By Samuel M. Shoemaker
HOW TO BECOMI
TTow does a person get started on a genuine Chris- ^ -Mian experience? We have seen enough of people for whom religion is just tradition or just ceremony. We have been too long like that ourselves. How can we move out of that into spiritual reality? If we can get the question of “how” answered for people, we shall have them halfway in it already. The first thing is to come in touch with religion where it is vital, where power is being generated and released. One of the reasons why religion has been a strong factor in Yale University is that for many years there has been a place called the Yale Hope Mission, where needy men get converted. Something happens. In some churches it seems as if no th in g ever happens. If it did, somebody would stand up and try to quiet it down. What chance has God got in a place like that? But go to an Alcoholics Anony mous meeting, or join my friend Ralston Young, Red Cap 42, in Grand Central Station, New York, when he is having one of his noon meetings in an empty car on Track 13, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fri days, and you will see religion at work, religion as power and joy and adventure. The second thing is to acknowledge your own need. You can’t just walk into the 15th story of a building: you have to remember you are on ground level and need to climb up. If you think you are pretty good as you are, then you will stay as you are. If you are dissatisfied with yourself—not with other people, nor with life and the world, but with your self—you run a chance of getting somewhere. In proportion to your sense of conscious need you will seek an adequate answer. Christ is adequate all right, but He never can do much for the self-satisfied. If you come by a good old red-hot conviction of sin, it will do you more good than all the little soft religious reading you will ever get out of some of the comfortable counsel that comes in promised booklets offered over the radio. We need a gospel that speaks to our condition. We are sinners, as men have always been—hot fiction sinners, not pro forma sinners, but real sinners, away from God, estranged from Him by our own disobe dience and rebellion. Ask yourself how much of your deep, inner, invisible private life is taken up with sex, with ego-satisfaction or the pursuit of sheer physical comfort. When have you helped anyone find Christ?
Let a man or woman honestly answer that, and then go on pretending he or she is not in any need of reformation or redemption! The desperation of our world is the reflection of our desperate inner need. The third thing is to make a definite Christian decision. There are two parts to Christian conversion; there is God’s part, and there is our part. You some times hear it said that “religion is what a man does with his solitude.” But that is not true if he is a Christian: for then religion is not what man does with his solitude, but what God does with man’s self estrangement. He has already made the great move in our direction. He came in Christ. Christ remains His standing invitation to the world. Christ was God’s first move toward us in our es trangement from Him. Whenever anybody finds God and becomes a real Christian most of the work is done from God’s side. No man can redeem him self. No man can make a cross of his own that saves him. The divine initiative comes first. “By grace are ye saved through faith.” That verse says it all. It is grace, not gumption or glands or goodness that saves us. But grace saves “through faith.” Grace is God’s part. Faith is man’s part. What is faith? Well, what is faith in a person? You have faith in a doctor, that when he puts you under an anaesthetic and cuts into your body he will do the wise and right thing. You have faith in a lawyer, that you can commit your case to him and he will handle it wisely and well. Faith is a belief in someone’s integrity and ca pacity. You can trust him. Faith in God is like that. It has intellectual factors in it, but it also has in it a preponderence of loyalty, of confidence, of active trust. Sometimes we think faith is given to some people and not to others, like an ear for music, or a striking personality. Faith is much more like falling in love, which can come to anybody. Faith does not so much de pend on my capacity to give it as on the other per- A bout the A uthor Samuel M. Shoemaker is an Episcopalian who has had a wide min istry as a missionary, pastor and writer. This article is included in "How to Become a C hristian cop yrigh t, 1953, by Harper & Brothers, N .Y., and used by permission.
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