The prayer isn’t magic; it’s not a spiritual secret formula. It’s a way of focusing on the important things about God and His desire to have a relationship with us.

“ Jesus, I believe in you and I receive you. Thank you for dying on the cross to pay for all my sins. As much as I know how, I ask you to come into my life and help me learn to know you, trust you, and love you.”

It’s a simple beginning. Notice it’s all about receiving. Lots of our promises to “turn over a new leaf” or “start living a new life” are relying on our will and determination to accomplish these things and are doomed to either fail or turn us into self-righteous judgers of others. This is about receiving His forgiveness for our past and the power to live out our future. It all comes from Him. That’s why it’s humbling and why we are all spiritually underprivileged when we come to God.

This, by the way, is what being “born again” is all about. This term is widely misunderstood today. Everyone is born once. We are born a second time by being born of God. This isn’t about starting over; it’s about learning a whole new way of living, depending on God for everything. It means having God born in us through His Spirit so we can begin to understand His purposes and find the power to do what He asks.

At some point, you have to take a leap of faith. It’s not necessarily a blind leap. You know something about the One who is asking you to trust Him, and you have a sense of confirmation in your heart that this is right, but it is a leap nonetheless.

Everyone believes in something or someone. We know we are not God. People who think they are God usually get placed in a mental hospital. Most of us believe in ourselves to a certain level (we’ve been taught to), but you have to ask the question at some point, how far can you trust yourself? To trust your emotions, your feelings, your intuition, is one thing. But can you place your future in your own hands? Can you believe that you will ultimately be able to answer all your own questions about your existence and why you are here and where you are going when you die? Can you control what will happen with your own future?

If you are even an occasional moviegoer, chances are you’ve seen a scene where someone is hanging onto the side of a cliff, a building, a helicopter—what have you—and a saving hand is being offered to that person. Without even working at it, I can think of three movies that have this type adventure climax. That’s because it represents challenges that all people face. We are all holding onto something as we dangle over the deep pit of the unknown, and at some time or other, a hand is being offered to us. At that point a number of questions come into play. Is whatever you are holding onto now strong enough to support you? Do you have the strength to keep holding on? For how long? If you are losing your grip and a hand is being offered, whose is it? Is it someone you can trust? Is it from someone who is strong enough to lift you to safety? And finally the big question… Can you let go? That is the act of faith. To grab onto God, you have to let go of whatever else you were holding onto at the time. We’ve all been holding onto stuff other than God for a long time. We’ve gotten pretty used to this even if it is abusive, unhealthy or dangerous.

At this point we often raise the question of whether we have enough information about this hand that’s being offered. That is important, but only to a point.

Faith is like a lot of things in life. You don’t have it until you use it. You can wait for all the information but you will probably never have it. You don’t need all your questions answered; you need just enough to let go and believe. I’ve been a believer for most of my life, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have questions. I have tons of questions, for that matter, but they have nothing to do with my faith. Faith is pretty much a done deal as soon as you let go and grab onto God. Because when you do, you get it. It’s like something’s really there. Paul goes as far to say that faith is the substance of things hoped for (Hebrews 11:1). Faith, I think, is one of God’s most incredible gifts. To those who don’t believe, it looks flimsy and even foolish. But to those who do, it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18). But when you use it, put yourself into it, let go and grab on, it suddenly becomes as solid as the ground below you and as vast as the sky above.

What do you have to lose? Some are avoiding putting their faith in Christ because of the bad reputation of other Christians. I must say that for myself, when I committed my life to Christ I made it clear I didn’t want to become like some Christians I knew who I saw as hypocrites. So I made a deal with God. I told Him I would believe and follow Him as long as my life and experience with Him would be real. I didn’t want to have to be a phony. I must say: God has delivered on His side of the bargain. I’ve never had to fake it, or be something I wasn’t in order to be a Christian. If I ever did, it was because I was misled into following some Christian ideal and not Christ.

So if you need to bargain with God, it’s okay. Go ahead. People in the Bible have done it for years, and God has come to their level. This is a part of His love and respect for His own creation. We aren’t robots, and He has plenty of angels to do His bidding. What He wants with us is a relationship, and I have a feeling He gets a special pleasure out of the more feisty ones. If we are fighting with Him it means we are alive and we mean it. God wants our participation even if that means questions and struggles.

One of the purposes of the purpose-driven life is to realize we were made for each other as well as made for God. One of the most important things about your faith journey is the fact that you are never alone in believing. You are joining a pretty elite group of underprivileged misfits who have found hope in Christ. Legions have gone before you. The Bible calls them “a cloud of many witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). If you want to read an inspiring account of a number of biblical examples of these people, read Hebrews 11. And then you add to that those who have believed from the first century on, and you get a picture of how large your family is. Telling someone about your decision to follow Christ cements that decision, but it also helps you find out about your new family in Christ.

We need to tell people because it’s important to identify with Christ. Jesus said that if we identify Him to our peers, He would identify us to His Father in heaven. This identification with Christ is actually the beginning of another of our purposes, to bring glory to God by telling others about our faith in Him and what it has done for us.

Truth of the matter is: once you’ve been set free from sin and guilt and put into relationship with God through Christ, you won’t be able to keep quiet about it. This isn’t bragging, or moralizing, or selling, or even preaching, it’s merely telling your story to whoever is interested in hearing it.

Jesus once healed a man who had been blind from birth. There was a lot of discussion among the people about this, especially the religious leaders who were threatened by His popularity with the people. These leaders found the man and questioned him extensively about what had happened and about Jesus. He knew little about Jesus except that He had healed him. At one point, exasperated with their non-stop questioning, he proclaimed: “Look, I don’t know the answers to all your questions, I only know that once I was blind and now I can see.” That about summed it up for him, and in many ways, that is the simple truth about our message as well. We don’t have all the answers, we aren’t experts on God, we may not even know God very well, but we know what happened to us. We were once lost in our sin and rebellion and separated from God, but now we’ve been found and forgiven, and we can walk and talk now with the God of the universe. That’s a pretty big deal.

John 3:1-17 About being born again.

Hebrews 11:1-40 An incredible account of what has been done by faith.

John 9:1-25 The story of the blind man.