I have a very hard question to ask you. It is hard because it requires brutal honesty. Why do you believe Jesus is the Christ? Hey, fair question, but you would be surprised at how hard that is to answer for many who profess to be Christian. Lets examine why a very famous man claimed to believe that. In Matthew 16:16-17 Simon responded to the question of who Jesus was this way,
" And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed [it] unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." You notice what Jesus said? He is saying that the knowledge that He is the Anointed One comes not from this world at all, but from God. Revealed knowledge straight from heaven.
You see, there are many people in the church today that have been drawn there by other reasons. They are scared into going or they have come to a strong personality or charismatic preacher. Often they want a social group to hang out with or they just think it is the socially correct thing to do. Some believe Jesus was the Christ because they believe archeology proves Jesus existed. Others because there is no other sociological reason for a bunch of people who had just had their leader killed to proclaim the things that they did. The problem with all these reasons for going to church and professing to be Christian is this, they are not there because of revelation from heaven that Jesus was the Christ. In that same passage of Matthew, Jesus calls Simon "Petros". Petros is a Greek word which means large, movable hunk of rock or "a mass of rock detached from the living rock.". Jesus then says on this rock (Petra) He will build His church. The word He uses this time, Petra, is Greek for huge, immovable rock or the "living rock" which the first was detached from. What Jesus is saying here is that because Simon had revealed to him from God that Jesus was the Christ, that knowledge in him was as solid as a rock. Jesus says He will build His church on the Rock of revealed knowledge from heaven and not even hell itself will be able to overcome that.
If you believe that Jesus was the Christ for any reason other than it being revealed to you personally from God, you are depending on the flesh, or this natural world. Now, I am not saying you are wrong in your belief, but it comes down to how solidly you believe what you confess. If you came to the knowledge of Christ based on the flesh, then the flesh could also shake that belief, because that is it’s foundation. When God reveals something to you from His word - for all true revelation lines up with His Word - you have a solid foundation for you belief. Matthew 7:24-25 declares,
" Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock." Now the only people who heard what Jesus said, and did them were those that believed Him, or had faith. That is what our belief is like, like a house founded upon the rock of revelation knowledge. If your belief is not built upon that rock, there are things in this natural world that can shake it to pieces, no matter how solid it may look to you.
I believe Jesus was the Anointed of God because of revelation from heaven, so no matter what happens or what anyone says or what new evidence the world comes up with, that belief of mine is un-shakable. It wouldn’t matter to me if aliens came to earth, enslaved all of mankind and started strip mining the planet. Nothing would shake that knowledge from me, nothing.
In these last days we need to allow ourselves to be taught of God and believe we receive truth from Him and Him alone, for Man will always be fallible. If you go to a Christian bookstore and buy ten different books you will have ten different opinions about what the Word of God means. It must be very confusing to a new Christian to try and sift through all that and determine what the truth is. You have one person saying "this is the way" and another calling him a false teacher. You must trust God to open your eyes to the Scriptures and trust Him to show you who is speaking truth. If you do that, then God can show you who is speaking and teaching by His authority and who is putting forth their own personal opinions. Without revelation from God, they are all their own personal opinions. If you get into the word, study it and ask God to reveal them to you, Jesus said it would be as easy to tell false teachers from real ones as it is to tell apart figs from thorns. How many of you are always getting pricked with thorns while trying to pick figs? Not many I trust, for in the natural world figs and thorns are very different looking. Well, if you trust in the supernatural realm of God, it will be the same with teachers and preachers. The only way you can be sure, for example, that I am teaching this by the power of God is if God tells you I am. How does He do that? Well, if you trust Him to show you the Scriptures then you would be able to tell if what I say line up with the Scriptures. You see, if you don’t know the Word, you will never be able to tell who is who, and you will easily be led astray, for it is by the Word of God that all spiritual matters are proved. If you know the Word through revelation of God, then you would be able to say to a false teacher, "You are wrong for that is not what God taught me through His Word" Then it doesn’t matter what they say, for you can trust God to open your eyes through His Word.
I cannot stress how important it is to constantly meditate on the Word of God, every day, day in and day out. Always pray to God to flood your understanding with revelation from heaven concerning the Word BEFORE you read it. Look at what Solomon said to God in 1 Kings 3:7-9,
" And now, O LORD my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of David my father: and I [am but] a little child: I know not [how] to go out or come in. And thy servant [is] in the midst of thy people which thou hast chosen, a great people, that cannot be numbered nor counted for multitude. Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?" We should always have that attitude when coming to God for teaching. Leave your understanding at the door, admit to God you know nothing as you should (1 Cor 8:2), and be willing to let God show you the truth. He may show you something that goes strongly against your religious understanding, and if you try to hold onto your understanding you may miss a great revelation. No tradition of the church is worth that. Come to God and ask, "Is this right or wrong?" and be willing to accept His answer. Don’t come to God with your mind already made up, ever. Sure, it may hurt your pride to find out something you believed for a long time was wrong, but it is better to have your pride hurt a little now than to stand before God on Judgment Day with weeds in the garden of your soul because you were too arrogant to search the Book to find out if they belonged there or not.
There is nothing I believe that God cannot correct me on. I am constantly learning. The only thing that makes us shy away from the truth is pride, and the longer you let something grow in you that shouldn’t be there, the worse it hurts getting it pulled out. When I find something in the Scriptures that seems to conflict with something I believe, I go to God and say, "What does this mean?", and I am willing to let God change my outlook. Consider what Peter must have thought. Here he is up on his roof. It has been about ten years after the Spirit was poured out on the Day of Pentecost. They were not going to the Gentiles to preach, probably thinking they can’t be saved anyway so why bother with them. Suddenly God shows Him a vision that totally changes his theological outlook towards the Gentile nations. Imagine if Peter had trusted in his own understanding, and said no no no, that can’t be right because I know that the Gentiles are not part of the Covenant. If he hadn’t let God correct his thinking on that matter, he would never had gone down to Cornelius’s house, and they wouldn’t have received the Holy Spirit. The sum is this, trust in God to show you the truth, not Man, and then you will be able to tell when Man has some truth. God Bless.