptures declaration that God saves because He is gracious, my intuitions are satisfied. For me the veridicality of my intuitions are satisfied with the gospel of Christ. Coincidence? Perhaps, but the peace I have from a commitment to Christ far surpasses anything I’ve ever known.

The Christian experience in the Philippines is a typical mixup of misconceptions involving the idea of an all-seeing Divine Entity whose eye is always watching what you’re doing, and ready to zap you with a punishment for a wrong that you commit.  Add to that, a litany of what you should do, and what you cannot do, and continual visits to the parish church for confession, and a lot of practices like not bathing at 3pm on Good Friday and a great many other imaginative theories that make up the uniquely Spanish influenced animist Philippine religious experience.

No wonder we’re confused as a people.

I grew up in a household that was very much influenced by the Hispanic flavored Roman Catholic experience.  Because of our middle class background, we were sent to Catholic schools, and we had Jesuit priests to provide our spiritual guidance.

It wasn’t very helpful.  Specially because they didn’t provide very good answers to probing questions that I had about the God we were supposed to worship and the confusing literature that we had to use for our religious education.

Sometime in the early 1980′s a dear friend in a radio station where we worked together started attending bible studies with another friend and it was there that I discovered the Bible and what it taught about salvation.  It was crystal clear and quite logical, even if it was the King James version.