Interview on April 10, 2024, with Ryan, who is studying education, by the bell tower at University of California Riverside.
Watch portion of interview here.
Do you consider yourself religious?
Ryan: I don’t really consider our relationship with God as a religion. I feel like religion is ordinances that you try to follow, it’s not really a living relationship with God. So I wouldn’t say I’m religious in that regard. I believe that, as Christians, we have received God’s life into us. We have received the Person of God into us. So actually we can have fellowship with God in a moment by moment, anywhere we are. We don’t have to go to a particular setting or go to these rituals in order to contact God, but actually God is very accessible to us who have received Him. So a big part of what the relationship looks like between God and I is that I feel like I’m able to have a very personal and just very normal fellowship with Him.
Why are you a Christian?
Ryan: It’s not really like I sought out the Lord, I would say it’s the Lord Who sought me out. There’s a verse in the Bible, I think Jesus said, “you did not choose Me, it’s I who chose you.” And actually for a long time I was really rejecting of the Lord. But every human being responds to love and the love of the Lord eventually reached me and caused me to become open to Him. So I would say I’m a Christian because of the love of the Lord. I became a Christian when I was a freshman in high school. I wasn’t raised in a Christian family at all.
How did you recognize God calling you to be Christian?
Ryan: There’s a power in the word of God and eventually someone preached the gospel to me. But it was also because – it was a brother from the church – there was an expression of God in that person’s living because that brother had been living in fellowship with God. So eventually, when they preached the gospel to me, it wasn’t just a doctrine, but there was something living there. There was a testimony of God in that person’s living. And I think that eventually opened my heart to the gospel. But throughout my life, the Lord has been softening my heart through different situations that I was going through. It was definitely the Lord’s sovereignty, His arrangement, but also it was a testimony through a member of His church that God became real to me and that caused me to be open to Him.
Who is Jesus?
Ryan: Jesus was God, becoming a Man, to reach us in His humanity and to draw us in His love.
How should someone develop a relationship with Jesus?
Ryan: That’s a good question. We should always come back to the Bible to see how we can have a personal relationship with the Lord. You need to first receive the Lord by believing into Him, by believing that He’s the Son of God Who came, that He has died for our sins, and that He has resurrected and has become the Spirit to enter into us. It’s important to see that. But if we believe this, a very practical way to cultivate a personal relationship with the Lord is to call on the name of the Lord. There’s a verse that says the Lord is rich to all who call on His name. It actually makes sense because when you call on someone’s name, like when you call someone, that person comes over. So one way for a person to develop a personal relationship with the Lord is even just calling, “oh Lord Jesus,” as they go through their day. That’s actually a form of prayer. Prayer doesn’t have to be something very formal. Sometimes you don’t really have something that you want to say to a person, but you just want to contact them. I think God is very happy even if we just contact Him, even if we don’t have much to say, as we go through our day. We can just call His name, “oh Lord Jesus.” In my personal experience, that always makes the Lord rich to me.
Do you believe in heaven and hell?
Ryan: Personally, I don’t believe that believers would go to heaven as a reward because I don’t believe that is what is revealed in the Bible. At the end of the Bible, it talks about the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven as a bride adorned for Christ. So I believe our destiny as believers is not necessarily that we would just go to heaven, but it’s actually that we as a church will be built together to become the bride of Christ. But that’s not really an item of the common faith that should divide genuine believers from having fellowship with one another. I believe there’s a lake of fire that is the eternal perdition reserved for the devil and for the people who do not receive the Lord. So I do believe that, but I don’t necessarily believe that our destiny as Christians is to just go to heaven.
It would be interesting to ask college students about their politics and whether they believe Democrats or Republicans are better models of Christian faith.
I enjoyed reading this interview.
Looks like Ryan has been studying his Christian (Protestant?) Bible and faith a lot. Great. What church does he attend? It is important to “keep the Sabbath holy” (3rd Commandment) and to worship God regularly, and attend your church every Sunday. After church, you can enjoy being close to God at any time, in any place. But church attendance is highly important, and very necessary, to grow in your faith. Maybe Ryan would like to attend a Catholic Mass, ask questions, and find out more about our Church?
This was a good article. It was different from what most college kids have been saying. It is hard to be a Christian or a member of any other faith for that matter, because it takes, drum roll, faith.
Almost all that makes us Catholic is based on faith, not fact. We believe that bread and wine are transformed during the mass. We believe that if you visit certain shrines you will get an indulgence that keeps you out of purgatory and sends you straight to heaven. We believe Mary ascended to heaven. We believe lots of things. We take it on faith.
Young people who study science, read history, work in labs, etc. find it hard to believe or just take something on faith and call it fact.
The challenge of course is to teach the faith and make it meaningful to those trained only to believe what can be proved.
We can’t prove that Christ rose to heaven. We believe he did, based on faith.
It is very hard to inculcate faith in those who are more and more educated. When I attended parochial school, etc. we were taught only what coincided with our faith. By the time we got to college, we believed everything the nuns taught, and then it began to slip away a bit for most students. That explains, I think, why there is so much emphasis on the social teachings of the Church. It is an effort to make the teachings relevant to folks. If you don’t believe it is hard to have faith.