About | My Core Beliefs

If you are investing time to read these blogs, it is only fair to provide you with my own personal core beliefs. Like most, during my teen years, I started questioning my faith. Finding answers to my questions were solely depended on head knowledge and what I had learned and experienced to that point. In reality, head knowledge only gave me more reasons not to believe and an ever increasing sense of being alone. There came a point where I could not take it any more and I simply rebelled against all religion—but for some strange reason, never against God. I somehow knew always that there must be a God in all of this, everything around me shouted out He was there waiting.

I grew so desperate that I even turned to the Christian Bible. Turns out it had a lot to say and there I discovered that faith is not something your can ague for or against, but simply accept regardless of what your head is telling you [Heb 11:1]. Only when I read the Bible as a book of truth and learn to read it with all my heart, while also leaning into God’s loving arms that I began to find not only my life but my soul as well. Shockingly, it had nothing to do with religion.

Over the years I have developed a list of sorts that I call my core beliefs. Early on they seemed to change almost daily but belief has now reached the point where I can write them down and stand behind them. These beliefs shape not only who I am but hopefully what motivates me to write the words in this blog. I need to stress having written them down, my journey is not complete. Rather they have become my daily starting point. They serve as non-negotiable truths for living each day. A plumb-line by which I measure what I read or hear against what I firmly believe—helping me walk straight in a world that tosses me nothing but curves. Hopefully they will serve as the plumb line against each of these postings as well.

1. The world and everything within it were created by an all-powerful God. How else would you explain all of what you see around you and how well it fits together? A “Big Bang”… really? To me that is equivalent of a tornado traveling through a junk yard, blowing up everything in its path, and as the parts swirl in the air a fully functional 747 airplane is created in the tornado’s wake.
2. God has no justification for lying. People lie for all kinds of reasons, but an all powerful God has no reason to protect or manipulate His creation, worse case He would wipe us out and start all over. How could a God who lies ever expect us to love and believe in Him?
3. For an unknown reason, God is relational. Our core DNA seems to have a shared need for relationship. What other explanation is there for why solitary confinement is considered one of the most severe forms of punishment?
4. God gave us the choice to either love him or not. God could have made us with the option to choose, but it would have left out the very thing He wants, a relationship. How can you establish a two-sided relationship with a being programmed to love?
5. The Bible is a message of love to His creation. The Bible is the only way to fully understand why the world and each of us were created, but only through a relationship with God can you truly understand it. Would you prefer to read a marvelous book about your true love or be able to cuddle in their arms?
6. By virtue of having free will humankind is intrinsically sinful and lost. For this reason too, we no longer have an active relationship with a holy and sinless God. Before you disagree, be honest and ask yourself how many wrong choices have been made in the past twenty-four hours?
7. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to earth as a man to pay the ultimate price for our sinful nature, once and for all time. Grace and forgiveness come not from a confession, a church or our own personal effort, but from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is impossible for anyone or anything else to return you to a personal relationship with God, which is the very reason you were created. Do you know Jesus?