Christian faith isn't a general religious awareness. Nor is it the ability to believe several unlikely propositions. It is certainly not a kind of gullibility which would put us out of touch with any genuine reality. It is the faith which hears the story of Jesus, including the announcement that he is the world's true Lord, and responds from the heart with a surge of grateful love that says: "Yes. Jesus is Lord. He died for my sins. God raised him from the dead. This is the center of everything." Whether you come to this faith in a blinding flash or by a long, slow, winding route, once you get to this point you are (whether you realize it or not) wearing the badge which marks you out as part of the church, on an equal footing with every other Christian who ever lived. You are discovering what it means to wake up and find yourself in God's new world.
How true it is, and yet how easy to forget, that as followers of Jesus, we are part of a massive God-centered movement that covers every Christian through all of history! Time and eternity, temporal and spiritual, interlocked with a beautiful perfection that only the Master Conductor could orchestrate. Powerful. Comforting. Peaceful.
