This page shows how anyone can find hope, happiness, and meaning in their life by learning to believe that the Bible is true, and the Word of God.

Common Obstacles to Belief in the Bible

One thing to be aware of here is that the Bible is a big book. (In fact it's a large number of books all bound together as if one). There's a lot in it. And there are many parts that appear to be contradictory to each other. This really bothers some people — I think especially those who pick it up and start randomly looking around it, and then find parts which contradict other parts, and it all just seems too hard, and to not make sense.

Another obstacle to belief is fairly obvious. That many of the things we can read about in the Bible seem to clearly contradict what most modern people living in modern civilisation are taught are real and true.

There are many other obstacles. Another obstacle (which is more easily accepted by people who already do believe) would be that the Devil is constantly trying to draw people away from believing. In any way he can. This often takes the form of planting thoughts of doubt and disbelief in people's minds.

Another obstacle to belief is the idea that if you believe in the Bible, then you will have to follow certain rules, and these rules will make your life much less "fun" and enjoyable. This is a very popular view, although it could not be more wrong. If you really do believe in the Bible, your life will be more enjoyable (and in a way that nothing can take away from you), and have more meaning, than you could have ever been aware of before.

There are even more obstacles. If you were to list them all, it would probably fill encyclopaedias of writing space, and still there would be more to tell, and after that, even more that people could think up that haven't yet been written down.

The point here being that if you look for obstacles, for reasons not to believe, there will always be some.

And if you make this into much of a focus, it can take you away from being able to believe.

So, instead, what about trying the opposite?

Just Believe in the Bible

If you decide that, for whatever reason, you'd like to believe that the Bible is true, there's nothing that can stop you.

Read that paragraph above over a few times. It's only short, but there's a lot in it.

Often doing this kind of thing is what people call "faith". There's nothing wrong with this, and nothing unusual about it (other than perhaps, in today's modern Western culture, it's something that's often viewed as unusual). The odd thing is that almost everything in our lives is based on faith anyway — even the things we usually think of as "logical", or "scientific", or some other word for "definitely true" — and the idea of faith is seen as somehow being lesser than that.

But really, if you'd like to believe in the Bible, just do it.

Even if you wonder about what it would be like to believe in the Bible, and can remotely imagine that some of the things in it would be good things (like the idea of being loved by God, going to heaven, having a saviour to follow, or any other thing in the Bible), just give it a try. The more you try it, and look into it, the more you're likely to discover its truth.

Conversely, the more of your life you spend looking at (and being with and participating in) things that go against what's found in the Bible, the harder it will be to believe.

So, if you think you might like the idea of believing in the Bible, and having something solid and true and good to base your life on, just do it.

Billy Graham's Moment of Faith

You can read more of this story from the link at the bottom of this quote by Billy Graham's grandson:

One night at Forest Home, he [Billy Graham] walked out into the woods and set his Bible on a stump – more an altar than a pulpit – and he cried out: “O God! There are many things in this book I do not understand. There are many problems with it for which I have no solution. There are many seeming contradictions. There are some areas in it that do not seem to correlate with modern science. I can’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck and others are raising.”

And then, my grandfather fell to his knees and the Holy Spirit moved in him as he said, “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word!”

My granddaddy wrote in his autobiography that as he stood up his eyes stung with tears, but he felt the power and presence of God in a way he hadn’t in months. “A major bridge had been crossed,” he said.

Learn About the Spiritual World

Although you won't hear much about it in the Western school system, or on the mainstream news, there's a whole spiritual plane of existence out there.

The Bible isn't the only place where you can read (or hear) about the spiritual world. Your whole worldview (and therefore your life) can potentially change from becoming aware of the existence of the spiritual "world".

Exposing yourself to other sources of information about the spiritual world can make a massive difference, perhaps all the difference, in your ability to have faith in the kinds of things the Bible is about. When you first get used to hearing many stories from many people who have experienced things that can only be explained by spiritual/supernatural means, and realise that there are far too many of these to count, and far too many of them that they could possibly all be somehow fake, or explainable by some mechanism that's already known to modern science, after a while it will change your outlook on how life works.

Keep in mind here that the main activity of scientists is research, that is, discovering new things — and that this itself proves that there must exist of things that do not fall within the scope of current scientific knowledge. So it's nonsensical to assume that anything that current science does not already know how to explain (such as the supernatural, by definition) cannot possibly exist — because science itself is continually expanding and discovering new things. So there must exist very many things that science can't explain. Yet so many people get hung up on this.

I'll improve this web page later, but for now, you could check out the subject of spiritual warfare, e.g. try watching a few things from this YouTube search, or some similar search. There are countless thousands of well-documented cases of happenings that only make sense within an assumption that the spiritual world does really exist. If you learn enough about them, for long enough it gets increasingly hard to keep up the idea that they must somehow all be fake. This is something that very definitely helped me, a lot, to gradually develop a spiritual worldview.