Why I Trust Christianity

I can't prove Christianity the way I can prove a property line. Nobody can prove or disprove God, and every worldview rests on trust. Science assumes nature is orderly and our reason is reliable, and no experiment can prove that, because every experiment depends on it. Naturalism, the view that nature is all there is, is a philosophy, not a lab result. I respect science for what it does well. Planes fly and medicine works. But whether God exists is not a lab question. So the honest question is not who has faith. It is whose faith is best founded.

Mine rests on three things.

History. Jesus was crucified under Pilate, and scholars across the spectrum agree. They also agree his followers sincerely believed they saw him alive. Paul preserves an early list of appearances, including one to more than five hundred people, and notes that most were still alive to be questioned (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Skeptics explain this with grief visions and legends that grew over time. Historians are divided, and I hold my view as a conclusion, not a proof. But grief and legend struggle to explain frightened men who hid after the cross and then preached publicly at real cost, or why a skeptical brother (James) and a persecutor of the church (Paul) changed sides. This is also where Christianity's claim to be the only true God stands or falls. Paul says that if Christ was not raised, the faith is empty (1 Corinthians 15:14).

A changed life. Before I trusted Christ, I had no peace and didn't care about life. Then I prayed for God to save me, confessed him as God, and asked for forgiveness. Something supernatural changed me. My moral compass changed, and the peace I never had finally came. My mother saw the change the moment I walked into the house. Someone who has known me all my life noticed it, so it was more than a mood I talked myself into. I still have struggles, but time after time, how I walk through them shows me God is at work in ways I can't explain. "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).

A community of witnesses. My friends and fellow church members each have their own story of coming to trust Jesus as the only true God. Different lives, different roads, same Savior.

The fair objection. People in other faiths also report changed lives, so stories alone can't tell religions apart. I agree. That is why I don't lean on experience alone. History points to Jesus in particular, and my experience fits what history points to. Suffering is the other hard question. Christianity doesn't explain it away. It says God entered it on the cross. I don't have every answer, but trust doesn't require every answer. It requires good reason to trust the one who does.

I don't trust Jesus because I never doubted. I trust him because he found me with no peace, and he has never left.