June 8th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Christian Living | No Comments »
One thing that one commonly hears about Christianity is that once a person accepts Christ, they begin to experience a lot more trouble. You might think that I’m going to go into people’s impression that accepting Christ meant that life would be easy, but that’s not where I’m going with this. (Though, that would be good, too!)
Instead, I’d like to address something that I’ve heard from non-believers. Often, I’ve heard rebuttals to this that basically try to claim that these “new” trials are just psycho-somatic. They contend that new believers are more sensitized to looking for things like this and falsely attributed it to their new-found faith.
For such things as personal illness, emotional struggles, etc. I can see where this argument might seem somewhat convincing. However, it does not take into account allof the data. For example, it doesn’t explain how people can suddenl face such trials as a home burning down, car accidents, loss of loved ones, etc.
Once again, taken individually, one person seems as likely to experience these types of things as any other (to a degree). But what about those people who accept Christ and suddenly begin to experience a whole string of these negative experiences in life? I’m not going to claim that their faith is the only explanation. I won’t even say that it’s the only plausible explanation.
What I am saying, however, is that the number of these testimonies belies the randomness of simple chance. While other explanations are possible, and even plausible, are they the most plausible? In many cases, I would have to say no. In many of these instances, it seems far too coincidental to chalk it up to pure, random chance. However, another explanation seems to have better explanatory power.
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