My parents were Christian, and I was raised in a Christian household. When I was young I was okay with believing what everybody I loved, and trusted told me, so accepting the God of my parents worked for me, even though I had never experienced God for myself. As I got older, my natural skepticism began to work against what I was taught to believe, so I decided to find God for myself. I did this by praying to God that he would save me, and reading the bible (with the goal of eventually reading it from cover to cover) every night before going to bed. Religious wise, this was the worse thing a skeptic like myself could have possibly done, had I never attempted to get saved, I probably would have been content with empty belief like so many other Christians have.
This shows that God has no grandchildren. So, your parents's faith could not be transferred to you. All they could have done was to teach you the ways of God and how to have a right attitude to Christ. But this would remain intellectual knowledge until the Holy Spirit did the work of conversion in you.
You cannot come to Christ by yourself. This is why all your efforts have been in vain. You were trying to come to God on your own terms and in your own way. What you missed is that the first step in coming to Christ is that you need to know and acknowledge that you are a totally depraved and hopeless sinner, deserving of hell. You do not deserve to have God save you, and there is nothing you can do of yourself to change God's mind about you. All you have gained through your parents' teaching is that you are a hopeless sinner with a Christian education.
After about 4 years of this with no communication from God, no signs of being saved, and constantly trying to justify atrocities and wrong doings because they were in the Bible, I was confused, exhausted, and frustrated by my failed attempts; so I gave up.
No surprises there!
I remember praying my last prayer to God telling him I will not be praying anymore but whenever he is ready for me, here I am. I didn’t stop immediately, I kept going to Church for a while, still professed to be Christian for a while because when you’ve invested your entire life in something, you don’t stop on the dime; especially considering many of my closest friends were Christian, and there were friends of mine that say they got saved because I invited them to my church. I guess I kinda felt like I was betraying them by walking away from what I introduced them to, but eventually I quit going to church as well. Leaving Christianity was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
You may have left "churchianity" but not Christianity, because you were never truly Christian in the first place. All you had was the Christian religion, giving lip service but knowing that there was nothing more inside of you. I think that you were less of an hypocrite for leaving it than remaining in it playing a role that was not really in your heart of hearts.
I’ve never really liked the term “atheist”, initially I considered myself agnostic, but after learning what an agnostic actually was I began to consider myself skeptic even though there is no difference between my skepticism and atheism definition wise. On my signature, I have atheist because skeptic was not an option.
I don't believe that you are a true atheist, and that you do believe in God, although on an intellectual basis. But true conversion to Christ is much more than this. It is a total transformation involving a new heart and spirit, and it is something that only God Himself, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, can do in you. It is not automatic. It has to be earnestly sought for with all your heart. It is not going to a church, walking the walk and talking the talk and pretending that you are a Christian. It is a total change of heart and spirit. The problem for you is that there is nothing you can do to achieve it. It is by the unmerited grace and mercy of God and His decision alone which will make the difference between whether He decides to transform you or leave you to face the judgment without Christ.
There are people who may tell you that all you have to do is to choose Christ and you will be automatically saved. I am not one of them. You have tried choosing Christ at a certain level, but you have known that something was missing and that just having religion and going to a church did not satisfy that feeling deep down in your heart that you were play acting and were not experiencing the real thing.
I spent two years in a Pentecostal church like that, and I told God that there was something missing. I knew all the religious stuff, but I did not know God on a personal level, and I didn't know how to get there. But I was determined to find out, and when I got to the point of absolute desperation I told God that I had to know Him personally or that I was going to give the whole thing away and live my life without religion at all.
As far as my world view, I don’t know if I have one; I doubt skeptic could be considered a world view. There are so many issues going on today, I have opinions on most of them but my opinions are based on what makes sense to me.
Having a right world view is dependent on knowing God on a personal level. You have to "meet" Him. I can't tell you how to do that because it is something that God has to do.
All I know is that I got out into the middle of a golf course one light, looked up at the stars and told God that I know He is within earshot of my voice wherever He is and I have come out to introduce myself to Him and would not be satisfied until I met Him personally. The next thing I knew was that I was all lit up inside like Times Square, and I just knew beyond doubt that God was real and He was right there with me. I would not have been surprised if Jesus had walked out from behind one of the trees and said, "Hi!" That was 51 years ago, and through all the ups and downs of my life since then, that reality has never left me.
When I got back among my Christian friends, they said that they knew something had changed in me. The Bible became a new book to me, and I started to see things in it that I have never seen before. Also, I started to hear God's voice in my thoughts, and it was a definite, characteristic voice among my own thoughts that I had never heard before. It was not an audible voice or a voice in my head. It was like my own thoughts but different in some way that I was able to recognise. This is in line with the Scripture, "My sheep hear my voice; they know Me and follow Me. They will not recognise the voice of a stranger and will not follow him."
I can't tell you how to meet God personally. You can't walk my journey. You have to seek Him for yourself. The Scripture says, "If you seek for Me with all your heart, you will find Me." God waited until I turned away from trying to seek Him through religion, and went with all my heart to Him directly. He told me that He was waiting all this time for me to do that, and that He responded when He saw that I was coming to Him with all my heart.
I went and read the biographies of all the men and women of God who were successful in their ministries and who won many for Christ. The common thread I saw was that that when they first came to Christ, they got alone with Him and sought him with all their hearts and would not give up until they met Him personally. Read John Bunyan's "Grace Abounding To the Chief of Sinners" to get an appreciation of the long journey he made until he received total assurance of the presence of God with him on a personal basis. One man went into his bedroom and would not come out until He had met God on a personal level. That was the level of his determination, and he was not disappointed. After several hours, he was totally transformed by the Holy Spirit and knew that God was totally real and came and fellowshiped with him on a personal level.
