Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Foreword by Ravi Zacharias

Introduction

1. What about other people’s genuine experience of God?
2. Your ‘experience of God’ is delusional, not real
3. Your relationship with God is just a psychological crutch
4. How can you say you have found the truth if you haven’t tried all the alternatives?
5. If Christianity is about a relationship with God, why does he let bad things happen to his friends?
6. If Christianity is about a transforming relationship with God, why are Christians so bad?
7. If God is so loving and relational, why did he go ahead and create when he knew people would end up in hell?
8. Belief in God is dangerous
9. I used to believe, but I’ve given it all up
10. How can I know?

INTRODUCTION

It was strange walking down a hospital corridor with a growing sense of foreboding, getting closer to the consultant’s office and wondering what he would say. I was fifteen years old and was having the afternoon off school to receive the results from the operation I had undergone the week before. A mole on my leg had begun to turn dark, and my doctor had decided to remove it as a precaution. My mother and I entered the office together and sat down. The consultant leaned over the desk and said, ‘I’m afraid it’s cancer.’

Those words still echo in my head now as I write them; the shock, the fear, the bewildering emotions rushed through my body from head to toe. He went on to explain that it was, in fact, a borderline case of melanoma and that they would need to do a further operation to make absolutely sure that I was in the clear. But those stark words ‘it’s cancer’ stayed with me. What was life all about? What was it for? Was there a purpose for my life? Was my life over?

Well, as you have probably guessed, I survived. My life was not yet over; it was to last longer than my fifteen years. Through the experience of the cancer, I encountered a God who is near us in suffering, a God who makes his presence known. I remember lying in my bed, shaking with fear and calling out to God, who then tangibly filled my bedroom and lifted the fear and blackness from my chest. As Psalm 30:1–3 says,

I will exalt you, O LORD, for you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me.
O LORD my God, I called to you for help and you healed me.
O LORD, you brought me up from the grave; you spared me from going down into the pit.

As life has gone on, friends have died suddenly, members of my community in London have been on the receiving end of horrific violence, and the questions of the human heart have kept on coming year after year as I have travelled and met people of different ages, backgrounds and nationalities.

I have found that many people have questions about Christian experience. These questions can be genuine objections to Christianity or things that trouble Christians in the back of their minds. During my journey of talking to the many people who have asked me all the questions in this book, I’ve discovered that finding answers is a real challenge, because the questions do not just touch on intellectual ideas but are undergirded by emotional realities and the pain of life. The issues examined in this book have all emerged during conversations in the course of the last couple of years.

Is God real? Is it possible to know anything – let alone to know him? Why do bad things happen to people who worship this God? What about the spiritual experiences of other faiths? All these questions and more have come out of real-life situations, so whether you are an atheist or someone who wonders if there just might be something more to Christianity than you first thought, I hope that, as you read this book, at least some of the thinking offered here will help you to see what the Christian faith has to say amid all the pain, confusion and complexity of life.