Why are you Christians?

Answer 1

Person A says: I'm a Christian because I was lovingly pursued by God through His Holy Spirit who spoke to my heart/spirit. I realized I was a sinner and needed a Saviour. I believed what the Bible said, that Jesus Christ was the Saviour I needed, who had paid the penalty for my sin by dying on the Cross. He then was resurrected, breaking the power of sin and death. I gave my life to God, and am now seeking to live as Christ did. I have never regretted this life-changing decision which I made 44 years ago. I have great joy, strength and peace because of my relationship with God. The good changes I have seen in myself and others because of the transforming work of God have confirmed my beliefs many, many times. God has revealed Himself to be a faithful, true, just, good and loving Father despite all of the hardships of this earthly life. I highly recommend Christianity as revealed in Jesus Christ to everyone! Person B says: I'm going to try and give the totally clinical, objective response here. The reasons why some individuals hold to the Christian faith are the same as for any person that holds any kind of belief. There are one's upbringing, personal experiences, and developed personality.

Your parents, or whoever might have raised you, had a tremendous impact on your current beliefs. Not so simple as "my parents are Christians and they taught me to be", but they were a symbol to you of what that religion stood for. If you had bad parents that professed to Christianity and justified their actions through that, you might discount the faith because you have that experience of Christianity failing to provide goodness into your life. Or you may have good Christian parents who brought you up in the faith, and you feel content in that. There are an infinite number of variables and scenarios regarding your upbringing, but it's undeniable that your impressionable early childhood can sway your adult thought patterns and values in such a way as to make a religion a safe haven of faith and spiritual comfort, or a fool's delusion.

Your personal experiences can effect it as well. If one who perhaps never truly considered religion found occasion to pray, perhaps for the safety or health of a loved one, and those prayers were answered in a common or less so manner, that may influence once to believe in a faith. Alternatively, unanswered prayers might have the opposite effect. Once again, these are the simplest of situations, and an actual life has so many variables and different scenarios as to make it impossible to list them, but it may be seen that personal experiences can lead one to or away from a faith.

Lastly, consider the mind you mold during your life. Some psyches are certainly more welcoming to faith than others. Life may have brought you up to value pride in oneself, to believe in the power your own hands wield and the works you can create. If so, the humility and acknowledgment of inferiority to an Almighty in Christianity may not sit well with you. Or you may well indeed be accepting of the idea of a super being, one who accepts your flaws and grants unconditional love, one with whom you can rest your problems and worries, and find peace.

There are variables uncountable as to why somebody might eventually find faith in Christianity to be an integral part of their life, and just as in any religion or lack thereof, it's more up to the individual to evaluate other individuals based on what they know rather than what they might deduct based on something so amorphous as faith.