Christianity requires initiation

To the uninitiated Christianity will always come across as strange. To the initiated Christianity will always come across as strange. This is because Christianity is not worldly. Everything else is worldly. Anything worldly is comfortable to us. Anything that's not worldly is weird. Just as everything that isn't God the Creator - i.e. everything that is part of the creation - is comfortable to us; yet God Himself is uncomfortable to our fallen nature. We'll worship anything that is part of creation, but we will refuse to worship or even recognize the Creator. That is because the Creator is higher than us. He created us. This makes our fallen nature very uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to even just recognize something higher than 'us.'

Take this thought - this reality - into how to think of non-Christians, or people who are commonly hostile to Christianity. It seems weird to them. Uncomfortable. It did - and still does - to me. Yet what happened? I finally took up the Bible and read. I read and persevered on until I'd read it all. (This is a side point, but even the various genres of the Bible are strange, even to a well-read individual.) I read, and read, and read again, until I became initiated into the world of the word of God. It slowly began to come into focus with each new reading. There is no shortcut. This is what you have to do. Just read it. Read the Bible. Page by page. Verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book. And this is what an unbeliever has to be told.

With all the raw living word inside you you will then be able to gravitate towards true biblical doctrine. This is part of it as well. But you have to have the entire word of God in you. Something so few make the effort to acquire. You have to be initiated.

You're not going to be argued into the faith, or coaxed, or convinced emotionally or intellectually. Without the real initiation of having the entire living, quickening words of the Bible in you it will all be shallow.

You have to have a stake in Christianity (a share, or interest in, money on). In reality itself.

Churches don't teach what I've written above. Seminaries don't teach what I've written above. The Bible itself to these people and institutions has become a sort of ad hoc, loose binder class notes, or professor's notes, or pastor's notes, and not even a complete, unified, pure and whole, supernaturally preserved, inspired, word of the living God. It's almost like these types not only don't see the Bible that latter way but they actually keep such a thing away from those they influence. Such a thing is something to mock.

Just read. And don't confute (disagree, or be disagreeable) at every page, just take it in. If you have to see it this way: like a computer downloading a program. Just download it. Complete. You don't want a partially downloaded program. Along the way the word of God has a way of quickening you. If you're really doing what I've written to begin with there is a reason for that. God quickens - regenerates, awakens - via His word, and via the Holy Spirit. Move towards Me, and I'll move towards you, says God, in several places throughout the Old and New Testaments...

Only this effort to get initiated in a real way has any meaning or leads to anything real.