Every family must have events which become landmarks of the family history. They may not be really significant in themselves, but they become established as important moments for the collective family memory. I must have been about four and a half years old when one such event in our family took place, and I am sure I actually remember the actual time as well as the retelling of it. My brother was at about the average age for learning to walk, but had not shown much sign of progress. He turned out to be one of those who suddenly just got up one day and walked right across the room with a look of absolute triumph on his face. I was there, and I am sure of the memory. My parents never spoke about my first steps, or those of my other brother - they must have developed more gradually, but those first steps of Iain have become legendary.
No baby is able to walk at birth. No child has ever been born with an existing Christian faith. True Christianity has always been within a generation of dying out, because mere outward tradition can never save. Many children growing in Christian homes have trusted Christ in young years, as young as 4 or 5, and have little conception of life without knowing the Saviour. But all have their first steps into new life, it is indeed described in the Bible as being born again, so definite is the fact of a new beginning.
The first steps are steps of faith. Faith in a person, Jesus Christ, and what He did - died for our sins and rose again with the promise of forgiveness of sins and new, eternal life. John's gospel consistently gets to the core of the matter. The key word of his Gospel is "believe". It is always good to read the context of the 99 or so references to the word and check out whether your own beliefs in (not merely about) Jesus Christ match up with the depth of experience that John writes about. The first steps of any journey may be tentative, but they must be real in our experience, and so it is with the Christian faith.
Whether coming to faith as child, or when older, the first steps in the Christian faith are the start of the most important journey anyone can ever experience in this world. The transformation is so dramatic that it is described in vivid ways in the Bible. It is a journey from darkness to light, from death to life - and the Bible is not prone to exaggeration. But the journey has to have the first step. "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved" are the simple terms. The cross of Christ is the starting place, as Christian discovered in "Pigrim's Progress". Yes, there are footsteps that first lead towards that point of the cross, but salvation is real when what was done at the cross becomes personal, so that we can say with Paul that Jesus is "the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me". Without that clear personal testimony, any spiritual journey we may believe we are on is empty and meaningless. We must not be content with knowing things about the Bible, or about Jesus. We must be able to say with conviction "I know whom I have believed". That alone will be sufficient to assure that we are truly on the Christian journey, where Christ is all in all for life, for death, and beyond.
I have written from the point of view of our own real life perspective and experience. Trusting in Christ is an active step, involving our wills and the whole of our being. But from another perspective, we see that God has also been at work throughout. His Holy Spirit brings conviction of sin, and points to Christ as Saviour. We read that that Lord Jesus seeks and saves those who are lost. He finds us just as much, or maybe even more, than we find Him. We can never properly express or explain the two sides of this salvation truth and the way they come together, but everyone who has truly taken the steps of faith comes to know without question the significance and reality of the new direction in their lives. It is a journey full of wonder and excitement, but never ever an easy one - any message to the contrary is false and not Biblical. There are many positive challenges from God to grow and test our faith. There are many negative pitfalls to disrupt and discourage our faith because we enter into a spiritual battlefield of great intensity. But Christ is with us all the way, one step at a time, and He only asks us to be with Him at this walking pace, a step at a time. He promises too to be with us, a step at a time.
We meet Him and start the journey in many different ways, but always through an experience of the cross, what it meant for Christ, and what it must mean for every real Christian. We cannot by pass the cross and join the journey at any later stage. We must experience those first steps, or the journey cannot be valid. A train journey is not valid without a ticket. The death and resurrection of Christ is the only ticket on offer for a relationship with God and a journey to His presence in heaven.
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