REBORN BY A PRIVATE CHOICE
By itself, being raised going to church doesn’t make any person a Christian.
A Christian isn’t defined by church attendance. A Christ-follower is any person whose heart has been reborn by choosing Jesus as Lord, through faith; a private choice they make in their heart, which becomes the choice they consequently make publicly by being baptized, and furthermore when they’re questioned about their beliefs by being given the opportunity to preach the Gospel.
Relationship with God through faith in Jesus is what causes our lives to change from the inside out. It’s easy to put on a show (a facade—a fake smile, etc.) by attending any number of church services, but it’s not easy to be bold about faith when no one else is watching if our faith is not authentically founded in Scripture and an intimate relationship with God.
A LIFESTYLE COMMITTED TO THE DIVINE
Our beliefs about God and Jesus are what characterize the connection in our hearts between what we do with the lives we’ve been given, and why we do it the way we do. Again, Christianity is not about what church we were raised in, it’s about what we do as a result of how we were raised there; it’s a lifestyle committed to a real relationship with the divine, driven by a contrite, humble, grateful heart posture.
Did we grasp and learn something spiritually significant from the church we were raised in, or was it purely ritualistic and (even if unintentionally) tainted by religiosity?
This has to be understood or people will simply attend church the rest of their lives thinking the churchgoing itself is a marker of being a better, more scrupulous person, when the real markers of being a Christ-follower has literally nothing to do with a person’s body being in a particular building at a certain time on a certain day.
THE CONNECTOR BETWEEN US AND GOD
Generally speaking, being raised in the church tends to mean a person was exposed to Scriptural teaching. But it doesn’t always indicate that a person learned from the inside out that the connector of the relationship between us and God is based upon whether or not we place our faith in Jesus as Lord.
Put a little differently, have we accepted what Jesus did for us on the cross, or is our idea of God based on the imagination? Christianity isn’t grounded upon the idea that we are all granted eternity with God no matter how we live or what we believe. It doesn’t matter how loving we are, we’re still sinners. What matters, and what grounds Christianity in humility, is the understanding that we can’t come to God in eternity without faith in Jesus as our atonement—and that belief is the seed to a reborn heart. This is why the spirit of Christianity cannot be faked.
COMING TO GOD THROUGH JESUS
To be crystal clear, any person can come to God as we are now, as sinners, through prayer, in Jesus’ name, yes! But this isn’t eternity. This life is where we make the choice about where we want to be when we reach eternity as a consequence of who (or what) we place our faith in, and the way our faith shapes how we live.
MISUNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITY OF THE BIBLE
Pushing deeper still, saying we were raised in the church doesn’t explicitly elaborate on what the teaching of a particular church means for us now as adults who are no longer naive and innocent like children.
Exposure to Scripture may ensure that we memorize particular verses, but it doesn’t promise we’ll understand their context, or the importance of the meaning behind the entire biblical narrative in all of its depth—nor does it ascertain that we’ll explicate the critical nature of taking the Word of God as His way of revealing Himself to us in the written form in order to help us see what our physical, human eyes cannot on their own.
Again, exposure to Scripture (being raised in the church)—by itself—doesn’t automatically declare someone a follower of Christ. It merely adds to a person’s quantifiable knowledge of Bible verses.
What about the higher qualifying factor of the heart?
PENETRATION OF THE HEART
Let’s make sure we’re on the same page. Being raised somewhere doesn’t really describe much more than the physical atmosphere we were in while very young. To put it more frankly, there are plenty of atheists and agnostics today who were “raised in the church.” Church attendance didn’t ultimately penetrate the heart for them—but why? There’s always the unfortunate possibility that the life-altering nature of our relationship to God, and the weight of Jesus’ selfless act of sacrificial love rectifying the reality of our sin against God, was not properly established or effectively discipled into their understanding of the fundamentals of Christianity.
Christianity was, for them, a term used to describe a religious lifestyle, but it wasn’t a word that pointed to a life reflecting the acceptance of redemption, salvation, freedom from sin, or eternal life.
Put another way, it didn’t mean what those individuals needed to understand it meant by simply being present in a church building with other people who may not have understood the complex intricacies of the biblical narrative themselves.
LEARNING TO TRUST GOD’S CHARACTER
Memorizing Scripture for the primary purpose of memorization is not commensurate with intentionally learning Scripture for the reason of desiring to understand the character of God Himself in our heart.
Like I’ve written before, it’s all about the heart with God. Memorization isn’t to impress God. Knowing Scripture more intimately than we know what’s on social media, say, is not for the purpose of pride or argumentation, but for the purpose of guarding ourselves against the principalities of darkness when we face spiritual warfare in life (Ephesians 6:12). It’s “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17 KJV)
Additionally, it’s to know the history of God’s character so we can learn to trust Him to follow through in the way He promises to in both the Old and New Testaments.
