I wasn't always a believer in Jesus Christ. I had what most would consider a quintessential Christian upbringing. I was raised in a Bible-believing family. I went to church every Sunday, to Christian summer camps, youth groups, among other activities. Perhaps my story is similar to yours.

Now, in my adult life, I have made a clear distinction between living someone else's faith and living my own. I can't really say that the faith that I was practicing — or pretending to practice — was a belief in the truest sense of the word. It begs the question: what does it mean to believe?

Modern living has trivialized the word belief. Along the same lines, we've trivialized the word truth. We throw these words around as if truth is something that can change on a whim, and that beliefs are short-term commitments. Popular mantras in today's society include "live your truth" and "it's my truth." How cheap are these words now? Apparently the only unchanging truths are either that all that exists is what we can see, or that there is no truth at all — most ironic considering that the statement is itself an absolute claim.

Maybe you think that belief in the religious sense is holding that something is true without evidence for it. Maybe you think that religion is a coping strategy for the inevitable reality of death. As I went through my adolescence, and into my college years, I, too, thought that religious belief was for the naive. Science, I told myself, was where knowledge was established; I could truly know what I know. It wouldn't be until I reached my 30s that I would understand that religious belief is the truest truth. I'm not talking about truths that are established by tautologies or circular reasoning. I'm talking about the reality that the most ultimate or primitive questions are not answered by microscopes, or telescopes, beakers, or balancing chemical equations. It's the question of origins that science cannot answer, and most definitely not in the sense that the scientific method could evaluate and answer for.

Surely, you, disbelieving reader, having read that last statement, must think that I am in some kind of delusion. Or, maybe you are a fellow believer and you are feeling reassured that you are not alone in your beliefs. I doubt that I will change the unbelieving mind in one blog entry, but I hope as you continue reading on — and it is my hope that you will — that you, too, will discover that religious belief is not just for the naive, but is, in fact, the most rational of beliefs there is.

I leave you with my confession of faith, and hope that you will continue reading through future blog entries to discover more about the rational, defensible, and coherent basis for belief in Jesus Christ.

I declare my faith in my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I believe that Jesus was not merely a man, nor merely a rabbi. I believe that Jesus is God incarnate – divinity in the flesh. I believe that Jesus came to die on the cross as the final sacrifice for our sins and that He rose again on the third day, completing the final atonement for our sins. I believe that Jesus is alive today and that He reigns on the throne as Lord over all. I believe, as John wrote in the Gospels, that Christ is the Word of God, the Logos. I believe that nothing came into existence except through Him. Finally, I believe that not a single person will stand blameless before the Father except through the proclamation of faith in Christ as their Lord and Savior.