STOIC MEMORIZATION WON’T SAVE US
When a person says they’re Christian and that they were raised in the church, my first thought is often, “what exactly did they teach you about God and Jesus, and what was their approach in teaching those very ideas to you?”
It doesn’t matter what church we went to when we were young. What matters more is to recognize that when we’re young, we’re naive, spiritually deaf and blind, and too immature to comprehend the Bible without a patient, Holy Spirit-led mentor guiding us through genuine spiritual growth, rather than stoic Bible memorization.
Memorization isn’t what saves our souls; faith in Jesus of the very Scriptures we memorize is. Faith isn’t born in the brain with logic and reasoning, it’s born from the humble heart by the grace of God.
LET’S ALL BE ON THE SAME PAGE
What’s also important to note is that there’s a lot more to understand than just the words on the pages of the Bible. We need to know and understand God’s character, itself, not just the literary aspect of the words talking about it.
Let me be clear. My point is not to claim anyone being raised in the church is absolutely not a genuine Christian, or that being raised in the church doesn’t have any positive influence on a person’s faith walk. Not at all. There are some strong Christ-following people who were given adequate biblical teaching and discipleship at a young age, who were able to ask the deep questions to adult figures of authority who—under their own guidance of the Holy Spirit—understood the esoteric nature of the Bible and were able to break it down in such a way that made sense, even to a young mind and heart.
RELEVANT TEACHINGS FROM A RIGHTEOUS GOD
That’s what pastors and priests in today’s churches are meant to do! They are there to instruct, teach, and impart the knowledge of God to His children in such a way that makes sense and is applicable to our current lives. Not that the instruction should be easy, per se, but it should be relevant. God’s commands aren’t always easy, especially since we are told to resist the temptations of the flesh in order to be revering of His righteousness. But we could say in the very least that His commands make sense because they come from a God who is righteous, pure, loving, and omniscient.
It’s because so many of us are “raised” in churches that don’t teach how much more important it is to desire God and to desire being obedient to Him, and why (the very active lifestyle of revering God with our every-day decisions), while also teaching how pointless it is to merely commit Scripture to memory if their only applications will be for self-deprecation when we find ourselves messing up, or, passing judgment on others’ imperfections.
THE REAL QUESTIONS WE NEED TO BE ASKING
Think of it this way: How can we love in the way God commands of us if our only understanding of Scripture is how to pick up on sinful fallouts? How can we “love our neighbor as ourselves” if we’re too busy memorizing Scriptural quotations, but not pursuing God’s heart?
How can we know any of the most important Christian principles if no one’s been explaining them to us from the pulpit, or from discipleship experience?
ADEQUATE, HOLY SPIRIT-LED BIBLICAL INSTRUCTION
For many of us, being raised in the church just means we were taken to Sunday school where we tuned out, memorized enough verses to get out of the room, and made a couple of friends along the way. There was no development of faith in that time period, and the young people who missed the central purpose of learning Scripture will grow into adults who don’t understand that they didn’t understand.
Some even think Christianity is either boring or, to the other extreme, too harsh—because they weren’t provided adequate teaching from someone who understood how to explain what God’s Word really means in its context and applicability, and why.
THE HARDEST IDEAS TO EMBRACE
God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). He desires our heart, not our minds. He doesn’t need us to understand, He wants us to trust and obey. He doesn’t need us to memorize Scripture if we don’t really care about Him and His Kingdom. We’re not going to be able to defend the act of being loving in the face of evil if we don’t agree to accept that the reason we’re loving that way is because God commands us to.
APPLIED BY PERSONAL FAITH
A hard thought for those who question the idea of God despite being raised in the church, is: what is the importance of the attendance of a particular church, really, if the teachings and the community aren’t actually establishing and developing personal intimacy with God through Jesus? The reason we go to church, when it’s not a humble decision to praise God for His amazing involvement in our life, is because others tell us what they believe it (attendance) means, and we subscribe to their definition of their own belief. But that means nothing for our heart if it’s not applied by personal faith.
FINDING CHRIST WITH OUR HEART
No one needs to know if you were raised in a church unless that church helped you to live a life where the fruit of your faith causes others to ask what makes you so different from other people. That is the perfect invitation to evangelize. Otherwise, saying we were raised in a church could very well simply spell out that we were raised with traditions and rituals, but that none of it really penetrated our hearts, it just filled up our schedule.
It doesn’t matter if we were raised going to church or only raised in a house without Bibles. There are Christ-followers today who came from abusive households. We don’t always find Christ in the church; sometimes we go to church because we found Christ somewhere we didn’t expect, and our faith brought us to the church. The order doesn’t matter. What does matter?
You guessed it. The heart.
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